Yuletide 2022
Oct. 18th, 2022 06:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lastwingedthingDear author, I'm so excited you're writing something for me!
I am generally pretty flexible with the things I like. Character-driven stories are awesome, plot-driven stories are awesome, explicit porn is awesome, angst and bleakness are awesome, happy endings are awesome, humor is awesome! Etc.
Some of my favourite things include:
-Canon divergence AUs!
-Time travel shenanigans, particularly characters going back in time to change their own past (I always love a good Peggy Sue!)
-Politics, history and worldbuilding
-Road trips (or spaceship trips, actual ship trips, etc)
-Enemies forced to work together by circumstance
-Redemption arcs
-Recovery & healing from trauma
-Polyshipping
-Unexpected and unconventional happy endings
-Bittersweet endings
-Tragedies that are more-or-less inevitable given the nature of the individuals involved
-People living in less-than-ideal or even actively hostile situations who manage to carve out some kind of happiness despite that.
Porn likes include rough/frantic sex, emphasising nonhuman strengths/capabilities/anatomy for nonhuman or superpowered characters, dirty talk, mild D/s, spanking and bondage/restraints.
I am generally okay with violence, noncon, character death, etc - provided that it is warned for up front - though I would prefer that stories do not focus solely on trauma/horror/violence, and if these do come up as part of the story, I am more interested in the lead up and the aftermath than in dragging out the details of the act itself.
If you need to work your way around a canon relationship of any configuration to write a pairing I've requested (or just like writing it), I do generally enjoy poly and open relationships! "They were together and then they broke up" and "don't even mention it" are also fine. Infidelity is also fine in most circumstances, I'm cool with reading about requested characters doing morally dubious things, so long as the cheated-on party doesn't get written as an OTT villain to justify it.
DNWs:
-Modern/mundane and genre-shift AUs, except for Hilary Tamar. Basically I don't want anything that takes the requested characters/pairings out of their canon setting; fusions like a daemon AU that keep the canon setting are fine
-Soulmates, soulmarks, hanahaki and similar
-Lengthy descriptions of violence/horror/noncon/major character death (as noted above)
-Non-canon character death of requested characters (and if a requested character's canon character death is averted, please don't then kill them off in a different way!)
-Unrequested kinks
-Explicit underage involving characters under 16 (non-explicit is fine).
-An explicitly male, female, nonbinary, agender etc Hilary Tamar - please keep their gender ambiguous as per the books.
As for the fandoms and pairings, I requested:
The Ivy Tree - Mary Stewart
Annabel Winslow
Con Winslow
So when I read this book for the first time this year, part of me was very appreciative of how clever this book is, how Mary Stewart plays with gothic romance tropes and reader expectations re heroes and villains...
...but, well. It's a gothic romance, and the heart wants what it wants, and sometimes what the heart wants is for the heroine to end up with the charismatic bad guy!!
Which is to say, I would love any kind of Annabel/Con or Annabel&Con fic here, from flat-out canon divergence where they get together - he threatens her into marrying him instead of trying to kill her, say - to a canon-based story with the same level of menacingly ambiguously-romantic tension as they have in the book. Please feel free to go dark if you like! (Although I will say, my preference tends to be for some level of ambiguous feelings, 'doesn't want to want it (but actually does)' over straight-up 'actually doesn't want it at all on any level' noncon.)
On a meta level, I really enjoy how Con's basically the male lead of the book, as well as the villain - Adam Forrest is a bit of a nonentity in comparison - and how ambiguous Annabel's feelings really are until the big reveal at the end; does she ever actually enjoy his interest and appreciation while she's pretending to be Mary? (Also I love how into her he is when he thinks she's Mary! He likes a good liar lol.) Obviously Mary Stewart is playing tricks to make the reader think he's a genuine love interest, but also, there are genuine moments when Annabel likes him and finds him charming! If only he would just stop trying to murder her and her loved ones for five minutes...
I'd love to see what their relationship would be like if they were ever actually working together, instead of against each other - whether that's "well we're married now and we both want the farm to be a success" or some other plot. Or just identity games! Or straight-up dubcon porn would be delightful too.
I'm pretty indifferent to Adam (the Mr Rochester references are an absolute turn-off for me) so I don't mind at all if you kill him off or have Annabel fall out of love with him when she meets him again, or just something like... oh dear, Annabel had to marry Con to protect Julie from him, and Adam sulked off to Europe again, never to be seen again. Regardless, I would prefer if he didn't play a major role in any story.
