Open Yuletide Letter

Dear Author, First and foremost, thank you thank you thank you for volunteering to write for me. I will try to give you sparks for ideas, but I’m a pretty easy cookie to please, so if you had a fic you really wanted to write that doesn’t quite fit with any of my suggestions, please write the fic you wanted to write. That tends to work out better for everyone in the end.

I have a few general squees and squicks that I figure I’ll cover at the beginning here.

Squees: Porn that is in-character. I love romance, and I love romance that slides into porn. But sometimes when that happens, the romance is excellent and the porn feels very plug-and-play, as if the moment the clothes come off, the characters cease to be whoever they were, and become just a bunch of interlocking body parts and squishy fluids. I really love porn where the character interactions continue during the sex. How would these two (or more) particular characters have sex? How would this particular sex scene not work if you substitued any other character. If you decide to write porn, and you keep these concerns in mind, I can guarantee that I will adore it.

Squicks: Please no non-con, no drunk!sex (which is just non-con dressed up to go out), no m-preg, no character bashing. Other than that, I’m good with whatever, from fluff to darkity-dark-dark.

So, on to the things I requested this year:

1) Midsummer Night’s Dream: Everything you need to know about what I want can be summed up in these pictures from the recent Globe production.

I just… unf. I didn’t even realize I shipped Oberon/Puck until I saw these pics. And the moment I did, I was all ‘Yup, there’s one of my Yuletide requests. Right there.’

You don’t have to tell the exact story in these pics. They’re more an inspirational jumping-off point. Oberon and Puck have an ongoing, sometimes contentious, friendship that could be problematic because of their different social positions. I would love an exploration of the sexual/romantic elements of that relationship.

Please, no Titania-bashing 🙂

If Oberon and Puck really aren’t your thing, I could also really enjoy an exploration of Titania/Bottom. There’s some undercurrent of ugly here. Oberon basically gives his wife a date-rape drug, which… uck. But there’s a sweetness to what passes between Titania and Bottom. He’s a buffoon, but an earnest one, and I kinda get the feeling that his honest admiration is something Titania could use a bit more of in her eternal life (better than being married to the real ass — Oberon). Titania and Bottom are kind of a doomed riff off the Beauty and the Beast thing, and I wonder if she regrets that it ended so soon, or if she misses him at all, or wishes Oberon weren’t such an ass himself.

Favorite Pairing(s): Oberon/Puck

Favorite Genre(s): Romance/smut

Ratings: PG to NR

Please No: non-con

2) Sleepy Hollow

Holy crap, I’m not asking for porn!?!

Yup. I’m not. Don’t get me wrong, I love Abby and Ichabod’s dynamic, but I feel like we need a lot more development between then before a romance/porn story would satisfy me.

The thing that hooks me for this one is that I am an absolute sucker for time-traveller-meets-the-future stories. I really love the confusion, the alienness, the opportunity to see our world through someone else’s eyes. They’ve touched on this a bit with Ichabod, but only as a few moments of side-humor. I want more! I want to see him struggling with the contemporary world and the changes. I’d love something that took us beyond the surface things like OMG women wear pants and black people aren’t slaves and get to some smaller, more nuanced things. I’m not going to dictate what, because I know Yuletide authors are a brilliant and well-educated lot, and I think you probably have an area of expertise that you can bring into play here.

As an added bonus, I would love to have some angst where Ichabod realizes just how far he is from the world he knew, and that he will never be going back. How would a guy from his era deal with that sort of thing?

Favorite Character(s): Ichabod Crane

Favorite Pairing(s): n/a, although I’m not terribly interested in Katrina

Favorite Genre(s): Time travel confusion!!

Ratings: PG to NR

Please No: non-con, not that I expect this will be an issue 🙂

3) Wicked

I’m probably going to be the least help on this one because I’m the most open. I hate the book, but I love the musical, so a lot of my feels come out of that. I love Elphaba/Galinda at whatever level of saucy you feel comfortable writing.

This… is going to sound very odd, but they hit my Thor/Loki squee button. They are almost like sisters, but there is still an undercurrent of competition between them that adds a bit of conflict. Elphaba (like Loki) is a social outcast for her darkness and her skill at magic, while Galinda (like Thor) is everybody’s golden girl. I don’t really expect you to explore this thematic parallel, but I wanted to share it because it is always in the back of my mind, and it is at the core of why I like both of these pairings.

So… yeah… have fun and feel free to get as shippy or as gen as you want.

Favorite Character(s): Elphaba

Favorite Pairing(s): Elphaba/Galinda

Favorite Genre(s): Romance/smut

Ratings: PG to NR

Please No: non-con

4) The Farseer Trilogy

I am so excited that we’re getting a new Fitz/Fool trilogy. I can’t even… yeah. Excited.

Talk about pairings that I was invested in and endings that left me deeply unsatisfied. I feel like Hobb gave us every reason to expect that Fitz and the Fool would come together in the end. I had so much interest in this queer pairing and in the genderfuckyness of the Fool, and I feel like the text encouraged this expectation. The way their romance played out felt like a betrayal of what Hobb had been promising us for three (six? nine?) books.

I’ve come to terms with Hobb’s choice (mostly by blaming Fitz for being a homophobic putz), and I’ve moved on. If you’re itching to do Fitz/Fool fix-it fics, missing scenes, whatever, I would love that, but I’d also love something that follows the Fool’s adventures after that final scene where he tells Fitz they’ll never meet again. What does he do? How does _he_ move on. Feel free to go as genderfucky queer as you want. I was never fully convinced of the biological male-ness of the Fool, let alone his gender identity. He can be male, female, androgynous, hermaphrodite, some other weird transgender category we don’t have names for. Go to town.

If you want to speculate on what we might see for the new trilogy, that could be awesome. If you want to do something with Amber, also awesome.

Finally, the Fool at one point tells Fitz that he has had better (implication: sexually-speaking). I wouldn’t mind seeing the story behind _that._

Favorite Character(s): The Fool (though I think Beloved is… kind of a stupid name 😛 )

Favorite Pairing(s): The Fool/Fitz

Favorite Genre(s): Romance/smut

Ratings: PG to NR

Please No: non-con

Additonal Details: Tilda Swinton from Constantine is my casting for The Fool. Do with that what you will.

Final comment: Yuletide doesn’t really support crossover fic requests, but I thought I would mention that crossovers are my favorite sorts of fics. If you happen to have an idea for crossing any of these over, either with each other or with some other fandom you wanted to write in more than these, please feel free to run with that. I don’t even need to know the fandom (and it’s possible you might introduce me to some fandom I’ve never followed before. First hit is free and all that).