Dear Yuletide Writer, 2014
Greetings, Yuletide writer!
Thanks for offering to write a story for me! You are clearly a person with excellent taste in fandoms, and I'm sure I'll love whatever you write. My optional details in the requests over at AO3 give a basic idea of what I'm looking for, but if you'd like a bit more information about my preferences, here it is.
I'm afraid this letter is rather long, but please don't be intimidated or annoyed. I wax prolix here because I'm naturally long-winded and because my journal is fairly empty (in recent years it seems to consist entirely of Yuletide letters) so my letter is the main guide to my preferences for an author who wants one, not because I'm picky and hard to please. If you're not someone who likes getting a lot of additional detail, feel free to skip it entirely.
Beneath the cut you will find my squicks and more detailed thoughts on yaoi, the characters, the fandoms, and possible directions you may want to take your story in, if you find yourself in need of inspiration.
All about me:
Triggers:
None
Squicks:
• Anything combining sex and digestion. Feeding a lover strawberries, licking chocolate or whipped cream off them, force feeding, scat, watersports... please refrain, kind author. I don't mind parts of the digestive tract doing double duty as an erogenous zone- anal and oral sex are fine. So is using a cucumber for a dildo or sex on the dining room table. But please no sexy games with fondue.
• Mutilation, scarification, knifeplay, needle play. Killing the characters or beating them to a pulp is fine by me, but for some reason it bothers me if you give them a papercut first. Nothing with sharp edges please.
Everything else is a-okay. Violence, character deaths, torture, non-con or dub-con, mind games, twisted power dynamics, and general bleakness are all fine- more than fine! I love dark fics. I love fluffy or uplifting stories too, so please don't feel obligated to write something dark, but if that's the direction your muse takes you then feel free to go for it. Holiday fic is also fine, provided it makes sense for the fandom. (Although actually 'A Very Chanur Christmas' in which the stshto freak out about the tasteless decorations and the kif attack Santa's sleigh and steal all the presents has a certain appeal...)
Things I like in stories:
• Worldbuilding. I like getting the sense that the story is a little window into a larger world where other people are going about their business and events are happening just offscreen, instead of a window on a few characters interacting inside a bubble surrounded by vacuum. Unless they're in space and they actually are interacting in a bubble surrounded by vacuum. But even then they probably have to think about where they're going to refuel.
• Challenging the text. I'm fond of these fandoms or I wouldn't have requested them, but I'm not... protective of them. If some group is marginalized by the canon, I'd love to see a story from their perspective. If you've noticed a plothole, I'd love for you to latch onto it and rip it to shreds and then think up an explanation to set it right. I'm always interested in the answers to questions like "If Galadriel lives in the shady primeval forest where does she grow the grain for all that lembas?"
• Politics. I'll spare you the tearful Alastair Campbell-esque lecture about my heartfelt belief in the ability of politics to effect change, but let's just say that these fandoms didn't land on my list by accident.
• Clever characters being clever.
• Clever characters being outsmarted by even cleverer characters.
• Power struggles, hierarchies, how these arrangements are negotiated and balanced and change over time and in response to changing circumstances.
• Culture clashes.
• Women kicking ass.
• Victories for social justice, democracy or tolerance.
• Depressing defeats for social justice, democracy or tolerance that still leave seeds of hope for the future.
• Characters trying to balance competing obligations and loyalties: personal vs. professional, practical vs. ideological, etc.
• Gen fic. Casefic, wacky adventures, character studies- they're all lovely.
• Shipping, as long as shipping is not the only thing in the fic. (Good characterization counts as a second thing.) Het, slash, femmeslash, kif-on-kif... whatever you call that, polyamory, threesomes- they're all great. I'm not protective of my favorite pairings, either, so feel free to pair anyone with anyone.
• Explicit porn, as long as sticking Tab A into Slot B is not the only thing in the fic. (Good characterization counts as a second thing.)
• Humor.
• All the dark stuff from the list above.
• Characters I like being cute and fluffy and happy together.
As you can see, I like a wide variety of things! Plotty gen, fluffy curtains fic where the characters snark about politics while they shop, grim, explicit kif rape fic, it's all good. Write something that makes you happy, and I will almost certainly be happy too.
A few things I dislike:
• Crackiness to no obvious purpose. I don't mind an AU where all the characters are living room furniture, but if you're going to write one the choice of furniture should be telling us something about the characters.
• Idiot plots. If characters have to suffer a major drop in IQ for a story to make sense, it needs a different plot. Stupid romantic comedy misunderstandings that could be cleared up in five minutes fall into this category.
• Healing cock, instantaneous peace after the crowning of a king or the birth of some biracial baby, and other forms of magical recovery from personal or national traumas. Good stories are like real life: events have consequences and people have to live with them.
On to the fandoms! I'll give a brief overview of what each one is and where to find it, so if you want to switch and learn about a new fandom you'll know what you're getting into.
Chanur Series - C. J. Cherryh
Characters: Hilfy Chanur, Vikktakkht, Tahy Mahn
A series of science fiction novels about an alien trading federation called the Compact (think the EU, but containing giant alien cats with guns instead of the French and not currently in a financial crisis) and the political shenanigans that ensue therein when an eighth alien species- humanity- is discovered on the borders. Told from the perspective of merchant captain Pyanfar Chanur and eventually her niece Hilfy who are inadvertently drawn into the fray, the books contain a lot of interspecies diplomacy, a lot of space battles and frantic fleeing from space battles, a lot of shootouts on space stations, and incredibly good worldbuilding. And lulz.
The books can be found on Amazon, and sometimes in used bookstores or your local library. Or through illegal filesharing.
What I like about it:
The alien species are all plausible and unique and fascinating and convincingly alien, the physics is unusually good for a space opera, and the characters are awesome. If you're going to start reading Cherryh's science fiction I strongly recommend starting here; it has all the virtues of the great Alliance/Union books (good worldbuilding, good politics, exciting plots, a refusal to romanticize violence, kickass female characters, immersive tight 3rd person POV narration that doesn't talk down to the reader) and none of the vices (inaccessibility, demented structuring choices, being thousands of pages long).
