Dear Yuletide Writer (subject to change until signups end)
Dear Yuletide Writer,
Hello! Thank you for writing a story for me. It's so exciting that we're both interested in one of these tiny fandoms! This will be, gosh, my fourth year doing Yuletide, and writing my Yuletide assignment has come to be one of the highlights of the year for me. I hope you have just as much fun filling my prompt this year. I'm writing this letter just to give you some more ideas if you want them--and because I love this opportunity to ramble on about the small fandoms of my heart--and I hope you get some inspiration out of it if that's what you're looking for. But please, feel free to ignore all this and just write a story that you like and enjoy writing. I will seriously be so thrilled to read anything about the characters I requested.
My requests were these:
Arsène Lupin - Maurice Leblanc (Narrator)
I want to read more about Lupin's friend and chronicler. I think it'd be really fun if he got a piece of the action for a change--if he ended up accompanying Lupin on some sort of adventure, treasure hunt, or even heist. Or, on a more mundane note, it would also be interesting to find out more about the writing and publishing of the Arsène Lupin stories in-universe. Has the narrator's literary association with Lupin ever gotten him into trouble? Anything about the narrator would be great.
I love this series! My favorite books are the Extraordinary adventures and the Confessions--I prefer the shorter adventures to the grander, darker themes of some of the novels. I love the crime, the mystery, and the adventure, and I love how utterly over-the-top cool Lupin is, with all his clever schemes and his disguises and his cavalier charm. I also like how often he cheerily walks the line between being a hero and lining his own pockets: "For [Lupin] was helpful--almost uncannily so. The trouble was that he always managed to help himself as well as others" ("The Bridge That Broke").
And I always like reading the stories that include the first-person narrator who is supposedly the one chronicling Lupin's adventures. It's so interesting that the greatest thief in Europe, a man who is forever changing his face and his name and his place of residence, would befriend someone who seems to be a bland, law-abiding everyman. Not only that--but that he continues to see this man long after the case that he had to do with was over; that he routinely just hangs out on the narrator's couch, in his own person with no disguises or precautions, and regales him with tales of his crimes. The narrator even has the ability to contact or summon Lupin, if he wishes. And they seem very comfortable with one another: Lupin teases the narrator about his less quick intelligence, but the narrator is not afraid to question or argue with Lupin occasionally.
So I'd love to read anything in which Lupin's Watson plays a major role. It would be cool to see him go on an adventure with Lupin, but there are also lots of other things that would be interesting to explore about him. Like, how does he go about turning Lupin's adventures into stories? Does he have to go to a lot of trouble to publish them under a pseudonym? Has Inspector Ganimard ever tried to arrest him for obstructing justice? How does being friends with Arsène Lupin affect his social life or career? Or whatever catches your interest about the narrator--I just want to read more about him.
I didn't ask for it specifically, but if you want to write Lupin/Narrator slash, I would not object.
(If you need the reference [I probably would], the chronicler makes Lupin's acquaintance in "The Seven of Hearts." He is prominent as a framing device in the Confessions, and I believe he is present in person for part of Versus Herlock Sholmes.)
Oz - L. Frank Baum (Shaggy Man)
I'd love to read a fleshed-out version of the story of how the Shaggy Man stole the Love Magnet. Or something else about the Shaggy Man's background and his adventures in America before he came to Oz. What was his childhood like? How did people in America treat a wandering shaggy man? When did he learn to operate a wireless telegraph? It'd also be neat to find out more about the Shaggy Man's life in Oz, and how it differs from his former life. Anything about the Shaggy Man would be great.
I fell in love with Baum after reading (and writing for) The Enchanted Island of Yew for Yuletide last year, and this year I went through the Oz series for the first time. It's so much fun! One of my favorite themes in media is the juxtaposition of the fantastic and the mundane, and I love that the Oz books have so much of that. I love the way the narrator is so matter-of-fact about the most fantastic things, and I love how delightfully pragmatic the story and the characters are, with the human characters always having to remember to bring lunch, and the Scarecrow commenting that "it must be very inconvenient to be made out of meat" and so on. I also think it's really interesting how the outside world is portrayed through the eventually many characters who make their way to Oz from there.
