How can it be letter time already?
Oct. 8th, 2013 07:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
damkiannaWhoever you are, I'm so glad you signed up for Yuletide, and I really hope this letter is helpful! Because this worried me last year and I'm sure it will worry me this year: please don't feel bad if you find yourself defaulting, whether it's because my requests were unworkable or because your RL would not cooperate or just for any reason at all. What I really want is for you to enjoy your Yuletide, have a good time writing a fic, and receive an excellent gift of your own; and if that can't happen, please don't beat yourself up about it to boot!
Naturally, optional details are totally optional. If you'd like to close out of this letter right now and write a thing you have already thought of, or a thing you are going to think of, or a thing that will hit you on December 20th, go for it! Whatever you do will be awesome.
If you're the kind of person who likes to poke around, feel free! I'm Damkianna everywhere (DW, LJ, AO3, Tumblr); my fic is all posted to my AO3 account, and my movies tag, books tag, and tv shows tag contain basically all my feelings about everything.
In General
The unfun stuff out of the way first, here. I have no triggers relating to but would generally like to avoid: deathfic (except in Snow White and the Huntsman, potentially), vividly detailed torture, really kinky or dark porn, BDSM, vividly detailed sexual assault or intense dub-con.
I love:
:: ladyslash, dudeslash, het, gen! I'm easy to please. I've added notes about specific pairings as I thought about them, but generally speaking you're probably in the clear no matter what ship you're sailing.
:: happy fic! Obviously I don't mean this as some kind of requirement from start to finish (especially not in Snow White and the Huntsman, as noted below), but generally speaking I enjoy stories that have friendship and banter; unexpected or unlooked-for kindness or trust or forgiveness (I will eat this up like GLORIOUS ID-FLAVORED CANDY); and people who are trying to do the right thing, even if they are wrong about what the right thing is, or they don't succeed. I don't mind suffering - I just want it to be for a purpose, or to end in vindication or relief.
:: AUs! All kinds of AUs - branching-off-from-canon AUs, AUs where the characters are in the Age of Sail or tending bar or in college. Obviously don't make yourself write an AU if that's not your thing; I love canon or I wouldn't care about the source material so much, and all my canon prompts are quite sincere! But if you like writing AUs, go for it.
:: tropes and clichés! Generally speaking, the answer to "Is this fic too tropey/cliché/overdone?" is going to be NOPE. Inversions, aversions, deconstructions, playing it straight - I love it all.
I like action; I like slice-of-life; I like character studies; I like introspection. I enjoy casefic; I enjoy long plotty stories; I enjoy 1002 words of casual conversation between two characters who are having a beer together. Overall, what I want the most is for you to write a story that a) you enjoy writing, and b) you're happy with when it's finished! If you have questions about anything at all, feel free to leave an anon comment here, or PMidriya if you have a DW account; idriya is my sister, we live together, and she's excellent at keeping secrets, so she can tell you anything I could tell you but I won't know about it.
One last thing! I know the rules say you have to unless I say otherwise, so I'm saying otherwise: don't feel like you have to stuff all the characters I've requested or talked about into your fic if you don't want to! If you get an INCREDIBLY GREAT idea for a fic with only one character in a fandom where I requested two, go with it! I ask for characters because I like them and like anything about them - I like them in combination, I like them alone, I just like them! So don't feel pressured to include all of my selections in a single fic. (For fandoms where I've requested "any", I run through each of the nominated characters just to provide you with extra details; write about any of them, all of them, or any combination.)
Banlieue 13 (Movies)
Any
I love these movies a completely ridiculous amount considering they are mostly an adoring visual ode to parkour. I have watched them both many times and I'd love fic for just about any point in the story - want to write pre-canon fic? Explore the gap between the movies? Ignore the second movie entirely? Go ahead! DO THE THING. I love each of the nominated characters individually and in any combination; whether you want to write about Damien being the cleanest cop or Leïto thwarting drug dealers, Lola as a racecar driver or Tao beating people up with her hair, I would love to read it!
My absolute favorite thing about these, besides watching David Belle leap tall buildings, is the sheer unsubtle value they assign to people and places that nobody else gives a shit about. The dialogue at the end of the second movie is like getting beaten with a giant pillow embroidered with the words EVERYBODY MATTERS; it is exactly that ridiculous but it makes me so happy. It was self-indulgent and probably oddly long if you are not me, but I really enjoyed the sequence at the beginning of the second movie where we are just zooming around the banlieue and looking at all the people, all the groups and gang organizations and social structures that have grown up out of what the rest of France considers an ugly crack in its sidewalk. I'm not precisely interested in glamorizing or romanticizing the banlieue so much as I'm interested in that totally whole-hearted and even cheesy devotion to perceiving people as people, whether they're good or bad or somewhere in between, whether they sell drugs or arms or sex or are just trying to live in this place nobody else gives a shit about.
