Dear Yuletide Goat
Nov. 17th, 2011 05:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
runespoorHi ! Welcome! Thank you so much for writing me a story!
Er, I’m going to try and tell you stuff about my requests, in case it helps. The result is that it’s an epic case of tl;dr, because I love these fandoms and I do excited babbling. I mostly give story hooks.
I like gennish better than straight-out romance, het/slash/poly/asexual romance, fusions (transplanting the characters of one fandom into the world of another) but not crossovers, banter/wit/snark/awkward babbling, hopeful endings, referencing to backstory, referencing canon, slice-of-life, making up anecdotes about characters, themes of family (the difficulties of blood family, the awesomeness of family-of-choice, mentor+student relationships, legacies), class issues, rebellion, embracing the fucked-upness that attracts me to most of the canons, not shying away from the problems the characters are likely to run into in their everyday life, relationships that defy categorization, rivalry as friendship or love, puns, cameos from other characters, heroes being vulnerable/wrong/angry/failing, cities, shippy pretending to be gen, cities, stories within stories, wacky AUs and post-apocalyptic/cyberpunk worlds, identity issues, fucking with gender-roles, characters holding themselves to impossibly high standards. I'm totally fine with underage sex, but anything under the enormously arbitrary age of about 13 hits my "can't read" zone. I like both imagery and clear-and-concise. I like snappy dialogue. I'm more character-driven than plot-driven as a rule.
I do not like setting fictional stories in actual, RL genocides or using WW2/Rwanda/Yugoslavia/etc as a backdrop for star-crossed romance, and I do not like heroic characters working for the people committing the genocide. (I’ve been triggered in the past, so I mention it even though it’s very specific.) I don’t like conspiracy theories explaining real life disasters/wars/etc. Slave AUs. Sexual assault as a basis for h/c, or sexual assault between the main pairing. Cross-generational incest. Prophecies and/or predetermination, especially the biological kind. I don’t particularly like the following tropes: characters realizing their love because their friends informed them (or a character realizing they were wrong/etc because a minor character talked them through), marriage fic.
-Isms: I do a lot of babbling about social issues here, because I’ve understood that blanket statements such as “I don’t like racism” aren’t that helpful. I dislike casual misogyny/homophobia/transphobia/etc (“don’t be such a girl”, “that’s so gay”, “haha, can’t believe you didn’t see she was a man!”) and slut-shaming of all types, unless it’s a theme of the story or from a jerk-ish character – and like racism or homophobia, when it’s used as a convenient short-cut to identify the Bad Guy. On a related note, many of the characters I’m interested in are PoCs.
What I’m trying to say is that I like when stories don’t shy away from the nastier parts of the human experience/society, but because it explores those issues and not because it takes the current social context for granted. I don’t necessarily want calling-out or karma retribution for that, RL isn’t always so pat, either.
The canons I list all deal with some of these issues, I try to identify them in brackets.
Oban Star-Racers [trigger for sexism, parental neglect, imperialism]
Characters: I didn't indicate any, because it's enough trouble already to find common fandoms, and if you're there I love you on principle, but basically any combination of the four nominees: Eva, Don Wei, Jordan, Rick. With a preference for Eva/Molly, maybe?
When I was trying to get other people into it, I did a short manifesto of awesome here. It doesn’t list everything I love about the series, but it’s a decent starting point.
Pre-canon, in-canon, post-canon is all good, though obviously in-canon is better if you want to include Jordan. I love the family interactions, and the obstacles they have hindering those. Adventure, domestic, humour, angst, I love everything.
Pre-canon, Eva as a child at school, fangirling Rick Thunderbolt and/or realizing she loves machines. Maybe she tried to contact either him or his father before canon picked up. Post-canon, maybe Rick hangs around more – maybe he and Don give their friendship/relationship another shot – it can only help the interactions between Eva and Don. What does Don think of Rick knowing who Molly was and not telling him? Does Eva fold Molly away completely? There’s a lot of stuff I’d like to see explored.
Or, in-canon, Earth-team shenanigans – Jordan being his faily-crush self and Earth Team beingLOLOLOL gently teasing, Rick giving genuinely good advice, and/or later on, Don Wei being his faily Don Wei self. Or maybe eavesdropping on dark political intrigue, exploring a temple, or chatting with the locals. Or Molly and Jordan have a conversation about the race that turns into a conversation about Eva’s mom. Or something exploring Don Wei’s fear of letting Molly race, because of Maya. And though I said I like gen better, well, if your heart takes you in the direction of Aikka/Molly/Jordan thinly disguised (or not) as gen, well, I would not complain.
