Yuletide letter!
Oct. 8th, 2013 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mari4212Dear Yuletider
Thank you so much for writing for me. I'm really hoping that you didn't get my letter and immediately panic.
The quick and dirty method to make me happy with my Yuletide fic: write the characters I picked, let them be as awesome as they already are in canon, and enjoy your story. If you like it and are happy with the final product, I will probably love it.
That being said, if you are anything like me, you are flailing and wanting more specifics as far as likes and dislikes, and would probably enjoy a few prompts. So to start with what applies to every fanfic exchange I do, here are some general guidelines. I have no objections to gen, het, or slash, nor to ratings ranging from g to a hard NC-17, though all of my prompts started out in my head as gen. I do squick out on infidelity, so if you want to write a pairing where the characters in canon already have an SO, please make sure you introduce a reason why the original pairing either broke up or that it’s an au where they weren’t together. I’m also not fond of incest, rape, or sexual assault, and you have to work really hard to convince me that including any of those as a plot element was necessary. I love female characters, and even when I didn’t request them, assume that I’m positive/neutral to the other female characters in the canon, and wouldn’t like them bashed. (Actually, you can probably assume that for any character in the fandoms I’ve requested.) I also don’t like racism, sexism, religious bashing or homophobia to be portrayed positively. If you really want to place it in as an issue to be addressed, please do not glorify it. For example, the original The Lost World book by Doyle was full of rampant sexism and race-fail, which makes sense in context of the time period. The tv series was much better, but you will note that most of the non-white characters were alternately savage or superstitious, Please if you write an adventure story in that fandom, if you make your own culture up for the main group to be interacting with, try not to fall into that same pattern.
Now for my specific requests:
The Lost World tv
Requested Characters Marguerite Krux, John Roxton
Marguerite and Roxton, bonus Summerlee or Veronica is bonus. I would like it for Marguerite and Roxton to have some level of interaction, but if you want to include Sumerlee or Veronica and have their take on the characters' interactions instead of being in the main requested characters heads, go for it. Marguerite's evolution and vulnerability.
So in this fandom, Marguerite is my best beloved character, and I love things that deal with how honestly complex she is a character, how she is both extremely selfish and yet will sacrifice a lot for those she cares about. Play with something about that, if you like. Or give me something from one of the semi-AU episodes they had, like the one where Roxton went back to the Old West, and write a continuation of those characters. Or hey, the one episode in the first season with the Druids, where Marguerite, Roxton, and Malone ended up forgetting what they'd done. How would things have potentially changed if they'd remembered that incident? It gave a very different perspective of Marguerite for the first season.
I'm also fine with family-style fluff around the camp, especially the dynamics we saw in season 3 where they had gotten used to each other and had some trust built up. Or if you have some long and elaborate adventure story that you've always wanted to do with this series, go with that. I'm a sucker for time travel and older versions of characters meeting the younger, so if you want to play with third season characters seeing first season characters again, it will make me squee high enough to make all the nearby bats start flying in circles.
Basically, I've loved this series for a long time, and have been requesting this show for several Yuletides. Not that I don't want my other fandom requests, because I really do, but I've been really lucky in prior Yuletides and have had most of my other rare fandoms given fanfics. If you signed up for this show but are realizing that you can't remember the characters as well as you hoped, here is a link to where most of the episodes are up on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpMnNPP9iILjW2rtTQNdyIw
Stealing Fire - Jo Graham
Requested Characters Any
Stealing Fire! I have squeed about this book previously on my livejournal, and about the author in general many times. I love the characters like burning. I love Lydias' honor, his deep love for Hephastion, for his wife and child, for Alexander, and later for Egypt and Alexandria. I love his relationship with Bagoas, how two such deeply wounded human beings can ye be so good and healing towards each other. I love the short conversations Lydias has with Thais, how both of them changed from being the outsiders to being central and important, how each of them chose their worlds by choosing their loyalties.