That was the serious part! I also love these movies because David Belle leaps tall buildings, Cyril Raffaelli destroys like twenty guys with the edges of a painting canvas, Dany Verissimo makes a dude eat her underwear at gunpoint, and Elodie Yung defeats the French Secret Service with her swinging hairknives. So if you looked at that incredibly long paragraph and were all NOPE, please don't panic! Also don't panic if you know nothing about France; you could write me an AU where this is all happening in space and still absolutely fill my eyes with hearts. As with my other fandoms, I'd love these characters in any combination, and I'm just going to smash out a paragraph of YAY about each of them and leave it at that.
Leïto
I just totally love Leïto's absolute devotion to the banlieue, and his conviction that it's worth it - worth the effort, worth his freedom, worth his life - when everybody else is telling him it isn't. He's so smart and so quick and has so much conviction; he's tilting at some serious motherfucking windmills in both movies, and in both movies the windmills lose. I adore his relationship with Lola, and I would be overjoyed by just about anything: pre-canon about what it's like for him trying to keep Lola safe in the banlieue when they are both younger; missing scenes from the gap between the movies, or what it was like for him to be in prison for killing a cop, or what he was thinking while he was going in to break Damien out of prison; post-canon about rebuilding the banlieue now that they have a clean slate. (I do totally ship him with Damien, if that is your thing; I love watching them learn to work together in the first movie and how easy it is for them to pick right back up in the second movie. Post-first movie AU where Damien comes to live with Leïto and Lola in the banlieue? Absolutely!)
Damien
The onlyJohn Wayne left in this town clean cop in Paris! I love Damien's compassion, how much he cares about people and about small cruelties, and I love his absolute pigheaded determination to do the right thing - the second movie didn't dwell very much on the ending of the first and what that must have done to Damien's seemingly total trust in his superiors, but I would love it if you did! He is a cop, the cleanest most upright most dedicated cop, and yet everything he does is meant to save the banlieue, when it would have been so easy for him to be just another douchebag who doesn't think Banlieue 13 is worth saving. (And I imagine the whole department knows he's all Galahad up in here, because why else would his superiors have lied to him?) As noted, I ship him with Leïto, if you are into that; I'd love pre-canon about his time as a cop (what other ridiculously amazing undercover assignments has he had?); mid-canon about the revelation of the bomb's real target, or what happened to keep him from enacting the reform program between movies, or what it felt like to be back in the banlieue with Leïto in the second movie; post-canon about what he does now that the authorities he was devoted to have screwed him over twice (go back, which he would totally do? Leave the force to help Leïto and Lola and Tao with rebuilding?). Anything!
Lola
LOLA FOREVER. I absolutely adored her in the first movie and a part of me will cry forever that she wasn't in the second one (except maybe as a voice on Leïto's answering machine). Obviously her being tied up and drugged a lot is not my favorite part of her storyline, but I love that her anger and her cleverness and her bravery are constants, and that she and Leïto tend to trade off saving each other - also, that the final tackle that saves Banlieue 13 is hers. ♥ I would readily ship her with Damien even though they barely spoke, or with Tao even though they never spoke at all, if you are a het or ladyslash fan. (If incest really does it for you and you have a super excellent incest fic ready to burst forth from your keyboard, I'd only ask that any Lola/Leïto be of the excessive-sibling-devotion variety, rather than the dark-and-creepy variety.) I'm repeating myself, but, seriously, anything: what it was like for her growing up in the banlieue (does she do parkour, too? Are there special nooks and rooftops she climbs when she wants to be alone?), how she got that job at the grocery, the first time she handled a gun (because she sure doesn't seem afraid to grab or handle K2's); what it was like to be chained alone on that roof, and what it was that she felt while she was planning to set herself on fire (bitterness? Rage? A bizarre kind of relief?); what it was like to deal with her addiction after the first movie, or where she was during the second.
Tao
Tao actually does not get all that much time in the second movie, but the time she does get is AMAZING. Swinging hairknives. I'm sure that scene is ridiculous if you are an objective human being, but I am not, and for me it was so over-the-top that it bent back on itself and became PERFECT. I don't even know. ANYWAY. Tao is cool and controlled and - I would like to say practical, but hairknives, so maybe that's the wrong word. I love how she takes everything in stride, how hard she is to knock off balance, and what an incredible badass she is - to be running a gang the way she does, to so readily volunteer to take down a roomful of French special ops soldiers. I love everything she chooses to be, and the movie does relatively little with her, so there's a lot of room to explore her backstory, how she rose to the position she has in the movie and how she feels about it, where she was during the events of the first movie, what happens to her and to her people after the second one. I am easy for Tao and ship her with everyone, if that is a place you'd like to go; I'd love her brand of impenetrable awesome with Damien's pit-bull do-rightery or Leïto's quiet intensity, and if you'd like to write a thousand words that's just her meeting Lola for the first time after the second movie ends, I would love that.
