Yuletide letter
Sep. 29th, 2017 12:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mari4212General Info:
AO3 Name: mari4212
Quick and dirty rules:
If you love the canon and you love writing your story, I will probably love it. Every prompt I throw out is a suggestion to have fun playing with or to spark ideas, it is not set in stone. I will read any rating from straight G to very explicit, though most of my prompts will start off gen based.
Things I love across all fandoms:
Female characters with agency (ie, making choices, having consequences, going out and doing the things themselves because they want them done). Friendships, especially female friendships. Friendships and respect into love. Unrequited love/pining, as long as the pining character figures out how to go on with the rest of their life. Unrequited/pining turning into mutual love as respect and friendship builds. Time travel, especially with older versions of the characters going back and interacting with younger counterparts/younger versions of their group (i.e., tvtropes’ Peggy Sue). Lawful good characters not being lawful stupid. Lawful good characters in general (think Steve Rogers, 90% of Star Trek, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Keladry of Mindelan, most Heralds in Valdemar). Trickster/guile heroines. I enjoy canon typical stories and canon divergent AUs, the kind where you ask what would have happened had this person made this key choice differently.
Do Not Wants:
Rape/Non-con/Dub-con. Racism/homophobia/misogyny being portrayed positively, if you have to portray it at all. Graphic descriptions of character/animal harm. Character bashing; even if it's not one of my nominated characters please assume I love everyone in all my canons and you'd be right more often than not. I squick on infidelity, so if you want to ship a couple that have significant others in canon, please set it in an au where the original couple never got together or somehow broke it off. On the other hand, I do like OT3 and consider it a very useful alternative to jealousy/shipping wars. AUs that drastically change the setting – no coffeeshop or high school aus for example.
Fandom-Specific:
The Lost World - tv
Requested Characters: Marguerite Krux, John Roxton
What I love: It's a post WW1 adventure setting with dinosaurs, shifting planes of reality and found family aspects, what's not to love? Moreover, I love the relationship between Marguerite and Roxton, how good they are for each other, how much they challenge and build one another up, and the chemistry was fantastic between the actors.
So in this fandom, Marguerite is my best beloved character and I love things that deal with how honestly complex she is as a character, how she is both extremely selfish and yet will sacrifice a lot for those she cares about, how she can be petty, cruel, and vindictive but also kind and compassionate with her own sense of honor. I love how she is unapologetic about being manipulative and using deception/leverage to succeed, especially when pretty much everyone else in the Treehouse charges straight ahead with no thought process/plan B. I love how she’s so strong and so vulnerable at once, and how she keeps going even when she’s the most wounded. Roxton is my next most beloved because he’s so much the lawful good archetype instead, and his courage/integrity and compassion play well against Marguerite’s pragmatism and focus. He’s also the one to stand toe to toe with Marguerite and call her on her worst. He can bring out her best, but he’s also correspondingly the one who often hurts her the most. I like how he sometimes loses his temper with her, because she can honestly be incredibly frustrating, but that when he’s in the wrong he apologizes. I love his protective streak, his nobility, and his sense of duty.
Prompts/Ideas: Play with something about their relationship, anything from super fluff to high drama, as long as they don’t end up permanently broken up. Give me character studyish something on one or both of them. 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 versions of the characters seeing first season versions of characters again, it will make me squee high enough to make all the nearby bats start flying in circles. I mean, what would season three Marguerite do if she were back in season one and interacting with the other characters as they were then?
Valdemar Series - Mercedes Lackey
Requested Characters: Karal Austreben
Valdemar as a series is one of my feel-good reads, I enjoy the fact that most of the characters are good people trying as hard as they can, and even though they sometimes fail or make mistakes, they keep trying to do what is right. It hits my idealist kink, okay?
With the Mage Storms trilogy subset of the Valdemar series, I love Karal as a person and his interactions with pretty much everyone. I love the mentorships between Karal and Ulrich, and Karal and Altra. I love the "you are practically an alien creature to me but I respect you and might fall in love with you if we ever spend more than a day with each other outside of crisis mode" that he and Natoli fell into. I love that Karal is sincerely devout, but his understanding and approach towards his religious calling shifts and deepens as the series goes on. I love that his story isn't over, that there's a lot of things that he still will develop and grow with in the new world after the storms ended.
