penitence_road | Yuletide Letter 2014

Dear Yuletide Author,

Hello, and merry festivities! I'm delighted in advance that you're willing to write for one of my fandoms, because man could they use more love. I'll talk about them and what would make me happiest to read (other than 'anything', which is true in itself), but if you like, here are also some general things I like and things I find less than engaging.

I love big, lived-in worlds with details teeming around the edges and leaking into things almost as much as I love intimate little character moments. I like particularly out-there AU settings just as much as I like fics written to flesh out periods of the canon we never saw. I enjoy holiday-themed stories, particularly around this time of year, so if you have a thought like that, feel free to run with it. Or don't! That's also totally fine.

I have a particular fondness for stories about relationships other than the standard two-person romance story (regardless of what I'm going to say in my Giant Robo request). That is, I like protector/protected relationships, sibling stories, platonic lifemates, resolving love triangles with threesomes, stories of paths crossing and parting and crossing again later, stories of connections forged through shared experiences, battle couples, mentor-student relationships, OTEverybodys, and on and on. I love reading about the curious little ways people connect with each other, romantic or otherwise. On the other hand, if you prefer plotty eventful fic, that would also be delightful--lets be honest, that stuff is way more involved to write, so I'd be thrilled and flattered to get something like that, too.

Conversely, I'm not big on the usual array of AUs--high school, barista, etc--unless the summary has a particularly interesting hook, such as explicit reincarnation and struggling with old memories. I also usually skim over explicit sex scenes, so PWP is very not my bag, though I've no objection to sex scenes contained in a larger story. I prefer my levels of angst and fluff to be not too far out of bounds from canon levels, but I don't mind if there's something you want to linger on a little. Moments of something sweet or painful are lovely; unrelenting crackfic or misery porn, not so much.

Other than those provisos, I'm not terribly demanding. I love all the characters and fandoms below, and the fic for them is basically non-existent, so I'm psyched in advance to read someone else's take on them. So write something that interests you, too, and I look forward to showering you in squee about it. Happy Holidays, and Happy Yuletide!

Onward, to my overly wordy series babblings!

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Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service

Warnings: this canon contains graphic depictions of violence and realistic decomposition of corpses, as well as semi-frequent nudity, typically clinical in nature. Homicide is a frequent subject, and suicide comes up a few times through the course of the series.

Corpse Delivery? Okay, so this series. Basically it's about a bunch of college students with not-very-marketable skills who, needing to find something to do with their college education that will keep food on the table, get together and form a business. Except the skills are things like dowsing (dead bodies only) and channeling spirits (aliens preferred), and the business is delivering the dead to wherever they need to go to in order to be at peace--provided they can also render some payment. It's a bizarre little paranormal slice-of-life manga starring eclectics and loners making something like a life for themselves, as they're all a little crossgrained, touched by death and not quite fitting into the normal flow of the world. It's sensible, honest, and deeply pragmatic. Also funny, and at times quite horrifying. It never shies away from the realities of death and decay, and is always willing to cut through propaganda about Japanese history and customs. It's got an overarching plot, but one that it's in no hurry to get through, meaning lots of time to just hang out with these weirdos and have some spreads of shambling, revenge-seeking dead bodies traumatizing people who richly deserve it. Despite its subject matter, it's maybe the most grounded, clear-eyed manga I've ever read, helped along immensely by a very witty translation courtesy of Dark Horse.

Characters? The main cast for this series is awesome, I want to stress, but there are a couple of recurring side characters who crop up, and two of those are the ones I've requested fic for this year.
Mr. Nire first crops up as the man in charge of a deeply Not Okay scheme involving resurrecting dead murderers so the families of their victims can take more personal revenge than allowed by the chilly Japanese justice system. A worse villain shows up before the story's over, though, and so unlike most of the chapter bad guys, Nire escapes to scheme again, getting shaded with some moral ambiguity about a comatose wife and the insufficiency of government restitution on his way out.
The next time the main characters run across him, he's heading a venture on mummification and the preservation of one's worldly goods, at which point he's picked up a suspiciously bandage-wrapped business associate named Shinuhe, who may or may not be (but probably is) an actual mummy from ancient Egypt. And so it goes, with the cool, condescending Nire and the more amicable Shinuhe always on some new business model for mortality aimed at the ultra-rich, working in upscale offices and facilities and generally serving to contrast the more moral but far more perpetually broke Kurosagi team.

