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damkiannaThank you so much for signing up for Yuletide, author! First things first: I am REALLY longwinded. /o\ I want this letter to be helpful to you, so it's here if you want to look at it—but if reading all of this yammering will bore you or sap your inspiration, don't feel like you have to! I have no triggers and I'll be delighted by any and all new fic in these fandoms, so it's 100% safe for you to x out right now and go write whatever moves you. And please don't feel bad if you end up defaulting on me, no matter the reason! I want you to enjoy your Yuletide season, both giving and receiving—if that's impossible, no need to layer guilt on top. You are still great!
If, on the other hand, you're looking forward to reading ten thousand words of me talking up my beloved Yuletide 2015 fandoms: HERE THEY ARE. If you like reading letters and also poking around, feel free. RL has kept my fannish activity at a minimum this past year, but I'm Damkianna at the AO3,![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
damkianna on Tumblr, and I crosspost on DW/LJ as damkianna/![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
damkianna. My movies tag, books tag, and TV shows tag have basically all my opinions about every piece of media I've ever consumed that isn't in this letter. If there's anything in particular you're looking for thoughts about, you may also want to try the full tag list. (Past Yuletide letters are tagged with yuletide, and I've also written letters for the rarewomen/rarelywritten exchange. If there's a prompt for one of this year's fandoms in my previous letters that you like a lot, by all means feel free to run with it, even if it doesn't show up in this year's letter! I've received amazing fics in these fandoms before, but am asking for them again because I want more—there can never be too many different authors' takes on a prompt!)
In General | Dark Matter | Dune series—Frank Herbert
The Goblin Emperor—Katherine Addison | Hellboy (movies) | Snow White and the Huntsman
In General
Bad news first! I don't usually like reading stories that include non-canonical major character death, extensive torture scenes, or on-screen rape/sexual assault. (Though, as noted above, I have no actual triggers—if you have a fantastic idea you really want to write that includes one or more of these things, it's absolutely safe to gift it to me.) Violence at the same level as a violent canon is fine, canonical character deaths are fine, canonical traumatic events and their aftermath are fine; I just don't enjoy gratuitously detailed Bad Stuff that goes above and beyond what canon would lead me to expect. Especially if a fic takes characters I love to their nadir and then leaves them there. D:
On a completely separate level, I don't especially enjoy wall-to-wall porn, and kink/BDSM/ABO-verse stuff does very little for me. If you ADORE these things and were looking forward to writing one or more of them in the tiny fandom we matched on, don't let this stop you! But if you're trying to decide between multiple ideas and want to know what I'd say, that's what I'd say.
On to the fun stuff! I usually really enjoy:
:: ladyslash, dudeslash, het, gen! Pairings, threesomes, moresomes—or any one of my requested characters by themselves! I multiship in most of my fandoms, and am also interested in each of the characters I've requested individually. (IIRC, the rules say you need to include all my requested characters in your fic unless I say otherwise. Here's me saying otherwise!) So any ship you ship can sail in my giftfic; and I'm equally interested in all kinds of other non-shipping scenarios or stories where relationship development takes a back seat.
:: AUs! All different kinds of AUs. I love fork-in-the-road AUs, AUs where different decisions were made or characters met or didn't meet earlier or later or are placed in different roles—and I love AUs where characters are IN SPACE or MERMAIDS, a high-fantasy party of unlikely adventurers or medical students at the same hospital. I also really love canonical settings and scenarios, and I'll prompt for those too! But if you want to write an AU (and that includes fusions with other fandoms—and, while we're talking fusions, regular crossovers are fine with me also), by all means feel free to do so. :D
:: clichés and tropes! If you've been hoping for a reason to write a time loop story about unlikely soulmates in a marriage of convenience during the zombie apocalypse—DO IT. I AM YOUR REASON. And this holds for story structures, or for any kind of stylistic choice you might normally hesitate over because it seems like it could come off as gimmicky. Epistolary fic? Fictional documentation (journal entries/criminal records/classified files/academic essays)? Five things/five times? Script format? Second person? Future tense? YES PLEASE. Amnesia? Wingfic? Undercover gay? Telepathy? Truth spells/serums/pollens? GRABBY HANDS. I'm here for ALL OF THAT STUFF. Obviously not all of these ideas will work equally well in all fandoms, and you definitely don't have to include any of this in your fic! But if you want to? I'M THERE.
I like long plotty fics and short introspective fics, action stories and romance stories, curtainfic and gritty noir AUs. I like plot-of-the-week fics that are just like canon and 1003-word fics where characters show different sides to themselves during brief conversations. I like people who do the right thing and people who do the wrong thing, people who know what they're doing and people who don't; I like reading about people who are manipulating each other and people who are taking care of each other, people who are doing both at the same time; people who want to like each other but think they can't, and people who hate each other but wish they didn't. I'm 100% interested in OCs, worldbuilding, stories that poke holes in canon, and stories that patch holes in canon—and stories that embrace canon exactly as it is. BASICALLY I'M JUST REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO YOUR STORY, is where I'm going with this.
I'm pretty sure the rules say you aren't supposed to deanon yourself before reveals, but feel free to leave an anon comment here or send me an anon ask on Tumblr if you have questions about anything, or PM my sisteridriya; I'll try to make sure all the necessary inboxes get checked during the span of the exchange.
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Dark Matter (TV)
Two, Three, Four, Five
I totally missed this show while it was live—I think I watched the pilot the weekend AFTER the finale actually aired—but am fully caught up and looking forward to S2! (Just in case you aren't, I'll try to keep major spoilers confined to my letter.) I'm in this for any combination or all of the characters I've requested, and would also love to see One, Six, and/or the android, so please don't feel like you NEED to include or omit anyone just because I narrowed my request down to four characters. I love this canon for the trust issues, the found family (fractured though it may be), and the space outlaw shenanigans/corporate intrigue; I picked these four characters in particular because I think they provide the most varied selection of backstory elements, if you're interested in those.
Post-memory-loss, I would love anything about Two being a badass or what it's been like for her taking on the leadership role in a group of amnesiacs; Three being a jackass, whether he worries silently about what he used to be like/what he might have done or has firmly decided not to care; Four and his swords, what they do and don't mean to him when he can't remember where he got them or how he learned to use them; Five and what it's like remembering EVERYTHING, remembering things that do and don't belong to her. And I'd also love it if you wanted to delve into anything you're especially interested in pre-memory-loss: being on the run with Two, acquiring all those guns with Three, imperial space politics with Four, living on a space station with Five. Pairings of all sorts welcome (One/Two? One/Three? Two/Three? Anybody/Four? Anybody/Six? GO FOR IT), except Five's a bit young—please leave her out of any shipwide orgies, unless you want to timeskip forward a few years.
As I mentioned in my request, I'm most interested in this fandom for the issues of trust, identity, and forgiveness—and for the space outlaw shenanigans. :D I would love a thoughtful, introspective piece about whether you're the same person without your memories and to what degree, whether you need to take responsibility for actions you can't remember and how to do so, just as much as a fic full of banter, stealing, and punching people in the face. DO WITH THAT KNOWLEDGE WHAT YOU WILL.
Two
Two! QUEEN OF MY HEART. I love Two beating people up, her automatic assumption of leadership, how naturally the sense that the Raza and its crew are hers seems to come to her and how protective she is of them both. I love the push-pull she has going with—well, with everybody, sort of, in that she demands their trust but is slow to give her own (hiding that healed neck wound), how certain she is that they'll come back for her in 1.12 but how almost tentative she is in thanking them for it. She's doing her best to keep everything going and keep them all safe, but it's such an incredible struggle when she DOESN'T REMEMBER ANYTHING, when there's no way for her to know what part of whose past might come back to bite them next. And yet even when it's her own past with Evil Wil Wheaton, she still just powers on through it. TWO.
So! Tell me any story you like about Two. In backstory terms—how and why did she end up choosing the name Portia Lin over "Rebecca", and how might she have ended up on the Raza? (Was the crew recruited for the job of catching her and returning her toEvil Wil Wheaton Alex?) Why is she so good at counting cards—is it just because her brain's been optimized for tasks that include memory and probability, or did Marcus Boone or the original Jace Corso teach her? When they had their memories, did the crew know she was synthetic, or was she keeping it secret back then, too? Or, post-stasis, I'd love any kind of missing scene or tag for your favorite episode: the first time she found the Raza's weight room and just how often she hangs out in there, what she was thinking while she was in isolation in the infirmary, or dealing with One, Three, Four, and Six while they're giddy with hypoxia. Or anything else you can think of! Discussing what it's like to be a manufactured person with the android; beating up anyone who looks at Five funny; a future encounter with Alex where she punches him in the face the way he so richly deserves. Five things she found in her quarters (and one thing she didn't, because her past self hid it too well)! ANYTHING.
Three
Oh, Three. /o\ Three tries not to care about people, and/or pretends not to, but is honestly pretty terrible at it, which is a character type I almost always love. I enjoy Three being rude, cracking jokes, and lugging around enormous guns that never seem to have more than one or two shots in them. And basically I just adore that he talks a lot of shit about leaving people behind/spacing adorable stowaways/shooting people in the back and taking their money, but he pretty much never does it. Which is spelled out very, very clearly by 1.07, and if you'd like to roll around some in that episode, feel free. :D Also: Charlotte's Web made him cry. Oh, Three.
I'd love all kinds of different things about Three. Again, anything you want to write about his backstory, other mercenary teams he's worked with and other jobs he's pulled; what might have happened with Catherine Moss (because I doubt it's what it looks like, even if One believes the news report); his time with Sarah (who must be a little tougher, must have a little more iron imperturbability behind all that good nature, than 1.07 maybe gave her credit for, if she put up with him for so long) or the time after—what he said to the crew of the Raza to get them to let him bring Sarah's pod on board, and whether or not they believed it—would be great. Post-stasis, there's so many things to choose from: 1.11 implies that he doesn't know his own backstory with One, but has he seriously not looked himself up at any point? (If he hasn't, is it because he doesn't want to know?) What else is left in his quarters from his previous self, besides a whole lot of guns? Did he ever go get those bullets back from Five? Does he spar with Two—even after they break off their fuckbuddy thing—or drink silently sometimes with Four, or hang out with the android late at night when he can't manage to fall asleep, telling her that her technical knowledge is boring and trying to teach her to use dirty idioms?
Four
Four! Four is obviously a little tough to get a read on, but I love how calm he is, how unflappable—even before we learned he was a crown prince, there was something kind of regal about how deliberate he was, how measured. And it would be interesting to me if some of that were kind of a subconscious holdover from his time at the imperial court, that he had these things drilled into him so far that he couldn't be wiped clean of them: that keeping silent will make other people feel a need to talk, that if you let them they'll tell you more than they planned to, that you can react any way you want inside your own head if you just make sure your face doesn't show it. (Or, conversely, keeping in mind that during Five's sessions with Four's memories, he wasn't terribly cautious and was much more talkative—maybe he's inclined to be calm, to consider things carefully, and it was life at court that was fraying him into someone drunk and loud.)
Four's backstory is SWIMMING in opportunities to do a whole lot of imperial space worldbuilding and political intrigue, if you happen to enjoy that. :D Your story should have Four in it but doesn't need to be from his POV, so if you wanted to write a gloriously scheming unreliable-narrator sort of story from his stepmother's POV, I would LOVE that. Or! Anything about his time as a child in the imperial palace, his own mother, his relationship with his half-brother or with Akita before either was fractured, the war with the Republic of Pyr, or his totally messed-up relationship with the emperor would be absolutely wonderful. Post-flight but pre-stasis, I'd be delighted with something about how he ended up on the Raza—I think it's especially interesting with Four, because he's not exactly low-profile, so I imagine they knew who he was ... or did they? Did they know but not care, because they were already in trouble with the Principality of Zairon for other reasons? Post-stasis, is he mostly interested in seeing justice done to his stepmother, or does he honestly want to dethrone his half-brother and take over (even though he knows ... basically nothing about Zairon right now)? What was going through his mind at the moment he decided to kill Akita, and when was that moment—only an instant before he did it, or did he know it would happen that way as soon as he saw it was Akita who'd come to meet him?
Five
YAY FIVE. I love Five for her eagerness and curiosity, her undeniable skill and her undeniable teenage grumpiness, her compassion and her fear. She's so honest—at least, emotionally speaking, given the thing with the bug under the table near the end of the season. It seems to me like she's the one who's the most willing to actually bring it up when she's got a problem with someone, at least until the finale, which is something the crew of the Raza definitely could use some lessons in. And I also love her struggles to figure out exactly where it is that she fits, when she's absolutely as fundamental a part of the post-stasis crew as anybody else but was a newcomer to the pre-stasis crew. Plus her hair is awesome. :D
There's actually not as much to go on with Five's backstory, I think, but I would love it if you did something with it anyway: how did she end up picking pockets on a space station in the first place? If you don't mind making a lot of stuff up, feel free to come up with any explanation you like as to what that chip/key thing she stole is for, who she stole it from, and what might happen if that person tried to come after the Raza to get it back. Technically Five was on the crew briefly pre-stasis—and I'm guessing she managed to prove she was useful, or else it's hard to believe pre-stasis Two would have wasted resources on running an extra stasis pod for her. How did she do that, and when? Post-stasis, I would happily accept a "five things Five remembered that belonged to other people, and one memory that was hers" story! Or anything else you'd like to write about her—a vignette about how close she feels to the ship, having crawled through all its vents, and the places on it she's explored that no one else has been; or her finding new ways to steal things from Three even after he bolts the vents in his quarters shut (and then one day he leaves Charlotte's Web out for her to find); or a scene where Four really does start teaching her to kick ass the way she wants. Anything!
Multiple characters
As noted, I ship all sorts of things in this fandom. I'm totally on board with Two/Three (he may have broken off the fuckbuddy thing because the virus creeped him out, but he still gave up the password first), or One/Two (oh my god, One, you are SUCH A FAILBOAT. "surprise hugs"??? SWEET JESUS), or One/Three (alternating lifesaving! Tied to the same chair! One found Three crying over Sarah's stasis pod! Also, if the farm memory really is One's—Three has a type, y/y?). I'd expect it to take a little bit more work to pair anyone up with Four, because he's so focused and restrained, but if you're up for it then by all means! And, uh, the finale obviously complicates things with Six a little bit, but I'm willing to be convinced. :D And, seriously, go as tropey as you like: Two and Three pretending to be married for a job! (Which would be equally hilarious as gen, honestly.) Pre-canon AU where One is the kind, hot, won't-take-your-shit farmperson who finds Three and nurses him back to health! One takes a bullet for Two like the doofus he is, even though Two can probably heal up a bullet wound in about ten seconds! I would also absolutely adore any sort of team gen you'd like to throw at me—a 1001-word snippet from a job-of-the-week fic with some team banter when the job goes wrong! Them saving each other or the android or helping more downtrodden miners/innocent bystanders/whatever, or getting tangled up in ever-more-complicated corporate rivalries! Or futurefic where the imperial fleet of Emperor Tetsuda is a gleaming technological marvel, led by a tiny beat-up flagship called the Raza. (Or an AU: they're steampunk mercenaries who sail the skies, and the android is half-clockwork, half-magic!) I liked this show best when these characters were funny, a little sad, totally lost, and insisting aloud that it made no sense for them to trust each other but doing it anyway when it counted; capturing any part of that dynamic would be awesome.
