karanguni | Dear Yuletide Writer 2019

Dear Yuletide writer,

Thank you for writing for me! I hope you have fun this Yuletide – everything in this letter is optional, and I am an omnivorous reader, so I'm looking forward to reading whatever you come up with! Enjoy yourself!

AO3: karanguni
tl;dr: Gen is great, porn is great, unusual media types and crossovers with fandoms I know are great, you are great; ignore or take as many parts of this wall of text as you want.

Jump:

Likes/DNWs
The Culture - Iain M. Banks (Any)
Thief of Time - Terry Pratchett (Lu Tze)
John Wick (Movies) (John Wick)
Breakfast With Scot (2007) (Eric, Sam)
Edo Era Japanese Go Players RPF (Shuusaku, Oota)
Keicho Embassy RPF (Hasekura)

Likes

Old friendships and relationships: people who were close but who then drifted or were driven apart, and how they come together again. The internal struggle of renegotiating new/old territory; unrequited/unresolved tension. Pining is great, and I don't mind not having a happy (or any) resolution.
People who know each other very well, and who translate that knowledge into a variety of things - whether that's intimacy, sex, codependency, codeswitching or otherwise - that aren't easily read or understood by third parties. Ingroup/outgroup dynamics!
Service/loyalty/contractual obligations.
High-pressure situations - whether immediate or over a long time span - and how people respond to them.
Competence porn: people who have worked very hard to become highly proficient in their skillsets, whether that's being an assassin or meticulous scholarship.
Private versus public conflicts, and how a character balances the two. Winning one only to lose the other; difficult compromises.
Cross-class interactions; the bigger the divide, the better. Double points if it's not just a case of "I've got X and you've not", but rather how two people challenge each other across said divides.
Worldbuilding, especially economic, in-group, and political worldbuilding.
AUs, crossovers, non-traditional media (IF, art, whatever!) are all great in my book. More or less anything I've written for or in my AO3 bookmarks is fair game for crossovers, but I do bookmark things that I do not have canon knowledge of, so please hit me up via a mod inquiry if you're worried!

If you're interested in writing porn (hi Yuleporn folks!) or for Crueltide:

Powerplays and mindfucking, whether in bed or out of it. Cavalier but not careless use of power.
Dom/sub dynamics, but not as a lifestyle (To whit - a commander/subordinate relationship with lots of sir-ing? Delicious. Slave or A/B/O AU where the setting encourages the dynamic? Yes, please! Bringing a BDSM master/slave relationship in a vanilla society out of the bedroom without a supporting non-bedroom context? Nah. :)) I give a carte blanche for any kink exploration.
Age gaps, and gaps in general - of experience, of personal wealth, of language, of social class.
Breathplay, dirty talk, spanking/impact play, voyeurism/exhibitionism, clothing or uniform porn or mostly-dressed sex, age gap, restraints.

Dislikes/DNWs:

Again, I'm omnivorous! I have no hard DNWs; if there is something I would like you to avoid, it will be in the fandom-specific section. I'd only request avoiding solely fluff- or introspection-based gen pieces - I don't mind it as a scene, but I'd rather not it be the whole fic.

Thief of Time – Terry Pratchett

Characters: Lu Tze

Lu Tze is hands (brooms?)-down my favourite character in Discworld. The combination of his cynicism with a nevertheless extremely energetic execution of his duty is the best thing ever; it's like he's simultaneously never turned on and never turned off. I'd love anything about the man's life (lives?) and times.

If you're interested in worldbuilding over and on top of writing about bald wrinkly men, tell me more about the History Monks and how Lu Tze fit in – or did not fit in – with them. Or tell me more about the mechanics of slicing time and what makes Lu Tze's Way so... different.

