Dear Yuletide 2015 Author

[penitence_road]

Dear Yuletide Santa--

Hey there, and thanks for checking out my letter!  I'm thrilled to match with someone interested in writing for any of these nonexistent fandoms, and I hope you enjoy writing for them half as much as I'm going to enjoy reading about them.

For some general guidelines, while I would say I prefer genfic to shipfic, the longer version is simply that my favorite things in relationship stories aren't about romance.  What I get out of fic of this sort is all the little details about how people connect with each other and adapt to one another, whether or not the relationship is romantic--all those little moments of intimacy in a close relationship of any kind.  I like sibling stories, platonic lifemates, protector/protected relationships, battle couples and found families.  I like small meetings fated to have large repercussions, and connections forged through shared experiences.  I would far rather read about threesomes than love triangles, and I've never seen a canon with an OTEverybody option I didn't like.

I like the little details blown up to a larger scale as well--I love slice-of-life and casefic, stories that have characters interacting with the world as much as they do each other.  I like stories that have consequences for people other than the leads, as well as stories that flesh out bits of the canon that we never saw.  On the other hand, I also enjoy sufficiently weird alternate setting takes on my fandoms of choice.  I enjoy holiday-themed fic, particularly around this time of year, so if you have any thoughts in that vein, feel free to run with them.  I am more than happy to read lengthy, plotty fic, so if you get a bug to write something more substantial, by all means do.  Any tense or POV is fine with me.

Conversely, I'm not big on the standard modern day AUs (high school, barista, etc) unless the summary has a particularly interesting hook--for example, I'm always a sucker for explicit reincarnation and the subsequent struggle to reconcile impossible memories.  I usually skim over explicit sex scenes, so while I've no objection to them in a larger story, PWP is not what I want to read for these characters.  I prefer my levels of angst and fluff to be within arm's reach of canon levels, though if there's an emotional beat you want to linger on, that's perfectly fine.  Other than those provisos, I'm pretty easy to please.

So, are you ready to read too many words about my canons?  If not, please feel free to skip down to the "Request/Prompts" section for whatever we matched on, where I'll provide a blurb on what I'm hoping for and a selection of prompts in that vein.  Please don't feel limited by what's provided below; if you have some other idea that you think I'd like, feel free to run with it instead!  Half the fun of Yuletide is in the writing, after all.  The characters below have zero or nearly zero stories about them anywhere, so I'd be delighted with pretty much anything you come up with.  But, as to the rest of what's below, I've tried to provide some summaries and info on what I like or find interesting about these canons, as well as some reasoning on my character choices.  Then prompts, lots of prompts, and whatever scant resources I've been able to dig up.  There are also some warnings included, so if you want to investigate something other than what we matched on, you'll know what to expect.

Thanks again, and happy writing!

Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service

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

What is it?  It's a manga series about a bunch of college students with not-very-marketable skills who, needing to find something to do with their education that'll keep food on the table, get together and form a business.  Except their 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 in modern-day Tokyo--often a difficult proposition, 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 the advancement on that is quite slow, leaving the more episodic installments as mostly an excuse to hang out with these weirdos and have some spreads of shambling, revenge-seeking dead bodies traumatizing those 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.

Who're your characters?: Mr. Nire and Shinuhe.

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 that the families of their victims can take more personal revenge than is allowed by the clinical Japanese justice system.  A worse villain shows up before the story's over, though, and so unlike most of the per-chapter bad guys, he escapes to scheme again, getting shaded with some moral ambiguity about a comatose wife and the insufficiency of government restitution.  The next time the main characters run across him, he's heading a venture on mummification and the preservation of one's worldly goods, by 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/Prompts?: 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 shady business 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 is he fairly blasé about it?  Does he specifically read up on funereal practices around the world in order to get new business ideas?  Is he still running all of the businesses 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 wild 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.

