skygiants

Dear Yuletide Writer:

First of all, whoever you are, if you are writing me fic for one of these fandoms, you are AWESOME. I know this for a fact! No matter what you write, I will be incredibly happy to receive it, and if you already have brilliant ideas and need no rambly thoughts from me I trust you to follow your instincts and turn out something amazing. Basically, feel free to ignore as much of the below as you want!

A couple of general comments:

Things I love include (but are not limited to): strong women; ensemble-fic and stories about unlikely teams coming together; ordinary characters who can be unexpectedly hardcore when the need hits and hardcore characters who can be unexpectedly ordinary when real life hits; mundane details interwoven with fantastic or dramatic events; comedy; tragedy; stories that mix the two together. As a sidenote, I also love crossovers like burning, so if you happen to get inspired by an amazing crossover idea, I very much encourage you to go for it!

Things I do not generally love include: character-bashing (especially towards female characters) and stories that are disturbing/violent for the sake of being disturbing/violent (except in some cases where that's part of the canon, but I am not sure it would suit any of the ones I have requested this year.)

Fandom: Capital Scandal
Character: Song-joo Cha
Details: Basically I am in love with Cha Song-Joo and anything you write about her will make me really happy! I am very fond of the angsty romance with Lee Soo Hyeon, the close mentor/mentee relationship with Na Yeo-Kyeong, and the platonic bantery BFF-ness with Woo Wan, so something that focused on any of those relationships would be especially awesome.

I don't have much to add here except seriously, I will love whatever you write about Cha Song-Joo because she is one of my favorite characters of all time! I love her control, her determination, how she is simultaneously ice-cold and ruthless and at the same time clever and funny and an older-sister figure. Cha Song-Joo and Lee Soo-Hyeon's angsty relationship of Duty Over Passion is a huge OTP of mine and so romantic fic here would fill my shippy heart with joy (let's face it, all the verbal sparring and quiet outmaneuvering and occasional disguised shoothouts and longing looks when they think the other isn't looking is super hot) but I also love her dynamics with the other characters. I really like how Na Yeo-Kyeong and Cha Song-Joo are never set up as rivals within the course of the show, and instead they develop a really close mentoring relationship; I also love how important Woo Wan and Cha Song-Joo are to each other in a completely nonromantic way. (It also amuses me immensely how Cha Song Joo's favorite hobby is apparently poking at Woo Wan's love life and seeing what happens.) So basically, if I get to see a story that involves any of these relationships, I will flail and dance about in glee - and one thing I forgot to mention in my request is that I would also love to see more about her relationships with the younger gisaengs she works with, so that would be awesome too! Or, you know, you could just spend a thousand words showing Cha Song Joo being amazing and badass. I am down with that.

Fandom: Diana Wynne Jones - Chronicles of Chrestomanci
Character: Estelle Green and Nirupam Singh
Details: I would be super excited to get to read more about any of the Witch Week kids. Nirupam and Estelle are my favorites and I would be very happy with fic that centered on their relationship, either romantic or as unlikely friends, but throwing in Nan and Charles for an ensemble fic about their group dynamic would be awesome too, or even fic about Nan and Charles themselves. My favorite thing about the book is how these incredibly messed-up kids somehow manage to work together and form a kind of community, and I'd love anything that reflected that.

I have never actually seen any Witch Week fic, and so I am incredibly excited about the possibility of getting some! As I said in my request, I love how Diana Wynne Jones does not gloss over how very damaged all of the kids in the story, which is one of the reasons I find them all so fascinating. I know this might be kind of a hard fandom to write for because of the way the ending rewrites many of the characters, but on the other hand, a story about the kids dealing with the merge and trying to integrate their two sets of memories (and the witch-world psychological issues that their AU selves don't have) could be really interesting. Some other possible story ideas, which you are completely free to ignore: pre-canon fic about how Nirupam and Estelle build their friendship before the events of the story (I do ship them a little, but you are free to ignore that if you don't) or anything about how Nirupam adapted to life in Britain; post-canon fic in which the characters regain their memories of the Witch Week-world; fic in which something happens that causes the kids to have to interact with the rest of the Related Worlds. But seriously, anything at all about these characters would be amazing.

Fandom: L A Meyer - Bloody Jack series
Character: Mary "Jacky" Faber
Details: I love these books and would love any stories for them, but I am most interested in seeing fic about Jacky's relationships with other girls. A focus on her friendship with Amy - or on Amy herself, for that matter, getting to have some Jacky-esque adventures of her own - would be great. Alternately, anything about Jacky and Clarissa, whether just as frenemies or as frenemies with slash, would equally be fabulous.

This is where my love for female characters and Bechdel-test passing comes to the forefront! I adore these books with a passion, but I will confess I am not as interested in Jacky's harem of dudes as I am in her female friends. This is one of the rare swashbuckling adventure stories where you get to have girls swashbuckling together, and I would be delighted to see fic that focused on that - whether it's Amy pulling out surprising reserves of intellectual hardcoreness, or Clarissa's awesomely bitchy spine of steel! (I will say that I am also pretty intrigued by that Clarissa/Jacky fakeout makeout scene from In the Belly of the Bloodhound.) However, if you have a great story in mind about Jacky and any of the other characters, that is wonderful and I am sure it will be awesome as well!

Fandom: Laurence Yep - Dragon of the Lost Sea series
Characters: Any
Details: Here I am going to be unhelpful and say I would just be incredibly excited to get any fic for this series at all! But if you are looking for ideas: anything written in Monkey's voice; anything about Civet, either pre-series or interacting with the others during the journey; and anything about the gang's interactions post-series, especially Monkey-Shimmer hijinksfic or Indigo and Shimmer and Thorn's complicated emotional triangle is sure to make me happy. (But so is anything else.)

I am not sure if there is anything else to say here! Except that because the books are relatively short kid's books and mostly written in the first-person voices of the characters, that gives a lot of room to play around the edges and I would love to see anything that is going on with the characters that the series doesn't show us - especially Civet, who I am completely fascinated by. I am also really curious to see the rebuilding of Shimmer's kingdom postcanon, and how everyone settles into the mundane realities of their new and possibly uncomfortable roles, and how they manage to navigate the minefield that is all of their mountains of issues and ridiculously codependent relationships. Also, Monkey being unhelpful - or being surprisingly helpful! - is always awesome, too. BUT BASICALLY I really just want fic for these books to exist, because the world is fun and the characters are awesome and they totally deserve it, so seriously, write whatever floats your boat and I will be incredibly happy.

Last and most importantly: THANK YOU SO MUCH, and what will make me most happy about any fic is that you have fun with it! :D