Hello Yuletide writer! Thank you for writing for me! Treats are also accepted!

This is yet another year where I requested what I thought was a set of very assorted fandoms, wrote my signup, looked back at my prompts, and said "Oh. I guess I had a theme." So I seem to be in a nesting mood this winter, I requested a bunch of stuff about people finding homes, making homes, making the best of homes, finding people who are homes, leaving homes, being stuck in toxic homes, etc. So if you're the sort of person who just wants a broad idea to get you started, there you are, you can stop reading here!

I am happy with lots of other things too, though. I really would be happy with just any new fic at all in these fandoms (and where there's nominated characters I didn't request, it's because I wasn't confident coming up with prompts, not because I don't want to see them.) If you want to write one of my prompts in a way that doesn't line up with that overall theme, that's also great (like I said, it was inadvertent!) But I don't usually do much of a likes list on these because I like nearly everything - all kinds of tropes, AU, genres, ships, kinks, unusual POV and formats, it's all good - and I am hereby opting in to all the official opt-in-only things. I especially like crossovers and I'm not picky about what with - several of my fandoms this year would be good for crossovers with each other or other stuff. I didn't put in any porn-specific prompts but if you want to write me porn of any kind for any of my prompts I'm up for it. And if there's something that's not in this letter or my signup that turns out to be what you really want to write, I don't mind ODAO either.

The yuletide letter link you have followed led you to my yuletide tag on this dreamwidth, which goes back 20 years; it should also include previous posts I've made about this year's requested fandoms. Feel free to poke around on this journal if you want to know more about me, or feel free to ignore it if you'd rather not.

I don't have any DNWs, really truly - all the things on the standard DNW lists are things I'm okay reading, if that's where your story leads you (I'm not particularly looking for noncon incest bestiality genocide torture death fic this year, my prompts came out pretty wholesome overall, but if it's where my prompts or your heart leads you or you need a place to drop off a treat for someone who doesn't DNW your kinks, as long as it's not intentionally OOC I will probably enjoy it. I really do just want anything at all for these fandoms!)

The only thing I really want to put under DNW is that if you write the SMPEarth fandom, please keep it focused on SMPEarth, and not as worked into the lore of a different SMP. There's plenty of fanfic already for other things Phil and Techno have done, and for SBI generally (Sleepy Bois Inc didn't even exist yet when SMPEarth started!) so while I'm fine if you pull in elements from elsewhere - it's hard to write this kind of fandom without doing that a little - and fine to thematically work with how what they did in SMP Earth made them the people they were later, that's something I find interesting too - please write something that is fundamentally centered in SMP Earth and doesn't twist SMP Earth lore to make it fit better with other SMPs' lore or make SMP Earth subordinate to them, and if you do write me a crossover for SMP Earth fandom, please don't cross over with any of the too-large-for-YT Minecraft fandoms. (You can crossover my other requested fandoms with the big Minecraft fandoms though, that's fine! Hannibal and Scipio would do great in any Minecraft world I'm pretty sure.)

Here's a copy of my signup:

• Request 1 by melannen
  Fandom:SMPEarth

( SMPEarth )

• Request 2 by melannen
  Fandom:Punic Wars RPF
  Hannibal Barca (Punic Wars RPF)Scipio Africanus (Punic Wars RPF)

( Punic Wars )

• Request 3 by melannen
  Fandom:Wulf and Eadwacer

( Wulf and Eadwacer )

• Request 4 by melannen
  Fandom:Perilous Gard - Elizabeth Marie Pope
  Christopher Heron

( Perilous Gard )

• Request 5 by melannen
  Fandom:The Ordinary Princess - M.M. Kaye

( The Ordinary Princess )

• Request 6 by melannen
  Fandom:Nimona (Webcomic)
  Ballister Blackheart

( Nimona )

And if you want to know more about the canons:

• SMPEarth is a Minecraft multiplayer server that was played on by a group of video game streamers c. 2019. It happened right before a lot of them became way more popular with the explosion in Minecraft streamer fandom early in the pandemic, so it's kind of a look at the very beginning of the modern Minecraft ecosystem. This is probably a terrible fandom to pick up just for Yuletide, but I am invested in sucking other people into it anyway, so if you want to get started, Technoblade's SMP Earth playlist is the reasonably-sized starting point, and if that makes you want more, you can sample his archived SMP Earth livestreams and Ph1lza's archived SMP Earth livestreams, which will give you more than enough for my prompts, and by that time it will be too late for you anyway.

