Dear Yuletide Writer 17
Oct. 1st, 2017 02:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elegantstupidityMost importantly, though, I’m very excited to see what you’ve got in store for me!
Let me say straight off that if you had an idea for a fic coming into this, please write it! I’d appreciate it if you check out my No, thanks! list first, but I won’t be heartbroken if none of the following prompts are filled. Go with your muse!
If that’s not true for you, then I hope this letter can give you a few ideas.
I generally think I’m pretty easy to please when it comes to fic? I will read basically anything about any character for any of these fandoms. Which is, I guess, kind of the point of Yuletide; more fic for small fandoms. When I do seek out fanfiction, it’s typically for shippy reasons, but I would be more than happy to get some good gen content for any of these canons.
If none of what follows appeals to you/meshes with your understanding of canon, that’s totally cool. These are just some questions/thoughts that I’ve had, where I think the answers might make for interesting fic. But honestly, who these characters are as human beings is the most important thing for me, so anything that you write that celebrates/explores/illuminates them is gonna make me happy.
Embrace or ignore what you’d like out of this letter, but I do hope I at least give you a nudge in the right (or some) direction? Just so you’re not flying blind. If I do, great, have fun writing! If not, I’m sorry and feel free to bad mouth me to your friends.
Anyway, thank you in advance and I really can’t wait to see what you write!
Kate/elegantstupidity
Yes, please!
Feel free to use all, some, or none of these. But I think this gives a pretty good idea of the kind of stuff I enjoy in fic?
- character-driven plots
- AUs, in almost any form
- especially if they’re a little weird but canon-adjacent (ie: body swap, unexpected telepathic connections, time loops, etc.)
- exceptions are omegaverse and slave/master AUs. Please do not write those.
- I’m kinda meh on soulmate and high school AUs
- slow burns
- especially combined with mutual pining and Reasons™ for not being together
- (enemies to) friends to lovers
- I’m all about snarky antagonism/teasing as flirting
- all the ridiculous romantic tropes
- ie: friends with benefits turning to something more; sharing a bed; secret relationships; weird enforced proximity (ie handcuffed together, locked in a closet); everyone thinks we’re dating and we’re not. what are we missing?; meddling friends; secret identities (à la You’ve Got Mail)
- actually, if Nora Ephron wrote about it, I love it
- found families and/or family feels and/or complex family dynamics
- team bonding/shenanigans
- ie: road trips, pranks, inside jokes, friendship building, nights out, games/game nights, betting pools, roughhousing/physical affection, etc.
- mutual admiration societies/positive partnerships
- I still love snark and teasing and even outright antagonism
- they just have to end up liking each other—even grudgingly
- I still love snark and teasing and even outright antagonism
- HEA or HFN
- smut is totally great, but I 100% do not expect it
- some likes: resolving UST, first time together, transparently thin reasons to bang it out, mild kink discovery (think hair pulling or spanking, not watersports), sexual awakenings, teasing/foreplay, rough sex, banter/dirty talk, enthusiastic oral, enthusiasm in general, trying new things, laughing together, …having a nice time? I don’t know, my tastes run pretty vanilla reading- (and writing-)wise.
- alternatively, I can definitely get behind some hate/grudge sex, but I do like when it eventually evolves into something more
- some likes: resolving UST, first time together, transparently thin reasons to bang it out, mild kink discovery (think hair pulling or spanking, not watersports), sexual awakenings, teasing/foreplay, rough sex, banter/dirty talk, enthusiastic oral, enthusiasm in general, trying new things, laughing together, …having a nice time? I don’t know, my tastes run pretty vanilla reading- (and writing-)wise.
No, thanks!
- pregnancy!fic, baby!fic, and kid!fic
- kids that already exist in canon are fine to include
- infidelity
- incest
- 2nd person narration
- general grimdark stuff (extra-canonical character death, graphic violence, gore, abuse, etc.)
- I’m good with angst and guilt and drama, but I need a light at the end of the tunnel, please.
- If you do go the smut route, please no noncon or dubcon. Everyone should be consenting adults or at least close in age if they’re underage.
Requests
Pitch (TV 2016)
characters: Any (Literally any of them, from the tag set or otherwise. Fair warning, Ginny is my favorite. Most prompts include her, but I’m more than happy to read about other characters.)
So, not to be overdramatic or anything, but Pitch was literally the show I was put on this Earth to love: a talented, barrier-breaking heroine; her snarky but emotionally invested mentor; multiple and multi-faceted female friendships; our national pastime; frank discussion of mental health issues; sexual tension so thick you could cut it with a knife.