I requested any characters here because I meant it. There isn't a character or character combination of these four that I wouldn't enjoy seeing played with. Give me Berenice and Thais working to understand each other and their places in Ptolemy's life and the running of Egypt. Give me Berenice's point of view when she comes to Egypt at the end of the book and makes herself into a queen. Give me Ptolemy with his choices both short and long term. Give me a discussion between Thais and Lydias about the fact that Ptolemy decided that Lydias was marrying her daughter. Give me Lydias going through a normal day in his life, sometime when the cat doesn't get to steal the dinner.
Those are some ideas to get you started, but run wild. Assume that I've seen/read most of what the author has said about extra background if you want to pull that in to your fic.
Prince of Egypt (1998)
Requested Characters: Any
I recently re-watched this movie and rediscovered how much I loved it. Actually, I re-watched it about four times, because I was showing it for a class that had three sections. Watching it over and over again in the course of a week did not stop me from loving it to pieces, which is a major accomplishment for any kind of media.
Things of specific love: The relationship between Rameses and Moses being articulated so well, and the underlying emotions being allowed to exist in the movie without always being spoken out loud. Moses at the death of Rameses' son, for example, was beautifully done so that you could tell how much he was feeling for the man he still considered his brother, but there was no character who had to point that out to the audience as if we couldn't interpret that from the animation. Similarly with Moses and Tzipporah, most of their relationship is portrayed wordlessly. We get everything about their romance and most of their decisions and support of one another from the animation and the musical score. I love the subtlety of this whole film, overall. I also love the choice the film-makers went with on focusing on the human drama, rather than dogmatic statements of faith.
Important to note for this fandom: Yes I am Christian, and fairly devout. I'm also rather liberal, and not a Biblical literalist. The closest I have to an automatic do not want in this fandom is something that is only a religious screed/anti-religious screed. I nominated Prince of Egypt because of the character interactions, and that is what I'm interested in for this prompt.
Specific prompts: I listed any characters, and I would love to see fic about any/all of them. If you don't think you can work a character into the story organically, I am fine with you focusing more on the story and not trying to shoehorn in one character. I would love to see something from Rameses' perspective on Moses' return. I'd be as happy to see something with Miriam and Tzipporah getting along and driving Moses nuts, because, really, those two would/do run rings around him and it is awesome. If you want to try an AU fic that somehow ends happier, I would be thrilled, though I appreciate that that would be hard to pull off. If you want to write a five-things fic that plays with alternate choices or what have you, that would also be cool. Moses working through his three families: birth, adoption, and marriage as represented by the other characters, I am so down with that.
Jousters of Alta – Mercedes Lackey
Characters: Vetch/Kiron, Ari
This I think my smallest fandom, so I'll be pleasantly surprised to get matched on it. I love Mercedes Lackey's writing in pretty much everything, but I loved her world-building and playing with Egypt here, and especially her dragons as they are amazing.
If you were not matched on this fandom but are going erp and running away from the prompts I gave for a different fandom, this is probably an easy one to find, as Mercedes Lackey's works are at a lot of American public libraries and used book stores, as well as still being at book stores. To find out the necessary information on Vetch/Kiron and Ari, you can get away with reading only Joust, though I'd highly recommend getting Alta as well, to continue Vetch/Kiron's character development when he gets to be himself.
I love these two characters so much. They are both very badly broken by the system they are in, and the way that they sometimes try to reach through their pain but sometimes fail at it as well is fantastic. If you want a specific prompt, I'd like to see more of Ari's prespective, as the whole series is narrated through Vetch/Kiron, and he is not what anyone would call unbiased. Other prompts include dragon shenanigans, Vetch/Kiron as the more equal brothers/friends they ended up as in the later books, or an AU based on different choices in the books.
Please note that because of the power differences present through most of the books, as well as the age differences, I have a really hard time reading these two as romantic/sexual at all. I love these two more as brothers and friends who each had a reason to be isolated from their peers, and how that gives them a lot in common even when their original situations were so different.
