1. Tridents as very rare chest loot in large ocean ruins.
   
2. Totems as very rare chest loot in woodland mansions.
   
3. Wither skulls as very rare chest loot in Nether Fortresses.
   
4. Froglights as very rare chest loot in ruined portals, since that's the mostly likely place for a frog to have encountered a magma cube in the past.
   
5. Ghast tears as cat gifts at the same frequency as phantom membranes (since *Earth* cats can fight ghosts in other dimensions I don't see why Minecraft cats couldn't.)
   
6. Blaze powder is craftable from one magma cream + one fire charge (with some loss of powder).
   
7. Blaze rods are craftable from blaze powder (with some loss of powder.)
   
8. Nether stars are craftable from four wither skulls + four netherite blocks + one end crystal.
   
9. Wither skulls can be smelted into wither roses.
   
10. Prismarine crystals can be smelted into prismarine shards.

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!

1. I have been seeing everybody's posts about the heat waves striking everywhere and I send you lots of sympathy. But also, I am tired of all the "you people from warm climates like the American South know how to handle the heat, it's different," comments. Americans do not know how to handle the heat, we just know how to throw more air conditioning at the problem until the entire world burns down.
   
   As someone who *is* acclimated to hot summers without relying on A/C, I have been sitting in my work, with me and all my coworkers in winter layers, wrapped in a fleece blanket, with my hands literally hurting from the cold as I type, reading the bit from our facilities people about don't worry, we're going to recirculate inside air instead of bringing new air from outside to save strain on the a/c (in the middle of an airborne pandemic) while being desperately jealous of those of you getting to spend time in nice old insulated brick 35 deg C buildings with ventilation and windows that open. (I go outside for lunch to enjoy the lovely 35 deg C weather and occasionally hide in the mechanical room to warm up.)
   
   I know that's not really a consolation when you're broiling. But please try not to be jealous of the large part of the US where everyone spends half their income trying to get cooler by burning fossil fuels and will immediately melt and die if their A/C ever fails (which it probably will because the ventilation systems are also badly designed) because their buildings aren't designed for their climate even before global warming and they don't know how to live in it. Save that for countries that actually do know how to handle heat.
   
   (I'm working on a post on ways to learn to happily live in 35 deg C summers without relying on A/C but it keeps getting longer so maybe it'll be up by next heat wave?)
   
   (For those of you hitting 40 deg C today though yeah sorry, *nobody's* jealous of that.)



2. On that note I just started writing a modern Southern Gothic Locked Tomb AU based on that agonyaunt post about the guy who married his daughter's bridesmaid but all either of them actually care about is the High Victorian house, because anything that will get me writing these days is worth a start and this is definitely the time of year for southern gothic, but then I realized I was basically writing "Rebecca but what if everybody except Mr. de Winter was a lesbian and Mrs. Danvers was actually Rebecca's ghost but only the protag could see her and also she was best frenemies with Mr. de Winter's illegitimate daughter who was living out her own separate Gothic plot in the background with her new wife's family".
   
   And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that but I feel like I oughta read (or at least watch) Rebecca first, so I'll be able to catch it when I reference it involuntarily, and I don't want to read and or watch Rebecca, so me and this fic are at a stalemate.



3. Which got me thinking a lot about how I really like Gothic (and its subgenres) in *theory* but I actively dislike or avoid most of the classic Gothics and a lot of newer ones, as part of my ongoing attempts to try to figure out what I think about horror, and I think with Gothics maybe it comes down to:
   
   
   • I like the aesthetic
     
   • I like the claustrophobic, stifling, incestuous mood
     
   • I like the focus on small-scale, women's concerns, and the actual acknowledgement of class that often shows up
     
   • I like the focus on setting and personification of setting! Give me a love story about a house or a town any day!
     
   • I like the ambivalent way it tends to treat with the supernatural.
   
   I don't like:
   
   • the misogyny (and parallel misandry, that often doesn't believe there are non-terrible men.)
     
   • the compulsory heterosexuality (or, well, I like it when it's part of the claustrophobia, but not when the story doesn't seem to realize any alternatives are even options)
     
   • the way the misogyny and misandry and compulsory heterosexuality often combine to put the heroine in a fucking awful happy ending
     
   • the frequent humorlessness
     
   • the horror elements when it leans on them
   
   
   So basically I want queer as hell gothics where people are terrible people but in ways completely delinked from their gender, and also who are willing to admit that sometimes you just have to laugh. Which I guess explains why I always want it in fic but am very chary about actual published ones…



4. A huge amount of my fandom time lately has been with Minecraft streamers, and I haven't talked about it here because at first I felt like I didn't know enough about it and then I felt like it was *too much* to talk about, and then I figured I could at least do an enemy fic recs post about it even if it really doesn't do 'shipping' like most fandoms do. –and then Technoblade, one of the most popular content makers and also probably one of the best people in the fandom, died of cancer way, way too young, and I just didn't know what to say. It's the first time I've ever been this deep in a fandom when someone who was still actively part of telling the story died, much less an rpf-adjacent one when the real people are so centered, and since I haven't really been talking about the fandom I don't really even have people who are also in the fandom to talk about it with. I was still working through his back catalog from a year ago when he passed so even the people who are fans aren't really in the same story place I am.
   
   ( but here is some stuff )
   
   
   Anyway to vaguely tie this up to the earlier topics, here's a really good Southern Gothic AU MCYT fic that wouldn't fit in an enemy recs post:
   
   devil town (100526 words) by hoorayy
   Chapters: 18/18
   Fandom: Dream SMP
   Rating: Mature
   Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
   Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Eerie vibes, Angst, Toby Smith | Tubbo and Wilbur Soot and Technoblade and TommyInnit are Siblings, Mystery, Horror, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Character Death, small town horror, sbi family but they’re dysfunctional as hell, none of them are bad people though. they’re just all a bit fucked up, religious trauma, mind the tags! this is a dark story pls be aware of that when/if you read, Murder, Blood, Hallucinations, kinda. it’s complicated., Implied/Referenced Skeppy, for legal reasons that was a joke, Angst with a Happy Ending, i promise it will be okay. you’ll see, Alexis | Quackity and Toby Smith | Tubbo are Siblings
   Series: Part 1 of we’ll make it another night
   Summary: The night Tommy disappeared, it went like this: Tubbo screamed the words that became his goodbye. He can’t accept that Tommy is gone, because that would be accepting that the last words they exchanged were angry and intended to hurt. So he doesn’t accept it. He’ll search for years if he has to.



5. Today is the quarterfinals of the fandom brackets on fictional_fans! Down to eight fandoms, and it looks like the final four will probably be Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Yuletide. Not exactly a surprising result, and yet somehow I'm still surprised. But you still have just over an hour to vote! Anything could happen!