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Dear Yuletide Writer/Yule Goat/Santa
Ack! I got this up early this year, but... it's... enormous. My God.
My very dear Yuletide writer,
Thank you for even being here to read this! This is my second time doing Yuletide, so hopefully I'll know the ropes a little better, but the wonderful writers and readers that make up YT are seriously a high point of my holiday season. Not just getting fic (that puts a lot of pressure on you as the writer, seriously) but the whole atmosphere and being in community with a lot of fellow writers and fans just makes me so happy. Most of my LJ/DW is friends-locked, and unless you're on my flist already you're unlikely to know me I don't really get out and around in fandom. I'm Skazka on nearly every site (including AO3) and I do most of my writing on anonymous memes. Most of the fandoms I'm active in are either book fandoms like HP or fandoms for musicals, but I try to get out more and dabble in a bit of everything. If you feel like getting your stalk on, I’ll definitely be in the #yuletide channel frequently, and several of my fics are up on AO3. (And for literally everything this year I'm slash-happy -- go ahead! But not anti-het in the least. I am also fine with kink and with queer characters of all stripes.)
Just a small update this year re. pronouns: I identify as androgynous, but I'm pretty flexible about how people refer to me pronounwise. "She" isn't offensive at all and works fine but Spivak pronouns -- ey, eirs, eir, etc. -- are preferred. Thanks!
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On To The Fandoms!
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Evelyn Waugh -- Brideshead Revisited:
If there's any other fic for this fandom this year I have the feeling it'll be Charles/Sebastian – they are more or less canon as a 'ship and really, really dynamic. But my favorite character is probably the rather alarming one of Kurt – Sebastian's friend in Morocco, the deserter from the French Foreign Legion with the infected foot and missing front teeth. Everyone I've talked to about the book has found his odd setup with Sebastian in Morocco a weird, rather unpleasant aside in the course of Sebastian's unhappiness, but the way their whole acquaintance is suggested really snagged me. The whole concept of "two waifs coming together", whether it's really just Sebastian having someone more pitiful and inept and vulnerable than himself to care for or not, really hooked me. (And the inevitable question from Sebastian's family as to whether there was "anything vicious" between the two of them – Charles of course says no, and whether you agree with him or not may vary.) I love Anthony Blanche as a character and how he seems to have been everywhere, doing everything (and everyone), his snark and flamboyance as a social position and a stand rather than just an author's hilarious stereotype. His outrageousness and how out he is with every aspect of his character belies a lot of , well, for lack of a better word, ballsiness. I really dig the rest of Sebastian's family and their eccentricities, even though the atmosphere in the family (partly a class thing, partly a religious thing, partly just temperament) really ends up causing pain, especially for childish Sebastian. Particularly Cordelia intrigues me, and what on earth she must have been thinking.
Robert Musil -- The Confusions Of Young Törless:
Literally almost anything for this fandom would make my Christmas. There is almost no fandom presence, and certainly no fic that I've found. While I liked the film just fine I prefer the book canon, though you can take personal fanon anywhere you like on stuff like first names, where the characters' futures lead after school, or Basini's Jewishness (which has been my personal persistent fanon since the film, but casts some intensely unfortunate implications on whether or not he "deserves" his torment for his theft). Since most of the book is spent in Törless' head, the rest of the events are left wide open.
While I'd love long, plotty fic (the book was too short for my liking, hélas) character studies or individual scenes are also fantastic. I was drawn to this book by the obvious appeal of young-teenaged characters behaving monstrously, but I was hooked by the moral ambiguity of all the characters, most of all Törless himself and Basini, the ur-victim. Božena is a fascinating character, but if Young Torless had a big fandom she'd probably get pushed to the wayside-- in addition to being a woman in a story that focuses mainly on manipulative, sexual teenaged boys, she's a prostitute with a rough life and a thoroughly cynical outlook. But I find her interactions with the boys, even recounted secondhand in order to embarrass them, really telling. If you can include her, I'd love it. Torless is obviously the main character and nearly the viewpoint character, his biases color how we see the rest of the cast. There's some really intensely interesting facets to his personality, like his friendship with Prince H. (which sounds alarmingly like a childhood crush) and his whole thing about being convinced he was a girl as a small child. (That's one of my favorite passages, in part due to my own exploration of gender, and seen with modern eyes it definitely suggests some interesting possibilities.) Reiting and Beineberg's interactions as a duo also really interest me. Their personalities and their takes on their abuse of Basini are quite different, and Beineberg was cheerfully willing to, well, out Reiting and ruin his life if he hadn't served his purposes so very well. Yet they complement each other well enough that they're partners in crime and superficially model students to boot.