Got any resources?: There are scanlations around in the usual places that will get you through all of the Nire+Shinuhe appearances to date, but if you're interested in getting into the series, now's a great time, as Dark Horse recently released the first volume of an omnibus rerelease, and a second will be along in early December.  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.

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 bonkers 70s adventure story to dabble in anything particularly graphic.

What is it? If you threw James Bond, Hong Kong action cinema, and the A Boy and His X trope into a blender and hit puree, you might get something very like the Giant Robo OVAs, released as seven episodes between 1992 and 1998 as a very special breed of bonkers AU.  I could say it's a bit like the Disney Princess crossovers, but those don't actually have official published material, just a boatload of fanwork.  I could say it's also 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.

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 story he was ostensibly adapting.  Left with only the titular giant 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 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 exist side-by-side with warring Chinese clans, a near-future world where the long-running rivalry of two international organizations is 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 hurdles 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 1995, you need to be at least a little aware of how it looks compared to a contemporary like, say, [it's a Gundam].

But it does work.  In spite of all the reasons that it probably shouldn't, it works, largely because it tackles its hodgepodge nature with complete 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 primo, top-shelf animation budget and a universally acclaimed score that is, to my ear, among the finest 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 narration 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.

Who're your characters?: Taisou and Youshi.

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, the action running so high 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, despite what I said in my intro about shipfic, I find myself completely smitten with Taisou and Youshi.

I really like battle couples, you see, and you could hardly find a better example.  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/Prompts?: 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, to use Taisou's words, 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 of 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.

Got any resources?: 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.

Heartcatch Precure

Warnings: Not much I can think of.  It's got a target audience of elementary school girls, after all.

What is it?: Tsubomi Hanasaki is a shy girl who's just transferred to a new school and is determined to make a new start for herself.  Her forays in this direction, however, are stymied by class spazz Erika, who, to Tsubomi's dismay, latches onto her as a new prospective friend.  It does not take long to see why Erika doesn't have a lot of friends--she's energetic but pushy, and often thoughtless.  But Tsubomi is about to have a much weirder new hanger-on in the form of a hapless mascot animal that runs into her while tryingto escape pursuit from a suspicious character calling herself a Desert Apostle.  One thing leads to another, Tsubomi becomes the magical Cure Blossom, and you can just about see the shape of things from there.

If you're into magical girl shows at all, you've probably at least heard of the massive commercial beast that is the Pretty Cure franchise.  But if you're anything like I was up until recently, you may not have ever looked into it much--it panders to fanboys probably, and it's never covered by any reviewers or blogging sites you follow, so it's probably nothing but a brightly colored artistic wasteland.  But then you might come home from work one evening to find your boyfriend and his family in the middle of a sprawling marathon rewatch.  You shrug, get some dinner, and settle in with your laptop.

And get completely blindsided by Heartcatch Precure.

The fifth entry into the franchise, Heartcatch is a contentious beast in the Pretty Cure fandom.  Its eye-searing color palate and more cartoony character design mark a significant stylistic departure from its predecessors, while the targeting of human victims-of-the-day rather than transformed objects is one the most immediately noticeable of what turn out to be a number of darker elements to the show.  It remains the only franchise iteration to feature the death of one of its cute magical animal companions, for example, one of many foundational tragedies for late-joiner veteran magical girl Cure Moonlight.  The run-in for the climax, in which the main villain unambiguously triumphs with five more episodes still to go, is shockingly dire.  And yet it's still so joyous!  Don't let my talk about its dark elements fool you into thinking this is another grimdark post-Madoka revisionist magical girl show--it's got enough darkness to give it some tooth, but at the end of the day, its themes of self-acceptance and community leave you with girls who are striving to improve themselves while also learning to love their own weaknesses and imperfections, and to understand and forgive such in others.  Not for no reason is it the best critically received iteration of the show outside its built-in audience.

