Dear Yuletide Writer

ETA: Please forgive the terrible formatting. It's late and Dreamwidth doesn't want to behave. I'll try and fix it tomorrow.

Hello!

Thank you for liking a thing I like, and being ready to write something about it for me! I’m extremely excited and also you have very good taste.

Before we get started, the DNWs. I am in general hard to upset: I have no particular triggers you need to be aware of. I do have a short list of squicks that I would prefer not to see.

• Soulmates AUs

• A/B/O

• Incest (though I don’t think this should come up in any of this year’s requests)

• Sexual assault (I am open to some dubcon/poorly negotiated kink, but I would prefer to see people in sexual situations they want to be in, even if they haven’t necessarily communicated that to their partner/s)

• Fallings out based on miscommunication/misunderstanding the other’s intention. If two characters must fall out, I’d rather they have a genuine disagreement that they need to resolve.

Now, a few more positive general things:

• I’ve chosen my requests this year to create a Yuletide experience that’s about relationships between women. I just want to see women who are important to each other!

• You do not have to write romance for me! I genuinely love stories about slow-burn friendship, and if that’s more your bent, that will please me too.

• I am fond of characters who think of themselves as isolated building families in spite of themselves.

• Even when I don’t specifically mention it, I’m always open to other world AUs. Go wild, follow your heart, stick any of these women in any setting that takes your fancy.

Specific fandom information is below. I tried to put a cut, but Dreamwidth is not cooperating with me today. Thank you for making a gift for me. I’m sure I’ll love anything you make!

Couple of Mirrors

The first thing that stole my heart about this show was Yan Wei’s relationship with her little milk delivery girl, before any of the plot started happening. She just really really wanted to be a big sister figure to Hong Mei, and I was devastated that she didn’t get the chance. So, an AU where Hong Mei survives the hit-and-run would delight me. Just some little vignettes about their odd friendship.

I would also enjoy something about Xu Youyi and Zhang Wan’s friendship when they were at school together. How did they become friends? Were they lovers ever? I think they probably were. Or if they weren’t I’d love to see one of them crushing on the other.

Otherwise, go wild with Yan Wei/Xu Youyi content. I’d love to hear about the first time they had sex. Or them having a cute date at the shooting range where Yan Wei teaches Xu Youyi to hold a gun and Xu Youyi turns out to be pretty good at it, actually.

I really like the way that the show really values Youyi’s skill as somebody who can manage people and relationships. I’d love to see her turn Yan Wei’s photography business into an actual viable business, while Yan Wei pretends to be grumpy about it but is secretly relieved.

Yan Wei is obviously pretty new to the idea that she can want things, and have preferences about the way she lives her life and what she keeps in her house around her. I think she deserves a lot of love and encouragement, and for Youyi to buy her fifteen of anything she shows even a little interest in, just in case.

Oh, I love it when Jiang Bin comes round to dinner or runs into one of them on the street and they all pretend that they’re not kind of becoming friends.

The Locked Tomb

When I wrote my sign-up, I was only about 100 pages into Harrow the Ninth, and I had no idea what was going on. To be honest, now I have finished Harrow the Ninth, and I am not sure that I have a greater sense of clarity.

The relationships between characters in this series are so deliciously written. I loved the way that Gideon and Harrow’s progression from teen nemeses to best friends happened so gradually over the course of the first book. So basically, if you show me some more of that relationship, I will be happy.

Here are some things that tickle my fancy:

• Some external POV on Harrow and Gideon during Gideon the Ninth. I really want to know what the hell that relationship looked like from the outside. Affectionate bickering? Obviously long-term dating? Mortal enemies? Just an absolute fucking mess?

• So it’s clear that Gideon was within and aware of everything that happened to Harrow for the whole of HtN. This just desperately makes me want some weird secondhand masturbation smut.

• Any version of events where they have to cohabit Harrow’s body and they are both conscious and kind of pissed off about it.

• Any other world AU.

  • How about a weirdly specific profession AU? Harrow is a chemistry teacher, Gideon is the lab tech that sets up her pracs. Harrow is a dance teacher and Gideon is an AFL player taking ballet class for cross-training. Whatever your job is, or whatever field you know weirdly a lot about, go wild.

  • Use that bodyguard loyalty kink! I would pay (in love and appreciation) for an organised crime AU of some kind.

  • I think they are ripe for a spy AU. You know that thing where in the Cold War, sometimes spies spent so much time with each other, and so much time away from their superiors, that they developed weird friendships with enemy spies?

  • Any one of those AUs we skimmed past towards the end of HtN.

I only requested Harrow & Gideon, but if you wanna write me some kind of Ianthe character study, or show me what Ianthe’s crush on Harrow looks like from inside Ianthe’s head, please be my guest.

Malory Towers

For some reason, I loved this series a lot as a kid, and the older I get, the more potential I think these characters have for some very messy, interesting relationships that I didn’t think about much when I was young.

Much is made in the series of girls sometimes having friends that are bad influences, or aren’t good for them, and much of the time, the girl in question eventually sees sense, breaks it off with the Bad Friend, and settles down with someone deemed more sensible. I want to see a story where that’s not what happens. I’d love a version of events where Felicity and June, or Darrell and Alicia, or any other pair of girls who aren’t meant to be good for each other, decide that their best-friendship (or girlfriendship) is important anyway and stick to their guns.

Another thing I’d love is to see any story where two Malory Towers girls reconnect in adulthood. It’s set in some non-specific time in the 1940s. What are the girls’ wartime experiences like? Or you don’t have to look at that. Maybe everything is happening after the war. Midway through finalising a messy divorce, Gwen runs into Darrell, who she hasn’t seen in a decade…...etc.

Alternatively, anything where somebody has the misfortune to navigate some kind of gender/sexuality stuff in the context of the all-girls-school environment. Speaking as a one-time Catholic-school, this is close to my heart!

Omar Rayyam paintings

I think I covered most of what I wanted to say about this fandom in my sign-up. I was very happy to stumble across it looking for a five-minute fandom. I dearly love any kind of merfolk - including non-traditional merfolk like these squid-headed people, and I’d love to explore something about their society.  I vaguely imagined the squid people living in some kind of undersea bubble with futuristic technology but rococo aesthetics, but honestly, go where your heart leads you.

Are there fashionable ways to arrange your head tentacles?

Can you make rude gestures with your head tentacles?

Who are these people, and why are they important enough to commission portraits of?

The Priory of the Orange Tree

There were a lot of things to love about this novel, but mostly I loved the relationship between Ead and Sabran.It’s my favourite kind of romance, where the two partners are both prepared to have full lives apart, but their relationship isn’t treated as less serious because of it. Individually, they’re both such mature characters, and they have other priorities in their lives that aren’t each other, but the novel still conveys how important they are to each other, and how tender they are with each other.

My dearest wish for this fandom is to see Sabran and Ead able to find each other again after the promised ten years, and have quiet domestic happiness into old age. If you can give me any little scene in those years, I would be delighted.

• How does their reunion go?

• Do they have to reach a compromise on their interior decorating choices?

• Maybe they’re living anonymously in a little seaside town, and at some point someone figures out who they used to be.

• An outsider’s point-of-view about them as two weird old ladies would be great.

I was also very sad about the loss of Sabran’s child, and I’d love for the two of them to have the chance to have a family in some fashion, whether they adopt, or they get to be somebody’s cool aunts, or what.

I would also enjoy a peek into their correspondence in the years that they’re both taken up with political obligations. I trust that they don’t keep it strictly professional in those pages.