Yuletide Letter

[penitence_road]

Dear Wonderful Yuletide Author:

Hello, and thank you so much for writing one of these wonderful under-appreciated fandoms!  I’m new to Yuletide this year, so apologies if any of this goes on for too long or isn’t detailed enough; I’m kind of taking my cues from other letters, and seeing people write about what they like about their requested series tends to make me run off at the mouth myself.  Thank you also for forging through my ridiculously lengthy fanning about the stuff I requested.  Rest assured that I will do the same for whatever you write.

For general form, I don’t have a lot of particular preferences.  I like introspective pieces and active ones, long things and short ones, holiday-themed or non.  I don’t really like crack-fics and long, explicit sex scenes.  I like extrapolation of canons, I’m fine with AUs, I think genderswaps are pretty keen.  I tend to prefer gen fic (my Deadman Wonderland request aside), but I’m happy to read romance for any of the requests below.  I only ask that everyone in a relationship be getting what they want out of it; non-con is absolutely not what I’m looking for in these.  Try to keep in character—no crushing angst for characters that aren’t canonically prone to it, no cattiness from women that get along well in the series, no misogyny/racism for a series that doesn’t already use it as an element of the plot, etc.  No gratuitous darkness, is I guess the point.

I dig empowered ladies, team dynamics in which everyone relates to everyone else in unique ways, competence and badassery of all types (whether combat-related or not), people with Histories that inform who they are and how they deal with the world, and—here’s a big one—transgressing boundaries on the standard two person romance.  I like intimate friendships, poly of all sizes and flavors, solving relationship problems with threesomes, non-romantic lifemates, asexuality, pansexuality, nakamas that live together, frenemies, epic bromances, lady bromances, knight-and-lord dynamics, and on and on.  I dig relationships, but I dig varied relationships.  I like articulations of how people are important to one another in ways beyond simply the romantic and physical. 

I like Determinators and upstarts and the ambitious and people who do not take bullshit; I like worlds that are colorful and interesting; I like characters standing up to bad systems but I also like characters who stand by systems that are nuanced, flawed but which serve important functions; I like people who strive against the dying of the light and also people who choose to go down with their ship.  I like consequences and characters who think about them and deal with them.  I like active decisions, villains who have made them, and heroes who are willing to make them.  A series can be fun or a series can be dark, but more than anything I like a series that lets its side characters be as real and human as its main cast, and doesn’t let its main cast forget it.   

That said, here are my requests and some tl;dr about why I like these series and what I’m looking for in fic that will make me squeal at you like a preteen.

      

1. Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service--

Characters: Any

Quickie Plot: A bunch of college students find themselves at loose ends after graduation from a Buddhist university.  With no family shrines to inherit, what are five people with no marketable life skills to do?  But Karatsu Kuro’s abilities are a little stranger than most—he can talk to the dead.  Joined by a dowser, an embalmer, a hacker, and a channeler, the Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service team offers a unique service: bring the dead where they want to go so their spirits can move on!  If the corpse can pay, of course.  It’s a delightfully quirky little slice-of-life manga about the walking dead.  (Of course, if they’ve got the powers that they do, it stands to reason that they’re not alone, and not everyone is as moral about it as they are.  That’s where the actual overarching plot comes in, as Kurosagi comes across a rival firm that has a very unhealthy interest in Kuro’s abilities and their attendant ancestor spirit…)

Why I love the series: Because I’ve never seen a zombie manga that feels so very down-to-earth and connected to its main cast.  The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service members are all just a bunch of kids looking to use their talents to make a living (though sadly, karma does not always pay monetary dividends).  They’re all a little outcast in their own ways, touched by death and solitude but coping with it in a way that is nearly non-existent in manga about teenagers.  There’s an admirably deft realism going on here for a manga about shambling corpses seeking revenge on those who wronged them. 

It’s not just the writing, though; the art style—more realistic than pretty, clean without being wispy or too polished—backs it up.  The characters are shaped like real people—the women in particular aren’t perfectly-formed dolls with perky tits that are constantly twisted toward the camera.  They dress in ways that seem comfortable for them; they seem comfortable in themselves.  Though the nudity does slant their way when nudity slants near the main characters at all, it’s not very fanservicey, just very natural for whatever situation it’s come up in.  Kurosagi isn’t interested in flashy action sequences and glamorous, sellable character designs; it’s just a sometimes messy story about the sometimes messy lives of some college grads dealing with the often messy fall-out of life and death in the modern world. 