Thank you so much for writing for me. I'm really hoping that you didn't get my letter and immediately panic.
The quick and dirty method to make me happy with my Yuletide fic: write the characters I picked, let them be as awesome as they already are in canon, and enjoy your story. If you like it and are happy with the final product, I will probably love it.
That being said, if you are anything like me, you are flailing and wanting more specifics as far as likes and dislikes, and would probably enjoy a few prompts. So to start with what applies to every fanfic exchange I do, here are some general guidelines. I have no objections to gen, het, or slash, nor to ratings ranging from g to a hard NC-17, though all of my prompts started out in my head as gen. I do squick out on infidelity, so if you want to write a pairing where the characters in canon already have an SO, please make sure you introduce a reason why the original pairing either broke up or that it’s an au where they weren’t together. I’m also not fond of incest, rape, or sexual assault, and you have to work really hard to convince me that including any of those as a plot element was necessary. I love female characters, and even when I didn’t request them, assume that I’m positive/neutral to the other female characters in the canon, and wouldn’t like them bashed. (Actually, you can probably assume that for any character in the fandoms I’ve requested.) I also don’t like racism, sexism, religious bashing or homophobia to be portrayed positively. If you really want to place it in as an issue to be addressed, please do not glorify it. For example, the original The Lost World book by Doyle was full of rampant sexism and race-fail, which makes sense in context of the time period. The tv series was much better, but you will note that most of the non-white characters were alternately savage or superstitious, Please if you write an adventure story in that fandom, if you make your own culture up for the main group to be interacting with, try not to fall into that same pattern.
Now for my specific requests:
The Lost World tv
Requested Characters Marguerite Krux, John Roxton
Marguerite and Roxton, bonus Summerlee or Veronica is bonus. I would like it for Marguerite and Roxton to have some level of interaction, but if you want to include Sumerlee or Veronica and have their take on the characters' interactions instead of being in the main requested characters heads, go for it. Marguerite's evolution and vulnerability.
So in this fandom, Marguerite is my best beloved character, and I love things that deal with how honestly complex she is a character, how she is both extremely selfish and yet will sacrifice a lot for those she cares about. Play with something about that, if you like. Or give me something from one of the semi-AU episodes they had, like the one where Roxton went back to the Old West, and write a continuation of those characters. Or hey, the one episode in the first season with the Druids, where Marguerite, Roxton, and Malone ended up forgetting what they'd done. How would things have potentially changed if they'd remembered that incident? It gave a very different perspective of Marguerite for the first season.
I'm also fine with family-style fluff around the camp, especially the dynamics we saw in season 3 where they had gotten used to each other and had some trust built up. Or if you have some long and elaborate adventure story that you've always wanted to do with this series, go with that. I'm a sucker for time travel and older versions of characters meeting the younger, so if you want to play with third season characters seeing first season characters again, it will make me squee high enough to make all the nearby bats start flying in circles.
Basically, I've loved this series for a long time, and have been requesting this show for several Yuletides. Not that I don't want my other fandom requests, because I really do, but I've been really lucky in prior Yuletides and have had most of my other rare fandoms given fanfics. If you signed up for this show but are realizing that you can't remember the characters as well as you hoped, here is a link to where most of the episodes are up on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpMnNPP9iILjW2rtTQNdyIw
Stealing Fire - Jo Graham
Requested Characters Any
Stealing Fire! I have squeed about this book previously on my livejournal, and about the author in general many times. I love the characters like burning. I love Lydias' honor, his deep love for Hephastion, for his wife and child, for Alexander, and later for Egypt and Alexandria. I love his relationship with Bagoas, how two such deeply wounded human beings can ye be so good and healing towards each other. I love the short conversations Lydias has with Thais, how both of them changed from being the outsiders to being central and important, how each of them chose their worlds by choosing their loyalties.