Specific prompts: I'd love to see something set after the trilogy ends. We know Firesong and Silverveil end up with Darien and K'Valdemar vale, and that And'esha ends up back with the Shin'a'in. Karal goes back to Haven as the new Karsite ambassador, what goes on then? How do things develop with the Alliance after the Storms subside and the hard work of living with each other post-crisis comes in to play? What happens when/if Karal visits Karse again, how do his fellow sunpriests view him and Altra (especially given that most of his agemates were not exactly friendly and accepting to him in general)? Or, give me an alternate universe where Ulrich was injured but not killed in the assassination attempt. How does that change the rest of the story? Does Karal take on the same levels of responsibilities? What things would come in to play? Or, we see Karal mostly from within his own viewpoint, with limited bits from a few other characters. How does Selaney, or Natoli, or Ulrich view Karal as he goes on in the story? What do the Heralds in general feel about a man who isn't Chosen spending all this time with a specific Companion? How does Alberich feel about Ulrich and Karal, before, during, after the Mage Storms crisis hits?
Order of the Air – Melissa Scott and Jo Graham
Characters: Mitchell Sorley, Stasi
So this is also a post WW1 semi-fantasy adventure setting about a group of found family characters doing cool things. But instead of dinosaurs and shifting planes of reality and the occasional very badly written episode, this is well written storytelling about ordinary people several steps away from the movers and shakers of the post-war/Depression/pre-war period that is the late 20s-30s. It’s more a story of ordinary people who dare to be extraordinary, who when faced with a problem and a danger to the world step up and try to fix it. It’s about a bunch of wounded people who still carry on and find new ways to love, to live, and to strive forward.
Stasi: So Stasi is also a trickster manipulative complicated jewel thief gone semi-straight (looks up at Lost World’s Marguerite). She’s been hurt and wounded, left to fend for herself in a dangerous world, and has learned to survive things that would kill most others. She also talks to the dead and occasionally reads the future, because yes she does. She also loves baking and children, her token “normal” traits, and willingly adopts orphans because she’s known what it was to be friendless and isolated. And with all that, she is still the woman who wears bright lipstick and dances scandalously with her husband in the middle of small-town conservative 1930s US.
Mitchell: So here’s this guy who could find it so easy to blend into the normal world and be welcomed and accepted with open arms. He’s the token straight white guy from a good family in the books. And yet he refuses to take that easy way when it would cut him off from every one of his friends who couldn’t blend: Alma the business woman and pilot in an era where she is expected to be a homemaker, Lewis with his strong Mexican background and a non-white last name and face, Jerry who is homosexual and down one leg from the war, Stasi the Hungarian Jew pretending to be Russian nobility, who reels off long complicated stories from Russian literature when asked about her past. He looks at them, and he looks at the world which would only welcome him, and he chooses them, because the world that has no place for them doesn’t have a place for him to love them.
Prompts: I love their use of dance as intimacy/seduction/play, so something on them practicing or learning a new dance? Or spinning off of that, a time where they tried a new dance and it epic failed on them/they hated it and spent the rest of the evening mocking themselves/the choreography? They’re also a pretty volatile relationship on some levels, maybe an exploration of where they do and don’t see eye to eye? Or, as it goes to their roles in magic/the Order aspect of the books, can you pull out a time where they balance well off of each other/or a time where their skill sets and beliefs about what to do next conflict? I also love their adoption plot in Wind Raker and beyond, taking on the children because they shouldn’t be broken up, and then figuring out as they went along how the heck they were going to do this whole parenting thing. I loved Stasi’s subplot where she wrestled with the performance of 1930s wife/mother, and how much it was just not her. More on how actively choosing to be parents shape Mitch and Stasi in the future? Or, a lot of what I like about this series is how well it grounds itself in the realities of the time while still being historical fantasy. Please feel free to pull in some interesting quirks or facts of life from the time and play on how the characters deal with them, like: Stasi loves to bake and is celebrated within the group for her recipes. How does she do with the substitutions or modifications to recipes? Has she ever made a mock-apple pie? Does she have an ongoing fight with at least one kitchen utensil while Mitch tries not to die laughing into his coffee? Mitch wrestles a lot with issues around his more hidden disability, and with his memory loss/loss of control in Steel Blues. We've seen some ways Stasi helps with that, but I will never turn down more scenes/takes on that.
I didn’t actively request any of the other characters, but feel free to pull in Lewis or Alma or Jerry and have Mitch or Stasi play off of them as well. In other words, go wild, and as long as you care about Stasi and Mitch and they get to do something I will love it. I am definitely team all the characters with Order of the Air, even if I keep circling back to Stasi and Mitch.
Lois Lane – Fallout – Gwenda Bond
Requested Characters: Lois Lane, Clark Kent
This is apparently my year of trickster heroines and their straight men partners.
