Yuletide 2023: Dear Author

Dear Author:

Thank you for signing up for Yuletide!  I've been participating for many years now, but it's always a new thrill to put out my requests for someone else to see.  I hope my prompts give you some interesting ideas, and that you enjoy the writing process as much as I'm going to enjoy your story!

If you're interested in seeing what I've written in the past, or the gifts I've received in previous years, everything's up at my profile on Ao3: PenguinZero  I'm not a very prolific writer, so there's not all that much there, but it might be an inspiration.

Don't consider any of my requests as mandatory in terms of detail.  I personally enjoy getting specific requests to prompt my imagination, but I'm not picky in terms of what I receive!  As long as it includes the characters I requested and at is at least loosely inspired by the mood of what I'm looking for, I'll be happy.

I'll be including source links for each of my fandoms -- obviously, we matched on at least one, but if my request for another catches your eye, go ahead and do whichever!

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 some 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 one or two 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.

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. 

Sub-challenges I'd be interested in: Interactive Fiction, Chromatic Yuletide, Queering the Tide (may add more as the posts are put up!)


Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine:

I've been a huge fan of Jenna Moran's writing for many years now.  There's just something about her style that is so amazing, and the worlds and characters she builds are breathtaking.  I've read Hitherby Dragons, Nobilis, her work on Exalted, Glitch, and a lot more.  (I've got a particular soft spot for the lore sheet vignettes she wrote for Weapons of the Gods.) I keep coming back to all of them, off and on, and right now, Chuubo's has me enraptured again.

I'm particularly fascinated by Natalia and Jasper, as portrayed in The Glass-Maker's Dragon.  They're two very different characters, and yet they have some undeniable parallels and interesting ties that I'd love to see explored more.  Even just in the game mechanics, there are some elements that immediately draw them together -- for instance, the quest set for being Natalia is the same as the quest set for being someone accompanying Jasper on her story, and vice-versa.  Just by being themselves, they're also in the perfect position to accompany each other.

Then there's their asymmetric Connections.  Jasper has a level 2 Connection with Natalia, stronger than she has with anyone else -- as strong as the bond Chuubo has with Seizhi, even, and they're best friends by dint of a world-changing wish!  And the only reason given is that Natalia fascinates her, and she's not sure why.

And on the other hand, we've got Natalia, who has a -1 Connection to Jasper.  Negative one!  Which means that when she's trying to work with Jasper, or trust her, or just spend time with her, she's got to spend Will just to get to a neutral result!  She just doesn't know how to deal with someone like Jasper, apparently.  And that leads to the obvious image of the two of them trying to do something together, and the cheery naive daughter of the sun somehow outshines the superhuman prodigy who's good at everything, just because Jasper's really enjoying Natalia's presence and Natalia feels somehow incredibly awkward around her.

Overall, I see them as a fascinating odd couple.  Jasper the cheerful ray of sunshine who's uncannily drawn to the dark, brooding Natalia for reasons neither of them can understand, and despite Natalia's discomfort with it, she can't get out of it somehow.

Personally, I like to interpret this mysterious imbalance as a mutual crush, where neither of them has any experience dealing with romance, but there's plenty of other ways to see it, and I'm eager to see how you take it.

The arcs of their stories also make for a number of potentially interesting scenarios they could find themselves in.  At the start of everything, they're both probably the newest arrivals in Town, and still trying to get their bearings in their own unique ways.  The two of them crossing paths during that could lead to some interesting interactions.  I'm struck by the way two of their early quests have the potential to overlap.  Jasper's 'The Miracle (Changes)' has, as one of the once-per-chapter actions, 'dealing with acne, braces, your period, ear infections, or other annoyingly intrusive elements of physicality.'  Natalia's 'The Golden Snake of the Rooftops,' meanwhile, has 'helping someone who's in trouble' and 'talking about your past in Russia, reflecting on and developing the memories the snake is resting on.'

And seeing those, I thought, well, aren't those annoyingly physical troubles the sorts of things Natalia might have been forced to deal with on her own in Russia?  The sort of things that a group of people training a prodigy to be the perfect physical specimen would have expected her to be capable of handling, or otherwise not seen as worth their time?  Might she not have had some sort of minor trauma from that -- something she'd feel the urge to try to help with when she meets a girl who's completely lost and bewildered by them?  (I mean, canonically, Jasper's utterly confused by sneezing -- how much worse would some of these be?)

So I can picture a first meeting between them, or at least an early one, where Natalia helps Jasper out, and Jasper is utterly, sunnily grateful for this in a way Natalia can't handle, and yet can't quite dismiss -- an early way in which Jasper's sunlight might melt Natalia's frozen heart a little.

