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 )

Hi Yuletide person!

I am working on my yuletide letter and hopefully will have it up by Monday. However, everything you might need is in the signup I promise, the letter will just restate the same stuff with more prolixity and add extra optional prompts. Crossovers, experimental formats, interactive fiction, and all the other opt-in stuff is explicitly ok!

Also, my laptop decided to go from "worryingly creaky" to "extremely scary bluescreen" about an hour ago, so if the letter doesn't appear on time that may be why. Sorry! I will still have internet access just not as easily if the laptop goes. In the meantime, you are as always welcome to scan down previous entries in this tag if you want to know more about what I like in Yuletide.

It's another new year!

My only new year's resolution last year was to GET A CAT and I did! I got the best cat in the world! Her name is Shelly and she does all the cat things the way a proper cat does and she does not do things that are not proper cat things, and she likes to snuggle very much. (She is actually the first cat I've ever met who seems so invested in Being A Cat properly, although sometimes she is a bit desultory at things like playing with her mousies. And she won't catch the crickets.) She has caught on pretty well at her job of making sure I get up, eat foods, and go to bed at reasonably regular times, although we need to get out of the bad habit of getting back in bed after breakfast and then being cuddled too hard to get back out again for hours.

(She is currently sulking in her sulk gourd in the other room because I accidentally sat on her leg on the bed but I am p. sure she still loves me.)

My friends say she is putting on too much weight but *I* say she is just becoming more squeezable and anyway the vet classed her as "size: large" when I got her. But we *are* both getting pretty sedentary, so my new years resolution this year is to play with the red dot EVERY DAY.

Also to post more cat pictures.


p.s. does anyone in the Birmingham-Atlanta area need a Very Good Kitten? (not as Good as Shelly but almost.)



And I wrote a yuletide fic! Which was probably obvious to anyone who saw it (it was to my recip.) I offered Gautier not expecting to get him and kind of panicked when I did get him but he is so great, and I ended up really enjoying reading all of his stuff (and a lot of other background on him and his friends), and wrote an extremely silly Star Trek crossover I had a lot of fun with!

Paris, in some unknown region of space (6375 words) by melannen
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Petit-Cénacle RPF, Star Trek - Various Authors
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Théophile Gautier/James T. Kirk, The Petit Cénacule
Characters: Théophile Gautier, James T. Kirk, Other canon characters
Additional Tags: Crossover, Time Travel, Paris - Freeform, Shakespeare, romantics, IN SPACE!, canon-typical orientalism (both canons), apologies to Théo for stealing the plot of Arria Marcella, or was Arria Marcella autobiographical???, we'll never know for sure
Summary:

Théo travels in time (mostly by accident), meets a new friend, has a one-night stand, goes to see a play. A fairly ordinary day in the life of a young Romantic poet, really.

I also got three (3!) yuletide fics of my very own! One of them has sharing turned off, so I won't link it here, but it was a Minecraft fic, and it was so great to see it Christmas morning.

The others are:

Five people Christopher Heron talked to (or tried to) about drainage (1870 words) by raspberryhunter
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Perilous Gard - Elizabeth Marie Pope
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Christopher Heron/Kate Sutton
Characters: Christopher Heron, Sir Thomas Sutton, Sir Geoffrey, Alicia, Kate Sutton, Francis Russell 2nd Earl of Bedford
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Drainage, five things fic
Summary:

Christopher Heron wants to talk to everyone about drainage and water-meadows. Not everyone wants to listen.

I GOT A STORY ABOUT DRAINAGE AND WATER-MEADOWS! It's so good, and so what I want after reading the book, Christopher getting to be the absolute anorak he 100% is and finding people who also care a lot about drainage, and getting the manor, and Kate still understanding him best of all. More noble knights who are extremely into estate management please.


The Ordinary Queen and the Amethyst Revolution (3375 words) by Jay Tryfanstone
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Ordinary Princess - M.M. Kaye
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Amy (The Ordinary Princess)/Peregrine (The Ordinary Princess)
Characters: Amy (The Ordinary Princess), Peregrine (The Ordinary Princess)
Additional Tags: Marriage, Royalty, Revolution, Post-Canon, Yuletide 2022, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

“I’m so glad it was you,” confided Queen Amy, the ordinary Queen. “I thought marriage was going to be embroidery and state dinners. But it’s all griffins and orchids!”

A really wonderful Ordinary Princess story about Amy and Perry being very good at being married and very good at being monarchs! (And also better at being anti-monarchist subversives than the actual anti-monarchist subversives, because, well, it's them.)

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!

We are back from a covid-careful visit to Alabama to see stellar_dust and her cat but I'm still scared to take the rapid test that's right next to me because I've had a little bit of a sore throat lately, what if I caught it anyway? (When I inevitably get omicron I want it to be sometime when I can blame it on work, please.) Happy 2022, everyone.

And I am proved correct in my prediction that I would continue to forget how to post regularly after my 100 days were up! Maybe I will attempt snowflake_challenge this year? Maybe I will actually do it?

Also I have exactly 100 comic trades shelved beside my bed, none of which I have read, so I could attempt a read-one-a-day-and-post-about-it thing, free up some shelf space and cognitive overhead and to-read list. They are all review copies that came from a friend who worked at Diamond and was literally avalanched with review copies; she no longer works there post-Covid layoffs so I actually have a chance of getting caught up on comics now! Maybe after Snowflake.

My New Year's resolution is to get a cat, which entails getting the apartment ready for a cat, and also choosing a cat to get and making a commitment. Maybe if I delay long enough one will choose me, that's how it's always worked before (also I really don't want to go tour shelters right now.) (I want one who can be like my sister's cat and clear executive function logjams by screaming at me until I get up and do stuff, but I don't know how to find that. Also one that cuddles and will walk on a leash.)

I made my Goodreads reading challenge by scrambling to add my Yuletide reading this morning! 52 books. The last few years I've started with a low number, been well over it by June, doubled it, and then read basically no books in the back half of the year, which also happened this year, although I think there were several re-reads and small books that didn't get counted, so I'm probably more comfortably over than I looked. (I really wish Goodreads handled rereads better. And reads of different editions of the same book! I read three different editions of my Yuletide canon and I still don't think I managed to get that in GR right, though at least it counted it for the challenge.) I put in 100 for next year while eyeing that shelf of trades, we'll see.

