Dear Yuletide Author 2016
Sep. 30th, 2016 04:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penitence_roadHello, Yuletide Writer, and thank you for looking at my letter! I've tried to ratchet back a little from last year's length but keep it engaging, so I hope you find something useful in the paragraphs (and paragraphs) below. I've included some quick summaries of my fandoms, some stuff about why I like them, and then blurbs on the characters I'm requesting, which segues into prompts, questions, and ideas. If you see a specific prompt you like, that's great! If you get inspired and come up with an idea of your own, that's also great! I'll look forward to reading whatever you end up with, short or long, because the bulk of these characters have little to nothing written about them, and anything more you come up with is going to thrill me.
For some non-fandom-specific guidelines, I really love little, lived-in details about how people connect with each other and adapt to one another, whether or not the relationship is romantic--all those little overlooked 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, worldbuilding and casefic, stories that have characters interacting with the world as much as they do each other. I enjoy stories that flesh out bits of the canon that we never saw. I also 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. Any tense or POV is fine with me.
Provisos and Do Not Wants:
Darkfic: I've provided prompts below that could definitely go to some pretty dark places, which is fine, and I'd love to see what you come up with. Please don't write darkfic for characters I haven't requested it for, though, and nothing with an ending so dire it would render the canon impossible (deathfic, mutilation, etc).
Porn: Nothing explicit, please. Referenced non-con and dub-con are fine within the bounds of darkfic, as above.
AUs: I'd prefer no AUs this year
Heartcatch PreCure
Summary: 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 trying to escape pursuit from a suspicious character calling herself a Desert Apostle. One thing leads to another, Tsubomi becomes the magical girl Cure Blossom, and you can just about see the shape of things from there.
Why I love it: I love Heartcatch for many reasons. Tsubomi and her fantastic character arc. Erika, with all her bombast and self-assuredness. The show's rock-solid narrative structure. Heartcatch Orchestra, my choice for best finisher attack in magical girl history. Everything about its use of the monster-of-the-day trope, especially the way it pays off in the show's exceptionally dire finale. There's one thing that really makes it unique among magical girl shows, though: its sense of history. It's not just that the main characters' battle is one that stretches back for centuries, and they have the lore, the treasures, and the secret places to show for it. It's not just Yuri, the veteran Cure with trauma and experience in equal measure from her battle. It's not just Kaoruko, Tsubomi's supremely awesome grandmother, who beat the villain the last time he took a crack at Earth.
It's of those things. The main characters exist at one end of a long story, one that has been going on since long, long before they were born. Yet the story hasn't skipped ahead to the end--there's no 'five hundred years ago' time gap. The story is unbroken; it lives and breathes in Kaoruko and Yuri, who are right there, from nearly day one, to give Tsubomi and Erika advice, training, support, and, incidentally, dire forecasts about villain difficulty curve.
The story also lives and breathes in the Heartcatch movie, which reaches back to the very beginning of the Pretty Cure's battle to resurrect an old, bitter villain, one with a terrible hatred for both sides of the conflict, and that's where we get to my request.
Characters and Prompts: Baron Salamander. He's really a uniquely situated character, someone who was close to Dune, someone who fought the very first Cure, the person who brought Sabaaku into the fold, a villain who had his heart 'caught' but retained his memory and his presence on earth afterwards. He's also got a ton of panache, which is great fun, and a long, eventful character arc, sketched out in enough detail that we get the shape of it without getting much detail. Well, some detail is what I'd like--it doesn't have to be long, even just a snapshot to fill in some more of his personal timeline would be amazing!
I'm endlessly curious about what Dune and Salamander's home planet was like, about what sort of species they are, about how many of them there are (and why they all wear white coats), and about how much connection remained between the two of them despite Salamander's poisonous hatred. Why did Salamander get so curious about Dune to begin with? What was his childhood like, under a ruler like Dune? How did he wind up on Earth--did Dune send/exile him there, or was Salamander how Dune found out about the planet to begin with? How and why did the whole Sabaaku thing play out, given how much Salamander surely hated Dune by that point?
Likewise with Cure Ange, I have so many questions about how long their battle went on, what he was like as a final boss, how much personal interaction they ever had, what she thought of him in the end, what the early history of the Pretty Cure looked like, and so on. What did Salamander think of humans, and why did this drive him to, well, be a Pretty Cure final boss? Did he have minions of his own, empowered in the same manner that Olivier was? And speaking of Olivier, how much of all this does Olivier even know? Salamander 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. Please, tell me anything.
