2015 Yuletide Request Letter
Hi there, Yuletide writer (and whoever else may stumble upon this post)! I generally seem to wind up taking these letters as an excuse to dump pretty much every spare relevant fic idea I’ve had over the last year or more in one place in the mad hope of getting someone to write one of them for me, so this is likely to get a little rambling. But as the cliché goes, optional details are optional, so feel free to take as much or as little from my disorganised jumble of prompts as you like, and run with them wherever they may take you.
I started last year’s letter with some general notes on likes/dislikes, though since three of my four requests this year are all different obscure corners of Who-canon (and the fourth is pretty unique anyway), I figure I may as well cut straight to fandom-specific stuff. So, some general preferences about the Whoniverse:
Whoniverse internal crossover possibilities
Parallels between the Shalka-verse and Season 6B: Something that struck me right away on watching Scream of the Shalka were the hints that the Doctor’s working for the Time Lords once again, in what seemed like such a very 6B-style scenario I’m halfway convinced it was a deliberate call back. I don’t think I’ve ever seen fic which really deals with the fact that Shalka may be very much not the first time the Time Lords have ever had the Doctor so firmly under their thumb, but I’d very much like to. Could it connect with Shalka’s questionable place in the timeline somehow? Even something as simple as a very drunk and morose Shalka!9 bemoaning his cyclic fate to a disinterested bartender could be interesting here - there’s got to be any number of other possibilities in this one, and I would love to see them played with in fic.
Parallels between the Shalka-verse and CoFD: So, just why are there so many short-lived 9th Doctors? Do all three of them ever get together for a chat? Alternately, playing up the RE Grant connection, I would love to see this prompt filled in any form.
Parallels between the Season 6B and CoFD? Okay, I’m not sure there are any per se, but throwing the cracktastic world of CoFD in with the Doctor many remember for his easily flustered personality and his recorder could sure be farcical good fun. Maybe Atkinson!9 mocks him for giving in to the Time Lords, maybe Two’s government job status gives him rare access to the very sort of bizarre pocket universe CoFD takes place in. It’s all possible.
Collisions with the greater Whoniverse, in all flavours: See point above on how much I love that thing where you can pretty much have any character from any part of the Whoniverse meet any other at any time. Obviously, playing mix-and-match with various incarnations of the Doctor and the Master is pretty much my favourite thing to do with this (heck, borderline-canon-compliant femmeslash is possible in that ship now, and I’d be very much down with reading it), but Doctors meeting other Doctors or companions past or present (or, indeed, companions meeting other companions and trading notes) is always good fun too. Basically, if you want to go that route in fic, I’m probably going to be down with more or less any combination of other characters showing up.
Alright, that about covers general possibilities, time to move on to some prompts that are a little more fandom-specific.
Season 6B
So! If you’ve signed up to write for this, I assume you probably don’t need the whole idea explained, but I since there’s probably a decent chance there’s someone reading this who’s mostly here for the Shalka/CoFD angle, what the hell, ten second summary:
Back in 1969, the Second Doctor’s run came to an end with an event where he was captured by the Time Lords and put on trial for the crime of ‘meddling’ with the affairs of primitive cultures. His companions had their memories of their time with him removed, and the Doctor was forced to regenerate into a new body and exiled to earth (though we didn’t actually see his new body or arrival on earth until the first episode of the following season). But that wasn’t the last we saw of the Second Doctor - he reappears again in the Five Doctors in the 70’s, and much later in the Two Doctors in the 80’s - the actor noticeably aged each time. Interestingly, parts of both the script and the commentary for The Two Doctors suggest that the writers decided to work with this issue rather than ignore it, hinting that the trial we saw on screen for the Second Doctor was largely for show, while in reality his sentence also required him to spend a number of years in direct service to the Time Lords, still in his aging second body. It would be during this period that he encountered some of his future regenerations during the events of The Two Doctors (and The Three Doctors, and The Five Doctors, and eventually even Dimensions in Time - the Second Doctor got to return more than any other). The whole idea sits in a weird place where it’s popular enough to show up on official websites, but still leans heavily on fanon and a lot of conjecture about events that never showed up on screen.
Fic-wise, I love the idea and how it ties in with hints that the Time Lords may have been subtly directing the Tardis at other periods too. I’m not terribly interested in looking at how the Doctor’s service to the Time Lords started, but anything set during or even dealing with how it ended could be interesting. Happy for Jamie (and/or Zoe, though she may be more of a stretch) to appear or not, but not personally into him being shipped with the Doctor if he does. References to events of The Two Doctors would also be very much okay with me, that being about the closest canon has ever come to addressing 6B officially. Maybe Two and Six have a bit of a chat about their relative places in life, their last respective run-ins with the Master or whatever else. Maybe Six actually has some holes in his memory still remaining from that time due to Time Lord tampering. Etc.