The AO3 download-your-history app has been down since November. :( I understand wanking to take it down around the period when everybody will be wanting their year-end stats, but I hope it comes back! Or somebody makes a new one! Not that it would tell me much this year, because the recs project would definitely mess up the stats. I added 132 pages to my AO3 history this year though! That's 2639 fic pages loaded this year, or an average of 7 a day.

The only fic I wrote this year was my yuletide fic. I wish I'd managed to write more on it - in particular you will just have to imagine Part 2, A Discourse on Translation, in which A. Square meets some Lines in the asylum who are so bent they are practically Polygons and various people realize they can rotate themselves through the third dimension for purposes of destroying gender essentialism, and also escaping the asylum. But writing about inverted Victorian geometry was great fun! And primeideal left a nice comment so I must not have messed up the maths too bad even if I worked too late to get a maths beta! (most of my knowledge of 4+ dimensional geometry can be credited to an 8 AM multivariable calculus course my freshman year of college, in which I learned that the way to see into the fourth dimension is to repeatedly fall asleep in your 8 AM multivariable calculus class, so this fic is dedicated to my recip and to the prof who though it was a great idea to schedule advanced freshman math at 8 am.) (Anything I did get wrong is due to A. Square not being up on the latest geometrical theory, due to being trapped in an asylum.)

A Discourse on Inversion Among The Inhabitants of Flatland (3164 words) by melannen
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Flatland - Edwin A. Abbott
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: The King of Pointland/A. Square
Characters: A. Square, The King of Pointland
Additional Tags: Solitary Confinement, Geometry, Solipsism, Dreams, Dream Sex, Dubious Consent, Worldbuilding, extremely nonhumanoid sex, Xeno, polygonal sex, Victorian Attitudes, Canon Nonbinary Character, it/its pronouns, sexual inversion, geometric inversion, a center point inverted to the point at infinity, hot vertex-on-vertex action, Sexuality Crisis, Non-Euclidean Geometry, sort of vore but not really it's complicated
Summary:

I should count myself a King of Infinite Space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

A very small baby strandbeest and the Teeny Little Super Guy from last year's Yuletide wish you a happy James Webb Space Telescope Launch Day! On its way to L2!

Of course it is also Yuletide day! I got two amazing set-during-canon Rick/Ilsa/Victor Casablanca fics that are both exactly what I have wanted since I saw the movie and I'm really impressed that the authors were able to take my vague prompts and put the scenes I wanted right where I wanted them!

As usual I am filled with 'how can I leave a comment that lives up to how good the fic is' anxiety, so I am rec'ing here first in hopes that telling y'all how good they were will help me figure out how to tell the authors.

Tomorrow, on That Plane (2746 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Casablanca (1942)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Rick Blaine/Victor Laszlo/Ilsa Lund
Characters: Rick Blaine, Victor Laszlo (Casablanca 1942), Ilsa Lund
Additional Tags: Missing Scene, Threesome - F/M/M, Porn with Feelings, Kissing, Handholding, Sex, of various kinds, Love, Jealousy, Tenderness, Mild Blood, During Canon, Canon Dialogue, With Paraphrases, Canon Compliant, If You Squint - Freeform
Summary:

Rick Blaine and Victor Laszlo and Ilsa Lund alone at Rick's before the gendarmes come for them.

This is the mostly-canon-compliant threesome in Casablanca that I asked for that still fixes nothing, except maybe a few hearts (including mine.) Also the sex is really good, so that's a bonus. I am also super impressed that the writer knew exactly what point in canon I was talking about when I said there was a point in canon where it would work. IT DOES.



That Rainbow Lure--Some Day (2083 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Casablanca (1942)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Rick Blaine/Victor Laszlo/Ilsa Lund
Characters: Rick Blaine, Victor Laszlo (Casablanca 1942), Ilsa Lund, Louis Renault, Heinrich Strasser
Additional Tags: Emotional Hurt/Comfort
Summary:

Rick Blaine learned a long time ago to know better than to expect justice or mercy or kindness.

And this is the ending scene AU where Ilsa and Victor and Rick manage to say out loud some of the things they didn't in canon that makes the bittersweet hopefulness of the end just that bit more hopefulness and that bit less bitter. It is lovely (and I also love the visual of Renault just having to stand there awkwardly and watch, okay.)

Hi writer! Sorry this is a bit late, I got all up in my head about it and then went a trifle overboard on prompts. But here is my letter! Feel free to ignore anything in this letter and write me what you want, I am an ODAO person!

Also I usually end up having at least one or two DNWs in my letter, and I am going to mention a few fandom-specific things I don't want, but I couldn't really come up with anything I definitively don't want at all this year. Anywhere my prompts take you - even if it's into the depths of the AO3 mandatory warnings, or the sort of kinks that are in 90% of DNW lists - I am willing to follow. (Don't take that as a challenge though, I am also all in for gen fluff in any of these fandoms.)

I'm also happy to get crossovers of any kind or fic in unusual or experimental formats, including IF! And I'm happy to get any sort of treats, including non-fic format, if someone is inspired.

If you've scrolled down my recent DW posts you might have the impression I am obsessed with enemy ships, but I am just in the middle of a three-month-long self-imposed posting challenge, I promise I am not actually obsessed with enemy ships and would be happy with lots of other kinds of shipping! Though scrolling down some of those recs posts would probably give you a better idea of my general likes than any list I attempted to come up with here.

Also I limited my character requests on a couple fandoms mostly because I wasn't sure I could come up with prompts for everyone, but if you want to write other characters, there aren't really any in these fandoms that I don't want!

( Astielle )


( Rock Candy Mountain (Comics) )


( Casablanca (1942) )


( The Boxcar Children - Gertrude Chandler Warner )


( Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by the Pearl Poet )


( Loki: Agent of Asgard )

Okay, the thing about the movie Casablanca is that Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine has chemistry with every single creature on this blue Earth. Yes, even if you haven't seen the movie, you have chemistry with him, you just don't know it yet. So, you know, I ship all the things.