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Dune series—Frank Herbert
Chani, Irulan Corrino
ETA: So apparently I messed up my signup and only actually entered Chani! OOPS. If you matched me on this, please enjoy my thoughts on Chani and ignore everything I said about Irulan, unless you happen to want to throw Irulan in there too. Thank you, and so sorry for my mistake!
I'm most familiar with the first three books of the series; if you've read them all, I apologize in advance for not having prompts for the later parts, and if you've only read the first book, no worries! I'm as interested in pre-canon and the first book as I am in later portions. Exhaustive attention to canonical details is absolutely appreciated, if that's your jam, but also in no way required, because the Dune universe is terrifyingly enormous. I'm at least as much in love with the overall aesthetic and feel of the books as I am with the gajillion named characters and teeny tiny worldbuilding details; if you are comfortable with either one, PLEASE do not stress over trying to also juggle the other.
And! I'm also in love with Chani and Irulan, because together they encapsulate everything that most interests me about Dune: the desert, survival, love, betrayal, politics, forgiveness, persistence, repentance. There's no need to try to shoehorn them both into a story you wanted to write about just one of them—though I'll also adore any fic where they interact! Anything about Chani, pre-canon about her early youth in the desert, growing up among the Fremen; or, in canon, teaching Paul how not to die, entering Arrakeen (had she ever been there before, maybe with Liet-Kynes?), comparing her life in the palace to life in the desert (easier in some ways—water everywhere—but surely much, much harder in others). Or about Irulan, pre-canon (and feel free to worldbuild) about her childhood on Kaitain, her interactions with the rest of the imperial family, how she learned to love books and writing (because she must, to have written so much herself—or was it just the only way she could occupy her time?); or anything about her as empress on Dune, her loneliness, her bitterness, her cruelty toward Chani, why she dedicated herself to raising Chani's children afterward. Absolutely anything you can come up with beyond this that would have them interacting, even briefly and unpleasantly, would be a delight!
I have a lot of feelings about Irulan—and Chani, but I just want to be really clear: my feelings about Irulan extend to every Irulan in every medium. If you happen to take a look at my fic or meta in Dune fandom, which is heavily influenced by miniseries!Irulan, and you think to yourself, But that is NOT book!Irulan! Is that what she's expecting???—DON'T PANIC. I will be happy with all kinds of different takes on Irulan's character! If you happen to be a miniseries fan and you'd like to draw on that as a source for info/characterization, I don't mind; if you think the miniseries barely qualifies as canon and you've deliberately never watched it, that's completely fine also. This is a bookverse request, and I'm here for bookverse Irulan! NO WORRIES. (Well, and it's less dramatic, but the same thing goes for Chani, incidentally. If you're picturing Barbora Kodetová when you describe Chani's face and smile, that's fine! If you don't know what I mean when I say that, that's fine, too.)
Chani
If it weren't for Jessica, Chani would be my favorite character in the first book hands-down (the competition gets stiffer later on). I have such a huge thing for casual everyday life-saving competence, and also for the balance Chani has to strike between looking out for Paul, not letting him just die stupidly on her watch, but also allowing him to make mistakes and getting him to understand the consequences of making them in an environment as harsh as Dune's. And it's just fascinating to me to consider the ways in which that did and didn't prepare her for life as an emperor's concubine—I mean, that she survives twelve years as an important figure in the Imperium speaks well of her ability to navigate it, but it must have been so weird. So many rules of desert living wouldn't have applied anymore, and she must have had to do all kinds of strange things that seemed totally pointless to her. But she adapted and awesomed her way through it like the fierce knife-wielding desert queen she is.
So! I'll read ALL KINDS OF THINGS about Chani. If you're comfortable filling in blanks, I'd love anything about her years as a girl in the desert—the choice of her name, her learning about ecology from Liet-Kynes or about herbalism from her mother Faroula. Anything from the early parts of the first book, too; it didn't really get into this (at least not that I recall? It's been a few years) but I LOVE the idea of Jessica and Chani spending time together while Chani was learning Bene Gesserit fighting moves, so any bit of that would be great! Or anything that comes later—you may have noticed that I'm interested in the contrast between surviving the desert as part of a Fremen sietch and surviving the Imperium as one of the most well-known women in the known universe. Honestly the degree of peril is probably about the same, but the forms it takes are so different, and so are the methods of handling them. Anything about the adjustment, Chani learning how to deal with having maidservants attending her, with not being able to just head out into the desert whenever she pleases, with having people smile to her face and then undermine her behind her back instead of just challenging her to tahaddi like they ought to—GOLD. ANY OF THAT IS GOLD. And of course I would absolutely love an AU where she lives, if you'd like to write a thousand words of that!
Irulan Corrino
Oh, Irulan. I've always wanted so very much more of Irulan than the books were ever willing to give me! I'm just fascinated by trying to imagine what Irulan's life has been like, and the juxtaposition of the things that are the most interesting about her—the number of books she wrote and the thought and effort and time she put into them, the dedication she showed in raising Paul and Chani's children and trying to protect them from Alia—and the things that are most terrible about her, the petty cruelty of what she does to Chani and how badly she handles the admittedly crushing unhappiness and loneliness of her life as Paul's empress. UGH MY HEART. Just her opening description is so great: tall, beautiful, haughty, undefeated—and trained by the Bene Gesserit. And the transition from someone who resents Chani so badly and is so jealous and unhappy to someone who "reeks of trustworthiness" and takes such good care of Chani's children is just—how? TELL ME MORE. IRULAN.
If you've skimmed the rest of this letter, you may have gleaned that I'm fond of empresses and imperial families—feel free to tell me absolutely anything you want to about Irulan's childhood, her relationships with her father and mother and sisters, what she spent her time on, what her training with the Bene Gesserit consisted of, whether she had any friends or confidants. Her "literary pretensions" are mentioned by Jessica at the end of the first book; does this mean she's already written or edited books as princess royal, as a hobby she genuinely enjoys? For slightly later canon, anything about what she's thinking as she doses Chani, or more about how she's even able to do so consistently (aren't there security measures in place to prevent that kind of thing? Or does Irulan have control over those processes, too?), or where, when, and what exactly the transition is between doing it and resolving to care for Chani's children (is she dealing with any increasingly insistent guilt right along, or is Chani's death and Paul's grief a slap in the face that makes her suddenly aware that she needs to be better?) would be amazing. I also love Leto II and Ghanima, so any kind of kidfic with them, Irulan trying to figure out how to care for children who know more than she does and are in some ways older than she is, would be STUPENDOUS.
Both of them
There's a lot of different ways to go with this, and I'd be delighted with pretty much any of them. Sticking close to canon, it's hard for me to imagine they spent twelve years living in the same palace and managed to avoid each other the whole time. So anything you can come up with where they speak at all would be lovely, even if it's just a few icy words to each other before entering a banquet hall to take their seats on either side of Paul. I'll be just as thrilled with a canon-compliant fic where they're unkind to each other as a minor AU where they interact in a moment when they didn't in canon and become even slightly friendlier toward each other. (Chani is Fremen and Irulan lives on Dune for years, so they both interact with spice—do either or both of them ever see some possible futures?) And, tbh, I will also be overjoyed by a more divergent AU that results in any sort of Irulan/Chani, even to the mildest degree—Chani lives through childbirth, because this is the future and there are doctors, and Paul does his thing and walks off into the desert and Chani and Irulan end up raising the twins together! Or Jessica and Paul were saved by some other sietch, and Chani never met him, but she comes to Arrakeen with the other fedaykin to serve him and ends up doing some weirding-way sparring with his Bene Gesserit empress. I DON'T KNOW. IT COULD HAPPEN. (And you may not have offered him, but if you're interested, Chani/Paul/Irulan is totally also on the table, here, in addition to canonical Paul/Chani or AU Paul/Irulan, if you'd like to write about either.) They're just such an interesting contrast to each other, Chani as Dune and the Fremen and the desert, and Irulan as the brilliant scheming lonely daughter of the Imperium. I mean, seriously, don't feel any need to write me an epic—but if you happen to be struck by a way to pull it off, I would absolutely love to read that!
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Goblin Emperor—Katherine Addison
Arbelan Drazharan, Chenelo Drazharan, Csethiro Ceredin
This book! This book is the adorable Cinderella story of my dreams + bureaucracy and conlanging, and I'm looking forward to more fic for it SO MUCH. And I enjoyed all sorts of different things about it—so if you groove on appendices and getting all the tiny fussy details perfect, that's awesome and I totally embrace that! And if you just want to write an awesome story about elves and goblins doing politics, I'm here for that too. Don't stress about getting all the fancy elven titles exactly right if you don't enjoy that; and feel free to make some things up if you enjoy that. I'm flexible!
My character choices sort of fit a theme, and that theme is EMPRESSES. I'm interested in pretty much any story you want to tell about any, all, or any combination of these women at any point in their lives. Arbelan's youth as a noblewoman (did she ever have "friends" like Vedero? Or an earlier version of it—was there an elven equivalent to the salon gatherings of the 1700s/early 1800s, before the more steampunky "modern day"?), her marriage to Varenechibel (had she met him before they married? Spoken to him at any length?), or any episode from her time as empress or her long years away. Chenelo as a tiny goblin princess, interacting with her sisters or mother or father, or getting married to Varenechibel—was she excited to get to go see the Elflands? Were they like or unlike anything she'd heard or read about them beforehand? How did she occupy her time at Isvaroë? And for Csethiro—all the dueling lessons! Who did she get them from, and was it the same person who taught her the warrior's alphabet? Has she dueled anyone before, and if so, why? And anything you wanted to write that gives any of them an excuse to interact with each other—was Arbelan recalled to court for the emperor's wedding to Chenelo, and encountered her unexpectedly in a quiet hallway? Did Arbelan have any input in her great-niece Csethiro's upbringing, or did Csethiro ever visit her? Did a child Csethiro ever bump into Chenelo at court?
I found this book really satisfying when it came to all the characters we saw the most of, so I'm veering toward more minor characters and things the book didn't mention for Yuletide (I mean, Csethiro's not minor minor, but she's not actually in like the first two-thirds of the book). But beyond that, don't feel in any way limited by my selections—anybody who might reasonably interact with any of these characters is totally fair game. If you want to write about one of Arbelan's dinners with Maia, or Csethiro and Csoru sniping at each other through the medium of elegant court manners, or, idk, a teenage Vedero writing letters to Chenelo because one of Vedero's earliest friends' areas of interest is goblin linguistics, any of those things would be absolutely fantastic!
Arbelan Drazharan
I just have SO MANY QUESTIONS about Arbelan! She's clearly not a gigantic douche like Varenechibel, but she was married to the guy for ten years; and yet the reason cited for his reluctance to divorce her is that he hated to be seen as having made a mistake, rather than that, you know, he liked her or anything wacky like that. So it doesn't seem as though they were especially fond of each other, and yet Arbelan obviously understood how to handle being empress with him. (Surely if she'd publicly fucked anything up, that would have been seized upon as a much more palatable reason to discard her, right?) Super competent + super gracious is CATNIP to me, and I want to know so very many things about who she is and how she got to be so awesome.
SO. Anywhere you want to go with her backstory, I'll be right there with you: was she always naturally calm and kind, even as a girl—or was she rowdy, mischievous, a troublemaker, and only learned an empress's self-contained restraint because she realized she needed to? Was she initially pleased to be empress for the respect and the finery and the social power, or did she want to be empress because she wanted whatever political input she could get—or did she not want to be empress at all? How did she deal with Varenechibel? Did she know the woman who would become Empress Leshan at all? Did she want to have children—because she really did want them? Because she considered it her duty, or knew other people did?—or was she secretly almost relieved to be barren, even when it resulted in her being set aside? What did she do with herself during the thirty-plus years she was at Cethoree? Did she have companions or amusements—was she allowed a stipend she could use for patronage of artists or musicians? Did she write letters, or even entire books? And her return to court, with Maia's acknowledgment of her as zhasanai: was there anyone she competently, graciously TOTALLY LORDED THAT OVER in a very restrained way? There must have been matters for her to deal with, favors to dispense or withhold, court intrigue to catch up on! TELL ME ANY OF THAT.
Chenelo Drazharan
It's totally natural for Maia's POV to dwell on the loss of Chenelo, but I am SO SO SO much more interested in her life! She pulls on every one of my heartstrings: it seems pretty clear that she was a quiet, shy, and not especially forceful person who got jerked around by a lot of different people who didn't care about her, and leaving to live the rest of your life in a foreign country that hates you at sixteen so you can marry a guy you don't actually know who also hates you is just—awful. But she was contemplative and faithful and kind, and she did the best she was able in her own way, and basically I really want to give her a hug.
The Great Avar didn't pay much attention to her as a child, that seems obvious, but somebody must have—her mother? A nurse? Another relative? Was she at all close to her wild future-lesbian-sea-captain older sister when they were girls? Did they dream of running away to be sailors together, or was Chenelo a captive audience to Shaleän's imagination but much more realistic about herself? It's hard for me to imagine she was enthusiastic about Varenechibel himself, but was she interested in traveling to the Elflands (presumably, as a woman, not having had the chance to do much of it) or did she hate the whole idea? Varenechibel's court must have been pretty awful for her, sixteen and with so little in the way of guidance, the memory of Empress Pazhiro hanging over her—but maybe not all bad. Did she meet Nemolis or Nemriän or Nemera, or a young Vedero? Did she ever interact with any of the other part-goblins in and around the capital before she was sent away with Maia to Isvaroë? Maia remembers only bits and pieces of the religious rituals Chenelo favored, but they must have been a great comfort to her; was she able to obtain Barizheise clothing, or food, or books, too?
Csethiro Ceredin
YAY CSETHIRO. I love everything about Csethiro: her anger, her lack of subtlety, her briskness of manner, how quick she is to let go and start fresh when she realizes what Maia's deal is, how kind she is in her own very Csethiro way afterward. ("We do not wish you to be frightened of us.") She's going to be such a stupendous empress and I am SO THRILLED about that. And I love that she can pursue things like dueling and learning the warrior alphabet and yet have managed herself carefully enough to still be considered a suitable bride for the emperor—presumably with the guidance of her mother or other older women she knows, which I would absolutely love to see.
Other things I would love to see! As with the other two women, anything about her childhood growing up in House Ceredada—those extensive dance lessons when she was five, maybe. (Did her parents have to buy her cooperation, using the dueling lessons? Or were dance and dueling valuable preparations for each other, both being concerned with timing, balance, and attentiveness to a partner's motions?) Is it traditionally acceptable, if no longer the done thing, to teach noble girls dueling, and it's just that most of them give it up? Did she have to go to a special effort to learn the warriors' alphabet, or is it something she's supposed to know but not necessarily expected to use? And anything, ANYTHING, about her disastrous forced acquaintance with Csoru would be gold. :D (I like Csoru too—I'm okay with Csethiro's POV disliking her, but not with the narrative disliking her, if that's a distinction that makes sense to you?) Anything set during the book would also be wonderful: her perspective on the beginning parts she isn't there for, or at least whatever filters to her via court gossip, or one of those dance lessons she gives Maia, or basically anything from her POV about navigating their relationship and marriage (including futurefic!). ANYTHING.