NYC 22
Any
I have to admit I'll be surprised if I get matched on this fandom, but I just finished watching this show and I ended up really enjoying it, just in time for Yuletide. Last I checked, there were three fics on AO3 and they were all crossovers, so when I say I'd enjoy anything in this fandom, I am completely sincere. A thousand words of Perry and Sanchez walking a beat, the continuing epic romance of Dana Apple and Ahmad Khan, Michelle's struggles with her brother or her job or with the most awkward family dinner ever at the McLaren home - anything! I like each of the nominated characters and any combination; mostly I just want more about them!
This show was super short-lived and aired out of order and I didn't even know it was a thing until after it had already been canceled, and then I got all thirteen episodes and watched them in about three days. I nominated it with the ladies because I wanted to, but honestly I love basically everybody on the show - I love the relationships the rookies have with each other, and with Yoda, and with the rest of the force; I love the small things and the stupid things and the heartbreaking things that happen to them; I love how hard they're all trying, and the times when they succeed, and the times when they fail. Basically I just have a lot of feelings!
If your skills and inclinations run toward shipfic, feel free - I liked all the canonical ships, I love het and dudeslash and ladyslash, and honestly with this show I could probably be convinced to ship almost anything because I just like everyone so much.
There's a lot of combinations here, so I'll just talk about each of the nominated characters a little bit and leave it at that.
Dana Apple
Dana! I liked her pretty much the moment she spoke words; I love how confident and funny she is and how much she just plain enjoys teasing people. I certainly do ship her with Ahmad, but I could also see her striking sparks off Perry's seriousness or Sanchez's coolness - anywhere you'd like to go with her and basically anybody else would be awesome!
Jennifer Perry
I love her prickliness and seriousness and badassery, how much things mean to her and how sympathetic she can be - it's clear that she took her military service extremely seriously, for example, and yet she's willing to stick with Lazarus's decision about the Samaritan, because once he's made it, she's got his back. I loved the little hints about her personal life and her clearly blossoming ~thing with Toney, so if you ship that, run with it!
Tonya Sanchez
I have a LOT of feelings about Sanchez's backstory, so if you'd like to go pre-canon with her, you absolutely can. She's fascinatingly open and wary by turns, and whatever the show was doing with her and Yoda was a hundred percent intriguing to me. Also, she and Lazarus and Lazarus's daughter - I more bro-ship her with Lazarus than anything, I think, but I loved that whole arc, so if you'd like to expand on that, go for it.
Michelle Terry
I love Michelle's episodes and wish there had been more of them - there's simultaneously a lot about her and not enough! Taking care of her brother must be so complicated; I love the thorniness between them, how much she must care about him and also want to shake him, and pre-canon with them would be excellent. I absolutely ship her like burning with McLaren, because he is a variety of golden retriever does-the-right-thing that REALLY works for me; but I would be totally thrilled with an AU where Sanchez or Perry or Apple is the cop who ends up dating her, too!
And more general AUs would be excellent, too; I would love a snippet of the rookies dealing with a zombie apocalypse, or as trainees joining the security team of a space station. Whatever floats your boat!
Painkiller Jane
Jane Vasco, Maureen Bowers
I just bought this show on DVD and rewatched it, and all of my feelings came back at once! Jane and Mo are my favorite part of this show (at least the first half), and honestly pretty much anything that has either or both of them in it will be incredibly awesome. I love their partnership at the beginning of the show and the way they fit on the team together during the show, and if you'd like to write a snippet from an AU where Maureen doesn't die, I would be ECSTATIC. You should feel free to write about either of them individually, or to embrace basically any buddy-cop trope that strikes your fancy - obviously Jane provides whole new angles on hurt/comfort and the good old "get yourself shot to save your partner". I also love the rest of the team, so if you'd like to include any/all of them, be my guest!
I pretty much love the first half of this show; I will freely confess that what happens to Mo + the handling of the arc plot means I give the second half the side-eye, but I lovelovelove Jane and the team the whole way through, and so if the second half of the show is what moves you, DON'T PANIC. I'll like fic about that, too!
Jane and Maureen
One of my favorite things about the show from the very start was that Jane's background was not a blank slate, and moving to Andre's team did not make it a blank slate. So often, shows like this kind of chop the protagonist's life in half, and even make a point of how little people from their "old life" know or understand about their "new life" - but Jane and Mo went through police training together, Jane and Mo were partners as cops, and Jane and Mo both end up getting transplanted off the force and plopped into the middle of this totally unexpected secret world full of superpowers! YES PLS. I really adore their friendship (or moreship, if you feel inclined to write some ladyslash this year!) and I would love a story about any part of it: the early days when they're learning to work together, a snippet of their time as cops (with ~hints of what's coming, if you like), a chunk of casefic from their time on the team as they work together and protect each other, an AU where they are COPS IN SPACE, or in high school, or spies. Anything!