I love the distribution of virtues among the alien species: the hani are warm-hearted, cozily mammalian, and refreshingly devoid of imperialist ambitions, but they're also conservative, xenophobic, sexist jerks, the kif are sadistic, sociopathic assholes, but they're far more cosmopolitan in their outlook and they're willing to engage other cultures on their own terms, and the stsho are politically and physically feeble but they're also the ones providing the legal and financial infrastructure holding the whole system together. And I love how everyone in the Compact is like "We are here to trade. We may not like everything about each other, but we are going to share the same space stations, follow the same laws, and not kill each other, because it's more lucrative that way. Now sit the fuck down and DEAL WITH IT." I love how Pyanfar winds up choosing not to murder an armada of people who were trying to kill her five minutes before because she doesn't want to be That Guy, because that's not how they solve their problems in the Compact and she doesn't want it to be. The triumph of commerce over twattery is a common theme throughout Alliance/Union, but nowhere is it stronger than here.
Optional details:
It would be an interesting challenge to get Hilfy, Vikktakkht and Tahy into the same story. You're more than welcome to try, but this is one of those cases where your requester is trying to use the AND as an OR.
I would be thrilled with a fic about any of them, or about some combination of them. I love all three of them and I love the Compact, so anything from introspective character studies to fics about their relationships to fics that delve into the worldbuilding and only feature the character in a cameo role would be awesome.
Hilfy is my favorite Chanur. I love how unlike her aunt she's by preference a diplomat rather than a fighter. Pyanfar became a negotiator by necessity because she couldn't outgun the kif, but for Hilfy getting into the heads of her customers and her enemies is a way of life. Pyanfar takes what she wants and damn the consequences, which is admirable in its way, but Hilfy thinks: what will it mean for society if we start taking men into space? What does this new arrangement with the kif mean for the balance of power in the Compact? Anything with her being her brainy little self would be great- her growing bond with her crew, her interactions with her aunt or her family back on Anuurn or Tahy Mahn or Vikktakkht or her new stsho buddies.
And then there's Vikktakkht! He's smart, he's adaptable, and he basically spent all of Legacy trolling Hilfy for the lulz while simultaneously preventing an international incident. I fell in love with him when he casually strolled up to the crew of the Pride in the midst of a group of kif who were about to gun them down and shot the other kif from behind- I felt he handled that incident with a certain panache- and I love how he's grown in Legacy. I love how he's been picking up hani concepts like medical care and trying to get the kif to adopt them. What was his relationship with Sikkukkut? How did he wind up on the Pride's dock in the first place? What does he think of Pyanfar, or Hilfy, or the future direction of the Compact? When and how did he change his name? Is he even a 'he'- how does kif reproduction work? Does he endure the stsho's crazy aesthetic requirements with the same long-suffering patience Hilfy does? How contingent is his loyalty to Pyanfar, and what is he planning to do when she eventually dies?
And finally Tahy. I have always liked Tahy, ever since she politely bowed to her parents and fucked off in the middle of her takeover attempt when she heard there was an international emergency going on and Pyanfar didn't have time to deal with local politics right then. She must be seriously pissed off that the Han handed Chanur Holding back to the Chanurs by fiat after Kara won it fair and square. What was her childhood like? What's her relationship like with her cousin Hilfy, who seems to have always gotten more of her mother's attention? Does it suck being the daughter of a poor, planet-bound clan when wealthy, space-faring Chanur is your next-door neighbor and your mother's priority? Would Tahy have liked to go into space herself if Mahn had ships, or does she prefer life on the farm? How does she feel about her father being alive, but faffing about in space with a bunch of loose women? Last Yuletide resulted in a fantastic Tahy fic (not written for me, but I was the one who nominated her so I feel a certain degree of vicarious satisfaction), and I'd be ecstatic with anything more in that vein.
One thing I would like to avoid is more Pyanfar POV. I love Py, but I feel like we've had her take on everything, and she's... quite opinionated, so it may have been slightly biased. I want to see through someone else's eyes for a bit. I love the Compact worldbuilding, so if you don't want to concentrate on any of these characters worldbuilding-y fics would be awesome too.
Alternately, I would quite enjoy a crossover where one of the asshole species from another Alliance/Union book- the iduve, the mri, etc- show up and the Compact teams up to kick the shit out of them. Or hell, go wild, have the Klingons invade, or the Daleks, or the Wraith, or whoever. Space battles are always fun, the kif are always fun, and I kind of assume the tc'a gave them spaceflight so the Compact would have a militia on hand to deal with precisely this emergency.
Happy Valley (TV)
Characters: Catherine Cawood, Clare Cartwright, Ryan Cawood
A gritty police drama about kickass Yorkshire police sergeant Catherine Cawood and her increasingly awful life. Eight years ago Catherine's daughter Becky was raped, bore a child and immediately committed suicide, leaving Catherine and her sister Clare to raise the baby. Between dealing with young Ryan's antisocial tendencies and patrolling drug-riddled Hebben Bridge, Catherine has more than enough on her plate, but things take a turn for the worse when Becky's rapist is released from prison and not at all coincidentally a local businessman's daughter is kidnapped.
It's out on DVD, and you can also get it through iTunes or Netflix. Or through illegal filesharing.
(It comes with a massive trigger warning for graphic sexualized violence. It’s a good show and fairly feminist in its sentiments, but if you don’t want to see women badly beaten and raped onscreen it is not for you.
It also has an insanely frustrating format for a cop show because it shows the police investigation and the kidnappers' timeline in tandem, so the viewer always has access to information the police desperately need to solve the case and winds up yelling at the television while they wander around in circles. I think Happy Valley’s other virtues redeem this flaw- if it even is a flaw; it certainly kept me engaged- but I want to give fair warning.)
What I like about it:
It’s a tense, well-plotted thriller and Catherine is a great protagonist, tough and clever and determined but realistically flawed. Her stubbornness and independence enable her to solve the case, but they also prevent her from seeing the full picture and sometimes lead her to hurt the people she cares about. And I was quickly won over by the Cawood-Cartwright household. I usually dislike it when procedurals get derailed by personal plotlines, but here the two strands of the plot were perfectly integrated. Also, Catherine’s personal problems are serious, interesting problems a sensible person might have, rather than the sort of personal problems characters run into because of overwrought melodrama inflicted on them by the writers or by their own inability to function as an adult. What do you do when the grandson you’ve given up your life to raise turns out to be a nightmare?