Kiznaiver
Summary: Katsuhira Agata and six of his classmates are selected as subjects for a mysterious experiment that links their awareness of pain in hopes of cultivating their empathy for one another, with the end goal of bringing about world peace. Katsuhira is an apathetic young man who doesn't feel pain, and he isn't the weirdest person among his very disparate group. Complications ensue.
Why I love it: Group psychic bonds are kinda my jam; I've loved that plot device since My Teacher Flunked the Planet, way back in grade school. That this group psychic bond is attached to a series with as many aesthetic virtues as Kiznaiver has is a huge bonus. It's stylish as hell, working wonders on a limited budget with a magnificent sense for the use of color, and a specific attention paid to character silhouette and body language down to the smallest details of stance and gesture. Looking past its convoluted hooks and flashy visuals, though, the main draw for me is the way it takes all the love octagons that seem to inevitably crop up in stories about teenagers and says, "What if that, but with mandatory empathy?"
The characters are, generally speaking, recognizably teenaged, with appropriately limited scope in what they see in the world around them, and likewise outsized emotional responses to things. They start out as fairly stock archetypes and, while we don't necessarily see changes in the acts they put on to deal with the world (and they all do, to one degree or another), what we start to see instead is how they respond to things in ways unique to them, and what those stock characters might really be thinking and feeling beneath their tropey veneer. What makes a Manic Pixie Dreamgirl act like she does? What are the motivations of the Girl Next Door? What do Emotionless Children think about their lost emotions--do they even want them back, and how far would they go to that end? Despite some of the early talk about world-changing results, in the end, the series reveals itself to be a meditation on friendship, empathy, and the give-and-take of emotional intimacy. It's a slice-of-life hiding in a high-concept sci-fi premise, and I love it for that.
Character and Prompts: Yoshiharu Hisomu. I love everything about him--his character design, the way his masochistic streak unnerves the rest of his bondmates, his blasé attitude about everything, and the fact that beneath that ho-hum, go-with-the-flow breeziness he is extremely supportive of his friends but also sharply unwilling to talk about his own history. My favorite scene in the whole show might be the part where he shows up at Katsuhira's apartment after everyone else has bailed with a sack of canned food and a gentle desire to help that's quite at odds with his first appearance. The power trio of Hisomu, Nico and Katsuhira was absolutely my favorite relationship of the show.
That all said, that bit up there where I said Hisomu can get pretty caustic when pressed about his past? It drives me crazy that the show never calls him on it. His idea of comfort food is canned pineapple eaten straight out of the can. He lives in a filthy apartment building with the recycling/trash piling up outside the door and mail stuffed into the slot, unretrieved. He wears ragged clothes in his own time and a P.E. uniform to school, when he can be bothered to attend school at all. He regularly injures himself badly enough to wind up in the hospital. Where on earth are his parents or guardians in all this? And for that matter, what about child services? Truancy officers? Anybody?
I've always liked the idea that Hisomu was also an experiment kid, perhaps in a different group than Katsuhira and Sonozaki, with a less drastic but equally permanent maladaptive response. It would explain the bandages (always around his neck, just like Sonozaki's choker), as well as his intuitive grasp on the subtle nuances of emotional pain, and a few noticeable silences at points where everyone else is asking questions. You can go with that concept or not, frame it post-series as someone finally prying out some answers, but in any case, please tell me something about Hisomu's younger years/home life.
Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-blooded Orphans
Summary: Life on the outer planets is pretty terrible for everyone, but it's especially bad for children without families to look out for them. The story opens on a terraformed Mars, tracking the various abuses and travails of the kids who work for the civilian security company Chryse Guard Security. The Third Division, as the kids' group is called, is given all the most dangerous and tiresome work; their leader Orga Itsuka sees a potential shift in their fortunes with the arrival of one Kudelia Aina Bernstein, a young diplomat with designs on reform and eventual Martian independence. Kudelia's intentions have put a target on her back, however, and when CGS is attacked, Orga takes advantage of the chaos to spearhead an uprising, relying on the strength of his childhood friend, Minazuki Augus, and the mobile suit Gundam Barbatos.
The first season concerns itself entirely with the Third Division, renamed Tekkadan, getting Kudelia to Earth--the dangers they face, the compromises they wrestle with, and the allies and enemies they make in the process. The second season premiere is just around the corner, with the story set to begin a new arc following a modest time skip. I'll be following it as it airs, so if you want to write something referencing current events, feel free.