I love this take on Lois. She’s every bit the Lois Lane from previous takes on the character: smart, curious, driven, willing to bend a few rules in pursuit of a greater goal, passionately focused on getting to the truth of the matter, and with a deep moral core that she sometimes hides from everyone around her. But I also love how Gwenda Bond plays with her character, lets her be a bit more vulnerable, lets her have friends (friends beyond just Clark, friends for whom her passion and drive are a good thing, not just rivals!). I love her lists of all the places where things have gone wrong, and the sort of noodle incident aspect to most of them where there's this crazy legend built up around her actions.
I love the pen-pal friendship she has with Clark, I love how they play off of each other so well. Clark comes off as just as intelligent, just as curious, and just as moral, but more cautious and reflective, more aware of how things could go wrong. Which, again, definitely harks back to the Lois and Clark dynamic I grew up with. I love Clark’s moves towards openness with Lois, how he’s obviously working himself up to confiding, but isn’t there yet, because yeah.
I love the update and modern relevance without dismissing or cheapening their story lines. I like them meeting in the VR world, and Clark’s character being an alien as a way to test the waters.
Prompts/ideas: I love their pen-pal friendship, and if you made that the entirety of your story I would not object. I’d love to see them counseling and supporting each other. Maybe Lois has an assigned column that’s driving her nuts because it is out of her wheelhouse and Clark is acting as vent/sounding board/ideas generator. Maybe Clark is the one having an adventure and Lois is the one acting as the backstage support this time, and it drives her nuts because she should be the one taking the risks, darn it! How do they handle their first big argument or two, especially when they don’t work together to force themselves to interact and grow? I’m also a sucker for a good meet-in-person story, how do you arrange that and what happens? What fresh disaster do they run into, how do they investigate and work together? How do Lois’s friends feel about Clark, meeting him in person? I didn't request any other characters, but feel free to bring in all your favorites: Lucy with her terrifying unicorn friends, Maddy's endless fake band tea-shirts, Devin's computer geekdom and calm assessments of people are all loves of mine. Or go pre-series, how did one of those aforementioned noodle incidents in other schools go? Play with something mentioned in passing in canon, like the chemistry stinkbomb, or something of your own that you think only Lois would ever do.
ETA: I haven't read the last book in the series yet, it's on request from the library, but I will have it read by the time fics drop, so if there's something from the third book you want to play with, go for it. And if there's something in my prompts that works against that book's canon, feel free to use your judgment and write what makes sense to you.
AO3 Name: mari4212
Quick and dirty rules:
If you love the canon and you love writing your story, I will probably love it. Every prompt I throw out is a suggestion to have fun playing with or to spark ideas, it is not set in stone. I will read any rating from straight G to very explicit, though most of my prompts will start off gen based.
Things I love across all fandoms:
Female characters with agency (ie, making choices, having consequences, going out and doing the things themselves because they want them done). Friendships, especially female friendships. Friendships and respect into love. Unrequited love/pining, as long as the pining character figures out how to go on with the rest of their life. Unrequited/pining turning into mutual love as respect and friendship builds. Time travel, especially with older versions of the characters going back and interacting with younger counterparts/younger versions of their group (i.e., tvtropes’ Peggy Sue). Lawful good characters not being lawful stupid. Lawful good characters in general (think Steve Rogers, 90% of Star Trek, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Keladry of Mindelan, most Heralds in Valdemar). Trickster/guile heroines. I enjoy canon typical stories and canon divergent AUs, the kind where you ask what would have happened had this person made this key choice differently.
Do Not Wants:
Rape/Non-con/Dub-con. Racism/homophobia/misogyny being portrayed positively, if you have to portray it at all. Graphic descriptions of character/animal harm. Character bashing; even if it's not one of my nominated characters please assume I love everyone in all my canons and you'd be right more often than not. I squick on infidelity, so if you want to ship a couple that have significant others in canon, please set it in an au where the original couple never got together or somehow broke it off. On the other hand, I do like OT3 and consider it a very useful alternative to jealousy/shipping wars. AUs that drastically change the setting – no coffeeshop or high school aus for example.
Fandom-Specific:
The Lost World - tv
Requested Characters: Marguerite Krux, John Roxton
What I love: It's a post WW1 adventure setting with dinosaurs, shifting planes of reality and found family aspects, what's not to love? Moreover, I love the relationship between Marguerite and Roxton, how good they are for each other, how much they challenge and build one another up, and the chemistry was fantastic between the actors.