(I do love Lisa and her codependent relationship with Con, though - and her weird semi-friendship with Annabel - and would love if she showed up; feel free to make it as weird and emotionally incestuous - or actually incestuous! - as you like.)
Hilary Tamar mysteries - Sarah Caudwell
Desmond Ragwort
Julia Larwood
Michael Cantrip
Selena Jardine
Everything about this fandom is just charming and delightful (except for the murders, I guess? Also the tax dodging in the third book has... not aged well) and I'd love any kind of story that gave me more of these characters, more of their relationships and hijinks and absurdity.
This is an AND not an OR request - while I love all the characters and I love pretty much all possible combinations and pairings, the thing I most want to see is the four of them together in some way - interacting, working together, getting together, whatever you like. Mostly because the thought of any one or two of them getting left out would make me really sad! I would be equally thrilled by gen, by ship fic involving any subset of the four, or by poly; I'm less interested in relationships between any one of the four and some other person - basically keep the focus on the four of them and I'll be very happy!
Normally I DNW genre shift AUs but for this fandom, I think a genre shift could be delightful! Provided that the focus was the relationship between the four of them, and they kept their dry humour and bickering, it would be really fun to see an AU with magic, or in space, or even a crossover/fusion with another fandom? (As well as the fandoms I requested this Yuletide, others I enjoy at the moment include Avatar: the Last Airbender, A Song of Ice and Fire, Tolkien, Star Wars, Temeraire, the Books of the Raksura, Emelan and Tortall, the Witcher, the Old Kingdom series and CJ Cherryh's Alliance-Union and Finisterre universes.)
Otherwise, I'd love a casefic/adventure, I'd love some kind of missing scene from any of the books, I'd love slice-of-life - honestly just a standard evening of bickering and sarcasm over dinner would be delightful. All the characters and their relationships with each other are just so hilarious and great, and I always want more. Selena's calm competence as she takes care of Julia is delightful - as is Julia herself, in all her scatty wildness. I really love how the two of them interact! Ragwort and Cantrip spend a lot of time bickering and not enough time working together, for my taste - I love the brief hints in canon that they do actually care about each other and I'd love to see more of that! Cantrip and Julia's bickering sibling-esque relationship is also fantastic - particularly their novel! And I love that Julia is the sexually-active pursuer and Ragwort is the one delicately holding onto his virtue in their relationship. I feel like Selena and Cantrip didn't interact as much - or if they did, it was less memorable - but I'd love to see more of them together!
And I'd absolutely adore some kind of poly fic, or an orgy - I feel like they'd all be up for it, and the kind of slightly-absurd scenario required to (figuratively) get them all into bed together seems like it would be perfectly in line with the books. I do love a good trope, too, so if you wanted to do something like 'forced to get married (for the tax benefits!) AU' or 'sedoretu AU' - or 'forced to get married as a sedoretu (for the tax benefits!) AU' - I would absolutely adore it.
I love Hilary too and would be delighted if Hilary showed up - outsider POV on the four of them, deus ex machina, just general busybodying - though please don't give Hilary an explicit gender identity if you do. (I realise this is kind of tricky with pronouns, I am fine with using 'they' in a gender-neutral way or slightly awkward phrasing to avoid pronouns altogether.)
Alphabet of Thorn - Patricia McKillip
Kane
Axis
This is such a beautiful, clever, twisty book! As a standalone reading experience, I love how perfectly the various story threads twist together for the ending; however, I have to admit that the resolution to Kane and Axis's story doesn't quite work for me when I consider them on their own - I'd love a story exploring their history together (or an alternate future??) from a slightly different perspective than the book!
The thing that gets me about Kane, in particular, is how unreliable a narrator she is - somehow by the end of the story she's repented of everything she did for Axis so she can live happily with Nepenthe, but I think that really glosses over how much she was the active partner in the relationship between her and Kane! She did everything out of her obsessive love for him, not for its own sake - but everything they did together was her idea first. I do actually really like her, I think she's a fascinating character - but I want to dig down more into how manipulative and ruthless she is too!
And I just find it fascinating how passive Axis is, for a world-breaking conquerer! He certainly enjoys everything Kane does for him - I'm not suggesting he's a victim to her villain in any way - but he wouldn't have been much without her, and I don't really love how the ending of the book suggests we should be comfortable blaming Axis for everything they did together, or that Kane still deserves a second chance with their daughter where he doesn't.