Some abhor the thought of Abbothood, some have Abbothood thrust upon them, extremely unwillingly, oh bloody hell anything but this?
His time in Ankh-Morpork living with Mrs. Marietta Cosmopilite: whether that's a story from that period of his life, or the great and mystical sayings compiled...
How does Lu Tze deal with ageing? How does he deal with Lobsang, with all that his apprentice can do that he simply cannot?
What led Lu Tze to seeking another Way? What was he like growing up? How did he end up at the History Monks?
Lu Tze evaluating brooms for his weapon of choice. Or any other cleaning equipment.
Lu Tze plays a board game (or... tabletop RPG as... a monk?) with your choice of characters from the Discworld universe, or any other universe for that matter

John Wick (Movies)

Characters: John Wick

Fuckin' John Wick: I love this assassin and his monosyllabic responses to most things until you, say, shoot his dog. The contrast between John's ability to be very eloquent in his fighting and his relatively laconic speech is one of my favourite things. Tell me what makes someone who is surface-level so calm burn on the inside. Tell me more about how he contrasts extreme brutality with also a rather philosophical touch: John doesn't seem to do murder, only assassinations/revenge and the necessary collateral.

I also love the whole worldbuild in the John Wick universe, and how fluent John is at speaking the language and walking the walk. What other places besides the Continental does he frequent? Tell me about John going in and out of the places that keep their underground running smoothly. Or tell me about John doggedly training with the best to become the best. Give me competence, assassinations, universe expansion – you can't go wrong with this fandom.

DNWs for this fandom: daddy kink (age gaps are more than fine).

The world learning how good John is before the movies: tell me about how the legend was made.
John civilian-proofing his lifestyle as he settles into retirement: all the things he has to clean up/bury under cement/hide in the walls. Him and his backup plans.
John and Marcus: how did they meet? How does Marcus feel, watching John establish himself? John/Marcus = amazing if you want to write it, whether as mentor/protege or something else. Perhaps Marcus takes him to get his first good suit? ALL THE CLOTHING PORN. (Bonus if he takes John out of it, too.)
Training: Marcus puts John through the wringer, only to watch him come back time and time again. If you want to go the porn route: gun kink? Sensory deprivation kink?
John, the incredibly bad at being Management. Perhaps how Winston views this? With amusement, I presume, but what else?
John, the functional bisexual. Interpret as you will.
The strangest thing John has bought with a gold coin. Or the strangest thing someone has bought of John with a gold coin. What you can and cannot buy from John with gold coins.
Cross this over with The Culture and listen to me scream.

Breakfast with Scot (2007)

Characters: Eric McNally, Sam Miller

This movie is such a feel-good Christmas watch for me... especially because it doesn't pull its punches. Tell me more about Eric having to start a life post his career-ending injury. Tell me about how Sam deals with and helps Eric come out of the closet, even if it's by building a bigger, upper-middle-class closet with top-of-the-line appliances and a big kitchen closet around him. Or if you want to flash forward to the trials and tribulations of co-parenting Scot, that's great too: all I ask is that the fic is not 100% fluff, because apparently I like characters to be tormented before they get their happy endings.

I love the idea of Eric being smart in his own way, even if he was "just an enforcer" in the NHL. He ended up netting a lawyer boyfriend and built a second career for himself, after all: tell me more about that. I'd love a comparison of the different kind of intelligences within the McNally-Miller household: the things they're differentially good at. Like how on the first day that they get Scot, Sam is listing concerns and Eric - despite being vocally against the whole idea – immediately comes up with straightforward solutions.

And Sam! Sam seems at once infinitely patient and understanding but also capable of losing his temper where it matters. Tell me more about where and when he draws lines in their relationship, or how they negotiated their way to the state they were in during the movie.

As for them together: I love the contrast between moments where they seem almost telepathic and others when they clearly come from two entirely different worlds. The movie does a brilliant job of showing how they can collide and argue and end up with one of them on the couch but nevertheless still rally together - show me more of that and I would be so happy.

Eric utterly unable to comprehend Sam's domestic desires until it is pounded into his brain
Eric coming to slow grips with how being in closet impacts Sam; Sam coming to grips with how hard it is for Eric to rebuild his life
Eric (shittily) rebuilds his life... while rebuilding the house that Sam and him come to live in, because he can still use his fists. Well. Hands.
Five (or however many) times Sam was infinitely stronger than his well-built boyfriend
Eric discovering the difference between Lawyer Sam and Not-Lawyer Sam
Hamfisted but extremely well-meaning attempts to understand how to parent Scot together
Eric encountering Sam encountering an ex-boyfriend?
Into the darkness with Eric suffering from concussion symptoms or fallout from having broken his body to do his job. A not too depressing ending would be good for this one – please no character death or giving up – but if you want to explore the difficulties inherent dealing with injury and recovery, go forth!

