Dear Yuletide Writer!

[eglantiere]

.My dear Yulewriter, thank you so much for writing for me! I'm excited to meet you and your story, and I hope my letter will be useful.

My AO3 name is egelantier, my Tumblr is at egelantier and my various exchange letters are by this tag.

I'm open to treats and love them!

Here are some general likes and dislikes, and an attempt to give a handful of prompts for each fandom. Those are intended to be very loose inspiration - mix and match at will, or discard if you have a different idea that you think will fit better! I like both gen and shipfic, and unless otherwise specified, I'm usually find with pretty much every pairing under the sun, so if you're feeling any of them, include them at will.

I particularly like:
- Hurt/comfort of all kinds! I love it absolutely in my opinion a solid dose of hurt/comfort can improve just about any story. (I'm particular about who is hurt, though.) I like h/c in context of relationship (friendship, romance, fealty, family etc.), with my fave getting hurt and other people rescuing/comforting/witnessing/consoling/helping them. I love iron woobies, but I also love stoic or imperturbable characters being driven to their limit. As for specific subgenres, just about everything (with a slight preference for physical h/c), from imprisonment to whipping to crucifixion to passing out from exhaustion to starvation to torture to isolation to people learning to be loved and to lean on their close ones.
- Loyalty and fealty, from informal to formal (vassal and liege, kings/queens and their knights, nobles and their retainers, etc), with all its trappings from 'I will die for you' to kneeling and ring kissing and whatnot.
- Rebuilding things and communities! People coming together to slowly and painstakingly either create or recreate order and peace out of chaos. Think Pratchett's city books or Mysterious Island or Frostpunk or various building sims.
- Hope and kindness despite adversity.
- Self-sacrifice (metaphorical and quite literal) and martyrdom (ditto).
- Pining (requited or unrequited but actually requited).
- Tropey AUs - space opera! high fantasy! historical! pirates! nomads traveling on winged cat steeds!
- Outsider POVs.

DNWs
- Permanent character death ('they came back' and 'presumed dead' are fine, mentioning canonical character death is fine).
- Unhappy or hopeless endings.
- Partner betrayal of any kind or infidelity.
- Omegaverse, any other 'verses with built-in biology-based inequality.
- Rape/non-con.
- Hanahaki AUs and variations thereof.
- Mundane AUs.
- PWPs.

Psmith - P. G. Wodehouse

Rupert Psmith, Mike Jackson

Canon-specific DNW: it can be Psmith/Mike or Psmith&Mike, but please no mention of Psmith or Mike being in a committed heterosexual relationship.

My darling Psmith, so unabashedly weird and so adored by the narrative, and his loyal and kind and steadfast Mike, the man of few words and a well-polished cricket bat, a team made in heaven. I love them, I love that Psmith is an unstoppable force, I love that Mike loves and on some level understand Psmith in his entirety and doesn't want him to change, I love that Psmith is fiercely loyal to Mike and will easily and heroically protect him, I love that Psmith's socialism might be mostly an affectation but his willingness to stick his neck out for people isn't, I love their relationship in whatever form it takes, and I want them to get into all the shenanigans, of all kind. For example:

• Psmith's latest adventure plunges him into actual physical danger (think Psmith, Journalist, minus racism, plus more mafia), and Mike is to the rescue.
  
• Psmith gets not just amused-invested into something but actually, painfully, horribly invested into some crusade, and Mike is there to help him make it happen and/or deal with the fallout.
  
• Psmith, Pining Nobly. Mike, Pining Nobly. Both, either, at once, in turn...
  
• Psmith falls on hard times after his father dies, will not admit to it or will cheerfully suffer the exhaustion/hunger/whatever, until Mike finds out and sees red.
  
• Psmith and Mike, a travelogue to the location of your choice.
  
• Pslavefic: Psmith, the languid but secretly revolutionary owner, turning the world around for the sake of his newly acquired slave? Psmith and Mike, sold to a cruel master together, surviving? Mike, a good-hearted but uninformed prince, finding himself in possession of one Psmith, a slave suave, imperturbable yet undeniably traumatized? All of the above, but They Were Friends Before? Indenture? Fantasy? Go wild.
  
• Fusions, crossovers, and AUs with whatever fandom I've ever dabbled in: the less probable setting Psmith and Mike can wreck chaos on, the more I want it.
  

RimWorld (Video Game)

Canon-specific DNW: cannibalism, sexual slavery or exploitation, mind control (RimWorld is a dangerous place overall and this is more than fine, but I would rather not read about those particular threats).

