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Dear Yuletide Writer 2024
Dear Yuletide writer,
Thank you for writing for me! I'm a generally omnivorous reader and excited to read anything that you come up with – everything in this letter is optional. Have fun!
AO3: karanguni
tl;dr: I happily opt into gen, porn, unusual media types, and crossovers with fandoms I have read/written/requested before; ignore or take as many parts of this wall of text as you want! My AO3 account has gifts enabled for treats.
- Likes/DNWs
- 平家物語 | Heike monogatari | The Tale of the Heike (Shigemori)
- Inu-Oh (Any)
- The Dreamlands Express (Any)
- Hikaru no Go (Touya Kouyou, Ogata)
- The Bedlam Stacks - Natasha Pulley (Keita Mori, Merrick Tremayne)
- The Culture - Iain M. Banks (Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints)
General Likes
I genuinely mean that I'm an omnivorous reader: if you have something that you want to write, I'm happy to read it. Please don't sweat stuff like first/second person POV, archive-warning content, &c. That said, if you want some jumping-off ideas:
- 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 fine with me. Anything I've written for or in my AO3 bookmarks is fair game, 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!
- Porn likes will go here once I sign up for Yuleporn :)
- Crossover prompts will go here once I sign up for 2F1 :)
Dislikes/DNWs:
I have no general DNWs; all DNWs are fandom-specific and listed with each prompt. In terms of general dislikes, for porn I would prefer not to read long, detailed descriptions of daddy kink or scat, but am fine with mentions of it.
平家物語 | Heike monogatari | The Tale of the Heike
Taira no Shigemori (Tale of Heike)
Oh Shigemori, cinnamon roll of the Heike, too good for this world. I am absolutely open to any adventures you might take him on, and I mean that in the truest sense: whether canon fill-in or grand Legends of the Galactic Heroes space opera AU or a tumble through Japanese mythology/Noh plays/???, I am down for anything you can come up with. He's just so... good. For what little time we get him, Shigemori is a force of nobility and dignity and old-time Taira awesome, the last of the Good Ones, a mirrored bookend on the other side of the tale from, say, Atsumori.
I adore Shigemori's competence, his ability to stand up to his father, his presence in the story despite how little time he has. The bittersweet tragedy of him not living long enough to become a villain (come on, who really gets out of the Genpei drama without some egg on their face?) is like candy to me.
Some ideas:
- What happens if he lives and Kiyomori doesn't?
- I am 100% – nay, 1000% – here for something a little magical realist or mythological: there are so many SIGNS! and SYMBOLS! in Heike. Was there something about the whirlwind before Shigemori's death that was significant? Does he come back as a ghost? Do you want him to haunt Kiyomori until Kiyomori
stops being an assholesees skulls and dogs baying? Or maybe he comes back as a hidden bodhisattva? - I will read anything competence porn related for Shigemori. You could write about him sitting at a desk thinking about trade deals, urban planning, the logistics of keeping a household fed, what to wear next season, or wood drying and I would love it. Maybe a bit of his journal? Some of his letters?
- External point of view of his retainers or [choose your own major character]?
- I hereby opt-in for wish fulfilment semi-crack. Shigemori in a modern corporate AU, where he could maybe have not fallen ill and chosen Another Way for the Taira
clanzaibatsu? Or something IN SPACE! You really can't go wrong with IN SPACE! - Going wildly in another direction, if you feel so inclined as to invent a Shigemori Noh play... I'd love even a sketched out version or liner notes of what that might look line.
- Random in-universe (?) crossovers (?): I have absolutely no justification for wanting Shigemori to chill with/school Yoshitsune, but I do. Or, what would have happened if Soujoubou randomly adopted Shigemori?
- I very much love the general fatalistic mood of the canon, and how rocks-fall-everybody-dies doesn't matter because the candleflames of people's lives still burn bright for a while. I happily opt-in to character death and sadness &c. &c., as well as you pairing Shigemori up with anyone if you want to go that way.