Season 6B fic that includes the War Chief serving out a sentence alongside the Doctor (his ‘death’ being presumably another forgery as part of the trial) is one of those things I’ve seen just enough of done to want more. I am personally pretty invested in the idea of the War Chief being a previous incarnation of the Master (and am only too happy to ignore the few bits of the extended universe that might arguably contradict this). If you don’t want to deal with that specifically in your story (which is of course perfectly fine), I’d still be happier if you didn’t contradict it either. It stands to reason his regeneration into his Delgado body could’ve well occurred somewhere in the same period too, if not immediately after being shot at the end of events of the War Games, so I wouldn’t half-mind having events there explored too.
Scream of the Shalka
(Largely copied from last year’s letter, but as I didn’t get this written then, all still just as relevant) Like most of us in Shalka!fandom, I'm largely here for the Doctor/Master slash possibilities, but will happily read almost anything set in the Shalka!verse. Canon gave us so tantalisingly little of their story that everything is up for explanation - backstory, future adventures, the lot. Though I haven't requested Allison specifically, I'm fond of her and would not be in the least disappointed to see her playing a major role (just what she makes of the Master is a source of some great interest alone). Vaguely curious about some of the less-ficced Shalka cast too, such as Major Kennet (just how much does his command know about the Doctor, and how does he deal with it?), which could provide some interesting angles to follow up.
As noted above, there's probably very little you could reference from the old TV series that I wouldn't get a kick out of. Past companions or friends of the Doctor stumbling into the Tardis and encountering the Master could have some great possibilities to explore - doubly so if it's someone who's met the Master before, or who could provide Allison with a sharper understanding of why he's not trusted. Hell, the Master meeting more or less anyone who finds themselves stumbling into the Tardis could be good value.
As I mentioned above, I’m very curious about just how and how much the Time Lords are involved in the Doctor’s current status quo, and past events such as his former companion’s death and the Master’s presence on board. (The idea of the Master in a role somewhat equivalent to Rimmer's from Red Dwarf, initially serving as an unsympathetic aid to get his flesh-and-blood companion out of a recent depressive slump amuses me greatly, FTR, and there might be fun to be had there with some sort of fusion or crossover, though I'm not sure quite what you'd do with it.) Alternately, the idea that letting the Master live and keeping him around is an act of deliberate defiance by the Doctor against his masters could be very interesting too. Not terribly keen on fic which portrays the Android!Master as a mere electronic copy, rather than the real Master in an unusual body, but more or less any other take on his weird living situation probably goes.
I am very much down for smut set in this universe, or fluff. A solid dose of Doctor/Master interaction and snark could easily be all it takes to make the fic for me, regardless of other content.
Doctor Who and The Curse of Fatal Death
(Again, substantially copied from last year’s letter, but still plenty of leftover prompts here I’d love to see used) Some things I would like to see in CofD-fic in no particular order:
Deadpool Pulp
Okay, so this is one of those fandoms you sign up for as much as an excuse to promote them a bit as out of any real expectation anyone else is going to write you something, but this weird-ass little series is still about my favourite Cable/Deadpool-related thing to come out after the Nicieza series ended, and still remains about the only time I’ve legitimately enjoyed something which used the Way-era yellow/white boxes, and I’m still haven’t got around to ficcing for it myself, so. Here goes.
If you really want to hear all about how much I loved it, there’s an extended post I wrote after reading the coming the first time here (with a number of thoughts on fic possibilities that occurred to me at the time). What I’m most fascinated with in the Pulp universe is (as you could probably have guessed) is Deadpool’s relationship with Cable, which we see only just enough of on page to intrigue without hardly answering any of the real questions. We hardly see them interact on page. We know how they actually met, but how much of it they remember or how much it explains about Cable’s blind faith in his craziest operative is completely up in the air. It’s even possible they might have ‘met’ a second time when Wade came to work for the FBI without either remembering the original event until Wade starts having flashbacks during events of the comic, though perhaps more likely that they both believed they escaped from the Japanese camp together. There’s a bunch more ideas along those sort of lines in the last section of that old post too (most of which I’d forgotten about, but any of which I’d still like to see developed). I could even see some interesting potential for Cable rising in influence post-Stryfe, working to tear down whatever remained of his network and/or twist it to his own purposes, with Wade (mirroring somewhat of their Cable & Deadpool dynamic) increasingly acting as the check-and-balance that keeps an eye on him to make sure he’s not becoming as bad as his predecessor.