Or it could be post-canon Jordan writing a travel guide of the places he’s seen. That’d be awesome too.
Annoying opinions: I’m not a huge fan of Prince Aikka, or more accurately I’m not a huge fan of the way the show went out of its way to make Molly and Aikka meet cute every time it possibly could (when Aikka’s had to endure more stuff, in the Cycle of Oban, I start liking him wholeheartedly). I’m more or less convinced Don and Rick used to have a relationship and a nasty break-up – it reads that way to me.
Basically, pretty much anything would make me a happy fangirl.
Astro City [trigger for class issues, violence, racism, parental abuse]
Character: Yolanda Costello.
My four favourite are Yolanda, Detective Ruiz, Quarrel, Brian, and most of the ideas I throw out are about them, but feel free to feature someone else - Winged Victory, Beautie, the Hanged Man, the Fox, or someone else entirely!
I also did a post of love for it.
I love cities-as-characters, the theme of family (blood family, friends as family, mentor/student), badass normals, and the question of growing up. I love the Irregulars, and I wish we could see more of them.
Stories-about-stories, stories about mythos, is one of favourite narrative kinks; I think this is the place to mention it. One of the things I love about Astro City is the homages to other comic canons, so if the characters don’t inspire you, maybe you could tell me about some of these parallel stories? Meta-parading-as-fic is just as yummy as fic with a plot.
You could go… Yolanda and Ruiz, he tries to mentor her. Yolanda in the Irregulars, what’s it like, what it means. What happens to her. Maybe once she gets in trouble at school and he comes to pick her up. Maybe once she gets in his face about the life he chose to leave behind. Or she meets Quarrel, and Quarrel too knows what’s like to have a villainous father. Or Brian meets the Irregulars – they’re almost the same age, but he takes the mentoring responsibility seriously, yet he’s not in the same situation as they are, so what happens there? Maybe through that Brian and Ruiz cross paths at one point; they’re mirror images, really. Or one of them rescuing someone, maybe someone from the Hill. Or one day in the life of Detective Ruiz, Gotham Central style - as he is Attempting To Mentor The Goldenglove Girl. Or Yolanda's experience of what it's like to live in Astro City.
These four all have (or have had) similar problems, they’ve been in similar situations, and they’ve responded differently.
They don’t have a defined sexuality in canon as far as I remember (except for Quarrel’s epic romance with Crackerjack), so if you wrote any of them as queer, I’d love you lots. I’d love you lots anyway, though, just, if your headRuiz or headYolanda or whoever is queer, you do not need to worry about it. Maybe they could meet Beautie or Winged Victory.
Also, if you’re into crossovers, and I’m usually not but I think this would be a great idea, Detective Ruiz and Renée Montoya meeting.
Gotham Central [trigger for violence, homophobia, sexism, racism, sexual abuse]
Characters: any
As a series, Gotham Central is gritty, realistic, and features triggery stuff (not in a positive light; when someone engages in homophobia/violence/racism/sexism, they’re jerks), if you’d rather give it a pass. Personally, I love that about it. But then, I have a thing about cities swallowing you up and spitting you out, and the atmosphere of noir. Gotham is the *~CITY OF MY HEART~*. I love Gotham Central because they’re about taking the outsider PoV and making it the hero of the story. I love it for all the little stuff we see of the characters that is never really explained.
I was most impressed with the arc "Life is Full of Disappointments", and the way it rotated PoVs; something like that would be awesome, because it could feature everyone and have different PoVs and all. Squad-room slice of life, as it were. I pretty much adore the tone of canon, casefic would make me amazingly happy, but that might be kind of long (though if you had an idea for such a fic but always put it off because there’s not as many people interested in Dagmar Procjnow as in Jason Todd – and I am guilty as charged – please be my guest! :D).
Joely Bartlett Doesn’t Talk to her parents who supported Lex Luthor’s campaign and she lives in a boat called the Emancipated Minor II. Renée fic always makes me happy (I like the Renée-and-Cris duo, the amazing switching Bad Cop/Stern Cop show.) Or that time when one of the MCU met with Barbara Gordon, maybe after Oracle got semi-involved in one of their cases? Maybe they found something that made them aware of Oracle at one of their crime scenes. Or you could tell me the life story of Renée Montoya. Or the MCU’s opinion on any of the crises that struck Gotham/the world, maybe when Robin disappeared. Maybe a Cass-cameo in Gotham Central.