(This is just to say that there's been some good Rick/Sam fic lately but even I can't figure out how to call that enemyslash, except to the extent that any pairing with Rick in it contains at least one person who hates Rick.)

There are two obvious enemyslash pairings for him though.

The first one is Victor Laszlo. Victor Laszlo is a hero of the Resistance against the Nazis, and Rick hates him for two reasons: the first one is that he is the husband of Rick's One True Love, Ilsa. When Rick and Ilsa were together, they both thought he was dead, but he was actually just rotting in a Nazi prison, and now he's escaped, and Rick's lost Ilsa forever. The second reason is that Laszlo actually deserves to get the girl: he's handsome, and noble, and strong, and a hero, and survived years of brutality, torture and war, still standing tall, and that makes him the man Rick thought maybe he could be, until he lost his faith and his hope and sank into bitterness and stopped believing that sort of thing was possible or worth trying for. Victor doesn't even have the decency to be jealous of Rick for sleeping with his wife!

So here's the thing: Rick's in love with Ilsa. Ilsa's in love with Rick. Ilsa's also in love with Victor. Rick hates Victor with the kind of hate that makes you want to shove him into a wall and kiss it out of him, and Victor is the kind of awful man who wouldn't even hate him for that.

You'd think this is something that could be solved with OT3, but the thing is there is a place between scenes in this movie where you could have the threesome happen - and having the threesome wouldn't make anything better, because there's still only enough Letters of Transit to get two people to America, and Rick still has to choose which two of them go.

(I really want someone to write that mid-movie threesome someday.)

The other pairing of course Rick Blaine/Louis Renault. Renault is the movie's real antagonist (to the extent it has one, other than The War and The Nazis.) Renault is the head of the Nazi-controlled police, and possibly the only person in the movie who has more cynicism and self-hatred than Rick. And at the very end, when Rick has finally decided to make the sacrifice for the person he loves, to reclaim his idealism and let Ilsa and her husband go to safety without him - we find out that Renault has done essentially the same thing. But he did it for Rick.

And then Rick and Renault go off into the desert together to have a boy's own road trip and find some Nazis to fight. It's the beginning of a beautiful friendship! (It's the original source of that quote. Renault is a) definitely in love with Rick, and b) nearly as quotable as Rick.)

This fandom doesn't have a lot of fics but it's a Yuletide perennial so here are favorites!

• Nom de Coeur (12725 words) by Dorinda
  Fandom: Casablanca
  Rating: General Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Rick Blaine/Louis Renault
  Additional Tags: Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2004, World War II, Travel
  
  Rick: And remember, this gun's pointed right at your heart.
  Louis: That is my least vulnerable spot.



• The Beautiful Dawn (6930 words) by Lyrastar
  Fandom: Casablanca (1942)
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
  Relationships: Rick Blaine/Louis Renault
  
  Well, Rick is the kind of man that.... Well, if I were a woman--and if I were not around--I should be in love with Rick.



• While There's Moonlight and Music (2564 words) by NervousAsexual
  Fandom: Casablanca (1942)
  Rating: General Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Rick Blaine/Victor Laszlo
  Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Hurt/Comfort
  
  In all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, they both walk into the same one.

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.

Hannibal Barca and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus were opposing generals in the Second Punic War fought around the Mediterranean around 2200 years ago. Hannibal was a general of Carthage, who led crushing victory after crushing victory against the Romans, taking the war to the very gates of Rome. Meanwhile a Roman general named Scipio, who as a young soldier had barely survived his first few battles against Hannibal, had taken an army to Hannibal's home ground and was busy defeating all the other Carthaginian generals. With Scipio's army approaching their city walls, Carthage finally recalled Hannibal, and they met for the first time in a parley before the battle of Zama. We have records of what they said at the parley, words of respect and admiration for each other - though who knows if they are true. It could not stop the war: they fought: Hannibal lost: and still-undefeated Scipio, to the consternation of pretty much everyone, let Carthage go dignified and intact into defeat, and left Hannibal free to become its political leader after the war.

Hannibal didn't last long in power - he appears to have been a principled and honorable reformer type, so he ended up having to flee in exile to Ephesus a few years later, where he became an advisor to the king there in his wars against Rome. Where Scipio also showed up, part of a delegation of Romans to the king. We don't know what happened there, only that they played games with each other in the gymnasium and laughed together. The Ephesians did not take Hannibal's advice, fought undefeated Scipio, and lost. Hannibal ended up farther exiled; but Scipio was having his own troubles at home, partly due to his mercy against Carthage, and mostly-voluntarily exiled himself from Rome after his return from Ephesus. (I've read he spent much of these later years trying to convince the Romans to leave poor Hannibal alone.)

In the year 183, Scipio died in "mysterious circumstances", and what became of his body is unknown: it is said he had his tomb inscribed "ungrateful fatherland, you will not even have my bones". In the year 183, Hannibal also died; nobody knows how or of what - there are contradictory stories - but there are also no reports of his burial; his tomb is unknown; it is said he left behind a note that read "Let us relieve the Romans from the anxiety they have so long experienced, since they think it tries their patience too much to wait for an old man's death".

I am not saying they faked their deaths and ran away together. But I'm not not saying that. All we have left of them is the few historical accounts written a generation later that happened to be lucky enough to survive 2000 years of copying (and some elephant poop in the Alps, I guess.) And most of what did survive those 2000 years is about how Hannibal and Scipio shaped each other's lives around each other, and kept showing each other mercy and respect and friendship even when they were fighting epic battles on either side of a horrific war. And both just happened to die mysteriously and sarcastically in exile at the same time and there were no bodies. History is what's remembered. So if we spend enough time telling the story of how they both faked their deaths and ran away together, perhaps in another 2000 years it'll be as true as any of it! (except the elephant poop. you don't get much more concretely factual than elephant poop.)

And anyway, I can introduce you to some people here on DW who know way more about Rome and Carthage than I do, and they will swear that the two of them definitely faked their deaths and ran away together, and who am I to disagree?

