Yuletide letter
Oct. 16th, 2018 05:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eccentric_hatHo-kay, so! These are my Yuletide requests!
In general I'm open to a lot of kinds of stories, and I have no triggers and very few dislikes. As a matter of taste, I'm currently very tired of "you don't know you're beautiful" stories (i.e. everyone falls in love with Person A constantly but Person A is too dim to realize it! When will Person A stop being so blind? Probably I've just been in Yuri on Ice fandom too long). Apart from that, I'd prefer not to read about sexual violence please. I'm just not really feeling up to it this year. Sad or melancholy stories are fine, though. (They'd better be; last year I wrote a Yuletide story that had me trying for weeks to decide whether to use a "Major Character Death" tag or not.) My AO3 bookmarks demonstrate some of what I like, but feel free not to worry about any of that too much, because honestly a fic in any of these fandoms is going to be very special to me whether or not it resembles something I've recced previously.
The Adventure Zone Amnesty
Character: Minerva
Earlier this fall a switch flipped in my head and I said "It is time to get into the McElroys" and now I have. I started The Adventure Zone at the beginning of the Amnesty arc because Balance was intimidatingly huge, and then I devoured Amnesty in such a short time that it seems inevitable I'm going to get into Balance eventually. I dunno when! I haven't yet! Anyway I love everybody in Kepler, including Beacon and the goatman who showed up too late to be nominated; but for the sake of requesting something specific, I thought I'd go for Minerva. I love the heck out of Griffin's delivery of her lines, and her sheer almost-unflappable bombast. I'm also super intrigued by her whole deal: how did she get this gig of long-distance training another planet's chosen one? What is that like, and why is she so confident and buoyant even though her own war was lost? Has she really been sure, in the years between her first appearing to Duck and her return at the beginning of Amnesty, that he was going to follow her instructions and train himself to save the world? Or is she faking her confidence? A lot of these questions are likely to be answered in canon eventually, but while there's some negative space there I'd enjoy seeing someone play with it.
Uprooted - Naomi Novik
Characters: Agnieszka, The Dragon | Sarkan
I ship this, but in a way where I'm happy to see any number of interpretations of their relationship. I can easily imagine a future where they drift through stages of being colleagues, friends, romantically involved, sexually involved, totally separated and doing their own thing, and various permutations and combinations of those in no particular order; I think they're always going to matter to each other but Sarkan seems like the kind of person who might decide someone matters to him and then not talk to them for years. You don't have to share this headcanon to write to this prompt! What I'm trying to say is that there are many ways I can see these two characters relating to each other, so there's lots of room for interpretation. In particular, I genuinely like Sarkan as a character, but that's partly for how baffled and astonished he is by Agnieszka, and it's fun to think about him being made to change, or admit reality, and face up to the totally different and really important approach and insights that she brings to her practice of magic. Also Agnieszka's whole connection to her magic, and the purpose and work that she finds at the end, are super compelling to me. I'm sorry this isn't actually a prompt! Just, I like these two, I would like to read about them some more.
Rev.
Characters: Any
I keep nominating this fandom, and it might actually be my favorite sitcom ever. I just have endless admiration for the way it allows things to go truly, permanently wrong, for people not to get what they want, for a community to dissolve and a vocation to go awry and a protagonist to conclude that he is actually bad at his beloved job, and through all that for the characters to be tasked with finding hope, keeping faith, accomplishing some good anyway. Here's a copy-paste of some prompts from a couple years ago: Archdeacon Robert is a particular favorite of mine; he's fierce and powerful and ambitious and clever, and he's hidden and vulnerable and tender and devout. I also relate painfully much to Adam's vocational uncertainty, Alex's concerned attempts not to be pigeonholed as a vicar's wife, Ellie's desperate competence in the face of hard circumstances, and all the other characters I didn't have room to nominate. I guess none of that constitutes a prompt, though. Maybe: Adam in seminary? Any of the characters after the end of the show? Adam and Alex in their early relationship? Ellie getting to have a life? Archdeacon Robert doing whatever the heck it is he does when he's not cruising around in a black car?