What I’d love most to see written for this series would be fic that could really work with the period-piece, noir-style feel of the setting, with all its 50’s paranoia grit-and-gloom. Failing that, something with Deadpool doing a bit of the classic first-person hard-boiled PI-style narration throughout the story could be brilliant (maybe post Weapon X - he could well come out a whole new kind of crazy, with a whole new relationship with the fourth wall), and would give you a lot more leeway to inject in a bit of crack into the mood, if that would be more your speed. You could probably even get something similar to work from Cable’s POV, if you’d prefer. I was going to say I don’t necessarily want to see too much introspection on either’s part about the revelations of the mini or the gaps in their memories, if only because Cable or Deadpool sitting down to go, in effect, “oh my god, my life is a lie!” strikes me as both somewhat OOC and not really tonally fitting with the rest of the story, but it occurs to me that even that could maybe work up to a point in hard-boiled first-person style. But really, any old standard third-person-limited POV type fic with some interesting ideas about where their relationship came from, how it worked over the years or where it goes ultimately could probably work very well for me too.
Obviously, I am very much down for shippy stuff, however that might work in this universe, but that can just as easily be as subtle or as explicit as you like.
I started last year’s letter with some general notes on likes/dislikes, though since three of my four requests this year are all different obscure corners of Who-canon (and the fourth is pretty unique anyway), I figure I may as well cut straight to fandom-specific stuff. So, some general preferences about the Whoniverse:
- I am a huge Doctor/Master shipper in all and every of their incarnations (if that wasn’t already obvious), and would be very happy to see basically any of the versions I’ve requested hooking up with any other, if you’d like to go that route. I also rec a lot of fic for the pairing, if you’d like to see some of what I’ve enjoyed before.
- I have hardly begun to dip my toe into the Big Finish Audio stories yet, so most references events from there will probably be lost on me. I’m not a huge fan of Time Lord academy-era stories either, simply because there’s so little canon to work from, but more or less every other era ever to appear on screen I’m going to be at least passingly familiar with.
- Not personally a fan of the use of gender-neutral or other non-standard pronouns for the Doctor, or any other Time Lord character. There’s probably plenty of interesting stories that could be written about exactly how gender is conceived in Time Lord society, but it’s not really what I’m looking for myself this year, and the appearance of pronouns which the Doctor has never used for him(or occasionally her)self in canon tend to throw me out of the story.
- Though I’m usually ridiculously down with AUs of all stripes, I’m more in a ridiculous canon geekery mode where the Whoniverse is concerned, so I’d prefer no AUs here (or at least not more AU than any fanfic is going to be by default)
Whoniverse internal crossover possibilities
Parallels between the Shalka-verse and Season 6B: Something that struck me right away on watching Scream of the Shalka were the hints that the Doctor’s working for the Time Lords once again, in what seemed like such a very 6B-style scenario I’m halfway convinced it was a deliberate call back. I don’t think I’ve ever seen fic which really deals with the fact that Shalka may be very much not the first time the Time Lords have ever had the Doctor so firmly under their thumb, but I’d very much like to. Could it connect with Shalka’s questionable place in the timeline somehow? Even something as simple as a very drunk and morose Shalka!9 bemoaning his cyclic fate to a disinterested bartender could be interesting here - there’s got to be any number of other possibilities in this one, and I would love to see them played with in fic.
Parallels between the Shalka-verse and CoFD: So, just why are there so many short-lived 9th Doctors? Do all three of them ever get together for a chat? Alternately, playing up the RE Grant connection, I would love to see this prompt filled in any form.
Parallels between the Season 6B and CoFD? Okay, I’m not sure there are any per se, but throwing the cracktastic world of CoFD in with the Doctor many remember for his easily flustered personality and his recorder could sure be farcical good fun. Maybe Atkinson!9 mocks him for giving in to the Time Lords, maybe Two’s government job status gives him rare access to the very sort of bizarre pocket universe CoFD takes place in. It’s all possible.
Collisions with the greater Whoniverse, in all flavours: See point above on how much I love that thing where you can pretty much have any character from any part of the Whoniverse meet any other at any time. Obviously, playing mix-and-match with various incarnations of the Doctor and the Master is pretty much my favourite thing to do with this (heck, borderline-canon-compliant femmeslash is possible in that ship now, and I’d be very much down with reading it), but Doctors meeting other Doctors or companions past or present (or, indeed, companions meeting other companions and trading notes) is always good fun too. Basically, if you want to go that route in fic, I’m probably going to be down with more or less any combination of other characters showing up.
