yay, Yuletide!
There's still a couple of hours left for signing up for yuletide! Come and squee with me people!
And if you are in fact my Yuletide gift-giver, then...
... hi! I love you already!
You probably gathered this from my requests, but: I am ridiculously easy to please. All those different ideas I randomly spouted at you will all be great, and if you have your own idea that you think would be AWESOME, then I quite probably will too. But if you would like some more specifics on things I like and dislike in a story, then here we are.
Loves:
- Happy endings! I love all the pairings I listed - Mikey/Steve and Chuck/Geoffrey and Mike/Psmith and Brett/Danny are pretty much equally dear to me - so if you can not be too mean to them, i.e. kill them or otherwise make out like they don't actually have any affection for each other, then that would be appreciated! I don't care about the porn level, so if you'd rather not write them as a couple then that's fine (although two of my requests have canon gay in them, so I'd be surprised!), but I tend to prefer any angst with a happy ending.
- That said, I love a nice mixture of realism and humour: silly, funny fluff can be fun but a meatier story would be even better, and a story where the characters go though a proper emotional journey make my life, so if you think something not-exactly-happy is the way to get them to their happy ending, that's a-ok. :)
- Also, jokes are a big feature of all the canons I asked for, so don't worry about being a bit ridiculous - most of the canons kind of are already! Funny is good: all the characters I asked for are funny people, and that humour in their situations and the way they talk is awesome. (Plus, I generally find that plot, angst and sap all work better if surrounded by jokes. This may be a fundamental principle of my life, or something. Mmmm, snark.)
- Politics. I don't necessarily mean the campaigning-and-voting sort of politics - though I'm the kind of nerd that will probably enjoy that too! - but I like stuff that examines the deeper social context and meaning of the things we do. Fiction with some kind of sociopolitical awareness, basically. This is mostly relevant for Making History and Strangers With Candy, and is a big part of what attracted me to both canons, but if you can add some of that into either of the others without making everyone in the story miserable forever, then I would jump up and down with glee.
(If it ends up being relevant, I note here that I am a huge liberal pinko commie. I'm probably what Stephen Fry calls a "pink champagne socialist". You can do what you want with that - though I'd obviously, y'know, generally prefer your fic wasn't all about how those awful socialists and feminists are crazy, heh.)
- Point of view - the characters I listed are all loved to the extent that I have probably written their name surrounded by hearts on at least one notebook, and their perspectives on the world are all fascinating to me.
- Basically, I am all about canon, forever and ever and ever amen. All of the canons I asked for are among my favourite things ever, and you are someone who apparently likes one of these canons enough to sign up for it! That in itself pretty much ensures your story will be JOYOUSLY jumped on, I promise.
Hates (though there aren't a lot of these, frankly, that aren't obvious from the above):
- I don't particularly want mega-angsterriffic badness happening to any of my characters: permanant maiming or suicide attempts or killing their kid/pet dog/whatever just seems a bit extreme! Except in SWC, I guess, but the angst there is played so ridiculously that hopefully if you have such things in your story, that too will be treated with the ridiculousness of the original. :)
- If you're going to add smut, then I would generally go for a less-is-more approach, please. And I'd prefer nothing too drastic: Chuck and Geoffrey may canonically role-play as Louis Pasteur and a cow, but to be honest that doesn't mean the idea of a ten-page description of how hot they find it is any more appealing, you know? :) I don't mind some sex in the story, but I just generally find it a lot less interesting than character and plot.
- My current biggest pet peeve in fic is the overuse of epithets: this conversation I think nicely sums up why they should be thought about very carefully before use!
- Character bashing. Yuletide tends top be awesome about this - I don't think I've ever seen a Yuletide story where the whole point was that one of the characters was stupid and rubbish and getting in the way. So it probably doesn't need saying, but, yeah.
- I have a horrific embarassment squick: basically, social humiliation (real or anticipated) makes me cringe, so while I wouldn't go so far as to ask you to not let any character ever be embarassed, I would rather that was kept to a minimum and only when there's a good reason for it, please. (Exception is Strangers With Candy: they all basically embarass themselves all the time but never actually realise it, which somehow makes it fine. And yeah, I have no idea how that works in my brain either!) Shall we say 'the same sort of level of embarassment for the characters as their canons'?
.. wow, that was a long winded way of saying 'I HEARTS CANON, MOAR PLS', wasn't it? Thankyou for reading, if you made it this far, O Mysterious Yuletide Benefactor!