And then on the other side of the story, the climax to both of their sagas involves journeying to the Bleak Academy.  For Jasper, it's because things have gone wrong, and she's not handling her grief for her mother well, and she's starting to turn from a sunny incarnation of hope into a more shadowy being of despair.  And for Natalia, it's also because her life has been going poorly, but she's coming to the Bleak Academy to demand answers of it, to find out why they sent an innocent weapon to kill everyone who she had to kill in turn, to try to fix or destroy the place to make the world better.

Under those circumstances, I can actually see the two of them reversing their roles from the first section.  Where it's Jasper who's the dark, depressed person who can't see the meaning of life and has a heart that's, if not frozen, perhaps shadowed -- and Natalia the one who pulls her out of it with her determination, her courage, her surety that there's something in the world worth saving -- and maybe that something is Jasper.

Those are just my broadest of ideas -- if you have any other interesting ways to make them interact, go for it!  I'm fine with most of the alternate versions of the characters, too, if that's what interests you (though as mentioned above, I'm a big WLW fan, so if you're going to ship them, I'd like female versions of each).  And of course, you can include as many or as few of the other main characters as you want -- obviously, they could have plenty of other friends getting involved in their mishaps, whether it's Rinley making mischief, or Seizhi ending up at the Bleak Academy as part of his story arc, or Leonardo or Chuubo or anyone else playing some kind of role in the plot.

Where to find: There are links to all currently-available releases on the official Chuubo's Wiki.


Magus of the Library:

I've loved reading since I was a child.  I love books, I love libraries, I love everything connected with the art form in general.  And so finding a series like Magus of the Library, which is a love letter to all those things, was amazing and overwhelming to me.  The enticing, mysterious plot, the charming characters, and the fascinating world were just a bonus.

So it might seem a little odd that I'm requesting worldbuilding.  But there's two reasons for it.  First, I really do enjoy the world and all the little hints we get of its depth.  The implications of cultures and races beyond the ones we've seen so far, the offhand references to authors and texts that may or may not get filled out later, the customs and rituals that pretty much everyone takes for granted until they come across someone who breaks the mold.  I'd love exploring that more.  Maybe take a look at some books that have been alluded to, like the famous authors the popular fiction club talks about, or the Seven Seminal Scripts described in Volume 3, and get more into their contents and their impact.  (You could even do a story as an in-universe work of fiction, if you liked -- maybe a new chapter of the Adventures of Shagrazzat or something like that!)  I'd like to see just how fiction or other writings would be affected by the cultures of the setting -- they obviously wouldn't be just like something written by a modern 21st century author!  What assumptions or stereotypes would go into their works?  What different tropes or cliches would they use that would be familiar to them but strange to us?  What moral lessons might they try to teach that we'd disagree with?

You could also explore the different cultures and their customs, as we did with marriage customs early on.  What sort of differences exist in the ways the various races approach parenting, or major life turning points, or grieving?  Looking at their approaches to LGBTQ+ issues could be fascinating, too -- I doubt they'd have a modern approach, with equality and individuality as ideals, and yet there have been places in cultures throughout history for people who didn't gender conform or who loved the same sex.  Is there any place for such people in Hyron society, or Rakta, or Kokopa?  What sort of clashes would come up when someone who fits such a role in one society faces someone from another society where the rules of acceptance are different?

And the second reason is that I'd love to see the world expanded with more details on, well, the parts of it having to do with books and librarian duties in general.  I loved the section in the first volume where the team of kafna go into repairing a damaged grimoire with all the intensity you'd find in a standard manga fight scene.  I loved the test where the candidates had to identify a book given just a cover and one page in an unknown language.  I loved the kafna giving Theo's home-town librarian a dressing-down for not letting poor people check out his books.  Every part of the story where we get into the making of books or the ways they're bought and sold or the duties of the kafna is enthralling to me.

A story focusing on this aspect could use any of the kafna trainees the series focuses on, or some of the other peripheral kafna, or original characters of your own devising.  I'm fond of a few of the trainees more than others (particularly Mihona, Ohgga, Sala, and Aya), but they're all pretty darned interesting characters.  You could write something about them learning a new aspect of a librarian's duties, or struggling with work repairing or categorizing books, or visiting a provincial library to learn how they'll be expected to interact with them, or in general anything else about their work with books.

Overall, I'd just like something that celebrates books, reading, and libraries, in whatever way you find most interesting.  I'm guessing most of the people who sign up for Yuletide have a love of the written word in one way or another, so I'd be honored if you'd reach deep inside and show off what you really love about writing and books, however that manifests!

Where to find: The first three chapters are available on Kodansha's web site, which also has links for purchasing all currently available volumes in digital or print versions.