Multiple characters
As far as pairings go, Csethiro&Maia platonic BFF marrieds fic and Csethiro/Maia marriage-of-convenience fic are both totally welcome for Csethiro. I find it hard to believe anybody who'd describe Varenechibel as a "killing frost" was super happy to be married to him, though, and the less time spent dwelling on his treatment of Chenelo, the better for my blood pressure, so I'd prefer that he not take up much time in fic about Arbelan or Chenelo, if you can manage it. As noted, I'd love anything that maneuvers things such that Csethiro visits her great-aunt (before her reinstatement might be tough, after's fine too!), or Arbelan starts writing letters to the other wife of Varenechibel he shoved off to some estate in the middle of nowhere, or Chenelo meets a very tiny Csethiro. If you feel like wandering a little further from canon, I would absolutely adore a snippet of an AU where Chenelo doesn't die and is dragged back to court along with Maia when the Wisdom of Choharo crashes, and becomes empress dowager, and makes friends with Arbelan, and Csethiro tries to find a way to connect with her and ends up teaching her swordhandling. /o\ I JUST THINK THAT WOULD BE SO GREAT.
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Hellboy (Movies)
Any (Hellboy, John Myers, Liz Sherman, Nuada)
Oh, these movies! No matter what you think of the writing, Guillermo del Toro is so fantastic at establishing and maintaining an aesthetic, and I am ALL OVER THAT for these movies. (Superpowers + angst + banter) * obscure creepy awe-inspiring beings and magic hiding just under the surface of ordinary things, raised to the power of RON PERLMAN = YESSSSSSS. ALL OF THAT, PLEASE. I love this fandom for the humor and the wonder, the beautiful and the ugly and the both-at-once, the awful and the incredible. Also, Ron Perlman.
SO. I'd love basically anything about any one of these characters or any part of canon. The movies fast-forward over Hellboy's youth, but I would love it if you didn't (gangly teenage Hellboy! COME ON)! Any sort of missing scene or between-movie tag from his POV, what it felt like to see those visions of his Anung-un-Rama potential and turn away, the sadness of killing that forest god—or how many kittens he has, what he's named them, and where he got them. :D For Myers, had he ever had any supernatural experiences before? What was he thinking when he followed Hellboy into high-speed traffic, or woke up chained to that rock? What's he been up to in Antarctica? For Liz, the first movie shows us the event that set off her powers, but not the aftermath during her teenage years—if you'd like to dive in, be my guest! Anything pre-canon about her recruitment or first meeting Hellboy or Bruttenholm, or the experience of really letting her power loose, or what it was like to be dead, or anything from her POV at all, really. And for Prince Nuada (and feel free to include Nuala in anything with Nuada, if you like)—the long, long life he's lived, the cities and civilizations and wonders he's seen rise and fall and be forgotten, the wild and beautiful and terrible magical realm: give me ANY OF THAT and I'll love it. Team gen, casefic, Hellboy/Liz, Hellboy/John, or anyone fighting with Nuada for a thousand words would also be fantastic!
One of my favorite things about these movies (besides the banter and Ron Perlman) is how they portray magic, and I can only convey how that comes through to me with overly dramatic lists of opposing adjectives: that it's wonderful and awful, beautiful and tentacular, astounding and lethal, delightful and terrifying. I am SO EASY for that particular flavor of wildly weird, spectacularly colorful magical world, and also for the way del Toro likes to juxtapose it with the nonmagical world: hag garbage ladies, elven smiths next to subway tunnels—and federal agents who have red stone hands and set themselves on fire. :DDDDDDDDDDDD YES PLEASE.
Hellboy
HB! Hellboy hits so very, very many of my buttons: wanting to belong but not being able to, helping people who would be afraid of him if they knew he was there, all that delicious angst buried under defense mechanisms and snarky banter. AND THEN free will! Turning his back on phenomenal cosmic power because he knows it's not good, because he refuses to fall for your pretentious Faustian bullshit! AND THEN refusing to continue working for people who consider him a monster, deciding not to let himself be used! YESSSSSSSSS. And I'm also really easy for characters who get beaten up and hurt and tired, and still keep hauling themselves back to their feet and fighting some more. So basically I pretty much love Hellboy beyond all reason. :D
I'll enjoy anything about any part of Hellboy's life, pretty much—I love tiny scrawny Hellboy listening eagerly to Professor Broom's stories just as much as I love the BPRD, or futurefic about what Hellboy does afterward (and if you'd like to draw on comics canon, you certainly can! Though of course you don't have to). Anything about Hellboy's youth, about the first magical thing he fights or evil he has to stop, about his integration into the BPRD (did Professor Broom fight it, wanting to keep Hellboy safer than BPRD agents typically are, or did he encourage it, hoping to give Hellboy something to fight for/believe in, a place where he might potentially belong?), or any snippet of casefic/missing movie scene/movie tag would be excellent! As would anything about what you imagine happening in the rest of Hellboy's life, or any sort of fork-in-the-road AU that has to do with him: if he hadn't ever joined the BPRD, what would he be doing? If you'd like to go creepy—if he had given in and become Anung-un-Rama? Or if the BPRD had decided to go public (and honestly I would really love that—I liked Golden Army fine, and I love Hellboy for leaving when he felt it was time, but overall I prefer the BPRD as an island-of-misfit-toys that really does back up and take care of its agents as best it can, rather than as a bureaucratic machine that ultimately fails to truly value difference).
John Myers
Oh, Myers. I love love love Myers's arc, how he's basically a hapless dweeb at the beginning, that he's got juuuuuust enough iron in him to stick with it even though Hellboy starts out trying to scare him off, that he tries so hard and jumps right in even though basically every single thing he meets after joining the BPRD could kill him without breaking a sweat. And it's so cheesy, but I have to admit I also adore the whole "pure of heart" thing—especially that he denies it, because people who would feel confident that they're pure of heart aren't pure of heart. MAN DO I EVER LOVE THAT. /o\ And he also gets knocked around a lot but keeps fighting anyway, which, as noted, is a character trait I love. (SO HARD TO TALK ABOUT without accidentally quoting "Tubthumping"!)
So I will enjoy anything you want to tell me about John T. Myers. Any previous encounters with the supernatural—ones he maybe only recognizes in retrospect once he joins the BPRD? Anything from his POV about the first movie, or missing scenes, or a snippet of casefic set between movies; him learning more about the BPRD, its history, any other agents working there, etc. is all interesting to me! Or anything post-movie, whether you want to embrace Golden Army and tell me what John was doing in Antarctica, or you want to rewrite a bit of it with John still working at the BPRD proper, or you want to ignore it completely and give me other BPRD shenanigans with Myers. And of course any other sort of fork-in-the-road story that doesn't have to do with Golden Army at all: if Myers hadn't been placed in the BPRD, might he still have gotten caught up in supernatural shenanigans anyway? (Is there anything out there that has a use or a taste for pure hearts, and might have come after him whether he's BPRD or not?) Also, I should probably say that while I don't mind following up on the Antarctica line at all, I like to think of Myers as doing well at the BPRD and getting along with Hellboy/Liz/Abe/whoever—if you do have him go to Antarctica, please don't make it because he was incompetent, or because the team disliked him, or because he disliked the team. The first movie doesn't seem to support that idea, IMO, and I'd rather not ignore that just because Doylist casting issues forced a Watsonian throwaway line to explain his absence. Yeah, he's kind of a tool; but he's a good guy and I like him!
Liz Sherman
LIZ. I adore Liz so much—and yes, I know, the "these powers are a curse and I just want to be normal" thing is SO overdone these days, but LIZ IS STILL AWESOME. I like her bitterness and defensiveness, the way she tries to protect herself with an almost aggressive apathy and the ways in which that does and doesn't work for her. And I actually kind of love that her bitterness is so valid! I feel like a lot of characters who fit Liz's same sort of type are bitter and sarcastic and distancing because ... I don't know, because that makes them seem ~cooler or they have commitment issues or there's some kind of single incident in their backstory that messed them up. But Liz is distancing because she could LITERALLY BURN YOU ALIVE if she isn't careful, which actually is pretty goddamn scary.
For Liz I would enjoy anything about her early years of trying to figure her powers out—which I realize could make for a very unpleasant story, so all I ask is that it end on a note that allows for hope/potential. And of course I would also love absolutely anything about her time at the BPRD, both before and during the movies: the first time she joined up, her decision to leave, what it was like for her when she first arrived at the facility and how she grew comfortable there, coming back, all of it. What do her powers feel like to her? Is it a relief to set things on fire, like stretching a stiff muscle, but easy enough to stop, or does it feed on itself like anger, so that it's a strain to choke back? There's a lot of (totally earned) angst for her, but have there also been times when she's loved her power—when it's been not just useful for incinerating eldritch horrors, but beautiful, fun, a thing that's made her happy? And, of course, any sort of futurefic about what she does after leaving the BPRD would be absolutely wonderful!
Nuada
... Gosh, this paragraph is going to sound so very different from the others. I can't exactly claim to love Nuada, I bail off that train at the point where he murders people with bone-eating hell fairies; but I do find him REALLY interesting as a character, and I would love something that delves deep into his point of view, that captures him as non-human, ancient, uncompromising—inflexible, perhaps, and almost certainly cruel, though of course his genuine affection for Nuala exists right alongside his willingness to raise the Golden Army and slaughter thousands (millions? Billions?) of people with it. I'm always kind of magnetically fascinated by antagonists who are so certain, who have clear convictions that they're doing what's best/most just/necessary, and Nuada is one of them.
So! I'll enjoy anything that really makes use of Nuada's POV. His perspective on just about anything would be fascinating, I think, and when I say "anything" for him that covers a LOT of ground, because he's been alive for so long. What was he like when he was younger, when the world was newer? Was there really a time when humans got on with magical beings, in the beginning? What was that like? Did Nuada know and like any humans, or did he always dislike us, even before we stopped believing and wrecked the planet? If you enjoy worldbuilding, there is so. much. space. pre-canon for you to do almost anything you want with both elven society and the magical realms of the "sons of earth" more generally. Why is it Clan Bethmoora that rules—what other elven clans are there, and were any of them ruling in the past instead? If so, when and why did the crown pass to King Balor? What other magical societies are there—did Nuada perhaps travel among them during his self-imposed exile, or was he alone (except perhaps for Mr. Wink)? In a certain sense, his exile could never be complete no matter how far he went, since he always had that connection to Nuala—what did that feel like? What did her unhappiness, her fear, her disagreement, feel like to him, and did it mean anything to him that the one person who knew him and presumably understood him the best kept trying to stop him? If you'd like to go AU, futurefic, and a little post-apocalyptic: what would the world look like if he'd succeeded? What would the rest of the characters be doing in that world?
Multiple characters
I'm into the canonical pairings—which I would say are Hellboy/Liz and also Nuala/Abe, if you feel like sliding that in somewhere in the background, and if you felt like there was a bit of a Nuada/Nuala vibe in Golden Army, too, I won't talk you out of it. :D And I would also love Hellboy/John or John/Liz, though in both cases please deal kindly with the third party (or solve it with Hellboy/John/Liz, if you like!). If you'd like to try Nuada/anybody but Nuala, I think it would take some serious work but I won't say no if you're up for it! For the BPRD team, honestly pretty much any supernatural trope would be entirely welcome: truth spells (or lie spells, for that matter), somebody getting nabbed by ~critters (and this is another spot where John's pure heart could come into play, if that's not just a phrase but a magical feature) and needing a rescue, amnesia, accidental (demon) baby acquisition, all sorts of hurt/comfort—seriously, knock yourself out! I would also be delighted with team gen in this fandom, or team mostly-gen with pairing hints hanging out in the background: any sort of snippet of casefic, Hellboy and Liz being sarcastic at each other while Abe and Myers try to actually get some work done, or them all hanging out in the BPRD building after a case, tending each other's minor wounds and exhaustedly eating takeout (which Liz reheats periodically, of course). And I threw Abe and Nuala in there just because they're around in the movies—I know they weren't nommed, no need to include them! But you can if you'd like, and that goes for Professor Broom, Clay, Manning—anybody. I LOVE EVERYBODY IN THIS BAR.
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Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
Ravenna, Snow White
I will probably keep asking for this movie from now until doomsday, I'm just so entranced with everything about it. I enjoy the strength of its focus on Snow White and Ravenna SO MUCH. They're two sides of a coin in so many ways, different and opposing but to my mind equally deserving of attention. I love Snow White's quiet goodness and steadiness, her bravery, the way she reaches out and builds bridges, just as much as I love Ravenna's bitterness and determination, her blazing hateful anger, her terrible deep unhappiness. Anything about either or both of them will be an amazing and wonderful gift!
Anything you want to do with either of their backstories would be wonderful—Ravenna's earlier years, how long she's lived, when and from whom she learned magic (or did she figure it out herself: clawing the power to her a bit at a time through trial and error, or intuitively, naturally, obsidian forming out of the air to cut people who hurt her to shreds?); Snow White's childhood as a princess, interacting with her mother or father or a tiny William, what she thought of Ravenna's arrival. Any sort of missing scene from either one of their POVs—and feel free to get creepy, if you want to pull some unreliable narration from Ravenna's perspective! Or post-canon: absolutely anything about Queen Snow White, her early rule and advisers, the kingdom's recovery. If you'd like to AU the end so Snow White spares Ravenna, I would love that; and ladyslash is 100% encouraged, whether you want to go creepy with Ravenna's obsession with Snow White's heart, or you'd like to straight-up let Snow White forge some kind of connection with Ravenna that allows them to be—not friends, perhaps, but fundamentally understood by each other in a way they can't quite get with anyone else. ANYTHING.
I've received absolutely lovely stories for this movie TWICE, but am asking for it again because I'm just that weird about it. /o\ I love that Ravenna and Snow White are the ones who truly drive the story, that in a certain sense their relationship is really the one that's central to the film (despite its title, and despite how awesome the huntsman is!). I love that Snow White is good—like, Good good—without that in any way diminishing her badassery/awesomeness. (Of course, I pretty much always think being Good good is badass, and have never been fond of the idea that it makes a character inherently boring, annoying, or self-righteous.) And I also love that the movie actually takes the time to give us an idea of why Ravenna is the way she is and does the things she does, instead of her just ... ~being evil~, the end. Also, I absolutely like William and the huntsman, and I realize that they (and Finn, too) might very well come into the responses to some of these prompts—that's totally okay.
Ravenna
Ravenna is just SO INTERESTING to me, I could go on about her all day. And I realize she's totally awful and does terrible things to a whole bunch of people—please don't feel like you need to ignore, erase, or minimize that in my gift. I'm interested in all kinds of things about her, in both the distance she places between herself and other people (except maybe Finn) and the distance that is placed there simply because of who she is: her magic and the way it works, her sheer age, the too many lives she's lived and too many lives she's ended. And it fascinates me that she is in so many ways her own worst fear, that the very effects she causes and brings along in her wake (disease, old age, ugliness, death) are the same things she herself is running from. That she can acknowledge that she's lived too long but can't bring herself to die—that she almost needs Snow White to kill her, because how else will she ever end?—is so terrible, and I feel tremendous sympathy for her, and then she WEARS BIRD SKULLS and STABS PEOPLE. /o\ THAT'S NOT GOING TO HEAL YOUR EMOTIONAL WOUNDS, RAVENNA. STOP IT.
I'm actively interested in creepy fic in this fandom, so if you're hoping to write some, feel free to write it about Ravenna! Her relationship with the mirror is a gold mine: is she hallucinating, or is Finn—is Ravenna the only one who can see the reality of the mirror, or the only one who can't? When and how did she acquire it, or did she make it? (And if so—what was the process? D:) More generally, if you'd like to do a little worldbuilding, how long has she been alive? Where else in the world has she lived/ruled/sucked the life out of people? Are there places where she's a myth, a legend, a ghost story? Anything in her perspective during the movie would be wonderful, from her viewpoint when Snow White is a child to watching Snow White charge up the beach in armor, coming to kill her. Deathfic is also okay here, either dealing with Ravenna's canonical death or if you'd like to go AU and let her succeed in cutting Snow White's heart out—just please keep the description spare if you go that route! I prefer psychological horror to gore. And I would be equally delighted by anything post-canon where they both survive!
