Dear Yuletide Writer

Oct. 22nd, 2025 12:33 pm
isis: (yuletide)
[personal profile] isis
Thank you for writing a story for me! I am [archiveofourown.org profile] Isis on AO3. As long as you generally stick with things I like and avoid things I dislike, I will enjoy your story even if it doesn't take on any of my vague prompts, which are really just suggestions. All my prompts are mildly spoilery so you may want to take care expanding those sections.

If you're not feeling inspired about your assignment and want to try something else, the British Airways "May We Haveth One's Attention" Safety Video is literally a 5-minute fandom (okay, 5:22), Il Gattopardo | The Leopard (2025) is 6 1-hour episodes, and you can write my request for the Fractured Europe Sequence based only on the first 2 books (out of 4).

Treats are enabled and welcome! I've included general art likes in the "nattering" section for artists interested in making Wrapping Paper treats (and if you draw me a treat I'll try to write you the story that goes with it!).

Likes: I like historical (if appropriate) and worldbuildy detail, scenery porn, what-if AUs, original characters (along with, not instead of, any requested ones, unless otherwise specified), pastiche of canon style, time travel, bodyswap, bodysharing, ghost/afterlife stories, mythological and supernatural elements, and magical realism. (These fantasy elements are welcome in canons that don’t have them, unless specified.) As you can probably tell from my specific fandom details, the setting and worldbuilding are as important to me as the characters, so I'm not a fan of AU that completely changes the setting, but if you have a brilliant idea, go for it; I would prefer "interesting" to "mundane" AUs, e.g., in SPAAAACE yes, coffeeshop no. (Coffeeshop in SPAAAACE, okay!). I would like happy endings and no major character death, though feel free to kill off original or minor characters as your story requires.

DNW: I do not want fic focusing on pregnancy or children (mentions of either are fine), A/B/O or BSDM dynamics, mundane modern AUs, or major character death (other than canon deaths). I do not want anything that contradicts the characters being cisgender as presented in canon, unless they are canonically not cisgender. I do not want fic that uses neopronouns (e.g. 'xie') – please use 'they' for nonbinary or agender characters, or whatever these characters use in canon. I do not want nonstandard capitalization or punctuation other than in the title. I very strongly prefer past tense; if you feel your story really needs to be in present tense for stylistic reasons that's fine, but I want it to be a conscious choice, not a default.

I do not want unrequested noncanon ships involving canon characters even in the background, other than those I've specifically mentioned I'm okay with. Canon ships, mentioned past relationships with OCs, and implicitly canon ships (such as people’s parents) are fine, as are OC/OC relationships. Please don't break up any specified relationships or put my requested characters in relationships other than the ones I've mentioned I like.

Other general nattering about my tastes - characters, crossovers, style, sex likes, art likes
Characters: The characters I've chosen are the ones I want the focus on, but the choice of what kind of story to write and who to include in it lies with you. Feel free to take things in whatever direction you like and/or include characters I haven't mentioned, including original characters, though please keep the focus on my requested characters (except as noted). For worldbuilding requests, feel free to use canon characters or original characters as you choose.

Crossovers: I love crossovers, but if you choose to write one, please make sure (either through checking my fic, tags [reading will find books, viewing will find movies and TV shows, games will find games, and some fandoms have tags as well; also you can check my Goodreads 'read' shelf for books, though I haven’t updated it in a while], asking my friends, or asking one of the other mods to ask me) that I know the other source. I have a particular soft spot for crossovers with real historical characters in historical-fiction fandoms.

Style: I generally prefer plot (as in, things happening; doesn't have to be elaborate or long – as contrasted with character studies), past tense, and lots of dialogue. But these are preferences, not hard DNWs, and if you have a brilliant idea that requires present tense and no dialogue, go ahead. My only hard preferences are for conventional pronouns (he/she/they as appropriate), capitalization, and punctuation. I'm happy with epistolary fic, journal entries, and other nonconventional formats, and if you want to create interactive fiction (second person is fine for this, or otherwise as you prefer), go for it! I have no preference on story length - make it as long (or as short) as it needs to be.