So in this fandom, Marguerite is my best beloved character and I love things that deal with how honestly complex she is as a character, how she is both extremely selfish and yet will sacrifice a lot for those she cares about, how she can be petty, cruel, and vindictive but also kind and compassionate with her own sense of honor. I love how she is unapologetic about being manipulative and using deception/leverage to succeed, especially when pretty much everyone else in the Treehouse charges straight ahead with no thought process/plan B. I love how she’s so strong and so vulnerable at once, and how she keeps going even when she’s the most wounded. Roxton is my next most beloved because he’s so much the lawful good archetype instead, and his courage/integrity and compassion play well against Marguerite’s pragmatism and focus. He’s also the one to stand toe to toe with Marguerite and call her on her worst. He can bring out her best, but he’s also correspondingly the one who often hurts her the most. I like how he sometimes loses his temper with her, because she can honestly be incredibly frustrating, but that when he’s in the wrong he apologizes. I love his protective streak, his nobility, and his sense of duty.
Prompts/Ideas: Play with something about their relationship, anything from super fluff to high drama, as long as they don’t end up permanently broken up. Give me character studyish something on one or both of them. 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 versions of the characters seeing first season versions of characters again, it will make me squee high enough to make all the nearby bats start flying in circles. I mean, what would season three Marguerite do if she were back in season one and interacting with the other characters as they were then?
Valdemar Series - Mercedes Lackey
Requested Characters: Karal Austreben
Valdemar as a series is one of my feel-good reads, I enjoy the fact that most of the characters are good people trying as hard as they can, and even though they sometimes fail or make mistakes, they keep trying to do what is right. It hits my idealist kink, okay?
With the Mage Storms trilogy subset of the Valdemar series, I love Karal as a person and his interactions with pretty much everyone. I love the mentorships between Karal and Ulrich, and Karal and Altra. I love the "you are practically an alien creature to me but I respect you and might fall in love with you if we ever spend more than a day with each other outside of crisis mode" that he and Natoli fell into. I love that Karal is sincerely devout, but his understanding and approach towards his religious calling shifts and deepens as the series goes on. I love that his story isn't over, that there's a lot of things that he still will develop and grow with in the new world after the storms ended.
Specific prompts: I'd love to see something set after the trilogy ends. We know Firesong and Silverveil end up with Darien and K'Valdemar vale, and that And'esha ends up back with the Shin'a'in. Karal goes back to Haven as the new Karsite ambassador, what goes on then? How do things develop with the Alliance after the Storms subside and the hard work of living with each other post-crisis comes in to play? What happens when/if Karal visits Karse again, how do his fellow sunpriests view him and Altra (especially given that most of his agemates were not exactly friendly and accepting to him in general)? Or, give me an alternate universe where Ulrich was injured but not killed in the assassination attempt. How does that change the rest of the story? Does Karal take on the same levels of responsibilities? What things would come in to play? Or, we see Karal mostly from within his own viewpoint, with limited bits from a few other characters. How does Selaney, or Natoli, or Ulrich view Karal as he goes on in the story? What do the Heralds in general feel about a man who isn't Chosen spending all this time with a specific Companion? How does Alberich feel about Ulrich and Karal, before, during, after the Mage Storms crisis hits?
Order of the Air – Melissa Scott and Jo Graham
Characters: Mitchell Sorley, Stasi
So this is also a post WW1 semi-fantasy adventure setting about a group of found family characters doing cool things. But instead of dinosaurs and shifting planes of reality and the occasional very badly written episode, this is well written storytelling about ordinary people several steps away from the movers and shakers of the post-war/Depression/pre-war period that is the late 20s-30s. It’s more a story of ordinary people who dare to be extraordinary, who when faced with a problem and a danger to the world step up and try to fix it. It’s about a bunch of wounded people who still carry on and find new ways to love, to live, and to strive forward.
Stasi: So Stasi is also a trickster manipulative complicated jewel thief gone semi-straight (looks up at Lost World’s Marguerite). She’s been hurt and wounded, left to fend for herself in a dangerous world, and has learned to survive things that would kill most others. She also talks to the dead and occasionally reads the future, because yes she does. She also loves baking and children, her token “normal” traits, and willingly adopts orphans because she’s known what it was to be friendless and isolated. And with all that, she is still the woman who wears bright lipstick and dances scandalously with her husband in the middle of small-town conservative 1930s US.
Mitchell: So here’s this guy who could find it so easy to blend into the normal world and be welcomed and accepted with open arms. He’s the token straight white guy from a good family in the books. And yet he refuses to take that easy way when it would cut him off from every one of his friends who couldn’t blend: Alma the business woman and pilot in an era where she is expected to be a homemaker, Lewis with his strong Mexican background and a non-white last name and face, Jerry who is homosexual and down one leg from the war, Stasi the Hungarian Jew pretending to be Russian nobility, who reels off long complicated stories from Russian literature when asked about her past. He looks at them, and he looks at the world which would only welcome him, and he chooses them, because the world that has no place for them doesn’t have a place for him to love them.