Request? They're two of the very limited number of recurring side characters, and there is zero fic about them. I would very much like that to change. Any fic of them would please me pretty well, but for some prompts:

Tell me a story about how they met, Nire and Mutsumi finding a mummy with a spark of life left in it. Or about how they got into cryostasis from the mummification business, or into some new venture altogether in the 10+ volumes it's been since we've seen them. Maybe they've had some run-ins of their own with other people who do "specialized" work with the dead--if Kurosagi finds competition in roving bicycle samaritans and go-getter mail carriers, what does competition look like for a high-end business like Nire's?
Or, heck, just tell me a day in the life. Is Shinuhe a legal resident--or at least does he have the forged paperwork to fake it, courtesy of Nire's witheringly competent in-house lawyer? Where does he live, and does he ever go out to sightsee? What does he need to do day-to-day to keep himself in passable condition--mystic rites, prayers, careful oiling? What does he think of Nire's circumstances, or modern-day Japan? On the other side, is Nire impressed at all by Shinuhe's background, or fairly blasé about it? Does he specifically read up on funeral practices around the world in order to get new business ideas? Is he still running all of the projects we've seen him at, or does he tend to abandon old projects when he finds new ones? Where did he get the start-up cash for these dubious ventures, anyway? And what's his reputation like with his peers, or with his neighbors? Any family, his own or his wife's, that he has to wrangle?

All in all, we only get the barest hint in the series about what sort of shenanigans the two of them are having when the Kurosagi gang's not around, and I have a mighty need to read more of Nire's smarm matched with Shinuhe's clueless affability. Yuletide author, anything you write in this vein would make me undyingly happy.

Availability? Best just to buy it. There are scanlations around in the usual places, but they're mostly just uploads of the Dark Horse releases anyway, and they peter out after a few volumes' worth of material (though that is enough to get you through all of the Nire+Shinuhe appearances to date). But hey, I hear tell DH is going to be doing omnibus releases soon! Excitement! Until then, there's always TVTropes. Also, as a quick reference to save you some time, we don't know Nire's given name, his wife and daughter's names, or Mutsumi's original family name. But we do know, of all things, the company lawyer's full name--Ishimaru Nakai--and his dry-as-the-face-of-the-moon sarcasm makes me laugh, so if you want to mention him, there you go.

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Giant Robo: The Day the Earth Stood Still (OVAs)

Warnings: This canon... Uh... Well, not much that I can think of, really. It's a little too invested in its high-spirited 70s adventure story to dabble in anything particularly graphic.

Giant Robo? The Giant Robo OVAs, released as seven episodes between 1992 and 1998, are a very special breed of bonkers AU storytelling. I could say it's something like the Disney Princess crossovers, but those don't actually have official published material, just a boatload of fanwork. I could say it's something like CLAMP's massive Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles, and that gets you closer, but thanks to Tsubasa's dimension-hopping plot, you're still not quite there. There's really very little else like the Giant Robo OVAs that I know of, certainly not on their scale, with their animation budget, with their music (Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra! Leitmotifs! Operatic themes! Seven distinct albums! SO! GOOD!).

Originally intended as an adaptation of Mitsuteru Yokoyama's manga Giant Robo, The Day the Earth Stood Still is the result of the director being told in the planning stages that he wouldn't be allowed to use any of the supporting cast from the manga he was ostensibly adapting. Left with only the titular robot and the main character Daisaku Kusama, the directer instead decided to write an entirely new story, using characters and ideas from over the entire career body of Yokoyama's work.