Why I love it: A lot of stories like this one really go out of their way to set their teenage protagonists up against all the adults in the world, as if all semblance of rationality flies out the window when you turn 19, and this show had a lot more reason to do it than most--the Tekkadan boys really do have a terrible lot in life, and Kudelia is transparently being set up as a pawn at best, a martyr at worst. But Orphans resists that simplistic approach at every turn; the world is run by grown-ups, and if Orga really wants his clutch of orphans and strays to make it, he's going to have to deal with some of those adults eventually. I appreciate the nuance of that.
I also like the modulated take towards mecha combat, and conflict in general. The big giant robot fights are actually pretty sporadic, and lower-tech than Gundam has been in years; this makes them brutal and plot-shaking when they do occur, rather than wearisome. It gives lots of time to really see how these characters live day-to-day. And what we see is not always comfortable. Tekkadan is full of, effectively, child soldiers, but the show never leans too strongly towards either glorifying how badass they are or moralizing about how stunted their development is. There's nothing badass about the chilling presentation of Mikazuki shooting a bound, subdued captive in the head, but neither does the narrative rain down karmic retribution for it. It's a terrible thing, and other characters respond to that act and others like it with a gamut of different responses based on where they themselves fall on the spectrum of morality.
I'm also fairly enamored with its worldbuilding. I love all the weird little frontier cultures that have popped up in response to the shit situation the outer planets are in, and the way that the ruling powers largely let those cultures do their thing because it's easier than doing the work themselves, they're getting bribed on the sly to let it go on, or they don't have the resources to do anything about it. Legal human trafficking? Space mafias? Whatever; we've got Earth politicking to do. And you can see the results in groups like Tekkadan, or the Turbines, or even the Brewers. Groups of people that have banded together and, to one degree or another, stuck a middle finger up at the expectations of the rest of the world and set about securing the prosperity of them and theirs. This can lead to wretched, awful hives, but it can breed fierce loyalty as well, and that makes it an extremely interesting setting.
Characters and Prompts: Chad Chadan, Dante Mogro, and Akihiro Altland.
One of the biggest questions I have about the setting is how, exactly, that whole Human Debris thing works. Like, we know it's legal, so what is the actual process of declaring someone Human Debris? Is there a note entered on their record? Is their record erased? What precautions are in place to deter escape attempts? Red-striped clothes would be fairly easy to ditch--is there another way to track them, like microchips or facial recognition software? How does the average planetary citizen react to a red stripe mark? Are Human Debris allowed to purchase their own freedom, if they can find the means for it? Are there any regulations in place (however laughably ill-enforced) about bare-minimum standards of treatment? What if a family member shows up looking for them? How does this stuff work?
In that vein, I was really struck by the situation of the Human Debris members of CGS. I loved Akihiro's early ambivalence about Orga's uprising, because the only thing Akihiro cared about was keeping his fellow Debris kids safe. I was interested in Chad right away; I'd been admiring the relative diversity in CGS and he caught my eye. He's about as bit character as named bit characters get, though--his next-episode preview reading in episode 10 is the most personal information we ever get. Anyway, Dante has sure maintained an upbeat attitude for someone in his situation, hasn't he? And when you're looking for them, it's easy to notice how frequently they show up together, even back in the very first episode, or in the official art. Chad's dark skin and Dante's red hair make them very easy to pick out. So please, what I'd like is to know more about these three--especially Dante and Chad, since Akihiro got comparatively loads of screen time. There are all the questions I asked above, but also more below, more specific to the characters themselves.
How did these three come to be with CGS? How old were they at the time? What do they actually think of each other, and how did those relationships form? The way CGS treats Orga and the others is already wildly abusive; in what ways is it even worse for the Human Debris? Are they confined to the compound? How long does it take them to really start trusting Orga's stated intention to treat them as equals, especially when they're still wearing the red stripe all through the first season? And why are they still wearing the red stripe all through the first season, given that the implication is that they're freed in episode four? What did they do with their first honest-to-god paycheck? You can write something about all of them together or do individual shorts, whatever you prefer; if you're feeling shippy about any or all of them, that's also cool; just please give me something about their lives as Human Debris.
Go! Princess PreCure
Summary: As a child, Haruka Haruno was bullied for her dream of becoming a princess, but she met a strange boy who gave her a dress-shaped charm and encouraged her to believe in herself and her dream. Eight years later, she's studied and worked to be able to attend the prestigious Noble Academy, where she soon encounters two cute talking animals who've come seeking help for their kingdom and its beleaguered prince, under attack by dark powers. When her new roommate Yui is captured, Haruka uses the charm to transform in Cure Flora, beginning a long path to gathering the other Cures, rescuing the prince, saving his kingdom, and along the way struggling to learn what it really means to be a princess.