There are, tragically, only a few dozen Hannibal/Scipio fics on AO3, but it's one of those tiny fandoms where every single fic is a pearl of delight, so you should definitely look beyond what I am rec'ing here!

• Fulmina Belli (1229 words) by sevenofspade
  Fandom: Ancient History RPF
  Rating: Not Rated
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
  Relationships: Scipio Africanus/Hannibal Barca
  Additional Tags: Psychic Wolves
  
  Scipio meets Hannibal for the first time at the fields of Zama, before the battle. (this is a psychic wolves AU but it's also just a really good portrait of Hannibal and Scipio at Zama. Don't let the wolves stop you; the wolves are a metaphor.)



• Ossa tibi bene quiescant (4064 words) by spacestationtrustfund
  Fandom: Punic Wars RPF, Ancient History RPF, Classical Greece and Rome History & Literature RPF
  Rating: Mature
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
  Relationships: Scipio Africanus/Hannibal Barca, Scipio Africanus/Aemilia Tertia
  Characters: Scipio Africanus, Hannibal Barca
  Additional Tags: Battle of Zama, Second Punic War, Identity, Linguistics, Flirting, Power Play, Diaspora, Enemies With Benefits
  
  The meeting at Zama with fewer wolves and more kisses.



• Libyssa (5438 words) by dirtybinary
  Fandom: Ancient History RPF, Punic Wars RPF, Classical Greece and Rome History & Literature RPF
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Scipio Africanus/Hannibal Barca
  Additional Tags: partial Epistolary, Not Really Character Death, Suicide mentions
  
  In which Scipio and Hannibal fake their deaths and run away together.



• Days of Sand (1248 words) by joyeusenoelle
  Fandom: Ancient History RPF
  Rating: General Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Characters: Hannibal Barca, Scipio Africanus
  
  Hannibal and Scipio, after they faked their deaths and ran away together.

Loki! There are so many great enemyships with Loki. MCU gave us Loki/Tony and Loki/Thor and many others; the Loki TV show has just given us a new surge of Loki fandom.

But the big Loki ships lost their shine for me after I met the best Loki (and I have not seen the TV show; I seem to be interested in it mostly to see how well it knows the real Loki). The current comics Loki, the Loki of Young Avengers Vol 3, and of Loki: Agent of Asgard; the sharp-tongued, genderqueer, self-created chaotic good(?) trickster, the Sin That Cannot Be Forgiven, Moon-Queen and Wanderer, Tamer of Monsters, Mother of Gods, They Who Created A Terrible Slash Upon The Internet, Agent of the Allmother, Odinschild-who-is-both-son-and-daughter, a little bit One Direction-a little bit Daft Punk, Who Can Change Into Anything As Long As It's Them, Cat Thor's #1 Fan, the Deity of Stories Stolen and Remade.

I missed posting yesterday because I spent my posting/rec'cing time re-reading all of Agent of Asgard and I don't regret it a bit - those comics are so good, they are even better than I remembered! If you have any interest in Loki and haven't read them, you should - there are only three trades (if you have access to Hoopla through your local library they're probably on there) and they work hard to stand alone even if you don't know Marvel comics or Loki's earlier continuity, even the inevitable intrusive crossover events are worked into the ongoing story smoothly enough so that you don't feel like you've been interrupted, but do feel like you're visiting a larger world. (Okay, the Agents of AXIS interlude was annoying as fuck but at least you got the distinct impression that both the writers and the characters agreed with you there - and it's made up for by the fact that one of Loki's new powers at the end is explicitly the ability to just skip any crossover event they find boring.)

(If I have a pantheon of patron deities it includes, in no particular order, the Lone Power as the Hesper as K't'l'k; Anoia, Goddess of Things Left In Drawers; and Loki, deity of Transformative Works. And the White Rat.)

So here are some recs for AoA Loki, Loki of the Stories:

• Bedroom Hymns (18651 words) by ginger_mosaic
  Fandom: Loki: Agent of Asgard, Marvel 616, Marvel (Comics)
  Rating: Mature
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Loki (Agent of Asgard)/Sigurd, Loki (Agent of Asgard) & Verity Willis, Loki (Agent of Asgard)/Lorelei/Sigurd
  Characters: Loki (Agent of Asgard), Sigurd (Marvel), Verity Willis, Lorelei (Marvel)
  Additional Tags: dubcon, Hate Sex, Rough Sex, Bad Romance, Genderfluid Loki, Bisexual Character, Self-Love, Self-Acceptance, journey to self-love, Mostly Canon Compliant, some canon divergence, hella the princess bride references, rated T for Tears before bedtime and all times in between, but actually rated M for maturity or at least attempts to reach it, spoilers for all of Agent of Asgard
  
  Look man, Loki/Sigurd is a bad, bad idea, and they know as well as anyone, but it's still always compelling as hell.



• Operation: Stop My Mom From Asking About My Love Life Ever Again (21693 words) by carrionkid
  Chapters: 6/6
  Fandom: Loki: Agent of Asgard, Marvel (Comics)
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Loki (Agent of Asgard)/Verity Willis
  Characters: Loki (Agent of Asgard), Verity Willis, Eloise Willis, Lorelei (Marvel)
  Additional Tags: Fake/Pretend Relationship, Genderfluid Character, Genderfluid Loki (Marvel), Hijinks & Shenanigans, Emotionally Stunted Losers Play Affection Chicken, Fluff and Humor, Slow Burn, (probably not actually slow burn i'm just bad at romantic shit), Sharing a Bed, Angst and Feels
  
  How better to convince your mom to stop the matchmaking than to introduce the former God of Evil as your new romantic partner?



• Be Careful Making Wishes in the Dark (25241 words) by Norickayer
  Chapters: 11/11
  Fandom: Young Avengers, Loki: Agent of Asgard
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: Major Character Death
  Relationships: Teddy Altman/Billy Kaplan, Billy Kaplan/Loki, Teddy Altman/Loki, Teddy Altman/Billy Kaplan/Loki
  Characters: Teddy Altman, Billy Kaplan, Loki (Agent of Asgard)
  Additional Tags: Temporary Character Death, Suicidal Thoughts, Time Loop, Slow Build, Polyamory, Genderqueer Character, Loki is sometimes a girl and never ever a guy, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, stealth crossover with MCU but not enough to tag, David and Tommy don't appear sorry guys, Billy gets panic attacks, and no one can blame him, Circa- volume 2, Loki Redemption
  Series: Part 1 of The One with BLT
  
  Timeloop AU! (This one draws heavily on Young Avengers canon, but if you trust the timeloop you can probably get through. But also you should read Young Avengers Vol 3, which is also really really good and almost entirely standalone.)