I would be really, really interested in a story digging into this ending a bit more - a darker and/or more complicated look at Kane than the happy mother-daughter reunion we get in the book. Or a story about what Axis does when he realises Kane is gone - because his love for her is as obsessive as her love for him, but he's never actually had to be the one to make decisions about their relationship before, so what would he do without her? There's several plausible ways it could go, I think, but 'gives up his empire to find her again' is absolutely one of them.
But honestly, I would also just love any kind of story about the two of them and their codependent love! I feel like there's a lot of scope for more stories from any point of their history - go wild!
Blood and Sand - Rosemary Sutcliff
Tussun Bey
Thomas Keith
Anoud
This book is peak Rosemary Sutcliff in so many ways! The classic loyal and brave Sutcliff hero with two loves: one a passionate bond with another man that transcends all the barriers of class, race, language and external loyalty between them, and one a deep mutual understanding with a woman that transcends all the barriers of gender etc between them. I enjoy what we get in the books very much, but I want more between them all! (This is another AND not OR request, please.)
I do appreciate that Tussun/Thomas is basically canon and honestly the primary romance of the book - but I do also like Anoud, and how matter of fact she and Tussun are about each other; they're starting to develop a lovely friendship, which I enjoy very much! I really like poly and the three of them manage to be remarkably functional, for the brief time they're in each other's orbit. I can absolutely see Tussun as basically uninterested in women - or at least in Anoud - and as just having a friendship with her; conversely I would be fascinated by a threesome, though with the caveat that it would be tricky to work around Anoud's religious sensibilities, and probably also Thomas's!
I would really, really love fix-it fic here - I appreciate the tragedy of Thomas and Anoud's deaths, and how Tussun basically pines to death after losing Thomas, it is very romantic and 100% in character for him - but also, fuck, the ending of the book is such a downer! Obviously Rosemary Sutcliff felt bound by real history, but fic has no such limitations, so please feel free to go as wild as you like with the canon divergence.
Also, I am a massive history nerd - while I'm not super across early 19th century Eygptian, Ottoman or Saudi history, I would be very much up for any level of detail you'd like to include to make a canon divergence happen (but 'none history' is absolutely fine too though haha).
And I also really genuinely love slice-of-life fic, so if you wanted to write missing scene(s) between the three of them in canon, that would also be really lovely! There aren't a lot of gaps, but there's space for more to have happened between the three of them than what we see in the book; anything would be lovely!
Thank you again so much for writing for me!
I am generally pretty flexible with the things I like. Character-driven stories are awesome, plot-driven stories are awesome, explicit porn is awesome, angst and bleakness are awesome, happy endings are awesome, humor is awesome! Etc.
Some of my favourite things include:
-Canon divergence AUs!
-Time travel shenanigans, particularly characters going back in time to change their own past (I always love a good Peggy Sue!)
-Politics, history and worldbuilding
-Road trips (or spaceship trips, actual ship trips, etc)
-Enemies forced to work together by circumstance
-Redemption arcs
-Recovery & healing from trauma
-Polyshipping
-Unexpected and unconventional happy endings
-Bittersweet endings
-Tragedies that are more-or-less inevitable given the nature of the individuals involved
-People living in less-than-ideal or even actively hostile situations who manage to carve out some kind of happiness despite that.
Porn likes include rough/frantic sex, emphasising nonhuman strengths/capabilities/anatomy for nonhuman or superpowered characters, dirty talk, mild D/s, spanking and bondage/restraints.
I am generally okay with violence, noncon, character death, etc - provided that it is warned for up front - though I would prefer that stories do not focus solely on trauma/horror/violence, and if these do come up as part of the story, I am more interested in the lead up and the aftermath than in dragging out the details of the act itself.
If you need to work your way around a canon relationship of any configuration to write a pairing I've requested (or just like writing it), I do generally enjoy poly and open relationships! "They were together and then they broke up" and "don't even mention it" are also fine. Infidelity is also fine in most circumstances, I'm cool with reading about requested characters doing morally dubious things, so long as the cheated-on party doesn't get written as an OTT villain to justify it.
DNWs:
-Modern/mundane and genre-shift AUs, except for Hilary Tamar. Basically I don't want anything that takes the requested characters/pairings out of their canon setting; fusions like a daemon AU that keep the canon setting are fine
-Soulmates, soulmarks, hanahaki and similar
-Lengthy descriptions of violence/horror/noncon/major character death (as noted above)
-Non-canon character death of requested characters (and if a requested character's canon character death is averted, please don't then kill them off in a different way!)
-Unrequested kinks
-Explicit underage involving characters under 16 (non-explicit is fine).
