Dear Yuletide Writer!

[eglantiere]

Dearest Yulewriter, hello! Thank you for writing for me, and for loving those fandoms.

I list specific prompts below to give you a sort of starting point, but I'm also sure that there are things that I haven't thought of that I would absolutely love - so if you have ideas you're really passionate about, I'm deeply curious to know what they are, and to read your story. ODAO is fine! Mix, match and invent at will, please, and I'm looking forward to seeing you in December.

Links:

• My exchange tag (letters, recs et cetera)
• AO3 (fics and bookmarks)
• Tumblr

Likes:

• Hurt/comfort! When in doubt, go with h/c: physical, emotional, captivity scenarios, caretaking, whipping, dungeons, bullet wounds, wilderness survival, whatever. I love hurt/comfort within a relationship context (ships or gen: family ties, friendship, comradeship, all is good), as an opening for one character to be hurt and for the other(s) to be outraged/terrified/comforting on their behalf. I am particular about who gets whumped, and will usually indicate so in prompts.
• Found families, tight friendships, us-against-the-world, people finding and keeping each other, providing kindness and warmth against the dark.
• Hope and kindness, Clair universes, stories where the entropy tries its hardest but doesn't win.
• Loyalty in all forms! From ritualized (oaths, kneeling, ring-kissing, knights and bodyguards and henchmen and so on) to more casual ways, like standing up for your friends.
• Self-sacrifice (metaphorical and quite literal) and martyrdom (ditto).
• Tropey AUs - space opera! high fantasy! historical! pirates!
• Outsider POVs.

DNWs:

• Hurt no comfort.
• Partner betrayal of any kind or infidelity.
• Unhappy endings and permanent character death ("presumed dead" and "died but got better" are fine).
• A/B/O, hurtcomfortverse, any other 'verses with built-in biology-based inequality.
• Hanahaki AUs and variations thereof.
• Mundane AUs.
• Non-con and dub-con front and center in the story (as a piece of backstory or an implied threat it's fine).

Psmith - P. G. Wodehouse Rupert Psmith, Mike Jackson

Those books are my perennial favorites; I adore the kind hilarity of them, and the intensity of the main relationship (whether it's taken as friendship or romance). I love Psmith's surety and his unflappability, his lowkey but endless loyalty and protectiveness, the way he manages to warp the world around himself but does it with benevolence, the way the narrative pokes fun at him but allows him to stand unhumiliated. And I love that Mike is his foil but never the butt of the narrative joke, that Mike's intrinsic value is never questioned or doubted, by the text or by them both. I love how different they are and how wholeheartedly they embrace each other nevertheless, neither trying to change or undermine each other, how much they just - adore and accept and support each other.

And so!

• ...Having said what I did about Psmith self-surety, I would also read a lot about Psmith secretly having doubts about himself and his own worth in relation to Mike and trying to let Mike go for his own good (family, career, etc.), and Mike having none of it.
• And also literally all the stories about Psmith getting into some trouble he can't get himself out of (ideally on Mike's behalf), and trying to hide it or make light of it, and Mike becoming the rescuer and taking care of him. I always thought that Psmith would make an awesome 'pay no attention to my troubles, have a languid anecdote' kind of iron woobie - iron woobie in a velvet glove? Is it a thing? In any case, yes.
• (For example, I loved Psmith's descent from rich heirdom to self-supporting poverty and the way he tried to deal with it by himself and without burdening anybody. Take it to the extreme, and I'll be here with bells on.)
• But also something with a more action/adventure bent and injuries, kidnappings, and accidents (see: Psmith, Journalist, only sans racism and Mike is actually there). Psmith Hides A Supernatural Secret (he's an elf! he's a selkie! he's an alien!) And Why Would Mike Care No Really.
• The super self-indulgent slavefic option: Mike the bewildered owner rescuing a chill, seemingly unconcerned slave!Psmith and slowly discovering the depths of trouble that will bring? Psmith the jaded, high-ranking slave taking a newly enslaved Mike under his wing and getting into all the trouble trying to keep him safe (and, being Psmith, probably engineering a revolution in the process?)
• Also all the setting AUs! Be it high fantasy or space opera or high sea piracy, those two trampling through it would be amazing.
• Also, optionally, all the crossovers and fusions. I love pastiche, but I would also love read Psmith and Mike transposed into a different kind of voice.

Fandom-specific DNW caveat: Please no happy heterosexuality for either Mike or Psmith. They can be platonic partners or friends, but I would rather not read about them marrying somebody else and parting ways.

Disco Elysium (Video Game) Worldbuilding (Disco Elysium), Revachol (Disco Elysium)

I'm absolutely obsessed with DE; it's easily my Game of the Year, the only spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment I ever found. I talked about it more at length here, but in short: holy shit wow.

This made narrowing down my choices extremely hard! But, much as I love Harry and Kim (and Cuno, and Lena, and the Smoker, and Klaasje, and Lillianne, and and and and), I couldn't pass up the opportunity to get something about Revachol, whom I was obsessed with ever since that where in the hood line.

