Here is my 2024 yuletide letter, in its final form! Text below the cuts is the content of my signup.

I am one of those people who comes to Yuletide mostly just wanting any fic for my small fandoms, so I'm really wide open about what you write for me. I will never be upset with ODAO as long as you write me the story you really wanted to write and that comes through, so if you saw one of these fandoms or characters in the tagset and immediately knew the story you wish there was a prompt for, write me that one instead.

I put a couple of fandom-specific DNWs in the signup but I don't really have any general ones, and I really did think that through. If the characters and the canon and the story you're writing cry out for something, I opt in even if it's something that's a common DNW (just tag for it if I might need to brace myself).

I like crossovers (I didn't prompt many this year, but an Aubrey/Maturin - Mairelon crossover would be amazing, so would Mairelon - Goblins in the Castle, or Scipio and Hannibal meeting characters from other fandoms/elsewhere in history, or any universe overlapping with Maupin, or anything else that strikes your fancy), I like setting-swap AUs that are interested in what the canon and the new setting have to say about each other, I like unusual prose formats and POVs and I like non-text treats or mixed media stories. (I allow treats.) I have a lot of other likes too, and perhaps I will edit this letter to add some more? If I don't get to that before you see this, this tag has my yuletide posts going back to 2003 and feel free to mine those for old likes! Some of my likes also come through in my prompts, and if you see something in a prompt for one fandom that you'd rather apply to another, go for it.

This year's "completely unintentional theme" is historical settings, so here we are in vaguely chronological order:

Symposium - Plato, Punic Wars RPF, Mademoiselle de Maupin - Théophile Gautier, Goblins in the Castle - Bruce Coville, Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian, Mairelon the Magician - Patricia Wrede

Fandom: Symposium - Plato, Any

Plato's Symposium is one of the Socratic Dialogues, possibly one of the most analyzed, discussed, and relitigated works in all of history. It's wildly important to queer/LGBT history as well, with some of the most detailed discussion of male/male relationships in the ancient world that echoed up through the next thousand+ years of European thought. But it's also basically an RPS story about a bunch of famous people Plato knew when he was younger hanging out, getting drunk, and talking about gay shipping, having a good time before all the tragedy that befell them later. If you've heard people talk about the ancient arguments over whether Achilles topped - that's in here. (There's a theory that this was published as an advertisement for Plato's later Academy, by showing it as a place where you get to hang out with your frat bros, meet famous people, have fun and talk philosophy, and it definitely makes sense as that.)

It's one of the shorter dialogues and one of the more accessible, and I would love to see fic that treats it for what it is as a stand-alone rps canon without having to drag along all that millennium of commentaries on top - you don't need that to understand most of what it's doing on a basic level. There's a bunch of English (and other) translations online, although the most common one is a mid-19th century one that's not the clearest (but most of the newer ones seem to be available as pdfs on professors' websites if you go looking.) That said, they are discussing sex from the POV of upper-class ancient Athenians where relationships with age gaps, power differentials, and young teens were more common; they don't all take the same moral position on it, but none of their positions line up with modern norms, so if you aren't interested in other cultural views on that, maybe skip this one.

( Fandom: Symposium - Plato )

Punic Wars RPF, Any

Hannibal Barca and Cornelius Publius Scipio Africanus were two opposing generals in the
2nd Punic War. Hannibal was famous as the world's greatest general and started inflicting defeat after defeat on Rome, but didn't have the backing to bring the war to a decisive end; and meanwhile Scipio showed up in the provinces and started making a serious attempt at earning the world's greatest general title from him. It all came to a head when Scipio led a Roman army on Carthage and won a decisive victory and then, against both common practice and the desires of Rome, let both Hannibal and Carthage survive their defeat, only for both the generals to attempt to retire, end up in politics, completely refuse to play the political corruption game, get exiled for it, fake their own deaths and run away together.

I love a pairing that's between two extremely competent people who know they're each other's closest chance at finding an equal but have no choice but to be opponents; add in the bit where the thing they're the best at is a terrible thing they both come to despise, and the equivocally tragic endings, and I'm there for all of it. I'm not completely unaware of Roman history generally but I am happy to admit I ship this because of dhampyresa's primers and I'm happy to get fic written pretty much entirely from them, if you don't know the history much either.