Sex and relationships: Explicit sex okay, non-explicit sex is okay, no sex is okay, but any sex should be in believable language for that era or fandom. UST, gen, het, slash, femslash, whatever. It's all good. I don't care for PWP, as I need at least a little context that establishes the world and those characters. I also prefer sex scenes that focus on emotions and perceptions rather than on the mechanics of what goes where: think M-rating rather than E-rating, and I'm totally fine with fade-to-black. I am rather vanilla in my preferences where kink is concerned: mouths, hands, genitals, toys, all are fine, but I am not interested in BSDM, bloodplay, watersports, spanking, or fetish play. I like kissing, touching, oral sex, penetrative sex, frottage, pegging, mutual masturbation, outdoor sex, indoor sex, and pretty much any position two bodies can contort themselves into. I am not interested in threesomes, moresomes, or poly fic in these fandoms. I am absolutely fine with a gen work in any of these fandoms.

Wrapping paper challenge art treats: I would love art for any of these fandoms! I like both serious portraits and funny little cartoons. I have a soft spot for art in which one character is doing something typical-but-alarming, and the other is rolling his or her eyes, or reacting with horror, or getting ready to douse them with a bucket of water, or whatever. Stylistically, I love interesting and experimental compositions, unusual perspectives, emphasis on textures such as hair and clothing, and scenery porn (Mountains! Trees! Cliffs with water crashing on them! Brooding ruins of an ancient castle!) and I like line drawings as well as full color. I really like stylized artwork that depends on a limited color scheme (my favorite colors are blues and greens; I also like black-and-white and grayscale), and not-too-detailed sketches that feel dynamic. I like art-pastiche such as playing cards and tarot cards, posters, and so on. If I receive any art treats, I will do my best to write a ficlet for the artist based on the art!

And now, on to the prompts!

British Airways "May We Haveth One's Attention" Safety Video: Any (Georgian Queen, Anne, George, Scots on Horseback, Worldbuilding)
I watched this homage to British costume drama (and airline safety video!) and was instantly charmed. Feel free to take it anywhere along the crack continuum that you like: is this a strange alternate world in which airplanes were invented much, much earlier? Did the historical characters time-travel forward, or the flight attendants time-travel in reverse? Did a real queen isekai into the filming of an airline safety video and just deal with it with royal aplomb? Why are Anne and George sitting in airline seats in the parlor? (Do they invite the flight attendants to their wedding?) And, the most provoking question of all: how did the Scots get seatbelts on their horses?

Additional DNW for this fandom: don't break up Anne and George! However, any other relationships here are fair game, and I'd be intrigued by something like Scot/flight attendant or Queen/pilot.

The Fractured Europe Sequence - Dave Hutchinson: Worldbuilding
I first read Europe in Autumn and Europe at Midnight nearly 10 years ago, when the "Xian Flu" was a far-fetched SF imagining and the "Global War on Terror" was not nearly so global. I'm re-reading these books now in preparation for reading the rest of the series, and let me just say it's landing rather differently.

The worldbuilding in this series delights and enthralls me! I would love anything about the splinter polities, about the Line, about the Campus or the Community or the Coureurs, on scales small (the discovery of an entrance to the Community) to large (a seemingly-stable country splitting into pieces). Past, present, or future; Europe, or beyond - what happened in Asia? In North America? while all this is happening in Europe? There are intriguing hints that the US has had a civil war, and that Texas has become its own country! The little bits of story with secondary characters hint at lots of things outside the scope of the novels that could be filled in. Or - and I don't know yet if these get answered in the books, but if it doesn't - how does mapping an alternate dimension make it spring into being? What was Mundt's "trick of topology"?

(Please note that as I write this letter, I've only read the first two books and about half of the third, but I will have read the entire series by Yuletime.)

Il Gattopardo | The Leopard (2025): Concetta Corbera di Salina
I enjoyed this costume drama set in the waning days of the Sicilian nobility and the rise of the Kingdom of Italy. I'm specifically looking for a canon-divergence AU here: please give Concetta a happy future. Maybe she runs off with Tancredi to America; maybe she runs off to Paris with Angelica! Maybe she gets married to Bombello after all, and it works out. Or perhaps she finds joy in her stewardship of the Salina estate, somehow, if you want to keep things closer to canon. I'd be intrigued with a crossover with historical RPF of the period, or any appropriate fandom I'm familiar with.

DNW a romantic relationship between Concetta and any of her siblings or parents, or Calogero, but I'm fine with her finding love with an OC, male or female, or a minor character ditto.