It’s impossible not to like Clare, the recovering heroin addict who is the most psychologically balanced person in the household and who is holding the family together through sheer goodwill. And despite myself I find myself charmed by Ryan, who is a plausibly difficult child being molded by difficult circumstances, but fairly cute when you’re not the one who has to deal with him. Also his little accent is adorable. I realize adults with strong regional accents start out as small children with strong regional accents- this probably does not come as an epiphany to locals- but on television “It’ll be reight” is a phrase you expect to hear from some gruff, grizzled man in his forties, not from an eight year old.
Optional details:
Catherine Cawood is awesome, and I'd be delighted to get case fic about her police work.
But the thing that led me to request this fandom for Yuletide is a bizarre craving for domestic fluff, or as close as it's possible to get in such a dark setting. When I was watching the show I found myself strangely charmed by the dynamics of the Carwood-Cartwright household: Catherine's surly depression, Ryan's realistic awfulness, and poor Clare trying to hold everything together with good intentions and futile gestures at normality. So I'm envisioning "Disastrous Family Gatherings of the Cawoods"- Christmas, a road trip, something like that, where Clare tries to arrange a nice family activity for the three of them, things go predictably and horribly wrong, but then everyone comes together in a heart-warming way at the end. (Or not.)
I recognize it's a bit of a tonal shift from the canon, though, so if it doesn't seem workable please don't feel obliged to write it! I really would be very happy with policing fic.
I don’t know what it is about this canon that suggests “Darkly humorous domestic fluff” to me, but for some reason I have a strange hankering for it. So the prompt is, force Catherine, Clare and Ryan to spend some family time together and see what happens.
Maybe after they refuse the offer to pay off their mortgage, Nevison insists on paying for a holiday for them? Catherine has a few weeks of mandatory leave and Ryan can barely function in school when he hasn’t just had his father pour a gallon of gasoline all over him and try to set him on fire- he probably needs some time to process events. They could take a road trip or go visit the south of France or Spain or wherever. (Because taking Ryan abroad is a brilliant idea that will in no way result in some kind of international incident.) Or it could be some other occasion, Christmas or a birthday or parents’ evening at Ryan’s school or Clare randomly decides they should have a picnic.
Inevitably things go awry, and there is a massive family row / mayhem / pillage and arson / near-death experience which ultimately proves cathartic and helps everyone to work through their issues and realize they all love and need each other after all. Or not, depending on your taste. But much lulz are had and we all feel sorry for Clare.
If this scenario does not appeal, I’d also be perfectly happy with case fic. Catherine’s a great police officer and it would be fun to watch her work. We don’t get to know Catherine’s fellow officers very well in the show but I liked what I saw of them, and between Calderdale’s drugs problem and everything that’s gone wrong with Yorkshire policing recently, you’re spoiled for choice as far as possible cases go.
One thing I would like to avoid is any more graphic sexualized violence. I got more than enough of that from the show and I’m kind of at saturation point. If you’d like to do a domestic violence case or a Rotherham scandal parallel, that’s fine, just please steer clear of serial rapists/killers.
The Sandbaggers
Characters: Neil Burnside, Geoffrey Wellingham, Jeff Ross
A TV series about Neil Burnside, the under-resourced and psychopathic Director of Operations for the SIS in the late 1970s/early 1908s, the spies who work for him, and the various people who screw him over, most notably the KGB, his bosses in Parliament and the civil service (here represented by his mentor and indirect superior Sir Geoffrey Wellingham, the permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office), the CIA (here represented by Neil's lunch buddy and American liaison officer Jeff Ross), and last but definitely not least himself (here represented by Neil Burnside). It's like the lovechild of Spooks and The West Wing, where most of the espionage work consists of Neil sitting in offices fighting with his superiors for the resources and authorization to actually send the eponymous Sandbaggers to go spy. It's also bleak as hell. A typical episode involves Neil pissing off his bosses by doing something sneaky and illegal in a desperate attempt to block the KGB, and then getting pwned by them anyway. Also notable for Neil's unique sartorial taste, which tends towards waistcoats and massive Seventies ties.
It's out on DVD, or various illegal filesharing services.
What I like about it:
The bleakness, the realism (all the real British spies say it's the most accurate depiction of their work they've ever seen) the strong writing and acting, Neil's well intentioned psychopathy, and the show's ability to convince you that Neil is an incredibly intelligent person making the best decisions he can, who nevertheless spends most his time getting his ass handed to him because his job is really hard. There are no idiot plots here, and the show expects the viewer to be intelligent too: terms are never defined, and sometimes people have conversations in foreign languages without subtitles. It makes for an immersive and refreshingly uncondescending viewing experience. Also Sir Geoffrey Wellingham is a BAMF.
I got a brilliant Sandbaggers fic for Yuletide two years ago and I'm reluctant to make the same request twice- it seems a little greedy, somehow, when I've had such a lovely gift already- but I saw on FFA that somewhere out there in the world there exists another lonely Neil Burnside/Jeff Ross shipper. So I thought, what the hell, I'll prompt it again for both of us. This request goes out to you, kindred spirit!
Optional details:
I'd love anything that explores Neil's relationship with either Sir Geoffrey or Jeff: the complex interactions between his well-intentioned psychopathy, their slightly less well-intentioned psychopathy, the fondness they feel for him, the power they have over him, and everyone's competing loyalties. You don't have to include both of them (although the two of them fighting over Neil could be hilarious, albeit a cruel mismatch in terms of ability). Slash is great but completely optional.
Possible avenues of ficcage include:
Does Sir Geoffrey ever worry that he's created a monster? Not just from a "What happens to my knighthood if something goes wrong?" standpoint, but from a national interest standpoint. Neil answers to the British Government only because Sir Geoffrey is smarter than him and Gibbs hates him; if it weren't for that the whole operational side of SIS would basically be a rogue agency. This seems like a less than ideal legacy to leave to one's successor at the Foreign Office, even if Neil broadly shares Sir Geoffrey's outlook on foreign policy and even if there are SIS officials with much bigger problems than Neil's cowboy tendencies (step forward, Edward Tyler).
If you'd rather deal with the specific than the general case, I'd love a case fic of one of those scenarios where Neil does something duplicitous and probably illegal and Sir Geoffrey outmaneuvers him and smacks him down. Those are always a lot of fun.
On a related point, what happens between Sir Geoffrey and Neil after the end of the series? Sir Geoffrey seems to be running out of patience with him, but if Neil were replaceable as his protégé presumably he would have replaced him a long time ago, and over the years he's done Neil an awful lot of 'final' favors. Then again, trying to sabotage the START treaty is pretty epic disobedience/borderline treason even by Neil standards.
