Dear Yuletide Writer
Hi! Thank you for being interested in writing for one of my fandoms. Or for idly wandering over from the letters post on the Yuletide comm, as the case may be.
So, general likes and dislikes! I don't have a strong preference as far as genre; I'm happy with adventure, casefic, slice-of-life, shippy stuff, whatever. I'm okay with pairings of any gender combination (I mean, among my five fandoms I've only requested one male character, which limits the options a bit, but in the background you can do what you like) and also with poly. I'm okay with stories not having happy endings--several of my requests have their unhappy endings built in, though if you want to do fix-it fic, that's fine with me too.
I don't like mundane AUs (coffee shop, high school, etc.), and while I generally like AUs that turn characters into wizards/spies/mecha pilots/whatever, I don't have a particularly strong desire for that in any of the fandoms I've requested here. Canon-divergence AUs are fine, though! I would prefer not to have crossovers unless they're with fandoms you're pretty certain I'm familiar with and interested in. I don't mind fic that deals with serious issues (for Analogue/Hate Plus in particular, I think it would be tough to write fic that doesn't at least touch on some heavy stuff) but would prefer that "Look, here's a Serious Issue!"/"Let's all contemplate our oppression!" not be all there is to the story, if that makes sense.
I don't think I have any major squicks or triggers that you're likely to trip by accident/in the course of writing things that seem innocuous, but if you're not sure about something, feel free to ask me(/get a mod to ask me).
I am on AO3 under this same username if it helps at all, although I've never written for any of the fandoms I'm requesting.
And now for the fandom-specific stuff:
Analogue: A Hate Story/Hate Plus - Any
I love these games and I love many of the characters and I would particularly enjoy fic where people get to be happy for once, although really that's probably only possible with *Mute, *Hyun-ae, and the PC. For those three I'd love to see some post-canon fic-after either of the main two routes or the improbable harem ending, whatever you prefer. Maybe dealing with either/both of the AIs adjusting to life in a society that's very different from what they're used to, the fallout from the Mugunghwa mission, either/both of the AIs helping the PC with a new investigation, anything like that. If you wanted to include PC/*Mute/*Hyun-ae or any subset thereof, I would enjoy it, but it's also fine if you would rather keep the AI shenanigans platonic.
As for the other characters, mostly I just want glimpses of the parts of their lives that we don't get to see in the handfuls of letter and diary entries scattered across the span of several years. More about Hana and So-jin's relationship during the good times? Court goings-on from Ryu Jae-hwa's perspective and/or her friendship with Hyun-ae? Heo Seo-yeong's early career and how she got to know Old *Mute?
And... Oh Eun-a was probably a pretty weird character to request, because she's not exactly likeable. She's certainly not a person I'd ever want to meet, but she's a mass of contradictions that I'm sort of fascinated by and the game never gave me quite as much explanation as I wanted for what made her tick. I mean, she legitimately seems to believe that women would be happier as heterosexually married housewives, and yet she was a university president in a long-term relationship with another woman before she got involved with Chief Councillor Ryu. What happened there?
(The fact that she gets a whole paragraph of the letter to herself in no way indicates that I care more about her than the other characters, by the way--just that I feel the most need to justify why I included her at all.)
My playthroughs have mostly been with a female PC and that's what I generally prefer if you're going to write a story involving the PC.
Analogue and Hate Plus can both be bought on Steam for $10 each; there's a complete Let's Play of Analogue here and an ongoing one of Hate Plus here.
Bubblegum Crisis - Any
I got into Bubblegum Crisis just a few months ago, so it's a party I'm about 25 years late to. It's so cheesy in some ways, and yet so compelling. My experience of watching it was something like "Haha, in this episode there are ambiguously lesbian vampire sexbots! And they're banned because of a totally accidental glitch that means they can easily synchronize with superweapons to blow shit up! That's ridiculous! ... and I'm very emotionally invested in them!
... So yes, they're one-off (two-off?) characters that exist mostly to be killed off to fuel Priss's womanpain, but I was quite interested in Sylvie and Anri (and even the rest of their friends who all die in the first few minutes of Episode 5). They seemed like they could be the protagonists of a story of their own--I mean, I feel like there's a whole story there that we only saw tiny bits of, about their captivity and their decision that they were going to get free at any cost and then trying to adjust to life on the outside. So I'm interested in their backstory, or scenes with the two of them set during episode 5, and I'd also love to see what might have happened had one or both of them survived. Would they have ended up helping out the Knight Sabers, or gone off to live as quiet a life as they could somewhere, or what?