-An explicitly male, female, nonbinary, agender etc Hilary Tamar - please keep their gender ambiguous as per the books.
As for the fandoms and pairings, I requested:
The Ivy Tree - Mary Stewart
Annabel Winslow
Con Winslow
So when I read this book for the first time this year, part of me was very appreciative of how clever this book is, how Mary Stewart plays with gothic romance tropes and reader expectations re heroes and villains...
...but, well. It's a gothic romance, and the heart wants what it wants, and sometimes what the heart wants is for the heroine to end up with the charismatic bad guy!!
Which is to say, I would love any kind of Annabel/Con or Annabel&Con fic here, from flat-out canon divergence where they get together - he threatens her into marrying him instead of trying to kill her, say - to a canon-based story with the same level of menacingly ambiguously-romantic tension as they have in the book. Please feel free to go dark if you like! (Although I will say, my preference tends to be for some level of ambiguous feelings, 'doesn't want to want it (but actually does)' over straight-up 'actually doesn't want it at all on any level' noncon.)
On a meta level, I really enjoy how Con's basically the male lead of the book, as well as the villain - Adam Forrest is a bit of a nonentity in comparison - and how ambiguous Annabel's feelings really are until the big reveal at the end; does she ever actually enjoy his interest and appreciation while she's pretending to be Mary? (Also I love how into her he is when he thinks she's Mary! He likes a good liar lol.) Obviously Mary Stewart is playing tricks to make the reader think he's a genuine love interest, but also, there are genuine moments when Annabel likes him and finds him charming! If only he would just stop trying to murder her and her loved ones for five minutes...
I'd love to see what their relationship would be like if they were ever actually working together, instead of against each other - whether that's "well we're married now and we both want the farm to be a success" or some other plot. Or just identity games! Or straight-up dubcon porn would be delightful too.
I'm pretty indifferent to Adam (the Mr Rochester references are an absolute turn-off for me) so I don't mind at all if you kill him off or have Annabel fall out of love with him when she meets him again, or just something like... oh dear, Annabel had to marry Con to protect Julie from him, and Adam sulked off to Europe again, never to be seen again. Regardless, I would prefer if he didn't play a major role in any story.
(I do love Lisa and her codependent relationship with Con, though - and her weird semi-friendship with Annabel - and would love if she showed up; feel free to make it as weird and emotionally incestuous - or actually incestuous! - as you like.)
Hilary Tamar mysteries - Sarah Caudwell
Desmond Ragwort
Julia Larwood
Michael Cantrip
Selena Jardine
Everything about this fandom is just charming and delightful (except for the murders, I guess? Also the tax dodging in the third book has... not aged well) and I'd love any kind of story that gave me more of these characters, more of their relationships and hijinks and absurdity.
This is an AND not an OR request - while I love all the characters and I love pretty much all possible combinations and pairings, the thing I most want to see is the four of them together in some way - interacting, working together, getting together, whatever you like. Mostly because the thought of any one or two of them getting left out would make me really sad! I would be equally thrilled by gen, by ship fic involving any subset of the four, or by poly; I'm less interested in relationships between any one of the four and some other person - basically keep the focus on the four of them and I'll be very happy!
Normally I DNW genre shift AUs but for this fandom, I think a genre shift could be delightful! Provided that the focus was the relationship between the four of them, and they kept their dry humour and bickering, it would be really fun to see an AU with magic, or in space, or even a crossover/fusion with another fandom? (As well as the fandoms I requested this Yuletide, others I enjoy at the moment include Avatar: the Last Airbender, A Song of Ice and Fire, Tolkien, Star Wars, Temeraire, the Books of the Raksura, Emelan and Tortall, the Witcher, the Old Kingdom series and CJ Cherryh's Alliance-Union and Finisterre universes.)
Otherwise, I'd love a casefic/adventure, I'd love some kind of missing scene from any of the books, I'd love slice-of-life - honestly just a standard evening of bickering and sarcasm over dinner would be delightful. All the characters and their relationships with each other are just so hilarious and great, and I always want more. Selena's calm competence as she takes care of Julia is delightful - as is Julia herself, in all her scatty wildness. I really love how the two of them interact! Ragwort and Cantrip spend a lot of time bickering and not enough time working together, for my taste - I love the brief hints in canon that they do actually care about each other and I'd love to see more of that! Cantrip and Julia's bickering sibling-esque relationship is also fantastic - particularly their novel! And I love that Julia is the sexually-active pursuer and Ragwort is the one delicately holding onto his virtue in their relationship. I feel like Selena and Cantrip didn't interact as much - or if they did, it was less memorable - but I'd love to see more of them together!