This game does something to my brain that's probably illegal, in a sense that I played it nonstop for about two years, and will play it nonstop again once I re-fiddle with my thousand mods and run it again. When my little hapless pawns land on this giant, unfamiliar, dangerous, scary world and slowly build their tiny world there, something in me goes brrrrrr. So yeah, my broad prompt is: a colony, coming together amidst all this adversity, ideally while clinging tightly to whatever kindness is available on the Rim. A sole desperate survivor taking in a stranger with paralytic abasia and sharing their dwindling resources, people desperately making it work on the polar ice, going from a tiny village to a thriving megapolis, making connections with other settlements, surviving the skirmishes, searching for the star maps, all that jazz. Queer characters - queer women - are a plus. Pet cats are a plus. Radioactive rain that they have to sit out while their crops are dying outside are a plus. Hail Marys are a plus.

(I'm not super invested in the lore and play on Medieval modset half the time anyway, so don't sweet the details much. You can even let them eat not at the tables and not go berserk immediately, oh no.)

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)

Arthur

Oh, this movie! I'm still crestfallen that we're not going to get a sequel, because it was some perfect intersection of Ritchie's Ritchiness, Arthuriana-adjacent feelings and Shenanigans. And I especially adored Hunnam's Arthur, with his combination of cockiness, competence, humor and vulnerability, his relationship with other characters and his unorthodox approach to management.

I would love to see an exploration of how Arthur deals with his happy endling. Ruling a whole country - and trying to rule it well - is mightily different from running slightly benign mafia, so how is it going to make it work? In the aftermath of Vortigern's rule, with all the neighbors looking over their borders, with the mages just starting to go out of hiding if there are any left but the Mage, with people to feed and wounds to mend and coffers to fill and laws to pass and the knights to keep busy. How would he do it? How many ways would he fail and succeed and fail and succeed again, and how many assassination attempts and harebrained but dangerous scenes will be there on the way?

(Feel free to include any other character and have Arthur be in whatever relationship that you'd like, I'm here for that.)

Chalion Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold

Lupe dy Cazaril

I'm starting to feel that this year is going to have a theme! So yeah, Lupe dy Cazaril, the retainer turned saint turned courtier, who, having survived all of his trials and tribulations, can now turn to his heart's true passion: building Chalion's roads! Or other things, like sea access, sea ports, diplomatic relationships with other countries, drafting better laws and promises, dealing with inheritance crises, maintaining the balance between various governmental branches, and doing other wonderfully interesting things - while managing (or failing to) his obvious PTSD, his raging case of workaholism, his inevitable spate of assassination attempts and so on. Wars! Attempts on Iselle and Bergon he can heroically prevent at any cost! Famines and droughts! Cazaril is where my love for reading administrivia meets my love for reading whump, and the more you lean into one or another or both, the more I'm going to love you.

Any relationship is fine, any supporting characters are fine (I"m especially partial to see him interacting with Ista, former saint to working saint, but it's by no means necessary).

The Goblin Emperor Series - Katherine Addison

Maia Drazhar

Canon-specific DNW: Maia and Csethiro can be in a happy marriage, or a happy friendship-under-the-guise-of-political-marriage, or in a happy lavender marriage, but please don't have either of them be made unhappy or trapped by the other.

Maia my beloved overwhelmed teeth-gritting stoic woobie boy, who entered a political intrigue world and made it work through kindness, steadfastness, dealing with people fairly, sticking to his principles and making everybody care about him: yes! I would love - continuing on the theme - to read about his reign way down the road - ten, twenty years later - when he would come into his own and add some earned gravitas to all those qualities, maybe from an outsider's POV, maybe from the point of view of his closest team of people, maybe through the eyes of somebody just coming into the court... It's fascinating to me to see who he will grow into, essentially, and what he'll help Ethuveraz to grow into. Overwork, exhaustion, dangers, assassinations, cultural clashes and diplomatic visits to other countries are a bonus!

Other possible options: Maia and co on the state visit to Barizhan; Maia if Chenelo survived and was with him when the airship crashed; Maia who grew up at court; Maia who ran away from Edonomee and lived some other life until the empire tracked him down; just Maia's everyday palace life at any point during or post-canon.

Any relationships and any supporting characters are welcome.

And that's it! Again, disregard the prompts at will; and thank you; and I'm looking forwards to your words in December ♥