Alright, that about covers general possibilities, time to move on to some prompts that are a little more fandom-specific.
Season 6B
So! If you’ve signed up to write for this, I assume you probably don’t need the whole idea explained, but I since there’s probably a decent chance there’s someone reading this who’s mostly here for the Shalka/CoFD angle, what the hell, ten second summary:
Back in 1969, the Second Doctor’s run came to an end with an event where he was captured by the Time Lords and put on trial for the crime of ‘meddling’ with the affairs of primitive cultures. His companions had their memories of their time with him removed, and the Doctor was forced to regenerate into a new body and exiled to earth (though we didn’t actually see his new body or arrival on earth until the first episode of the following season). But that wasn’t the last we saw of the Second Doctor - he reappears again in the Five Doctors in the 70’s, and much later in the Two Doctors in the 80’s - the actor noticeably aged each time. Interestingly, parts of both the script and the commentary for The Two Doctors suggest that the writers decided to work with this issue rather than ignore it, hinting that the trial we saw on screen for the Second Doctor was largely for show, while in reality his sentence also required him to spend a number of years in direct service to the Time Lords, still in his aging second body. It would be during this period that he encountered some of his future regenerations during the events of The Two Doctors (and The Three Doctors, and The Five Doctors, and eventually even Dimensions in Time - the Second Doctor got to return more than any other). The whole idea sits in a weird place where it’s popular enough to show up on official websites, but still leans heavily on fanon and a lot of conjecture about events that never showed up on screen.
Fic-wise, I love the idea and how it ties in with hints that the Time Lords may have been subtly directing the Tardis at other periods too. I’m not terribly interested in looking at how the Doctor’s service to the Time Lords started, but anything set during or even dealing with how it ended could be interesting. Happy for Jamie (and/or Zoe, though she may be more of a stretch) to appear or not, but not personally into him being shipped with the Doctor if he does. References to events of The Two Doctors would also be very much okay with me, that being about the closest canon has ever come to addressing 6B officially. Maybe Two and Six have a bit of a chat about their relative places in life, their last respective run-ins with the Master or whatever else. Maybe Six actually has some holes in his memory still remaining from that time due to Time Lord tampering. Etc.
Season 6B fic that includes the War Chief serving out a sentence alongside the Doctor (his ‘death’ being presumably another forgery as part of the trial) is one of those things I’ve seen just enough of done to want more. I am personally pretty invested in the idea of the War Chief being a previous incarnation of the Master (and am only too happy to ignore the few bits of the extended universe that might arguably contradict this). If you don’t want to deal with that specifically in your story (which is of course perfectly fine), I’d still be happier if you didn’t contradict it either. It stands to reason his regeneration into his Delgado body could’ve well occurred somewhere in the same period too, if not immediately after being shot at the end of events of the War Games, so I wouldn’t half-mind having events there explored too.
Scream of the Shalka
(Largely copied from last year’s letter, but as I didn’t get this written then, all still just as relevant) Like most of us in Shalka!fandom, I'm largely here for the Doctor/Master slash possibilities, but will happily read almost anything set in the Shalka!verse. Canon gave us so tantalisingly little of their story that everything is up for explanation - backstory, future adventures, the lot. Though I haven't requested Allison specifically, I'm fond of her and would not be in the least disappointed to see her playing a major role (just what she makes of the Master is a source of some great interest alone). Vaguely curious about some of the less-ficced Shalka cast too, such as Major Kennet (just how much does his command know about the Doctor, and how does he deal with it?), which could provide some interesting angles to follow up.
As noted above, there's probably very little you could reference from the old TV series that I wouldn't get a kick out of. Past companions or friends of the Doctor stumbling into the Tardis and encountering the Master could have some great possibilities to explore - doubly so if it's someone who's met the Master before, or who could provide Allison with a sharper understanding of why he's not trusted. Hell, the Master meeting more or less anyone who finds themselves stumbling into the Tardis could be good value.
As I mentioned above, I’m very curious about just how and how much the Time Lords are involved in the Doctor’s current status quo, and past events such as his former companion’s death and the Master’s presence on board. (The idea of the Master in a role somewhat equivalent to Rimmer's from Red Dwarf, initially serving as an unsympathetic aid to get his flesh-and-blood companion out of a recent depressive slump amuses me greatly, FTR, and there might be fun to be had there with some sort of fusion or crossover, though I'm not sure quite what you'd do with it.) Alternately, the idea that letting the Master live and keeping him around is an act of deliberate defiance by the Doctor against his masters could be very interesting too. Not terribly keen on fic which portrays the Android!Master as a mere electronic copy, rather than the real Master in an unusual body, but more or less any other take on his weird living situation probably goes.