Why I love it: What I love most about Princess is its strong cast, and the way that cast draws together over the course of the series for the finale. It's got some record great Cures--Haruka is charmingly dopey, but never played as stupid, and not easily discouraged; Kirara is my second-favorite Cure of all time, brisk and kind and a complete and total wrecking ball when her attention is focused on something--but in particular, Princess really nails its side cast, heroic and villainous alike.
The thing is, Dyspear has already won when the show starts. All she needs to do is catch the errant prince and stop him and his hapless fairy retainers from awakening the legendary warriors. The entire story from that starting point is turning the tide, which had almost overwhelmed Kanata, until by the end, Dyspear has lost everything she started with save one loyal retainer of her own, which leads us into the finale. So, for the bulk of the story, the main characters are basically running a resistance--and it's a hell of a great one, between the prince in exile who still holds a lot of the powers that are his birthright, the lost princess who came back to help save her kingdom, the three chosen warriors who'll make the final push in the end, the dedicated fairies, the turned villains, and the one mundane human girl who does everything she can to help the others. The battle in Princess feels so much less isolated than magical girl shows often do, because Princess allows the supporting cast to be present and helpful to an extent that's shockingly rare. So many great characters, so few character slots to nominate them all!
Characters and Prompts: Minami and Asuka (or Shut or Kanata, see below).
So I wrestled with this nomination for weeks, trying to figure out how I wanted to structure it. I nominated all four characters, yes, but while I'd be perfectly happy to read a story about Shut or Kanata individually, I really want to read about Minami and Asuka together--so how to request? I eventually settled on just nominating the girls, but I do include some prompts for the boys below, because I'd be equally happy to get any of those stories as something shippy about Minami and Asuka. Please take your pick!
I've low-key shipped Minami and Asuka ever since their meet-cute in Asuka's first episode, but I fully expected her to be a one-off character. Lo and behold, she kept coming back, and every time, Minami got more flustered. By the time we got to the scene where Asuka was asking Minami, "Have you told your parents yet?" I was certain the allegory couldn't be any more blatant. Twenty minutes later, after affirming to her brother that 'something happened' when she met Asuka, Minami was tearfully apologizing to her parents for a lifestyle change she never actually specified, leaving me gobsmacked that the series was getting away with the barely veiled coming-out scene it was getting away with right in front of me. And then Asuka's with them on their vacation?? OH COME ON!
Long story short--I ship it. I ship it so hard. Asuka didn't just pull Minami out of her school-princess archetype, she levered her onto a whole different life path. They're very different people, from very different backgrounds, and I want to read a whole manga about how they fall in love despite and because of those differences. I would read about dates they go on, significant firsts, moving in together, getting through college, how their careers intersect, joint projects they undertake, working lunches, meeting the parents, discovering each other's hobbies, lifestyle clashes, or anything else you want. You can be as tropey as you want--lord knows the series was! You can involve other characters if you want--everyone in Princess was great. Does Minami ever tell Asuka about all the Cure stuff? Do they ever get to see Hope Kingdom again, perhaps with Asuka along for the ride, far newer to this than e.g. Yui, to whom it's all pretty old hat? What would their wedding look like, with a fashionista like Kirara involved in the planning stages and the amount of money the Kaidou family has to spend? Would that get overwhelming for Asuka? What would she do about it? (There are some complications involved there, but I really don't require strict realism in my fluffy shipfic, and anyway, it's not like Minami can't afford a trip overseas.)
Basically, anything about the two of them would make me happy. As to the other two…
Kanata is really great, a storybook prince who's introduced fighting tooth and nail to evade the people who've brought his kingdom to ruin, a perfect fairy tale character who gets dragged down to nothing and has to build himself back up from scratch. I loved the entirety of his amnesia arc, ridiculous trope though it is, because I never knew quite how or when the show was going to resolve it, and especially as it became clear that Kanata did not blindly accept the ideals the other characters were preaching to him and was in fact drowning under the weight of them. When his and Haruka's roles become fully reversed, and he takes up his memories and beliefs again because of the way she inspires him, it was a perfect end to the arc, and the solidification of the La Resistance group dynamic that was rapidly becoming one of my favorite aspects of the show.
I would love to read anything about him in those rougher parts of his life--how much rest was he ever able to grab when he was fighting alone against Dyspear? How did he manage to hold out so long? Where could possibly have been safe for him? How were he and Dyspear able to sense each other's stirrings? And what happened to him after Towa's rescue? There's a huge, glaring gap between his staff breaking and him washing up on the beach with amnesia, and the series doesn't touch that space with a ten-foot pole. I would read approximately all the darkfic about that missing time. Towa carried her guilt forward with her from her time as Twilight--what does Kanata carry forward with him? Even something set post-series touching on that question as he tries to get back into the rhythms of princely life would quite delight me.