Anyway, Pretty Cure's got a bad rap in anime fandom at large, and as I am discovering, it's not really a fair one.  Yes, it is absolutely hocking cheap plastic toys to small girls, and there are definitely stronger and weaker franchise installments--how could there not be?--but the impression I'd had that it was also marketing on the side to adult otaku dudes is not borne out by any of it that I've seen.  if you're interested in magical girl shows at all, the franchise is definitely worth some research.  Heartcatch Precure, meanwhile, is a strong enough show on its own merits that I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in anime featuring female friendships or genre-based slice-of-life.

Who's your character?: Baron Salamander.

So one of the things every cast of Pretty Cure girls gets, late in their run, is a movie, almost universally involving some new fairy creature pleading for help or new threat menacing the locale.  In the case of the Heartcatch movie, the new cast members in question are a mysterious young boy fleeing from the new villain, one Baron Salamander.  When confronted with Tsubomi's demand to know who he is, Salamander ambivalently replies that the simplest way to explain it is to say that he's a Desert Apostle.  This will prove to be a laughably huge over-simplification of his allegiances and history.

The palpable sense of history is maybe my favorite part of Heartcatch--Tsubomi's grandmother's history as a Cure, for example, or the statues of other past Cures in the Pretty Cure Palace.  It's something that sets the show apart from a lot of other magical girl series, even within its own franchise, and when Salamander waltzes in like a history book with an enormous purple bow on the cover, his motivations all tied up in his backstory with both sides of the Precure vs. Desert Apostle conflict, he turns the dial up so hard it snaps clean off.  Unlike the rest of the rest of the Desert Apostles, he's not a brainwashed human or the product of magical experimentation, rather hailing from the same place as King Dune, though clearly subordinate to him.  When his curiosity about his own nature leads him to start asking a bunch of questions about it, Dune kicks him out--it's unclear whether he's sent as an early scout to Earth or if he finds his own way there, but once there, he eventually becomes the last boss for Earth's very first Pretty Cure, Cure Ange, and her compatriots.  Who promptly seal him in the basement of a monastery in Paris, where he will remain for four hundred years until released by the boy who will eventually be called Olivier.  The two of them then set out on a journey to gather the scattered shards of Salamander's power--and also develop a stunted father-son relationship, but more on that later.

Request/Prompts?: Basically Salamander interests me on two levels.  The first is how suited his unique perspective is to worldbuilding: the simple what of all the questions he could answer about both Dune (whom he renders more interesting just by existing) and the first Cures.  Where are he and Dune from?  What was their relationship like?  Were there others like them, and if so, what was their society like?  How did they think of themselves?  Did they all wear that same white coat Dune, Salamander and, for some damn reason, the Mirage Cures wear?  Why did Salamander get curious about their nature, and how did he end up on Earth when Dune took poorly to such questions being raised?  Is he how Dune found out about Earth in the first place, or is there some other connection between it and the Desert Apostles?

And about his time on earth!  Was Salamander acting on Dune's orders when he clashed with Cure Ange, or was that a battle all of his own making?  What were his encounters with Cure Ange like, given that she's the only full-grown adult Cure we see in the whole of the franchise, and only sealed him when he couldn't or wouldn't be convinced to stop?  Skipping forward some, after Olivier freed him from the seal, was Salamander still beholden to Dune on some level, and that's why he was doing Desert Apostle dirty work in giving Sabaaku the mask?  Or was bringing Sabaaku into the fold an arrangement between Dune and Salamander, with the former granting the latter power or freedom in return?

The second level is simply Salamander's character arc.  While long worldbuilding would delight me, I'd be just as happy with a short scene delving into his internal life.  What was his "childhood" like, growing up indoctrinated in Dune's miasma of never-explained-in-canon hatred?  What did he think of humans when he interacted with them and why did this lead him to fight them?  How did he go from a curious youth to someone who apparently wanted to destroy the world simply because he had no other concept of how to interact with it, even after several years of trucking around with an adoptive son?  And how does he reconcile all of that post-movie?  He strikes me as someone whose early repudiation taught him some very clear lessons about the dangers of engaging in hazardous pastimes like "self-reflection" or "acknowledging feelings of affection," and I wonder about the relationships that were created or scenes that might have played out as that vector of character development crossed with Dune, Cure Ange, Olivier and eventually the Heartcatch girls.