I am very much down for smut set in this universe, or fluff. A solid dose of Doctor/Master interaction and snark could easily be all it takes to make the fic for me, regardless of other content.
Doctor Who and The Curse of Fatal Death
(Again, substantially copied from last year’s letter, but still plenty of leftover prompts here I’d love to see used) Some things I would like to see in CofD-fic in no particular order:
- Crack. Considering the whole story was light-hearted parody, this probably goes without saying. (Not that I wouldn't be thoroughly impressed by anyone who can pull off serious fic or graphic smut which still works within that universe, but let's not kid ourselves about we both went in expecting from this fandom.)
- Backstory: How did Eight become Atkinson!Nine? How did the Pryce!Master come by his present body? Did both arise from related incidents, and will either of them ever speak of it again? Have they had any significant recent run-ins before the events of CofD? (In case there is any doubt here: I am totally down for slash to be part of any of this, if you feel it appropriate)
- More or less anything that features the short-lived 10th, 11th and/or 12th Doctors from the CofD-verse in any capacity. Actually, I feel a little odd about requesting this again, since that was the exact request someone filled for me last year (and it was FANTASTIC), but excluding that one very specific scenario, I’m always down for more.
- Past companions meet the Lumley!Doctor and deal with her new relationship status! Past (or alternate) incarnations of the Doctor/the Master meet their future selves and deal with their new relationship status (or perhaps just end up in some sort of orgy)! The Whoniverse is huge and the possibilities are endless. (See general section above for a few other crossover-related ideas.)
Deadpool Pulp
Okay, so this is one of those fandoms you sign up for as much as an excuse to promote them a bit as out of any real expectation anyone else is going to write you something, but this weird-ass little series is still about my favourite Cable/Deadpool-related thing to come out after the Nicieza series ended, and still remains about the only time I’ve legitimately enjoyed something which used the Way-era yellow/white boxes, and I’m still haven’t got around to ficcing for it myself, so. Here goes.
If you really want to hear all about how much I loved it, there’s an extended post I wrote after reading the coming the first time here (with a number of thoughts on fic possibilities that occurred to me at the time). What I’m most fascinated with in the Pulp universe is (as you could probably have guessed) is Deadpool’s relationship with Cable, which we see only just enough of on page to intrigue without hardly answering any of the real questions. We hardly see them interact on page. We know how they actually met, but how much of it they remember or how much it explains about Cable’s blind faith in his craziest operative is completely up in the air. It’s even possible they might have ‘met’ a second time when Wade came to work for the FBI without either remembering the original event until Wade starts having flashbacks during events of the comic, though perhaps more likely that they both believed they escaped from the Japanese camp together. There’s a bunch more ideas along those sort of lines in the last section of that old post too (most of which I’d forgotten about, but any of which I’d still like to see developed). I could even see some interesting potential for Cable rising in influence post-Stryfe, working to tear down whatever remained of his network and/or twist it to his own purposes, with Wade (mirroring somewhat of their Cable & Deadpool dynamic) increasingly acting as the check-and-balance that keeps an eye on him to make sure he’s not becoming as bad as his predecessor.
What I’d love most to see written for this series would be fic that could really work with the period-piece, noir-style feel of the setting, with all its 50’s paranoia grit-and-gloom. Failing that, something with Deadpool doing a bit of the classic first-person hard-boiled PI-style narration throughout the story could be brilliant (maybe post Weapon X - he could well come out a whole new kind of crazy, with a whole new relationship with the fourth wall), and would give you a lot more leeway to inject in a bit of crack into the mood, if that would be more your speed. You could probably even get something similar to work from Cable’s POV, if you’d prefer. I was going to say I don’t necessarily want to see too much introspection on either’s part about the revelations of the mini or the gaps in their memories, if only because Cable or Deadpool sitting down to go, in effect, “oh my god, my life is a lie!” strikes me as both somewhat OOC and not really tonally fitting with the rest of the story, but it occurs to me that even that could maybe work up to a point in hard-boiled first-person style. But really, any old standard third-person-limited POV type fic with some interesting ideas about where their relationship came from, how it worked over the years or where it goes ultimately could probably work very well for me too.
Obviously, I am very much down for shippy stuff, however that might work in this universe, but that can just as easily be as subtle or as explicit as you like.