Yuletide 2022: Dear Author

To my author: hello, and thank you for putting up with the delay on getting my letter out!  I've been a bit busy lately, and frantically trying to get a bunch of things handled.  Hopefully my actual sign-up has been helpful to you — I don't expect there to be that much more here aside from some general principles, but check the bottom of each fandom for any additions.  I'll also put in general sourcing for each canon, just in case you were matched to me on one of my fandoms but get interested in checking out the others!

General likes:

• Plot-filled fics — while quick vignettes or mood pieces are fine too, there's something about a story with a challenge the main characters overcome or an event they have to react to that really appeals to me.  Doubly so if it's thematically appropriate — if it somehow parallels the dynamic the main characters have, or highlights their personalities, strengths, and flaws.  You can absolutely have the emotional relationship between the characters be the main point of the story, but I do like having something else going on at the same time.
• WLW relationships.  I was hooked on yuri and femslash at an early age.
• Worldbuilding.  I didn't tag it specifically on any of these fandoms, but I'd love to explore all of their worlds.
• I love exploring the sides of a world that often go overlooked in the big drama — how people get by day to day, what they do to relax, where the basic necessities come from, how whatever weird powers or unusual situations they're in affect their daily routine.
• Happy endings.  I don't mind a story where things get tough for the characters — indeed, that's often really satisfying.  But in the end, I like optimism in my stories.  I like the idea that even when times are tough, people can make a difference if they work at it.
• Additional characters.  I may have only asked for a couple of characters in my prompt, but I know that all of them have a whole constellation of supporting cast or other protagonists around them, and I'd love to see them get involved in whatever the story is.  Having characters bounce off their friends, their family, their enemies, or just the random people they know can add so much depth and richness to the story.

 

General dislikes:

• Plotless smut.  I like romance in my stories, but just having two characters making out or more for the whole story doesn't really satisfy me.  It's the plot and the emotional depth I'm here for.
• Random AUs.  I'm generally invested in the characters and the world as they are, and looking to explore their depths.  Canon divergences, or pre- or post-canon stuff is just fine, but randomly taking the characters and putting them in a coffee shop or a sitcom premise kind of takes a lot of the fun out of it for me.  (With one exception; see below.)

General DNWs: underage below about 16, graphic violence, graphic sex, incest, noncon/dubcon, futanari (trans is okay), cheating, loss of body parts, hopeless situations, 'grossout' situations or kinks, ABO, PWP.


Hitherby Dragons

Her name is Ink Catherly.  Named for the fact that you'll be doing a lot of writing about her, she'll tell you, and maybe that's the truth.

Ink is perhaps my favorite character in all of Hitherby Dragons, and I'd love to see anything more about her. Another floor in the tower where she confronted a strange and beautiful and horrible world, another step on her quest as the imago to kill whoever's on the throne of the world, something backstage as Jane and Martin work on the performances of her legends, anything.

But one thing that specifically intrigues me is her potential connection to Mei Ming. Back in the day there were theories that they might have been linked together, or even in some sense the same person. That perhaps Mei Ming was the person playing Ink in the legends, or even that the Ink Catherly legends and the creation of the imago was Jane and Martin's way of giving Mei Ming a real identity, instead of leaving her 'nameless.' Is that the case? Or is there something even weirder going on? Your own thoughts on the idea would be interesting.

And there's a lot of other options, if you don't want to go for that. Ink was twelve when she started exploring the tower, and fifteen when she was trapped in her personal Hell of Greystoke's jungle, and still fifteen when she emerged into the real world. Even if time didn't pass for her like it does for real people, there's still a lot of room for her to have grown and changed. Did she have some sort of experience at fifteen that reflected something she experienced at twelve, but have a different perspective on it? Did she have any sort of recurring encounter over the years with the same being, or different-but-related beings, or beings that claimed they totally weren't the same even though they obviously were?