If you take even cursory tour of this blog/my recent works on ao3, I would hope the one thing you can take away is how much I love this show. I’m endlessly bitter that it got cancelled, though this probably isn’t the place to talk about that. (That’s twitter where I can send belligerent tweets to the official Fox account.) Anyway, I love the premise, I love the baseball, I love the relationships, I love the individual characters. Anything you write for this show, I will adore and appreciate.
If you do take that tour, you’ll also notice that Ginny/Mike is my ship. I’ve got a lot of thoughts and don’t know how to shut up about it. I ship Bawson largely because Ginny/Mike is a pretty slam dunk way to achieve Ginny/Eternal Happiness and Fulfillment. If you wanna give that a whirl with another ship/no ship for her and without making Mike into the bad guy, go for it, I’d love to read it! (Seriously. I have a huge soft spot for Ginny/Livan[/Mike] and Ginny/Blip/Ev as well as Ginny/Cara, but I don’t think I have any NOTPs. Well, maybe not Ginny/Al. Ginny & Al is great, though!)
(P.S. Pitch is now back on Hulu if you need a refresher. Or haven’t had a chance to watch it yet!)
more prompt ideas (in no particular order)
- I’d like to know more about Ginny and Mike’s phone habits. Actually, I just want to know when Ginny and Mike become each others’ go to drunk dial.
- Who instigated this and why? Do they ever talk about it sober? Do they ever talk about it at all? What happens when one of them actually answers? Is a line crossed? (I’d be super okay with some phone sex or more and the weird mish mash of guilt and longing that follows.)
- Alternatively, if Bawson’s not your speed: Any drunk dials Ginny makes to anyone for any reason. Maybe she and Cara are out and go through her phone. Maybe Ginny’s drinking alone and calls Cara or Livan or any of her teammates, Al, Amelia, Eliot, Evelyn, etc. (I’d be super okay with some more phone sex with anyone here—with the exception of Al, probably.)
- I, personally, need to believe that Amelia came back to Ginny and they worked it out, but I haven’t really been able to figure out how it happens. Maybe you want to give it a shot? What boundaries do they set up? How hard is it to navigate their new dynamic? Where does Eliot fit in around this drama? Did he stay with Ginny? Go with Amelia?
- Are the Sanders okay? Tell me they’re okay, please. (In as much vivid, electrifying, specific detail as you like.)
- Basically any Bawson you want to write—the time before they get together but are still aware they want one another, established relationship, pretending they don’t want more, mostly platonic teammates, “platonic” fuck buddies, etc, etc—is gr9 with me (the camaraderie! the teasing! the pining! the ust!) but I’ve wanted someone to write a Hollywood!AU forever.
- Baseball is weird and has a lot of superstitions, please tell me all about Ginny’s/Blip’s/Mike’s and/or the rest of the team’s.
- ie: The first time Mike and Ginny kiss, he goes 0-for-4 at the plate three days in a row and he starts to think that the kiss/resolving some of that tension has cursed him.
- Or: How long has it been since Mike was allowed to change his walk up song? Who refuses to wash their socks when the team goes on a streak? Who will only eat a certain meal before a game? Blip’s got his Grandmaster Flash shirt, but who’s got a lucky rabbit’s foot/four leaf clover/penny? And there are so many other possibilities because ballplayers are superstitious weirdos!
- Basically any kind of clubhouse shenanigans you want to write, I will happily take.
- I also wouldn’t hate a body swap AU? However you can justify that happening—hell, even if you don’t justify it—I wouldn’t hate it, but real bonus points if you can keep it as close to the canon universe as possible. (With or without smut, but c'mon. How can you ignore the smut potential between any of these people—Ginny and Mike, Ginny and Livan, Ginny and Cara, Mike and Livan while Ginny tries to figure out what the hell is happening!—switching bodies?)
- Actually, I’m gonna go ahead and say I wouldn’t hate a body swap AU for any of these fandoms.
A League of Their Own (1992)
characters: Any (Dottie Hinson, Jimmy Dugan, Kit Keller, Marla Hooch)
optional characters: Any other characters from the movie you feel like adding
If Pitch is the love of my life, A League of Their Own is what laid the foundation. The cooly competent catcher and her disaster of a manager; the underdog story of the Little League That Could; a complex, but ultimately loving, relationship between sisters; more of our nation’s pastime; more sizzling sexual tension.
If you haven’t had a chance to see this movie, you really should go track it down. There’s a young Tom Hanks and Geena Davis, a bunch of really athletic women, great femslash potential, and the perfect mix of drama and humor. Can’t recommend this movie highly enough! The fact that there’s so little fic for it is ceaselessly disappointing. Which is where Yuletide comes in!
