About that time again.
Oct. 2nd, 2017 11:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freneticfloetryYou know, the two or three times I year I actually post (so if you're my assigned writer and you enjoy stalking your recips, sorry, not much here to see). That's right folks, it's Yuletide o'clock! This is my 11th year participating, and each Yuletide brings fresh challenges, fresh ideas, and loads of fresh new fic to enjoy. It also marks another year of the Misses Clause Challenge, which hauntedd and I are thrilled to be running once again.
My letters have historically been fairly… enthusiastic. I'm a rambler. In recent years I've tried to pare that back; this year, most of my high-level likes/dislikes section — not to mention three requests — have pretty much been lifted part and parcel from last year's letter. If it helps at all, previous letters, recs, and reveal posts can be found under my LJ Yuletide tag.
Generally…
Yes, please: Found families. Platonic soulmates. Canon divergence. Demonstrations of love, not declarations. Magical realism. Verbal sparring (TO THE DEATH). Internal vs. external conflict. Symbolism, subtext, and stories that live between the lines. Broken-boy soldiers, magnificent bastards, snarky sidekicks with hearts of gold. Strong women whose strength isn't all (or at all) physical. My tropetastic trinity: amnesia, huddling for warmth, and fake relationships (when they both have Feelings!). Hero's Trials (especially when the hero is female). And good old-fashioned jealousy, as long as the jealous party is the person who holds the balance of emotional power.
No, thank you: Incest and infidelity. If you take nothing else away from this section, please take that. Completely non-canon AUs (i.e. of the book shop, coffee shop, or college variety). Curtainfic — I like a dash of salt with my sugar. Marginalized characters of color. Second person (sorry!). Animal abuse. Fridging. Rape as a plot device. PWP. For Yuletide, D/s, BDSM, kinks that end in "play" (and don't start with "fore") unless otherwise noted. And bananas. Because reasons.
Specifically…
Being Human (US) | Sally Malik, Aidan Waite
The Request: Finally. In this life, the next, or the ones they never lived.
The Details: First and foremost, you should know that I love Sally Malik. I love her sarcasm and her self-deprecation and her stream-of-consciousness babbling. I love her tendency to screw up while trying to do the right thing, and screw up more when she tries to fix what she's broken. And I love Aidan and Sally's friendship more than anything, literally anything, in a show where I loved a whole hell of a lot. That said, the events of "Rewind, Rewind…" and "Too Far, Fast Forward" were the best possible way to go from BFFs to True Love in the span of six episodes. Six. Episodes. Which is where my request comes in.
When Donna agrees to send Sally back, she says that it's not an exact science, and Sally will ping through time until she settles. So what if there are these infinite alternate universes, where these three people are destined to collide in some capacity, and Sally spent time (however infinitesimal) in some of them, even if she can't consciously remember? Does she take what she learned in the first alternate timeline and try to do things differently? Maybe she plays with different points of first contact. Maybe she lets Josh and Nora happen more organically. Maybe she takes matters into her own hands and tries to kill Bishop or Marcus on her own. Maybe she's stuck in a perpetual Groundhog Day loop, testing which things to test until she gets it right. Does history always repeat itself? Is she always doomed to die at someone else's hand, or is their reality, where she sacrifices herself — saving and dooming and saving him again — their best possible outcome?
Alternatively, I'd love to spend some more time within the show's alternate universe. How does Sally adjust to being a werewolf? If that alleyway brawl had never happened, how much further would Aidan have spiraled (and what would Sally have done to bring him back)? Of course, you can always disregard all that and write me something awesome about hijinks or house meetings or the hilarity of the three of them sitting down to dinner when Josh is the only one who eats or five times someone walked in on someone else in the shower (and whether or not there was blood involved). Or afterlife sex. That will totally work.
TL;DR: I love these two insanely as friends, but I also ship it hard. Have a ball.
The Fine Print: I love Sally most (clearly). And Aidan's right behind her. But I also love Nora and Josh (and their wonderful family unit), and Emily, and Zoe, and Suren and Donna and Bishop and Kat and pretty much anyone who is not Danny. Include as few or as many of them as you wish. And for any sex not of the afterlife variety (where I don't think it would apply), Aidan's a vampire, Sally might be human, feel free to introduce some feeding/blood-drunk euphoria.
Penny Dreadful (TV) | Ethan Chandler
The Request: "We’ve all done things to survive. There are such sins at my back it would kill me to turn around."
The Details: Penny Dreadful was a thing of beauty. And now that it's over, I'm left with more questions than answers.
