Yuletide 2019
Much of this letter is c&p'd from years past, because I'm a predictable person I guess.
Another year, another Yuletide! :D Thank you for signing up to write in one of my fandoms! I can't wait to see whatever you come up with, and with these fandoms, chances are I'll love whatever it is you choose to write. If my requests/prompts/details don't catch your interest, just remember that Optional Details Are Optional, and that I will be thrilled to get fic in any of these fandoms at all.
As far as my basic preferences go: I am okay with gen, het, slash, and femslash. If I've indicated a pairing preference in my request, don't feel pressured to write it! I'm a big gen lover, and I'll specifically note if there's a pairing I don't want to see with the characters I've requested. Also, a confession: I usually skim through sex scenes. I know, I know, what am I doing in fandom if I skim past the porn. But I am almost always way more interested in character interaction than in sexy times. Feel free to include sex scenes! I'd just really prefer that porn not be the whole point of the fic.
Things I love: happy endings, banter, subtle but meaningful declarations of love and/or trust, pining, characters finding home and family with each other, the smaller moments of domesticity or the calm before the storm, crossovers, detailed worldbuilding, lolz, feelings, women being complex and sometimes assholes, dudes being stoic yet simmering with repressed emotions, people being kind to each other in ways both obvious and not obvious, any number of forced intimacy situations (fake married! Undercover relationship! Surprise soul bond! Huddling for warmth! Oh no there’s only one bed! Sex pollen! I could go on, really), threesomes/sedoretu-style moresomes, and indulgent emotional hurt/comfort.
DNWs that apply to all requests: dark fic, character bashing, character death, non-con, infidelity, incest, alpha/beta/omegaverse fic, mpreg, harm to children, being mean to robots, unhappy endings, issuefic, ageplay, daddy/mommy kink, scat, watersports, extreme underage, humiliation or anything that would trigger secondhand embarrassment, gaslighting.
Also, while I generally love AUs, I love these fandoms for their settings and the characters in those settings, so I'd prefer no total AUs (canon-divergent AUs okay though).
1. The Last Samurai - Helen Dewitt (Ludo, Sybilla)
My desires in terms of Last Samurai fic are simple: I just want to know what happens to Ludo and/or Sybilla, after the book. Especially Ludo. Who does he end up being, when he grows up? What does he do with his brilliant mind? Hell, what name does he choose to go by? I'd really just love to see something about an older Ludo interacting with the world and the interesting people in it, a sort of extension of the kind of adventures he got up to in the book.
I'd also love to know more about Sybilla, whose character arc I thought ended up getting somewhat short shrift. How does her life change as Ludo grows up? Does she enter the world again, academic or otherwise? How does she continue to deal with her depression?
This is now my NINTH year requesting this, because NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER SURRENDER. I live in hope! I’m pretty sure the book is even in print again now! Here is what I said in years past: I wrote about my thoughts on the novel here, if that interests you. Anyway, like my request says, I more or less want straight up future fic about Ludo and Sybilla. I want to know what kind of man Ludo becomes, what happens to Sybilla as Ludo grows into an adult, what happens to their relationship. In short, I just want to know more. Whatever you do to fill my insatiable desire to know more more more about these characters will make me happy. Don't feel like you have to match the style of the novel. I will be very impressed if you do, but it's not a dealbreaker for me.
Anyway, Ludo and/or Sybilla future fic! That's my Last Samurai request in a nutshell.