If you want to go down the slash route, Sir Geoffrey/Neil would be terrifying but intriguing.
On the other hand, Jeff! If you wanted to write me the first Neil/Jeff slash fic in existence, you would be my hero. (If you wanted to write a Neil/Jeff slash fic that supports my pet conspiracy theory that Jeff deliberately got Laura killed, or at least failed to look for an alternate solution, because she was cockblocking him by getting in the way of his lunch dates with Neil, you would be my hero for all of time.)
Alternately, they could have more wacky gen adventures where Jeff screws Neil over on behalf of Langley and then bribes his way back into his affections with soda. How does Jeff feel about periodically betraying his friend, especially given that he must know Neil can kill him with his brain? How does Jeff feel about the fact Neil basically spends the show spiraling downward into self-destructive madness and it's partially his fault?
Or examine their relationship from an outside viewpoint- how does Willie feel about their weird little dance, considering that he and Jeff have a shared interest in Neil's welfare and continued employment, but Jeff is the person most likely to get a Sandbagger killed?
Political RPF - UK 20th-21st c. (or as we call it elsewhere on the interwebs, Lolitics)
Characters: Walter Harrison, Bernard "Jack" Weatherill
What it says on the tin: RPF about the people who have been running Britain for the past hundred years or so. The cast is obviously immense, but this year I've opted for the two Deputy Chief Whips in the 1974-1979 Parliament. If you've seen James Graham's play This House you already know exactly who these people are and why I requested them. If you haven't you're probably completely lost right now, so let me try to explain.
In the late 1970s, the ruling Labour Party were just short of a majority in the House of Commons, which meant they could be thrown out of power by a vote of no confidence. To prevent this they had to madly scramble around to get votes by making deals with the minor parties, getting all their own MPs to show up to vote, and keeping the opposing Tory MPs from voting whenever possible. It was quite important that the government survive, because they were keeping Margaret Thatcher out of power and as soon as she got in she was going to either save Britain (the rightwing view) or make a huge mess that would lead to all of Britain's current social and economic woes (the leftwing view), but by any standard do a lot of harm to the sort of people who voted Labour.
The man in charge of the day-to-day operations to make sure this didn't happen was Labour's Deputy Chief Whip Walter Harrison, who came up with some ingenious and dubiously legal tricks to win every vote. (These included issuing MPs with disguises so they could vote twice, letting sick MPs live in the House of Commons so they could vote from their beds, and once jamming part of his body through the closing door of the voting lobby and saying it should count as a fractional vote since he was halfway in the room.) Opposing him was the ridiculously nice and honorable Tory Deputy Chief Whip Jack Weatherill. Jack was as clever as Walter and knew a few tricks of his own, but his outstanding feature was his decency.
Although their jobs were dedicated to thwarting each other at every possible turn, the two men were friends. On the night the government finally fell they had an incredible confrontation: Jack offered to destroy his own career by abstaining from the confidence vote to honor a gentleman's agreement between them, and Walter refused to accept his sacrifice and chose to let the government go down instead. (To give you a sense of the magnitude of this, there was a Labour MP who was on his deathbed and the whips were seriously discussing whether it would be worth killing him by dragging him down to Westminster if it meant they could win this vote. Several people including the dying MP himself were in favor of this plan, although Walter ultimately vetoed it.)
This history is covered magnificently in This House, but unfortunately the play has finished its run and no copies of the film of the production seem to have made their way online. If you really want you can buy the script here, but it's unlikely to be in your library and anyway it seems unfair to ask someone to read a script.
So if you haven't seen it you'll have to make do with the RL versions of Walter and Jack. There's a BBC radio documentary about the final confidence vote featuring interviews with both of them that you can play with RealPlayer here, and their Lolitics wiki pages are here and here. And here is an adorkable C-SPAN interview of Jack in his later incarnation as Speaker of the House of Commons. (There's a particularly entertaining bit of transatlantic comedy at 8:00 where the C-SPAN reporter asks him how much all the state portraits of the speakers could be sold for and Jack is politely aghast.)
I'm equally amenable to This House fanfic or RPF, whichever takes your fancy. (The primary difference of course being theatrical!Jack's fabulous blond quiff, but fans of both may feel there are some characterization differences as well.)
What I like about it:
Walter and Jack have an odd couple charm to them- the bluff, devious Yorkshire electrician vs. the urbane, honorable Savile Row tailor- that makes them an engaging partnership/rivalry, or an appealing slash pairing if you're into that sort of thing. I enjoy watching their high-stakes chess game as they try to maneuver their MPs into the right voting lobbies. And the high stakes lend enormous tension to the interplay between their jobs and their friendship. They're opposing generals in a sort of civilized war and the future of their country is at stake, but in the final choice between friend and country they both choose to stand by their friend.
Optional details:
I'm open to any fic that touches on their relationship. If you ship them I'd be very happy with some slash. If you don't then gen case fic about some of their parliamentary shenanigans or the story of their first encounter or a thoughtful character study looking back over their careers would be lovely too. Or even an AU where they're transplanted to a different setting but retain their friendly rivalry. There is a grand total of one fic about them apart from James Graham's play, so the world is pretty much your oyster here.
Some fic ideas:
• The slash potential is vast. Given the sum total of Harrisill fics written to date ( 1), the field is wide open to you.
• Case fic, which in this case means the two of them running around Parliament trying to whip votes, unwhip the other side's votes, and plotting various shenanigans to that end.
• Jack is a vegetarian and Walter likes plain, hearty meals centering around meat. I sense a rich vein of comedy waiting to be mined.
• The aftermath of the 1979 election. Jack is immediately fired as Deputy Chief Whip by Thatcher and becomes Deputy Speaker, so in essence his offer to abstain was his last act as a whip and as a Tory. During that period the Deputy Speakers were appointed by the agreement of the whips, so Walter would have had some say in this. Jack ends up as Speaker and eventually goes to the House of Lords. Walter ultimately gets shafted by his leadership and denied a peerage, so they don't get to hang out together in the politicians' retirement home. How does it all work out for them?
• The "friendly rivals" dynamic seems like it would translate well to a variety of AUs. Whips in spaaaaaace? The historical AU where Walter is a Roundhead and Jack is a Cavalier? I dunno, surprise me.
Crossposted to Dreamwidth: http://kainosite.dreamwidth.org/4511.html. Comment there or here.