I requested any characters here because I meant it. There isn't a character or character combination of these four that I wouldn't enjoy seeing played with. Give me Berenice and Thais working to understand each other and their places in Ptolemy's life and the running of Egypt. Give me Berenice's point of view when she comes to Egypt at the end of the book and makes herself into a queen. Give me Ptolemy with his choices both short and long term. Give me a discussion between Thais and Lydias about the fact that Ptolemy decided that Lydias was marrying her daughter. Give me Lydias going through a normal day in his life, sometime when the cat doesn't get to steal the dinner.
Those are some ideas to get you started, but run wild. Assume that I've seen/read most of what the author has said about extra background if you want to pull that in to your fic.
Prince of Egypt (1998)
Requested Characters: Any
I recently re-watched this movie and rediscovered how much I loved it. Actually, I re-watched it about four times, because I was showing it for a class that had three sections. Watching it over and over again in the course of a week did not stop me from loving it to pieces, which is a major accomplishment for any kind of media.
Things of specific love: The relationship between Rameses and Moses being articulated so well, and the underlying emotions being allowed to exist in the movie without always being spoken out loud. Moses at the death of Rameses' son, for example, was beautifully done so that you could tell how much he was feeling for the man he still considered his brother, but there was no character who had to point that out to the audience as if we couldn't interpret that from the animation. Similarly with Moses and Tzipporah, most of their relationship is portrayed wordlessly. We get everything about their romance and most of their decisions and support of one another from the animation and the musical score. I love the subtlety of this whole film, overall. I also love the choice the film-makers went with on focusing on the human drama, rather than dogmatic statements of faith.
Important to note for this fandom: Yes I am Christian, and fairly devout. I'm also rather liberal, and not a Biblical literalist. The closest I have to an automatic do not want in this fandom is something that is only a religious screed/anti-religious screed. I nominated Prince of Egypt because of the character interactions, and that is what I'm interested in for this prompt.
Specific prompts: I listed any characters, and I would love to see fic about any/all of them. If you don't think you can work a character into the story organically, I am fine with you focusing more on the story and not trying to shoehorn in one character. I would love to see something from Rameses' perspective on Moses' return. I'd be as happy to see something with Miriam and Tzipporah getting along and driving Moses nuts, because, really, those two would/do run rings around him and it is awesome. If you want to try an AU fic that somehow ends happier, I would be thrilled, though I appreciate that that would be hard to pull off. If you want to write a five-things fic that plays with alternate choices or what have you, that would also be cool. Moses working through his three families: birth, adoption, and marriage as represented by the other characters, I am so down with that.
Jousters of Alta – Mercedes Lackey
Characters: Vetch/Kiron, Ari
This I think my smallest fandom, so I'll be pleasantly surprised to get matched on it. I love Mercedes Lackey's writing in pretty much everything, but I loved her world-building and playing with Egypt here, and especially her dragons as they are amazing.
If you were not matched on this fandom but are going erp and running away from the prompts I gave for a different fandom, this is probably an easy one to find, as Mercedes Lackey's works are at a lot of American public libraries and used book stores, as well as still being at book stores. To find out the necessary information on Vetch/Kiron and Ari, you can get away with reading only Joust, though I'd highly recommend getting Alta as well, to continue Vetch/Kiron's character development when he gets to be himself.
I love these two characters so much. They are both very badly broken by the system they are in, and the way that they sometimes try to reach through their pain but sometimes fail at it as well is fantastic. If you want a specific prompt, I'd like to see more of Ari's prespective, as the whole series is narrated through Vetch/Kiron, and he is not what anyone would call unbiased. Other prompts include dragon shenanigans, Vetch/Kiron as the more equal brothers/friends they ended up as in the later books, or an AU based on different choices in the books.
Please note that because of the power differences present through most of the books, as well as the age differences, I have a really hard time reading these two as romantic/sexual at all. I love these two more as brothers and friends who each had a reason to be isolated from their peers, and how that gives them a lot in common even when their original situations were so different.