And maybe that's why I'm so interested in the Shaggy Man. He might be my favorite character, and there's a lot to like about him--his helpful, down-to-earth nature, the way he is capable of being stirred to deep emotion--but maybe what interests me most is that he is a fantastic character who comes from a mundane world. We meet him "on the road to Butterfield" with Dorothy, and he is an American--we later find out that it is he who relays the stories to Baum over the wireless telegraph. But even when he first appears in Kansas, there's a lot of mystery about him that the other American characters in the books don't have. It's interesting that he doesn't have a name, and that he is not introduced so much as he simply appears. "The shaggy man" speaks to Dorothy in the first sentence of The Road to Oz, and the Shaggy Man he is called for the rest of the series. It must be a family trait, too, because when we meet his also nameless brother, he soon loses the title of the Ugly Man and becomes simply "the Shaggy Man's brother".
So there's a lot to be explored about the Shaggy Man's background. Like I said in my request, I think the story of how the Shaggy Man stole the Love Magnet is interesting and I'd love to see it expanded upon. (And there's another oddly fantastic element--what was a Love Magnet doing in America in the first place?) But there's so much else to explore, too. How did the Shaggy Man and his brother come to be without names? What did the Shaggy Man do with his life before he wound up in Oz? Or what does he do after? What is his daily occupation in Oz? What is his life with his brother and Betsy Bobbin like after those two make their way to Oz? How does Oz differ from the Shaggy Man's experience of America, and does he ever miss America? Or whatever you find most interesting about the Shaggy Man--I'd love to read more about him.
Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated (Ricky Owens/Professor Pericles)
I want to read more about young Ricky Owens and his relationship with Professor Pericles. What was their life together like before the events of twenty years ago? Did Pericles have genuine affection for Ricky, or did he have ulterior motives the whole time? On a lighter note, I'd also love to read something about the original Mystery Incorporated solving a mystery in the late eighties. Anything with Ricky and Pericles would be great.
I know it has its problems, but I don't even care, I love this show so much. I watched the first part of season two this year as it came out, and then I went back and re-watched season one, and it's just so great. I love the way it plays with the original Scooby-Doo franchise, the meta-humor and the in-depth character arcs for our main five. I love the way it's goofy and funny and cracked-out, but also really dark and epic, with occasional genuinely affecting emotional moments. (Like the last scene of "The Midnight Zone", oh my god.) And, especially after re-watching season one and seeing how everything fits together, I'm really interested in the arc plot, the story of the original Mystery Incorporated, the other mystery-solving groups, the cursed treasure, the sense of cosmic supernatural destiny that is emerging.
So I really like the glimpses we get of the original Mystery Incorporated, both in the flashbacks at the end of season one and in the present day as they reunite and talk about the past. I'm interested in finding out more about them, and about Ricky Owens and Professor Pericles in particular.
It's interesting to compare Ricky and Pericles to their counterparts from twenty years later--Shaggy and Scooby grew up together and are like two peas in a pod. But in the flashbacks, Ricky and Pericles seem very different from one another. In fact, Mr. E seems to have more in common with the present-day Pericles than Ricky had with him twenty years ago. And unlike Scooby, Professor Pericles is long-lived and had a life before Ricky--he is almost some sort of intruder.
I am suspicious about the how-they-met flashback in "The Gathering Gloom". "Were we ever so young" indeed! I wonder if Professor Pericles, even thirtyish years ago, was really the kind of careless, naive bird who would fly into a tree and allow himself to be nursed back to health by a kid. He was already on to the mystery of the cursed treasure years before this--but then, he did stay with Ricky for some years before the original Mystery Incorporated happened upon the mystery of the planispheric disc. What kept him there? Was he using Ricky the whole time, guiding the kids towards the treasure? Was he just biding his time? Did he legitimately enjoy his life with Ricky? Did he have affection for the kid? Does he still?
Ricky, on the other hand, definitely seems to have been very fond of Pericles. There's a moment in the flashback in "Pawn of Shadows" that sticks out to me: Ricky is obviously the most timid member of the gang, much like Shaggy after him. But Professor Pericles goes out of his sight for one minute and he's ready to climb a rickety, centuries-old pipe organ to find him? That's devotion right there. Maybe it's even too much devotion--is there a note of fear, of insecurity, in it?