2. 17776 - Any
I am so utterly FASCINATED by the improbable and amazing and weird utopia Jon Bois has built with 17776. It’s a world that seems to be positively teeming with stories, and I’m wildly interested in reading about any and all of them. I do not actually care about football qua football; I like the country and centuries-spanning version of the game Jon Bois has extrapolated here, but you don’t have to make it the focus of anything you write. What I’d love to know more about are those first few decades after humanity realizes they can no longer die. Or, heck, who first realizes people have stopped dying, and how do they approach that mystery? How do other parts of the world deal with immortality, what games do they play? I know Jon Bois thinks that humanity is alone in this universe, and won’t be able to overcome the practical roadblocks to long-range space travel, but what if they did? What if humanity’s not alone? Who are the kinds of people who’d fling themselves out into the big, wide dark of space, with no expectation of returning, and eternity stretching out in front of them? What other bits of electronics or AI have gained their own sentience or significance, and who do they talk to? There are no children anymore: how do the probes like Nine, Ten, Juice, and Hubble, and any other satellites or computers, fill that void?
Honestly, I’d be thrilled with you exploring just about any nook or cranny of this fascinating universe. I’d only ask that you maintain the source’s absurd yet optimistic and loving tone. Bittersweet and even a little elegiac is fine, I just don’t want anything grim or dark here. The world we’re living in right now has plenty of that. Also, do not feel the need to try any wild format/coding stuff the way Bois did if you don’t want to. A vanilla text story is more than enough for me.
I've gotten some lovely treats for this the past couple of years, so I feel a little weird asking for it again, but the fact remains: I have an endless hunger for more stories set in this universe. The world of 17776 feels so huge and so fascinating that I'm greedy and want MORE. There are so many possible stories to tell here, about humans and immortality and the probes and what life can be without the fear of scarcity and death, and I would be thrilled with any one you choose, dear writer.
A quick primer on 17776 in an effort to snare more people in, and also just elaborate a little more on why I love it:
You can find 17776 here. It is...hard to explain. Maybe impossible to explain. For one thing, it's a sort of multimedia storytelling experience, composed largely of text, but also some video and audio, and some website weirdness. Jon Bois of SB Nation wrote this, ostensibly, as a series on the future of football. It is not what you might expect, given that starting point.
The premise is this: humans stopped dying and aging as of April 7, 2026. Any other risk of injury or illness has been mitigated by a worldwide network of nanobots that will fix anything. It’s a post-scarcity utopia, all pressing problems fixed, from climate change to, apparently, all or most global conflict. Having reached this pinnacle, and having hit the hard limits of ability and resources that leave them unable to meaningfully explore space, the humans of 17776 are left with some weird ways to pass their endless supply of time, one of which is playing football. Only it’s not football as we know it, it’s football blown up so the field crosses states and the timespan crosses decades, centuries.
17776 opens with the space probes Pioneer 9 and Pioneer 10 trying to talk to each other, many years in the future. As 17776 slowly unfolds, Pioneer 9 is shepherded into sentience and learns about what’s going on on Earth from Pioneer 10 and JUICE (the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer). Pioneer 9 learns about football, and the people who play it now, and some people who don’t play it, but who are passing their endless amount of time in different ways. Really, the whole experience is worth a read/watch, I’m not doing it justice here.
I’ve always been fascinated by fictional takes on immortality, and 17776 offers a pretty new take on it, one where everyone is immortal, not just a few people, so humanity has to figure out how to deal with it together. It would be easy to turn this premise into a horrifying dystopia, a sort of endless hell for all the humans stuck on Earth together with eternal life and no escape. What I love about 17776 is that Bois turned this premise into a utopia, a bittersweet sort of heaven. There are things and experiences that the humans of 17776 mourn and miss (no more children seems like an especially bitter loss, ouch), and they seem to be a little obsessive about cataloging and exploring the past. But it’s so meaningful to me that, when free of want and hardship and death, this vision of humanity buckles down to do ridiculous, wild, fun, sweet things like play century and country-spanning games of football, or travel around learning every minute detail of every place, or travel around meeting each other to share stories.
Here is a quote from Jon Bois that really gets at why I’m so fascinated and in love with the 17776 universe: Humanity’s technological advancement over the last 150 years has been almost frightening, but that’s a very small speck of time. I think we’ll eventually hit a wall, and that wall will be, “we can’t travel into deep space ourselves.” Too much distance, too much radiation, and too little incentive. If that ends up being the case, we’ll have nothing to do but solve our problems on Earth. I’m being really optimistic when I guess that we might someday. After we do that, we’re gonna want our games, our art, and each other. One day, we might see those as the only reasons we’re here.