If you're in it for the Ethan… welcome to the club, we have pie. The combination of "lone wolf unconsciously hunting for a pack" and "born protector who's selective in deciding where his unwavering loyalties lie" is like catnip to me. I may also have a huge weakness for men with daddy issues, and damn did season three ever feed it. Show me the past sins, all the horrors of the Talbot household — the war between father and son, the bond between Ethan and his sister, the faith he had and lost. Or show me the future — Ethan and Malcolm, trying to carry on when they've lost everything and everyone else (most by their own hand, or some extension of it). Do they move on? Do they self-destruct? Given who Vanessa and Sembene were within the family they made, and how both of them met their end, what impact does guilt have on Ethan? On Malcolm? And are they just haunted in their own heads, or is it more literal than that?
If you're here for the gen, I adore almost nothing more than Ethan and Sembene's friendship. I love that they reserve their darkest secrets for each other. I love that they fight and plot and do the dishes as a team. I love love love that they have these wonderful moments of levity within this looming reality. Likewise, every exchange between Ethan and Lyle in "Verbis Diablo" had me grinning like a loon. We didn't get to see them do much plundering — perhaps hijinks at the British Museum are in order. Perhaps there's some kind of farcical Ethan+Sembene+Lyle fiasco (the trio has high tea? Sembene conducts baking lessons?). Perhaps Lyle returns, post-everything, and the men left behind try to carry on together.
If you walk on the shippier side, Ethan and Vanessa. Ethan. And. Vanessa. "We have claws for a reason" became such a siren song, for me — what if he'd succeeded in the kill he tried to spare her from? What if he had stayed, when she asked him to? What if she'd said yes to that vision of what her life could be, and they lived out normal days as normal people in a normal house with their normal children and were madly in love until the end of the world? What if Vanessa's catatonia in 4x01 was months of lucid dreaming of that life, and all the ways it would become a waking nightmare? What if he'd made it back in time? What if, what if, what if. You could always go darker — what if Vanessa wasn't alone in her possession, and the Ethan at her bedside hadn't been a figment, but the devil animating Ethan's body while he was trapped in his own head? Fallout from that could be delicious. (Or, to save on postage… Ethan and Sembene, in secret. Just sayin.)
The Fine Print: Fix-it fic is more than welcome, for any and all of it. I'm not the biggest fan of Victor, in the context of Ethan (I like his dynamic much more with Vanessa), so there's that, but I adore Brona/Lily and would love to see where she fits post-finale. And where Ethan/Vanessa is concerned, I'm all for canon-influenced kinks. Bondage, bloodplay, marking, maybe some edging. Throw it at me.
The Adjustment Bureau (2011) | Harry Mitchell
The Request: He's lived vicariously since the beginning. In the end, his penance is firsthand experience.
The Details: Who is Harry Mitchell? This movie is one of my favorites — clever, quick, and unique, with a really appealing cast and some thought-provoking concepts. Every time I watch, I wonder who the Adjusters are. They're wearing the standard Wings of Desire / City of Angels uniform — full suit, trench coat — which definitely implies something, but their powers are all about the hat. But do they have powers? Or are they just conduits for the power of the Chairman?
More specifically, though, I wonder about Harry. His ill-timed nap not only changed David and Elise's lives, but may have changed the course of humanity. So the questions I want to pose are these: is Harry a pathological screw-up, or did he catch a few winks on purpose? Were David and Elise flukes, or has Harry been building up to something with a series of small "mistakes" made in other peoples' lives? And most importantly, what's the fallout for the Adjusters in general, and Harry specifically, when all is said and done?
I'd love to see something where Harry gets to live as a human after sending those two on their way, either as punishment or reward. How long has he spent watching humanity before he gets to have a life of his own? What does he envy most about the humans in his charge? Does he get an Adjuster of his own, one he's aware of and can interact with? And is he eager to actually live a life, or is he a little afraid of mortality?
I also like the idea that Harry has fallen for a human he monitors, and this is all an elaborate plan to ultimately join them. Or for another take, what other interesting adjustments has Harry made (and for whom?)
The Fine Print: The original ending featured Shohreh Aghdashloo as the Chairman, and it's become part of my headcanon, so I don't think Harry is secretly God. It's much more interesting, for me personally, that he's just a cog that broke the wheel by squeaking. A lot. :)
Westworld (TV) | Maeve Millay
The Request: Hell hath no fury like a host turned human.
The Details: Maeve is the shit. There's your everyday run-of-the-mill hardcore, and there's "one woman going all 'A Million Ways to Die in the West' in grand pursuit of knowledge and self-possession" hardcore. I love that she was only briefly discomfited by technology and the future, and immediately moved on to how it could be best used to her advantage. I love that she uses her body as a tool, not a weapon, because she values her mind more than anything. I love how unrepentantly deliberate she was about "dying" — how it seemed to thrill her, in a way wholly separate from the things she learned on the other side.