Daphne du Maurier -- Rebecca
I love love love this book, and will be rereading it over the holidays whether or not I get fic for it. Du Maurier has an exquisite hand for the creepy and sinister in completely mundane events. Manderley feels so tangible and real and so does the cast of characters -- it’s a completely non-supernatural ghost story with a mousy, awkward narrator
Prequel fic would be fantastic (the narrator’s school days? Maxim’s life before Rebecca? Hell, even during?) but I find the narrator’s interactions with Maxim during their married life (especially after the real circumstances of Rebecca’s death are revealed) super-interesting. They’re one of the first het couples I ever found really appealing and dynamic. You can explore that period, the narrator’s (or Maxim’s) thoughts, all those fervent kisses, go nuts. Part of the fun with the looming presence of Rebecca haunting everyone is how little of it we get, how we never learn exactly what she told him that Maxim could never repeat, and I... am going to be a bit of a bad fan and say I want to know. You needn’t oblige me, just capture a little bit of that mystery. (And I know this is an odd possible request, but the narrator’s comments comparing her love for Maxim to an awkward schoolboy crush got me pondering what Maxim’s school years were like and whether he was ever the subject of an awkward boycrush.)
Deathwatch:
(At the time of this letter's writing, Deathwatch was available for full viewing on Youtube here. It is definitely a horror movie, so if those aren't your cup of tea over the holidays I wouldn't recommend it.)
Part of the big sell for me in war movies is the terrifying camaraderie. I've seen this more in movies dealing with WWI in the trenches (and while it's in no way a war movie, 28 Days Later has hints of this during the parts set in the soldiers' barricade) and at very best it gives the characters a kind of nakama with each other forged under fire. There's much infighting and brutality and increasing mental strain on everyone in the group. While the situation of being off on your own in the middle of a brutal, terrifying, all-consuming war, in increasing isolation, is pretty far from romantic it really, really grabs me. The radio breaking up, the restlessness and agitation of the soldiers, the corpses in the mud (and my God, the rats)... it hits on so many of the things that just scare me to death. I have no idea why that really grabbed me in what otherwise has some tiresome horror movie tropes. (For heaven's sake, don't sneak off to have a wank! And the sentient barbed wire was a little much.) It might not be optimal in terms of the canon of Great Awesome Horror Movies, suspense and scene-setting and freshness, but it got me invested in the characters.
The entire cast here I really like. They fall into some fairly standard tropes: Charlie the shell-shocked young private who lied about his age to enlist, the slightly naïve religious type, the increasingly more strained and damaged officers, the snarky Scot, the sociopathic soldier you're practically rooting for to die (okay, maybe only me)... But they all start to crack under the pressure in different ways and some hold on longer than others. If you're writing slash, take into account everybody's place in the social order in the battalion – age, rank and social background especially. With the Kill 'Em All ending (well, apart from Friedrich, and a story from his POV would be interesting, wouldn't it?) there's not much room for fic set after the film for Y Battalion. (Unless you decide that Charlie survives...) But something centering around the battalion before them, if it was indeed a German battalion, and Friedrich's place in the whole thing (is he as terrified of the evil there as he seems, and finally just completely cracked, or has he decided from the start that anything that gets rid of the other guy is fine by him?) would be cool if you don't care for prequel fic or something taking place in the timeline of the movie or as an AU.
---
... And The Rest Of It
---
Naughty Bits
The physical goings-on of sex scenes aren't a die-hard selling point for me (not to say you need to mask everything in ~AND THEIR SOULS TOUCHED... ALL NIGHT LONG~-style euphemism unless you want to!) but the thoughts and feelings of those involved I find super-interesting. If sex scenes aren't your thing, feel free not to include any, but just do whatever you enjoy and find fun to write! Some of my requested fandoms (Young Torless especially) have the obvious possibility of including sexual violence; I'm totally fine with this, just warn on the AO3 form.