Regarding canon and related canons: I am thoroughly unfussed about canon sources. My English copy is the Royall Tyler and I own it in annotated classical Japanese as well – but romanise however you want! My Heike knowledge is broad but also really piecemeal, as is my general knowledge of Japanese literature as a whole; I will happily suck up any links to source material/footnotes if you feel inclined to go Heike-wild. It would make my year to receive some random reference to anything Genji/Genpei/Hogen/Heiji/random Noh or kabuki or movie or anime/poetry/woodblock carvings/weirdly obscure facts about Kyoto. If, for some reason, you stick some Japanese references in, I will happily go look them up. But I also honestly don't care if you wallpaper all of that in favour of just going with... Shigemori vibes, for a lack of a better term: I'm not fussed with historical accuracy if you're not aiming for historical accuracy.
P.S. If you're reading this section of my letter and comprehending anything I'm writing to begin with, believe me when I say I'm already just gleeful that someone out there wants to read or write some Heike too.
Inu-Oh
Any: Tomona, Inu-Oh, Taniichi. (Use any.)
Acquiring the canon: if you don't know this canon, it's easily streamable online and is a quick watch. Or, goodness, just listen to their tale of kujira. ROCK OPERA HEIKE, PEOPLE. ROCK OPERA.
Whew. This movie. Like I said in my signup: Inu-Oh is just such an incredible movie: how can something contain so many things I love simultaneously like this??? Biwa-houshi performing ROCK OPERA re-imagined Heike stories with a cursed and ostracised Noh actor, bending everything from gender to history only to end in tragedy-not-tragedy set in the landscape of pre-Edo Japan??? Wildly good off-the-top psychedelic historiography-in-action with sing-out-loud, hand-clapping, taboo-breaking renditions that attempt to throw tradition off the roof????? With additional find-you-wherever, whenever friendship that traverses space/time as two individuals attempt to deal with the weight of Things they have inherited????????????? Yes, please.
I adore Tomona especially because I have a soft-spot for blind biwa-houshi, but honestly love anything and everyone nominated in this universe. I get frothy over the concept of performance arts passed down through institutional, in/out group secret transmission and the codification of un-codifiable oral/visual traditions, so everything that Tomona and Inu-Oh do in their massively awesome reworking of The Classics That Are In Fact Still In The Process Of Becoming The Classics We Know In The 21st Century is popcorn to me. Just in case the giant section on the Tale of Heike above didn't make it obvious, I adore Shigemori and the general episodic nature of the Tale of Heike, and I would love beyond reason your take on one of the tales in the vein of this canon.
Some ideas:
- Tales of the Heike: Shigemori. If you give me them tell/re-telling Shigemori (DOES HE LIVE??? DOES HE TURN INTO
BATMANA VENGEFUL RIGHTEOUS SPIRIT?) I will do backflips. That said, the whole of the Heike really interests me, so if you want to do, say, Yoshitsune, or yet-another-Dan-no-Ura, or flute boiii Atsumori (sorry not sorry) or Kiyomori or whomever, I'm all there. - HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THEIR ART. I am unreasonably interested in things ilike how we've ended up primarily with the Kakuichi manuscript for the Heike – a manuscript that has picked/chosen episodes out of a fundamentally oral/musical tradition. SO MUCH HAS BEEN LOST. THERE IS SO MUCH NEGATIVE SPACE. Inu-Oh as a movie just scratches that major itch, for me, of what was it like, over the centuries? and how did these compilations happen and evolve? I adore that they touch upon both radical performances and institutional lock-down of the material as a form of propaganda/narrative control. This out of control paragraph is here to say that any bendy/twisty things you want to do with this – whether you tell a story-of-stories from the 21st century backwards or a in-the-canon snippet of Tomona arguing with Taniichi or Inu-Oh reflecting on his family's Noh or do a look-we-found-this-diary-in-a-musty-box reveal in the future, I AM HERE FOR IT.
- Tomona's perception of sound! Inu-Oh's perception of space/his physical body!
- I love ambiguous relationships, so if you want to play with Tomona &/ Inu-Oh, go forth! What do they do when they meet again? What if they, say, enter the matrix of modern computing somehow? Reincarnate them, remix them, sing them songs and write their poems!
- What's in a name? WHAT'S IN A NAME? In name changes! And, as they live on in the ether, in the changing of era names, perhaps?
- Crossover/blends of the WEALTH of material that sits adjacent to this canon, spiritual or historical: so welcome. Source material-wise, the original Tale of Heike, Kwaidan, general Japanese mythology! And then performance art wise, canons like Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu where Tomoari possesses Kikuhiko and Inu-Oh possesses Sukeroku, perhaps? Or, gosh, a remix a la Samurai Champloo?