Prompts: I love their use of dance as intimacy/seduction/play, so something on them practicing or learning a new dance? Or spinning off of that, a time where they tried a new dance and it epic failed on them/they hated it and spent the rest of the evening mocking themselves/the choreography? They’re also a pretty volatile relationship on some levels, maybe an exploration of where they do and don’t see eye to eye? Or, as it goes to their roles in magic/the Order aspect of the books, can you pull out a time where they balance well off of each other/or a time where their skill sets and beliefs about what to do next conflict? I also love their adoption plot in Wind Raker and beyond, taking on the children because they shouldn’t be broken up, and then figuring out as they went along how the heck they were going to do this whole parenting thing. I loved Stasi’s subplot where she wrestled with the performance of 1930s wife/mother, and how much it was just not her. More on how actively choosing to be parents shape Mitch and Stasi in the future? Or, a lot of what I like about this series is how well it grounds itself in the realities of the time while still being historical fantasy. Please feel free to pull in some interesting quirks or facts of life from the time and play on how the characters deal with them, like: Stasi loves to bake and is celebrated within the group for her recipes. How does she do with the substitutions or modifications to recipes? Has she ever made a mock-apple pie? Does she have an ongoing fight with at least one kitchen utensil while Mitch tries not to die laughing into his coffee? Mitch wrestles a lot with issues around his more hidden disability, and with his memory loss/loss of control in Steel Blues. We've seen some ways Stasi helps with that, but I will never turn down more scenes/takes on that.
I didn’t actively request any of the other characters, but feel free to pull in Lewis or Alma or Jerry and have Mitch or Stasi play off of them as well. In other words, go wild, and as long as you care about Stasi and Mitch and they get to do something I will love it. I am definitely team all the characters with Order of the Air, even if I keep circling back to Stasi and Mitch.
Lois Lane – Fallout – Gwenda Bond
Requested Characters: Lois Lane, Clark Kent
This is apparently my year of trickster heroines and their straight men partners.
I love this take on Lois. She’s every bit the Lois Lane from previous takes on the character: smart, curious, driven, willing to bend a few rules in pursuit of a greater goal, passionately focused on getting to the truth of the matter, and with a deep moral core that she sometimes hides from everyone around her. But I also love how Gwenda Bond plays with her character, lets her be a bit more vulnerable, lets her have friends (friends beyond just Clark, friends for whom her passion and drive are a good thing, not just rivals!). I love her lists of all the places where things have gone wrong, and the sort of noodle incident aspect to most of them where there's this crazy legend built up around her actions.
I love the pen-pal friendship she has with Clark, I love how they play off of each other so well. Clark comes off as just as intelligent, just as curious, and just as moral, but more cautious and reflective, more aware of how things could go wrong. Which, again, definitely harks back to the Lois and Clark dynamic I grew up with. I love Clark’s moves towards openness with Lois, how he’s obviously working himself up to confiding, but isn’t there yet, because yeah.
I love the update and modern relevance without dismissing or cheapening their story lines. I like them meeting in the VR world, and Clark’s character being an alien as a way to test the waters.
Prompts/ideas: I love their pen-pal friendship, and if you made that the entirety of your story I would not object. I’d love to see them counseling and supporting each other. Maybe Lois has an assigned column that’s driving her nuts because it is out of her wheelhouse and Clark is acting as vent/sounding board/ideas generator. Maybe Clark is the one having an adventure and Lois is the one acting as the backstage support this time, and it drives her nuts because she should be the one taking the risks, darn it! How do they handle their first big argument or two, especially when they don’t work together to force themselves to interact and grow? I’m also a sucker for a good meet-in-person story, how do you arrange that and what happens? What fresh disaster do they run into, how do they investigate and work together? How do Lois’s friends feel about Clark, meeting him in person? I didn't request any other characters, but feel free to bring in all your favorites: Lucy with her terrifying unicorn friends, Maddy's endless fake band tea-shirts, Devin's computer geekdom and calm assessments of people are all loves of mine. Or go pre-series, how did one of those aforementioned noodle incidents in other schools go? Play with something mentioned in passing in canon, like the chemistry stinkbomb, or something of your own that you think only Lois would ever do.
ETA: I haven't read the last book in the series yet, it's on request from the library, but I will have it read by the time fics drop, so if there's something from the third book you want to play with, go for it. And if there's something in my prompts that works against that book's canon, feel free to use your judgment and write what makes sense to you.