• The Punic Wars are the wars between Rome and Carthage, during the Roman Republic. For this prompt you want the second one, in the 3rd century BCE. Polybius (not the video game) wrote a book about it. Hannibal was Carthage's genius undefeated general, taking much of Italy with impunity, until a young unknown named Scipio on the Roman side rose up to be his equal at military command. It was all very romantic and dramatic and a lot of people died around them. There is actually very little recorded history about them, so it doesn't take much to get caught up on the backstory, but every bit of it is somehow building the evidence that they were secret soulmates. (soulmate AU yes? please?) Here is a previous post by me on the topic, here are some background resource posts from dhampyresa who got me into it.

• Wulf and Eadwacer is a very short English poem from about the 9th century AD, from the first-person POV of a woman who has been troubled in love. This is probably your best option if you want to pick up one of these fast! You can probably read it faster than I can summarize. Here is teenage me's translation and commentary which I still mostly endorse, here is the academic paper that inexplicably decided to analyze Teenage Me alongside a bunch of professional translations (also in the paper). For some reason a lot of academia likes to treat this poem as a Great Enigma but? it's just a poem about some people? That's why it doesn't have simple obvious interpretations, it's about people.

• The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope is an older YA/Middle Grade novel set in Elizabethan England and loosely based on the legend of Tam Lin: Our Heroine Kate is sent to a remote keep and discovers a fairy cult (or possibly actually fairies?) who take her captive and are planning to sacrifice Christopher Heron as a tithe to their gods. Kate and Christopher are both very not fairy-story sorts of people and they and the fairies come up against a lot of blankly mutual incomprehension, but eventually Kate and Christopher manage to escape the fairy underworld (or possibly secret cult caves?) together to get a happy-ever-after, but changed forever and tinged with a bit of regret for losing the fairy world. If you can find a copy it's definitely worth a read.

• The Ordinary Princess by M. M. Kaye is another older YA/Middle Grade novel, this one set in a classic fairy tale world. Princess Amethyst of Ambergeldar is cursed as a baby by a not-exactly-evil-but-kind-of-cranky fairy to be Ordinary, so she grows up as a perfectly ordinary little girl who happens to be living in a castle with her parents and her princess sisters. She has mousy brown hair that doesn't grow very long, freckles, and no particular talents other than living a fairly ordinary life, but it works OK until she gets old enough for her parents to think about marriage, at which point she runs away and lives wild in the forest for most of a year. Eventually she needs money for clothes so she becomes and ordinary kitchenmaid at a neighboring castle, where she meets and falls for an ordinary young serving man named Perry who, of course, turns out to be a prince in disguise. It's a delightful little fairy tale about running around the woods shoeless and nut-brown, and about the value of the ordinary and the extraordinary, and is also definitely worth a read if you can find a copy!

• Nimona is a comic by N. D. Stevenson (now better known for things like She-Ra) that originally ran on Tumblr. It has since been put out by a major publisher as a graphic novel and you should be able to find it that way, and unfortunately most of comic is no longer online, but you can still find bits and pieces on Tumblr to get a taste of it. It's set in a sort-of-medieval, sort-of-steampunk, sort-of-SF world, about a mysterious shapeshifter who is generally shaped like a mischievous young girl, who has appointed herself sidekick to an evil (but not really) villain/mad scientist/former knight, who opposes the Institute who trained him and the Knights he trained with that support it. It is also excellent and worth a read if you can get your hands on it!

Sera and the Royal Stars, Vol. 1
John Tsui, Writer / Audrey Mok, Artist
Vault, 2020

I pulled this off the pile next because it was noted as being by the same writer as the last one. Somehow I'd had the idea that is was along the lines of "Jem and the Holograms" or "She-Ra and the Princesses of Power" (probably from the font they used for the title) but it is not! It is a Persian-inflected quest fantasy about a Warrior Princess chosen by Destiny to Save The Kingdom from an Evil Curse. In this case, what she has to do is rescue the Royal Stars - so far we have met Aldebaran, Antares, Fomalhaut, Regulus, and possibly Draco. Basically the only characterization note we've got so far is that she loves her family and she's trying a standard Refusal of the Call but can't make up her mind on it for more than twenty pages.