I put this on my list partly in hopes that the Dev Patel movie would turn on a firehose of Gawain/Bercilak/Lady fanfic for me. Alas, early reviews seem to be that while it is a good film, it is not that sort of a film.

Luckily there is still (Some! not a lot! but Some!) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight fanfic on AO3 that I can read!

(If you don't know the plot of this one: ( spoiler cut for a text written in Middle English )

Anyway. Yeah. Here are two fics!

• my heartly service (1297 words) by pelican_in_its_piety
  Fandom: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
  Relationships: Lady Bertilak/Gawain/Bertilak de Hautdesert, Lady Bertilak/Gawain, Gawain/Bertilak de Hautdesert
  Additional Tags: a wee bit of fealty kink, kiss exchange carried to its logical conclusion, sameflash treat
  
  In which Gawain is given more than kisses


• Shame To Them Who Think Evil Of This (1020 words) by Rymenhild
  Fandom: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Gawain/Bertilak/Bertilak's Lady
  
  A newly uncovered manuscript fragment of the poem.

So far, I have spent my 2021 attempting to write a Python script that will parse my AO3 reading history into a csv file so I can run end-of-year stats on it, because I may not have accomplished a lot for a year-end roundup post this year, but I did manage to fill 100 pages of AO3 history, and that deserves to be celebrated.

But I am totally stuck on the "access your AO3 reading history" part of the python script, so that's a wash. (I do have a pretty good parsers that works for users' works and gifts and

Anyway. Yuletide! Yuletide was a good yuletide for me this year.

I got two stories! They were both really good, and don't-really-need-the-fandom stories, so everyone should read them!

I am amazed my assigned didn't turn out to be somebody I know on DW, because the story they wrote was so much my thing. So many crossovers! So many muppets! So many failed attempts to sing the Teeny Little Super Guy theme without having bad thoughts!

A Travel Mug Travels Home (4948 words) by SCFrankles
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Teeny Little Super Guy (Sesame Street), Sesame Street (US TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Teeny Little Super Guy, R. W. Shipshape (Teeny Little Super Guy), Original Female Character(s), Miss Piggy, Swedish Chef, Suspendisse (Strandbeest - Theo Jansen)
Additional Tags: Humor, Some innuendo, Pigs in Space (The Muppet Show), Mild Chicken Peril
Summary:

R. W. Shipshape is now grown up and has become a teacher. But when a student needs some help in dealing with bullying and feeling more at home, RW finds he needs some assistance from an old mentor...

I got a blank travel mug for Christmas and now I really want to put a TLSG or R.W. Shipshape on it. Anyone know a microwave-safe way to decorate a mug?

And my madness treat was for the Strandbeest and did a perfect job of capturing the feeling I get watching strandbeest videos, with some really thoughful worldbuilding that went into a plot.

Shore of moss (822 words) by laughingpineapple
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Strandbeest - Theo Jansen, Undisclosed Fandom
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Animaris Bruchus
Additional Tags: ...windy, Worldbuilding, Non-human POV, Travel, but mostly: windy.
Summary:

A land wind blows.

I wrote a Machineries of Empire fic, because I was having a bad October and only did minimal offers, mostly for escapist SF books I'd already been re-reading and loving lately (So... basically MoE, Murderbot, Locked Tomb and Imperial Radch). MoE is kind of a weird canon to write for Yuletide, but I didn't think that one through. :P

Anyway, my prompt was just anything with Cheris and Jedao, and I wasn't sure which Jedao my recipient wanted with Cheris, so I wrote about them all.

Duels in the Dark (4120 words) by melannen
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ajewen Cheris & Garach Jedao Shkan, references to past jedao/khiaz
Characters: Ajewen Cheris, Garach Jedao Shkan
Additional Tags: terrible media, less-than-canon level mentions of trauma rape abuse torture genocide violence etc., characters watching porn of themselves, Sort Of, five things fic, sort of-, THERE WAS ONLY ONE BED, sort of--, Platonic Life Partners, sort of., self-insert reader fic, (sort of, what would that even mean in this fandom anyway)
Summary:

Every Kel cadet went through a General Jedao phase. Usually it was around the end of their first year at the Academy, when what it meant to be Kel really hit them. Cheris's came later.

(Or, five Jedaos that Ajewen Cheris shared a bed with.)

Hi Yuletide person!

This has been a weird year for me. Has it been a weird year for you? I suspect the answer is yes. I'm having trouble with figuring out how to, like, enjoy things right now, plus being American at this very moment I am having trouble planning ahead beyond next Tuesday.

But! I am not going to let that ruin Yuletide! Writer, I do not have a lot of detailed requests or rhapsodies this year, but I have requested a set of fandoms where I am sure I will be happy to get any fic at all that you write for me. I really truly mean that.

Also three of them are very low-effort to pick up, if you can't manage what we matched on:

Pigs in Space: 30-ish 3-min-ish sketches, up on Youtube, Pigs in Space playlist, also a good Muppet Wiki entry.
Teeny Little Super Guy: 10 3-min-ish sketches, up on YouTube, TLSG playlist (earworm warning).
Strandbeest are kinetic sculpture/art installation. There's info on the website linked and also various articles and videos around the web, but not much "canon". Feel free to write me fic after just staring at youtube videos of them until your brain smooths out.

This year pretty much all I have in the way of DNWs and special requests is that I need a story where things are mostly okay, at least for now, at least a little, and writer, I hope we both find our way there.

If you'd like more in the way of my likes or specific prompts, feel free to dig back in this tag in my journal, or mix up the prompts I gave between fandoms. I am always up for a crossover (whether or not I know the other fandom), a fun AU, or experiments with form and structure, if those also float your boat, whether I mentioned them in a specific requeset or not. I did not request any ships but I am fine with any ship you want to write. Optional details are optional.