Warrior (TV 2019): Any (Ah Toy, Father Jun, Hong, Lai, Nellie Davenport, Wang Chao, Young Jun)
This show gave me vibes of Peaky Blinders set in the late 19th C San Francisco Chinatown Tong Wars, with a generous helping of Game of Thrones. I'd love a story about any of the nominated characters, particularly their backstory or an imagined future after the show (you are welcome to canon-divergence away canon deaths). Some specific things that interest me:
- How Ah Toy and Nellie navigate their romantic relationship (forbidden in multiple ways!)
- Lai's hero-worship of Ah Toy, her silent steadfastness, the way she blossomed at the vineyard
- Hong's ridiculous cheery attitude in the face of a thousand insults and injuries, his matter-of-fact approach to his sexuality
- Wang Chao's careful balancing act at the fulcrum of the warring tongs and the police
- The fraught father-son relationship of Father Jun and Young Jun

Please don't break up canon relationships. General DNW of unrequested noncanon ships involving canon characters applies here except for the following: I vaguely ship Wang Chao with Richard Lee (growing out of their developing understanding during their forced road-trip); Lai might be interesting with Penelope or Mai Ling, if you could figure out how to get them together, or an OC (male or female) or any other non-nominated character; Hong with an OMC or any non-nominated male character, before or after his time with Marcel. However, please feel completely free to write gen!

AWS outage

Oct. 20th, 2025 10:11 am
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

It's Agatha Christie time!

Oct. 18th, 2025 08:42 am
scaramouche: Gene Kelly dancing in the rain, from Singin' in the Rain (singin' in the rain - umbrella)
[personal profile] scaramouche
I might've waited longer to make a post, but I just finished The Listerdale Mystery, which is a collection of twelve short stories, and I had such a fun time I had to post ASAP! It's different from the previous short story collections I've read in that only one is a proper murder mystery, while the rest are murder without the mystery, murder adjacent, or do not come anywhere near murder at all! (Look at me being so excited, when it may turn out Christie has plenty of these.)

Some of the stories were centered on a twist that, by virtue of being a short story, made the twist far more important to the story itself, like anthology episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents or Twilight Zone (in terms of story structure, but with mundane concepts instead of fantastical). By the time I got to story ten there were some tropey repeats, especially featuring a man being pulled into an adventure by mysterious girl, but overall it's a fun mix and I really enjoyed myself.

Only caveat I would say that classism is particularly strong throughout in terms of justification for certain characters' successes or assumptions being proven right, but sometimes it seems earnest and others it seems ironic. I say that because another repeated topic of the stories is to not believe that people are who they say they are without proof, but the working class characters who get scammed this way tend to be rescued by their honesty, while the upper class characters who get scammed are either able to brush it off or are able to notice just enough truth through the scam to be rewarded by it.

Particular shoutouts to:
  • The opening "The Listerdale Mystery", about a widowed mother who finds a house for rent that seems to good to be true; the story is, if you think about it for two seconds, a ridiculous concept, but it's a particular kind of romantic id that you'd be well used to if familiar with Bollywood films and I found it kinda charming for that;

  • "Philomel Cottage", the most Alfred Hitchcock Presents of the bunch, with a recently-married woman realizing that her new husband might be planning to murder her;

  • "Accident", where a retired inspector suspects that a neighbour is a twice-murderess who is going to kill her current husband and wants to try to prevent it, spoilers )

Besides that, I've also read two more Christie short story collections, both of which are Poirot collections and thus more traditional mysteries: The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding and Murder in the Mews. The best thing about short Poirot stories is that Poirot can show up at a scene of the crime, take one turn of it and solve the mystery immediately. Which is neat!

In Christmas Pudding, I did like the one about the elderly estranged twin men, which kind of deceives you into thinking it'll be a switcheroo between the twins but is actually a switcheroo of a different kind. But quite a few (three, I think) stories involve disguises to make the murder appear to have happened differently or at a different time, and it kind of kicked my disbelief a bit too hard, especially the one that hinges on the murderer leaving it to chance that another character won't see the body after the murder.

Murder in the Mews has four short stories, with three being meatier than the fourth, and they’re kind of bound together with the theming of the "crime" isn’t exactly what it looks like. Well, the third one, "Dead Man's Mirror" is way more in line with Christie's precise murders, right down to the layout of the room being key to what's happened, but all of them are in the same realm. The only qualm I'd have is with the last one, "Triangle at Rhodes" which is the shortest of the lot and the assumptions are a bit of a stretch for me, in terms of what Poirot observes of the relationships that's happening vs. what we the reader are shown of those same relationships.