 Star Trek: Lower Decks:

Of all the characters on this show, I'm fondest of Tendi.  A cheerful, optimistic nerd who's got a somewhat hidden but very strong conflicted relationship with her past and her heritage.  She grew up as heiress to a criminal empire and a trained pirate assassin, she's good at being a pirate and assassin, but that's not who she wants to be.  She wants to be a Starfleet officer who helps people and studies science and geeks out about Jeffries tubes and tweaking RNA sequences.

I like exploring that conflict a bit.  It seems to me that, in trying to hide and ignore her past before Starfleet, she's been denying the culture she grew up in -- and for good or ill, our cultures tend to influence us a lot.  Is she really comfortable cutting off her past like that?  Certainly there's a lot of stereotypes about Orions -- the piracy, the criminality, the whole 'dancer slave' business.  And there's an unfortunate amount of truth to some of them.  It's not surprising someone like Tendi would want to distance herself from that.  But is that the whole story?  Cultures are rarely monolithic, no matter what impression we might get from 'planets of the week' and the quick glimpses we get of them on screen.  Even just on Lower Decks, we've seen Orion as having beautiful public plazas, grimy cyberpunk cities, luxurious criminal estates, junkyards, and open fields with rhinoceros beasts.  There could very well be parts of Orion culture that don't match up to the stereotypes that Tendi is throwing away regardless.  And for that matter, when she does 'break character' and do piratey things, she does seem to get surprisingly in to it.  Maybe she really does enjoy some stereotypical piratey things, and is just really embarrassed about it.

I'd like to dive into that a little.  Have Tendi face up to her conflicted feelings about her heritage, and maybe find things are a bit more complicated than she'd like them to be.  Are there any things about Orion society she misses, or that she loves but tries to avoid because she'd be playing into stereotypes?  Any kind of Orion sports, or entertainment, or recreational activities?  Any things she enjoyed doing growing up, or that bring back memories of good times with her family?  They could be stereotypical Orion activities tied to piracy, crime, and racy behavior that she thinks would reflect badly on her current image -- or they could be completely non-stereotypical things, things that no outsiders would imagine Orions do, that she still avoids because she's trying to cut herself off from her past, maybe to an unhealthy degree.

There's all sorts of angles you could take on this -- maybe after her sister's wedding, she gets roped into some hijinks on Orion with Mariner and T'Lyn that bring her back to things she'd cut herself off from, maybe Starfleet needs an expert on Orion customs for some crisis of the week, maybe there's some sort of traditional Orion competition she gets pushed in to by her friends and she's torn on how to react to it.  Take it in whatever direction you want, just as long as that whole conflict in her history is at the core.

I'm just fine with whatever cast you want to include in this -- obviously the other three of the main quartet are great, as is T'Lyn, and Dr. T'ana is always great, but I like all of the main cast of the series and just about all of the guest stars, so I'm entirely up for anyone you think would make for an interesting story.

I'm not particularly set on romance or shipping for this, but if you're interested, I think I lean towards either Mariner or T'Lyn with Tendi.  I know the show tends to hint at her more with Rutherford, but I'm not all that fond of it -- partially that's my bias towards WLW, but partially it's just that I love the two of them as platonic friends nerding out over things and oblivious to how they look to others.  But I'm just fine with no romantic shenanigans at all, so go with whatever you prefer.

Where to find: All episodes are available for streaming on Paramount Plus.


Wayfarers Series:

There's something about Speaker and the Akarak that speaks to me (if you'll pardon the redundancy).  Speaker's not the most prominent character in the books, and the Akarak only get one real appearance outside of her story, but just what's seen there is fascinating to me -- and what could come next, even more so.

The Akarak are interesting because of their place on the margins of galactic culture.  The Galactic Commons is generally a good place to be -- but not for everyone.  The exposition on how the GC council kept putting them off for centuries, due to the difficulties of finding a methane-atmosphere world they could survive on and the inconvenience their shorter lifespans caused in negotiations, was heartbreaking. In a way, they're a mirror to the humans -- the humans lost their planet due to their own excesses, and had to live on spaceships for generations, but were warmly accepted by the GC, and now have worlds of their own and the ability to live just about anywhere.  The Akarak lost their planet due to the actions of one of the GC's founding species, and have had to live on spaceships for many more generations (due to their shorter lifespans and the longer time they've been exiled), and yet were given the brush-off by the GC, can't go anywhere without protective suits, and are unwelcome due to the reputation they've gotten from some of them turning to piracy to survive.

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, or enlisting Roveg to make more sims so the Akarak can get an even broader understanding of what a world is like. A grand-scale overview of the changes over the next few standards as Akarak culture undergoes an upheaval due to this could be interesting. 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?  I certainly think Sidra and Owl could have empathy for people whose existence is inconvenient for GC regulations...

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...

Where to find: The author has links to purchase all of the books at her web site. Speaker's story is entirely contained in The Galaxy and the Ground Within, but the other books would give more depth to the setting.