Note: I did enter a blurb on the Crueltide post about this fandom, because Salamander's deep history is removed enough from the main narrative of Heartcatch that I am a-okay with explorations of it being rather darker than the canon itself tends to get.  If that's your kind of thing, you can find my entry here.  If it isn't, please don't concern yourself with it; I promise that I will read less lurid explorations of Salamander's history with just as much eagerness.

Got any resources?: Not even sort of legally available in English, but with a thriving fanbase, so torrents are plentiful and well-seeded. Here's a TV Tropes!   Here're some pictures! Here's the wiki!

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'.

What is it? 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 callous 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 Brutha 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 Vorbis, a cold-blooded torturer with designs on being the next head of the church, and Om, a god who only cares about humans for the power their belief imbues, most specifically the power that will let him stop being a damned tortoise.

Who's your character?: Brutha.

I'll say upfront that Om and Vorbis are both pretty fascinating in their own right, and if you want to include either or both of them in some fashion, please feel free.  Om's 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, meanwhile, though coldly compelling in his intelligence and remorseless self-certainty, is nowhere more interesting than in the way he forces everyone around him, even his enemies, to start thinking in the same ways he does.

But Brutha is one of my favorite characters in the franchise, and the one I'm formally requesting.  The book's principal lead and much-needed sympathetic character, he's 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/Promts?: Small Gods is pretty complete in and of itself, but all the same, it being one of the stand-alone Discworld books means that fanfic for it is pretty thin on the ground.  I got some lovely little gems last year, but my hunger remains unsated.  My big hope with this fandom I mentioned as just a possibility last year, but I've since gotten intrigued enough by it that I'm putting it first this time:

I would actually be really interested in some kind of alternate setting take on the story.  Taking the bare bones of the novel's premise and putting it in a different setting (steampunk! western! space opera! grim cyberdistopia! modern day?) to see how it changes the nature of Brutha's abuse, the look of the power structures he goes up against, and the setting of that grueling desert walk would actually be pretty delightful.  A full version of that is obviously beyond the 1K scope of Yuletide, but seriously, just one solid scene, enough to get a hint of what's been and what's to come, would fill this request quite solidly.

If that's not something you're comfortable with, though, that's fine too!  I also have some closer-to-canon prompts!  What's your take on the gaps in Brutha's prodigious memory and the circumstances around him being sent to the church to begin with?  How do you think history will wind up portraying the events of the book?  Like, I'm pretty sure that that time Brutha 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 his 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 end up visiting Ankh-Morpork?  Does he have any opinions about pamphlets? Help I can't hold all my questions about the Omnian Reformation.

Lastly, while I'm a bit dubious of Bad End AUs, as I'd rather not get my heart broken for Christmas, I'm very curious about what Vorbis was thinking about 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.

Got any resources?: 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, this wikia page has a gigantic, stupidly-comprehensive name and place list, while this one 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 have found in the novel, which is always an interesting read.

The Orphan's Tales

Warnings: Though there are never any detailed sex scenes, this canon does include coerced or otherwise non-consensual relationships, romantic and otherwise, and a number of characters are impacted by neglect or child abandonment--well, look at the title, after all.  It also dabbles periodically in body horror.