With Shut, he's hands-down my favorite minion character in the franchise. I spent the whole back third of the show yelling at the screen, "Just get out of there, you poor stupid man!" I adored that he chose his own arc at every turn; that all the Pretty Cure/Miss Shamour ever really do for him is pull him out of the deepest part of his despair and then let him know it doesn't have to be that way. Everything else, he does on his own. And he finishes the series not going back to Hope Kingdom with Towa, who he so adored as Twilight, but rather staying in the human world--even keeping his makeup and fishnet stockings, which as far as I know, makes him a first among Pretty Cure villains, who typically get more "normalized" over the course of their redemption arcs.
Shut's just really great, is the point, and I'd love to read anything about his history or his future. What is he, exactly? Lock is some sort of Evil Yarn Elemental, Close may in fact have been a crow all along, but what about Shut? Dyspear created all three of them in some measure, but they're all kind of different, too. Was Shut made from nothing, a spirit of despair who found another way? Is he an empowered cat? Was he ever an actual resident of Hope Kingdom? What's his story, exactly? And likewise, if you want to tell me any bit of frivolity about what he and Lock get up to post-series, I'd love that too. The ridiculous roommate dramedy that is going to be the rest of their lives together makes me laugh and laugh and laugh.
Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service
Summary: Kuro Karatsu is a senior at a Buddhist university, wondering how he's supposed to take all his average grades and translate them to anything meaningful in real life. He has one notable talent, though, and maybe Ao Sasaki knew it all along when she recruited him into her little group, fellow students with no temples to inherit, no family legacy to speak of, but all with some little quirk or special field of study. One's an embalmer. One's a dowser (dead bodies only). One's a channeller (aliens preferred). Sasaki herself is an internet whiz, and definitely hangs out in some dark places on the web. Kuro is the one who brings all this together into a marketable enterprise, though, because Kuro can actually talk to dead people--and sometimes, the dead want to do a lot more than talk.
Why I love it: 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 its main cast 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.
Man, though, it really is the cast that sells it. They're 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. So as well as making a living, they're perhaps also making a family for themselves, and it's a tremendously gratifying thing to watch develop. They're perpetually broke, but racking up the karma, and this makes it a lot of fun whenever they happen across competition.
Characters and Prompts: Mr. Nire and Shinuhe. I thought Nire was pretty fun the first time he showed up and managed to karma Houdini his way out of the ending, and loved him even more when he showed up again with a literal, for-real mummy in his employ in the form of Shinuhe. I love Nire's tendency towards smarm, his total unrepentance about getting disgustingly wealthy on the backs of the desperation of the ultra-rich, and the ambiguity in how much of this is related to the circumstances surrounding his wife and how much is, in fact, just Nire's personality. Shinuhe is much more affably clueless, which is interesting, as he's by far the more mystical of the two. They're great foils for the main characters, I wish they'd show up more, and I really just want to read more about the two of them on any level.
So, 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? How about the snooping from law enforcement--does Sasayama ever have to deal with their nonsense, or are they above his usual paygrade? Do they have an equivalent annoying authority figure of some kind?
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?
And that's what I've got. Thank you again, Yuletide Writer, and I eagerly await reading what you come up with. Happy writing, and happy holidays!
For some non-fandom-specific guidelines, I really love little, lived-in details about how people connect with each other and adapt to one another, whether or not the relationship is romantic--all those little overlooked 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, worldbuilding and casefic, stories that have characters interacting with the world as much as they do each other. I enjoy stories that flesh out bits of the canon that we never saw. I also 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. Any tense or POV is fine with me.
Provisos and Do Not Wants:
Darkfic: I've provided prompts below that could definitely go to some pretty dark places, which is fine, and I'd love to see what you come up with. Please don't write darkfic for characters I haven't requested it for, though, and nothing with an ending so dire it would render the canon impossible (deathfic, mutilation, etc).
Porn: Nothing explicit, please. Referenced non-con and dub-con are fine within the bounds of darkfic, as above.
AUs: I'd prefer no AUs this year
All that out of the way, on to my fandoms!
Heartcatch PreCure
Summary: 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 trying to escape pursuit from a suspicious character calling herself a Desert Apostle. One thing leads to another, Tsubomi becomes the magical girl Cure Blossom, and you can just about see the shape of things from there.
