mayhap: animated gif of yule log burning (yule log)
mayhap ([personal profile] mayhap) wrote2014-10-24 12:35 pm
Entry tags:

Dear Yuletide Author 2014

Dear Yuletide author,

I am so excited that you share one of these fandoms with me! I am really looking forward to reading whatever you write for me in whichever of them it is!

I enjoy a wide range of things—short, punchy stories and longer plottier stories, explicitly porny and/or kinky stories and coy stories that are all about the teasing and the implications, stories with some kind of meta angle to them and stories that engage with the source material 100% on their own level. One thing I always enjoy is stories that are written in a very particular style or manner, like a set of letters or a faux-academic paper or something; if that sort of thing appeals to you, go wild!

I apologize in advance if my gen prompts are not very detailed, varied, or inspiring. This in no way reflects a desire not to receive gen (or canon relationships only, as applicable), which is something that I would absolutely be interested in reading for any of these sets of characters. It is purely a function of me being terrible at writing gen prompts.

The Bugle
Andy Zaltzman, John Oliver

It's not that The Bugle doesn't have a fandom—The Bugle fandom is pretty amazing!—but it does not, for the most part, write fic. One of my favorite things about The Bugle is the 'bullshit', i.e. the wildly counterfactual world that John and Andy (but let's be realistic, mostly Andy) narrate and/or act out in skits. I would totally love what is basically Bugle worldbuilding fic, based on anything that's ever been referenced on the show, a combination of multiple Bugle references, or completely original things in the Bugle house style. My other favorite thing about The Bugle is John and Andy's working relationship, especially when one of them manages to make the other start laughing uncontrollably during the podcast, and if you would rather write something that is set in something more closely approximating the real world, I would love to read gen or shippy fic about John and Andy working together and doing Bugle-y things. If you want to use the Bugle house style to do fandom or Yuletide meta somehow, those are things I always enjoy and think the Bugle format would lend itself to, or you could do any of many things that I haven't even thought of.

Dialogues — Plato
Socrates, Alcibiades

If Plato didn't want me to ship Socrates carnally, he shouldn't have given him such sizzling sexual tension with Alcibiades! Also with pretty much everyone present at the symposium, but especially with Alcibiades. I love the teasing and the reversal of the expected roles for the pursued and the pursuing. Although I desperately crave a physical consummation of their relationship, no matter how much it runs contrary to everything Plato stood for, you could absolutely also write something that continues the dynamic of Alcibiades pursuing and Socrates making him frantic with his refusal to reciprocate. Since Plato's dialogues are essentially Real Person Fiction, I feel like you can just as easily incorporate known biographical details or take only what is on the page as a complete work in itself to draw upon, as you prefer.

Frog and Toad
Frog, Toad

I loved these books when I was a kid and only realized later that they were my first exposure to a type of relationship that I always love (and tend to ship). I read an interesting interview with Arnold Lobel where he talked about not wanting to continue the series because he felt like the relationship between Frog and Toad was getting unhealthy, which frankly puts it even more in line with my shipping tendencies, although I was very surprised that he saw it as Frog controlling Toad when I tend more towards seeing Frog as the put-upon one in their relationship. I would also love a gen Frog & Toad story, or set of shorter stories in keeping with the original—and if you're inclined towards meta, I think a story where either or both of them do Yuletide would be hilarious. The one thing I ask is that if you do write explicit Frog/Toad—and I hasten again to reassure you that gen or far tamer shippy fic is also great—I would want it to involve realistic frog anatomy, i.e., cloacas instead of penes. (Incidentally, it turns out that there is no scientific distinction between frogs and toads, which are just another kind of frog. The more you know!) I promise you that I would in no way feel that this injured my childhood, although I completely understand if you would feel diferently.

The Once and Future King — T. H. White
Arthur Pendragon, Guenever, Lancelot du Lac

Each of three loves the other two and doesn't want to hurt them but finds themselves constrained to do so anyway. I'm not saying that a threesome would necessarily solve everything here, but I do believe that it could solve a lot of the things. Whether the inevitable ending is the same, but at least the three of them are able to share another kind of happiness with each other while it lasts, or in fact them being together and not lying to each other allows them to somehow overcome Mordred's scheming, I would be interested in exploring any possibility, sweet or bittersweet or angsty. I'm really interested in Lancelot's thing with sadism, where other people's pain interests him and he can't conceive of any ethical way to deal with this interest, and incline to the theory that he is in many ways White's self-insert character. If no version of the threesome and the timeline is gelling for you, I would also love any story about the three of them interacting in some way that shows them all caring about each other in spite of the underlying tension/guilt.

Trixie Belden series — Julie Campbell Tatham & Kathleen Kenny
Trixie Belden, Honey Wheeler

I absolutely adore Trixie and Honey's friendship and think they would make an incredibly adorable couple as well. I love how loyal and supportive they are of each other, especially when it comes to the ways in which they are opposites. I think the setting is really important in these books and would prefer that everyone doesn't suddenly have a computer and a cell phone—unless it is actually far futurefic, in which case, that is totally awesome and I would love to see what the Bob-Whites are doing in their seventies. I'd be cool with background or past Jim/Trixie in a romantic or friendship fic, but would prefer that it not be the focus of the story, and would also prefer no Honey/Brian or Mart/Di.

For stalking purposes, I am [personal profile] mayhap on Dreamwidth, crossposted to [livejournal.com profile] mayhap on Livejournal, and [archiveofourown.org profile] mayhap on AO3; on tumblr I am [tumblr.com profile] pinchofnutmeg, because mayhap was taken. Feel free to take a gander at these tags ("dear author" and "yuletide") for stuff from Yuletides past if you so desire. Happy Yuletide!

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