Snow White
Snow White! As I mentioned above, I really hate the idea that goodness = weakness, and so the way the movie blatantly pairs Snow White's goodness and strength, that her mother explicitly wishes for it, would probably have been enough all by itself to make me love Snow White, even if I hated the rest of the movie. (AND THEN I DIDN'T, OBVIOUSLY. BUT ANYWAY.) I love how much Snow White cares about everybody and everything she meets, how hard she tries to connect in the little ways—and honestly that she still tries at all, that that's still her instinct after being locked up in a cell for half her life, is extraordinary in and of itself. I love love love her shouting right back at that bridge troll, making herself heard (discovering that she can make herself heard, after so many years knowing that no one cared if she screamed or cried or shouted for help). And I love the slow progression of her choices, that she starts out just wanting to get away, and then it turns into wanting to go back, wanting to raise an army, wanting to retake her throne and become the goddamn queen. YES.
So I'll take absolutely anything about Snow White! Something about her childhood, a quiet pleasant time with Queen Eleanor before her death, what she thought when King Magnus came home with Ravenna in tow. Or anything set during the movie, her thoughts about the dwarves or the fairies or the hart (did she know any of those were real before she met them? Had she ever been told—or made up—stories about them?), how incredible it was to be outside again for real (sleeping on the ground: more or less uncomfortable than her cell, and, if less, did she not even care?), how it felt to see William again or an argument with the huntsman or what it was like to come back from the dead. What was she thinking as she fought Ravenna in the castle, or when she killed her, or immediately afterward? If your taste runs toward creepy, what might happen in a post-canon universe where she keeps Ravenna's mirror? If your taste runs toward bureaucracy and political finagling, tell me ALL about the arrangements Snow White needs to make to help the kingdom recover from the famine (any other kingdoms she can call on for aid? Allies of her father's—or new ones she needs to make her own deals with?) And if your taste runs toward the long game: as "life itself", what's the effect of Snow White's rule, and how long does it last? Was that line a hint that she's somehow ageless—would she rule forever, or would she do it for a while, 'til everything was better, and then pass the reins to someone else and go travel the world/live with the trolls/become some small town's hedgewitch?
Both of them
I would adore absolutely anything that has these women interacting, whether hatefully, platonically, both, or neither. A missing scene from the movie where Ravenna and the child Snow White speak to each other for a little longer than they did onscreen, or Ravenna visiting Snow White's cell to taunt her, or something that ventures a little further from canon—what if Ravenna had pulled the crow thing again to go speak to Snow White the night before the attack on the castle? Or you could go entirely AU and let them both live through the end of the movie: if Snow White chose to spare Ravenna, would Ravenna be relieved—or would she be upset, terrified of living any longer, of aging, of dying? If you'd like to reinterpret the "have her heart" line such that Snow White can keep Ravenna as she is without Ravenna having to kill her, I would LOVE something about them remaining, two immortal queens, inherently distanced from everyone else and thereby closer to each other. And basically any tack you'd like to take with ladyslash would be 100% okay with me, whether you want to go creepy with Ravenna's obsession (though please no actual sexual assault!), or commit to any kind of redemption arc: in an AU with different timing, Ravenna is married to King Magnus's armored daughter instead of him, and tells herself every day that she's going to kill the princess that night, but never quite can; or Snow White spares Ravenna and, following a hunch, takes her to see the white hart. Anything!
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So that was incredibly long and I apologize, but I hope that if nothing else, it's clear that I love all of these fandoms and all of these characters a completely ridiculous amount, and I'll enjoy whatever it is you want to write about them. I'm so glad we matched on one (or more) of them! I hope you have a great time writing and you get a great gift yourself—have a wonderful Yuletide!
If, on the other hand, you're looking forward to reading ten thousand words of me talking up my beloved Yuletide 2015 fandoms: HERE THEY ARE. If you like reading letters and also poking around, feel free. RL has kept my fannish activity at a minimum this past year, but I'm Damkianna at the AO3,
damkianna/damkianna. My movies tag, books tag, and TV shows tag have basically all my opinions about every piece of media I've ever consumed that isn't in this letter. If there's anything in particular you're looking for thoughts about, you may also want to try the full tag list. (Past Yuletide letters are tagged with yuletide, and I've also written letters for the rarewomen/rarelywritten exchange. If there's a prompt for one of this year's fandoms in my previous letters that you like a lot, by all means feel free to run with it, even if it doesn't show up in this year's letter! I've received amazing fics in these fandoms before, but am asking for them again because I want more—there can never be too many different authors' takes on a prompt!)In General
Bad news first! I don't usually like reading stories that include non-canonical major character death, extensive torture scenes, or on-screen rape/sexual assault. (Though, as noted above, I have no actual triggers—if you have a fantastic idea you really want to write that includes one or more of these things, it's absolutely safe to gift it to me.) Violence at the same level as a violent canon is fine, canonical character deaths are fine, canonical traumatic events and their aftermath are fine; I just don't enjoy gratuitously detailed Bad Stuff that goes above and beyond what canon would lead me to expect. Especially if a fic takes characters I love to their nadir and then leaves them there. D:
On a completely separate level, I don't especially enjoy wall-to-wall porn, and kink/BDSM/ABO-verse stuff does very little for me. If you ADORE these things and were looking forward to writing one or more of them in the tiny fandom we matched on, don't let this stop you! But if you're trying to decide between multiple ideas and want to know what I'd say, that's what I'd say.
On to the fun stuff! I usually really enjoy:
:: ladyslash, dudeslash, het, gen! Pairings, threesomes, moresomes—or any one of my requested characters by themselves! I multiship in most of my fandoms, and am also interested in each of the characters I've requested individually. (IIRC, the rules say you need to include all my requested characters in your fic unless I say otherwise. Here's me saying otherwise!) So any ship you ship can sail in my giftfic; and I'm equally interested in all kinds of other non-shipping scenarios or stories where relationship development takes a back seat.
:: AUs! All different kinds of AUs. I love fork-in-the-road AUs, AUs where different decisions were made or characters met or didn't meet earlier or later or are placed in different roles—and I love AUs where characters are IN SPACE or MERMAIDS, a high-fantasy party of unlikely adventurers or medical students at the same hospital. I also really love canonical settings and scenarios, and I'll prompt for those too! But if you want to write an AU (and that includes fusions with other fandoms—and, while we're talking fusions, regular crossovers are fine with me also), by all means feel free to do so. :D
:: clichés and tropes! If you've been hoping for a reason to write a time loop story about unlikely soulmates in a marriage of convenience during the zombie apocalypse—DO IT. I AM YOUR REASON. And this holds for story structures, or for any kind of stylistic choice you might normally hesitate over because it seems like it could come off as gimmicky. Epistolary fic? Fictional documentation (journal entries/criminal records/classified files/academic essays)? Five things/five times? Script format? Second person? Future tense? YES PLEASE. Amnesia? Wingfic? Undercover gay? Telepathy? Truth spells/serums/pollens? GRABBY HANDS. I'm here for ALL OF THAT STUFF. Obviously not all of these ideas will work equally well in all fandoms, and you definitely don't have to include any of this in your fic! But if you want to? I'M THERE.
I like long plotty fics and short introspective fics, action stories and romance stories, curtainfic and gritty noir AUs. I like plot-of-the-week fics that are just like canon and 1003-word fics where characters show different sides to themselves during brief conversations. I like people who do the right thing and people who do the wrong thing, people who know what they're doing and people who don't; I like reading about people who are manipulating each other and people who are taking care of each other, people who are doing both at the same time; people who want to like each other but think they can't, and people who hate each other but wish they didn't. I'm 100% interested in OCs, worldbuilding, stories that poke holes in canon, and stories that patch holes in canon—and stories that embrace canon exactly as it is. BASICALLY I'M JUST REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO YOUR STORY, is where I'm going with this.
I'm pretty sure the rules say you aren't supposed to deanon yourself before reveals, but feel free to leave an anon comment here or send me an anon ask on Tumblr if you have questions about anything, or PM my sister
idriya; I'll try to make sure all the necessary inboxes get checked during the span of the exchange.Dark Matter (TV)
Two, Three, Four, Five
I totally missed this show while it was live—I think I watched the pilot the weekend AFTER the finale actually aired—but am fully caught up and looking forward to S2! (Just in case you aren't, I'll try to keep major spoilers confined to my letter.) I'm in this for any combination or all of the characters I've requested, and would also love to see One, Six, and/or the android, so please don't feel like you NEED to include or omit anyone just because I narrowed my request down to four characters. I love this canon for the trust issues, the found family (fractured though it may be), and the space outlaw shenanigans/corporate intrigue; I picked these four characters in particular because I think they provide the most varied selection of backstory elements, if you're interested in those.
Post-memory-loss, I would love anything about Two being a badass or what it's been like for her taking on the leadership role in a group of amnesiacs; Three being a jackass, whether he worries silently about what he used to be like/what he might have done or has firmly decided not to care; Four and his swords, what they do and don't mean to him when he can't remember where he got them or how he learned to use them; Five and what it's like remembering EVERYTHING, remembering things that do and don't belong to her. And I'd also love it if you wanted to delve into anything you're especially interested in pre-memory-loss: being on the run with Two, acquiring all those guns with Three, imperial space politics with Four, living on a space station with Five. Pairings of all sorts welcome (One/Two? One/Three? Two/Three? Anybody/Four? Anybody/Six? GO FOR IT), except Five's a bit young—please leave her out of any shipwide orgies, unless you want to timeskip forward a few years.
As I mentioned in my request, I'm most interested in this fandom for the issues of trust, identity, and forgiveness—and for the space outlaw shenanigans. :D I would love a thoughtful, introspective piece about whether you're the same person without your memories and to what degree, whether you need to take responsibility for actions you can't remember and how to do so, just as much as a fic full of banter, stealing, and punching people in the face. DO WITH THAT KNOWLEDGE WHAT YOU WILL.
Two
Two! QUEEN OF MY HEART. I love Two beating people up, her automatic assumption of leadership, how naturally the sense that the Raza and its crew are hers seems to come to her and how protective she is of them both. I love the push-pull she has going with—well, with everybody, sort of, in that she demands their trust but is slow to give her own (hiding that healed neck wound), how certain she is that they'll come back for her in 1.12 but how almost tentative she is in thanking them for it. She's doing her best to keep everything going and keep them all safe, but it's such an incredible struggle when she DOESN'T REMEMBER ANYTHING, when there's no way for her to know what part of whose past might come back to bite them next. And yet even when it's her own past with Evil Wil Wheaton, she still just powers on through it. TWO.
So! Tell me any story you like about Two. In backstory terms—how and why did she end up choosing the name Portia Lin over "Rebecca", and how might she have ended up on the Raza? (Was the crew recruited for the job of catching her and returning her to
Three
Oh, Three. /o\ Three tries not to care about people, and/or pretends not to, but is honestly pretty terrible at it, which is a character type I almost always love. I enjoy Three being rude, cracking jokes, and lugging around enormous guns that never seem to have more than one or two shots in them. And basically I just adore that he talks a lot of shit about leaving people behind/spacing adorable stowaways/shooting people in the back and taking their money, but he pretty much never does it. Which is spelled out very, very clearly by 1.07, and if you'd like to roll around some in that episode, feel free. :D Also: Charlotte's Web made him cry. Oh, Three.
I'd love all kinds of different things about Three. Again, anything you want to write about his backstory, other mercenary teams he's worked with and other jobs he's pulled; what might have happened with Catherine Moss (because I doubt it's what it looks like, even if One believes the news report); his time with Sarah (who must be a little tougher, must have a little more iron imperturbability behind all that good nature, than 1.07 maybe gave her credit for, if she put up with him for so long) or the time after—what he said to the crew of the Raza to get them to let him bring Sarah's pod on board, and whether or not they believed it—would be great. Post-stasis, there's so many things to choose from: 1.11 implies that he doesn't know his own backstory with One, but has he seriously not looked himself up at any point? (If he hasn't, is it because he doesn't want to know?) What else is left in his quarters from his previous self, besides a whole lot of guns? Did he ever go get those bullets back from Five? Does he spar with Two—even after they break off their fuckbuddy thing—or drink silently sometimes with Four, or hang out with the android late at night when he can't manage to fall asleep, telling her that her technical knowledge is boring and trying to teach her to use dirty idioms?
Four
Four! Four is obviously a little tough to get a read on, but I love how calm he is, how unflappable—even before we learned he was a crown prince, there was something kind of regal about how deliberate he was, how measured. And it would be interesting to me if some of that were kind of a subconscious holdover from his time at the imperial court, that he had these things drilled into him so far that he couldn't be wiped clean of them: that keeping silent will make other people feel a need to talk, that if you let them they'll tell you more than they planned to, that you can react any way you want inside your own head if you just make sure your face doesn't show it. (Or, conversely, keeping in mind that during Five's sessions with Four's memories, he wasn't terribly cautious and was much more talkative—maybe he's inclined to be calm, to consider things carefully, and it was life at court that was fraying him into someone drunk and loud.)
Four's backstory is SWIMMING in opportunities to do a whole lot of imperial space worldbuilding and political intrigue, if you happen to enjoy that. :D Your story should have Four in it but doesn't need to be from his POV, so if you wanted to write a gloriously scheming unreliable-narrator sort of story from his stepmother's POV, I would LOVE that. Or! Anything about his time as a child in the imperial palace, his own mother, his relationship with his half-brother or with Akita before either was fractured, the war with the Republic of Pyr, or his totally messed-up relationship with the emperor would be absolutely wonderful. Post-flight but pre-stasis, I'd be delighted with something about how he ended up on the Raza—I think it's especially interesting with Four, because he's not exactly low-profile, so I imagine they knew who he was ... or did they? Did they know but not care, because they were already in trouble with the Principality of Zairon for other reasons? Post-stasis, is he mostly interested in seeing justice done to his stepmother, or does he honestly want to dethrone his half-brother and take over (even though he knows ... basically nothing about Zairon right now)? What was going through his mind at the moment he decided to kill Akita, and when was that moment—only an instant before he did it, or did he know it would happen that way as soon as he saw it was Akita who'd come to meet him?
Five
YAY FIVE. I love Five for her eagerness and curiosity, her undeniable skill and her undeniable teenage grumpiness, her compassion and her fear. She's so honest—at least, emotionally speaking, given the thing with the bug under the table near the end of the season. It seems to me like she's the one who's the most willing to actually bring it up when she's got a problem with someone, at least until the finale, which is something the crew of the Raza definitely could use some lessons in. And I also love her struggles to figure out exactly where it is that she fits, when she's absolutely as fundamental a part of the post-stasis crew as anybody else but was a newcomer to the pre-stasis crew. Plus her hair is awesome. :D
There's actually not as much to go on with Five's backstory, I think, but I would love it if you did something with it anyway: how did she end up picking pockets on a space station in the first place? If you don't mind making a lot of stuff up, feel free to come up with any explanation you like as to what that chip/key thing she stole is for, who she stole it from, and what might happen if that person tried to come after the Raza to get it back. Technically Five was on the crew briefly pre-stasis—and I'm guessing she managed to prove she was useful, or else it's hard to believe pre-stasis Two would have wasted resources on running an extra stasis pod for her. How did she do that, and when? Post-stasis, I would happily accept a "five things Five remembered that belonged to other people, and one memory that was hers" story! Or anything else you'd like to write about her—a vignette about how close she feels to the ship, having crawled through all its vents, and the places on it she's explored that no one else has been; or her finding new ways to steal things from Three even after he bolts the vents in his quarters shut (and then one day he leaves Charlotte's Web out for her to find); or a scene where Four really does start teaching her to kick ass the way she wants. Anything!