Just Jane
I LOVE JANE. I love her noir-like voiceovers and the way she makes jokes out of her own emotional and physical traumas, how terrible she is at dealing with her own pain and how much she doesn't let that stop her. Large chunks of this show are basically a love letter to Jane's ~grit and ~toughness and willingness to get shot/knifed/thrown out of windows to save other people's lives, and SO IS MY FACE. Pretty much any fic about Jane will make me so so happy, whether it's pre-canon or mid-canon or post-canon; casefic while she's a cop, casefic while she's with the team, AU where she ~grittily and ~toughly runs a bakery or actually is a '40s gumshoe or joins the Stargate program. As long as she is still Jane, I'm ALL OVER IT.
Just Maureen
MO. I love her loyalty and snarkiness and bravery - she is constantly putting herself on the line, both as a cop and as someone without any superpowers going up against people who can set her on fire with their brains (although if you would like to go AU and give her superpowers, I WOULD READ THAT TOO). I love how smart she is and how she doesn't let anybody give her shit. Obviously what happened to her in the show was not my favorite thing in the world, so feel free to leave canon by the wayside! Honestly, just rewriting the end of that episode would make me smile. Anything about how Maureen deals with the revelation of neuro powers, or how she feels about leaving the police force behind, or about her settling into her own place on the team independent of Jane - how she forms relationships with Andre, Connor, &c. over time - I would eat up with a spoon. (Or, as I have indicated, AUs: a barista! A woman-in-black! Steampunk bounty hunter! MO.)
Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
Ravenna, Snow White
I love Snow White's sweetness and iron, Ravenna's bitterness and determination, and basically the whole aesthetic of this movie! I'd love to see more of just about any part of either of these women's lives, anything from the moment Ravenna first decides to take her fate in her own hands to Queen Snow White making friends with some more bridge trolls, or anywhere in between. You absolutely don't have to write a fic about the two of them together if that doesn't spark your interest; but I'd also love any excuse for them to interact a little more than they did in the movie, whether it's early-movie Ravenna talking to a still-imprisoned Snow White or a later-movie story where Ravenna disguises herself as a peasant girl or a Fenland child to learn more about Snow White. I'm fascinated by how similar they are in their strength and how different they are in their choices of how to use that strength. Seriously, anything in this fandom would be awesome!
I have a lot of feelings about this movie and I enjoyed it a lot! I find Ravenna incredibly sympathetic and also awesome - while being totally cognizant of the part where she does a lot of terrible things to other human beings, so don't feel like you have to tone her down or gentle her. This is one fandom where I would be actively interested in creepy fic, if your tastes run in that direction (although I'd still rather not receive a story with graphic sexual violence): I'd be as intrigued by a story where Ravenna succeeds as I would be by a story where she decides to try to get close to Snow White through a pretence of kindness and then the ~pretence slowly becomes real. (Like I said, I enjoy a good tropefic.) I do ship it, if you'd like to write that (in a creepy way, in a slow difficult redemption way, in ALL THE WAYS); I would also absolutely love gen about both or either of these women! (Also! I do like William and the huntsman both, and I realize that Finn is totally going to come up in anything about Ravenna's backstory, so don't feel like you have to pretend no one else exists just because I focused in on Ravenna and Snow White.)
Ravenna
I find Ravenna TOTALLY FASCINATING. We saw wee glimpses of her childhood, but there are so many blanks! How long has she been alive? How many kings has she destroyed? (I absolutely love worldbuilding, so feel free to use this to fill in more about this universe: what other kingdoms and countries are there? How many has Ravenna been to? Is she ruling a bunch of them in absentia as god-empress during the movie? Or has she been usurping kingdoms one at a time and then leaving them in ruins and moving on to the next? Or has she been gradually pulling together her resources, and this is the first time she's taken an entire kingdom for herself?) What is the mirror? How does Ravenna's creepy black-glass magic work? Did she invent it or did she learn it from someone else? SO MANY QUESTIONS. And during the movie, her perspective on just about anything - I absolutely love reading the POV of someone who sees everything in a very particular light. (Nobody ever thinks they're the one who's unjustifiably evil.) Obviously post-movie is a tough one if you stick to canon, but feel free to AU her into surviving! I would be all over that.
Snow White
I don't even know where to start - I love the emphasis on the strength of Snow White, I love that she roars at trolls and dances with dwarves and makes dolls with children and, oh, yeah, ASSAULTS CASTLES. I like that she's quiet and even awkward; I am a total sucker for heartfelt and unpretentious goodness, and I think Snow White has that in spades. I'd love anything pre-movie, her childhood and relationship with her mother, what it was like to live in that little stone room for so long - or, mid-movie, what it was like to finally get outside again. I'm fascinated by the connection the movie sort of inarticulately tosses out about her connection to the actual physical land of the kingdom; just how direct is that tie? Does she consider herself responsible for the famine/drought because she hasn't gotten her throne back quickly enough? (Would the famine have happened even if Ravenna had been a generous and merciful queen, just because she wasn't Snow White?) I also love the slow growth of her ambition - it seems to me that at first she really just wants to get the fuck away, and then the more she sees and understands, the more she starts to want to be queen, to want to have the power to do the right thing for the kingdom as a whole. UGH MY HEART.