( Punic Wars RPF )

Mademoiselle de Maupin - Théophile Gautier, Any

This is a 19th century French novel that is some times considered a famous "dirty" book, about a man who sometimes wishes he was a woman, a woman who loves women, and a woman who is also a man, who all love each other dearly while all telling themselves they are incapable of love, and also have fursuit sex sometimes. Also it has all the Gender. All of it. It's one novel and it's set in a deliberately only sketched out "romantic past of France" which is fun to explore. It's on Project Gutenberg in two volumes in the standard translation (and French). It needs all the fanfic.

( Mademoiselle de Maupin - Théophile Gautier )

Goblins in the Castle - Bruce Coville, Karl

This is a mostly stand-alone kids' fantasy novel from the 90s, one of my favorites of childhood, and isn't free online that I know of but should be reasonably easy to get your hands on. It's about a cursed castle and a quest to free the world's wild joy again, and also about Granny Pinchbottom and an Igor with a teddy bear. The author used to have Igor himself visit his elementary school classrooms every year to read it out loud to them, complete with teddy bear. (It was also not a surprise to me at all when I learned that the author had recently come out as bi.)

When I was looking it up pre-Yuletide I learned that the author has since worked it into his wider fantasy universe; feel free to use that or not, if you want to. There is also a direct sequel, and I tried to read it before assignments went out but didn't quite make it. So far I'm not as enchanted with it as with the first, but that may change once I finish? If anything in my prompts is contradictory with the sequel, feel free to ignore, and don't worry about spoilers.
( Goblins in the Castle )

Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian, James Dillon

This is a very long series about the British Navy in the Napoleon Wars featuring a ship's Captain Aubrey and his learned companion Dr. Maturin. I'm re-reading to it in audiobook on my commute because the radio news is scary, but it's a very short commute so I'm going very slow. I only just got through Book 1 and I'm enjoying it, but if you have ever wanted an excuse to start this series, Book 1 is all you will need to write my prompts. It's a classic enough series that it's always still in print, if you want to try. James Dillon is the ship's lieutenant who is secretly going through some personal and political crises and doesn't outlive the first book, and he's my only request.

( Aubrey/Maturin )

Mairelon the Magician - Patricia Wrede, Renee D'Auber

This is another kids' novel with a sequel, about a regency Britain with magic, and a gentlemanly wizard who picks up a street rat while working undercover for Runners. I'm sorry if the prompts here feel a little sparse in comparison to the others; it's not that I want this one less, just that I have re-read it far less recently. If that comes through in the prompts I apologize; please ignore any inaccuracies and write want you want!

If you want more detailed prompts the best I can offer is this old comment by me when I was nine years closer to the last time I'd read it through..
( Mairelon the Magician - Patricia Wrede )

Ah, Les Miserables. The fandom that rescued me from the doldrums of my RPF phase! Not just fictional, but public domain classical literature with a leftist political message! You can't get a more respectable fandom than that.

(I still haven't seen any movie versions. Or the musical. At this point it's a whole thing. Vive le Brick!)

If you look at Les Mis fandom as it exists, you might get the impression that the main enemy pairing is Enjolras/Grantaire. The problem with this is that Enjolras and Grantaire are not enemies. The fandom has done a good job of writing all the enemy tropes and archetypes for them (after all with only a few dozen pages of canon you have to get your story somewhere) and believe me I have read them all! But in canon they are not enemies. In canon Enjolras is the friend in your friend group who always seems to be doing five things at once, and is super passionate and doing good work at all of them, and you don't know how they manage it until you realize it's because they don't reserve any time for, like, being a human person. And Grantaire is the friend in your friend group who is constantly distracting himself with trivial stuff, new stuff every week, because if he ever stops distracting himself he remembers that life is futile and living is pain and we might as well all just die. You don't want to assign them to a group project together, but that doesn't make them enemies.

The real enemies are the old mens. Valjean and Javert. Valjean, the convict on the run! Javert, the policeman who never quits! Destiny keeps them crossing each other's paths and ruining each other's lives! Valjean's central character note is the way he slips in and out of identities - he believes deep down that the person he really is doesn't deserve to exist, so he spends most of his live becoming who other people need him to to be and abandoning selves at a moment's notice without ever daring to look back. Javert also believes he isn't worthy but he has dealt with this by deciding to be useful and standing firm in who he is like a rock. He is also happy to tell you exactly who and what you are, which he is also very certain of. This comes in handy in post-canon fic, where Valjean needs someone to teach him how to be who he is without any disguises, and Javert needs someone to teach him how to shed his old self and survive it.