As far as the Knight Sabers go, Priss and Sylia were definitely the ones that interested me the most. One's a cool, reserved heiress who creates a mercenary/vigilante team to carry out her vendetta against the megacorp that killed her father (and also she may or may not be a robot)! One's a tough-on-the-outside-squishy-on-the-inside scrappy orphan turned biker chick/rock star by night and railgun-toting slayer of rogue androids by... also night! They fight crime! I'd enjoy canon-flavored mission fic for them, or something more character-driven focusing on one or both of them, or... whatever you're interested in writing, really.
(I confess I ship Sylvie/Anri and Priss/... all the other nominated characters, but you don't have to do anything with that unless you want to.)
If you're willing to subject yourself to the dub (and I am way less anti-dub than your average anime fan as a general rule, but this one is... very early '90s), you can watch all of Bubblegum Crisis on Hulu. Unfortunately I have not found a legitimate source for the subbed version (short of buying the DVDs, I mean).
Eien no Filena: Filena, Lila
Eien no Filena is kind of a weird game, and I wouldn't say it's terribly good, either as a game or in terms of writing, but I totally love it anyway. (I discovered it just slightly too late for Yuletide 2012 and I have been waiting all year to request it, and probably annoying my friends by refusing to shut up about it in the meantime.) It's got your standard "lost heir discovers destiny, goes on quest to reclaim throne" fantasy plot going, but the lost heir is a woman and so are most of the other party members, and one of said party members declares herself the lost heir's wife, and neither of them ever gets anything resembling a male love interest and they're shown at the end side-by-side in the throne room, apparently ruling the kingdom together. Which is a thing that I appreciate very much.
So, uh, as you may have guessed, I ship Filena/Lila pretty hard, although the fic doesn't necessarily need to have a romantic focus. I'd love post-canon fic about them trying to rebuild the kingdom and dealing with the challenges that come with that, or them going off on another adventure, or more domestic post-canon fic if you prefer, or a missing scene or scenes during the course of the game that shows something of the development of their relationship, or... anything, really. I know that's not helpful, but I'd pretty much just be thrilled for fic for this game to exist at all.
Since this game is twenty years old and was never available in English to begin with, I'm going to go ahead and link a ROM and an English patch, which you can play with an SNES emulator such as ZSNES or SNES9X (which are linked from the page the ROM is on). There's also a complete Let's Play, although the LPer really doesn't like Lila and that makes me sad.
The Night Circus - Tsukiko, Hinata
Tsukiko was my favorite character in The Night Circus, and the book drops all kinds of interesting hints about her backstory that never get fleshed out. Which is reasonable, because she's not the main character, but it piqued my curiosity. Hinata is basically just a name (and whatever can be inferred from knowing she was willing to sacrifice herself for Tsukiko), but I'd really love some exploration of who she might have been, as well. I'd love any story about their relationship and the competition they were involved in, or stuff about either or both of their childhoods with Prospero and A.H., or anything like that.
Or, if you'd rather, I'd also be interested to see an episode (or episodes) from Tsukiko's life between the end of her competition and the start of Celia and Marco's. It seems like she had some adventures in the meantime-travelling around the world, becoming a contortionist, wooing princesses, all that sort of thing.
In the interest of full disclosure, I did make a similar request for Femslashex, but (a) no one offered The Night Circus for Femslashex except for me, so it's unlikely to get written, and (b) even if someone did write it for me for another exchange, I would still want more, because there's so much potential here and there's almost no existing fic that I've found.
Steins;Gate - Any
I have both played the game and seen the anime, so I'm fine with whatever continuity you want to work off of in that regard. I have not, however, read any of the many and various spinoff manga, so I'd prefer nothing that relies on knowledge of those.
There is pretty much not a single character in Steins;Gate that I don't love (well, maybe not Dr. Nakabachi, but other than that...). They're a bunch of dorks, and I love their weird quirks and their issues and the way that they form these oddball friendships despite themselves. ... and this part of the letter sounds so wacky and then most of my prompts are at least moderately depressing, whoops. But that's kind of how Steins;Gate rolls.
I'd be happy just with post-canon Future Gadget Lab shenanigans! But I'm also interested in exploring what might happen when one or all of the non-Okabe characters start regaining memories from the other timelines and how they'd deal with that knowledge. Or if you want to take a look at what might have happened with one of the ultimately non-canon timelines if they'd continued, that might be interesting too. If you go that route, I'm particularly interested in either of the dystopian futures that Suzuha comes from (whether the focus is on Suzuha or on how the other characters deal with it)--though I seem to recall that there's a manga covering at least one of them, so that throws a bit of a wrench in that one.
Last minute edit: I forgot to mention that I have no non-canon Steins;Gate ships, but if you want to write something focused on Okabe/Kurisu I'm down with that.
You can watch Steins;Gate for free on Funimation's website, and there's a completed Let's Play of the VN here.