Feel free to go AU in any direction you like, too. Does Ravenna show up ten or twenty years late and end up with an armored Snow White at the head of an army, breaking her out of her box, instead of Snow White's father? Yes please! Is this actually some kind of amazing sci-fi story where they are living in a colony ship and the "throne" is advanced technology keyed to Snow White's familial DNA, leading to the failure of various life support systems when she is not crowned? Tell me more! Basically I just really enjoyed this movie, and anything you write about it will make me really happy.
That got embarrassingly long, but if you chose to read it, I hope it was helpful! If you write a story you love, I will undoubtedly love it also, and I can't wait to have the chance to read it. ♥
Happy Yuletide!
Naturally, optional details are totally optional. If you'd like to close out of this letter right now and write a thing you have already thought of, or a thing you are going to think of, or a thing that will hit you on December 20th, go for it! Whatever you do will be awesome.
If you're the kind of person who likes to poke around, feel free! I'm Damkianna everywhere (DW, LJ, AO3, Tumblr); my fic is all posted to my AO3 account, and my movies tag, books tag, and tv shows tag contain basically all my feelings about everything.
In General
The unfun stuff out of the way first, here. I have no triggers relating to but would generally like to avoid: deathfic (except in Snow White and the Huntsman, potentially), vividly detailed torture, really kinky or dark porn, BDSM, vividly detailed sexual assault or intense dub-con.
I love:
:: ladyslash, dudeslash, het, gen! I'm easy to please. I've added notes about specific pairings as I thought about them, but generally speaking you're probably in the clear no matter what ship you're sailing.
:: happy fic! Obviously I don't mean this as some kind of requirement from start to finish (especially not in Snow White and the Huntsman, as noted below), but generally speaking I enjoy stories that have friendship and banter; unexpected or unlooked-for kindness or trust or forgiveness (I will eat this up like GLORIOUS ID-FLAVORED CANDY); and people who are trying to do the right thing, even if they are wrong about what the right thing is, or they don't succeed. I don't mind suffering - I just want it to be for a purpose, or to end in vindication or relief.
:: AUs! All kinds of AUs - branching-off-from-canon AUs, AUs where the characters are in the Age of Sail or tending bar or in college. Obviously don't make yourself write an AU if that's not your thing; I love canon or I wouldn't care about the source material so much, and all my canon prompts are quite sincere! But if you like writing AUs, go for it.
:: tropes and clichés! Generally speaking, the answer to "Is this fic too tropey/cliché/overdone?" is going to be NOPE. Inversions, aversions, deconstructions, playing it straight - I love it all.
I like action; I like slice-of-life; I like character studies; I like introspection. I enjoy casefic; I enjoy long plotty stories; I enjoy 1002 words of casual conversation between two characters who are having a beer together. Overall, what I want the most is for you to write a story that a) you enjoy writing, and b) you're happy with when it's finished! If you have questions about anything at all, feel free to leave an anon comment here, or PM
idriya if you have a DW account; idriya is my sister, we live together, and she's excellent at keeping secrets, so she can tell you anything I could tell you but I won't know about it.One last thing! I know the rules say you have to unless I say otherwise, so I'm saying otherwise: don't feel like you have to stuff all the characters I've requested or talked about into your fic if you don't want to! If you get an INCREDIBLY GREAT idea for a fic with only one character in a fandom where I requested two, go with it! I ask for characters because I like them and like anything about them - I like them in combination, I like them alone, I just like them! So don't feel pressured to include all of my selections in a single fic. (For fandoms where I've requested "any", I run through each of the nominated characters just to provide you with extra details; write about any of them, all of them, or any combination.)
Banlieue 13 (Movies)
Any
I love these movies a completely ridiculous amount considering they are mostly an adoring visual ode to parkour. I have watched them both many times and I'd love fic for just about any point in the story - want to write pre-canon fic? Explore the gap between the movies? Ignore the second movie entirely? Go ahead! DO THE THING. I love each of the nominated characters individually and in any combination; whether you want to write about Damien being the cleanest cop or Leïto thwarting drug dealers, Lola as a racecar driver or Tao beating people up with her hair, I would love to read it!
My absolute favorite thing about these, besides watching David Belle leap tall buildings, is the sheer unsubtle value they assign to people and places that nobody else gives a shit about. The dialogue at the end of the second movie is like getting beaten with a giant pillow embroidered with the words EVERYBODY MATTERS; it is exactly that ridiculous but it makes me so happy. It was self-indulgent and probably oddly long if you are not me, but I really enjoyed the sequence at the beginning of the second movie where we are just zooming around the banlieue and looking at all the people, all the groups and gang organizations and social structures that have grown up out of what the rest of France considers an ugly crack in its sidewalk. I'm not precisely interested in glamorizing or romanticizing the banlieue so much as I'm interested in that totally whole-hearted and even cheesy devotion to perceiving people as people, whether they're good or bad or somewhere in between, whether they sell drugs or arms or sex or are just trying to live in this place nobody else gives a shit about.