I wanted to be pretty Dottie Hinson when I grew up. I’m not, but I still wanted to. No offense to Bob or whatever, but Dottie should’ve stayed and kept playing ball and she definitely should’ve made out with Jimmy at some point. (I realize that this is skirting awfully close to my whole “no infidelity” thing, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I contain multitudes. Feel free to ignore that bullet in my No, thanks! list for this fandom. Alternatively, you can flout the “no character death” thing and kill off Bob. Or they can get a divorce. I’m not picky. I just want Jimmy and Dottie to touch mouths and maybe more. Fine. Definitely more.)
Also, WWII on the home front is endlessly fascinating to me and I grew up in the Midwest, so I’ve been to a lot of the places that had teams in the AAGPBL. There are a lot of sweet spots for me in this movie. Any historical details, especially how they deal with some of the darker/uglier/less nostalgic ones (ie: racism, misogyny, poverty, homophobia—without getting too graphic), you wanna add in would make my day. . References to any of those things? Great! Fic where those things are the focus? Less so.
more prompt ideas (in no particular order)
- What if Dottie made an impromptu return to the league? Maybe the next season, maybe a few down the line? What impact does her return have on her former manager? (And yeah, okay, her sister and former teammates, too.)
- Any missing scene you want to add in. (Obviously not required, but if it’s got a Jimmy/Dottie angle, I’d be heart eyes forever.)
- What did Jimmy/Marla/Kit/Dottie/whoever think about the filming of that news reel?
- Generally more of Jimmy and Dottie sitting next to one another on the bus, please.
- What were the bumps in the road between Jimmy being passed out for most of the game to actually being a functional manager? Aside from making Evelyn cry, that is. How unsympathetic was Dottie to that struggle? How little did Jimmy mind?
- Apparently, there’s a deleted scene (#14) where Dottie joins Jimmy for a little late night batting practice and they kiss. Why this kind of content was cut from the movie, I’ll never understand, but I’d love to hear your take on that scene, (preferably without the infidelity angst).
- Also from the above article (#5): “Dottie isn’t sure if going ‘all the way’ is something married women ‘get to’ or ‘have to’ do.” Um, please expand on how Jimmy Dugan convinces her otherwise, either during the movie or after.
- I like the idea of Dottie keeping in touch with her former team, especially Marla (even though that’s clearly not what happens given the end of the movie). What does she feel when Marla—or Kit or any of the Peaches—writes and fills her in on the second season?
- Some pre-canon of Dottie and Kit/sister feels would be excellent. Who started playing baseball first? How close did one of their parents actually come to saying, “This is our daughter Dottie. This is our other daughter Dottie’s sister”??? How often did Kit run away from home and Dottie was the one who went to find her?
- If you’re feeling some femslash: Marla feeling self-conscious (either before or after meeting Nelson) about having never kissed anyone. Dottie (or Kit or one of the other Peaches, if you’d rather) offer to help her out.
- Yeah, okay, you can probably skip the body swap thing on this one. Unless you’ve ever experienced some gin-soaked nightmares about switching bodies with your pretty catcher that you’d like to exorcise by writing about Jimmy feeling the same?
The Good Place (TV)
characters: Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani (This is an OR selection. Feel free to pick one, two, or all three)
optional characters: Any (From the tag set or otherwise.)
A few things I especially love about The Good Place: the ethos of the humor (the jokes aren’t at the expense of people who don’t deserve it, and they aren’t potshots for the most part); a diverse, ensemble cast; a shrewd, morally questionable main character who’s not an antihero(ine) and the nerd who believes she can be better; the practically endless possibilities for AUs as Michael reconfigures the neighborhood to torture the humans.
note: this section is not spoiler-free
I live a Mike Schur appreciation life. If the real world were as charmingly optimistic as his TV worlds are, I feel like there would be fewer problems. Or at least our problems would be funnier. I haven’t read a ton of fic for this show, yet, but I have a feeling that’s going to change as season 2 unfolds. (Update: It already has. Episode three and all the iterations of the neighborhood definitely got to me.)
I don’t actually have any definite ships for this show. Eleanor/Chidi is super cute and Jason/Janet is pretty hilarious, but I’m definitely not against Eleanor/Tahani or Eleanor/Chidi/Tahani. Basically, I’m good with any of my three requested characters in any kind of romantic/platonic/uneven configuration you feel like. I’d really like a character driven fic for this fandom, so any plot can be incidental/hand-wavey.
more prompt ideas (in no particular order)
- the selfish ass: Oh, Eleanor. My bi garbage human. I kind of assume I’ll have more ideas as the writing period goes on and we get new eps, but right now I want to know how many times Eleanor has bought a cake for herself aside from her birthday and getting her parents to sign her emancipation papers.