All my suspicions and dark rambling aside, though, what I really want is to see more of Ricky and Pericles as we see them in the flashbacks. Ricky is totally adorkable, with his slang twenty years more outdated than Shaggy's. And Pericles, the smart one, is great--I mean, he does seem nice enough in the flashbacks, if a little aloof. He may have been a completely different bird before those twenty years in the asylum. (Plus, a propos of nothing, I think it's completely charming that Professor Pericles wears a scarf. A bird wearing a scarf! What's up with that, is Crystal Cove that much cooler than wherever Pericles is native to? [Africa? Is he an African Grey?] It's totally cute.) I would be so happy just to see more of Ricky and Pericles together.
Also, I'm not specifically requesting slash for this pairing, but it's true that their relationship is sort of weirdly intimate in canon ("my sweet Ricky"), and I'm cool with wherever you may decide to go with that.
---
What else do I like, in general? I like lots of things! I'm a big fan of fanfic that really draws on canon, pastiching the voice of the source material or expanding on little details from canon. I like a story with a plot, but I also like short pieces, and I don't mind stories where nothing really happens--I'm a big fan of stories that are mostly just talking. (Like, I love Asimov, haha.) I like character studies, vignettes, missing scenes, whatever. I like to find out interesting little details about even the most mundane topics. I like adventure, dialogue, humor, hurt/comfort, language, mystery, science, slice-of-life, trivia, UST, wordplay, &c.
I'm not religious, but I do celebrate Christmas--I love the decorating, the carols, the shopping, the spirit of good will... So I would not object to a Christmastime-themed story if you wanted to write one.
I'm not really interested in reading explicit sex. I'm not a big fan of character death, characters having children, or transplant AUs--basically, I like it when the status quo remains more or less intact.
If you're looking for more information about me, I don't maintain much of a presence of LiveJournal or Dreamwidth, but I'm reasonably active on tumblr. There's also my account at the AO3, and I keep my fanfic bookmarks (and general bookmarks) on Pinboard. Feel free to poke around.
Optional details are, of course, optional. Most of all I hope you have a good time writing a story that you like, and I'm sure I'll love it too! Whatever you come up with, it will be so great to read a story in any of these fandoms. Thanks again, and happy Yuletide!
Hello! Thank you for writing a story for me. It's so exciting that we're both interested in one of these tiny fandoms! This will be, gosh, my fourth year doing Yuletide, and writing my Yuletide assignment has come to be one of the highlights of the year for me. I hope you have just as much fun filling my prompt this year. I'm writing this letter just to give you some more ideas if you want them--and because I love this opportunity to ramble on about the small fandoms of my heart--and I hope you get some inspiration out of it if that's what you're looking for. But please, feel free to ignore all this and just write a story that you like and enjoy writing. I will seriously be so thrilled to read anything about the characters I requested.
My requests were these:
Arsène Lupin - Maurice Leblanc (Narrator)
I want to read more about Lupin's friend and chronicler. I think it'd be really fun if he got a piece of the action for a change--if he ended up accompanying Lupin on some sort of adventure, treasure hunt, or even heist. Or, on a more mundane note, it would also be interesting to find out more about the writing and publishing of the Arsène Lupin stories in-universe. Has the narrator's literary association with Lupin ever gotten him into trouble? Anything about the narrator would be great.
I love this series! My favorite books are the Extraordinary adventures and the Confessions--I prefer the shorter adventures to the grander, darker themes of some of the novels. I love the crime, the mystery, and the adventure, and I love how utterly over-the-top cool Lupin is, with all his clever schemes and his disguises and his cavalier charm. I also like how often he cheerily walks the line between being a hero and lining his own pockets: "For [Lupin] was helpful--almost uncannily so. The trouble was that he always managed to help himself as well as others" ("The Bridge That Broke").
And I always like reading the stories that include the first-person narrator who is supposedly the one chronicling Lupin's adventures. It's so interesting that the greatest thief in Europe, a man who is forever changing his face and his name and his place of residence, would befriend someone who seems to be a bland, law-abiding everyman. Not only that--but that he continues to see this man long after the case that he had to do with was over; that he routinely just hangs out on the narrator's couch, in his own person with no disguises or precautions, and regales him with tales of his crimes. The narrator even has the ability to contact or summon Lupin, if he wishes. And they seem very comfortable with one another: Lupin teases the narrator about his less quick intelligence, but the narrator is not afraid to question or argue with Lupin occasionally.