That was the serious part! I also love these movies because David Belle leaps tall buildings, Cyril Raffaelli destroys like twenty guys with the edges of a painting canvas, Dany Verissimo makes a dude eat her underwear at gunpoint, and Elodie Yung defeats the French Secret Service with her swinging hairknives. So if you looked at that incredibly long paragraph and were all NOPE, please don't panic! Also don't panic if you know nothing about France; you could write me an AU where this is all happening in space and still absolutely fill my eyes with hearts. As with my other fandoms, I'd love these characters in any combination, and I'm just going to smash out a paragraph of YAY about each of them and leave it at that.
Leïto
I just totally love Leïto's absolute devotion to the banlieue, and his conviction that it's worth it - worth the effort, worth his freedom, worth his life - when everybody else is telling him it isn't. He's so smart and so quick and has so much conviction; he's tilting at some serious motherfucking windmills in both movies, and in both movies the windmills lose. I adore his relationship with Lola, and I would be overjoyed by just about anything: pre-canon about what it's like for him trying to keep Lola safe in the banlieue when they are both younger; missing scenes from the gap between the movies, or what it was like for him to be in prison for killing a cop, or what he was thinking while he was going in to break Damien out of prison; post-canon about rebuilding the banlieue now that they have a clean slate. (I do totally ship him with Damien, if that is your thing; I love watching them learn to work together in the first movie and how easy it is for them to pick right back up in the second movie. Post-first movie AU where Damien comes to live with Leïto and Lola in the banlieue? Absolutely!)
Damien
The only
Lola
LOLA FOREVER. I absolutely adored her in the first movie and a part of me will cry forever that she wasn't in the second one (except maybe as a voice on Leïto's answering machine). Obviously her being tied up and drugged a lot is not my favorite part of her storyline, but I love that her anger and her cleverness and her bravery are constants, and that she and Leïto tend to trade off saving each other - also, that the final tackle that saves Banlieue 13 is hers. ♥ I would readily ship her with Damien even though they barely spoke, or with Tao even though they never spoke at all, if you are a het or ladyslash fan. (If incest really does it for you and you have a super excellent incest fic ready to burst forth from your keyboard, I'd only ask that any Lola/Leïto be of the excessive-sibling-devotion variety, rather than the dark-and-creepy variety.) I'm repeating myself, but, seriously, anything: what it was like for her growing up in the banlieue (does she do parkour, too? Are there special nooks and rooftops she climbs when she wants to be alone?), how she got that job at the grocery, the first time she handled a gun (because she sure doesn't seem afraid to grab or handle K2's); what it was like to be chained alone on that roof, and what it was that she felt while she was planning to set herself on fire (bitterness? Rage? A bizarre kind of relief?); what it was like to deal with her addiction after the first movie, or where she was during the second.
Tao
Tao actually does not get all that much time in the second movie, but the time she does get is AMAZING. Swinging hairknives. I'm sure that scene is ridiculous if you are an objective human being, but I am not, and for me it was so over-the-top that it bent back on itself and became PERFECT. I don't even know. ANYWAY. Tao is cool and controlled and - I would like to say practical, but hairknives, so maybe that's the wrong word. I love how she takes everything in stride, how hard she is to knock off balance, and what an incredible badass she is - to be running a gang the way she does, to so readily volunteer to take down a roomful of French special ops soldiers. I love everything she chooses to be, and the movie does relatively little with her, so there's a lot of room to explore her backstory, how she rose to the position she has in the movie and how she feels about it, where she was during the events of the first movie, what happens to her and to her people after the second one. I am easy for Tao and ship her with everyone, if that is a place you'd like to go; I'd love her brand of impenetrable awesome with Damien's pit-bull do-rightery or Leïto's quiet intensity, and if you'd like to write a thousand words that's just her meeting Lola for the first time after the second movie ends, I would love that.
NYC 22
Any
I have to admit I'll be surprised if I get matched on this fandom, but I just finished watching this show and I ended up really enjoying it, just in time for Yuletide. Last I checked, there were three fics on AO3 and they were all crossovers, so when I say I'd enjoy anything in this fandom, I am completely sincere. A thousand words of Perry and Sanchez walking a beat, the continuing epic romance of Dana Apple and Ahmad Khan, Michelle's struggles with her brother or her job or with the most awkward family dinner ever at the McLaren home - anything! I like each of the nominated characters and any combination; mostly I just want more about them!
This show was super short-lived and aired out of order and I didn't even know it was a thing until after it had already been canceled, and then I got all thirteen episodes and watched them in about three days. I nominated it with the ladies because I wanted to, but honestly I love basically everybody on the show - I love the relationships the rookies have with each other, and with Yoda, and with the rest of the force; I love the small things and the stupid things and the heartbreaking things that happen to them; I love how hard they're all trying, and the times when they succeed, and the times when they fail. Basically I just have a lot of feelings!