P.P.S: much as with Heike above, I'm just excited that anyone might be reading this section of my letter and interested in this niche. I'm genuinely not fussy about what/how much source historical material you use or nuts-and-bolts historical accuracy! Please don't feel compelled to get anything Perfectly Historical if you choose to write for me.
Call of Cthulhu: The Dreamlands Express (Roleplaying Game)
Any: Henri Peeters, Worldbuilding (Use any.)
Acquiring the canon: The Dreamlands Express is a small (~50 pages) optional standalone module within the larger Horror on the Orient Express campaign. Read my promo post here!
As I said in my signup, there is so much psychological and pseudo-geographical land to cover here. I love that one man's passion led to the creation of this dream railway, that part of Henri's dream involves allowing other people to go to a place where they can ultimately throw away their own. I've always liked the Dream sequence within the larger Cthulhu Mythos, and this module feels like a tasting menu of some of its high points.
Starting with Henri: his passion for service! The deals with the devils the gods that he had to make to establish the Express! I'd love to learn about these things.
- What did Henri promise, do, or sacrifice to the gods?
- What was the process of embedding the Express into the Dreamlands like?
- What stories could Henri tell about the people – real, imagined, Mythos or any crossover you can dream up – who come on his train, if he were ever to keep a diary of some sort?
The Express's ability to transcend place/time and for humans to be able to board it so long as they're riding on the Orient Express in the waking world opens up so many opportunities. Put anyone you can think of on the train! I'll probably love it. Some thoughts:
- From the Mythos: Randolph Carter is the immediate and obvious first choice. Why is he on the train? Is he just visiting on one of his excursions? He's such an excellent dreamer: even a slice-of-life view of him talking with Henri would be lovely. Or, if you want to put Nyalarthotep into the picture and have them battling things out on the Express somehow, I'm all eyes... Other figures I like include Professor Armitage and poor Walter Gilman.
- Or crossovers! What if Agatha Christie dreamt herself onto the Dreamlands Express, and Murder on the Orient Express is really a re-telling of her meeting a dream-Poirot, or some other investigator she later turns into Poirot?
- Or maybe the King in Yellow from Robert Chambers?
Any fandom I've ever written for and any part of the Mythos, I'd be happy to see crossed over here.
On the worldbuilding front: where to even start. The wide sweep of the Dreamlands is there for us to tour through – for something unconventional, maybe a tourist's guidebook to the Dreamlands that Henri provides would be fun? Or a more psychological piece that digs into one or several of the stops on the line. Heck, maybe it's literal worldbuilding crossovers: maybe Calvino's Invisible Cities come to pay a visit.
More generally, themes of nostalgia, wistfulness, ambition and heartbreak really appeal to me for this canon. Perhaps there's a more mundane story to be told of someone from our waking world, of whatever century, who finds peace in riding the Dreamlands Express. Whether that peace comes from letting a fear go or a dream die is up to you.
Or, if you'd like to wander into places feline, I'd love a story about the Cats of Ulthar, whimsical or otherwise. The cats get special treatment on the train: what do they get up to? Do some of them have alter-egos in the waking world, and how does that factor into them coming and going on the Express?
Hikaru no Go (Anime)
Touya Kouyou, Ogata Seiji. (Use one or both)
Hikaru no Go, back in the tagset for one renewed/last glorious year! I'd love to see, above all, old man troll Touya Kouyou, happy in his retirement and ravaging the Go universe with his newfound freedom from giving a damn about all the boring bits related to professional Go like showing up for events or being polite or, you know, making sense. I love the idea of the man being freed from the chains of being a generational Face For Go and just rolling around doing whatever he wants, wherever he wants, whenever he wants, breaking young players' brains and generally being finding new ways to play a game he's loved forever. Perhaps he's learned how to be a different kind of parent/teacher/person since his game with Sai?
Out of Kouyou's somewhat zany collection of students, I particularly love Ogata because he's as zany as Akira and Hikaru but in his own crazy mid-30s way. He's so clearly physically an outsider but also just as clearly a Go insider – he's got an impeccable Go lineage and the wins to match even as he's sports-car-driving, obsessive doesn't-see-daylight person surrounded mostly by fishtanks. How did he end up where he is?