Why I love it: I love Heartcatch for many reasons. Tsubomi and her fantastic character arc. Erika, with all her bombast and self-assuredness. The show's rock-solid narrative structure. Heartcatch Orchestra, my choice for best finisher attack in magical girl history. Everything about its use of the monster-of-the-day trope, especially the way it pays off in the show's exceptionally dire finale. There's one thing that really makes it unique among magical girl shows, though: its sense of history. It's not just that the main characters' battle is one that stretches back for centuries, and they have the lore, the treasures, and the secret places to show for it. It's not just Yuri, the veteran Cure with trauma and experience in equal measure from her battle. It's not just Kaoruko, Tsubomi's supremely awesome grandmother, who beat the villain the last time he took a crack at Earth.
It's of those things. The main characters exist at one end of a long story, one that has been going on since long, long before they were born. Yet the story hasn't skipped ahead to the end--there's no 'five hundred years ago' time gap. The story is unbroken; it lives and breathes in Kaoruko and Yuri, who are right there, from nearly day one, to give Tsubomi and Erika advice, training, support, and, incidentally, dire forecasts about villain difficulty curve.
The story also lives and breathes in the Heartcatch movie, which reaches back to the very beginning of the Pretty Cure's battle to resurrect an old, bitter villain, one with a terrible hatred for both sides of the conflict, and that's where we get to my request.
Characters and Prompts: Baron Salamander. He's really a uniquely situated character, someone who was close to Dune, someone who fought the very first Cure, the person who brought Sabaaku into the fold, a villain who had his heart 'caught' but retained his memory and his presence on earth afterwards. He's also got a ton of panache, which is great fun, and a long, eventful character arc, sketched out in enough detail that we get the shape of it without getting much detail. Well, some detail is what I'd like--it doesn't have to be long, even just a snapshot to fill in some more of his personal timeline would be amazing!
I'm endlessly curious about what Dune and Salamander's home planet was like, about what sort of species they are, about how many of them there are (and why they all wear white coats), and about how much connection remained between the two of them despite Salamander's poisonous hatred. Why did Salamander get so curious about Dune to begin with? What was his childhood like, under a ruler like Dune? How did he wind up on Earth--did Dune send/exile him there, or was Salamander how Dune found out about the planet to begin with? How and why did the whole Sabaaku thing play out, given how much Salamander surely hated Dune by that point?
Likewise with Cure Ange, I have so many questions about how long their battle went on, what he was like as a final boss, how much personal interaction they ever had, what she thought of him in the end, what the early history of the Pretty Cure looked like, and so on. What did Salamander think of humans, and why did this drive him to, well, be a Pretty Cure final boss? Did he have minions of his own, empowered in the same manner that Olivier was? And speaking of Olivier, how much of all this does Olivier even know? Salamander 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. Please, tell me anything.
Kiznaiver
Summary: Katsuhira Agata and six of his classmates are selected as subjects for a mysterious experiment that links their awareness of pain in hopes of cultivating their empathy for one another, with the end goal of bringing about world peace. Katsuhira is an apathetic young man who doesn't feel pain, and he isn't the weirdest person among his very disparate group. Complications ensue.
Why I love it: Group psychic bonds are kinda my jam; I've loved that plot device since My Teacher Flunked the Planet, way back in grade school. That this group psychic bond is attached to a series with as many aesthetic virtues as Kiznaiver has is a huge bonus. It's stylish as hell, working wonders on a limited budget with a magnificent sense for the use of color, and a specific attention paid to character silhouette and body language down to the smallest details of stance and gesture. Looking past its convoluted hooks and flashy visuals, though, the main draw for me is the way it takes all the love octagons that seem to inevitably crop up in stories about teenagers and says, "What if that, but with mandatory empathy?"
The characters are, generally speaking, recognizably teenaged, with appropriately limited scope in what they see in the world around them, and likewise outsized emotional responses to things. They start out as fairly stock archetypes and, while we don't necessarily see changes in the acts they put on to deal with the world (and they all do, to one degree or another), what we start to see instead is how they respond to things in ways unique to them, and what those stock characters might really be thinking and feeling beneath their tropey veneer. What makes a Manic Pixie Dreamgirl act like she does? What are the motivations of the Girl Next Door? What do Emotionless Children think about their lost emotions--do they even want them back, and how far would they go to that end? Despite some of the early talk about world-changing results, in the end, the series reveals itself to be a meditation on friendship, empathy, and the give-and-take of emotional intimacy. It's a slice-of-life hiding in a high-concept sci-fi premise, and I love it for that.