I also need to put in a good note for Father Fauchevelent here, who did the whole sworn-enemy-to-devoted-partner thing as a speedrun quietly in the background while Valjean entirely failed to notice they had ever been enemies in the first place or that Fauchelevent had undergone any emotional turmoil about him. But they were basically married and raising a kid together for almost a decade? People should ship them more.

(note: if you only know a little bit about les mis fandom, you might be surprised at all of these pairings if you're under the impression these characters all died at the end of the book. Don't worry, they definitely didn't. Valjean followed Javert and saved him from the river, after which Javert decided that if he had to live and be forgiven against his will, Valjean did too.)

• Three Days (or The One Where Javert and Valjean Take a Road Trip Through France and Raise a Child) (36182 words) by zamwessell
  Chapters: 8/8
  Fandom: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables (2012)
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Javert/Jean Valjean
  Additional Tags: Kid Fic, Fix-It, Road Trips, Resolved Sexual Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Parenthood, Fluff, Fluff and Crack, Fluff and Smut, I Don't Even Know, i want this to work out so much, Javert would be a good dad, tad bit ooc, Fluff and Angst
  Summary:

  Javert calls what he thinks is Valjean's bluff about needing three days to find the child Cosette and intercede for her. The Inspector comes along for the ride -- and gets much more than he bargained for, in the process.




• A Ribbon for a Spider (2987 words) by voksen
  Fandom: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (Radio Play 1937)
  Rating: General Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Père Fauchelevent & Jean Valjean
  Characters: Père Fauchelevent, Jean Valjean, Javert (Les Misérables)
  Summary:

  By chance, Fauchelevent and Javert meet at a tobacconist's.




• Toil Until the Old Colours Fade (94310 words) by drcalvin
  Chapters: 7/7
  Fandom: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types
  Rating: Mature
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
  Relationships: Javert/Jean Valjean
  Additional Tags: Groundhog Day, Time Loop, Temporary Character Death, Redemption, Purgatory, Suicide, Pining, Kink Meme, Holding Hands, Post-Canon, Alternate Universe - Afterlife, Canonical Character Death, Javert's Redemption, Slow Burn, Ensemble Cast, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
  Series: Part 1 of Groundhog-verse
  Summary:

  After his leap into the Seine, Javert finds himself back in Montreuil-sur-Mer on the morning of his first appointment with M. Madeleine. He soon discovers that while his choices can change the outcome of things, nothing can stop death from delivering him back to that same morning.

  Now he has to defeat the game of fate or keep returning to 1820, eternally dying without finding peace.

Hi I am back! (Okay I was back Sunday, have just been easing back into life very... slowly.) I even got my YT noms in woo!

Meanwhile I have declared October to be Finish Yer Dern Wips month. (Not all of them, that would be nuts, just the ones that have wound up on the thumb drive I take to work.) So prepare yourself for a deluge of fic that starts well and then has an abrupt tacked-on ending. :P

Here's the first one:

The Nothing Hurts 'Verse (4591 words) by melannen
Chapters: 2/2
Fandom: Les Misérables (2012)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Javert/Jean Valjean
Additional Tags: Fluff, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Dancing, Historical Reenactment, Clothing, Coming Out, Established Relationship, Self-Indulgent, Coffee, Donuts
Summary: In which there are ficlets set in an egregiously fluffy modern-day JVJ AU and there is a lot of awkward old men drinking coffee together, falling in love, slandering Marius Pontmercy and tripping over things.

There are eight more. If I finish two more of them by October 15, I get to sign up for intobar. If I finish four more of them by the end of the month, I get to do NaNo. If I finish all eight of them (or, at least, get to a postable stopping point) I get to do a NaNo that consists of the first 1700 words of 30 different stories that I will never finish, without guilting about it, as a trenchant postmodern commentary on the writing process. Yes. That seems like a reward I might be willing to fight for

Hopefully are all in the perfect state of mellow aging that the first one was, where I still remember what happens but I no longer have the passionate obsession with the story that makes me too scared to write anything down...

Here are the other eight, in order of how recently I haven't worked on them, if you want to egg me on for one of them. :P

1. The Marius/Cosette modern day AU that's heavily based on my own experience of modern US political activism. Currently 100 words, estimated ~5,000 finished.
   
2. The Enjolras/Grantaire modern day AU that's based on tlb daring me to write one in the ~true spirit~ of Victor Hugo. Currently 1075 words, estimated ~3500 finished.
   
3. The next chapter of the Les Mis pirates AU, currently 352 words, estimated ~1000 finished. (finishing the chapter counts, this is meant to be A Serial That Never Ends.)
   