Edo Era Japanese Go Players RPF

Characters: Honinbou Shuusaku, Oota Yuuzou

Go in real life, I've come to discover, is as strange or stranger than - say - Hikrau no Go, and that's what makes it amazing. (I mean, even the modern players have weird fairytale careers.) I listed competence porn as one of my likes above, and boy oh boy do Go players hit that spot. There are some tremendous stories about them and their exploits. This request does not actually need all that much digging into: GLORIOUS AGE-DIFFERENCE RIVALRY is all you really need to know about the Honinbou Shuusaku/Oota Yuuzou relationship. To quote this website:

[...] Yuzo was Shusaku's top rival and Shusaku played more games with Yuzo than with anyone else. [...] He was also said to be one of the most handsome professional Go players of the time. He did not participate in the Castle games because he would have had to shave his head.

WHAT MORE NEED I SAY? Here we have two people with incredibly specific competencies at a slow board game set in - what for me has always felt like - a decaying fin de siècle time when old fuedal Japan was on the teetering brink of major change. WRite me absolutely anything about them going at their craft and I will love it! I know near to nothing about Go the game itself, so don't feel obliged to go into the technical details, though if you do, I thoroughly enjoy reading about it. While I'd love this to be shippy, I'd be just as happy with gen.

How do either of them feel about titles and status? Did Oota care at all? Does he smirk at Shuusaku's accumulated accolades? Is he envious? I adore in-group/out-group dynamics, so if you want to write about how rankings worked and what that meant socially for them, I'd love that
Castle Game or the 30 Game Competition shenanigans. Thought: Oota hanging outside any of the million of Castle Games Shuusaku won, smiling rakishly/suggestively...
Tell me about Shuusaku growing up and learning from Oota: why didn't they end up in a mentor/student setup? How did Shuusaku, little genius that he was, go about learning about the world beyond the Go board?
Drunken Go with other players while the two of them engage in totally inappropriate cross-generational flirting
Reincarnation AU? Magical Go board AU?

N.B.: feel free to abandon and choose your own romanisation of the character names; after typing this letter even I'm finding "Oota Yuuzou" ridiculous looking.

Keicho Embassy RPF

Characters: Hasekura Tsunenaga
Wikipedia

This can really be a five minute or 500 hour fandom if you want to write it: I'd be equally excited to receive either a high fantasy/speculative/alternate universe depiction of Hasekura's journey or a deep historical dive with oodles of footnotes. Whatever floats your (heh) boat! (If you are looking at my writing history, please don't feel like you have to write to a high degree of historical accuracy – as long as there isn't something anachronistic to the point that no suspension of disbelief is possible (I'm talking Mickey Mouse showing up in Edo Japan level), I'm not nitpicky. I actually know very little about Edo Japan!)

Some general ideas that I would love explored: how genuine was Hasekura's conversion? Was it an intimately personal conversion, or a practical one, or a mixture of the two? What level of syncretism was there?

The scale of the ambition of the campaign is also fascinating to me; to boldly go indeed. Tell me more about the mental landscape of this embassy; about the strange equivalency of Sotelo coming to Japan and Hasekura going to New Spain, the fearsomeness of the unknown, the interaction of human fear with a divine mission.

I'd also love a journey-tale, whether a travelogue or a mythical retelling or whatever else you want to play with. Or tell me about how the maps, geography, material culture, and the visions of the world that either side of the embassy had were different.

The Keicho Embassy... In Space!
Hasekura codeswitching; how does he interact with Date as opposed to with the Europeans?
Epistolary fic, with letters addressed to either direction of the Embassy. Or a historical record!
A magical realist or Mononoke-style closed room (closed ship?) fantastical episode on the ship during the journey. Bonus points for syncretism and multilingual/cultural mixture of monsters. (If you've watched Mononoke and want to cross this over with the Medicine Seller...)
Competence porn: shipbuilding as a craft! Language acquisition! Diplomacy as a craft!
The mixed-upness of very educated men writing in their own historical contexts is fascinating to me: if you're interested in the construction of the linguistic or religious of this period/the embassy, I'd love to see it in whatever form you come up with!