Put together, I am a sucker for the difference in their personalities and ages. I love how Ogata is voiced in the anime: all deferential to his teacher and politeness when he's usually running around chainsmoking and roughing up teenagers. How did they meet? Did Ogata have a tough time getting into the Go world and was Kouyou his ticket in? Have they ever fought? Has Kouyou ever intentionally needled Ogata into reacting in a certain way For His Development?
Some ideas:
- Young man Kouyou: does he have his own go inheritance cross to bear, or was he the first?
- Give me pre-retirement Kouyou, helping Ogata become the player he ends up being, whatever that looks like! Is there a study group war between Ogata and Akira? :3???
- What is being Kouyou's apprentice even like? How has he changed over time? How did they meet?
- What I would give for Touya Study Group dynamics. Kouyou and his motley crew, looking so dignified but actually just as go-mad as everyone else. Tell me whether he's the sort of teacher who drops students who don't achieve high rank, or does he see value in people for other traits: teaching, spying on others, actual emotional intelligence? (Spoiler alert: I'd love the latter) I'd adore a slice of life of that group if you want to go there!
Additional prompts in this letter:
- Mid-career Kouyou: what was it like when he started getting all the titles and the fame and media attention was bearing down on him?
- I'm 100% here for Kouyou's outsider opinion on anything, too, so if you want to write a Hikaru&/Akira story that's narrated from his POV, that would be incredible. The snark.
- How does Kouyou make Ogata somehow behave like a real human being when they're both in the same room at the same time? What does he think of all those fish?
- Ogata teaching Kouyou how technology works...
- 5 times there was a sort of barrier (language, age, experience) between them and 1 time there was not
While I'm on this Japanese board game trip, I'd also adore a crossover with March Comes In Like A Lion, whether it involves one or both of these two! I am particularly fond of Shimada and Souya, and think it would be quite excellent to see these two worlds mushed together.
DNWs: Kouyou being end-game malicious towards Ogata (i.e. intending serious psychological harm as opposed to "I'm pushing you in a particular instance to make you better"). I'd be happy with either gen, ambiguous, or shippy fic, but would request no breaking up/persistent unhappiness in the Touya family as a result of it – you can either just not mention Kouyou's wife/Akira's opinions or have them ultimately be cool about it, even if there's initial discomfort.
I'm caught up on the manga as well if you want to use content from that!
The Bedlam Stacks - Natasha Pulley
Keita Mori, Merrick Tremayne
Well here are a pair of thoroughly dubiously amoral Company boys: Merrick, tossed around by life & time(s) (or Keita?) into thinking he isn't full of his own competencies; and Keita such a mess of pining and attempting to escape out from his own abilities/heritage and to some only theoretical future. I'm fascinated by how Keita basically pushes Merrick forward/overboard into his own future: how sure was he that that was going to work out? And then there was that flash of regret we see from him in the book: what did he have to give up and forget by pushing Merrick away? Keita's so very alone for so very long, and such a prickly creature: yet he and Merrick were clearly close, and remained close enough through Watchmaker and beyond to rely on one another/show up unannounced at each other's places. Whether you set it when Keita is younger in their Company days or later in the game after Merrick's gone and found Bedlam or even post-Watchmaker series, I just want more of their amazing and complicated relationship.
I'd also thoroughly love an AU – there are so many dead-ends that could've been sprawling in the trees of possibility in Keita's timelines.
- What if Keita never gets Merrick injured? What if he never leaves the Company?
- What if Thaniel never ends up in the picture or leaves the picture abortively, whether because Keita realises he can't get to him in time or by other happenstance? Or what if Keita needs Merrick's help and, goodness, has to ask for it?
- Merrick and Keita as pirates. Somehow.
- What happens if Merrick is a younger man? Would Keita have possibly chosen him instead?
- Or what happens if all goes as per Bedlam, and Keita visits? Or helps Merrick live his best South American life somehow?
Either gen or shipfic for these two would be lovely. If you prefer Keita/Thaniel and/or Merrick/&Raphael, I am also well and truly in those camps, so some ideas that lap into that territory:
- Keita introduces Thaniel to Merrick after as many or few events of Watchmaker/Pepperharrow as you desire. Maybe at Christmas. Maybe there are dogs...