Multiple characters
As noted, I ship all sorts of things in this fandom. I'm totally on board with Two/Three (he may have broken off the fuckbuddy thing because the virus creeped him out, but he still gave up the password first), or One/Two (oh my god, One, you are SUCH A FAILBOAT. "surprise hugs"??? SWEET JESUS), or One/Three (alternating lifesaving! Tied to the same chair! One found Three crying over Sarah's stasis pod! Also, if the farm memory really is One's—Three has a type, y/y?). I'd expect it to take a little bit more work to pair anyone up with Four, because he's so focused and restrained, but if you're up for it then by all means! And, uh, the finale obviously complicates things with Six a little bit, but I'm willing to be convinced. :D And, seriously, go as tropey as you like: Two and Three pretending to be married for a job! (Which would be equally hilarious as gen, honestly.) Pre-canon AU where One is the kind, hot, won't-take-your-shit farmperson who finds Three and nurses him back to health! One takes a bullet for Two like the doofus he is, even though Two can probably heal up a bullet wound in about ten seconds! I would also absolutely adore any sort of team gen you'd like to throw at me—a 1001-word snippet from a job-of-the-week fic with some team banter when the job goes wrong! Them saving each other or the android or helping more downtrodden miners/innocent bystanders/whatever, or getting tangled up in ever-more-complicated corporate rivalries! Or futurefic where the imperial fleet of Emperor Tetsuda is a gleaming technological marvel, led by a tiny beat-up flagship called the Raza. (Or an AU: they're steampunk mercenaries who sail the skies, and the android is half-clockwork, half-magic!) I liked this show best when these characters were funny, a little sad, totally lost, and insisting aloud that it made no sense for them to trust each other but doing it anyway when it counted; capturing any part of that dynamic would be awesome.
Dune series—Frank Herbert
Chani, Irulan Corrino
ETA: So apparently I messed up my signup and only actually entered Chani! OOPS. If you matched me on this, please enjoy my thoughts on Chani and ignore everything I said about Irulan, unless you happen to want to throw Irulan in there too. Thank you, and so sorry for my mistake!
I'm most familiar with the first three books of the series; if you've read them all, I apologize in advance for not having prompts for the later parts, and if you've only read the first book, no worries! I'm as interested in pre-canon and the first book as I am in later portions. Exhaustive attention to canonical details is absolutely appreciated, if that's your jam, but also in no way required, because the Dune universe is terrifyingly enormous. I'm at least as much in love with the overall aesthetic and feel of the books as I am with the gajillion named characters and teeny tiny worldbuilding details; if you are comfortable with either one, PLEASE do not stress over trying to also juggle the other.
And! I'm also in love with Chani and Irulan, because together they encapsulate everything that most interests me about Dune: the desert, survival, love, betrayal, politics, forgiveness, persistence, repentance. There's no need to try to shoehorn them both into a story you wanted to write about just one of them—though I'll also adore any fic where they interact! Anything about Chani, pre-canon about her early youth in the desert, growing up among the Fremen; or, in canon, teaching Paul how not to die, entering Arrakeen (had she ever been there before, maybe with Liet-Kynes?), comparing her life in the palace to life in the desert (easier in some ways—water everywhere—but surely much, much harder in others). Or about Irulan, pre-canon (and feel free to worldbuild) about her childhood on Kaitain, her interactions with the rest of the imperial family, how she learned to love books and writing (because she must, to have written so much herself—or was it just the only way she could occupy her time?); or anything about her as empress on Dune, her loneliness, her bitterness, her cruelty toward Chani, why she dedicated herself to raising Chani's children afterward. Absolutely anything you can come up with beyond this that would have them interacting, even briefly and unpleasantly, would be a delight!
I have a lot of feelings about Irulan—and Chani, but I just want to be really clear: my feelings about Irulan extend to every Irulan in every medium. If you happen to take a look at my fic or meta in Dune fandom, which is heavily influenced by miniseries!Irulan, and you think to yourself, But that is NOT book!Irulan! Is that what she's expecting???—DON'T PANIC. I will be happy with all kinds of different takes on Irulan's character! If you happen to be a miniseries fan and you'd like to draw on that as a source for info/characterization, I don't mind; if you think the miniseries barely qualifies as canon and you've deliberately never watched it, that's completely fine also. This is a bookverse request, and I'm here for bookverse Irulan! NO WORRIES. (Well, and it's less dramatic, but the same thing goes for Chani, incidentally. If you're picturing Barbora Kodetová when you describe Chani's face and smile, that's fine! If you don't know what I mean when I say that, that's fine, too.)
Chani
If it weren't for Jessica, Chani would be my favorite character in the first book hands-down (the competition gets stiffer later on). I have such a huge thing for casual everyday life-saving competence, and also for the balance Chani has to strike between looking out for Paul, not letting him just die stupidly on her watch, but also allowing him to make mistakes and getting him to understand the consequences of making them in an environment as harsh as Dune's. And it's just fascinating to me to consider the ways in which that did and didn't prepare her for life as an emperor's concubine—I mean, that she survives twelve years as an important figure in the Imperium speaks well of her ability to navigate it, but it must have been so weird. So many rules of desert living wouldn't have applied anymore, and she must have had to do all kinds of strange things that seemed totally pointless to her. But she adapted and awesomed her way through it like the fierce knife-wielding desert queen she is.
So! I'll read ALL KINDS OF THINGS about Chani. If you're comfortable filling in blanks, I'd love anything about her years as a girl in the desert—the choice of her name, her learning about ecology from Liet-Kynes or about herbalism from her mother Faroula. Anything from the early parts of the first book, too; it didn't really get into this (at least not that I recall? It's been a few years) but I LOVE the idea of Jessica and Chani spending time together while Chani was learning Bene Gesserit fighting moves, so any bit of that would be great! Or anything that comes later—you may have noticed that I'm interested in the contrast between surviving the desert as part of a Fremen sietch and surviving the Imperium as one of the most well-known women in the known universe. Honestly the degree of peril is probably about the same, but the forms it takes are so different, and so are the methods of handling them. Anything about the adjustment, Chani learning how to deal with having maidservants attending her, with not being able to just head out into the desert whenever she pleases, with having people smile to her face and then undermine her behind her back instead of just challenging her to tahaddi like they ought to—GOLD. ANY OF THAT IS GOLD. And of course I would absolutely love an AU where she lives, if you'd like to write a thousand words of that!
Irulan Corrino
Oh, Irulan. I've always wanted so very much more of Irulan than the books were ever willing to give me! I'm just fascinated by trying to imagine what Irulan's life has been like, and the juxtaposition of the things that are the most interesting about her—the number of books she wrote and the thought and effort and time she put into them, the dedication she showed in raising Paul and Chani's children and trying to protect them from Alia—and the things that are most terrible about her, the petty cruelty of what she does to Chani and how badly she handles the admittedly crushing unhappiness and loneliness of her life as Paul's empress. UGH MY HEART. Just her opening description is so great: tall, beautiful, haughty, undefeated—and trained by the Bene Gesserit. And the transition from someone who resents Chani so badly and is so jealous and unhappy to someone who "reeks of trustworthiness" and takes such good care of Chani's children is just—how? TELL ME MORE. IRULAN.
If you've skimmed the rest of this letter, you may have gleaned that I'm fond of empresses and imperial families—feel free to tell me absolutely anything you want to about Irulan's childhood, her relationships with her father and mother and sisters, what she spent her time on, what her training with the Bene Gesserit consisted of, whether she had any friends or confidants. Her "literary pretensions" are mentioned by Jessica at the end of the first book; does this mean she's already written or edited books as princess royal, as a hobby she genuinely enjoys? For slightly later canon, anything about what she's thinking as she doses Chani, or more about how she's even able to do so consistently (aren't there security measures in place to prevent that kind of thing? Or does Irulan have control over those processes, too?), or where, when, and what exactly the transition is between doing it and resolving to care for Chani's children (is she dealing with any increasingly insistent guilt right along, or is Chani's death and Paul's grief a slap in the face that makes her suddenly aware that she needs to be better?) would be amazing. I also love Leto II and Ghanima, so any kind of kidfic with them, Irulan trying to figure out how to care for children who know more than she does and are in some ways older than she is, would be STUPENDOUS.
Both of them
There's a lot of different ways to go with this, and I'd be delighted with pretty much any of them. Sticking close to canon, it's hard for me to imagine they spent twelve years living in the same palace and managed to avoid each other the whole time. So anything you can come up with where they speak at all would be lovely, even if it's just a few icy words to each other before entering a banquet hall to take their seats on either side of Paul. I'll be just as thrilled with a canon-compliant fic where they're unkind to each other as a minor AU where they interact in a moment when they didn't in canon and become even slightly friendlier toward each other. (Chani is Fremen and Irulan lives on Dune for years, so they both interact with spice—do either or both of them ever see some possible futures?) And, tbh, I will also be overjoyed by a more divergent AU that results in any sort of Irulan/Chani, even to the mildest degree—Chani lives through childbirth, because this is the future and there are doctors, and Paul does his thing and walks off into the desert and Chani and Irulan end up raising the twins together! Or Jessica and Paul were saved by some other sietch, and Chani never met him, but she comes to Arrakeen with the other fedaykin to serve him and ends up doing some weirding-way sparring with his Bene Gesserit empress. I DON'T KNOW. IT COULD HAPPEN. (And you may not have offered him, but if you're interested, Chani/Paul/Irulan is totally also on the table, here, in addition to canonical Paul/Chani or AU Paul/Irulan, if you'd like to write about either.) They're just such an interesting contrast to each other, Chani as Dune and the Fremen and the desert, and Irulan as the brilliant scheming lonely daughter of the Imperium. I mean, seriously, don't feel any need to write me an epic—but if you happen to be struck by a way to pull it off, I would absolutely love to read that!
Goblin Emperor—Katherine Addison
Arbelan Drazharan, Chenelo Drazharan, Csethiro Ceredin
This book! This book is the adorable Cinderella story of my dreams + bureaucracy and conlanging, and I'm looking forward to more fic for it SO MUCH. And I enjoyed all sorts of different things about it—so if you groove on appendices and getting all the tiny fussy details perfect, that's awesome and I totally embrace that! And if you just want to write an awesome story about elves and goblins doing politics, I'm here for that too. Don't stress about getting all the fancy elven titles exactly right if you don't enjoy that; and feel free to make some things up if you enjoy that. I'm flexible!
My character choices sort of fit a theme, and that theme is EMPRESSES. I'm interested in pretty much any story you want to tell about any, all, or any combination of these women at any point in their lives. Arbelan's youth as a noblewoman (did she ever have "friends" like Vedero? Or an earlier version of it—was there an elven equivalent to the salon gatherings of the 1700s/early 1800s, before the more steampunky "modern day"?), her marriage to Varenechibel (had she met him before they married? Spoken to him at any length?), or any episode from her time as empress or her long years away. Chenelo as a tiny goblin princess, interacting with her sisters or mother or father, or getting married to Varenechibel—was she excited to get to go see the Elflands? Were they like or unlike anything she'd heard or read about them beforehand? How did she occupy her time at Isvaroë? And for Csethiro—all the dueling lessons! Who did she get them from, and was it the same person who taught her the warrior's alphabet? Has she dueled anyone before, and if so, why? And anything you wanted to write that gives any of them an excuse to interact with each other—was Arbelan recalled to court for the emperor's wedding to Chenelo, and encountered her unexpectedly in a quiet hallway? Did Arbelan have any input in her great-niece Csethiro's upbringing, or did Csethiro ever visit her? Did a child Csethiro ever bump into Chenelo at court?
I found this book really satisfying when it came to all the characters we saw the most of, so I'm veering toward more minor characters and things the book didn't mention for Yuletide (I mean, Csethiro's not minor minor, but she's not actually in like the first two-thirds of the book). But beyond that, don't feel in any way limited by my selections—anybody who might reasonably interact with any of these characters is totally fair game. If you want to write about one of Arbelan's dinners with Maia, or Csethiro and Csoru sniping at each other through the medium of elegant court manners, or, idk, a teenage Vedero writing letters to Chenelo because one of Vedero's earliest friends' areas of interest is goblin linguistics, any of those things would be absolutely fantastic!
Arbelan Drazharan
I just have SO MANY QUESTIONS about Arbelan! She's clearly not a gigantic douche like Varenechibel, but she was married to the guy for ten years; and yet the reason cited for his reluctance to divorce her is that he hated to be seen as having made a mistake, rather than that, you know, he liked her or anything wacky like that. So it doesn't seem as though they were especially fond of each other, and yet Arbelan obviously understood how to handle being empress with him. (Surely if she'd publicly fucked anything up, that would have been seized upon as a much more palatable reason to discard her, right?) Super competent + super gracious is CATNIP to me, and I want to know so very many things about who she is and how she got to be so awesome.
SO. Anywhere you want to go with her backstory, I'll be right there with you: was she always naturally calm and kind, even as a girl—or was she rowdy, mischievous, a troublemaker, and only learned an empress's self-contained restraint because she realized she needed to? Was she initially pleased to be empress for the respect and the finery and the social power, or did she want to be empress because she wanted whatever political input she could get—or did she not want to be empress at all? How did she deal with Varenechibel? Did she know the woman who would become Empress Leshan at all? Did she want to have children—because she really did want them? Because she considered it her duty, or knew other people did?—or was she secretly almost relieved to be barren, even when it resulted in her being set aside? What did she do with herself during the thirty-plus years she was at Cethoree? Did she have companions or amusements—was she allowed a stipend she could use for patronage of artists or musicians? Did she write letters, or even entire books? And her return to court, with Maia's acknowledgment of her as zhasanai: was there anyone she competently, graciously TOTALLY LORDED THAT OVER in a very restrained way? There must have been matters for her to deal with, favors to dispense or withhold, court intrigue to catch up on! TELL ME ANY OF THAT.
Chenelo Drazharan
It's totally natural for Maia's POV to dwell on the loss of Chenelo, but I am SO SO SO much more interested in her life! She pulls on every one of my heartstrings: it seems pretty clear that she was a quiet, shy, and not especially forceful person who got jerked around by a lot of different people who didn't care about her, and leaving to live the rest of your life in a foreign country that hates you at sixteen so you can marry a guy you don't actually know who also hates you is just—awful. But she was contemplative and faithful and kind, and she did the best she was able in her own way, and basically I really want to give her a hug.
The Great Avar didn't pay much attention to her as a child, that seems obvious, but somebody must have—her mother? A nurse? Another relative? Was she at all close to her wild future-lesbian-sea-captain older sister when they were girls? Did they dream of running away to be sailors together, or was Chenelo a captive audience to Shaleän's imagination but much more realistic about herself? It's hard for me to imagine she was enthusiastic about Varenechibel himself, but was she interested in traveling to the Elflands (presumably, as a woman, not having had the chance to do much of it) or did she hate the whole idea? Varenechibel's court must have been pretty awful for her, sixteen and with so little in the way of guidance, the memory of Empress Pazhiro hanging over her—but maybe not all bad. Did she meet Nemolis or Nemriän or Nemera, or a young Vedero? Did she ever interact with any of the other part-goblins in and around the capital before she was sent away with Maia to Isvaroë? Maia remembers only bits and pieces of the religious rituals Chenelo favored, but they must have been a great comfort to her; was she able to obtain Barizheise clothing, or food, or books, too?