Character and Prompts: Yoshiharu Hisomu. I love everything about him--his character design, the way his masochistic streak unnerves the rest of his bondmates, his blasé attitude about everything, and the fact that beneath that ho-hum, go-with-the-flow breeziness he is extremely supportive of his friends but also sharply unwilling to talk about his own history. My favorite scene in the whole show might be the part where he shows up at Katsuhira's apartment after everyone else has bailed with a sack of canned food and a gentle desire to help that's quite at odds with his first appearance. The power trio of Hisomu, Nico and Katsuhira was absolutely my favorite relationship of the show.
That all said, that bit up there where I said Hisomu can get pretty caustic when pressed about his past? It drives me crazy that the show never calls him on it. His idea of comfort food is canned pineapple eaten straight out of the can. He lives in a filthy apartment building with the recycling/trash piling up outside the door and mail stuffed into the slot, unretrieved. He wears ragged clothes in his own time and a P.E. uniform to school, when he can be bothered to attend school at all. He regularly injures himself badly enough to wind up in the hospital. Where on earth are his parents or guardians in all this? And for that matter, what about child services? Truancy officers? Anybody?
I've always liked the idea that Hisomu was also an experiment kid, perhaps in a different group than Katsuhira and Sonozaki, with a less drastic but equally permanent maladaptive response. It would explain the bandages (always around his neck, just like Sonozaki's choker), as well as his intuitive grasp on the subtle nuances of emotional pain, and a few noticeable silences at points where everyone else is asking questions. You can go with that concept or not, frame it post-series as someone finally prying out some answers, but in any case, please tell me something about Hisomu's younger years/home life.
Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-blooded Orphans
Summary: Life on the outer planets is pretty terrible for everyone, but it's especially bad for children without families to look out for them. The story opens on a terraformed Mars, tracking the various abuses and travails of the kids who work for the civilian security company Chryse Guard Security. The Third Division, as the kids' group is called, is given all the most dangerous and tiresome work; their leader Orga Itsuka sees a potential shift in their fortunes with the arrival of one Kudelia Aina Bernstein, a young diplomat with designs on reform and eventual Martian independence. Kudelia's intentions have put a target on her back, however, and when CGS is attacked, Orga takes advantage of the chaos to spearhead an uprising, relying on the strength of his childhood friend, Minazuki Augus, and the mobile suit Gundam Barbatos.
The first season concerns itself entirely with the Third Division, renamed Tekkadan, getting Kudelia to Earth--the dangers they face, the compromises they wrestle with, and the allies and enemies they make in the process. The second season premiere is just around the corner, with the story set to begin a new arc following a modest time skip. I'll be following it as it airs, so if you want to write something referencing current events, feel free.
Why I love it: A lot of stories like this one really go out of their way to set their teenage protagonists up against all the adults in the world, as if all semblance of rationality flies out the window when you turn 19, and this show had a lot more reason to do it than most--the Tekkadan boys really do have a terrible lot in life, and Kudelia is transparently being set up as a pawn at best, a martyr at worst. But Orphans resists that simplistic approach at every turn; the world is run by grown-ups, and if Orga really wants his clutch of orphans and strays to make it, he's going to have to deal with some of those adults eventually. I appreciate the nuance of that.
I also like the modulated take towards mecha combat, and conflict in general. The big giant robot fights are actually pretty sporadic, and lower-tech than Gundam has been in years; this makes them brutal and plot-shaking when they do occur, rather than wearisome. It gives lots of time to really see how these characters live day-to-day. And what we see is not always comfortable. Tekkadan is full of, effectively, child soldiers, but the show never leans too strongly towards either glorifying how badass they are or moralizing about how stunted their development is. There's nothing badass about the chilling presentation of Mikazuki shooting a bound, subdued captive in the head, but neither does the narrative rain down karmic retribution for it. It's a terrible thing, and other characters respond to that act and others like it with a gamut of different responses based on where they themselves fall on the spectrum of morality.
I'm also fairly enamored with its worldbuilding. I love all the weird little frontier cultures that have popped up in response to the shit situation the outer planets are in, and the way that the ruling powers largely let those cultures do their thing because it's easier than doing the work themselves, they're getting bribed on the sly to let it go on, or they don't have the resources to do anything about it. Legal human trafficking? Space mafias? Whatever; we've got Earth politicking to do. And you can see the results in groups like Tekkadan, or the Turbines, or even the Brewers. Groups of people that have banded together and, to one degree or another, stuck a middle finger up at the expectations of the rest of the world and set about securing the prosperity of them and theirs. This can lead to wretched, awful hives, but it can breed fierce loyalty as well, and that makes it an extremely interesting setting.
Characters and Prompts: Chad Chadan, Dante Mogro, and Akihiro Altland.