Amadeus

Oct. 17th, 2025 11:34 am
scaramouche: Freddie Mercury in profile, with "Hello again, my beauties" in text (freddie hello my beauties)
[personal profile] scaramouche
A friend and I had a loose resolution to check out more non-pop orchestral performances next year (since the ones we've gone to so far have all been for pop culture music, eg. movie and video game soundtracks), so she shared the 2026 season for the Malaysian Philharmonic and I thought maybe I'd check out their upcoming Mozart concert which is in conjunction with his 270th birthday.

Coincidentally, or maybe not because of said birthday, there's a new adaptation of Amadeus! Looks like a miniseries instead of a movie, but still, excitedly hopeful!

wednesday reads and things

Oct. 15th, 2025 04:40 pm
isis: starry sky (space)
[personal profile] isis
Hiya! It's been a while! I blame Yuletide. (The preparatory work is a Lot, even with all the comods and tagmods who do an amazing job of putting things together. So, make me feel like it was worthwhile: go sign up! 😁)

But I have been consuming media!

What I recently finished reading:

Chaos Vector and Catalyst Gate, the second and third books in the space-opera Protectorate series by Megan E. O'Keefe. I enjoyed the series overall, though I feel like O'Keefe slowed things down and lost momentum after the sequence of clever twists from the first book. The actual story behind the story turned out to be less novel and captivating than I was expecting, and although a few of the reveals were "a-HA!" great, some parts just felt as though the worldbuilding was being done on the fly, and the plot built around to justify it.

The writing occasionally felt a little fanficcy to me, like, "let's express found family sentiment here! Let's throw in an obstacle that turns out not to be one!" but overall it was easy to read and fairly entertaining.

Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson, which like the first book of the previous series is a reread so I can read the rest of the books in the series. This one I first read in 2014, and as with the Protectorate books, I am stunned at how much I completely don't remember at all. Here's my review from 2014:
A whole lot of elements in this book hit my buttons perfectly. There is the alternate-history/near-future aspect, which centers on the interesting idea that the EU has not just fallen apart but splintered into dozens of tiny pocket states (and I have to say, there was a strange resonance to reading the bit about Scotland's explosive parting from the UK only a month after the real-world vote failed). There is the largely Eastern European setting, the Estonian and Polish and Hungarian characters, which read delightfully exotic to this American (though I wonder how it will read to my European friends!). The writing is strong, never getting in the way of the story but frequently delighting me with clever phrases and evocative images, exactly the style I love reading. And I adored the idea at the heart of the eventual reveal.

But...there were problems. The pacing was a little odd, slow to get going, with scenes (or parts of scenes) that did not obviously contribute to the story. Some, granted, played a part later. But it didn't feel tight to me; yet at the same time, there were all these questions that were answered in oblique ways, or left hanging such that clearly the reader was supposed to connect invisible dots, which made me feel a bit too stupid for the clever author - not as bad as Ken MacLeod's books make me feel (and there were bits of this that were reminiscent of his The Execution Channel, but along those lines. And the cool reveal I mentioned above comes practically at the end of the book - but when I hit it, I felt, that is what I want the book to be about! Not all this preparation stuff! And there wasn't enough about the cool part!
I mostly still agree with this, though I now think the pacing works better for me, maybe because I missed some details before or failed to understand how a later section made use of information from an earlier one. Also - there was an offhand bit of building up the undergirdings of this near-future world, the why of Europe having splintered into micro-polities, involving a pandemic of the "Xian flu" which "had brought back quarantine checks and national borders as a means of controlling the spread of the disease..." and I was, holy shit, this was published in 2014. (This fictional pandemic was 10-20x more deadly than Covid-19, which was certainly bad enough.) Other contributors to European disunity were "Economic collapse, paranoia about asylum seekers – and, of course, GWOT, the ongoing Global War On Terror," and about there I started thinking damn, if it wasn't for the Great Uniter (of everyone else against him) this would be playing out right now...and maybe it will play out here, as the states attempt to sort themselves by political party.

I guess the point is, I enjoyed reading this both as an escape and also as a a warning. On to the second book, which according to my notes I read in 2016 and liked even more (because it was mostly about the cool thing at the end of the first book)!