Except not everything Yokoyama ever wrote was sci-fi manga. A contemporary of Osamu Tezuka, and tremendously influential in the formation of manga genres that still endure today, Yokoyama wrote some of the earliest stories about super robots, magical girls and super-powered teenagers. He wrote historical action pieces, started a boom of stories about magic ninjas, and churned out sixty volumes of an epic adaptation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Characters from all of these wildly different stories went into the Giant Robo melting pot, forming a setting in which giant riveted-iron robots existed side-by-side with warring Chinese clans, a near-future world where the long-running rivalry of two international organizations was drawing to a head, a story about the cost of technological advancement and the nature of legacy, spiced up with bombastic battles between metal titans and super-powered agents, globe-trotting merrily across Europe and Asia, from the rooftops of sparkling cities to snow-blasted train tunnels in the middle of desolate nowhere.

There are some bars to clear, particularly the old school character designs, nowhere more apparent than in the deeply retro giant robots. Personally, I like the original dub best for this reason--it's totally sincere, full of heart and enthusiasm, and yet, at the same time, just the tiniest bit tongue-in-cheek in some of its dialogue in ways that the staunchly straight-faced original Japanese script and updated English dub are not. Frankly, I think if you're trying to serve this up to audiences in 1994, it behooves you to be a little aware of how it looks compared to what your Gundam and Macross contemporaries are getting up to.

But it works. In spite of all the reasons that it probably shouldn't, it works, largely because it tackles its hodgepodge nature with complate dedication. Meet it halfway, and it gives you a rollicking adventure, a fascinating world, a huge cast of characters and a host of political situations to go along with them, and way more apocalyptic city-exploding drama than you'd suspect from just glancing over pictures of the thing. All with top-shelf animation budget and what is, to my ear, unquestionably the finest score in anime history.

The big problem with all this, of course, is that the show serves up such a fascinating, fully-realized world and we only have seven episodes to live in it. The action we see is a penultimate story--there are decades of history we will never see because the story was invented wholecloth, years in which the cast formed rivalries and alliances that, since they're often from completely unrelated works, we will never know the roots of. There's a final showdown referenced in the closing lines that remains completely unknown. The scope of the world is tremendous; we see only a sliver of it, and while I'd not give away Giant Robo for anything, that aspect of it is maddening. Fair warning.

Characters? Given the scope of its plot, the show does not have a lot of room for romance, and on the whole I think that's a good thing. It doesn't have much room for most of these characters' relationships; why should their love interests be any different? Particularly when everyone involved is an adult with a job to do and a place to be, often on the other side of the continent from one another? And yet, with the action running so high, this often means that the revelation that, wait, he's in love with her? wait, those two are married? can come completely out of left field. Thus it is that I, given what I said in my intro about how I like battle couples, am completely smitten with Taisou and Youshi.
Coming out of the other of Yokoyama's big Chinese lit adaptations, Outlaws of the Marsh, the one is a grinning, lightning-flinging badass balanced neatly between cool big brother and supportive father figure, and the other is a blue-skinned polearm-wielding giantess who never saw a situation so hopeless she wasn't ready to kick it in the teeth while shouting encouragements to her more easily-rattled comrades. We see them in group scenes a few times but don't find out they have anything going on together until Taisou stays behind in a deathtrap of a mission and, after an all-too-brief goodbye, Youshi has to keep the rest of her team's hotheads on task as they get the hell out. And all of the scenes in that sequence are awesome, but my god, I want more.