If your skills and inclinations run toward shipfic, feel free - I liked all the canonical ships, I love het and dudeslash and ladyslash, and honestly with this show I could probably be convinced to ship almost anything because I just like everyone so much.
There's a lot of combinations here, so I'll just talk about each of the nominated characters a little bit and leave it at that.
Dana Apple
Dana! I liked her pretty much the moment she spoke words; I love how confident and funny she is and how much she just plain enjoys teasing people. I certainly do ship her with Ahmad, but I could also see her striking sparks off Perry's seriousness or Sanchez's coolness - anywhere you'd like to go with her and basically anybody else would be awesome!
Jennifer Perry
I love her prickliness and seriousness and badassery, how much things mean to her and how sympathetic she can be - it's clear that she took her military service extremely seriously, for example, and yet she's willing to stick with Lazarus's decision about the Samaritan, because once he's made it, she's got his back. I loved the little hints about her personal life and her clearly blossoming ~thing with Toney, so if you ship that, run with it!
Tonya Sanchez
I have a LOT of feelings about Sanchez's backstory, so if you'd like to go pre-canon with her, you absolutely can. She's fascinatingly open and wary by turns, and whatever the show was doing with her and Yoda was a hundred percent intriguing to me. Also, she and Lazarus and Lazarus's daughter - I more bro-ship her with Lazarus than anything, I think, but I loved that whole arc, so if you'd like to expand on that, go for it.
Michelle Terry
I love Michelle's episodes and wish there had been more of them - there's simultaneously a lot about her and not enough! Taking care of her brother must be so complicated; I love the thorniness between them, how much she must care about him and also want to shake him, and pre-canon with them would be excellent. I absolutely ship her like burning with McLaren, because he is a variety of golden retriever does-the-right-thing that REALLY works for me; but I would be totally thrilled with an AU where Sanchez or Perry or Apple is the cop who ends up dating her, too!
And more general AUs would be excellent, too; I would love a snippet of the rookies dealing with a zombie apocalypse, or as trainees joining the security team of a space station. Whatever floats your boat!
Painkiller Jane
Jane Vasco, Maureen Bowers
I just bought this show on DVD and rewatched it, and all of my feelings came back at once! Jane and Mo are my favorite part of this show (at least the first half), and honestly pretty much anything that has either or both of them in it will be incredibly awesome. I love their partnership at the beginning of the show and the way they fit on the team together during the show, and if you'd like to write a snippet from an AU where Maureen doesn't die, I would be ECSTATIC. You should feel free to write about either of them individually, or to embrace basically any buddy-cop trope that strikes your fancy - obviously Jane provides whole new angles on hurt/comfort and the good old "get yourself shot to save your partner". I also love the rest of the team, so if you'd like to include any/all of them, be my guest!
I pretty much love the first half of this show; I will freely confess that what happens to Mo + the handling of the arc plot means I give the second half the side-eye, but I lovelovelove Jane and the team the whole way through, and so if the second half of the show is what moves you, DON'T PANIC. I'll like fic about that, too!
Jane and Maureen
One of my favorite things about the show from the very start was that Jane's background was not a blank slate, and moving to Andre's team did not make it a blank slate. So often, shows like this kind of chop the protagonist's life in half, and even make a point of how little people from their "old life" know or understand about their "new life" - but Jane and Mo went through police training together, Jane and Mo were partners as cops, and Jane and Mo both end up getting transplanted off the force and plopped into the middle of this totally unexpected secret world full of superpowers! YES PLS. I really adore their friendship (or moreship, if you feel inclined to write some ladyslash this year!) and I would love a story about any part of it: the early days when they're learning to work together, a snippet of their time as cops (with ~hints of what's coming, if you like), a chunk of casefic from their time on the team as they work together and protect each other, an AU where they are COPS IN SPACE, or in high school, or spies. Anything!
Just Jane
I LOVE JANE. I love her noir-like voiceovers and the way she makes jokes out of her own emotional and physical traumas, how terrible she is at dealing with her own pain and how much she doesn't let that stop her. Large chunks of this show are basically a love letter to Jane's ~grit and ~toughness and willingness to get shot/knifed/thrown out of windows to save other people's lives, and SO IS MY FACE. Pretty much any fic about Jane will make me so so happy, whether it's pre-canon or mid-canon or post-canon; casefic while she's a cop, casefic while she's with the team, AU where she ~grittily and ~toughly runs a bakery or actually is a '40s gumshoe or joins the Stargate program. As long as she is still Jane, I'm ALL OVER IT.