Csethiro Ceredin
YAY CSETHIRO. I love everything about Csethiro: her anger, her lack of subtlety, her briskness of manner, how quick she is to let go and start fresh when she realizes what Maia's deal is, how kind she is in her own very Csethiro way afterward. ("We do not wish you to be frightened of us.") She's going to be such a stupendous empress and I am SO THRILLED about that. And I love that she can pursue things like dueling and learning the warrior alphabet and yet have managed herself carefully enough to still be considered a suitable bride for the emperor—presumably with the guidance of her mother or other older women she knows, which I would absolutely love to see.
Other things I would love to see! As with the other two women, anything about her childhood growing up in House Ceredada—those extensive dance lessons when she was five, maybe. (Did her parents have to buy her cooperation, using the dueling lessons? Or were dance and dueling valuable preparations for each other, both being concerned with timing, balance, and attentiveness to a partner's motions?) Is it traditionally acceptable, if no longer the done thing, to teach noble girls dueling, and it's just that most of them give it up? Did she have to go to a special effort to learn the warriors' alphabet, or is it something she's supposed to know but not necessarily expected to use? And anything, ANYTHING, about her disastrous forced acquaintance with Csoru would be gold. :D (I like Csoru too—I'm okay with Csethiro's POV disliking her, but not with the narrative disliking her, if that's a distinction that makes sense to you?) Anything set during the book would also be wonderful: her perspective on the beginning parts she isn't there for, or at least whatever filters to her via court gossip, or one of those dance lessons she gives Maia, or basically anything from her POV about navigating their relationship and marriage (including futurefic!). ANYTHING.
Multiple characters
As far as pairings go, Csethiro&Maia platonic BFF marrieds fic and Csethiro/Maia marriage-of-convenience fic are both totally welcome for Csethiro. I find it hard to believe anybody who'd describe Varenechibel as a "killing frost" was super happy to be married to him, though, and the less time spent dwelling on his treatment of Chenelo, the better for my blood pressure, so I'd prefer that he not take up much time in fic about Arbelan or Chenelo, if you can manage it. As noted, I'd love anything that maneuvers things such that Csethiro visits her great-aunt (before her reinstatement might be tough, after's fine too!), or Arbelan starts writing letters to the other wife of Varenechibel he shoved off to some estate in the middle of nowhere, or Chenelo meets a very tiny Csethiro. If you feel like wandering a little further from canon, I would absolutely adore a snippet of an AU where Chenelo doesn't die and is dragged back to court along with Maia when the Wisdom of Choharo crashes, and becomes empress dowager, and makes friends with Arbelan, and Csethiro tries to find a way to connect with her and ends up teaching her swordhandling. /o\ I JUST THINK THAT WOULD BE SO GREAT.
Hellboy (Movies)
Any (Hellboy, John Myers, Liz Sherman, Nuada)
Oh, these movies! No matter what you think of the writing, Guillermo del Toro is so fantastic at establishing and maintaining an aesthetic, and I am ALL OVER THAT for these movies. (Superpowers + angst + banter) * obscure creepy awe-inspiring beings and magic hiding just under the surface of ordinary things, raised to the power of RON PERLMAN = YESSSSSSS. ALL OF THAT, PLEASE. I love this fandom for the humor and the wonder, the beautiful and the ugly and the both-at-once, the awful and the incredible. Also, Ron Perlman.
SO. I'd love basically anything about any one of these characters or any part of canon. The movies fast-forward over Hellboy's youth, but I would love it if you didn't (gangly teenage Hellboy! COME ON)! Any sort of missing scene or between-movie tag from his POV, what it felt like to see those visions of his Anung-un-Rama potential and turn away, the sadness of killing that forest god—or how many kittens he has, what he's named them, and where he got them. :D For Myers, had he ever had any supernatural experiences before? What was he thinking when he followed Hellboy into high-speed traffic, or woke up chained to that rock? What's he been up to in Antarctica? For Liz, the first movie shows us the event that set off her powers, but not the aftermath during her teenage years—if you'd like to dive in, be my guest! Anything pre-canon about her recruitment or first meeting Hellboy or Bruttenholm, or the experience of really letting her power loose, or what it was like to be dead, or anything from her POV at all, really. And for Prince Nuada (and feel free to include Nuala in anything with Nuada, if you like)—the long, long life he's lived, the cities and civilizations and wonders he's seen rise and fall and be forgotten, the wild and beautiful and terrible magical realm: give me ANY OF THAT and I'll love it. Team gen, casefic, Hellboy/Liz, Hellboy/John, or anyone fighting with Nuada for a thousand words would also be fantastic!
One of my favorite things about these movies (besides the banter and Ron Perlman) is how they portray magic, and I can only convey how that comes through to me with overly dramatic lists of opposing adjectives: that it's wonderful and awful, beautiful and tentacular, astounding and lethal, delightful and terrifying. I am SO EASY for that particular flavor of wildly weird, spectacularly colorful magical world, and also for the way del Toro likes to juxtapose it with the nonmagical world: hag garbage ladies, elven smiths next to subway tunnels—and federal agents who have red stone hands and set themselves on fire. :DDDDDDDDDDDD YES PLEASE.
Hellboy
HB! Hellboy hits so very, very many of my buttons: wanting to belong but not being able to, helping people who would be afraid of him if they knew he was there, all that delicious angst buried under defense mechanisms and snarky banter. AND THEN free will! Turning his back on phenomenal cosmic power because he knows it's not good, because he refuses to fall for your pretentious Faustian bullshit! AND THEN refusing to continue working for people who consider him a monster, deciding not to let himself be used! YESSSSSSSSS. And I'm also really easy for characters who get beaten up and hurt and tired, and still keep hauling themselves back to their feet and fighting some more. So basically I pretty much love Hellboy beyond all reason. :D
I'll enjoy anything about any part of Hellboy's life, pretty much—I love tiny scrawny Hellboy listening eagerly to Professor Broom's stories just as much as I love the BPRD, or futurefic about what Hellboy does afterward (and if you'd like to draw on comics canon, you certainly can! Though of course you don't have to). Anything about Hellboy's youth, about the first magical thing he fights or evil he has to stop, about his integration into the BPRD (did Professor Broom fight it, wanting to keep Hellboy safer than BPRD agents typically are, or did he encourage it, hoping to give Hellboy something to fight for/believe in, a place where he might potentially belong?), or any snippet of casefic/missing movie scene/movie tag would be excellent! As would anything about what you imagine happening in the rest of Hellboy's life, or any sort of fork-in-the-road AU that has to do with him: if he hadn't ever joined the BPRD, what would he be doing? If you'd like to go creepy—if he had given in and become Anung-un-Rama? Or if the BPRD had decided to go public (and honestly I would really love that—I liked Golden Army fine, and I love Hellboy for leaving when he felt it was time, but overall I prefer the BPRD as an island-of-misfit-toys that really does back up and take care of its agents as best it can, rather than as a bureaucratic machine that ultimately fails to truly value difference).
John Myers
Oh, Myers. I love love love Myers's arc, how he's basically a hapless dweeb at the beginning, that he's got juuuuuust enough iron in him to stick with it even though Hellboy starts out trying to scare him off, that he tries so hard and jumps right in even though basically every single thing he meets after joining the BPRD could kill him without breaking a sweat. And it's so cheesy, but I have to admit I also adore the whole "pure of heart" thing—especially that he denies it, because people who would feel confident that they're pure of heart aren't pure of heart. MAN DO I EVER LOVE THAT. /o\ And he also gets knocked around a lot but keeps fighting anyway, which, as noted, is a character trait I love. (SO HARD TO TALK ABOUT without accidentally quoting "Tubthumping"!)
So I will enjoy anything you want to tell me about John T. Myers. Any previous encounters with the supernatural—ones he maybe only recognizes in retrospect once he joins the BPRD? Anything from his POV about the first movie, or missing scenes, or a snippet of casefic set between movies; him learning more about the BPRD, its history, any other agents working there, etc. is all interesting to me! Or anything post-movie, whether you want to embrace Golden Army and tell me what John was doing in Antarctica, or you want to rewrite a bit of it with John still working at the BPRD proper, or you want to ignore it completely and give me other BPRD shenanigans with Myers. And of course any other sort of fork-in-the-road story that doesn't have to do with Golden Army at all: if Myers hadn't been placed in the BPRD, might he still have gotten caught up in supernatural shenanigans anyway? (Is there anything out there that has a use or a taste for pure hearts, and might have come after him whether he's BPRD or not?) Also, I should probably say that while I don't mind following up on the Antarctica line at all, I like to think of Myers as doing well at the BPRD and getting along with Hellboy/Liz/Abe/whoever—if you do have him go to Antarctica, please don't make it because he was incompetent, or because the team disliked him, or because he disliked the team. The first movie doesn't seem to support that idea, IMO, and I'd rather not ignore that just because Doylist casting issues forced a Watsonian throwaway line to explain his absence. Yeah, he's kind of a tool; but he's a good guy and I like him!
Liz Sherman
LIZ. I adore Liz so much—and yes, I know, the "these powers are a curse and I just want to be normal" thing is SO overdone these days, but LIZ IS STILL AWESOME. I like her bitterness and defensiveness, the way she tries to protect herself with an almost aggressive apathy and the ways in which that does and doesn't work for her. And I actually kind of love that her bitterness is so valid! I feel like a lot of characters who fit Liz's same sort of type are bitter and sarcastic and distancing because ... I don't know, because that makes them seem ~cooler or they have commitment issues or there's some kind of single incident in their backstory that messed them up. But Liz is distancing because she could LITERALLY BURN YOU ALIVE if she isn't careful, which actually is pretty goddamn scary.
For Liz I would enjoy anything about her early years of trying to figure her powers out—which I realize could make for a very unpleasant story, so all I ask is that it end on a note that allows for hope/potential. And of course I would also love absolutely anything about her time at the BPRD, both before and during the movies: the first time she joined up, her decision to leave, what it was like for her when she first arrived at the facility and how she grew comfortable there, coming back, all of it. What do her powers feel like to her? Is it a relief to set things on fire, like stretching a stiff muscle, but easy enough to stop, or does it feed on itself like anger, so that it's a strain to choke back? There's a lot of (totally earned) angst for her, but have there also been times when she's loved her power—when it's been not just useful for incinerating eldritch horrors, but beautiful, fun, a thing that's made her happy? And, of course, any sort of futurefic about what she does after leaving the BPRD would be absolutely wonderful!
Nuada
... Gosh, this paragraph is going to sound so very different from the others. I can't exactly claim to love Nuada, I bail off that train at the point where he murders people with bone-eating hell fairies; but I do find him REALLY interesting as a character, and I would love something that delves deep into his point of view, that captures him as non-human, ancient, uncompromising—inflexible, perhaps, and almost certainly cruel, though of course his genuine affection for Nuala exists right alongside his willingness to raise the Golden Army and slaughter thousands (millions? Billions?) of people with it. I'm always kind of magnetically fascinated by antagonists who are so certain, who have clear convictions that they're doing what's best/most just/necessary, and Nuada is one of them.
So! I'll enjoy anything that really makes use of Nuada's POV. His perspective on just about anything would be fascinating, I think, and when I say "anything" for him that covers a LOT of ground, because he's been alive for so long. What was he like when he was younger, when the world was newer? Was there really a time when humans got on with magical beings, in the beginning? What was that like? Did Nuada know and like any humans, or did he always dislike us, even before we stopped believing and wrecked the planet? If you enjoy worldbuilding, there is so. much. space. pre-canon for you to do almost anything you want with both elven society and the magical realms of the "sons of earth" more generally. Why is it Clan Bethmoora that rules—what other elven clans are there, and were any of them ruling in the past instead? If so, when and why did the crown pass to King Balor? What other magical societies are there—did Nuada perhaps travel among them during his self-imposed exile, or was he alone (except perhaps for Mr. Wink)? In a certain sense, his exile could never be complete no matter how far he went, since he always had that connection to Nuala—what did that feel like? What did her unhappiness, her fear, her disagreement, feel like to him, and did it mean anything to him that the one person who knew him and presumably understood him the best kept trying to stop him? If you'd like to go AU, futurefic, and a little post-apocalyptic: what would the world look like if he'd succeeded? What would the rest of the characters be doing in that world?
Multiple characters
I'm into the canonical pairings—which I would say are Hellboy/Liz and also Nuala/Abe, if you feel like sliding that in somewhere in the background, and if you felt like there was a bit of a Nuada/Nuala vibe in Golden Army, too, I won't talk you out of it. :D And I would also love Hellboy/John or John/Liz, though in both cases please deal kindly with the third party (or solve it with Hellboy/John/Liz, if you like!). If you'd like to try Nuada/anybody but Nuala, I think it would take some serious work but I won't say no if you're up for it! For the BPRD team, honestly pretty much any supernatural trope would be entirely welcome: truth spells (or lie spells, for that matter), somebody getting nabbed by ~critters (and this is another spot where John's pure heart could come into play, if that's not just a phrase but a magical feature) and needing a rescue, amnesia, accidental (demon) baby acquisition, all sorts of hurt/comfort—seriously, knock yourself out! I would also be delighted with team gen in this fandom, or team mostly-gen with pairing hints hanging out in the background: any sort of snippet of casefic, Hellboy and Liz being sarcastic at each other while Abe and Myers try to actually get some work done, or them all hanging out in the BPRD building after a case, tending each other's minor wounds and exhaustedly eating takeout (which Liz reheats periodically, of course). And I threw Abe and Nuala in there just because they're around in the movies—I know they weren't nommed, no need to include them! But you can if you'd like, and that goes for Professor Broom, Clay, Manning—anybody. I LOVE EVERYBODY IN THIS BAR.
Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
Ravenna, Snow White
I will probably keep asking for this movie from now until doomsday, I'm just so entranced with everything about it. I enjoy the strength of its focus on Snow White and Ravenna SO MUCH. They're two sides of a coin in so many ways, different and opposing but to my mind equally deserving of attention. I love Snow White's quiet goodness and steadiness, her bravery, the way she reaches out and builds bridges, just as much as I love Ravenna's bitterness and determination, her blazing hateful anger, her terrible deep unhappiness. Anything about either or both of them will be an amazing and wonderful gift!
Anything you want to do with either of their backstories would be wonderful—Ravenna's earlier years, how long she's lived, when and from whom she learned magic (or did she figure it out herself: clawing the power to her a bit at a time through trial and error, or intuitively, naturally, obsidian forming out of the air to cut people who hurt her to shreds?); Snow White's childhood as a princess, interacting with her mother or father or a tiny William, what she thought of Ravenna's arrival. Any sort of missing scene from either one of their POVs—and feel free to get creepy, if you want to pull some unreliable narration from Ravenna's perspective! Or post-canon: absolutely anything about Queen Snow White, her early rule and advisers, the kingdom's recovery. If you'd like to AU the end so Snow White spares Ravenna, I would love that; and ladyslash is 100% encouraged, whether you want to go creepy with Ravenna's obsession with Snow White's heart, or you'd like to straight-up let Snow White forge some kind of connection with Ravenna that allows them to be—not friends, perhaps, but fundamentally understood by each other in a way they can't quite get with anyone else. ANYTHING.