Thanks for offering to write a story for me! You are clearly a person with excellent taste in fandoms, and I'm sure I'll love whatever you write. My optional details in the requests over at AO3 give a basic idea of what I'm looking for, but if you'd like a bit more information about my preferences, here it is.
I'm afraid this letter is rather long, but please don't be intimidated or annoyed. I wax prolix here because I'm naturally long-winded and because my journal is fairly empty (in recent years it seems to consist entirely of Yuletide letters) so my letter is the main guide to my preferences for an author who wants one, not because I'm picky and hard to please. If you're not someone who likes getting a lot of additional detail, feel free to skip it entirely.
Beneath the cut you will find my squicks and more detailed thoughts on yaoi, the characters, the fandoms, and possible directions you may want to take your story in, if you find yourself in need of inspiration.
All about me:
Triggers:
None
Squicks:
• Anything combining sex and digestion. Feeding a lover strawberries, licking chocolate or whipped cream off them, force feeding, scat, watersports... please refrain, kind author. I don't mind parts of the digestive tract doing double duty as an erogenous zone- anal and oral sex are fine. So is using a cucumber for a dildo or sex on the dining room table. But please no sexy games with fondue.
• Mutilation, scarification, knifeplay, needle play. Killing the characters or beating them to a pulp is fine by me, but for some reason it bothers me if you give them a papercut first. Nothing with sharp edges please.
Everything else is a-okay. Violence, character deaths, torture, non-con or dub-con, mind games, twisted power dynamics, and general bleakness are all fine- more than fine! I love dark fics. I love fluffy or uplifting stories too, so please don't feel obligated to write something dark, but if that's the direction your muse takes you then feel free to go for it. Holiday fic is also fine, provided it makes sense for the fandom. (Although actually 'A Very Chanur Christmas' in which the stshto freak out about the tasteless decorations and the kif attack Santa's sleigh and steal all the presents has a certain appeal...)
Things I like in stories:
• Worldbuilding. I like getting the sense that the story is a little window into a larger world where other people are going about their business and events are happening just offscreen, instead of a window on a few characters interacting inside a bubble surrounded by vacuum. Unless they're in space and they actually are interacting in a bubble surrounded by vacuum. But even then they probably have to think about where they're going to refuel.
• Challenging the text. I'm fond of these fandoms or I wouldn't have requested them, but I'm not... protective of them. If some group is marginalized by the canon, I'd love to see a story from their perspective. If you've noticed a plothole, I'd love for you to latch onto it and rip it to shreds and then think up an explanation to set it right. I'm always interested in the answers to questions like "If Galadriel lives in the shady primeval forest where does she grow the grain for all that lembas?"
• Politics. I'll spare you the tearful Alastair Campbell-esque lecture about my heartfelt belief in the ability of politics to effect change, but let's just say that these fandoms didn't land on my list by accident.
• Clever characters being clever.
• Clever characters being outsmarted by even cleverer characters.
• Power struggles, hierarchies, how these arrangements are negotiated and balanced and change over time and in response to changing circumstances.
• Culture clashes.
• Women kicking ass.
• Victories for social justice, democracy or tolerance.
• Depressing defeats for social justice, democracy or tolerance that still leave seeds of hope for the future.
• Characters trying to balance competing obligations and loyalties: personal vs. professional, practical vs. ideological, etc.
• Gen fic. Casefic, wacky adventures, character studies- they're all lovely.
• Shipping, as long as shipping is not the only thing in the fic. (Good characterization counts as a second thing.) Het, slash, femmeslash, kif-on-kif... whatever you call that, polyamory, threesomes- they're all great. I'm not protective of my favorite pairings, either, so feel free to pair anyone with anyone.
• Explicit porn, as long as sticking Tab A into Slot B is not the only thing in the fic. (Good characterization counts as a second thing.)
• Humor.
• All the dark stuff from the list above.
• Characters I like being cute and fluffy and happy together.
As you can see, I like a wide variety of things! Plotty gen, fluffy curtains fic where the characters snark about politics while they shop, grim, explicit kif rape fic, it's all good. Write something that makes you happy, and I will almost certainly be happy too.
A few things I dislike:
• Crackiness to no obvious purpose. I don't mind an AU where all the characters are living room furniture, but if you're going to write one the choice of furniture should be telling us something about the characters.
• Idiot plots. If characters have to suffer a major drop in IQ for a story to make sense, it needs a different plot. Stupid romantic comedy misunderstandings that could be cleared up in five minutes fall into this category.
• Healing cock, instantaneous peace after the crowning of a king or the birth of some biracial baby, and other forms of magical recovery from personal or national traumas. Good stories are like real life: events have consequences and people have to live with them.
On to the fandoms! I'll give a brief overview of what each one is and where to find it, so if you want to switch and learn about a new fandom you'll know what you're getting into.
Chanur Series - C. J. Cherryh
Characters: Hilfy Chanur, Vikktakkht, Tahy Mahn
A series of science fiction novels about an alien trading federation called the Compact (think the EU, but containing giant alien cats with guns instead of the French and not currently in a financial crisis) and the political shenanigans that ensue therein when an eighth alien species- humanity- is discovered on the borders. Told from the perspective of merchant captain Pyanfar Chanur and eventually her niece Hilfy who are inadvertently drawn into the fray, the books contain a lot of interspecies diplomacy, a lot of space battles and frantic fleeing from space battles, a lot of shootouts on space stations, and incredibly good worldbuilding. And lulz.
The books can be found on Amazon, and sometimes in used bookstores or your local library. Or through illegal filesharing.
What I like about it:
The alien species are all plausible and unique and fascinating and convincingly alien, the physics is unusually good for a space opera, and the characters are awesome. If you're going to start reading Cherryh's science fiction I strongly recommend starting here; it has all the virtues of the great Alliance/Union books (good worldbuilding, good politics, exciting plots, a refusal to romanticize violence, kickass female characters, immersive tight 3rd person POV narration that doesn't talk down to the reader) and none of the vices (inaccessibility, demented structuring choices, being thousands of pages long).