- If you’d also like to include what gets her to accept a cake from Chidi and/or Tahani (with or without Jason and Janet) I definitely would not mind that.
- the tortured academic: Okay, I initially had something else for Chidi, but after 203, I really need to read some Chidi pining for Eleanor. That tiny scene where he ducks his head when Eleanor says she’s into her current soulmate? I wanna live there. I wanna roll around in that gut-wrenching belief that the person you like doesn’t like you back—right up until the resolution comes and everything works out.
- If you wanna make me really happy, you could do lots of different versions of pining. How, through all the reboots, he almost always starts feeling the same things.
- the rich, hot fraud: I love Tahani. I love her roiling, nauseating sense of inadequacy that she’s desperate to ignore and/or rise above. I’d love to know what niggling sense of that gets to her, even when she believes she’s in the Good Place.
- How does she get drawn into the ethics lessons in some of the reboots? Does she realize that she wasn’t actually a good person from the get go or does that take longer to set in? How does it get to her in Attempt 802 and how do Chidi and Eleanor help her cope?
- or: I’d love to see something where all (including Jason, probably) of their lives brush up against one another while they’re alive. Not necessarily meeting, but maybe something that convinces Michael that these four are perfect to torture each other.
- Here’s the thing, I can see there being some kind of Neighborhood glitch that gets everyone to switch bodies/matches up souls with the wrong physical interface/whatever. Whether this is Michael just messing with them or an actual problem in the system is up to you.
- But some thoughts: Chidi being so pained about the ethical ramifications of seeing one of his friends naked without their consent while he showers. Jason (if you include him), conversely, is super into whoever’s boobs he gets. Tahani would immediately overhaul someone’s closet in the pursuit of “charity,” and Eleanor is trying to figure out what she’s forked up to trigger this kind of disaster
Crown Duel - Sherwood Smith
characters: Meliara Astiar, Vidanric Renselaeus
optional characters: Any (Nimiar Argaliar, Tamara Chamadis, plus anyone else you feel like adding)
I think it can safely be said that Crown Duel instilled in me my love of enemies to friends to lovers as a trope and for that, I am truly thankful. Other things I love about it are, but are not limited to: rebellion and guerrilla warfare against an oppressive king; destitute but honorable nobility; magical world building; plus one scrappy resistance fighter/countess and the marquis who finds her fascinating.
I love these books so much. My copy is falling apart, I’ve read it so many times. I haven’t had a chance to read Remalna’s Children or A Stranger to Command, but I’m not opposed to future!fic that includes the kids or drawing on Vidanric’s past, I just won’t know what you’ve made up and what’s technically canonical. I’m also not opposed to any other characters from canon showing up here.
That said, Meliara Astiar is the abrasive, stubborn, prideful, truly good rebel of my dreams. I love her mind, I love her (lack of) shoes. Mostly, what I love about her is how absurdly competent Mel is when it comes to sheer survival and how at sea she is in what is supposed to be civilization.
more prompt ideas (in no particular order)
- How does Mel adjust to being queen? How jealous does she feel that Vidanric was trained for this since he was a boy? What kind of insecurities she feels from her upbringing and when she wants to escape it all and run for the hills. Literally.
- If you’re so inclined, I’m also interested in the way Nee and Mel’s relationship changes after Mel becomes queen. Same for Mel’s and Tamara’s relationship. Basically give me a friendship (even if it’s slightly skeptical on Tamara’s part) fic with the two courtiers falling back on old habits of royal deference as Mel struggles to take on the duties of a queen and feels a little abandoned.
- Enemies to friends to lovers is basically my shipping sweet spot, so Mel/Vidanric has a special place in my heart. Like, I know they’ve got to be king and queen or whatever, but please tell me they’re still squabbling and being general assholes to one another
- Fighting and having to pretend to be on speaking terms around courtiers/ambassadors/whoever. Vidanric’s got his court mask perfected, but Mel’s pretty tricky. She could make him feel her annoyance.
- Please tell me they keep making bets with one another and/or they have a running tally of who’s won what that gets out of hand
- My last push for a body switch, promise: Mel and Vidanric somehow switch bodies while she’s on the run.
- (Listen, there is actual magic in this universe. Out of all my body swap requests, this is the one where it could potentially happen!)
Last updated on October 12th