So! Revachol as a protagonist, please, in whatever sense that pleases you: from very eldritch-alien to humane, from encompassing all the lives in all its districts to focusing on those, like Harry, who can listen to her and answer her pleas, from suffering through the first war to waiting and watching for her own coming destruction. How does Revachol interact - intersect - with the Pale? How doesn't she?

What I'm trying to articulate is this chilling and beautiful combination of utterly incomprehensible and startlingly human in Revachol, the way she's always there and yet always just out of the reach. Shivers, in shorts. Shivers of Revachol.

(Bring in any named characters you'd like, or go with OCs from a completely different corner of Revachol, or both, or neither - all is good, I love everybody in this bar, I'm fine with every pairing and relationship combination. Unusual formats like IF or epistolary or found footage are also super cool. I have no DNWs here and all the curiosity in the world. This being DE, I'm fine with the bittersweet mood/ending, but I would prefer to have some hope, remaining.)

The Goblin Emperor Series - Katherine Addison Maia Drazhar

I absolutely adore this book, a story of a previously powerless, painfully self-conscious, horribly isolated person doing his utmost and careful best to do what he has to do. Maia's, at his core, first and foremost kind, and he brings this kindness with him as a banner and as a shield, into a situation over which he has little control and in which he has no allies, and sets out to reclaim his empire, one person at a time.

Some prompts that come to mind (but by no means feel constrained by them):

• A development of his relationship with Cala and Beshelar and navigating further the friends/nonecharei divide; and ditto for Maia and Csevet.
• Politics! We saw Maia growing into his role as a ruler; how would he look in it after several years, what project would he undertake after the bridge is built? What civil reforms will he usher in?
• Maia and his relationship with his mother's religion: would it become more mainstream in the court, in Maia's wake? Or would it always be something deeply private and guarded for him?
• Maia on a diplomatic visit to his grandfather, navigating both the cultural divide and the family relationship.
• Maia and Csethiro, exploring and defining their marriage, be it romantic in earnest or something of a more complicated, platonic arrangement.
• Maia in peril: a kidnapping! A dangerous journey! Another, more successful attack within the court! A lingering sickness! A riding accident! A sea journey! Fainting from overwork! Nightmares! Stalkers! (All of this is also very welcome in combination with other prompts.)
• Maia's birthdays over the years.

Fandom-specific DNW caveat: pretty much every pairing is fine, but please no alluding to Maia being unhappy with Csethiro (Maia/somebody with him and Csethiro being in a peaceful lavender arrangement is fine).

Till We Have Faces - C. S. Lewis Orual | Maia (Till We Have Faces)

Till We Have Faces is a beautifully realized, psychodramatic rendition of the myth of Psyche and Eros from the POV of Psyche's bitter older sister, Orual, the one who talks Psyche into looking into her lover's face and destroying her happiness. But mainly it's a journey into Orual as the most unreliable of the unreliable protagonists, into the tricks her own psyche (sorry) plays on her: she turns her anger and her bitterness and her refusal to forgive first against the gods, disclaiming her own responsibility in the loss of her sister… and then against herself, with the same mix of unflinching self-knowledge and complete traumatized ignorance. Orual refuses to see herself clearly, until the very end, and her view of herself is skewed, angry, and disdainful.

But! In the epilogue, we learn that Orual was a just, kind, and thoughtful ruler, a champion of her people, and somebody who was deeply beloved by (at least) her court and probably her subjects. And that's what makes the whole thing really come together to me, the last part of the puzzle, and this is what I would really love to read about: Orual through her life and reign, Orual through the eyes of her friends and enemies and lovers and subjects and allies. Orual as she never saw herself.

(Again, any unusual format is cool, although I would prefer you keep with people in her lived life rather than with the 'historians from the future review her reign' kind of thing. Intimacy is very welcome here. On the iddier note, whump is also welcome.)

Canon-specific note: I don't DNW Orual/Psyche, and if you see their relationship, or at least Orual's side of it, as explicitly romantic/sexual, it's fine with me… but it's not particularly iddy or interesting to me, and I'd rather it not be the center of the story.

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke Worldbuilding (Piranesi - Susanna Clarke)

The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.

So. Was there ever a weirder and more beautiful setting? The halls of the House, and the statues, and the tides, and the birds, and the sunlight in the upper reaches. The horrifying but kind (or kind but horrifying) amnesia effect, the honeyed slowness of its time, the way it connects to all the worlds and belongs to none. I would be grateful to any story that catches and conveys this sense of numinous, and explores it - maybe in a similar way to what the narrator of the book goes through, or maybe completely different.

Some people found their way there by trauma or deceit, or were forced into it; some people fled into the house, some, maybe, sought it out deliberately. Maybe it was used for spiritual or religious practices, and maybe somebody found a refuge in it, mental of physical, or chose the existence within the House voluntarily, or set out to explore and map it - who knows? I'm deeply interested in exploration and… experience of the house, of sorta, either through people or through animals or just through presence.

(Optionally, I would also welcome crossovers/fusions with just about any canon I requested below or in the last year or so, if you're so inclined. It's kinda easier to explore unfamiliar through the familiar.)