I love the distribution of virtues among the alien species: the hani are warm-hearted, cozily mammalian, and refreshingly devoid of imperialist ambitions, but they're also conservative, xenophobic, sexist jerks, the kif are sadistic, sociopathic assholes, but they're far more cosmopolitan in their outlook and they're willing to engage other cultures on their own terms, and the stsho are politically and physically feeble but they're also the ones providing the legal and financial infrastructure holding the whole system together. And I love how everyone in the Compact is like "We are here to trade. We may not like everything about each other, but we are going to share the same space stations, follow the same laws, and not kill each other, because it's more lucrative that way. Now sit the fuck down and DEAL WITH IT." I love how Pyanfar winds up choosing not to murder an armada of people who were trying to kill her five minutes before because she doesn't want to be That Guy, because that's not how they solve their problems in the Compact and she doesn't want it to be. The triumph of commerce over twattery is a common theme throughout Alliance/Union, but nowhere is it stronger than here.
Optional details:
It would be an interesting challenge to get Hilfy, Vikktakkht and Tahy into the same story. You're more than welcome to try, but this is one of those cases where your requester is trying to use the AND as an OR.
I would be thrilled with a fic about any of them, or about some combination of them. I love all three of them and I love the Compact, so anything from introspective character studies to fics about their relationships to fics that delve into the worldbuilding and only feature the character in a cameo role would be awesome.
Hilfy is my favorite Chanur. I love how unlike her aunt she's by preference a diplomat rather than a fighter. Pyanfar became a negotiator by necessity because she couldn't outgun the kif, but for Hilfy getting into the heads of her customers and her enemies is a way of life. Pyanfar takes what she wants and damn the consequences, which is admirable in its way, but Hilfy thinks: what will it mean for society if we start taking men into space? What does this new arrangement with the kif mean for the balance of power in the Compact? Anything with her being her brainy little self would be great- her growing bond with her crew, her interactions with her aunt or her family back on Anuurn or Tahy Mahn or Vikktakkht or her new stsho buddies.
And then there's Vikktakkht! He's smart, he's adaptable, and he basically spent all of Legacy trolling Hilfy for the lulz while simultaneously preventing an international incident. I fell in love with him when he casually strolled up to the crew of the Pride in the midst of a group of kif who were about to gun them down and shot the other kif from behind- I felt he handled that incident with a certain panache- and I love how he's grown in Legacy. I love how he's been picking up hani concepts like medical care and trying to get the kif to adopt them. What was his relationship with Sikkukkut? How did he wind up on the Pride's dock in the first place? What does he think of Pyanfar, or Hilfy, or the future direction of the Compact? When and how did he change his name? Is he even a 'he'- how does kif reproduction work? Does he endure the stsho's crazy aesthetic requirements with the same long-suffering patience Hilfy does? How contingent is his loyalty to Pyanfar, and what is he planning to do when she eventually dies?
And finally Tahy. I have always liked Tahy, ever since she politely bowed to her parents and fucked off in the middle of her takeover attempt when she heard there was an international emergency going on and Pyanfar didn't have time to deal with local politics right then. She must be seriously pissed off that the Han handed Chanur Holding back to the Chanurs by fiat after Kara won it fair and square. What was her childhood like? What's her relationship like with her cousin Hilfy, who seems to have always gotten more of her mother's attention? Does it suck being the daughter of a poor, planet-bound clan when wealthy, space-faring Chanur is your next-door neighbor and your mother's priority? Would Tahy have liked to go into space herself if Mahn had ships, or does she prefer life on the farm? How does she feel about her father being alive, but faffing about in space with a bunch of loose women? Last Yuletide resulted in a fantastic Tahy fic (not written for me, but I was the one who nominated her so I feel a certain degree of vicarious satisfaction), and I'd be ecstatic with anything more in that vein.
One thing I would like to avoid is more Pyanfar POV. I love Py, but I feel like we've had her take on everything, and she's... quite opinionated, so it may have been slightly biased. I want to see through someone else's eyes for a bit. I love the Compact worldbuilding, so if you don't want to concentrate on any of these characters worldbuilding-y fics would be awesome too.
Alternately, I would quite enjoy a crossover where one of the asshole species from another Alliance/Union book- the iduve, the mri, etc- show up and the Compact teams up to kick the shit out of them. Or hell, go wild, have the Klingons invade, or the Daleks, or the Wraith, or whoever. Space battles are always fun, the kif are always fun, and I kind of assume the tc'a gave them spaceflight so the Compact would have a militia on hand to deal with precisely this emergency.
Happy Valley (TV)
Characters: Catherine Cawood, Clare Cartwright, Ryan Cawood
A gritty police drama about kickass Yorkshire police sergeant Catherine Cawood and her increasingly awful life. Eight years ago Catherine's daughter Becky was raped, bore a child and immediately committed suicide, leaving Catherine and her sister Clare to raise the baby. Between dealing with young Ryan's antisocial tendencies and patrolling drug-riddled Hebben Bridge, Catherine has more than enough on her plate, but things take a turn for the worse when Becky's rapist is released from prison and not at all coincidentally a local businessman's daughter is kidnapped.
It's out on DVD, and you can also get it through iTunes or Netflix. Or through illegal filesharing.
(It comes with a massive trigger warning for graphic sexualized violence. It’s a good show and fairly feminist in its sentiments, but if you don’t want to see women badly beaten and raped onscreen it is not for you.
It also has an insanely frustrating format for a cop show because it shows the police investigation and the kidnappers' timeline in tandem, so the viewer always has access to information the police desperately need to solve the case and winds up yelling at the television while they wander around in circles. I think Happy Valley’s other virtues redeem this flaw- if it even is a flaw; it certainly kept me engaged- but I want to give fair warning.)
What I like about it:
It’s a tense, well-plotted thriller and Catherine is a great protagonist, tough and clever and determined but realistically flawed. Her stubbornness and independence enable her to solve the case, but they also prevent her from seeing the full picture and sometimes lead her to hurt the people she cares about. And I was quickly won over by the Cawood-Cartwright household. I usually dislike it when procedurals get derailed by personal plotlines, but here the two strands of the plot were perfectly integrated. Also, Catherine’s personal problems are serious, interesting problems a sensible person might have, rather than the sort of personal problems characters run into because of overwrought melodrama inflicted on them by the writers or by their own inability to function as an adult. What do you do when the grandson you’ve given up your life to raise turns out to be a nightmare?