In general I'm open to a lot of kinds of stories, and I have no triggers and very few dislikes. As a matter of taste, I'm currently very tired of "you don't know you're beautiful" stories (i.e. everyone falls in love with Person A constantly but Person A is too dim to realize it! When will Person A stop being so blind? Probably I've just been in Yuri on Ice fandom too long). Apart from that, I'd prefer not to read about sexual violence please. I'm just not really feeling up to it this year. Sad or melancholy stories are fine, though. (They'd better be; last year I wrote a Yuletide story that had me trying for weeks to decide whether to use a "Major Character Death" tag or not.) My AO3 bookmarks demonstrate some of what I like, but feel free not to worry about any of that too much, because honestly a fic in any of these fandoms is going to be very special to me whether or not it resembles something I've recced previously.
The Adventure Zone Amnesty
Character: Minerva
Earlier this fall a switch flipped in my head and I said "It is time to get into the McElroys" and now I have. I started The Adventure Zone at the beginning of the Amnesty arc because Balance was intimidatingly huge, and then I devoured Amnesty in such a short time that it seems inevitable I'm going to get into Balance eventually. I dunno when! I haven't yet! Anyway I love everybody in Kepler, including Beacon and the goatman who showed up too late to be nominated; but for the sake of requesting something specific, I thought I'd go for Minerva. I love the heck out of Griffin's delivery of her lines, and her sheer almost-unflappable bombast. I'm also super intrigued by her whole deal: how did she get this gig of long-distance training another planet's chosen one? What is that like, and why is she so confident and buoyant even though her own war was lost? Has she really been sure, in the years between her first appearing to Duck and her return at the beginning of Amnesty, that he was going to follow her instructions and train himself to save the world? Or is she faking her confidence? A lot of these questions are likely to be answered in canon eventually, but while there's some negative space there I'd enjoy seeing someone play with it.
Uprooted - Naomi Novik
Characters: Agnieszka, The Dragon | Sarkan
I ship this, but in a way where I'm happy to see any number of interpretations of their relationship. I can easily imagine a future where they drift through stages of being colleagues, friends, romantically involved, sexually involved, totally separated and doing their own thing, and various permutations and combinations of those in no particular order; I think they're always going to matter to each other but Sarkan seems like the kind of person who might decide someone matters to him and then not talk to them for years. You don't have to share this headcanon to write to this prompt! What I'm trying to say is that there are many ways I can see these two characters relating to each other, so there's lots of room for interpretation. In particular, I genuinely like Sarkan as a character, but that's partly for how baffled and astonished he is by Agnieszka, and it's fun to think about him being made to change, or admit reality, and face up to the totally different and really important approach and insights that she brings to her practice of magic. Also Agnieszka's whole connection to her magic, and the purpose and work that she finds at the end, are super compelling to me. I'm sorry this isn't actually a prompt! Just, I like these two, I would like to read about them some more.
Rev.
Characters: Any
I keep nominating this fandom, and it might actually be my favorite sitcom ever. I just have endless admiration for the way it allows things to go truly, permanently wrong, for people not to get what they want, for a community to dissolve and a vocation to go awry and a protagonist to conclude that he is actually bad at his beloved job, and through all that for the characters to be tasked with finding hope, keeping faith, accomplishing some good anyway. Here's a copy-paste of some prompts from a couple years ago: Archdeacon Robert is a particular favorite of mine; he's fierce and powerful and ambitious and clever, and he's hidden and vulnerable and tender and devout. I also relate painfully much to Adam's vocational uncertainty, Alex's concerned attempts not to be pigeonholed as a vicar's wife, Ellie's desperate competence in the face of hard circumstances, and all the other characters I didn't have room to nominate. I guess none of that constitutes a prompt, though. Maybe: Adam in seminary? Any of the characters after the end of the show? Adam and Alex in their early relationship? Ellie getting to have a life? Archdeacon Robert doing whatever the heck it is he does when he's not cruising around in a black car?