So I'd love to read anything in which Lupin's Watson plays a major role. It would be cool to see him go on an adventure with Lupin, but there are also lots of other things that would be interesting to explore about him. Like, how does he go about turning Lupin's adventures into stories? Does he have to go to a lot of trouble to publish them under a pseudonym? Has Inspector Ganimard ever tried to arrest him for obstructing justice? How does being friends with Arsène Lupin affect his social life or career? Or whatever catches your interest about the narrator--I just want to read more about him.
I didn't ask for it specifically, but if you want to write Lupin/Narrator slash, I would not object.
(If you need the reference [I probably would], the chronicler makes Lupin's acquaintance in "The Seven of Hearts." He is prominent as a framing device in the Confessions, and I believe he is present in person for part of Versus Herlock Sholmes.)
Oz - L. Frank Baum (Shaggy Man)
I'd love to read a fleshed-out version of the story of how the Shaggy Man stole the Love Magnet. Or something else about the Shaggy Man's background and his adventures in America before he came to Oz. What was his childhood like? How did people in America treat a wandering shaggy man? When did he learn to operate a wireless telegraph? It'd also be neat to find out more about the Shaggy Man's life in Oz, and how it differs from his former life. Anything about the Shaggy Man would be great.
I fell in love with Baum after reading (and writing for) The Enchanted Island of Yew for Yuletide last year, and this year I went through the Oz series for the first time. It's so much fun! One of my favorite themes in media is the juxtaposition of the fantastic and the mundane, and I love that the Oz books have so much of that. I love the way the narrator is so matter-of-fact about the most fantastic things, and I love how delightfully pragmatic the story and the characters are, with the human characters always having to remember to bring lunch, and the Scarecrow commenting that "it must be very inconvenient to be made out of meat" and so on. I also think it's really interesting how the outside world is portrayed through the eventually many characters who make their way to Oz from there.
And maybe that's why I'm so interested in the Shaggy Man. He might be my favorite character, and there's a lot to like about him--his helpful, down-to-earth nature, the way he is capable of being stirred to deep emotion--but maybe what interests me most is that he is a fantastic character who comes from a mundane world. We meet him "on the road to Butterfield" with Dorothy, and he is an American--we later find out that it is he who relays the stories to Baum over the wireless telegraph. But even when he first appears in Kansas, there's a lot of mystery about him that the other American characters in the books don't have. It's interesting that he doesn't have a name, and that he is not introduced so much as he simply appears. "The shaggy man" speaks to Dorothy in the first sentence of The Road to Oz, and the Shaggy Man he is called for the rest of the series. It must be a family trait, too, because when we meet his also nameless brother, he soon loses the title of the Ugly Man and becomes simply "the Shaggy Man's brother".
So there's a lot to be explored about the Shaggy Man's background. Like I said in my request, I think the story of how the Shaggy Man stole the Love Magnet is interesting and I'd love to see it expanded upon. (And there's another oddly fantastic element--what was a Love Magnet doing in America in the first place?) But there's so much else to explore, too. How did the Shaggy Man and his brother come to be without names? What did the Shaggy Man do with his life before he wound up in Oz? Or what does he do after? What is his daily occupation in Oz? What is his life with his brother and Betsy Bobbin like after those two make their way to Oz? How does Oz differ from the Shaggy Man's experience of America, and does he ever miss America? Or whatever you find most interesting about the Shaggy Man--I'd love to read more about him.
Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated (Ricky Owens/Professor Pericles)
I want to read more about young Ricky Owens and his relationship with Professor Pericles. What was their life together like before the events of twenty years ago? Did Pericles have genuine affection for Ricky, or did he have ulterior motives the whole time? On a lighter note, I'd also love to read something about the original Mystery Incorporated solving a mystery in the late eighties. Anything with Ricky and Pericles would be great.