-Nasty Bits
I adore creepy, but outright fight scene gore doesn’t apppeal to me a great deal. But I’m not distressed by violence in my fic either, as long as it feels like it flows
-Triggers and Squicks
My triggers relate mostly to abuse of trust from an adult authority position, especially in the form of child grooming. I'm made uncomfortable seeing a character (a child or someone exceptionally trusting) putting faith in an adult and having that adult encourage that trust in order to take advantage of the their vulnerability. Yes, even if the taking advantage is only a metaphor for sex, or if the sexual element isn't shown, or if the child/trusting character is the hero and the other party is unquestionably the bad guy. Thankfully this is quite unlikely to come up in my YT fic, but on the odd chance it does – and you needn't rewrite your bajillion-word fic to erase any possible traces of that theme – please warn for it so I don't stumble on it unawares. Thank you! Likewise with warnings, if you're going to include suicide or self-harm I'd appreciate a heads-up. For just squicks I don't think much bothers me.
-Wants And Kinks
(This is NOT a checklist – there's seriously no way one could fit all these into one fic, and I wouldn't put that burden on any author. Nor is it a shopping list where any given fic must include this many things I like. I just wanted to give a vague idea of what I generally go out for in fic.)
All of my kinks in fic-writing (in the general sense of "stuff that hooks me and I'd like to see" rather than solely sexual turn-ons) tend to be upstairs rather than downstairs, digging the mental rather than physical. I like a sense of struggle, dreaminess, pensiveness, melancholy, resignation and how people try to reconcile things to themselves to make them tolerable. Queer stuff in a historical setting (and drag kings, but that is unlikely this year). I like violence approached matter-of-factly, injuries explored at leisure and all the intimate hinkiness inherent (hinkiness, not kinkiness) in telling or recollecting how you were hurt. I also like friendships building under odd circumstances, little odd signs of or moments of affection from otherwise awful people, like minds/folie a deux type arrangements, and people who are themselves struggling supporting one another. Noncon and dubcon. Tight non-sexual bromances with nevertheless a romantic overlay to them. Perfectly regular domestic scenes don't get me much, there's always the feeling that there's something weird and not-so-wonderful hidden just underneath, and even in a really safe, "normal" setup I love peeks at that. Also, I kind of dig pastiches.
Thank you so much for writing this year! Writers make the Yule go ‘round and I hope I haven’t been too terrifyingly bossy. <3
Fondest regards,
Skazka.
My very dear Yuletide writer,
Thank you for even being here to read this! This is my second time doing Yuletide, so hopefully I'll know the ropes a little better, but the wonderful writers and readers that make up YT are seriously a high point of my holiday season. Not just getting fic (that puts a lot of pressure on you as the writer, seriously) but the whole atmosphere and being in community with a lot of fellow writers and fans just makes me so happy. Most of my LJ/DW is friends-locked, and unless you're on my flist already you're unlikely to know me I don't really get out and around in fandom. I'm Skazka on nearly every site (including AO3) and I do most of my writing on anonymous memes. Most of the fandoms I'm active in are either book fandoms like HP or fandoms for musicals, but I try to get out more and dabble in a bit of everything. If you feel like getting your stalk on, I’ll definitely be in the #yuletide channel frequently, and several of my fics are up on AO3. (And for literally everything this year I'm slash-happy -- go ahead! But not anti-het in the least. I am also fine with kink and with queer characters of all stripes.)
Just a small update this year re. pronouns: I identify as androgynous, but I'm pretty flexible about how people refer to me pronounwise. "She" isn't offensive at all and works fine but Spivak pronouns -- ey, eirs, eir, etc. -- are preferred. Thanks!
On To The Fandoms!
---
Evelyn Waugh -- Brideshead Revisited:
If there's any other fic for this fandom this year I have the feeling it'll be Charles/Sebastian – they are more or less canon as a 'ship and really, really dynamic. But my favorite character is probably the rather alarming one of Kurt – Sebastian's friend in Morocco, the deserter from the French Foreign Legion with the infected foot and missing front teeth. Everyone I've talked to about the book has found his odd setup with Sebastian in Morocco a weird, rather unpleasant aside in the course of Sebastian's unhappiness, but the way their whole acquaintance is suggested really snagged me. The whole concept of "two waifs coming together", whether it's really just Sebastian having someone more pitiful and inept and vulnerable than himself to care for or not, really hooked me. (And the inevitable question from Sebastian's family as to whether there was "anything vicious" between the two of them – Charles of course says no, and whether you agree with him or not may vary.) I love Anthony Blanche as a character and how he seems to have been everywhere, doing everything (and everyone), his snark and flamboyance as a social position and a stand rather than just an author's hilarious stereotype. His outrageousness and how out he is with every aspect of his character belies a lot of , well, for lack of a better word, ballsiness. I really dig the rest of Sebastian's family and their eccentricities, even though the atmosphere in the family (partly a class thing, partly a religious thing, partly just temperament) really ends up causing pain, especially for childish Sebastian. Particularly Cordelia intrigues me, and what on earth she must have been thinking.