I have been spending a lot of time this last year reading stories about necromancy and the differently alive, so if you're stuck for ideas throwing some of that in probably won't hurt.

( Here's a copy of my signup for posterity )

..okay rereading my requests, I do have one big DNW: Please do not give me anything set in that weird AU where Muppets are not real people. Thank you. (I mean I know the Pigs in Space are fiction, so this shouldn't even come up, but their *actors* aren't, idk why people keep trying to pretend Miss Piggy isn't real.)

ETA belatedly: if you happened to match on more than one fandom, I would be equally delighted with TLSG helps Harrow in the kitchen, Pigs in Space meet Strandbeests, the Myriad helps solve math crimes, etc. and so on!

Hi all! I will be adding more to this letter before matching (I hope), or at minimum links and better formatting, but I just got my request in and my brain won't let me go to bed without getting a letter up, so here is the very basics Sorry I got distracted re-reading all the fic for these fandoms. I may still go in and add some links or extra prompts tomorrow, but no worries, that is the most I'm planning to do.

I like crossovers of all sorts, I like setting-swap AUs and urban fantasy/powers type AUs, I like het and gen and slash and poly and other, I tend to be flexible about most things really! All my fandoms this year I am happy to get porn (or not-porn) in many configurations, and I don't really have any blanket DNWs at the moment. This tag covers 15 years of YT seasons, feel free to backread if you are a person who wants to know more, although also feel free to ODAO anything not in my actual signup.

Here is a copy of my signup, I have a very assorted assortment of requests this year!

( Never Gonna Give You Up, Montaillou, Papers of the Adam Family - Mark Twain, Imperial Radch - Ann Leckie, Palaeontology RPF, The Thick of It )

So back in... June, was it June? I said I was going to blog all my reading, and then I got halfway through the month and stopped.

Luckily part of the reason is that I started some heavier books and slowed way down on the reading, so who knows, I may even be able to catch up.

The book I was reading when I stopped was Montaillou, of the many different subtitles. This is a famous history book by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, and is usually said to be a classic work of social history that takes advantage of an unprecedented collection of primary narratives to describe the life of medieval peasants in their own words.

This is not untrue. But the reason the primary narratives - the detailed descriptions by 14th century peasants of their own lives - exist is that they were preserved in the records of the Catholic Inquisition.

And the reason the Inquisition interviewed all the residents of Montaillou is that, several generations after the Cathar heresy was, in theory, destroyed, the majority of the people of Montaillou decided that they wanted to be Cathars again.

What I am saying is that Montaillou was not exactly a normal medieval peasant village.

It and its region had a history of heresy, and they were kind of isolated up in the mountains and had a unique political situation, but Montaillou was also not so much isolated as isolationist, and one gets the impression that many of the 14th century heretics who lived there had as much in common with Sovereign Citizens, who thought being hereticated should exempt them from taxes, than with the sincere religious believers of other centuries.

Also, Montaillou, going by what its people told the Inquisition, was a roiling cauldron of some of the most amazing soap opera batshit I have ever encountered in a history book.

Here are some things that are described in the records Ladurie is working from:

• a shepherd and the Last of the Cathar Holy Men, who were so gay for each other that even Ladurie outright ships it, and also the shepherd married the holy man’s mistress for unclear reasons and then almost immediately had it annulled
• some villagers who attempted to hire a hit man to kill a government official and failed due to utter incompetence on all sides
• an actual seven-hundred-year-old unsolved murder most foul
• ghosts who wander on rocky cliffs
• SO MUCH ridiculous cloak-and-dagger hijinks, most of which involve hiding behind casks of beer
• an onsen episode
• a heretical priest and his noblewoman mistress having blasphemous sex in the sanctuary of a church
• old ladies sitting outside houses, gossipping and ruling the town
• A shoemaker who may have been overcome with Cathar religious fervor, or may have just gotten tired of making shoes and decided to run off into the hills, nobody's quite sure
• a nobleman who married the wrong woman because he got her mixed up with a different noblewoman with the same name
• everybody is named either Guillaume, Guillemette, Raymond, Raymonde, Jean or Jeanne, and surnamed either Maurs, Maury, or Marty, so you can kind of see how that happened.
• Incest! Adultery! Bastardry!
• Relatedly, magical birth control charms
• a subculture of people who avidly collect crusts of stale bread as a hobby
• a gay priest, who was definitely gay but not technically a real priest if you want to get legalistic on him, spilling the dirt on how to pull hot twinks in a medieval French cathedral town
• the noblewoman, now much older, attempting to elope with her new, much younger, priest lover

And those were just the first few things that came to mind several months after I read it!

Unfortunately, Ladurie was still writing a very serious book of social history, so it’s all organized based on what he needs in order to describe the milieu to make his important academic arguments, and not in terms of the actual amazing narratives that are all over the place. The plus side is that the book does give a very vivid account of what daily life would have been like for the people involved.

They do, of course, all get rounded up by the Inquisition and questioned, and some of them get imprisoned for awhile and/or lose their property, and a few of them (though not really very many) burn, and one of them gets jailed, dies in jail, and then his corpse is dug up and desecrated, but he deserved it if anyone ever did, and after all, every real-life story has an unhappy ending eventually. And the Catharism and petty feuding goes on a surprisingly long time before the Inquisition actually gets down to business (and even then, a lot of it is the locals manipulating the Inquisition to play out their local disputes - this was before the Inquisition really got rolling later.)

I am sure other work has been done on the sources and in the period, and some of what’s in this book has been argued with, but it’s still taught as a basic text of medieval history; it’s held up fairly well.

Anyway I’m not exactly saying I recommend the book as a light read, but it’s kind of amazing and I’m really glad I read it, and if you have any interest in medievalish worldbuilding I think it would be a pretty valuable resource. And I am definitely requesting some of that 14th century soap opera for Yuletide.

For the December Meme, skygiants asked for me to talk about my favorite pre-20th-century literature.

So on one hand, it's easy : I do not think I will ever quite make it all the way back out of Les Mis fandom.