Request? Anything more you want to tell me would be awesome, but for some ideas... How did their courtship go? What does Youshi think of Taiso's very intense manly rivalry with Shocking Alberto? Does Taiso ever envy Youshi's partner Issei? How'd they first meet Daisaku and grow to care for him, as Taisou said, like the son they never had? How often do they see each other? Do they keep in touch long-distance when they're both working? What do they do when they get some free time? And, given that special moments in the lives superheros rarely go off without a hitch, exactly how many peoples' heads did they have to bash in on their wedding day?
I'd also be delighted to see the two of them used as a vehicle for some world-building--I have a lot of questions about the everyday business practices of the Experts of Justice branch at Interpol. What're their paychecks like? Vacation policies? Timekeeping? Jurisdictions? Do Taisou and Youshi have a home branch location--Peking? Mount Ryouzanpaku?--or do they just get sent to anywhere a member of the Big Nine like Chief Chujo wants them? And if they just get sent wherever and whenever, what are the accommodations like? What's the mission protocol from start to finish of an assignment? Additionally, because the canon is so focused on the big events and the people whose job it is to be involved with them, we see exactly zero of what the random person on the street thinks of all this clash of powers business. Are the Experts of Justice, like, celebrity heroes, or the stuff of heated conspiracy theories? Are there sighting reports? Merchandising? Fanzines? Primitive internet newsgroups? The possibilities are endless and mindboggling.
Long story short, you can tell me anything about Taisou and Youshi's lives, any story, any event, any anecdote; I would read any of it and love it for the rest of my days.

Availability? Out of print for some time now, though around on Amazon and such in various releases--the individual DVD volumes in particular are dirt cheap used if you're willing to pay the shipping. You can find it streaming, but make sure it's the seven episode OVA series The Day The Earth Stood Still and not the milquetoast 2007 GR: Giant Robo, which is a re-imagining of Yokoyama's original manga (I guess they got permission to use the side characters finally?) and has nothing to do with the OVAs. It's way more dull--but honestly, we probably shouldn't be too hard on it. After all, what isn't just a little more boring stacked up against competition like that?
The fandom presence is pretty non-existant, as are good cross-references for the manga any given GR character was drawn from, but if you want some little character blurbs to reference for names and such, here's a tripod page(!) that's been up since 1999(!!) and which has some basic information, as well as links to a few other sites.

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Small Gods (Discworld)

Warnings: This canon deals extensively with a culture saturated in fear and spiritual abuse, with regular physical abuse referenced in the backstory and non-detailed torture happening a few times over the course of the plot. There is some religion-rooted-sexism mentioned in the setting, but since the characters are universally male, it never comes up on-screen.

Small Gods? Man, where do I even start with this book? I'm going to start blithering and stop when I'm done, but if it's shorter or less coherent than the others, please don't take that to mean I want this fandom any less than the others. A book request is just a bit different than usual for me.

So.

Small Gods is a "comedic" fantasy novel by Terry Pratchett, one of the smattering of stand-alone novels in his massive Discworld series. I use the quotation marks there because while the books on the whole are classified as comedic fantasy, there's a pretty wide margin between, e.g. the cover-to-cover riffs on sword&sorcery tropes of The Colour of Magic and the thick stew of fantasy racism and bubbling savagery peppered lightly with procedural jokes of Thud!. Small Gods falls, to my eye, far closer to the latter end of the scale, dealing as it does with the nature of gods and religion with only the occasional break for mood-lightening with comic philosophers.
By and large, the flavor of the day here is holy war and inquisitions, the use and abuse of innocents, the uncaring nature of the divine, and how a system of faith grows, expands and eventually ossifies, until belief in the god at its heart is replaced with belief in--or fear of--the system itself. The main character was beaten frequently in his childhood on the say-so of that system, and has to face a lot of hard questions about his faith when he finds himself stuck between a cold-blooded torturer with designs on being the next head of the church and a god who only cares about humans for the power their belief imbues.

Characters? The nominated characters are the three leads, as mentioned just above, and though Brutha is the only one I requested specifically, I'd be happy to see him in conjunction with either or both of the other two.
Om is the god around whom the book's questions revolve, a proud and callous deity who decided one day to descend from heaven and go raise some hell among the humans by turning into a divine bull or a pillar of animate flame, something awe-inspiring, and woke up three years later as a tortoise. His impotent, furious leveling of florid curses at people who can't hear his voice is one of the principal sources of humor in the first third of the book, and his all-consuming terror of what happens to gods after their religions die out lends the book its deepest existential darkness.
Vorbis is the story's villain, a man with an unyielding desire to spread the Omnian faith by sword and by fire, and to cleanse Omnia of all heresies and weaknesses. He's intelligent, coldly compelling, and wholly remorseless, but the worst danger he poses is making everyone around him, even his enemies, start thinking in the same ways he does.