It’s impossible not to like Clare, the recovering heroin addict who is the most psychologically balanced person in the household and who is holding the family together through sheer goodwill. And despite myself I find myself charmed by Ryan, who is a plausibly difficult child being molded by difficult circumstances, but fairly cute when you’re not the one who has to deal with him. Also his little accent is adorable. I realize adults with strong regional accents start out as small children with strong regional accents- this probably does not come as an epiphany to locals- but on television “It’ll be reight” is a phrase you expect to hear from some gruff, grizzled man in his forties, not from an eight year old.
Optional details:
Catherine Cawood is awesome, and I'd be delighted to get case fic about her police work.
But the thing that led me to request this fandom for Yuletide is a bizarre craving for domestic fluff, or as close as it's possible to get in such a dark setting. When I was watching the show I found myself strangely charmed by the dynamics of the Carwood-Cartwright household: Catherine's surly depression, Ryan's realistic awfulness, and poor Clare trying to hold everything together with good intentions and futile gestures at normality. So I'm envisioning "Disastrous Family Gatherings of the Cawoods"- Christmas, a road trip, something like that, where Clare tries to arrange a nice family activity for the three of them, things go predictably and horribly wrong, but then everyone comes together in a heart-warming way at the end. (Or not.)
I recognize it's a bit of a tonal shift from the canon, though, so if it doesn't seem workable please don't feel obliged to write it! I really would be very happy with policing fic.
I don’t know what it is about this canon that suggests “Darkly humorous domestic fluff” to me, but for some reason I have a strange hankering for it. So the prompt is, force Catherine, Clare and Ryan to spend some family time together and see what happens.
Maybe after they refuse the offer to pay off their mortgage, Nevison insists on paying for a holiday for them? Catherine has a few weeks of mandatory leave and Ryan can barely function in school when he hasn’t just had his father pour a gallon of gasoline all over him and try to set him on fire- he probably needs some time to process events. They could take a road trip or go visit the south of France or Spain or wherever. (Because taking Ryan abroad is a brilliant idea that will in no way result in some kind of international incident.) Or it could be some other occasion, Christmas or a birthday or parents’ evening at Ryan’s school or Clare randomly decides they should have a picnic.
Inevitably things go awry, and there is a massive family row / mayhem / pillage and arson / near-death experience which ultimately proves cathartic and helps everyone to work through their issues and realize they all love and need each other after all. Or not, depending on your taste. But much lulz are had and we all feel sorry for Clare.
If this scenario does not appeal, I’d also be perfectly happy with case fic. Catherine’s a great police officer and it would be fun to watch her work. We don’t get to know Catherine’s fellow officers very well in the show but I liked what I saw of them, and between Calderdale’s drugs problem and everything that’s gone wrong with Yorkshire policing recently, you’re spoiled for choice as far as possible cases go.
One thing I would like to avoid is any more graphic sexualized violence. I got more than enough of that from the show and I’m kind of at saturation point. If you’d like to do a domestic violence case or a Rotherham scandal parallel, that’s fine, just please steer clear of serial rapists/killers.
The Sandbaggers
Characters: Neil Burnside, Geoffrey Wellingham, Jeff Ross
A TV series about Neil Burnside, the under-resourced and psychopathic Director of Operations for the SIS in the late 1970s/early 1908s, the spies who work for him, and the various people who screw him over, most notably the KGB, his bosses in Parliament and the civil service (here represented by his mentor and indirect superior Sir Geoffrey Wellingham, the permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office), the CIA (here represented by Neil's lunch buddy and American liaison officer Jeff Ross), and last but definitely not least himself (here represented by Neil Burnside). It's like the lovechild of Spooks and The West Wing, where most of the espionage work consists of Neil sitting in offices fighting with his superiors for the resources and authorization to actually send the eponymous Sandbaggers to go spy. It's also bleak as hell. A typical episode involves Neil pissing off his bosses by doing something sneaky and illegal in a desperate attempt to block the KGB, and then getting pwned by them anyway. Also notable for Neil's unique sartorial taste, which tends towards waistcoats and massive Seventies ties.
It's out on DVD, or various illegal filesharing services.
What I like about it:
The bleakness, the realism (all the real British spies say it's the most accurate depiction of their work they've ever seen) the strong writing and acting, Neil's well intentioned psychopathy, and the show's ability to convince you that Neil is an incredibly intelligent person making the best decisions he can, who nevertheless spends most his time getting his ass handed to him because his job is really hard. There are no idiot plots here, and the show expects the viewer to be intelligent too: terms are never defined, and sometimes people have conversations in foreign languages without subtitles. It makes for an immersive and refreshingly uncondescending viewing experience. Also Sir Geoffrey Wellingham is a BAMF.
I got a brilliant Sandbaggers fic for Yuletide two years ago and I'm reluctant to make the same request twice- it seems a little greedy, somehow, when I've had such a lovely gift already- but I saw on FFA that somewhere out there in the world there exists another lonely Neil Burnside/Jeff Ross shipper. So I thought, what the hell, I'll prompt it again for both of us. This request goes out to you, kindred spirit!
Optional details:
I'd love anything that explores Neil's relationship with either Sir Geoffrey or Jeff: the complex interactions between his well-intentioned psychopathy, their slightly less well-intentioned psychopathy, the fondness they feel for him, the power they have over him, and everyone's competing loyalties. You don't have to include both of them (although the two of them fighting over Neil could be hilarious, albeit a cruel mismatch in terms of ability). Slash is great but completely optional.
Possible avenues of ficcage include:
Does Sir Geoffrey ever worry that he's created a monster? Not just from a "What happens to my knighthood if something goes wrong?" standpoint, but from a national interest standpoint. Neil answers to the British Government only because Sir Geoffrey is smarter than him and Gibbs hates him; if it weren't for that the whole operational side of SIS would basically be a rogue agency. This seems like a less than ideal legacy to leave to one's successor at the Foreign Office, even if Neil broadly shares Sir Geoffrey's outlook on foreign policy and even if there are SIS officials with much bigger problems than Neil's cowboy tendencies (step forward, Edward Tyler).
If you'd rather deal with the specific than the general case, I'd love a case fic of one of those scenarios where Neil does something duplicitous and probably illegal and Sir Geoffrey outmaneuvers him and smacks him down. Those are always a lot of fun.
On a related point, what happens between Sir Geoffrey and Neil after the end of the series? Sir Geoffrey seems to be running out of patience with him, but if Neil were replaceable as his protégé presumably he would have replaced him a long time ago, and over the years he's done Neil an awful lot of 'final' favors. Then again, trying to sabotage the START treaty is pretty epic disobedience/borderline treason even by Neil standards.