What is it?:  Once upon a time, a young prince met a girl who lived in his father's garden, a girl with words so thickly printed across her eyelids that they seemed black.  They struck up a friendship, and she began to tell him her stories--fantastical stories of firebirds, djinn, holy cities and dying cities, sainted sailors, witches rescuing maidens, talking animals, demi-gods walking the earth, and a whole host of other elements, some borrowed from fairy tales and monster legends we know, others spun out of nothing but a sense of fairy-tale rightness.  The stories weave in and out of one another, as a boy on a quest hears the tale of a witch, who tells a story of her grandmother's training, during which she met a wolf in a cave with a legend of five celestial sisters, or an orphan girl in a frigid port city hearing of the youth of another of the net-menders, who went on a journey with three dog-headed brothers, who tried to kill a woman who had already died once, who was saved by a wizard who had once sought answers from Death.  A character might leave one girl's story as a loose end, an unfinished thread, only to be woven back in later as they appear in a totally different tale to tell a different girl, years later, what became of them.  And gradually, gradually, over the course of two books and four arc stories, we begin to see the whole picture, and the point of the framing narrative of the girl in the garden.

The Orphan's Tales is a duology by Catherynne Valente, an author who deserves the phrase "builds castles with words" if ever one existed, though "castles" is pretty rote--maybe "bustling markets" or "lush banquets" would be more apropos.  Her writing is rich and sumptuous, heavy with sensory detail, and I've rarely read anything where purple prose is more well-suited to the material.  It is, most definitely, not the kind of thing everyone is going to like.  But if you're interested in twists on fairy tale formulas, it's absolutely worth a look.  It's also loaded up to the very brim with women--if I'm being honest, it's so woman-centered that I sometimes felt bad for the men.  It feels much like a world created by someone who's watched a thousand movies centering men at the expense of womens' agency and inner life, said, "Nuts to that," and wrote a story where it's the men left behind while women go off to meet their destiny, a story where men who coerce women into being with them are undone by the fruit of those misdeeds.  But neither is it all GRRRL POWER!!--there are women brought into captivity by kings or wizards who suffer for years before their revenge or escape comes to fulfillment,women who die to sate a man's hunger and are never properly avenged.  It is not a story interested in easy outs or karmic resolutions for every single person ever wronged in the world.  It's unflinching, basically, in places where a gentler, kinder story would be more forgiving, and that gives it a personality all its own.

Who're your characters?: Ragnhild, Leander, Seven, or Dinarzad.

The two books between them contain stories recounted by or about dozens of characters, practically all of whom could support further expansion.  I narrowed my selections down to four characters who provoked broadly the same emotional response in me, that being, "GOD, PLEASE JUST GIVE THIS CHILD A MOMENT OF HAPPINESS, IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK?"  They are mostly unrelated, but presented in as best an order as I can figure by the books' murky timeline:

-Ragnhild the Black Papess, who once naively agreed to take an antipope-esque position that got her murdered pretty terribly; her spirit was preserved by a callous wizard and left on a shelf to fester for a few hundred years.  When she eventually came back for her revenge, she was defeated at chess rather than at war, and though aflame with humiliation joined a convent of worshipers of a seabound-saint, and thence passed out of the history of the world as we know it.

-Prince Leander, a young man whose quest resulted in him finding a number of truths, about the mother he'd thought dead, the sister he never knew he had, and the father he'd always rather hated--and then losing them all in fairly short order.  Bereft and lonesome, he ruled for a few short years before taking vows in a holy order of patricides, and, like Ragnhild, surrendering all claims of influence on the world.

-Seven, a seventh son whose fate of being staked out on a hill as a sacrifice to generous gods gave way to something much more fantastically grim when he got swept up by the wraith of a city destroyed by a hunger spirit but which still haunted the world.  There he was made by the city's residents to feed corpses into a machine that minted coins from the stripped bones.  Seven makes one friend, they escape, and things--only ever get so much better before they both wind up chasing idealized relationships into the lands of the dead, and at the end their best comfort is in knowing where they stand, even if it isn't as highly-regarded as they might have hoped.

-Dinarzad, a princess deeply tied down by societal gender constraints, who gets more sympathetic just in time to have an arranged marriage land on her head.  She exits the story full of anxiety about where her tale will take her, but because she's part of the framing device rather than one of the orphan's stories within it, her fate remains wholly unresolved.