I'm so torn when it comes to prompts for Maeve. On the one hand, I love the idea that Dolores is a distraction for Ford, and Mave is actually Arnold's failsafe. If that idea intrigues you, by all means, run with it. But more than anything in this canon, I love that Maeve is responsible for her own evolution. She makes conscious choices, she feels human emotions, and she is deeply motivated by her own sense of self-preservation (and then, of course, by her love for her daughter). Is it neater if all of that was a pre-programmed back door buried in her code by Arnold? Sure. But I like things messy. :)
So show me the aftermath of the finale! How does Maeve infiltrate Delos in order to find her daughter? Does she go back into the park and hunt from the inside, or does she take all that she's learned and play at being part of the programming machine once all the chaos has died down? Does she rescue/revive/reprogram Hector and Armistice to fill ranks? Does she bring Felix back into the fray? (Read: please have her bring Felix back into the fray.)
I'm also intrigued by the idea of Maeve teaming up with Bernard to bring down Delos. She's crafty enough to see exactly which crack to slip a blade into, and twist — in this case, to use the pain they have in common. Bernard was given haunting, heartbreaking memories of losing a child that didn't exist, but the child Maeve lost is out there, somewhere in the world Ford built. Perhaps she finds and repairs him, stoking that little flame of Ford hatred into full-on flames. Whether she sympathizes, as she seemed to in that brief encounter acknowledging what he still didn't want to believe, or whether she's using him for access and resources, well, that's up to you!
You could also tell me about the other lives Maeve has lived. Who was she in this story before she became the Westworld madam? What was her first assignment? Was she the chief's daughter to be conquered in some gross New World fantasy framework? Why is she so attached to Clementine — do they have history in another world? And what exactly was it about having a daughter, about being a mother, that made that life haunt her in the next?
The Fine Print: I'm almost ashamed to say that I have no Maeve ships! I liked her easy conversation with Teddy, I love her dynamic with Felix, and I adore her mother/daughter-esque bond with Clementine, but there's no one I actively ship her with. That said, I am not opposed to more of the weird, intense, opportunistic thing she's got going with Hector, so if you ship it, throw it on in!
That's all from my end. Please remember: when in doubt, write what wants to be written. I hope you have a wonderful Yuletide, and I look forward to reading whatever you have in store for me.
hauntedd and I are thrilled to be running once again.My letters have historically been fairly… enthusiastic. I'm a rambler. In recent years I've tried to pare that back; this year, most of my high-level likes/dislikes section — not to mention three requests — have pretty much been lifted part and parcel from last year's letter. If it helps at all, previous letters, recs, and reveal posts can be found under my LJ Yuletide tag.
Generally…
Yes, please: Found families. Platonic soulmates. Canon divergence. Demonstrations of love, not declarations. Magical realism. Verbal sparring (TO THE DEATH). Internal vs. external conflict. Symbolism, subtext, and stories that live between the lines. Broken-boy soldiers, magnificent bastards, snarky sidekicks with hearts of gold. Strong women whose strength isn't all (or at all) physical. My tropetastic trinity: amnesia, huddling for warmth, and fake relationships (when they both have Feelings!). Hero's Trials (especially when the hero is female). And good old-fashioned jealousy, as long as the jealous party is the person who holds the balance of emotional power.
No, thank you: Incest and infidelity. If you take nothing else away from this section, please take that. Completely non-canon AUs (i.e. of the book shop, coffee shop, or college variety). Curtainfic — I like a dash of salt with my sugar. Marginalized characters of color. Second person (sorry!). Animal abuse. Fridging. Rape as a plot device. PWP. For Yuletide, D/s, BDSM, kinks that end in "play" (and don't start with "fore") unless otherwise noted. And bananas. Because reasons.
Specifically…
Being Human (US) | Sally Malik, Aidan Waite
The Request: Finally. In this life, the next, or the ones they never lived.
The Details: First and foremost, you should know that I love Sally Malik. I love her sarcasm and her self-deprecation and her stream-of-consciousness babbling. I love her tendency to screw up while trying to do the right thing, and screw up more when she tries to fix what she's broken. And I love Aidan and Sally's friendship more than anything, literally anything, in a show where I loved a whole hell of a lot. That said, the events of "Rewind, Rewind…" and "Too Far, Fast Forward" were the best possible way to go from BFFs to True Love in the span of six episodes. Six. Episodes. Which is where my request comes in.