I think I am maybe just the wrong audience for books about royal children who have been Chosen to go on a Quest to Save the Kingdom from Evil. I was going to say perhaps I've outgrown them, but honestly I'm not sure I was ever into that plotline, played straight? I've been thinking lately with everyone talking about Wheel of Time how I ought to have been 100% the demographic to have read that when it was coming out, but actually I never did, and even when friends talked about it, I was never particularly tempted. And when I think about the stuff I was reading - or, at least, the stuff I remember - from my glory days of reading five or six fantasy or SF novels a week, it was never the stuff that played the basic fantasy tropes straight. It was always the stuff that was trope-subverting or explicitly queer or full of bad puns or deliberately going for unusual stakes.

So I think this is a perfectly fine example of that if that's your thing! But I guess it's not mine and that's a weird thing to figure out at this age. And I am always interesting in personified stars, but this bunch are no Luminaries.

***Writing: It's fine, no particular complaints. I have no idea what is actually going on with the cursed stars - they just seem to occasionally turn up without Sera putting in any effort, and then she gets credit for freeing them - but I might be able to figure out if I thought about it harder, I'm just not interested enough.
***Art: Also fine. The linework style that sort of scratchy style that's not my favorite, although it's not an extreme enough example to really bug me, and in general the character designs are ok but I won't be sketching them in my notebooks. I skimmed most of the extensive fight scenes but I think that's as much the writing's fault as the art's, since I didn't miss anything by doing it.
****Stand-Alone-Ness: This is a first trade that collected five monthly floppies. The trade itself stands alone pretty well - the ending isn't a terrible place to leave off, even - and they made an effort to convey enough information that people picking up the floppies partway through wouldn't be lost. Probably as good as you could do with an ongoing.
Keeper? Probably not, I can't really see myself wanting to go refer back to it.
Will I be seeking out more? If I stumbled on a later volume somewhere I would probably read it, if only to see what the rest of the star designs look like! I don't think I will be actively looking though.

Discard score: 1/1, 100% A+

Okay, as part of "post to DW every day in January" I decided that if I couldn't think of anything, I would pull a comic off the pile, read and review it.

This one is from the library so it doesn't really count, but it was still there on the pile!

Star Wars: Guardians of the Whills: The Manga
Adapted by Jon Tsuei Illustrated by Subaru
Viz Media, 2021

I thought this was an original manga when I checked it out but I think it's actually adapted from a novel by Greg Rucka. Anyway, it's a perfectly cromulent Star Wars adventure in which Baze and Chirrut, always the best, get to shoot a lot of Imperials while saving orphans, so I have no real complaints. My main takeaway is: for something that purports to be a backstory book set on Jedha about Baze and Chirrut called "Guardians of the Whills", it sure manages to give us absolutely no new backstory about Baze and Chirrut and Jedha and the Guardians of the Whills! Okay, it explains how they met Saw and where Baze got his giant gun. Because that was definitely the burning question about Baze and Chirrut's backstory that everybody wanted answered. Otherwise, it's just more of what we saw of them in the movie - which is great, don't get me wrong! It made a fine comic. I'm not sure if I'd've had patience with it at novel-length.

(To be fair, I don't think you could do a good Baze and Chirrut story at anything other than surface level while maintaining even a little plausible deniability about the fact that they're married, so my main complaint is probably corporate's fault.)

Hmmm if I'm doing reviews I should have like, stars and categories, right?

*** Writing: perfectly cromulent, as stated above, no complaints except what was probably Disney's fault.
**** Art also perfectly workable manga style, I did not fall in love but also it never detracted from the story. The extra point is because so many recent media tie-in comics do a terrible job on visually translating the screen characters to paper and this one does great (Basically every character in this comic looks like they give great hugs, which is exactly what you want in a Rogue One spinoff), and the fact that it uses black & white really well, a rare skill in American comics. (Which is going to be an issue if I move on to the rest of the stack, because I'm usually reading at night with a red go-to-sleep lamp that basically washes everything monochrome. I have in the past reviewed based on 'is it legible under the red lamp' though. We'll see.)
**** Stand-Alone-Ness: It would probably help to have minimal knowledge of like, what a Jedi is, but it's a complete story in one volume and you probably have to know much more than that.
Keeper? n/a it's a library book, but if I had it I would probably keep it, if only to be able to look at Chirrut's face whenever I wanted to.
Will I be seeking out more? Meh. Probably not until Disney admits they're married. Might go look up and see if there's any good fic for them I missed last time I looked! I feel like I might remember a long one that was, in retrospect, confusing because it used canon from this book maybe I'll try to find it.