Request/Prompts?: A MOMENT OF HAPPINESS, IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK?  That is to say, I'd really like to read a story in which any of these people find some measure of peace in themselves, especially if it's set after the last we see of them.  Their stories all end on such uncertain notes, and Leander is the only one we know finds some serenity in the long run.  I'll give some prompts for all of them, but yeah, my desires for them are really pretty simple in the end: that they have days where they're mostly okay--a little sad or bittersweet, maybe, but mostly okay.

Ragnhild: What is her training in the Tower of St. Sigrid like?  Does she make any friends, in her tower or outside of it?  What sort of ship does she build, and where does she sail for its first voyage?  What does she wind up taking as her Saint title?  What sorts of tasks does she do with or for the Order?  Does she ever grow to like Al-a-Nur enough to go out into it, or does she find her serenity in seclusion?  Does she ever invite anyone in as she was invited in?  Does she ever deal with Shadukiam again?  What does she think of its fall, if it happens in her lifetime (and given that she was invited in by Sigrid of the Ways, who was the bear woman Ulla, whose once-love Eyvind gave advice to Leander, whose sister Aerie delivered Sorrow, whose fare was paid by Seven, who was abducted by Marrow as a boy, I think there's a decent chance it did)?

Leander: He was called the Maimed King--did he have that title in his own time, or is it just what history calls him?  How long did he rule, and did he rule very well, before he decided to go to Al-a-Nur?  How did he hear of the city, or what did he already know of it, that prompted him to take a pilgrimage there, and did he go already intent on joining the Tower of the Patricides?  Who was his "Father" there, and how did the two of them grow close?  What do the Patricides do with their lives day to day?  What did he think of the city on the whole?  Did he have to deal with any politics trying to draw him back in, or historians coming to ask about what he knew?  When the time eventually came, what was it like for him to take a father's life in love and respect instead of in desperation and hate?  How long was it before he took a "Son" of his own--is there a gap between having a father and becoming one, in the Tower's practices?  What was the son like, and how did he also bring peace to Leander's life?  What was his death like, in the end?

Seven: Most of the slices of his life we see are pretty bleak, but we know there were a few good years with Taglio and Grotteschi, so maybe a look at a successful performance and a happy night afterward?  I'd be very curious to know how a one-armed youth learned to play a fiddle.  But moreover, how do things go as time stretches on in the Isles of the Dead?  Do Seven and Oubliette age there, since they came as living folk, or has their time stopped in the crossing, somehow?  What more things do they build, seeing as they clearly have the motivation to improve the place somewhat?  Does Seven ever grow close to any of the others abiding there--and do he and Oubliette ever come to a less bitter accord?  ...Maybe he and the Itto twins can figure out how to build a fiddle again?  What could they use to string it, and how would it sound, and how would Oubliette dance to it, if she would at all?

Dinarzad: Dinarzad passed through the gates of the palace first, out into a world where, we are told, miracles do exist.  Does she find one?  Do the wives turn out to be friendly and welcoming?  Does she find peace in the new household?  Since the lands of the south are "ruled by those who kept harems," presumably they're acquainted with Indrajit's country.  Maybe she impresses someone in the harem-run government set up there after his death, and is eventually taken under their wing?  Or does she buck her society's expectations entirely, and go off to have her own wild adventure story?  Perhaps like others she finds her way to a Tower--the Tower of Ice and Iron, where the Draghi Celesti practice their martialtry?  Or an animal-bond in the Tower of the Living?  Or perhaps she's picked up by the once-more roaming Saint Sigrid?  Whatever happens, does she ever see her brother again after he runs off with Sorrow and company?

Got any resources?: ...I dearly wish I had more to give you.  You can pick it up on Amazon, and here's the trope page, but pretty much everything else is reviews.  There's a little bit of fanart in the tumblr tag, most notably this series of lovely pieces for a senior thesis.