4. The Sequel to The One Where Tony Stark and Princess Leia Hook Up, that's been in 'progress' since before the Avengers movie came out, surely space battles aren't *that* hard to write and that's all I have left, currently 5,651 words, estimated ~7500 words complete.
   
5. The one where Captain America and the Winter Soldier play Frisbee on the National Mall and Maria Hill hates her job. Currently 1204 words, estimated 2000 finished.
   
6. The one where Drifting makes you Not Have Sex and Newt is not happy about this at all. Currently 1982 words, estimated 3500 complete (first stand-alone-ish part of a plotted Five Times Newt And Hermann Attempt To Have Sex)
   
7. The Eponine/Cosette modern day AU where they both work at an aquarium and are raising an orphaned Sula nebouxii by the name of Baron Pontmercy. Currenly 1075 words, estimated ~5000 words finished.
   
8. The first part of the one where the Guardians of the Galaxy get married to each other because sure, whatever, why the hell not get married. Currently 6125 words, estimated 10000 words complete.

Counting the one I finished yesterday, that's 19674 words written, 21656 to go, 41300 words of finished fic for the month. Totally doable, right? With the one I finished yesterday I'm almost halfway there already and it's only the second day!!

The Les Mis panel didn't make it in. So... if I unilaterally declared a Les Mis Room Party on Friday night at con.txt, starting about 10:00 or so to give people time to disco first, would anybody come...?

(DC-area Mis people who aren't going to con.txt would also be welcome, they would just have to call my cell to get let into the elevator.)

I figure I will buy a wheel of brie, a can of oysters, a loaf of French bread, and some cheap wine, and if nobody comes, I can sit there by myself getting lonely-drunk, listening to On My Own on repeat and writing Sad Grantaire fic. Which is also a valid Les Mis party if you think about it.

(no, I am not ready for my panels yet. shush. or else give me more help in my plz help post. :P)

Yuletide Reveals!

I got two stories, both of which were really good:
Five Time Enjorlas Dropped a Barricade On Someone (1594 words) by Bobcatmoran
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Arm Joe, Les Misérables - All Media Types
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Enjorlas (Arm Joe), Ponpon, Police (Arm Joe), Marius (Arm Joe)
Summary:

Dropping barricades from the sky is not a skill that is mastered in just one day, nor is it one to be taken lightly.

ARM JOE FIC WITH AMAZING WORLDBUILDING. Unfortunately this failed at accomplishing the main thing that I was hoping requesting it for yuletide would do - which is to say, sating my mad desire for Arm Joe fic, because this is so PERFECT and WONDERFUL that I now want ALL THE ARM JOE IN THE WORLD even more than I did before because there is hope some of it might be as good as this. I'm not going to rec this at length because really if ARM JOE FIC about ENJORLAS DROPPING BARRICADES with WORLDBUILDING doesn't do it for you than you're probably beyond hope anyway. Thanks, bobcatmoran.


a good song to sing you to sleep (1267 words) by elithewho
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Otzi the Iceman RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Otzi the Iceman
Additional Tags: Religion, Death, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Yew for love, yew for death, yew for the names no one would ever speak.

There were three Ötzi stories in Yuletide this year, and they were all really good (especially the one for me though, of course) - I really recommend reading them all together, because even though they were all for different people and by different people, the Ötzi requests were all basically the same, and they make a really good set. Not to say that the fics themselves were at all the same - one thing that makes reading them together so neat is that they all went in completely different directions, which is what I was hoping would happen if this fandom got fic written!

I really like the one that was for me because, where the other two both tell a fairly straightforward story, extrapolating from the evidence we have to build an answer about how Ötzi came to die on the mountain, my author went in a much less concrete direction, trying to build a picture of Ötzi and his world and more than that, the way Ötzi's worldview shapes his world, without really setting out to answer any questions. It really effective drew me back to the same reactions I had when I was little, reading the first media stuff to come out about Ötzi's discovery, the combination of the creeping horror and the comfortable coziness that are all mixed up together in the story.