I'm back! Some friends spent three days Pandemic Camping, which is to say living in tents in my mom's suburban backyard and hiking in nearby parks and pretending it was the wilderness, and it actually worked pretty well? Felt like we'd actually gone somewhere! I am refreshed! And itchy!

Anyway, today's enemyslash fandom is Nimona, the fandom for people who were Noelle Stevenson fans before Noelle Stevenson was cool. It is about a man named Ballister, who grew up in the Institution being trained to be a Knight and a hero along with his best friend Ambrosius, but then some stuff went down, Ambrosius betrayed him, Ballister realized the Institution wasn't what they thought it was, and he making the best of it as a mad scientist and official Villain Lord Blackheart, coming up with schemes for Ambrosius the hero to foil. Then a girl named Nimona showed up as Ballister's appointed sidekick, and stuff started to Go Down.

Anyway, by the end of the comic, Nimona has left, the Institution (and local government) have fallen, Ballister is being celebrated as a hero, and Ambrosius is in the hospital badly injured with nobody to visit him or care about him but Ballister. Will they manage to rebuild their old friendship and maybe a little bit more?? (spoilers: yes. yes they will.)

So this canon is basically just enemyslash + found family tropes slathered on with a shovel?? It's so great. There's fic. Here's two favorites.

• Black Flag (10627 words) by wakeupnew
  Fandom: Nimona (Webcomic)
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Ballister Blackheart/Ambrosius Goldenloin
  
  Ballister buys some furniture.



• When There's Nothing Left to Burn (18630 words) by strix_alba
  Chapters: 4/4
  Fandom: Nimona (Webcomic)
  Rating: General Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Ballister Blackheart/Ambrosius Goldenloin, Ballister Blackheart & Nimona
  Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Politics, Canon-Typical Violence, Families of Choice
  
  Ballister goes to some committee meetings.

For anyone who wasn't familiar, Calvin & Hobbes was an American newspaper comic than ran through most of the 80s and 90s about an imaginative little boy named Calvin and his stuffed tiger, Hobbes. Susie Derkins was the girl next door. I would say she and Calvin were nemeses except Calvin had a lot of nemeses. The babysitter. His first-grade teacher. That tree in the middle of the good sledding hill. The aliens who were trying to eat him when he went exploring space. Hobbes, when Hobbes decided to pounce on him the middle of the hallway. His mom, on casserole night. And so on.

Calvin was definitely Susie's nemesis though, because Susie didn't actively make nemeses out of everyone else in her life. Susie and Hobbes the Tiger, however, got along fine - Hobbes was a charmer and Susie treated him like the fine gentleman he was. This greatly annoyed Calvin, who did not believe Hobbes should ever be a gentleman, and in particular did not appreciate that Susie liked Hobbes better than him and Hobbes would happily throw him over for a tea party with Susie every time. Honestly the Hobbes & Susie dynamic was my favorite thing in the strip! Not only was it fun to see Calvin completely helpless before Susie's power (of not being a small rude gremlin) but also because it did a great job of capturing that childhood experience when other kids played with your toys and you almost though they understood about your toys? But not quite, because they weren't quite themselves when the other kids had them. Just like you were never quite sure whether Susie could hear Hobbes talk the way Calvin did, or if they were both just pretending, and you got just as frustrated as Calvin did.

Anyway this is the first pair to come up on the list where I'm not really all that interested in them as a romantic 'ship - the stories where Calvin and Susie grow up and have kids just like their parents and Hobbes moves on to a new generation aren't really my thing? But I do love stories where Calvin and Susie stay each other's Important Person - even if they move away and haven't seen each other for years, the influence they had over each other as kids, and Hobbes linking them, are still so important to who they are.

So here's some recs for that. More or less.

1. Hello Operator, Please Give Me Number Nine (3066 words) by Starlingthefool
   Fandom: Calvin & Hobbes
   Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
   Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
   Characters: Susie Derkins, Death - Character
   Additional Tags: Nerdiness, Deus Ex Machina, Calvinball, Ingmar Bergman references, This is creepier than I intended it to be, Death as a character
   
   Susie Derkins plays Calvinball with Death.
   
   (Also read the related Stargate Atlantis crossover linked at the end, it's great.)
   