In a world where there is no death, where the biggest human problems have been solved, there's something beautiful about those things that still hurt, those things we still lost: the dream of space, children, childhood, endings. And what sweet hope, to distill down our reason for being here to games, art, and each other. There’s a real love of people that runs through all of 17776, and that's one of my favorite things about it.
3. The Adventure Zone: Amnesty (Podcast) - Barclay, Agent Stern
Missing scene(s), the beginnings of their friendship, how/when they fall in love, how they deal with Barclay's revelation, how/why both of them decide to stay in Kepler together, pre-slash, slash, gen... I'll take any and/or all of it, just give me some more Barclay and Agent Stern!
DNWs specific to this request: I know Barclay is Literally Bigfoot, and I'm down with monsterfucking, but please nothing that edges up against bestiality, and nothing that's A/B/O adjacent (i.e., knotting, heats, breeding, etc.).
Back in July, I saw this tumblr post and lo, my Barclay/Agent Stern feelings awakened with a roar. I never expected it to be basically canon, and my only true, deep disappointment with TAZ Amnesty is that Griffin never got a chance to flesh that story out more, what with it being an all NPC thing. The sheer thought of FBI Agent Investigating Bigfoot Unknowingly Falls in Love with Bigfoot is just beautiful to me. This pairing has it all: lolz, angst about keeping a secret, identity porn shenanigans, friends to lovers, big dramatic reveals, pseudo-buddy cop shenanigans as they protect Kepler together, handsome, tall suited FBI agent/woodsy handsome flannel-wearing Bigfoot man...so many delightful tropes! Explore any of them, or give me any missing scene with them from Amnesty, and I will be happy.
This entry was originally posted at https://yasaman.dreamwidth.org/480554.html, with
comments there.
Another year, another Yuletide! :D Thank you for signing up to write in one of my fandoms! I can't wait to see whatever you come up with, and with these fandoms, chances are I'll love whatever it is you choose to write. If my requests/prompts/details don't catch your interest, just remember that Optional Details Are Optional, and that I will be thrilled to get fic in any of these fandoms at all.
As far as my basic preferences go: I am okay with gen, het, slash, and femslash. If I've indicated a pairing preference in my request, don't feel pressured to write it! I'm a big gen lover, and I'll specifically note if there's a pairing I don't want to see with the characters I've requested. Also, a confession: I usually skim through sex scenes. I know, I know, what am I doing in fandom if I skim past the porn. But I am almost always way more interested in character interaction than in sexy times. Feel free to include sex scenes! I'd just really prefer that porn not be the whole point of the fic.
Things I love: happy endings, banter, subtle but meaningful declarations of love and/or trust, pining, characters finding home and family with each other, the smaller moments of domesticity or the calm before the storm, crossovers, detailed worldbuilding, lolz, feelings, women being complex and sometimes assholes, dudes being stoic yet simmering with repressed emotions, people being kind to each other in ways both obvious and not obvious, any number of forced intimacy situations (fake married! Undercover relationship! Surprise soul bond! Huddling for warmth! Oh no there’s only one bed! Sex pollen! I could go on, really), threesomes/sedoretu-style moresomes, and indulgent emotional hurt/comfort.
DNWs that apply to all requests: dark fic, character bashing, character death, non-con, infidelity, incest, alpha/beta/omegaverse fic, mpreg, harm to children, being mean to robots, unhappy endings, issuefic, ageplay, daddy/mommy kink, scat, watersports, extreme underage, humiliation or anything that would trigger secondhand embarrassment, gaslighting.
Also, while I generally love AUs, I love these fandoms for their settings and the characters in those settings, so I'd prefer no total AUs (canon-divergent AUs okay though).