A Little Princess [trigger for classism, racism, abuse]
Character: Sara Crewe
A city, and a steel-willed young girl whose powers are her imagination and her refusal to let the circumstances lower her self-worth.
As long as you keep these two elements, I’m going to be so happy.
Go AU. Feel free to race-lift all you want. (my brain thinks as a grown-up, Sara Crewe might resemble Zoë Saldana.) Maybe it’s cyber- or steampunk. Maybe it’s still Victorian London, but there are mages or vampires, or shadows without names reaching out to her. Maybe the story doesn’t take place in London at the turn of the century, but in Cairo four millennia ago. Or in Samarkand. Or in Kano or Mombasa, or one of the other great cities of Africa before the colonialism. Or her father came back from the Crusades with a baby daughter, after his beautiful Sarracen wife died of the plagues in Jerusalem.
Maybe it takes place during the same time period, but in China, or Japan. Maybe she doesn’t know how to read, for whatever reason, and so storytelling becomes entirely a spoken art. Maybe she’s still a child of priviledge. Maybe not. Maybe she lives in a Fahrenheit 451-like world, and books are an act of resistance. Magic-as-stories, stories-as-magic can be cool, whatever the setting.
What heroine does she look up to? Scheherazade, Isis, Joan of Arc, Eleanor of Aquitaine?... What positions do the other characters occupy? (Feel free to bring in any other character so you can write, y’know, dialogue or conflict or action or whatever strikes your fancy, and if you want to go the way of the great Sara/Lavinia romance in Insert Setting There, far from me the idea of stopping you! Or other non-crossgen femslash. I have not found enough Little Princess fic to imprint on an OTP.)
Caveat: for all that Sara adores Marie-Antoinette, I really, really don’t. So if you can avoid putting her in any position that relates to the French Revolution, you would have my most relieved gratitude.
Maybe the city talks to her in her dreams. Maybe you want to write the story of a labyrinth-like city and Sara’s stories like Ariadne’s thread lead the way out.
If you don’t care for AU and are seriously starting to wonder what the hell I’ve been smoking, I’d love stories set in canon, too. Though feel free to go the evocative way. Or the social issue-way; how does it change Sara’s outlook, to have been one of the 99%? Or smudge the timeline and have her go after Jack Ripper. Or meet Sherlock Holmes. Or meet with Lavinia again years down the road. Or have trouble re-adjusting to life after her traumatic events.
I am full of ideas you’re as free to heed, if they are inspiring to you, as to throw them away if they get in the way. I support whatever you choose to write! :D
In case anything needs clarification, anonymous is on and IP is off.
Er, I’m going to try and tell you stuff about my requests, in case it helps. The result is that it’s an epic case of tl;dr, because I love these fandoms and I do excited babbling. I mostly give story hooks.
I like gennish better than straight-out romance, het/slash/poly/asexual romance, fusions (transplanting the characters of one fandom into the world of another) but not crossovers, banter/wit/snark/awkward babbling, hopeful endings, referencing to backstory, referencing canon, slice-of-life, making up anecdotes about characters, themes of family (the difficulties of blood family, the awesomeness of family-of-choice, mentor+student relationships, legacies), class issues, rebellion, embracing the fucked-upness that attracts me to most of the canons, not shying away from the problems the characters are likely to run into in their everyday life, relationships that defy categorization, rivalry as friendship or love, puns, cameos from other characters, heroes being vulnerable/wrong/angry/failing, cities, shippy pretending to be gen, cities, stories within stories, wacky AUs and post-apocalyptic/cyberpunk worlds, identity issues, fucking with gender-roles, characters holding themselves to impossibly high standards. I'm totally fine with underage sex, but anything under the enormously arbitrary age of about 13 hits my "can't read" zone. I like both imagery and clear-and-concise. I like snappy dialogue. I'm more character-driven than plot-driven as a rule.
I do not like setting fictional stories in actual, RL genocides or using WW2/Rwanda/Yugoslavia/etc as a backdrop for star-crossed romance, and I do not like heroic characters working for the people committing the genocide. (I’ve been triggered in the past, so I mention it even though it’s very specific.) I don’t like conspiracy theories explaining real life disasters/wars/etc. Slave AUs. Sexual assault as a basis for h/c, or sexual assault between the main pairing. Cross-generational incest. Prophecies and/or predetermination, especially the biological kind. I don’t particularly like the following tropes: characters realizing their love because their friends informed them (or a character realizing they were wrong/etc because a minor character talked them through), marriage fic.