   
2. The Lengthy Dimly Lit Coffee Break of the Psyche (2728 words) by dotfic
   Fandom: Calvin & Hobbes
   Rating: General Audiences
   Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
   Characters: Calvin (Calvin and Hobbes), Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes), Susie Derkins
   
   Susie and Calvin, grown up together. Sort of.



3. Spaceman Spiff and The Redoubtable Scientist (1656 words) by redsnake05
   Fandom: Calvin & Hobbes
   Rating: Not Rated
   Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
   Characters: Calvin (Calvin and Hobbes), Susie Derkins
   Additional Tags: Imagination
   Spaceman Spiff isn't the only person who has adventures. The Redoubtable Scientist is more subtle, but no less enthusiastic in her imaginings.

1. Greetings on this shortest, darkest, most miserable day of the year (by which I mean yuletide due date, of course.)

I unexpectedly got mine in shape to post yesterday, so I'm way less panicked than I was planning to be this morning, and thus feel like I'm flapping around at loose ends (I know, cry moar). Now I just have to decide if I want to do more Yuletide or if I want to just lay back and read comics until after Christmas.

..and if I want to hang with family on Christmas Eve after all or if I want to spend the day in my pajamas watching the rest of AtLA.

2. WXPN, my current favorite radio station, did its morning show as a non-Christmasy winter music set to celebrate the solstice. I approve (and will probably be looking up a bunch of them when I get home.)

3. chordatesrock asked about how the MCU compares to comic universe. There are many ways to compare them! The super-basic answer is the comic universe is so vast and complicated and ever-changing that it's frankly impossible to compare it to anything other than itself. And the MCU isn't (yet.)

But I'm going to pull out one small part of it, and talk about ( serial storytelling as it pertains to Marvel. )

Does that, uh. Does that answer your question?

..ugh I forgot that the problem with the December Meme is that suddenly there's SO MUCH good content on my DW reading list that I am so busy reading I don't have time to write posts. BUT! I will persevere. And by persevere I mean "tl;dr on command."

dhampyresa asked "What are your feelings on Agent of Asgard?"

I'm afraid I won't have anything very deep for you, alas. My current thoughts on Agent of Asgard sort of go like this:

1. SO MANY things I want to talk about and/or want stories about, except there's so much canon out that I haven't read, and I know it's a comics fandom so I should just ignore that, but with a recent series it's hard, okay, augh, THIS IS WHY I TRY TO AVOID OPEN CANONS, by the time I figure out how I feel about something it's already out of date.

2. I NEED TO GET MY HANDS ON MORE BB!LOKI CANON LIKE YESTERDAY

3. The thing is, I have a TYPE. And that type is Really Old People (like, age measured in centuries old) who try very hard to stay young despite all their tangled history and memories, and as a result are usually the only Old One, living semi-incognito among mortals, who have really complicated relationships with morality and guilt and the concepts of good and evil (partly because you can't live that long without your morality going at least a bit blue and orange) and with their own identity (ditto the way that outliving worlds screws with sense of identity) and with their own mythology; but who are sustained by endless and unkillable - no matter how hard they sometimes try - reservoirs of love. Love for family, love for students and friends, all-encompassing love for that-which-lives, love for sunlight and cats and stars and breakfast meats. Oh and preferably they have a semi-adversarial, semi-flirtatious relationship with a peer who uses slightly different shades of blue and orange, but that's optional.

I think my first character who fit that archetype was Deth, the High One's harpist. (I feel like there must have been someone before him but I can't think of any offhand. Perhaps that is why Deth hit me so hard when I met him.) And, of course, Methos. And ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ. And the Doctor and the Master. And Crowley and Aziraphale. And certain of the more ambiguous avatars of the Lone Power. and Don Simon Ysidro, the Oldest Vampire in Europe. And I could probably go on into progressively more obscure stuff, but you get the gist. Basically, I should have known better, even leaving aside that it's Loki and I definitely know better than to mix it up with trickster gods.

4. Srsly why no Loki/Sigurd slash????

4a. Dammit if I have to write it myself does that mean that I have to start caring about the Volsungasaga? But I've worked very hard at not caring about the Volsungasaga for thirty years now.

5. LOOOOKI

5a. Oh hey it's Advent, that means I can put Lokes Rapsody and Gudesang back in the MP3 rotation!

Anyway for the under-the-cut rambling I'm going to choose to focus on #2, which sadly has less to to with Loki, and more to do with ( how I go about acquiring comics )