If you want to go down the slash route, Sir Geoffrey/Neil would be terrifying but intriguing.
On the other hand, Jeff! If you wanted to write me the first Neil/Jeff slash fic in existence, you would be my hero. (If you wanted to write a Neil/Jeff slash fic that supports my pet conspiracy theory that Jeff deliberately got Laura killed, or at least failed to look for an alternate solution, because she was cockblocking him by getting in the way of his lunch dates with Neil, you would be my hero for all of time.)
Alternately, they could have more wacky gen adventures where Jeff screws Neil over on behalf of Langley and then bribes his way back into his affections with soda. How does Jeff feel about periodically betraying his friend, especially given that he must know Neil can kill him with his brain? How does Jeff feel about the fact Neil basically spends the show spiraling downward into self-destructive madness and it's partially his fault?
Or examine their relationship from an outside viewpoint- how does Willie feel about their weird little dance, considering that he and Jeff have a shared interest in Neil's welfare and continued employment, but Jeff is the person most likely to get a Sandbagger killed?
Political RPF - UK 20th-21st c. (or as we call it elsewhere on the interwebs, Lolitics)
Characters: Walter Harrison, Bernard "Jack" Weatherill
What it says on the tin: RPF about the people who have been running Britain for the past hundred years or so. The cast is obviously immense, but this year I've opted for the two Deputy Chief Whips in the 1974-1979 Parliament. If you've seen James Graham's play This House you already know exactly who these people are and why I requested them. If you haven't you're probably completely lost right now, so let me try to explain.
In the late 1970s, the ruling Labour Party were just short of a majority in the House of Commons, which meant they could be thrown out of power by a vote of no confidence. To prevent this they had to madly scramble around to get votes by making deals with the minor parties, getting all their own MPs to show up to vote, and keeping the opposing Tory MPs from voting whenever possible. It was quite important that the government survive, because they were keeping Margaret Thatcher out of power and as soon as she got in she was going to either save Britain (the rightwing view) or make a huge mess that would lead to all of Britain's current social and economic woes (the leftwing view), but by any standard do a lot of harm to the sort of people who voted Labour.
The man in charge of the day-to-day operations to make sure this didn't happen was Labour's Deputy Chief Whip Walter Harrison, who came up with some ingenious and dubiously legal tricks to win every vote. (These included issuing MPs with disguises so they could vote twice, letting sick MPs live in the House of Commons so they could vote from their beds, and once jamming part of his body through the closing door of the voting lobby and saying it should count as a fractional vote since he was halfway in the room.) Opposing him was the ridiculously nice and honorable Tory Deputy Chief Whip Jack Weatherill. Jack was as clever as Walter and knew a few tricks of his own, but his outstanding feature was his decency.
Although their jobs were dedicated to thwarting each other at every possible turn, the two men were friends. On the night the government finally fell they had an incredible confrontation: Jack offered to destroy his own career by abstaining from the confidence vote to honor a gentleman's agreement between them, and Walter refused to accept his sacrifice and chose to let the government go down instead. (To give you a sense of the magnitude of this, there was a Labour MP who was on his deathbed and the whips were seriously discussing whether it would be worth killing him by dragging him down to Westminster if it meant they could win this vote. Several people including the dying MP himself were in favor of this plan, although Walter ultimately vetoed it.)
This history is covered magnificently in This House, but unfortunately the play has finished its run and no copies of the film of the production seem to have made their way online. If you really want you can buy the script here, but it's unlikely to be in your library and anyway it seems unfair to ask someone to read a script.
So if you haven't seen it you'll have to make do with the RL versions of Walter and Jack. There's a BBC radio documentary about the final confidence vote featuring interviews with both of them that you can play with RealPlayer here, and their Lolitics wiki pages are here and here. And here is an adorkable C-SPAN interview of Jack in his later incarnation as Speaker of the House of Commons. (There's a particularly entertaining bit of transatlantic comedy at 8:00 where the C-SPAN reporter asks him how much all the state portraits of the speakers could be sold for and Jack is politely aghast.)
I'm equally amenable to This House fanfic or RPF, whichever takes your fancy. (The primary difference of course being theatrical!Jack's fabulous blond quiff, but fans of both may feel there are some characterization differences as well.)
What I like about it:
Walter and Jack have an odd couple charm to them- the bluff, devious Yorkshire electrician vs. the urbane, honorable Savile Row tailor- that makes them an engaging partnership/rivalry, or an appealing slash pairing if you're into that sort of thing. I enjoy watching their high-stakes chess game as they try to maneuver their MPs into the right voting lobbies. And the high stakes lend enormous tension to the interplay between their jobs and their friendship. They're opposing generals in a sort of civilized war and the future of their country is at stake, but in the final choice between friend and country they both choose to stand by their friend.
Optional details:
I'm open to any fic that touches on their relationship. If you ship them I'd be very happy with some slash. If you don't then gen case fic about some of their parliamentary shenanigans or the story of their first encounter or a thoughtful character study looking back over their careers would be lovely too. Or even an AU where they're transplanted to a different setting but retain their friendly rivalry. There is a grand total of one fic about them apart from James Graham's play, so the world is pretty much your oyster here.
Some fic ideas:
• The slash potential is vast. Given the sum total of Harrisill fics written to date ( 1), the field is wide open to you.
• Case fic, which in this case means the two of them running around Parliament trying to whip votes, unwhip the other side's votes, and plotting various shenanigans to that end.
• Jack is a vegetarian and Walter likes plain, hearty meals centering around meat. I sense a rich vein of comedy waiting to be mined.
• The aftermath of the 1979 election. Jack is immediately fired as Deputy Chief Whip by Thatcher and becomes Deputy Speaker, so in essence his offer to abstain was his last act as a whip and as a Tory. During that period the Deputy Speakers were appointed by the agreement of the whips, so Walter would have had some say in this. Jack ends up as Speaker and eventually goes to the House of Lords. Walter ultimately gets shafted by his leadership and denied a peerage, so they don't get to hang out together in the politicians' retirement home. How does it all work out for them?
• The "friendly rivals" dynamic seems like it would translate well to a variety of AUs. Whips in spaaaaaace? The historical AU where Walter is a Roundhead and Jack is a Cavalier? I dunno, surprise me.
Crossposted to Dreamwidth: http://kainosite.dreamwidth.org/4511.html. Comment there or here.