(On the topic of realism, let me add this real quick: where else in any anime or manga have you seen a willingness to talk about Unit 731 and Japanese war crimes in China?  Kurosagi’s lack of hip mainstream attitude also extends to a no-bullshit-allowed treatment about Japanese history and national character; one of the adult characters even talks disparagingly about Japanese desires to sanitize their history via neglecting to tell kids in school about these things.)

Basic request: Literally anything.  It’d be nice if it involves the core crew at least tangentially, but I will adore anything that gets fanfiction for this series into the English language and on AO3.

Maybe something a little more detailed than that?: Well, okay.  The crew in general has a fantastic bantering dynamic that I’d love to see in gen-fic of any sort.  Every one of the cast has an interesting enough history that anything about their pasts would be interesting, though Yata, Kuro, and Sasaki would probably be my preferences. 

My single favorite character is probably Sasaki—she is just so on top of everything, and even her moments of vulnerability are brief, subtle affairs, quickly swept under the rug.  She’s not some kind of prickly tsundere with a broken interior that needs to be helped; she has medication and a therapist and a handle on things.  I love that about her.  She’s so very in command of herself, aware of her own soft spots, and always, always so very capable.  She’s emotionally distant, but not cold.  Her gradually-developing Thing for Kuro is among my favorite romances in anime and manga because it’s so plainly just something that she’s aware of about herself and may or may not choose to act on, and until then it’s not really any of Kuro’s business, is it?  Anything about Sasaki would be fantastic.  Figuring out a romance with Kuro, talking to her therapist, sauntering into the building of a prominent political party to hack into their computers in broad daylight (thanks, volume 9!)…  She’s awesome; any fic about her will be awesome.

Of course, even aside from the main cast, Kurosagi isn’t lacking for good characters.  Yaichi and Kereellis are interesting enigmas; anything from their perspective about how they connect to Kuro and Yata respectively could be fun (and sparkled with a delightful variety of obscenities in the latter case.)  Something about Kuro and the Shirosagi pair would be suspenseful and delightful.  Nire and Shinuhe being Dubiously Moral Business Model Bros would be hilarious.  The day-to-day trials of Tooru Sasayama would be a m a z i n g. 

But seriously, go nuts.  I just found tumblr posts with OT5 fanart for this series in the course of looking for resources on it and my night is now perfect.  Literally any character, pairing, or story would just make my Christmas.

Links to more info:  Honestly the most practical way to read it is just to buy it.  Online scanlations are sharply limited, and they’re all just uploads of the first few Dark Horse releases anyway.  The fandom is almost nonexistent, though there are some delights to be had in the tumblr tag, as mentioned above.  The Dark Horse site is here; it includes previews for all the volumes that have been published so far.  There’s a round-up of reviews here—the Johanna Draper Carlson reviews are fairly comprehensive, and touch on other things I like about the series.  TVTropes is always ready to provide, and the Wikipedia entry has a good quick-reference cast list.  Some splash pages here.

Favorite quote: “There’s nothing so cold as winter break, your senior year, when you count up all your average grades and average them out…to average.  And you wonder how you’re going to pay for all your wasted time.”  (One of the first lines in the series, and the one that convinced me almost immediately that picking up this shrink-wrapped manga I’d never even heard of had been a worthwhile expenditure of my cash.)

2. Deadman Wonderland--

Characters: Takami Minatsuki and Takami Yoh

Quickie Plot: When Igarashi Ganta’s classmates are slaughtered by the Red Man, a masked figure with strange powers who appears at the school with no warning, the boy finds himself arrested and imprisoned for a crime he didn’t even understand, much less commit.  To make matters worse, the prison is Deadman Wonderland, a prison-cum-amusement park where life-or-death games are staged to entertain the public.  But there’s more going on beneath DW’s candy-coated exterior.  What is the secret behind the mysterious Section G?  When Ganta begins to manifest powers of his own, will he be able to get in, find the Red Man, and avenge his dead friends?  And who is Shiro, the mysterious girl who seems to wander freely around DW and claims to be Ganta’s friend? 

Why I love the series:  When I was first seeing summaries about this series, I thought, "Come on, seriously?  A prison-based amusement park?  What kind of absurd premise is this?"  But when I eventually found myself reading it, I realized that the absurdity is, explicitly, the point.  DW is so wildly over the top in what goes on in even its surface-level horrors that the protagonist’s initial shutdown seems really the most reasonable response.  And his ensuing development as a shonen protagonist is like such arcs often go, but on a considerably steeper, bloodier curve.  That goes for the rest of the characters and the series as a whole as well and is what I really like best about it—the characters are kind of shonen stereotypes, and their series is sort of like a shonen series, just with all the dials turned up, broken off, stomped on, and set on fire.  Not a deconstruction, perhaps, but an exaggeration.   It's just so gory and violent and deranged--those are really the key words for the things I enjoy the most about DW: absurd and deranged. 