I know it has its problems, but I don't even care, I love this show so much. I watched the first part of season two this year as it came out, and then I went back and re-watched season one, and it's just so great. I love the way it plays with the original Scooby-Doo franchise, the meta-humor and the in-depth character arcs for our main five. I love the way it's goofy and funny and cracked-out, but also really dark and epic, with occasional genuinely affecting emotional moments. (Like the last scene of "The Midnight Zone", oh my god.) And, especially after re-watching season one and seeing how everything fits together, I'm really interested in the arc plot, the story of the original Mystery Incorporated, the other mystery-solving groups, the cursed treasure, the sense of cosmic supernatural destiny that is emerging.
So I really like the glimpses we get of the original Mystery Incorporated, both in the flashbacks at the end of season one and in the present day as they reunite and talk about the past. I'm interested in finding out more about them, and about Ricky Owens and Professor Pericles in particular.
It's interesting to compare Ricky and Pericles to their counterparts from twenty years later--Shaggy and Scooby grew up together and are like two peas in a pod. But in the flashbacks, Ricky and Pericles seem very different from one another. In fact, Mr. E seems to have more in common with the present-day Pericles than Ricky had with him twenty years ago. And unlike Scooby, Professor Pericles is long-lived and had a life before Ricky--he is almost some sort of intruder.
I am suspicious about the how-they-met flashback in "The Gathering Gloom". "Were we ever so young" indeed! I wonder if Professor Pericles, even thirtyish years ago, was really the kind of careless, naive bird who would fly into a tree and allow himself to be nursed back to health by a kid. He was already on to the mystery of the cursed treasure years before this--but then, he did stay with Ricky for some years before the original Mystery Incorporated happened upon the mystery of the planispheric disc. What kept him there? Was he using Ricky the whole time, guiding the kids towards the treasure? Was he just biding his time? Did he legitimately enjoy his life with Ricky? Did he have affection for the kid? Does he still?
Ricky, on the other hand, definitely seems to have been very fond of Pericles. There's a moment in the flashback in "Pawn of Shadows" that sticks out to me: Ricky is obviously the most timid member of the gang, much like Shaggy after him. But Professor Pericles goes out of his sight for one minute and he's ready to climb a rickety, centuries-old pipe organ to find him? That's devotion right there. Maybe it's even too much devotion--is there a note of fear, of insecurity, in it?
All my suspicions and dark rambling aside, though, what I really want is to see more of Ricky and Pericles as we see them in the flashbacks. Ricky is totally adorkable, with his slang twenty years more outdated than Shaggy's. And Pericles, the smart one, is great--I mean, he does seem nice enough in the flashbacks, if a little aloof. He may have been a completely different bird before those twenty years in the asylum. (Plus, a propos of nothing, I think it's completely charming that Professor Pericles wears a scarf. A bird wearing a scarf! What's up with that, is Crystal Cove that much cooler than wherever Pericles is native to? [Africa? Is he an African Grey?] It's totally cute.) I would be so happy just to see more of Ricky and Pericles together.
Also, I'm not specifically requesting slash for this pairing, but it's true that their relationship is sort of weirdly intimate in canon ("my sweet Ricky"), and I'm cool with wherever you may decide to go with that.
---
What else do I like, in general? I like lots of things! I'm a big fan of fanfic that really draws on canon, pastiching the voice of the source material or expanding on little details from canon. I like a story with a plot, but I also like short pieces, and I don't mind stories where nothing really happens--I'm a big fan of stories that are mostly just talking. (Like, I love Asimov, haha.) I like character studies, vignettes, missing scenes, whatever. I like to find out interesting little details about even the most mundane topics. I like adventure, dialogue, humor, hurt/comfort, language, mystery, science, slice-of-life, trivia, UST, wordplay, &c.
I'm not religious, but I do celebrate Christmas--I love the decorating, the carols, the shopping, the spirit of good will... So I would not object to a Christmastime-themed story if you wanted to write one.
I'm not really interested in reading explicit sex. I'm not a big fan of character death, characters having children, or transplant AUs--basically, I like it when the status quo remains more or less intact.
If you're looking for more information about me, I don't maintain much of a presence of LiveJournal or Dreamwidth, but I'm reasonably active on tumblr. There's also my account at the AO3, and I keep my fanfic bookmarks (and general bookmarks) on Pinboard. Feel free to poke around.
Optional details are, of course, optional. Most of all I hope you have a good time writing a story that you like, and I'm sure I'll love it too! Whatever you come up with, it will be so great to read a story in any of these fandoms. Thanks again, and happy Yuletide!