Nor will I ever stop attempting to get people to read Hans of Iceland (if only because Hugo would so very much rather I didn't.)

But other than that it's harder than I expected - especially since I ran a panel on really old fandoms at con.txt! - because for most of my oldest fandoms, part of what draws me to them is that canon works differently when you have that much time; I like the fact that they have centuries of interpretations and reinterpretations built up, so that in going back to 'canon' it's hard to deny what's lost in taking the original as the 'real' thing and scraping off all the transformative work done on it. Even something as relatively concrete as Shakespeare - I like certain productions of the plays; I like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, and that everybody from now on who encounters MacBeth for the first time will remember Tolkien and think Shakespeare should have gone all-out on his prophecies; that my first exposure to the Bard was on Sesame street.

...Also it's hard because when I think of some of my very favorite old stories I go 'oh yeah, I should probably get around to reading the original at some point'. I am not. Actually. As well-read as I give off the impression of being.

In terms of really old literature - I keep coming back to Tao Te Ching, but I haven't yet found an English translation I like well enough I'd recommend it, though I've read six or seven; I keep coming back to Ecclesiastes/Qohelet, but I haven't read any translations from outside the Christian tradition so I don't know if the ones I have are really any good.

But! In honor of Shitposting February, there is one Very Old Fandom where I have Very Strong Opinions about the "canon", and that is that @$#P%@#$ Chretien de Troyes ruined Arthurian fandom forever with his annoying OC 'Lance-a-Lot The Perfectly Perfect' and his soap opera, and the only good stuff is the stuff that came out before Lancelot ate the fandom and ruined it. :P

So here, poall:



ETA: Also I forgot, what prompted this is that they just found some new Arthur fanfic! It's from after Lancelot but pre-Malory so it's still pretty exciting!.

Okay, back to December meme, where were we?

hannah wanted me to talk about Always Coming Home by Ursula le Guin, but Always Coming Home was my yuletide fandom, so I had to screen the comment until now. :D

I wrote Three Tellings about Dead Things In The Earth for cenozoic_synapsid and it was a great experience to write!

Three Tellings About Dead Things in the Earth (5376 words) by melannen
Chapters: 3/3
Fandom: Always Coming Home - Ursula K. Le Guin
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Pandora, Stone Telling
Additional Tags: plays, Visions, Coal - Freeform
Summary: Some things a geomythologer brought out of the archives of the Madrone Lodge at Wakwaha: a life history from a woman of Sinshan; an account of a play performed in Tachas Touchas; a story left behind from a traveler in the Valley.

Always Coming Home is a strange sort of book; it’s a novella mixed with a worldbuilding bible mixed with an ethnography mixed with a poetry collection, basically. My assigned request said "I don’t know how to write fic for Always Coming Home at all, so I’ll leave you without any specific prompts." I didn’t really know how to write fic for Always Coming Home either, but they mentioned in a prompt for a different fandom that they like paleontological trivia, and they got assigned to me, so what resulted was fairly inevitable.

I decided pretty quickly that I wanted to do a "Five Things" related to the Valley of the Na and palaeontology (each of them over the yuletide limit individually), because the book is also set up as a collection of related shorts, and also that way I’d have a better chance that recip would get at least 1000 words of something they liked.

The first step of course was to put on reserve at the library all the LeGuin nonfiction they had, and also all of Adrienne Mayor’s books about the way premodern cultures conceptualized fossils, and figure out what interesting palaeontology stuff was near the Kesh, and also to pull every open-access science paper about the geomythology of fossils that I could find online.

"Reread Always Coming Home" should probably have been higher on that list, but you live and learn.

I came up fairly quickly with five-ish ideas I thought would probably work, although some vaguer than others, and they changed a lot after I did re-read canon, each of them connecting somehow to both palaeontology and some of the major themes of the book, which ended up outlined as so:
1. Stone Telling and the Stone Trees (from Stone Telling’s story and the Calistoga forest)
2. A Woman Who Lived On The Coast (vaguely based on Mary Anning and some of the fossil cliffs around the Bay)
3. Life, Heya, Finds a Way (based on the Chindi/Job play in the book, and Jurassic Park)
4. Visiting Pandora in the Water (based on the Mt. Diablo coal mines southwest of Napa and the Pandora section in the book)
5. The City Underground (about the geology - and infrastructure - underlying the Valley.)

...then all the papers got lost in work’s computer issues, and also I got distracted by multiple things and didn’t actually get through all the background reading in time, and also my plan to make a full multi-layer GIS map of the Valley did not happen, and I ended up only writing three of the five. #2 got dropped because I wasn’t having much luck finding good accounts of the fossil cliffs near the Bay, beyond that they existed and what age they were, and also that figuring out the coastal geography (both physical and cultural) during the time of the Kesh was going to be very complicated. #5 got dropped because it was going to take a disproportionate amount of research and worldbuilding and I couldn’t figure out how to make it not be boring anyway.

Planning a series of connected-but-independent shorts makes it very easy to scale back as needed; I recommend the strategy.

So here’s more about each of the three that I did end up writing:

( A Life Story: Bones Dancing )

( A Dramatic Work: Owing Greatly and the Bird Women )

( Alexander-Ammon Visits Pandora In The Water )

Anyway in conclusion, Le Guin's poetry is great, Always Coming Home is a great book and you should all read it and then write fanfic for it, and I got a lot of comments on this story, which I still need to answer, and which I can only attribute to a) a fandom at the beginning of the alphabet and b) people wanting to tell me they got the joke in Chapter 2.

Hello Yuletide friend! I'm glad you found my letter!

I am a very laid-back person to write for. I only request fandoms that I would love almost anything for, but also that I have several specific ideas for. So you're welcome to just run with the fandom and do whatever you want, or only go by what I put in the signup. My only real DNW for this year's fandoms is that if a character is not given a binary gender in canon, please don't assign them one in your story.

I really love crossovers (whether I know all the fandoms or not) and I love AUs of all kinds, especially when the crossover or AU setting reveals new viewpoints on how canon works. I like fluff and angst and humor and darkness. I like good old-fashioned storytelling and experimental stuff and everything in between. A good writer can sell me on pretty much any ship or kink, but I love gen too, whether it's plot or character or worldbuilding focused.