Just Maureen
MO. I love her loyalty and snarkiness and bravery - she is constantly putting herself on the line, both as a cop and as someone without any superpowers going up against people who can set her on fire with their brains (although if you would like to go AU and give her superpowers, I WOULD READ THAT TOO). I love how smart she is and how she doesn't let anybody give her shit. Obviously what happened to her in the show was not my favorite thing in the world, so feel free to leave canon by the wayside! Honestly, just rewriting the end of that episode would make me smile. Anything about how Maureen deals with the revelation of neuro powers, or how she feels about leaving the police force behind, or about her settling into her own place on the team independent of Jane - how she forms relationships with Andre, Connor, &c. over time - I would eat up with a spoon. (Or, as I have indicated, AUs: a barista! A woman-in-black! Steampunk bounty hunter! MO.)
Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
Ravenna, Snow White
I love Snow White's sweetness and iron, Ravenna's bitterness and determination, and basically the whole aesthetic of this movie! I'd love to see more of just about any part of either of these women's lives, anything from the moment Ravenna first decides to take her fate in her own hands to Queen Snow White making friends with some more bridge trolls, or anywhere in between. You absolutely don't have to write a fic about the two of them together if that doesn't spark your interest; but I'd also love any excuse for them to interact a little more than they did in the movie, whether it's early-movie Ravenna talking to a still-imprisoned Snow White or a later-movie story where Ravenna disguises herself as a peasant girl or a Fenland child to learn more about Snow White. I'm fascinated by how similar they are in their strength and how different they are in their choices of how to use that strength. Seriously, anything in this fandom would be awesome!
I have a lot of feelings about this movie and I enjoyed it a lot! I find Ravenna incredibly sympathetic and also awesome - while being totally cognizant of the part where she does a lot of terrible things to other human beings, so don't feel like you have to tone her down or gentle her. This is one fandom where I would be actively interested in creepy fic, if your tastes run in that direction (although I'd still rather not receive a story with graphic sexual violence): I'd be as intrigued by a story where Ravenna succeeds as I would be by a story where she decides to try to get close to Snow White through a pretence of kindness and then the ~pretence slowly becomes real. (Like I said, I enjoy a good tropefic.) I do ship it, if you'd like to write that (in a creepy way, in a slow difficult redemption way, in ALL THE WAYS); I would also absolutely love gen about both or either of these women! (Also! I do like William and the huntsman both, and I realize that Finn is totally going to come up in anything about Ravenna's backstory, so don't feel like you have to pretend no one else exists just because I focused in on Ravenna and Snow White.)
Ravenna
I find Ravenna TOTALLY FASCINATING. We saw wee glimpses of her childhood, but there are so many blanks! How long has she been alive? How many kings has she destroyed? (I absolutely love worldbuilding, so feel free to use this to fill in more about this universe: what other kingdoms and countries are there? How many has Ravenna been to? Is she ruling a bunch of them in absentia as god-empress during the movie? Or has she been usurping kingdoms one at a time and then leaving them in ruins and moving on to the next? Or has she been gradually pulling together her resources, and this is the first time she's taken an entire kingdom for herself?) What is the mirror? How does Ravenna's creepy black-glass magic work? Did she invent it or did she learn it from someone else? SO MANY QUESTIONS. And during the movie, her perspective on just about anything - I absolutely love reading the POV of someone who sees everything in a very particular light. (Nobody ever thinks they're the one who's unjustifiably evil.) Obviously post-movie is a tough one if you stick to canon, but feel free to AU her into surviving! I would be all over that.
Snow White
I don't even know where to start - I love the emphasis on the strength of Snow White, I love that she roars at trolls and dances with dwarves and makes dolls with children and, oh, yeah, ASSAULTS CASTLES. I like that she's quiet and even awkward; I am a total sucker for heartfelt and unpretentious goodness, and I think Snow White has that in spades. I'd love anything pre-movie, her childhood and relationship with her mother, what it was like to live in that little stone room for so long - or, mid-movie, what it was like to finally get outside again. I'm fascinated by the connection the movie sort of inarticulately tosses out about her connection to the actual physical land of the kingdom; just how direct is that tie? Does she consider herself responsible for the famine/drought because she hasn't gotten her throne back quickly enough? (Would the famine have happened even if Ravenna had been a generous and merciful queen, just because she wasn't Snow White?) I also love the slow growth of her ambition - it seems to me that at first she really just wants to get the fuck away, and then the more she sees and understands, the more she starts to want to be queen, to want to have the power to do the right thing for the kingdom as a whole. UGH MY HEART.
Feel free to go AU in any direction you like, too. Does Ravenna show up ten or twenty years late and end up with an armored Snow White at the head of an army, breaking her out of her box, instead of Snow White's father? Yes please! Is this actually some kind of amazing sci-fi story where they are living in a colony ship and the "throne" is advanced technology keyed to Snow White's familial DNA, leading to the failure of various life support systems when she is not crowned? Tell me more! Basically I just really enjoyed this movie, and anything you write about it will make me really happy.
That got embarrassingly long, but if you chose to read it, I hope it was helpful! If you write a story you love, I will undoubtedly love it also, and I can't wait to have the chance to read it. ♥
Happy Yuletide!