-Isms: I do a lot of babbling about social issues here, because I’ve understood that blanket statements such as “I don’t like racism” aren’t that helpful. I dislike casual misogyny/homophobia/transphobia/etc (“don’t be such a girl”, “that’s so gay”, “haha, can’t believe you didn’t see she was a man!”) and slut-shaming of all types, unless it’s a theme of the story or from a jerk-ish character – and like racism or homophobia, when it’s used as a convenient short-cut to identify the Bad Guy. On a related note, many of the characters I’m interested in are PoCs.
What I’m trying to say is that I like when stories don’t shy away from the nastier parts of the human experience/society, but because it explores those issues and not because it takes the current social context for granted. I don’t necessarily want calling-out or karma retribution for that, RL isn’t always so pat, either.
The canons I list all deal with some of these issues, I try to identify them in brackets.
Oban Star-Racers [trigger for sexism, parental neglect, imperialism]
Characters: I didn't indicate any, because it's enough trouble already to find common fandoms, and if you're there I love you on principle, but basically any combination of the four nominees: Eva, Don Wei, Jordan, Rick. With a preference for Eva/Molly, maybe?
When I was trying to get other people into it, I did a short manifesto of awesome here. It doesn’t list everything I love about the series, but it’s a decent starting point.
Pre-canon, in-canon, post-canon is all good, though obviously in-canon is better if you want to include Jordan. I love the family interactions, and the obstacles they have hindering those. Adventure, domestic, humour, angst, I love everything.
Pre-canon, Eva as a child at school, fangirling Rick Thunderbolt and/or realizing she loves machines. Maybe she tried to contact either him or his father before canon picked up. Post-canon, maybe Rick hangs around more – maybe he and Don give their friendship/relationship another shot – it can only help the interactions between Eva and Don. What does Don think of Rick knowing who Molly was and not telling him? Does Eva fold Molly away completely? There’s a lot of stuff I’d like to see explored.
Or, in-canon, Earth-team shenanigans – Jordan being his faily-crush self and Earth Team being
Or it could be post-canon Jordan writing a travel guide of the places he’s seen. That’d be awesome too.
Annoying opinions: I’m not a huge fan of Prince Aikka, or more accurately I’m not a huge fan of the way the show went out of its way to make Molly and Aikka meet cute every time it possibly could (when Aikka’s had to endure more stuff, in the Cycle of Oban, I start liking him wholeheartedly). I’m more or less convinced Don and Rick used to have a relationship and a nasty break-up – it reads that way to me.
Basically, pretty much anything would make me a happy fangirl.
Astro City [trigger for class issues, violence, racism, parental abuse]
Character: Yolanda Costello.
My four favourite are Yolanda, Detective Ruiz, Quarrel, Brian, and most of the ideas I throw out are about them, but feel free to feature someone else - Winged Victory, Beautie, the Hanged Man, the Fox, or someone else entirely!
I also did a post of love for it.
I love cities-as-characters, the theme of family (blood family, friends as family, mentor/student), badass normals, and the question of growing up. I love the Irregulars, and I wish we could see more of them.
Stories-about-stories, stories about mythos, is one of favourite narrative kinks; I think this is the place to mention it. One of the things I love about Astro City is the homages to other comic canons, so if the characters don’t inspire you, maybe you could tell me about some of these parallel stories? Meta-parading-as-fic is just as yummy as fic with a plot.
You could go… Yolanda and Ruiz, he tries to mentor her. Yolanda in the Irregulars, what’s it like, what it means. What happens to her. Maybe once she gets in trouble at school and he comes to pick her up. Maybe once she gets in his face about the life he chose to leave behind. Or she meets Quarrel, and Quarrel too knows what’s like to have a villainous father. Or Brian meets the Irregulars – they’re almost the same age, but he takes the mentoring responsibility seriously, yet he’s not in the same situation as they are, so what happens there? Maybe through that Brian and Ruiz cross paths at one point; they’re mirror images, really. Or one of them rescuing someone, maybe someone from the Hill. Or one day in the life of Detective Ruiz, Gotham Central style - as he is Attempting To Mentor The Goldenglove Girl. Or Yolanda's experience of what it's like to live in Astro City.
These four all have (or have had) similar problems, they’ve been in similar situations, and they’ve responded differently.
They don’t have a defined sexuality in canon as far as I remember (except for Quarrel’s epic romance with Crackerjack), so if you wrote any of them as queer, I’d love you lots. I’d love you lots anyway, though, just, if your headRuiz or headYolanda or whoever is queer, you do not need to worry about it. Maybe they could meet Beautie or Winged Victory.