1. The Last Samurai - Helen Dewitt (Ludo, Sybilla)
My desires in terms of Last Samurai fic are simple: I just want to know what happens to Ludo and/or Sybilla, after the book. Especially Ludo. Who does he end up being, when he grows up? What does he do with his brilliant mind? Hell, what name does he choose to go by? I'd really just love to see something about an older Ludo interacting with the world and the interesting people in it, a sort of extension of the kind of adventures he got up to in the book.
I'd also love to know more about Sybilla, whose character arc I thought ended up getting somewhat short shrift. How does her life change as Ludo grows up? Does she enter the world again, academic or otherwise? How does she continue to deal with her depression?
This is now my NINTH year requesting this, because NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER SURRENDER. I live in hope! I’m pretty sure the book is even in print again now! Here is what I said in years past: I wrote about my thoughts on the novel here, if that interests you. Anyway, like my request says, I more or less want straight up future fic about Ludo and Sybilla. I want to know what kind of man Ludo becomes, what happens to Sybilla as Ludo grows into an adult, what happens to their relationship. In short, I just want to know more. Whatever you do to fill my insatiable desire to know more more more about these characters will make me happy. Don't feel like you have to match the style of the novel. I will be very impressed if you do, but it's not a dealbreaker for me.
Anyway, Ludo and/or Sybilla future fic! That's my Last Samurai request in a nutshell.
2. 17776 - Any
I am so utterly FASCINATED by the improbable and amazing and weird utopia Jon Bois has built with 17776. It’s a world that seems to be positively teeming with stories, and I’m wildly interested in reading about any and all of them. I do not actually care about football qua football; I like the country and centuries-spanning version of the game Jon Bois has extrapolated here, but you don’t have to make it the focus of anything you write. What I’d love to know more about are those first few decades after humanity realizes they can no longer die. Or, heck, who first realizes people have stopped dying, and how do they approach that mystery? How do other parts of the world deal with immortality, what games do they play? I know Jon Bois thinks that humanity is alone in this universe, and won’t be able to overcome the practical roadblocks to long-range space travel, but what if they did? What if humanity’s not alone? Who are the kinds of people who’d fling themselves out into the big, wide dark of space, with no expectation of returning, and eternity stretching out in front of them? What other bits of electronics or AI have gained their own sentience or significance, and who do they talk to? There are no children anymore: how do the probes like Nine, Ten, Juice, and Hubble, and any other satellites or computers, fill that void?
Honestly, I’d be thrilled with you exploring just about any nook or cranny of this fascinating universe. I’d only ask that you maintain the source’s absurd yet optimistic and loving tone. Bittersweet and even a little elegiac is fine, I just don’t want anything grim or dark here. The world we’re living in right now has plenty of that. Also, do not feel the need to try any wild format/coding stuff the way Bois did if you don’t want to. A vanilla text story is more than enough for me.
I've gotten some lovely treats for this the past couple of years, so I feel a little weird asking for it again, but the fact remains: I have an endless hunger for more stories set in this universe. The world of 17776 feels so huge and so fascinating that I'm greedy and want MORE. There are so many possible stories to tell here, about humans and immortality and the probes and what life can be without the fear of scarcity and death, and I would be thrilled with any one you choose, dear writer.
A quick primer on 17776 in an effort to snare more people in, and also just elaborate a little more on why I love it:
You can find 17776 here. It is...hard to explain. Maybe impossible to explain. For one thing, it's a sort of multimedia storytelling experience, composed largely of text, but also some video and audio, and some website weirdness. Jon Bois of SB Nation wrote this, ostensibly, as a series on the future of football. It is not what you might expect, given that starting point.