And if you are in fact my Yuletide gift-giver, then...
... hi! I love you already!
You probably gathered this from my requests, but: I am ridiculously easy to please. All those different ideas I randomly spouted at you will all be great, and if you have your own idea that you think would be AWESOME, then I quite probably will too. But if you would like some more specifics on things I like and dislike in a story, then here we are.
Loves:
- Happy endings! I love all the pairings I listed - Mikey/Steve and Chuck/Geoffrey and Mike/Psmith and Brett/Danny are pretty much equally dear to me - so if you can not be too mean to them, i.e. kill them or otherwise make out like they don't actually have any affection for each other, then that would be appreciated! I don't care about the porn level, so if you'd rather not write them as a couple then that's fine (although two of my requests have canon gay in them, so I'd be surprised!), but I tend to prefer any angst with a happy ending.
- That said, I love a nice mixture of realism and humour: silly, funny fluff can be fun but a meatier story would be even better, and a story where the characters go though a proper emotional journey make my life, so if you think something not-exactly-happy is the way to get them to their happy ending, that's a-ok. :)
- Also, jokes are a big feature of all the canons I asked for, so don't worry about being a bit ridiculous - most of the canons kind of are already! Funny is good: all the characters I asked for are funny people, and that humour in their situations and the way they talk is awesome. (Plus, I generally find that plot, angst and sap all work better if surrounded by jokes. This may be a fundamental principle of my life, or something. Mmmm, snark.)
- Politics. I don't necessarily mean the campaigning-and-voting sort of politics - though I'm the kind of nerd that will probably enjoy that too! - but I like stuff that examines the deeper social context and meaning of the things we do. Fiction with some kind of sociopolitical awareness, basically. This is mostly relevant for Making History and Strangers With Candy, and is a big part of what attracted me to both canons, but if you can add some of that into either of the others without making everyone in the story miserable forever, then I would jump up and down with glee.
(If it ends up being relevant, I note here that I am a huge liberal pinko commie. I'm probably what Stephen Fry calls a "pink champagne socialist". You can do what you want with that - though I'd obviously, y'know, generally prefer your fic wasn't all about how those awful socialists and feminists are crazy, heh.)
- Point of view - the characters I listed are all loved to the extent that I have probably written their name surrounded by hearts on at least one notebook, and their perspectives on the world are all fascinating to me.
- Basically, I am all about canon, forever and ever and ever amen. All of the canons I asked for are among my favourite things ever, and you are someone who apparently likes one of these canons enough to sign up for it! That in itself pretty much ensures your story will be JOYOUSLY jumped on, I promise.
Hates (though there aren't a lot of these, frankly, that aren't obvious from the above):
- I don't particularly want mega-angsterriffic badness happening to any of my characters: permanant maiming or suicide attempts or killing their kid/pet dog/whatever just seems a bit extreme! Except in SWC, I guess, but the angst there is played so ridiculously that hopefully if you have such things in your story, that too will be treated with the ridiculousness of the original. :)
- If you're going to add smut, then I would generally go for a less-is-more approach, please. And I'd prefer nothing too drastic: Chuck and Geoffrey may canonically role-play as Louis Pasteur and a cow, but to be honest that doesn't mean the idea of a ten-page description of how hot they find it is any more appealing, you know? :) I don't mind some sex in the story, but I just generally find it a lot less interesting than character and plot.
- My current biggest pet peeve in fic is the overuse of epithets: this conversation I think nicely sums up why they should be thought about very carefully before use!
- Character bashing. Yuletide tends top be awesome about this - I don't think I've ever seen a Yuletide story where the whole point was that one of the characters was stupid and rubbish and getting in the way. So it probably doesn't need saying, but, yeah.
- I have a horrific embarassment squick: basically, social humiliation (real or anticipated) makes me cringe, so while I wouldn't go so far as to ask you to not let any character ever be embarassed, I would rather that was kept to a minimum and only when there's a good reason for it, please. (Exception is Strangers With Candy: they all basically embarass themselves all the time but never actually realise it, which somehow makes it fine. And yeah, I have no idea how that works in my brain either!) Shall we say 'the same sort of level of embarassment for the characters as their canons'?
.. wow, that was a long winded way of saying 'I HEARTS CANON, MOAR PLS', wasn't it? Thankyou for reading, if you made it this far, O Mysterious Yuletide Benefactor!