Also, if you’re into crossovers, and I’m usually not but I think this would be a great idea, Detective Ruiz and Renée Montoya meeting.
Gotham Central [trigger for violence, homophobia, sexism, racism, sexual abuse]
Characters: any
As a series, Gotham Central is gritty, realistic, and features triggery stuff (not in a positive light; when someone engages in homophobia/violence/racism/sexism, they’re jerks), if you’d rather give it a pass. Personally, I love that about it. But then, I have a thing about cities swallowing you up and spitting you out, and the atmosphere of noir. Gotham is the *~CITY OF MY HEART~*. I love Gotham Central because they’re about taking the outsider PoV and making it the hero of the story. I love it for all the little stuff we see of the characters that is never really explained.
I was most impressed with the arc "Life is Full of Disappointments", and the way it rotated PoVs; something like that would be awesome, because it could feature everyone and have different PoVs and all. Squad-room slice of life, as it were. I pretty much adore the tone of canon, casefic would make me amazingly happy, but that might be kind of long (though if you had an idea for such a fic but always put it off because there’s not as many people interested in Dagmar Procjnow as in Jason Todd – and I am guilty as charged – please be my guest! :D).
Joely Bartlett Doesn’t Talk to her parents who supported Lex Luthor’s campaign and she lives in a boat called the Emancipated Minor II. Renée fic always makes me happy (I like the Renée-and-Cris duo, the amazing switching Bad Cop/Stern Cop show.) Or that time when one of the MCU met with Barbara Gordon, maybe after Oracle got semi-involved in one of their cases? Maybe they found something that made them aware of Oracle at one of their crime scenes. Or you could tell me the life story of Renée Montoya. Or the MCU’s opinion on any of the crises that struck Gotham/the world, maybe when Robin disappeared. Maybe a Cass-cameo in Gotham Central.
A Little Princess [trigger for classism, racism, abuse]
Character: Sara Crewe
A city, and a steel-willed young girl whose powers are her imagination and her refusal to let the circumstances lower her self-worth.
As long as you keep these two elements, I’m going to be so happy.
Go AU. Feel free to race-lift all you want. (my brain thinks as a grown-up, Sara Crewe might resemble Zoë Saldana.) Maybe it’s cyber- or steampunk. Maybe it’s still Victorian London, but there are mages or vampires, or shadows without names reaching out to her. Maybe the story doesn’t take place in London at the turn of the century, but in Cairo four millennia ago. Or in Samarkand. Or in Kano or Mombasa, or one of the other great cities of Africa before the colonialism. Or her father came back from the Crusades with a baby daughter, after his beautiful Sarracen wife died of the plagues in Jerusalem.
Maybe it takes place during the same time period, but in China, or Japan. Maybe she doesn’t know how to read, for whatever reason, and so storytelling becomes entirely a spoken art. Maybe she’s still a child of priviledge. Maybe not. Maybe she lives in a Fahrenheit 451-like world, and books are an act of resistance. Magic-as-stories, stories-as-magic can be cool, whatever the setting.
What heroine does she look up to? Scheherazade, Isis, Joan of Arc, Eleanor of Aquitaine?... What positions do the other characters occupy? (Feel free to bring in any other character so you can write, y’know, dialogue or conflict or action or whatever strikes your fancy, and if you want to go the way of the great Sara/Lavinia romance in Insert Setting There, far from me the idea of stopping you! Or other non-crossgen femslash. I have not found enough Little Princess fic to imprint on an OTP.)
Caveat: for all that Sara adores Marie-Antoinette, I really, really don’t. So if you can avoid putting her in any position that relates to the French Revolution, you would have my most relieved gratitude.
Maybe the city talks to her in her dreams. Maybe you want to write the story of a labyrinth-like city and Sara’s stories like Ariadne’s thread lead the way out.
If you don’t care for AU and are seriously starting to wonder what the hell I’ve been smoking, I’d love stories set in canon, too. Though feel free to go the evocative way. Or the social issue-way; how does it change Sara’s outlook, to have been one of the 99%? Or smudge the timeline and have her go after Jack Ripper. Or meet Sherlock Holmes. Or meet with Lavinia again years down the road. Or have trouble re-adjusting to life after her traumatic events.
I am full of ideas you’re as free to heed, if they are inspiring to you, as to throw them away if they get in the way. I support whatever you choose to write! :D
In case anything needs clarification, anonymous is on and IP is off.