And yet, while it’s inarguably kind of trashy, it manages to be so wild-eyed while still allowing its cast some humanity—to pick one of its more unusual examples, it’s the only Japanese series I’ve ever seen that allows a transsexual to have a backstory that reflects an experience something like what that a male-bodied, female-identified salaryman in Japan might actually have, rather than just making the character a big dramatic drag queen with no history or living as a woman for some kind of contrived reason related to the plot.  Also, for every female character making dubious outfit decisions there’s a male character who usually wanders around with no shirt on, lovingly rendered pecs on full display; for every instance of a female character needing to be saved, there’s an example of one taking matters into her own hands.  There’s a realism to it, and an unusual physicality, eyeballs and guts and flayed muscle, characters expressing sexual desire, drugs and poisons, and the series is that much more believable than typical shonen fare for it.

-Basic request: A fic about Minatsuki and Yoh’s sibling relationship.  You can approach it in whatever way you feel comfortable, but what I really want is the incest fic that plenty of the fandom thinks is behind-the-scenes canon but that no one will write. 

-Dear God why??: Minatsuki is a gloriously deranged sadist who, while she mellows out considerably after her initial introduction, remains unrepentantly vulgar—and I do mean that; the phrase “curse words” is not anywhere near sufficient to getting across how seriously filthy this girl’s mouth is—and prone to twisted facial expressions and death threats throughout the series.  At least initially she claims outright to be getting off on the protagonist’s pain and her brother’s cluelessness.  Yoh himself is a proficient liar, actor, and petty thief who never rebukes Minatsuki for her behavior or expresses, even to other characters, any kind of wish for her to change.  He seems to have accepted that she is who she is, that her sadism is a strength for her that he has no interest in depriving her of, and all he really wants is for her to be honest with him about her feelings and let him be there as her big brother in whatever capacity she needs. 

So I want to read something about them when they’re on their own, squirreled away in her room, and he is being the big brother she needs.  BDSM is a plus, bloodplay is practically mandatory given the nature of her power, and I can’t see any reasonable explanation for why she wouldn’t be on top.  She is still a sadist and still gets off on him suffering for her sake, but does value him more than she’ll ever say out loud.  He’s well-adjusted enough to be aware of the maladjustedness of it all, but has made his peace with it.

Obviously incest is a squick for a lot of people, so you don’t have to take that angle with them.  Anything about how they cope and coexist in the context of DW’s absurdity would be great in and of itself.  But if you’re willing to write it, them having an intensely fucked up but weirdly okay with it incestuous relationship would really make my month.

-Resources for more info:  The anime is playing on Toonami, with the box set released and available to buy but (issues of dubbing and character omission aside) the anime, due to covering only the first few major arcs of the story, doesn’t cover one of Minatsuki’s best moments and makes her backstory more ham-handed than it really needs to be.  The manga had several volumes released here, but it went down when Tokyopop’s publishing arm did, so online scanlations are really the only way to read the whole thing.  It isn’t a tremendously long read—only 50 chapters, though they’re definitely longer chapters than is shonen-standard.  The series itself has been on hiatus due to maternity leave since January, so it may or may not ever finish—I’ve not heard any news about it out of Japan, but it’s likely that the English fandom isn’t big enough to catch that sort of thing anyway. 

It has a fairly detailed wiki, here, and of course there’s always TVTropes.  There are a couple of inactive LJ communities, and a tiny, tiny kink meme, but it’s a pretty small, sedentary fandom.  Some anime promo art and a few manga splash pages here.

Favorite quote: “I’m sorry, but the whole virgin knight thing is fucking disgusting.”   (One of Minatsuki’s cleaner lines, and the one that revealed that she is definitely not the shy, delicate blossom she’d been pretending to be.)

      

3. Monster--

Characters: Dieter

Quickie Plot: Genius neurosurgeon Kenzo Tenma, a Japanese immigrant living in Germany, has everything—a respected position in a good hospital, a rosy career path, a beautiful fiancée—but loses everything when, to be true to his belief that all life is equal, he chooses to operate on a young boy that’s been shot in the head over the city’s mayor.  Distraught with his subsequent change in fortunes, he rails against his hypocritical, status-obsessed superiors—who then turn up dead after the boy he operated on, Johan, goes missing.  The police suspect him, but can never prove it, and seven years later he’s gotten his life back on track when Johan, now a man, appears before him and shoots one of his patients, thanking Dr. Tenma for saving his life before disappearing back into the night.