If you want to know more about what I like specifically, feel free to browse my DW - my tagging is unfortunately sporadic, but the fandom:yuletide tag you followed to get here is pretty well-kept and has letters going back almost to the first YT. If you don't want to know more about me, that's fine! Stop reading at any point and write me whatever you want to write; that will be the best story anyway.

I feel like I've got a really mixed bag of fandoms this year, but the heart wants what it wants. At least a couple of them should be pretty easy to pick up if you want to try.

I am working the rest of this letter right as assignments are about to go out, so I'm going to paste in my requests here & then edit in a bit more later tonight, just in case you want more. ETA: OK, edits done, I hope. Thanks for your patience.

( Norse Religion & Lore, Heimdall )
( Pokemon: Magikarp Jump )
( The Hidden Almanac, Pastor Drom )
( Welcome to Mars - James Blish )
( Round Planet (TV), Garth de la Spong )
( The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells, Asshole Research Transport )

Thank you so much for writing for me! Yuletide is the best holiday of the year.

So I wrote the Yuletide fic that was a massive multi-fandom urban fantasy crossover featuring the POV of a cat and elditch tentacle monsters trying to break through the barriers between worlds. Raise your hand if you're surprised! Raise your hand if you're surprised I have now written two of those!

...thought not.

Assistance to British Nationals Abroad (20372 words) by melannen for ambyr
Fandom: British Government Cats RPF, Slip Slidin' Away - Paul Simon (Song), Monstress (Comics), Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch, Young Wizards - Diane Duane
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Palmerston (Chief Mouser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office), Larry (Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office), Tam Tam (First Record-Keeper of the Is'hami Temple), Cronus (Assistant to the Chief Whip), Siffha'h (Tower Bridge Gating Team), Toby (Rivers of London), Molly (Rivers of London), The Woman Who Became A Wife, The Man Who Wore His Passion For His Woman Like A Thorny Crown, The Father Who Had A Son
Additional Tags: Crossover, London, worldgates, Cats, Tentacle Monsters, Spiders, Dogs, Wizards
Summary: Three cats, three humans, a dog and a tarantula walk through a Gate -

Me! I was surprised! That's the longest story I've ever finished by about 4,000 words. I wasn't sure I was going to make it (and I won't confess how much of it got written after 12/11) but I did! I sort of painted myself into a corner - ( Read more... )

So it was either default or buckle down and WRITE THE THING. And I've never yet defaulted yuletide (quite), So I did.

But, yeah, if you were wondering about the higher-than-usual amount of bears this year, 20,000 VHAI'ING WORDs is why. Also I had a small mental break on the evening of the 17th and wrote 6,000 words of Clark Kent/Lois Lane fic. And another earlier mental break in which I wrote several thousand words of Steve/Bucky porn. So with the Star Wars reaction story, that's, like, 30,000 words in a month after not posting any fiction for the entire previous year.

But I finished it! With a whole 24 hours to spare after I did my "final" revision, even! (...we'll ignore the last-minute bonus chapter and all the spag errors I found later and the character name problem which I'm blaming on the AO3 tag being wrong.) And it seemed to go over really well with people other than my recip, which I was NOT expecting, so yay. Now I have a bunch of comments to reply to.

And 24 hours meant I had time to beta! For my recip, even! Both of the stories I beta'd this year were really good well before I looked at them, you should read them:

Antelope Dreams (3620 words) by ambyr, Fandom: Summer in Orcus - T. Kingfisher, Rating: Explicit<, Warnings: Underage<, Relationships: Summer/The Antelope Woman, Summer/Original Female Character, Characters: Summer (Summer in Orcus), The Antelope Woman (Summer in Orcus), The Weasel (Summer in Orcus), Additional Tags: High School, Dream Sex
Summary: When she was eleven, Summer thought she was very nearly an adult. At seventeen, she's starting to understand how much she has to learn.

And I Think My Spaceship Knows Which Way To Go. (3832 words) by Lanna Michaels, Fandom: The Martian - Andy Weir, Wonder Woman (2017), Rating: General Audiences, Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Relationships: Beth Johanssen/Chris Beck/Mark Watney, Characters: Beth Johanssen, Chris Beck, Mark Watney, Diana (Wonder Woman), Additional Tags: Yuletide 2017, Post-Canon, Canon Compliant, Crossover, Established Relationship, Summary: No one becomes an astronaut because they want to stay home all the time.

I have been very slowly reading through the collection and rec-bookmarking a lot of stories, too! So much good stuff (as usual.)

In non-yuletide news, sisi-rambles podficced one of my old Marvel fics that I honestly though had been completely forgotten! It is a really good podfic, I had forgotten how much FEELS I had packed into the dialogue of that story, and she does justice to all of them. (Also this may be the only one of my old Marvel fics that could still be more-or-less canon at this point, hmm.)

[Podfic] The One Where Bucky Barnes Was a Yankees Fan All Along (4:21) by sisi_rambles
Fandom: Captain America (Movies)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes, Sam Wilson (Marvel)
Additional Tags: Baseball, New York Yankees, Brainwashing, Podfic, Podfic Length: 0-10 Minutes
Summary: "I remembered somethin’," Bucky drawled, not looking away from Steve. "Somethin’ I guess I shouldn’t’ve remembered."

And just to top off an interesting week for me in fic, I just got my first AO3 comment on the very first fanfic I ever posted to the internet. (More than half my life ago, that was.....)

Anyway, I've just posted the Thor/Star Wars fic from last post (currently under the title The One With Rey's Mom after I chickened out about putting major movie spoilers in the title) to AO3, since nobody on here yelled at me about how it was wrong and I shouldn't've done it.

I've been seeing everybody's end-of-year wrap-ups going around talking about all the great stories they posted to AO3 this year and I DIDN'T REAlIZE, so either y'all need to get better about announcing fic on DW or I need to finally cave and start using AO3's subscription system, I guess.


....and that's all. I think. Next week should be back to the usual nice helpful SF novel polls and wretched excuses about why I haven't reviewed the previous ones yet. Hurrah!