I wrote two stories, both of which I really enjoyed writing:

What I Did On My Summer Vacation in "The Bronx" (8432 words) by melannen for waywren
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: PINKWATER Daniel - Works, Alan Mendelsohn the Boy from Mars - Daniel Pinkwater
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Alan Mendelsohn/Leonard Neeble
Characters: Alan Mendelsohn, Leonard Neeble
Additional Tags: Mars, Alien Cultural Differences, Pre-Slash, Teenagers, POV First Person, Summer Vacation, Friendship, Bookstores, "The Bronx", Comic Book Collecting, 1970s, documentary fic, grandparentshipping, Post-Canon, fleegix
Summary:

Welcome to another great year at Bat Masterson Junior High School. For your first homework assignment, you will write a two-page composition about what you did on your summer vacation. Some of you may get a chance to share them with all of your classmates! Due Monday.

( Extended Notes for Pinkwater )


Girl Of My Dreams (1051 words) by melannen for stellar_dust
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Lil BUB, Dinosaurs (Anthropomorfic)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Lil BUB/Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex
Characters: Lil Bub - Character, Sue the Tyrannosaurus Rex
Additional Tags: Dating, Hot Air Balloon, Dinosaurs, theropod paleopathology, Bub Ub Bub, visiting in dreams, Science and Magic, Post-Episode: s01e05
Summary:

Lil BUB and Sue finally go out to dinner. Nobody gets eaten (except some fishes!) GOOD JOB BUB

( Extended notes for BUB )


I haven't had time to read many YT stories - I feel like I've been going nonstop since Thanksgiving and no end in sight - but I did manage to read all the Madness stories over 500 words that were in fandoms I felt like reading, and bookmarked the ones I liked in the yuletide_recs collection, so they are in my bookmarks if you care. Next step is to get caught up on post-YT tag wrangling, so my goal is to read all YT fics in fandoms I wrangle and bookmark-rec in those too. :P By then it'll probably be mid-February.

ETA: Okay, I think I have enough people! LM fandom friends you are awesome ♥ we will do this thing.


So: /report is doing guest episodes during their mid-year hiatus this year, and one topic that they mentioned they'd love to have somebody do is Les Misérables fandom. I just heard back from them, and apparently they still haven't had anybody offer to do Les Mis.

Les Mis fandom, we can make this happen! I'm willing to organize and do all the audio editing and tech stuff, but I can't do a podcast just talking to myself (I know. I've tried. It doesn't work.) and all the people I've asked so far are too shy to talk into a mike. So I need 1-3 other people who are in Les Miserables fandom, who would like to spend a couple of hours in the near future talking about this fandom on Skype, to go out to an audience of probably a few thousand listeners.

Is there anybody reading this who thinks that describes them? If it doesn't describe you, but you know people who might be interested, would you let them know?

All you have to do is be able to ramble about Les Mis fandom with me and maybe a few other fanpeople, in something resembling English, over Skype, for a few hours in the next month or so.

You don't have to a) be a bnf, b) already be my friend, c) be any sort of expert, d) have podcasting experience, or e) do anything in the fandom other than lurk, although of course I wouldn't turn down anybody who is! It would be nice if you are familiar with /report, or if you can pronounce the names of Les Amis properly (since I can't), and I'd prefer if you're over 17 in case we start talking about porn a lot, but none of those are required.

Podcasting is basically the only fannish medium I haven't messed around with, so I would love to take this chance to try it and screw up in the most public way possible.

Let me know either through tumblr or dw or email (this username at yahoo) if you're interested, and we'll put something together!

The Liberation of Night Vale (5080 words) by melannen
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Welcome to Night Vale, Les Misérables - All Media Types, Arm Joe
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Cecil/Carlos
Characters: Cecil (Welcome to Night Vale), Carlos (Welcome to Night Vale), Combeferre (Les Misérables), Courfeyrac (Les Misérables), Jean Valjean, Grantaire (Les Misérables), Enjorlas (Arm Joe), Trish Hidge
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Reincarnation, revolutionary rhetoric, The Dog Park, Cecil's Radio Show, embedded music, Crossover, character fusion, Friendship, Chief Guide Center, I'm the one who'd have to wrangle it so I'll be good and not tag this E/C/C even though I want to, Unreliable Narrator, Local Politics
Series: Part 5 of Les Mis Crossovers That Should Not Be
Summary:

Carlos's friend, who may or may not in fact be an angel, moves to Night Vale, and things start to get strange in a new and different way, even for Night Vale.

It's officially Part Five in the "Les Mis Crossovers That Should Not Be" series! Strong emphasis on the "Should Not Be" this time. Also possibly only makes sense to me, because the Unreliable Narrator and Dramatic Irony and Significant References are strong with this one.

(Also the story originally planned as the fifth crossover is still sitting there 2/3 finished. I should probably do something about that.)