Romance is obviously a possibility, but tread carefully. It never seemed to be a strong element of the Legends, possibly due to Jane avoiding it on account of her own trauma. And Ink had her own baggage, which could be worth exploring in herself. She was of an age where a lot of teens are starting to get interested in that stuff, but she was also fixated on finding Hell, and bearing a lot of personal issues with her home life and father that could have caused her to avoid thinking about it. But still, it could be interesting to see if there was some guy or girl or nonbinary being she met in the tower who had an interest in her, leading her to explain herself more as she pulled away from them.

And, of course, I'd love to see any other Hitherby characters -- whether as actors in the Legends, or people she crosses paths with as the imago, or any other reason to interact with them you can think of!

Hitherby Dragons is kind of overwhelming to get a hold of, I know.  It's a long canon, it's pretty obscure, and it's got an extremely ideosyncratic voice and philosophy behind it that is hard to recapture.  But I really love it enough that I hope it'd be worth the effort for you.  

Links: The entirety of the canon can be found at hitherby-dragons.wikidot.com. There's links there to Ink's storyline, alongside a number of others.  You can also take a look at my promo post over in the Yuletide community for more links.  Adding to it, there's at least one Mei Ming story I missed (the site's search function is sadly offline), at The Nest of Mirror Pieces (5/5), which may be the most important one for the connections between Ink and Mei Ming (as it has Martin seeming to want to help her become more of a real person).


Undead Unluck

Juiz is a fascinating character for me simply on account of how long she's lived. Billions upon billions of years, through countless cycles of the universe being destroyed and reborn. She's borne it well, and one can presume that the Ark's looping has an effect on her to reinforce her mentally, but she's still lived more time than any normal human could even realistically imagine, with Victor her only reliable companion.

And she's lived through the addition of rules countless times over, too. We've seen her androgynous form from before the rule of sex/gender is added to the world. We've heard her discuss the rules that have been added, from disease to death. She must have gone through lifetimes with countless variations of what rules were in play at any given point. And that's something I'd like to see. What's a blank-slate, ruleless world like? We may be seeing that very soon with Fuuko looping, but your own take on it would be interesting. Is the order of the rules always the same, or does it vary? Does she get used to the steps the world takes in turn -- 'ah, now that Spoil is in play, the world will be like this for a few months before we have to deal with Language' -- or does it feel novel each time? For that matter, do the same rules always come into play, or do some get skipped sometimes? Has she lived through a world with no insects, or disease, or sex? Are there rules that didn't come into play in this cycle that sometimes do -- fictional concepts, maybe ones we don't even have an idea of? Did the Union at some point head off the creation of a UMA Dragon, or a UMA Soulmate, or a UMA Slood? (Shout-out to Terry Pratchett there.)

And how does it feel getting to know some of the same people over and over again through countless lives? The first time she meets, say, Gina or Billy or Tatyana or Nico in a given cycle, she'll know everything that happened to them in all the previous times she's worked with them, but they won't know anything about her. They won't even know the sorts of things they're likely to have happen to them, but she will. We've seen Nico alongside her in previous loops, implying he had the Unforgettable power in them -- does that mean he always loses Ichico? In contrast, we've seen Gina not trying to look young -- does that mean this time around was an aberration, due to her meeting Andy instead of Victor? How much changes, and how much stays the same? And how does Juiz deal with all that? What's it like when she meet someone new, and the world takes a turn she wasn't expecting, as may have happened with Fuuko this time around?

There's a lot to explore in Juiz's endless life -- and her recent choice to stop looping. Use that space however you like!

With the new loop having started in the chapters since I submitted my request, we're likely to be on the verge of seeing information on a lot of what I asked for, so if there's anything you can incorporate, go for it!  Or if you have any ideas that aren't quite aligned with where canon is going, I'd find that interesting too.  You might run through the events happening in the manga in a version of the timeline where Juiz looped -- or see what she's like and how she's reacting in a world where she's not the ancient veteran, but the newcomer!  I can't predict where the story's going, so I trust you to do your best!.

Links: The entire current series is available at the Shonen Jump web site with a subscription -- and even without it, you can read the first three and most recent three chapters.  Print or digital volumes are available there too, but they don't have the whole series yet.