Brutha is the book's principal lead and much-needed sympathetic character, a novice who finds Om in his reduced state and is tasked with restoring belief in him. But while Vorbis is temporally influential and capable of planning multiple steps ahead of everyone else, Brutha is a slow thinker, incompetent at any form of dishonesty, and easily cowed by any demands made of him--not exactly the material Om would have hoped for in a Chosen One. But he believes, and he has a compassion and empathy wholly missing from the other two leads, a sense of pity and duty that will eventually rock both Omnianism and Om himself to their core.

Request? Small Gods is pretty complete in and of itself, but the lack of any fic at all about it pains me, so even more than most other canons, I'd be happy with pretty much anything expanding on these three. I'm curious about Vorbis's youth and relationship with his family, as well as his early advancement in the church. There's a horror inherent to both Om's tortoise-based existence before he finds Brutha and his perhaps-inevitable fate as a god that's very compelling, and I wonder how the events of the story change the way he interacts with other gods, and how effective his new methods will be in the long run.

Anything like that, or anything else you have in mind for either of them would be interesting, but it's Brutha I asked for particularly, as he's my favorite. I'm interested in what other peoples' takes are on the gaps in his prodigious memory and the circumstances around him being sent to the church to begin with. I'd love to read something about how history will wind up portraying the events of the book--like, I'm pretty sure that the time he prayed to Om on a storm-tossed ship and the ocean went millpond-flat in the space of ten seconds is going down in the books as The First Miracle of the Prophet Among Prophets; what other wonders will rumor and hearsay spin out of Brutha's life?
And my god, how much do I want fic about anything that happens in the literal century separating the climax and the last scene? How does Brutha rebuild the church? How does he navigate the politics of the (collapsing? dissolving?) Omnian Empire? Where does he draw the line between just reparations for his country's and his church's past wrongs and demands made out of spite and a desire for revenge? What do all the adults around the table think of having to deal with this baffling young man, straightforward to the point of simple-mindedness one moment, then ineffably wise the next? Did he ever visit Ankh-Morpork? Does he have any opinions about pamphlets? Help I can't hold all my questions about Brutha's life as Cenobiarch and the Omnian Reformation.

On a wildly different note, and moreso than in my other two requests, it strikes me that an AU story could be fun here. Taking the bare bones of the novel's premise and putting it in a different setting (steampunk! western! space opera! grim cyberdystopia! modern day?) to see how it changes the nature of Brutha's abuse, the build of the power structures he goes up against, and the walk through the desert would actually be pretty delightful. I'm a bit dubious of Bad End AUs, as I'd rather not get my heart broken for Christmas, but on the other hand, I'm very curious about what Vorbis thought of Brutha from about the library burning on, and the book gave us precious little of that. Brutha and Vorbis' relationship got more and more fascinating as their interaction grew more tense, so something that allows that to play out a little longer could be a great read.

Basically, anything you give me that lets me roll around some more in how much I love Brutha--his compassion, his traumas, his horror of violence, his slow unfolding into the light of new knowledge and new sights--will make me so, so happy.

Availability? By far the simplest to go pick up and read in a day or three. There's a good chance your local library or one of the ones in its system will have it, and failing that, the bookstore certainly will. If cheaper is more your bag, you can get it used on Amazon for half a buck or less. For some references, one wikia page has a gigantic, stupidly-comprehensive name and place list, while another has a good write-up on Omnianism before and after Brutha (which only exacerbates the timeline problems Small Gods presents--clearly, the time monks did it). L-Space has its typical annotation page listing all the jokes and references people can find in the novel, which is always an interesting read.

And that's about it, I think! Thanks for reading this godawfully long letter, which I hope has given you some ideas or inspired you in any way, and thanks so much for writing for me!