When Donna agrees to send Sally back, she says that it's not an exact science, and Sally will ping through time until she settles. So what if there are these infinite alternate universes, where these three people are destined to collide in some capacity, and Sally spent time (however infinitesimal) in some of them, even if she can't consciously remember? Does she take what she learned in the first alternate timeline and try to do things differently? Maybe she plays with different points of first contact. Maybe she lets Josh and Nora happen more organically. Maybe she takes matters into her own hands and tries to kill Bishop or Marcus on her own. Maybe she's stuck in a perpetual Groundhog Day loop, testing which things to test until she gets it right. Does history always repeat itself? Is she always doomed to die at someone else's hand, or is their reality, where she sacrifices herself — saving and dooming and saving him again — their best possible outcome?
Alternatively, I'd love to spend some more time within the show's alternate universe. How does Sally adjust to being a werewolf? If that alleyway brawl had never happened, how much further would Aidan have spiraled (and what would Sally have done to bring him back)? Of course, you can always disregard all that and write me something awesome about hijinks or house meetings or the hilarity of the three of them sitting down to dinner when Josh is the only one who eats or five times someone walked in on someone else in the shower (and whether or not there was blood involved). Or afterlife sex. That will totally work.
TL;DR: I love these two insanely as friends, but I also ship it hard. Have a ball.
The Fine Print: I love Sally most (clearly). And Aidan's right behind her. But I also love Nora and Josh (and their wonderful family unit), and Emily, and Zoe, and Suren and Donna and Bishop and Kat and pretty much anyone who is not Danny. Include as few or as many of them as you wish. And for any sex not of the afterlife variety (where I don't think it would apply), Aidan's a vampire, Sally might be human, feel free to introduce some feeding/blood-drunk euphoria.
Penny Dreadful (TV) | Ethan Chandler
The Request: "We’ve all done things to survive. There are such sins at my back it would kill me to turn around."
The Details: Penny Dreadful was a thing of beauty. And now that it's over, I'm left with more questions than answers.
If you're in it for the Ethan… welcome to the club, we have pie. The combination of "lone wolf unconsciously hunting for a pack" and "born protector who's selective in deciding where his unwavering loyalties lie" is like catnip to me. I may also have a huge weakness for men with daddy issues, and damn did season three ever feed it. Show me the past sins, all the horrors of the Talbot household — the war between father and son, the bond between Ethan and his sister, the faith he had and lost. Or show me the future — Ethan and Malcolm, trying to carry on when they've lost everything and everyone else (most by their own hand, or some extension of it). Do they move on? Do they self-destruct? Given who Vanessa and Sembene were within the family they made, and how both of them met their end, what impact does guilt have on Ethan? On Malcolm? And are they just haunted in their own heads, or is it more literal than that?
If you're here for the gen, I adore almost nothing more than Ethan and Sembene's friendship. I love that they reserve their darkest secrets for each other. I love that they fight and plot and do the dishes as a team. I love love love that they have these wonderful moments of levity within this looming reality. Likewise, every exchange between Ethan and Lyle in "Verbis Diablo" had me grinning like a loon. We didn't get to see them do much plundering — perhaps hijinks at the British Museum are in order. Perhaps there's some kind of farcical Ethan+Sembene+Lyle fiasco (the trio has high tea? Sembene conducts baking lessons?). Perhaps Lyle returns, post-everything, and the men left behind try to carry on together.
If you walk on the shippier side, Ethan and Vanessa. Ethan. And. Vanessa. "We have claws for a reason" became such a siren song, for me — what if he'd succeeded in the kill he tried to spare her from? What if he had stayed, when she asked him to? What if she'd said yes to that vision of what her life could be, and they lived out normal days as normal people in a normal house with their normal children and were madly in love until the end of the world? What if Vanessa's catatonia in 4x01 was months of lucid dreaming of that life, and all the ways it would become a waking nightmare? What if he'd made it back in time? What if, what if, what if. You could always go darker — what if Vanessa wasn't alone in her possession, and the Ethan at her bedside hadn't been a figment, but the devil animating Ethan's body while he was trapped in his own head? Fallout from that could be delicious. (Or, to save on postage… Ethan and Sembene, in secret. Just sayin.)
The Fine Print: Fix-it fic is more than welcome, for any and all of it. I'm not the biggest fan of Victor, in the context of Ethan (I like his dynamic much more with Vanessa), so there's that, but I adore Brona/Lily and would love to see where she fits post-finale. And where Ethan/Vanessa is concerned, I'm all for canon-influenced kinks. Bondage, bloodplay, marking, maybe some edging. Throw it at me.