Wayfarers -- Becky Chambers

 

One of my favorite things about the Wayfarers universe is the exploration of the psychology and social structures of the various races, and how they're affected by their biology. And my favorite specific instance of that is the Akarak, and Speaker's story in the fourth book. A short-lived race that focuses intently on one subject to the point that they name themselves after it, a race dealing with the loss of their homeworld so many generations ago that it might as well be myth by now, a race that's been mistreated by the Galactic Commons for so long that they've withdrawn from its society almost entirely, a race that can't share the things all the other races have in common, be that oxygen atmospheres or sims.

And Speaker, just by being trapped at the Five-Hop One-Stop with Roveg, may have started to change things (ironically enough, given how isolationist both of their species are). I feel like when Speaker and Tracker attend the next rakree, they're going to be eager to figure out how to distribute copies of Wushengat to every Akarak who wants one. And after initial skepticism, I think it would probably take the community by storm. The way it hit Speaker will probably be echoed in just about every Akarak who experiences it. After hundreds of generations, just being exposed to the world like that is beyond even the remotest imagination of any Akarak alive.

You could take this in a lot of different directions -- Speaker and Tracker at the rakree, trying to find ways to copy the sim and get sim hubs bought or built for any Akarak who wants them, or trying to persuade skeptical Akarak to try it. A grand-scale overview of the changes over the next few standards as Akarak culture undergoes an upheaval due to this. Or maybe thirty or forty standards later, Roveg gets a guest named Speaker, and is overjoyed for a moment before realizing the Speaker he knew must be long gone, and it turns out this is an entirely different Akarak with a talent for languages wanting to meet the sim artist who did so much for xyr species. Or any other idea you have! Speaker running into the characters from the other books could be interesting, too -- maybe she meets up with Pepper while trying to get sim hubs made on Port Coriol?

Crossing over with the Wayfarer itself would be tricky, but possible, and I'd love to see Rosemary and Sissix if you have an idea for them.  (As I said above, sucker for WLW.)  Seeing if the Akarak have any analogies to romance would be interesting, too -- they don't have recreational or bonding sex, and they view all members of their ship as basically equal family, but do they have any form of short- or long-term connection above and beyond that with its own place in their culture?

And what sort of things have survived from their dead planet?  Not just materially, but in terms of history, legend, and myth, or ancient cultural practices that have long since lost the context they make sense in?  Are there any Akarak archaeologists who try to reconstruct their lost civilizations, or historians who have ancient information they carefully preserve?  And would the arrival of sims be a blessing or a bane for them?  Or perhaps some Akarak know their lost history is archived in some Harmagian database or museum somewhere, and now Speaker's inadvertently inspired a heist to get it back so it can be reborn in sim form...

Links: Becky Chambers has the series (and her other books) listed on her website, with links to places to buy them.


Unpacking:

There's so much implied in this game, and so much that can be overlooked -- I've found new details whenever I've played, and even more when watching other people play. There's implied stories over the course of the years, that could be interpreted several different ways -- a rock-climbing injury? The fate of the beetle? The girlfriend's job?

And so I'd like to see something fleshing out those interim stories and the implied characterization. Ideally it would be something romantic -- how the protagonist and her girlfriend get together, or some of the things that happen to them as they're building a life. Maybe something about them exploring each other's jobs and hobbies, maybe something about them adjusting to past events that still linger. (The boyfriend is an obvious choice, but maybe too obvious -- though I wouldn't object to them talking about him! Something to do with the protagonist's physical issues might be meaningful, though -- after all, with the cane, the heat pads, the wrist brace, and so on, it's clear the protagonist has had to deal with the stress her lifestyle puts on her. Does she embrace it, or feel it's a failing?)

A story taking place over several years could be interesting, too -- maybe jumping between the gaps between the chapters? Or a story exploring the homes she's moved in to, and the neighborhoods she lives in, and the friends she's made. (I'd love to have some callbacks to the apparent RPG campaigns she and her first roommates got up to!)

Ultimately, however you approach it, I'd like a generally happy mood. Unpacking ends up a pretty optimistic game, even with the struggles along the way, and I'd like an attitude in keeping with that.

Link: The game is available on multiple platforms; check out its home page for whichever works best for you.