N.B. I am guilty for the period-inaccurate character disambiguations; sorry! I know they should be Edo era, not Sengoku...

The Culture - Iain M. Banks

Characters: Any
Amazon: Use of Weapons and Surface Detail are the only two you technically need.

I mean come on how could you not.

ONE DAY MY SHIP WILL COME; I have reached a point where I am perfectly happy any Culture fic at all - spin the wheel on any of the requested characters, or go wild and worldbuild. Want to write whatever that Culture fic is that's been sitting in your head? Fantastic. I can't wait to read it. I've snipped out most of the non-bulleted part of this request that have appeared in previous years' letters, so take anything you want from my 2018/2017/2016 (all practically identical), 2015/2014 with the crazy Homestuck concept borrowing, or anywhere else I've typed about it. My prompts for FOTNMC/Zakalwe/Diziet are contained in those letters!

If you were matched to me on other fandoms, rest assured that I want all of them equally: The Culture has simply been my forever-fandom for a long, long, long while. Forgive its multi-year accumulated length!

As always, gosh do I want to see the fallout (or fall-in) of a Culture AI actually going literal meatfucker. FOTNMC + human + sex it actually cares about = ? Especially if that person it cares about is Lededje. Explore their relationship with each other after Surface Detail: I'd love to see them stay in touch, and develop a bond that is unlike what everyone expects them to develop. Does he help her establish herself in the Culture? Or is it the other way around: does Led take to her freedom like a duck to water and end up giving more back to FOTNMC than he – a mere pile of guns stapled together with cutting edge tech – helps her?

SC caperfic would be amazing. Maybe someone has to hunt down FOTNMC. Maybe FOTNMC is hunting down someone. Zakalwe gets into trouble and Sma calls in a favour, perhaps. Or Zakalwe ends up on FOTNMC on assignment and they end up going... rather outside the bounds of their authority, which Sma has to deal with. Or either Sma or Lededje getting in trouble and these two relative strangers finding it in them to go after them.

Demeisen going through an upgrade. One hundred pages of him drooling over new inventory? Amen. Him window-shopping for a new body? YES. Or: what GCU does he dock with for his refitting? What GCU would want to take him? Or what GCU would reject him? Demeisen talking it over with Lededje, or Zakalwe...
Lededje and Demeisen's penpal relationship.
Sma dolls Zakalwe up in an attempt to help the man fucking unwind a moment. Fucking ensues. Unexpected fucking.
Sma, Demeisen, and hatefucking over their comparative SC philosophies after having a talk about Contact. Or the exact opposite: Sma and Demeisen having a complete and frightening meeting of SC minds.
Zakalwe attempting to learn any amount of Culture technology; is he like a clueless tech-support nightmare with his first touchscreen device? Him getting a crash course in certain bits of tech – point-and-shoot-y or otherwise – from Demeisen. Or a piece contrasting the tech Zakalwe is brilliant at with the other types of Culture tech he's totally useless about.
Sma and FOTNMC have a talk about Contact. Philosophical, ah, disagreements ensue.

talk

Cross this over with John Wick and listen to me scream

Additional porn prompts:

Lededje/Demeisen as an act of Demeisen demonstrating his affection for her, or Led watching Demeisen wreck some other humans for her sake, not his.
Anything involving Zakalwe tied to a chair. (Sma/Demeisen go at it in front of him? Clearly it's, ah, cognitive behavioural therapy, right?)
Sma/Zakalwe with Sma topping the hell out of him. Demeisen watching them both for bonus points, triple points if he's pitching in instructions!
Demeisen experimenting with xeno in all the ways it could do so.
Or Zakalwe learning to bend a little bit the longer he's in the Culture: his heterosexual capabilities have never been in question, but...

Dear Yuletide Writer 2019