And I'd absolutely adore some kind of poly fic, or an orgy - I feel like they'd all be up for it, and the kind of slightly-absurd scenario required to (figuratively) get them all into bed together seems like it would be perfectly in line with the books. I do love a good trope, too, so if you wanted to do something like 'forced to get married (for the tax benefits!) AU' or 'sedoretu AU' - or 'forced to get married as a sedoretu (for the tax benefits!) AU' - I would absolutely adore it.
I love Hilary too and would be delighted if Hilary showed up - outsider POV on the four of them, deus ex machina, just general busybodying - though please don't give Hilary an explicit gender identity if you do. (I realise this is kind of tricky with pronouns, I am fine with using 'they' in a gender-neutral way or slightly awkward phrasing to avoid pronouns altogether.)
Alphabet of Thorn - Patricia McKillip
Kane
Axis
This is such a beautiful, clever, twisty book! As a standalone reading experience, I love how perfectly the various story threads twist together for the ending; however, I have to admit that the resolution to Kane and Axis's story doesn't quite work for me when I consider them on their own - I'd love a story exploring their history together (or an alternate future??) from a slightly different perspective than the book!
The thing that gets me about Kane, in particular, is how unreliable a narrator she is - somehow by the end of the story she's repented of everything she did for Axis so she can live happily with Nepenthe, but I think that really glosses over how much she was the active partner in the relationship between her and Kane! She did everything out of her obsessive love for him, not for its own sake - but everything they did together was her idea first. I do actually really like her, I think she's a fascinating character - but I want to dig down more into how manipulative and ruthless she is too!
And I just find it fascinating how passive Axis is, for a world-breaking conquerer! He certainly enjoys everything Kane does for him - I'm not suggesting he's a victim to her villain in any way - but he wouldn't have been much without her, and I don't really love how the ending of the book suggests we should be comfortable blaming Axis for everything they did together, or that Kane still deserves a second chance with their daughter where he doesn't.
I would be really, really interested in a story digging into this ending a bit more - a darker and/or more complicated look at Kane than the happy mother-daughter reunion we get in the book. Or a story about what Axis does when he realises Kane is gone - because his love for her is as obsessive as her love for him, but he's never actually had to be the one to make decisions about their relationship before, so what would he do without her? There's several plausible ways it could go, I think, but 'gives up his empire to find her again' is absolutely one of them.
But honestly, I would also just love any kind of story about the two of them and their codependent love! I feel like there's a lot of scope for more stories from any point of their history - go wild!
Blood and Sand - Rosemary Sutcliff
Tussun Bey
Thomas Keith
Anoud
This book is peak Rosemary Sutcliff in so many ways! The classic loyal and brave Sutcliff hero with two loves: one a passionate bond with another man that transcends all the barriers of class, race, language and external loyalty between them, and one a deep mutual understanding with a woman that transcends all the barriers of gender etc between them. I enjoy what we get in the books very much, but I want more between them all! (This is another AND not OR request, please.)
I do appreciate that Tussun/Thomas is basically canon and honestly the primary romance of the book - but I do also like Anoud, and how matter of fact she and Tussun are about each other; they're starting to develop a lovely friendship, which I enjoy very much! I really like poly and the three of them manage to be remarkably functional, for the brief time they're in each other's orbit. I can absolutely see Tussun as basically uninterested in women - or at least in Anoud - and as just having a friendship with her; conversely I would be fascinated by a threesome, though with the caveat that it would be tricky to work around Anoud's religious sensibilities, and probably also Thomas's!
I would really, really love fix-it fic here - I appreciate the tragedy of Thomas and Anoud's deaths, and how Tussun basically pines to death after losing Thomas, it is very romantic and 100% in character for him - but also, fuck, the ending of the book is such a downer! Obviously Rosemary Sutcliff felt bound by real history, but fic has no such limitations, so please feel free to go as wild as you like with the canon divergence.
Also, I am a massive history nerd - while I'm not super across early 19th century Eygptian, Ottoman or Saudi history, I would be very much up for any level of detail you'd like to include to make a canon divergence happen (but 'none history' is absolutely fine too though haha).
And I also really genuinely love slice-of-life fic, so if you wanted to write missing scene(s) between the three of them in canon, that would also be really lovely! There aren't a lot of gaps, but there's space for more to have happened between the three of them than what we see in the book; anything would be lovely!
Thank you again so much for writing for me!