What I recently finished watching:

Two episodes of Resident Alien which was too cringe for me. I liked the concept, in theory? But the execution was excruciating.

Foundation S3, which - well, another way that civilizations crumble, I guess. I enjoyed it, particularly watching the various Cleons diverge from their assigned paths, but alas the problem with a generation-spanning epic is that the characters you liked in a previous season are (mostly) long dead now. Probably my favorite part was Bayta (and Toran, I guess) who felt very much like Star Wars characters to me.

What I'm still playing but not for much longer:

I'm about to start the endgame sequence (at least, that's what the quest screen tells me) of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Time to kill those pesky gods!

Book Log: Where am I Now?

Oct. 15th, 2025 03:14 pm
scaramouche: Kerry Ellis as Elphaba from Wicked (elphaba reaching)
[personal profile] scaramouche
I must've gotten Mara Wilson's memoir Where Am I Now?: True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame during one of my trips to UK, because it has a price tag in pounds, but heck if I can remember when. What I do remember is that I put the book at the back of the drawer because I was annoyed and/or upset at her for something she'd said online. I no longer remember what it was! So I suppose it's time to be reading.

There is a feeling at the start that Wilson was way too young to be writing a memoir, but upon reading it it does make sense, because the bulk is about her time as a child actress and the fallout of that into the neuroses of teenhood and young adulthood. And going through that same thing we all do, where in growing up we become conscious of certain kinds of privilege we don't have and having to reckon with that, except Wilson's realization of the importance of looking traditionally pretty isn't just about trying to fit in and get friends, but also to get acting work. (Ow.) She namechecks as specific examples her peers Kristen Stewart and Scarlett Johansson who beat her to roles and did get to make the transition to acting adults, and her raw frustration that this was not something she could balance out with talent.

Tangled up in that is the intense celebrity-adjacent subculture of growing up in Burbank, California surrounded by peers who want to "make it" into the business and thus have feelings about those who do when they do not. Mean girl culture in a greater Hollywood setting, baby! (Ooofff.) This is probably the most fascinating section of the book to me, of how that world warps the expectations of children and teenagers who feel they're in the pipeline to showbiz greatness. Also, by her reckoning, there's lore than the Californian school subculture of show choirs that she participated in was what inspired Ryan Murphy to make Glee, though that may be more guesswork than cold hard facts.

Wilson specifically lived through some rough times (including the early death of her mother), but she got out of showbiz with relatively less trauma than other child actors, but it's still only other child actors who could understand what it was like to grow up in that environment and have so much of your personality and looks dissected by people who don't know you. Also, to have creepers think it's fun to ask a child questions about mature topics they haven't yet grappled with. Toxic and sadly familiar.

Dear Yuletide 2025 Author

Oct. 13th, 2025 11:09 am
thefourthvine: A weird festive creature. Text: "Yuletide squee!" (Yuletide Woot!)
[personal profile] thefourthvine
Dear Yuletide Writer,

Hi!

I am going to provide you with all the details I can, because that is who I am as a person. Thank you so, so much for writing in one of these fandoms. See you on the 25th!

Likes/DNWs and General Stuff )


Between Silk and Cyanide -- Leo Marks, Leo Marks, Forest Yeo-Thomas )


blink-182 )


Blue Prince, Worldbuildling, Simon P. Jones )


Nomads, Eileen Flax, Veronique Pommier )

I have an icon for this!

Oct. 9th, 2025 05:48 pm
rivkat: Bruce and Johnny investigate (bruce and johnny investigate)
[personal profile] rivkat

I’ve been rereading Stephen King for comfort reasons, and I have a couple of observations. First, The Dead Zone—which posits political assassination as an actual solution to a potential presidential madman—hits a bit different these days. Second (and not unrelatedly), while I am happy enough to get the expanded version of The Stand, it was a huge mistake for King to try to change the setting from 1980 to 1990; random updated pop culture references can’t disguise the fact that America changed substantially in that decade, such that characters and settings that made sense in 1980 were no longer plausible in 1990. The teenaged, white Nick Andros would almost certainly not have used the word “Negro” to describe an old woman in 1990. The singer Larry Underwood would have different beliefs about music from the 70s, when he was a young child rather than a teen/early adult. From attitudes towards single mothers to how racism was expressed to the dumping practices of fabric mills, the revised version still reads like 1980, but with a mention of rap on the radio, and it’s not good.


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