I've received absolutely lovely stories for this movie TWICE, but am asking for it again because I'm just that weird about it. /o\ I love that Ravenna and Snow White are the ones who truly drive the story, that in a certain sense their relationship is really the one that's central to the film (despite its title, and despite how awesome the huntsman is!). I love that Snow White is good—like, Good good—without that in any way diminishing her badassery/awesomeness. (Of course, I pretty much always think being Good good is badass, and have never been fond of the idea that it makes a character inherently boring, annoying, or self-righteous.) And I also love that the movie actually takes the time to give us an idea of why Ravenna is the way she is and does the things she does, instead of her just ... ~being evil~, the end. Also, I absolutely like William and the huntsman, and I realize that they (and Finn, too) might very well come into the responses to some of these prompts—that's totally okay.
Ravenna
Ravenna is just SO INTERESTING to me, I could go on about her all day. And I realize she's totally awful and does terrible things to a whole bunch of people—please don't feel like you need to ignore, erase, or minimize that in my gift. I'm interested in all kinds of things about her, in both the distance she places between herself and other people (except maybe Finn) and the distance that is placed there simply because of who she is: her magic and the way it works, her sheer age, the too many lives she's lived and too many lives she's ended. And it fascinates me that she is in so many ways her own worst fear, that the very effects she causes and brings along in her wake (disease, old age, ugliness, death) are the same things she herself is running from. That she can acknowledge that she's lived too long but can't bring herself to die—that she almost needs Snow White to kill her, because how else will she ever end?—is so terrible, and I feel tremendous sympathy for her, and then she WEARS BIRD SKULLS and STABS PEOPLE. /o\ THAT'S NOT GOING TO HEAL YOUR EMOTIONAL WOUNDS, RAVENNA. STOP IT.
I'm actively interested in creepy fic in this fandom, so if you're hoping to write some, feel free to write it about Ravenna! Her relationship with the mirror is a gold mine: is she hallucinating, or is Finn—is Ravenna the only one who can see the reality of the mirror, or the only one who can't? When and how did she acquire it, or did she make it? (And if so—what was the process? D:) More generally, if you'd like to do a little worldbuilding, how long has she been alive? Where else in the world has she lived/ruled/sucked the life out of people? Are there places where she's a myth, a legend, a ghost story? Anything in her perspective during the movie would be wonderful, from her viewpoint when Snow White is a child to watching Snow White charge up the beach in armor, coming to kill her. Deathfic is also okay here, either dealing with Ravenna's canonical death or if you'd like to go AU and let her succeed in cutting Snow White's heart out—just please keep the description spare if you go that route! I prefer psychological horror to gore. And I would be equally delighted by anything post-canon where they both survive!
Snow White
Snow White! As I mentioned above, I really hate the idea that goodness = weakness, and so the way the movie blatantly pairs Snow White's goodness and strength, that her mother explicitly wishes for it, would probably have been enough all by itself to make me love Snow White, even if I hated the rest of the movie. (AND THEN I DIDN'T, OBVIOUSLY. BUT ANYWAY.) I love how much Snow White cares about everybody and everything she meets, how hard she tries to connect in the little ways—and honestly that she still tries at all, that that's still her instinct after being locked up in a cell for half her life, is extraordinary in and of itself. I love love love her shouting right back at that bridge troll, making herself heard (discovering that she can make herself heard, after so many years knowing that no one cared if she screamed or cried or shouted for help). And I love the slow progression of her choices, that she starts out just wanting to get away, and then it turns into wanting to go back, wanting to raise an army, wanting to retake her throne and become the goddamn queen. YES.
So I'll take absolutely anything about Snow White! Something about her childhood, a quiet pleasant time with Queen Eleanor before her death, what she thought when King Magnus came home with Ravenna in tow. Or anything set during the movie, her thoughts about the dwarves or the fairies or the hart (did she know any of those were real before she met them? Had she ever been told—or made up—stories about them?), how incredible it was to be outside again for real (sleeping on the ground: more or less uncomfortable than her cell, and, if less, did she not even care?), how it felt to see William again or an argument with the huntsman or what it was like to come back from the dead. What was she thinking as she fought Ravenna in the castle, or when she killed her, or immediately afterward? If your taste runs toward creepy, what might happen in a post-canon universe where she keeps Ravenna's mirror? If your taste runs toward bureaucracy and political finagling, tell me ALL about the arrangements Snow White needs to make to help the kingdom recover from the famine (any other kingdoms she can call on for aid? Allies of her father's—or new ones she needs to make her own deals with?) And if your taste runs toward the long game: as "life itself", what's the effect of Snow White's rule, and how long does it last? Was that line a hint that she's somehow ageless—would she rule forever, or would she do it for a while, 'til everything was better, and then pass the reins to someone else and go travel the world/live with the trolls/become some small town's hedgewitch?
Both of them
I would adore absolutely anything that has these women interacting, whether hatefully, platonically, both, or neither. A missing scene from the movie where Ravenna and the child Snow White speak to each other for a little longer than they did onscreen, or Ravenna visiting Snow White's cell to taunt her, or something that ventures a little further from canon—what if Ravenna had pulled the crow thing again to go speak to Snow White the night before the attack on the castle? Or you could go entirely AU and let them both live through the end of the movie: if Snow White chose to spare Ravenna, would Ravenna be relieved—or would she be upset, terrified of living any longer, of aging, of dying? If you'd like to reinterpret the "have her heart" line such that Snow White can keep Ravenna as she is without Ravenna having to kill her, I would LOVE something about them remaining, two immortal queens, inherently distanced from everyone else and thereby closer to each other. And basically any tack you'd like to take with ladyslash would be 100% okay with me, whether you want to go creepy with Ravenna's obsession (though please no actual sexual assault!), or commit to any kind of redemption arc: in an AU with different timing, Ravenna is married to King Magnus's armored daughter instead of him, and tells herself every day that she's going to kill the princess that night, but never quite can; or Snow White spares Ravenna and, following a hunch, takes her to see the white hart. Anything!
So that was incredibly long and I apologize, but I hope that if nothing else, it's clear that I love all of these fandoms and all of these characters a completely ridiculous amount, and I'll enjoy whatever it is you want to write about them. I'm so glad we matched on one (or more) of them! I hope you have a great time writing and you get a great gift yourself—have a wonderful Yuletide!
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Date: 2015-10-20 01:19 am (UTC)So, okay, in order by my character requests, let's start with Two: I love Two. (True story: I bought a pair of heels for a wedding and then had to learn to walk in them, and I sucked at it until I said to myself, "Self, walk like Two," and then it worked and I stopped turning my ankles every third step and also I felt like a badass.) I read Two's reaction to Five pre-stasis and Two's reaction to Five post-stasis as coming from exactly the same place: it's just that pre-stasis, Five isn't Crew but rather poses a danger to Crew (using up additional resources! Needing to be cared for/hidden/otherwise looked out for when they are out on dangerous jobs! Might slow them down! Being looked for by someone who might not be happy with the Raza for sheltering her! NOT GOOD), and post-stasis, Five is Crew. And Two will put up with a lot for Crew, I think, which is so—I mean, I cannot overemphasize how iddy that kind of loyalty thing is for me. /o\ Especially coming from a reserved strong silent type who otherwise tries to ignore feelings. AND THEN we found out her whole backstory thing about how she was constructed and Evil Wil Wheaton was a COMPLETE CREEP, and her wanting to GTFO and not caring if she hurt people who'd hurt her (because they totally "ran tests" on her the first time around too, yeaugh) was being taken as proof of something WRONG WITH HER BRAIN (NO. NO, IT'S PROOF OF SOMETHING RIGHT WITH HER BRAIN, YOU CIRCULAR-SAW-WIELDING ASSHOLE), and it was all so awful. And so—I mean, we have no idea what order any of these people originally joined the crew of the Raza in. I hypothesized up there that the crew had already been formed and sent after her, but it's also totally possible that she's the one who started it, she escaped and stole the ship from Evil Wil Wheaton or something (it was a prototype, even, which is why everybody keeps talking about how fast it is) and then found the others one by one. But EITHER WAY I suddenly see that as her, like, being the change she wants to see, building this Crew thing around herself the way she thinks it should be, because it shouldn't be Evil Wil Wheaton and strapping people down when they don't want to be strapped down and cutting them up, it shouldn't be any of the things she experienced as Rebecca. Crew should be like this, taking care of people and killing other people to keep them safe and always coming back for them and trusting them. And so either she comes into the Raza's crew and makes it like that, or else she forms the Raza's crew up around herself with those rules. Except then the contradictions start: she wants them to trust each other, and to trust her, because it makes it easier for her to take care of them, because that's how it should be (because there should be somebody there who you know won't cut you open with a saw, there should be somebody there who'll stop other people from cutting you open with a saw); but at the same time it's so hard for her to do, so much easier to point out the speck in her brother's eye and pretend there's no plank in her own. Which is also kind of tied up in the feelings thing, because in order to unpack why it's hard for her to trust anybody, she'd have to face up to not wanting to, being afraid to, but she's the leader and she can't let herself have cracks where other people can see her. /o\ TWO. And then! Finding out she's synthetic suddenly means she can't trust herself, she can't trust herself with her Crew—I read the things she was saying about her thoughts being her own and all that as maybe 30% existential crisis and 70% OH SHIT WHAT IF I PULL A WENDY. I CAN'T PULL A WENDY. I WOULD SPACE MYSELF BEFORE PULLING A WENDY ON MY CREW. And I am a sucker for people taking care of other people so hard they push them away because THEY THEMSELVES ARE THE GREATEST DANGER. /o\ help me I'm such a cliché
(Probably ALL OF THIS will be jossed, and we're going to find out that when they had their memories the crew of the Raza professionally tolerated each other and that's it. *sticks fingers in ears* LALALA.)
SO. One is a doofus, like I said, but I actually sort of love him with Two just because he's so open: he's a shit liar and he just—blurts out what he's thinking like half the time and he wears his feelings all over not just his sleeve but like his entire SHIRT, like TATTOOED ON HIS FACE. Which I think Two is a little contemptuous of but also maybe is into more than she'd like to admit, and that is ADORABLE to me. (Seriously, though, One: surprise hugs? SURPRISE HUGS? You're lucky your ARMS are still attached. /o\) She even actually admits out loud that she's hesitant to bang him because she could totally fall in love with him (we all know what "complicated" means, come on), which I say speaks volumes when it's Two. ♥ BUT THEN I also love Two/Three, because Three is, like, trying to be Two but totally failing—he tries to be detached and a douche and make decisions like a stone-cold self-interest-assessing utilitarian decision-making machine, and he sucks at it. So Two's all "it's simple with a guy like that," except then IT'S NOT, NOT AT ALL, because he's nearly as bad as she is about the whole loyalty-caretaking thing (and I'll save more of my thoughts on that for his section). And then Four! TWO HAVING THEM GO BACK FOR FOUR. (Yeah, yeah, they were all, "Once he's emperor he'll be super useful." WHATEVER, GUYS, YOU LIKE HIM. YOU DON'T WANT HIM TO DIE ALONE ON THAT CRAPPY PLANET. JUST ADMIT IT.) Like, she really doesn't interact with him much that we see, but even just the minimum of him being there and traveling with them, slicing up hapless security guards for them, is Crew enough to risk the ship. And it is a risk, I would say, because what assurance does she have that Four's half-brother doesn't have a dozen ships hiding behind that system's sun, waiting to blow them up for harboring Four? NONE. SHE HAS NONE ASSURANCE. And Five! I love Two watching out for Five—watching out for Five so hard it scares Five, and don't tell me Two wasn't remembering the way Five looked at her after the casino episode when Circular-Saw-Wielding Asshole was going on about something being wrong with her brain. /o\ I love the arc of Two and Five, Five freaking out and avoiding Two until Two's in danger from the virus and then hugging her, Five being so upset to hear Two talking about killing a crewmember that she wasn't thinking straight. (That's my favored explanation for how Five loses it over that stupid bug even though a) it apparently totally failed to record the whole conversation, unless that was the show deliberately trying to keep the context secret from the viewer, and b) FIVE. TWO DOESN'T EVEN REMEMBER HAVING THAT CONVERSATION. SHE DOESN'T EVEN KNOW WHY SHE MIGHT HAVE WANTED TO KILL ANYBODY. FIVE. YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE SMART.) I honestly might even ship that in a Maleficent/Aurora, Xena/Gabrielle kind of way. /o\ And then Six, who honestly barely speaks to Two most of the time, but he's quiet and level-headed, doesn't splatter feelings everywhere like One or deliberately antagonize people like Two, isn't as distant and self-contained as Four, is more sensible than Five—I think Six is just plain dependable, to Two, and if he really did screw them over I don't want to see her face when she finds out. :( :( :( :( :( And then THE ANDROID. :D I adore the friendship between Two and the android, how much Two relies on the android, and then the android going into Evil Wil Wheaton's facility for Two is just, MY HEART. /o\ I mean that prompt about Two and the android talking about what it's like to be a constructed person SO HARD, because the android has already proven she has feelings about her own identity, about personhood and emotion and attachment, about whether affection directed toward her is valid, about whether affection she directs toward others is valid (if it is affection—what makes it so? Can she rightly call it that? Why or why not? Does she have a self in any way separate from her programming? Does it matter?) So honestly I probably ship that too. /o\ OOPS.
And so basically I'm interested in EVERYTHING to do with Two. Creepy fic with scenes from her construction and original testing (that ends in her getting away!), and the immediate aftermath—did she have a plan? Did she just kill everybody and run like hell? Did she steal the Raza from Dwarf Star Technologies? Or did she steal something else of theirs to get away, and then do ... what? Count cards? Join Fight Club? Something for money, to obtain the Portia Lin identity, etc. Did she join up with the crew of the Raza of her own volition, looking for a place where someone with violent urges and a brain flaw (IT'S LIES, TWO, YOU'RE PERFECT JUST THE WAY YOU ARE) might fit in? Were they contacted by Dwarf Star and sent after her, except she nearly kicked their asses and they decided they preferred to have her on their side so screw Dwarf Star? (And really, we have no idea what order the crew joined up in—if they existed before Two joined them, was it all of them, or did some of them join up before her and some after? Were there other members of the crew to start with, but Two gave them the boot because they failed her somehow/didn't live up to her standards for Crew?) Did they have any idea she was synthetic? Did they guess she was, but knew better than to ask/bring it up? How does her relationship with any of them now compare to her relationships with them before—contrast them with a flash forward-flash back setup, maybe? (Obviously this would be making stuff up, it could go any way you liked.) My personal theory regarding the bug conversation, incidentally, is that she'd figured out about Derrick Moss replacing Jace Corso, and wasn't going to permit a threat to Crew (even if she HATED Marcus Boone, I would argue); but that doesn't mean it's the answer! Was she really talking about Six? Had she somehow discovered that, say, he'd made a deal with the GA to get himself immunity for the space station bombing in exchange for him bringing down the Raza? And post-stasis, seriously, any missing scene or episode tag or anything would be great. Does the Raza itself feel intuitively familiar, or just the controls? What about her quarters? The weight room? How exactly did she work out that deal with Mikkei to save the miners? Did she ever look herself up once they were linked to a station? What are the details of Portia Lin's crimes (and given the bullshit we've already seen the GNN anchor spouting, does the reality differ from the official reports?)? Does Two ever talk with Six—spar with Four—drink with Three? (Can she actually get drunk, or do her nanites clear her system immediately? Is it just that she's more relaxed and happier when her Crew is relaxed and happy, which is almost as good?) I would love any ridiculous tropey fuckbuddies-to-lovers story where she and Three are simultaneously ignoring their own feelings because as long as they pretend not to have any they can keep banging; or where she needs to pretend to be married to anyone (One! Four! Six! THE ANDROID); or where someone hurts her Crew or takes her Crew hostage and she wrecks them; or hurt/comfort where she's all frustrated because her nanites heal her but she can't do anything to fix anybody else (... or can she, if she wants to badly enough? With the android's help, could she find a way to tell her nanites what she wants them to do?). What exactly are the limits of her physical strength? Any deliriously awesome story about her, you know, punching her way through duracrete or whatever to save people and kick ass would be great. TWO.