Thus begin 18 volumes of tense psychological thriller by Naoki Urasawa, as Tenma decides that he must hunt down the monster whose life he saved and correct his mistake before Johan can kill anyone else.  But the path to the monster is a fraught one, littered with organized criminals, political dissidents, and straight-up killers, and Tenma isn’t the only one looking for Johan.  What do all these men want with him?  What is the history that so many will kill to reveal or keep secret?  Are all lives truly equal?  And what is Johan himself planning?

Why I love the series: It’s at the sweet spot of being just complicated enough to be a rollicking good suspense read but not being so choked in coincidence and happenstance that it becomes completely unbelievable (a problem I have with some of the author’s later works).  It’s a layered, complex work that asks more questions than it answers, dealing ably with child abuse and the after-effects of trauma, the complicated political situation in eastern Europe after the collapse of the Iron Curtain, and a dollop of tremendously creepy childrens’ books.  The art is meticulous and skillful, with distinct, unique-looking characters—the anime is among the most faithful adaptations ever made, usually shot-for-shot echoing the manga, just moving and in color, with music and voice acting. 

The characters are real gems.  Tenma is relatable in spite of his slight author avatar traits (another problem I have with Urasawa’s later works), largely due to the sheer magnitude of the emotional wrack and ruin he’s put through, and his philosophy is one that’s easy to empathize with.  Johan, in turn, is one of manga’s best villains--cool and collected, impossible to read, utterly calm when shooting people, but so breathtakingly skilled at manipulation and coercion that when he appears you’re always far, far more scared of what he’s going to say than whether or not he’s about to shoot someone.  And he does it all wearing a faint, vague smile that suggests someone who’s already guessed the ending of the book they’re reading.  I really could go on forever about the rest of the cast—the implacable police detective, the steely-eyed twin sister, the embittered fiancée, the smiling journalist with a bloody secret, the orphaned kid with nowhere to go but with the man who saved him, and on and on and on—but this section would balloon in length forever.  Suffice it to say than even the bit characters are quickly and ably fleshed out with enough traits to go on, so you know the leads are going to be even better, particularly with all that tasty suffering they’re doing.

Basic request: Dieter.  Anything with Dieter.  Please just put something focusing on Dieter on AO3.

So what do you want me to do with the kid?:  Dieter as a character fascinates me because of all of the lines he’s straddling: dependent vs. independent, innocent vs. traumatized, naïve vs. worldly.  I want something about that border—the abuse he grew up with and what he saw when travelling with Tenma and Nina, versus the fact that he was rescued from all that relatively young and is still a wholly decent and surprisingly well-adjusted kid.  (Though, make no mistake, a little bit of maladjustedness would tickle me too; I’d like to hear about lingering emotional scars and how he deals with them.)  This could be in the timeframe of the series or afterward; I’m partial to both.  I think a post-series fic intrigues me slightly more; Dieter has a hell of a history that he’ll be bringing to the table for the rest of his life, and I’d like to see how he handles that as he grows up and slips back into a more normal life—school, college, finding a job, maintaining interpersonal relationships, etc.  Literally the only thing the canon tells us about what he’s getting up to after the series is that he has regular soccer practice through some avenue or another. 

Links to more info:  This is the longest series I requested fic for, licensed as are the other two.  You can still find scanlations online, as well as episodes of the anime, though the places and channels that were playing it legally seem to have stopped doing so.  Here’s the general Wikipedia entry; it also has a full list of the anime episodes, which include summaries, nicely giving a quick but thorough rundown of the series.  There are some utterly dead livejournal communities here and here.  Some DVD covers here.

Favorite quote: “People are strange things…  Sadness fades away with time, and only the enjoyable memories remain.  We’re built so conveniently, aren’t we…?” (At least it’s a line that stuck with me; it’s an exceptionally well-written manga and I would probably find others were I to sit down and look.)

Finally, the end: I know that was an awful lot of rambling about things I do or would like, but seriously, write something you want to write, too!  As I said waaaay up there at the top of this way too long letter, I'm going to be thrilled with anything that gets written about these characters/fandoms anyway, so have your own Yuletide fun with it.  And thanks again!