Robert Musil -- The Confusions Of Young Törless:
Literally almost anything for this fandom would make my Christmas. There is almost no fandom presence, and certainly no fic that I've found. While I liked the film just fine I prefer the book canon, though you can take personal fanon anywhere you like on stuff like first names, where the characters' futures lead after school, or Basini's Jewishness (which has been my personal persistent fanon since the film, but casts some intensely unfortunate implications on whether or not he "deserves" his torment for his theft). Since most of the book is spent in Törless' head, the rest of the events are left wide open.
While I'd love long, plotty fic (the book was too short for my liking, hélas) character studies or individual scenes are also fantastic. I was drawn to this book by the obvious appeal of young-teenaged characters behaving monstrously, but I was hooked by the moral ambiguity of all the characters, most of all Törless himself and Basini, the ur-victim. Božena is a fascinating character, but if Young Torless had a big fandom she'd probably get pushed to the wayside-- in addition to being a woman in a story that focuses mainly on manipulative, sexual teenaged boys, she's a prostitute with a rough life and a thoroughly cynical outlook. But I find her interactions with the boys, even recounted secondhand in order to embarrass them, really telling. If you can include her, I'd love it. Torless is obviously the main character and nearly the viewpoint character, his biases color how we see the rest of the cast. There's some really intensely interesting facets to his personality, like his friendship with Prince H. (which sounds alarmingly like a childhood crush) and his whole thing about being convinced he was a girl as a small child. (That's one of my favorite passages, in part due to my own exploration of gender, and seen with modern eyes it definitely suggests some interesting possibilities.) Reiting and Beineberg's interactions as a duo also really interest me. Their personalities and their takes on their abuse of Basini are quite different, and Beineberg was cheerfully willing to, well, out Reiting and ruin his life if he hadn't served his purposes so very well. Yet they complement each other well enough that they're partners in crime and superficially model students to boot.
Daphne du Maurier -- Rebecca
I love love love this book, and will be rereading it over the holidays whether or not I get fic for it. Du Maurier has an exquisite hand for the creepy and sinister in completely mundane events. Manderley feels so tangible and real and so does the cast of characters -- it’s a completely non-supernatural ghost story with a mousy, awkward narrator
Prequel fic would be fantastic (the narrator’s school days? Maxim’s life before Rebecca? Hell, even during?) but I find the narrator’s interactions with Maxim during their married life (especially after the real circumstances of Rebecca’s death are revealed) super-interesting. They’re one of the first het couples I ever found really appealing and dynamic. You can explore that period, the narrator’s (or Maxim’s) thoughts, all those fervent kisses, go nuts. Part of the fun with the looming presence of Rebecca haunting everyone is how little of it we get, how we never learn exactly what she told him that Maxim could never repeat, and I... am going to be a bit of a bad fan and say I want to know. You needn’t oblige me, just capture a little bit of that mystery. (And I know this is an odd possible request, but the narrator’s comments comparing her love for Maxim to an awkward schoolboy crush got me pondering what Maxim’s school years were like and whether he was ever the subject of an awkward boycrush.)
Deathwatch:
(At the time of this letter's writing, Deathwatch was available for full viewing on Youtube here. It is definitely a horror movie, so if those aren't your cup of tea over the holidays I wouldn't recommend it.)
Part of the big sell for me in war movies is the terrifying camaraderie. I've seen this more in movies dealing with WWI in the trenches (and while it's in no way a war movie, 28 Days Later has hints of this during the parts set in the soldiers' barricade) and at very best it gives the characters a kind of nakama with each other forged under fire. There's much infighting and brutality and increasing mental strain on everyone in the group. While the situation of being off on your own in the middle of a brutal, terrifying, all-consuming war, in increasing isolation, is pretty far from romantic it really, really grabs me. The radio breaking up, the restlessness and agitation of the soldiers, the corpses in the mud (and my God, the rats)... it hits on so many of the things that just scare me to death. I have no idea why that really grabbed me in what otherwise has some tiresome horror movie tropes. (For heaven's sake, don't sneak off to have a wank! And the sentient barbed wire was a little much.) It might not be optimal in terms of the canon of Great Awesome Horror Movies, suspense and scene-setting and freshness, but it got me invested in the characters.