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Date: 2015-10-20 03:11 pm (UTC)I also thought about how on earth Two convinced Truffault to help so quickly! my thought is def sex :D
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Date: 2015-10-20 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-20 01:32 pm (UTC)I would absolutely love some One/Three, they have a hilarious dynamic and they probably interact more often than any two other characters on the show (which I'm judging the writers for just a smidge—the two white guys have the most lines and screentime! WHAT A COINCIDENCE—but it does give us a lot to work with). I LOVE the tied-to-a-chair together, the banter, the lifesaving tally; One letting his own safer grip go to get close enough to reach Three gave me so many feelings, and Three shooting those zombies was inexpressibly hot. THEY FELL ASLEEP ON EACH OTHER. And they touch each other an awful lot, too—the scene when Three finds Sarah dead and then One comes in, how close they stand to each other, and all the shirt-pulling and staring when they're hypoxic, and One thinking about shooting Three but saving his life instead, I just. I CAN'T. /o\ YOU DWEEBS. And Two! I already talked a bunch about Two/Three, but yes, the loyalty thing plus expecting not to develop any feelings and then discovering OOPS, the other person is actually smart and hot and dependable and a little sad, oh, my heart. The show doesn't give nearly as much of a jumping-off point for Four/Three or Four&Three, but it's adorable to me how impressed Three is with Four's badassery, that Four is the person he approaches about the vault door and when he wants to try to take over the ship, that he mentions Four's sense of honor but doesn't seem to think Four's stupid for it (even though he normally makes a show of his disdain for that kind of stuff). And I would love some Five&Three, for sure, though not so much Five/Three—I LOVED Five stealing Three's bullets and Three sealing his vent shut so she couldn't do it again. I adore their gentle antagonism: they make a lot of faces at each other and disagree with each other a lot, but stuff like Three trying to pour Five a cup of booze when nobody else wants to let her drink and the way he defends her to the other mercenary crew ("Still think she's not up to it?") makes me think he'd be horrified by his past self throwing her in the airlock. (Even if Marcus Boone was only kidding, he seems a little crueler than Three is, if I can draw that line.) I know I've mentioned this like three times, but I'd love them bonding over Charlotte's Web, or Three defending Five either verbally or physically (and then perhaps Five defending Three, though that's likely to be verbally unless she's got a shock stick). Basically I just really enjoy Three as Five's annoying older brother. ♥ I don't think Three and Six actually interact much, but I wouldn't mind in the least if you wanted to change that—I imagine Six as typically calm, thoughtful, knowing, and vaguely amused by Three, which I'm sure Three finds extremely annoying. :D There's also not much to jump off for Three/Six, but I wouldn't mind in the least getting to see them have a conversation about doing bad things, whether doing good things afterward can ever be enough to make up for it—Three perhaps not wanting to know the specifics of what his past self did, and Six unable to forget what he learned while he was trying to find Five in their memories. And the android! I am ALL OVER Three's grudging affection for the android, his attitude that robots are creepy but she's their robot. /o\ YES. GIVE ME ALL THE BELONGING TO THIS FOUND FAMILY, PLEASE. I would love anything where Three is his Threeiest (slinging around dirty slang, making jokes, saying unkind things he doesn't mean) and the android is her androidiest (politely not getting it at ALL ♥).
And I am interested—unsurprisingly—in all kinds of things about Three! I'm repeating myself, but I would love to know more about the other teams he worked with before coming to the Raza, how his interactions with them shaped him into a harder version of himself and then Sarah warmed him into a (slightly) softer one. Three taking care of a sick person would be both sweet and HILARIOUS, because I feel EXTREMELY SURE that his bedside manner is nothing to write home about, and I imagine him trying hard but not always succeeding (he probably had to cook for them both! /o\) and then sometimes succeeding REALLY WELL (when he let himself, at the moments Sarah was the most tired and in pain, weary and unhappy—I think Three could unexpectedly be excellent. Like, I'm expecting it, but he wouldn't be expecting it of himself, I think). And Five's best guess is that the farm memory with the gooseberry pie belongs to One, but what if it were Three's? Is that why he knows how to chop wood and take care of Sarah's house and land while she's ill? AND THEN did he join up with the Raza and have to convince them to let him bring Sarah's stasis pod aboard? (It doesn't seem to have its own power supply, so maybe it couldn't have gone that way, unless a portable supply could be temporarily attached to it at times?) How did he do that? Or was he the one who started it all, bought or stole the Raza, installed a stasis pod in the middle of the ship's vault for Sarah, planned to build up a team and take jobs nobody else could or would do so he could make enough money to try to help Sarah? EITHER WAY I'M ON BOARD. Did he tell the truth to the rest of the crew, pre-stasis? Lie to them? ("She owes me money.") Did they believe him or not? If Two was in charge, how did he convince her to let him plop a stasis pod in the middle of her vault—are his shooting skills so good that he could say "I won't join up unless—" and she'd go along, his usefulness enough to outweigh it? Back when he remembered both the code to the vault and that Sarah was in there, did he go visit her regularly? Or did he stay away, to help himself be the meaner version of himself that he needed to be? (Did pre-stasis Five ever find out she was in there, and start visiting her herself even without knowing the whole story?) He doesn't seem to have his whole enormous passel of guns on him when Sarah finds him, so he must have acquired some of them during his time on the Raza—which ones, and where did he get them? Did he have the habit of naming them pre-stasis? Does he have favorites, an older one he's had longest and loves particularly? (And I sort of love the idea that he's so impressed with the size and function of that huge pulse-gun that he stubbornly hangs onto it even though it only seems to be able to fire about twice per charge. /o\ THREE. THREE, IT'S JUST NOT THAT USEFUL.) And then post-stasis—I would LOVE to see Three first discovering all his guns ("Oh, yeah. These are definitely my quarters."), naming or re-naming them (or did he find a list his past self kept, matching gun makes up with names?), discovering he's got the muscle memory to clean them as long as he doesn't focus too hard on what he's doing, that he doesn't know the words for the parts but can take them apart and put them back together in under thirty seconds. And then basically anything with Three yelling about how he doesn't care about anyone while shooting other people for them/letting himself get beat up for them/etc. would just be BLISS. :D
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Date: 2015-10-20 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-20 03:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-20 04:23 pm (UTC)also yeaaaaah, so much of the existing fic is One/Three blackmail-sex that clearly everyone thought it :D
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Date: 2015-10-20 04:56 pm (UTC):D Haha, yes, I was unsurprised to discover that when I went looking! Possibly part of my brain had just kind of checked that off as "dealt with", which is why I left it out (even though I can't claim I'd mind more).
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Date: 2015-10-20 03:30 pm (UTC)For the sake of brevity (LOL HELP), let's skip Two and Three here, since I've already talked about him and them. So: One and Four! PRETEND BOYFRIENDS. Four's equanimity in that scene was so great, how calm and authoritative he was about it next to One's spluttering—and there's something to be said about the way he's the first one to see One's actual face, that he believes One's explanation and doesn't get angry (or at least doesn't stay angry long) and doesn't lop One's head off. (I wonder whether One ever went back and told Four what he'd found out about himself and why he was on the ship; I doubt Four would have judged him for taking on a mission of revenge, and One might have appreciated that a lot.) But yeah, I would 100% love a lighter fic that took "pretend boyfriends" and ran with it, with One overthinking everything the way he does and Four patiently putting up with it. :D For Five and Four, I would absolutely adore anything else about her remembering his memories and telling him about them—has remembering so many things that belong to him made her feel like she understands him more or knows him better in some ways than the rest of the crew? Any sort of missing scene where she talked to him more about them or described them for him in more detail, or remembered another one and told him about it, would be fantastic. Are his memories part of the reason Five wants to learn to kick ass (because she remembers the movements as though she made them herself, because she remembers what it feels like to wield a sword)? And is the connection she's forged with Four because of it the reason he agrees to do it? (Will she be a better student for having Four's memories in her head? Or will she struggle with it, remembering how to move but in the wrong body for it, trying to move like young Four except her actual body is shorter/slighter/longer-limbed?) For Four and Six—it's hard for me to imagine them chatting up a storm, but working out at the same time in companionable silence, absolutely. I'd imagine Four likes Six at least as much as he likes anyone: he's not loud like One and Three, not the leader and therefore deserving of more distance like Two, not a child like Five. Given how Four feels about honor, if Six really did betray them I imagine he wouldn't take it well ...
And prompts for Four are just—I HAVE SO MANY IMPERIAL SPACE QUESTIONS. ALL THE WORLDBUILDING. What was the rest of his childhood like, when he wasn't being smacked around by his father in the guise of teaching him a lesson? How many wives has his father had, and how many children—did he have any sisters, or was it just him and his half-brother? He must have had friends or at least companions, the sons of noble houses sent to suck up to him. Were any of them actual friends (or did he think some of them were and then discover he was wrong? :( )? What other messed-up shit has his stepmother tried to pull? How did it get to the point where killing the emperor and exiling his other son for it was the best move? (Let's face it, that's not exactly a subtle maneuver—was there something else happening in the background that accelerated her timetable to the point where MURDER was the only way to get shit done fast enough? Did she have reason to fear she was about to be set aside or removed, or her son disinherited for some reason? Or was there something else looming—maybe to do with the war with Pyr?—and she really wanted her son in place as emperor before that something else could happen? DEETS PLS.) What is the war with Pyr even about, and did Four think it was stupid or not? How many space battles has he participated in, and what happened in any of them? And then we saw part of Four escaping the palace before he could be arrested, but what about the rest? What did he do in between leaving the palace and joining up with the crew of the Raza, and how did he do it without being recognized—or did he get recognized and almost caught once or twice, and the rep he got from slaughtering everybody who was after him is part of the reason the crew of the Raza took him on? Or did they not know who he was at all? SO MANY WAYS THIS COULD GO. *shakes canon, hoping answers will fall out* It seems like Four is just kind of predisposed to like Five, given that he almost kind of smiles at her pre-stasis when he decides to let her stay on the ship—or is he smirking because he knows his decision will piss Marcus Boone or Jace Corso (original flavor) off? He calls her "little warrior", too—does he ever teach her anything pre-stasis about fighting (could the fact that they hung out some back then be part of the reason his memories come to her first?)? And post-stasis, aaaaaaanything he's thinking about what it's like to hold his swords, how they feel in his hands, finding his signet ring, the reaction of that man on the station to the insignia, when he learns what he supposedly did to his father (does he think for a while that it might be true? Or does he have a gut reaction like One that makes him feel like he couldn't have, he just wouldn't have?), how he feels about the rest of the crew over time and slicing up security guards to save their asses, what he thinks of One's true face, whether he has any guesses as to why One came on board (did he suspect One might be working for his stepmother, at first?). ANYTHING.
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Date: 2015-10-20 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-20 08:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-20 06:12 pm (UTC)Who's left? I love One and Five trying to take care of each other; the scene in the mess is obviously the big moment for that, but I do think there are other times when One is trying to look out for her in his doofy patronizing way and Five's having none of it and I want to squish them. And if Three is Five's annoying prank-playing older brother and One is her sincere and overprotective older brother, I love that Six is her composed, thoughtful oldest brother, the one she goes to for advice and help and when she doesn't know where else to go. I love that dynamic so much and would be 100% okay with ignoring the finale to retain it. (WHY, SIX. WHY. :( :( :( :( :( ) And I adore Five and the android beyond all possible words—like, fine, it may be a kind of cliché narrative trick, but I don't care: I love that Five, as a kid compared to everybody else, has a better intuitive grasp of feelings and how people react to them/how they make people stupid than the android, and is willing to take the time to explain it to her. And her genuine affection for the android, and the way she reacts when she finds out about the projection the android programmed and orders it to delete itself—YES. THE ANDROID IS FINE THE WAY SHE IS AND WE LOVE HER. GO AWAY. I'm basically really easy for the way the rest of the crew can be standoffish/defensive/putting walls up with one another, but they all drop them for Five, or at least try to; and if Five were in serious trouble I think they'd all be willing to put aside basically ANY other consideration to team up and get her out of it, which is BEAUTIFUL AND I LOVE IT. GROUP HUUUUUUUUG.
So! Here is my prompting trip through Five's life as we've learned about it so far: what is the bad thing in her backstory? Is she an abandoned-as-a-child orphan or a family-died-of-plague orphan? (A murdered-family orphan? A ran-away-from-family orphan?) Each of these options has a ZILLION follow-up questions (if abandoned: where was she left? If plague: what plague and where, and how did Five survive? etc.) that I would also love to see the answers to. How did Das end up on that space station? Who was it she took that keycard thingum from? Had she heard of the Raza, even in a vague rumor-y way? She seems pretty good with the vent system even when she's new to the ship—did she use vents to get around on the space station, too? What are her first impressions of the Raza and its crew? Does she get to know any of them in the relatively brief time she has with them pre-stasis, or does she get permission to stay on the ship and then HIDE FROM THEM FOREVER (or at least until the android crawls into the vents after her to calmly inform her they'll be going into stasis)? How did she get so good with engineering stuff—did somebody teach her? Was she friends with the ship's engineer on whatever vessel brought her to the station in the first place, or with the station's own technical maintenance staff? Or did she just figure it out through a combination of talent and necessity? And post-stasis—I freely assume that the things we see her remember onscreen aren't the only memories she experiences that aren't hers, even if the others are moments too insignificant to be plot-relevant. More about what that's like for her, what she sees and feels, what she tells people and doesn't tell people about their memories afterward, would all be great. Her struggles with her place on the crew are gold, too, that she can be so self-assured sometimes and so insecure at other times, especially after she finds out she wasn't quite part of the crew proper pre-stasis. And there are so many little things I would love to see about Five and also about the rest of them: the process of settling into their quarters and the things they found there—both the stuff that made them sure the quarters they'd picked really were theirs, and maybe some stuff that made them doubt it, made them wonder just who the hell they were. How they take care of the ship, and their things—are there washing machines somewhere on the Raza? (NGL, I kind of love the idea of Three struggling with something small and domestic like that, giving in and going to Five for help, and her discovering he just, like, forgot to clean the lint off the dryer filter. /o\ YOU PRECIOUS GOOFS.) And any kind of more serious insight into any of the episodes, what it felt like to kill someone, whether she was sorry or couldn't bring herself to be, how many times she sat there listening to that bug's recording before she went to Six with it. What her favorite color of ration packet is! OKAY I'M DONE NOW, I SWEAR.
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Date: 2015-10-20 07:59 pm (UTC)thank you again for sharing all your excellent thoughts about this show, and wishing you a calm and phenomenal yuletide season!!
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Date: 2015-10-20 08:12 pm (UTC)You are so incredibly welcome! Thank you for asking and for reading the terrifyingly epic answers, and right back at you—obviously I can't make any guarantees, but I will write as many treats as I can and hope one of them ends up being for you. :)
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Date: 2015-10-20 08:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-21 12:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-10-21 12:17 pm (UTC)