The Adjustment Bureau (2011) | Harry Mitchell
The Request: He's lived vicariously since the beginning. In the end, his penance is firsthand experience.
The Details: Who is Harry Mitchell? This movie is one of my favorites — clever, quick, and unique, with a really appealing cast and some thought-provoking concepts. Every time I watch, I wonder who the Adjusters are. They're wearing the standard Wings of Desire / City of Angels uniform — full suit, trench coat — which definitely implies something, but their powers are all about the hat. But do they have powers? Or are they just conduits for the power of the Chairman?
More specifically, though, I wonder about Harry. His ill-timed nap not only changed David and Elise's lives, but may have changed the course of humanity. So the questions I want to pose are these: is Harry a pathological screw-up, or did he catch a few winks on purpose? Were David and Elise flukes, or has Harry been building up to something with a series of small "mistakes" made in other peoples' lives? And most importantly, what's the fallout for the Adjusters in general, and Harry specifically, when all is said and done?
I'd love to see something where Harry gets to live as a human after sending those two on their way, either as punishment or reward. How long has he spent watching humanity before he gets to have a life of his own? What does he envy most about the humans in his charge? Does he get an Adjuster of his own, one he's aware of and can interact with? And is he eager to actually live a life, or is he a little afraid of mortality?
I also like the idea that Harry has fallen for a human he monitors, and this is all an elaborate plan to ultimately join them. Or for another take, what other interesting adjustments has Harry made (and for whom?)
The Fine Print: The original ending featured Shohreh Aghdashloo as the Chairman, and it's become part of my headcanon, so I don't think Harry is secretly God. It's much more interesting, for me personally, that he's just a cog that broke the wheel by squeaking. A lot. :)
Westworld (TV) | Maeve Millay
The Request: Hell hath no fury like a host turned human.
The Details: Maeve is the shit. There's your everyday run-of-the-mill hardcore, and there's "one woman going all 'A Million Ways to Die in the West' in grand pursuit of knowledge and self-possession" hardcore. I love that she was only briefly discomfited by technology and the future, and immediately moved on to how it could be best used to her advantage. I love that she uses her body as a tool, not a weapon, because she values her mind more than anything. I love how unrepentantly deliberate she was about "dying" — how it seemed to thrill her, in a way wholly separate from the things she learned on the other side.
I'm so torn when it comes to prompts for Maeve. On the one hand, I love the idea that Dolores is a distraction for Ford, and Mave is actually Arnold's failsafe. If that idea intrigues you, by all means, run with it. But more than anything in this canon, I love that Maeve is responsible for her own evolution. She makes conscious choices, she feels human emotions, and she is deeply motivated by her own sense of self-preservation (and then, of course, by her love for her daughter). Is it neater if all of that was a pre-programmed back door buried in her code by Arnold? Sure. But I like things messy. :)
So show me the aftermath of the finale! How does Maeve infiltrate Delos in order to find her daughter? Does she go back into the park and hunt from the inside, or does she take all that she's learned and play at being part of the programming machine once all the chaos has died down? Does she rescue/revive/reprogram Hector and Armistice to fill ranks? Does she bring Felix back into the fray? (Read: please have her bring Felix back into the fray.)
I'm also intrigued by the idea of Maeve teaming up with Bernard to bring down Delos. She's crafty enough to see exactly which crack to slip a blade into, and twist — in this case, to use the pain they have in common. Bernard was given haunting, heartbreaking memories of losing a child that didn't exist, but the child Maeve lost is out there, somewhere in the world Ford built. Perhaps she finds and repairs him, stoking that little flame of Ford hatred into full-on flames. Whether she sympathizes, as she seemed to in that brief encounter acknowledging what he still didn't want to believe, or whether she's using him for access and resources, well, that's up to you!
You could also tell me about the other lives Maeve has lived. Who was she in this story before she became the Westworld madam? What was her first assignment? Was she the chief's daughter to be conquered in some gross New World fantasy framework? Why is she so attached to Clementine — do they have history in another world? And what exactly was it about having a daughter, about being a mother, that made that life haunt her in the next?
The Fine Print: I'm almost ashamed to say that I have no Maeve ships! I liked her easy conversation with Teddy, I love her dynamic with Felix, and I adore her mother/daughter-esque bond with Clementine, but there's no one I actively ship her with. That said, I am not opposed to more of the weird, intense, opportunistic thing she's got going with Hector, so if you ship it, throw it on in!
That's all from my end. Please remember: when in doubt, write what wants to be written. I hope you have a wonderful Yuletide, and I look forward to reading whatever you have in store for me.