- Merrick introduces Keita to Raphael, whether in Peru or... Heligan :3
- Botany adventures. These two doing anything botany or horticulture related would be quite incredible to me,
like a crossover with Gardeners World somehow, somewhen, I mean, timey-wimey, right? - Downtime during the bad old days in the Company. I'd love it if Keita saw in Merrick real, genuine friendship because Merrick looks at all of his eldritchness and... doesn't care even though he sees clearer than most
- Merrick visiting Keita in Japan, at any stage.
- Keita taking Six to visit Merrick and the sheer amount of semi-grandfatherly indulgences that might involve...
DNW: unhappy endings for either Keita or Merrick. Bittersweet or ambiguous is fine, but please avoid nothing-will-ever-be-good-again levels of despair!
The Culture - Iain M. Banks
GOU Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints
Acquiring the canon: out of The Culture series, you only need Surface Detail, which can be found anywhere books are sold
I mean come on how could you not.
I'd love something about our delightfully badly-behaved-but-within-S.C.-if-not-straightforward-moral-constraints Picket Ship. FOTNMC is a darling because it's such a bucket of contradictions: it's a bad boy, but also clearly not a loose canon. Despite its atrocious behaviour, in all the ways that seem to count FOTNMC is hardly "Mawhrin-Skel" from The Player of Games, exiled from S.C. for being too dangerous: it does its job.
So! What is it like being a "picket" ship in a rather post-war timeline? What is it like consenting (maybe) to be engineered to be exactly what S.C. wants you to be? What is its relationship with being part of the Culture's not!army – I've requested oodles of Zakalwe in the past and been rewarded with just such excellent fic about our human(ish) mercenary man-weapon, and I'd love to see the Mind/ship side of that explored. We get all these whiffs and hints of how S.C. ships and rank and committees work throughout the various books: I'd love to see that fleshed out.
I also would really like an exploration of FOTNMC's actions during the - probably large amounts of - downtime it has. If you, like me, think that it kept up with Led after the events of Surface Detail, I'd love anything you could whip up about it. The epilogue of the book mentions that it hangs around GSVs: tell me more about that, maybe – about ship-class interactions, how the physical bodies that Mind(s) get put in sort of are or are not deterministically linked to the Mind(s) themselves.
Some ideas:
- FOTNMC gets put into a different ship body, for Some Reason
- What are the Normal Moral Constraints anyway? Is there a standard for the panhumans and a standard for Minds? What's Moral in the Culture anyhow?
- Who was FOTNMC's parent ship and/or parent S.C. committee? Does he ever get checked up on?
- Was FOTNMC born into S.C.? Are all Picket Ship Minds? How do other Minds feel about that – especially, perhaps, the older (or oldest) ones from the Idirian War or the formation of the Culture?
- I'm also here for just FOTNMC having a very merry holiday season indeed: FOTNMC gets a dream refit? Or maybe it gets to pick apart equivalent-level tech?
- Does FOTNMC ever... read a book or something? It's got so much spare time, it claims not to be social...
- Does FOTNMC ever go into the happy place that the Minds go, that land of infinite fun space? Or does it find it a load of rubbish?
- FOTNMC's transmissions with Led
- FOTNMC's transmissions with [any named Ship of your choice from the books] I'm a sucker for the ship's relationship with Led, so if you want to write anything in that vein, it'd be delightful
I've read all of The Culture books and am happy for you to reference them, but I'm just as happy happy to disregard anything outside of Surface Detail, since that's the only one needed for this request.
Crossovers: I'd adore a crossover with the Culture, whether complete crack or very serious. What if Estraven from the Left Hand of Darkness lived and ended up working for the Ekumen, but what if... the Ekumen is really Contact/Special Circumstances? Or, if that's too much of a stretch, what if the Ekumen ships him off to a sector of space where he meets Special Circumstances and FOTNMC? To go from a planet where life and death are no laughing matter to the land of (erstwhile) Happy Fun Times and giga-death wars: what perspective could Estraven give a warship or vice-versa? Could they philosophically could end up on the same level? What if Estraven could Pacific Rim-style Drift with a ship because of the Handdara? /terrible thoughts.