Yuletide Reveals!

[karanguni]

Writing and I were not quite friends this year, but after a whirlwind 2023 I managed to get some (very last minute) works into the collection... and turned out liking some of them better than I have a lot of other things I'd written in 2022. Hooray?

All of my recs are in #yuletide-recs on the Yuletide Discord server, because I am lazy. I'll collect them later, with hope.

My main assignment was (zero surprises here) The Culture - Curator(ship) (GCU Arbitrary POV on Sma, ~2k), in which I finally made myself read State of the Art and thoroughly enjoyed how terribly idealistic Diziet is.

Treats:

• Yamaguchi Akira Pseudo-Edo Scifi Art - Prime Time (Gen, ~1.5k, no need to know canon) - many, many thanks to rachelmanija for putting me onto this 5-minute fandom, which exploded my brain. This was one of those fics where I sat in the bath for an hour just letting A Feeling run through my brain over and over again, then promptly emerged mentally screaming EUREKA and ran to type it all out before I lost all the threads. This is also the nth time in a row that I've written Timey-Wimey stuff for Yuletide, which is hilarious because I find timey-wimey stuff really hard to write and read. But it felt good, it came out easily, and people despite its nicheness seem to like it! A fun Japanese history/alternate history flex, with lots of random "ooh let's throw this random reference" in. I wish I had more time to go into Terrible Tokugawa Politics in the tradition of what it means to be 洛外, but that and art history cannot be done with less than five days to the deadline 8D
• Hikaru no Go - The Other Side (Kuwabara-POV, ~5K) - HnG, my beloved, back in the tagset for one final year. I mulled over the many requests for far too long and this is the weird, maybe-one-day-Hikaru-can-explain-Sai-because-magic-is-everywhere AU result. Kuwabara is a lot of fun to write, it turns out. And my Touya Kouyou disease continues to spread.
• Lilywhite Boys - KJ Charles - Plans (Jerry/Alec, ~2K, porn) - Determined to hit four fics, I stared into the void until the void stared back at me. I've been terrified of writing Lilywhite Boys for a long time because pastiche and I for this time period don't quite mesh, but the temptation to treat another tagmod was too strong 8D Again, rachelmanija shoved me over the line by screaming prompt ideas at me until something clicked.

And that's it! I'm happy to have tripped over another Japanese fandom this year, and delighted by Yamaguchi's art.