The premise is this: humans stopped dying and aging as of April 7, 2026. Any other risk of injury or illness has been mitigated by a worldwide network of nanobots that will fix anything. It’s a post-scarcity utopia, all pressing problems fixed, from climate change to, apparently, all or most global conflict. Having reached this pinnacle, and having hit the hard limits of ability and resources that leave them unable to meaningfully explore space, the humans of 17776 are left with some weird ways to pass their endless supply of time, one of which is playing football. Only it’s not football as we know it, it’s football blown up so the field crosses states and the timespan crosses decades, centuries.
17776 opens with the space probes Pioneer 9 and Pioneer 10 trying to talk to each other, many years in the future. As 17776 slowly unfolds, Pioneer 9 is shepherded into sentience and learns about what’s going on on Earth from Pioneer 10 and JUICE (the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer). Pioneer 9 learns about football, and the people who play it now, and some people who don’t play it, but who are passing their endless amount of time in different ways. Really, the whole experience is worth a read/watch, I’m not doing it justice here.
I’ve always been fascinated by fictional takes on immortality, and 17776 offers a pretty new take on it, one where everyone is immortal, not just a few people, so humanity has to figure out how to deal with it together. It would be easy to turn this premise into a horrifying dystopia, a sort of endless hell for all the humans stuck on Earth together with eternal life and no escape. What I love about 17776 is that Bois turned this premise into a utopia, a bittersweet sort of heaven. There are things and experiences that the humans of 17776 mourn and miss (no more children seems like an especially bitter loss, ouch), and they seem to be a little obsessive about cataloging and exploring the past. But it’s so meaningful to me that, when free of want and hardship and death, this vision of humanity buckles down to do ridiculous, wild, fun, sweet things like play century and country-spanning games of football, or travel around learning every minute detail of every place, or travel around meeting each other to share stories.
Here is a quote from Jon Bois that really gets at why I’m so fascinated and in love with the 17776 universe: Humanity’s technological advancement over the last 150 years has been almost frightening, but that’s a very small speck of time. I think we’ll eventually hit a wall, and that wall will be, “we can’t travel into deep space ourselves.” Too much distance, too much radiation, and too little incentive. If that ends up being the case, we’ll have nothing to do but solve our problems on Earth. I’m being really optimistic when I guess that we might someday. After we do that, we’re gonna want our games, our art, and each other. One day, we might see those as the only reasons we’re here.
In a world where there is no death, where the biggest human problems have been solved, there's something beautiful about those things that still hurt, those things we still lost: the dream of space, children, childhood, endings. And what sweet hope, to distill down our reason for being here to games, art, and each other. There’s a real love of people that runs through all of 17776, and that's one of my favorite things about it.
3. The Adventure Zone: Amnesty (Podcast) - Barclay, Agent Stern
Missing scene(s), the beginnings of their friendship, how/when they fall in love, how they deal with Barclay's revelation, how/why both of them decide to stay in Kepler together, pre-slash, slash, gen... I'll take any and/or all of it, just give me some more Barclay and Agent Stern!
DNWs specific to this request: I know Barclay is Literally Bigfoot, and I'm down with monsterfucking, but please nothing that edges up against bestiality, and nothing that's A/B/O adjacent (i.e., knotting, heats, breeding, etc.).
Back in July, I saw this tumblr post and lo, my Barclay/Agent Stern feelings awakened with a roar. I never expected it to be basically canon, and my only true, deep disappointment with TAZ Amnesty is that Griffin never got a chance to flesh that story out more, what with it being an all NPC thing. The sheer thought of FBI Agent Investigating Bigfoot Unknowingly Falls in Love with Bigfoot is just beautiful to me. This pairing has it all: lolz, angst about keeping a secret, identity porn shenanigans, friends to lovers, big dramatic reveals, pseudo-buddy cop shenanigans as they protect Kepler together, handsome, tall suited FBI agent/woodsy handsome flannel-wearing Bigfoot man...so many delightful tropes! Explore any of them, or give me any missing scene with them from Amnesty, and I will be happy.
This entry was originally posted at https://yasaman.dreamwidth.org/480554.html, with
comments there.