The entire cast here I really like. They fall into some fairly standard tropes: Charlie the shell-shocked young private who lied about his age to enlist, the slightly naïve religious type, the increasingly more strained and damaged officers, the snarky Scot, the sociopathic soldier you're practically rooting for to die (okay, maybe only me)... But they all start to crack under the pressure in different ways and some hold on longer than others. If you're writing slash, take into account everybody's place in the social order in the battalion – age, rank and social background especially. With the Kill 'Em All ending (well, apart from Friedrich, and a story from his POV would be interesting, wouldn't it?) there's not much room for fic set after the film for Y Battalion. (Unless you decide that Charlie survives...) But something centering around the battalion before them, if it was indeed a German battalion, and Friedrich's place in the whole thing (is he as terrified of the evil there as he seems, and finally just completely cracked, or has he decided from the start that anything that gets rid of the other guy is fine by him?) would be cool if you don't care for prequel fic or something taking place in the timeline of the movie or as an AU.
---
... And The Rest Of It
---
Naughty Bits
The physical goings-on of sex scenes aren't a die-hard selling point for me (not to say you need to mask everything in ~AND THEIR SOULS TOUCHED... ALL NIGHT LONG~-style euphemism unless you want to!) but the thoughts and feelings of those involved I find super-interesting. If sex scenes aren't your thing, feel free not to include any, but just do whatever you enjoy and find fun to write! Some of my requested fandoms (Young Torless especially) have the obvious possibility of including sexual violence; I'm totally fine with this, just warn on the AO3 form.
-Nasty Bits
I adore creepy, but outright fight scene gore doesn’t apppeal to me a great deal. But I’m not distressed by violence in my fic either, as long as it feels like it flows
-Triggers and Squicks
My triggers relate mostly to abuse of trust from an adult authority position, especially in the form of child grooming. I'm made uncomfortable seeing a character (a child or someone exceptionally trusting) putting faith in an adult and having that adult encourage that trust in order to take advantage of the their vulnerability. Yes, even if the taking advantage is only a metaphor for sex, or if the sexual element isn't shown, or if the child/trusting character is the hero and the other party is unquestionably the bad guy. Thankfully this is quite unlikely to come up in my YT fic, but on the odd chance it does – and you needn't rewrite your bajillion-word fic to erase any possible traces of that theme – please warn for it so I don't stumble on it unawares. Thank you! Likewise with warnings, if you're going to include suicide or self-harm I'd appreciate a heads-up. For just squicks I don't think much bothers me.
-Wants And Kinks
(This is NOT a checklist – there's seriously no way one could fit all these into one fic, and I wouldn't put that burden on any author. Nor is it a shopping list where any given fic must include this many things I like. I just wanted to give a vague idea of what I generally go out for in fic.)
All of my kinks in fic-writing (in the general sense of "stuff that hooks me and I'd like to see" rather than solely sexual turn-ons) tend to be upstairs rather than downstairs, digging the mental rather than physical. I like a sense of struggle, dreaminess, pensiveness, melancholy, resignation and how people try to reconcile things to themselves to make them tolerable. Queer stuff in a historical setting (and drag kings, but that is unlikely this year). I like violence approached matter-of-factly, injuries explored at leisure and all the intimate hinkiness inherent (hinkiness, not kinkiness) in telling or recollecting how you were hurt. I also like friendships building under odd circumstances, little odd signs of or moments of affection from otherwise awful people, like minds/folie a deux type arrangements, and people who are themselves struggling supporting one another. Noncon and dubcon. Tight non-sexual bromances with nevertheless a romantic overlay to them. Perfectly regular domestic scenes don't get me much, there's always the feeling that there's something weird and not-so-wonderful hidden just underneath, and even in a really safe, "normal" setup I love peeks at that. Also, I kind of dig pastiches.
Thank you so much for writing this year! Writers make the Yule go ‘round and I hope I haven’t been too terrifyingly bossy. <3
Fondest regards,
Skazka.