One of the biggest questions I have about the setting is how, exactly, that whole Human Debris thing works. Like, we know it's legal, so what is the actual process of declaring someone Human Debris? Is there a note entered on their record? Is their record erased? What precautions are in place to deter escape attempts? Red-striped clothes would be fairly easy to ditch--is there another way to track them, like microchips or facial recognition software? How does the average planetary citizen react to a red stripe mark? Are Human Debris allowed to purchase their own freedom, if they can find the means for it? Are there any regulations in place (however laughably ill-enforced) about bare-minimum standards of treatment? What if a family member shows up looking for them? How does this stuff work?
In that vein, I was really struck by the situation of the Human Debris members of CGS. I loved Akihiro's early ambivalence about Orga's uprising, because the only thing Akihiro cared about was keeping his fellow Debris kids safe. I was interested in Chad right away; I'd been admiring the relative diversity in CGS and he caught my eye. He's about as bit character as named bit characters get, though--his next-episode preview reading in episode 10 is the most personal information we ever get. Anyway, Dante has sure maintained an upbeat attitude for someone in his situation, hasn't he? And when you're looking for them, it's easy to notice how frequently they show up together, even back in the very first episode, or in the official art. Chad's dark skin and Dante's red hair make them very easy to pick out. So please, what I'd like is to know more about these three--especially Dante and Chad, since Akihiro got comparatively loads of screen time. There are all the questions I asked above, but also more below, more specific to the characters themselves.
How did these three come to be with CGS? How old were they at the time? What do they actually think of each other, and how did those relationships form? The way CGS treats Orga and the others is already wildly abusive; in what ways is it even worse for the Human Debris? Are they confined to the compound? How long does it take them to really start trusting Orga's stated intention to treat them as equals, especially when they're still wearing the red stripe all through the first season? And why are they still wearing the red stripe all through the first season, given that the implication is that they're freed in episode four? What did they do with their first honest-to-god paycheck? You can write something about all of them together or do individual shorts, whatever you prefer; if you're feeling shippy about any or all of them, that's also cool; just please give me something about their lives as Human Debris.
Go! Princess PreCure
Summary: As a child, Haruka Haruno was bullied for her dream of becoming a princess, but she met a strange boy who gave her a dress-shaped charm and encouraged her to believe in herself and her dream. Eight years later, she's studied and worked to be able to attend the prestigious Noble Academy, where she soon encounters two cute talking animals who've come seeking help for their kingdom and its beleaguered prince, under attack by dark powers. When her new roommate Yui is captured, Haruka uses the charm to transform in Cure Flora, beginning a long path to gathering the other Cures, rescuing the prince, saving his kingdom, and along the way struggling to learn what it really means to be a princess.
Why I love it: What I love most about Princess is its strong cast, and the way that cast draws together over the course of the series for the finale. It's got some record great Cures--Haruka is charmingly dopey, but never played as stupid, and not easily discouraged; Kirara is my second-favorite Cure of all time, brisk and kind and a complete and total wrecking ball when her attention is focused on something--but in particular, Princess really nails its side cast, heroic and villainous alike.
The thing is, Dyspear has already won when the show starts. All she needs to do is catch the errant prince and stop him and his hapless fairy retainers from awakening the legendary warriors. The entire story from that starting point is turning the tide, which had almost overwhelmed Kanata, until by the end, Dyspear has lost everything she started with save one loyal retainer of her own, which leads us into the finale. So, for the bulk of the story, the main characters are basically running a resistance--and it's a hell of a great one, between the prince in exile who still holds a lot of the powers that are his birthright, the lost princess who came back to help save her kingdom, the three chosen warriors who'll make the final push in the end, the dedicated fairies, the turned villains, and the one mundane human girl who does everything she can to help the others. The battle in Princess feels so much less isolated than magical girl shows often do, because Princess allows the supporting cast to be present and helpful to an extent that's shockingly rare. So many great characters, so few character slots to nominate them all!
Characters and Prompts: Minami and Asuka (or Shut or Kanata, see below).
So I wrestled with this nomination for weeks, trying to figure out how I wanted to structure it. I nominated all four characters, yes, but while I'd be perfectly happy to read a story about Shut or Kanata individually, I really want to read about Minami and Asuka together--so how to request? I eventually settled on just nominating the girls, but I do include some prompts for the boys below, because I'd be equally happy to get any of those stories as something shippy about Minami and Asuka. Please take your pick!
I've low-key shipped Minami and Asuka ever since their meet-cute in Asuka's first episode, but I fully expected her to be a one-off character. Lo and behold, she kept coming back, and every time, Minami got more flustered. By the time we got to the scene where Asuka was asking Minami, "Have you told your parents yet?" I was certain the allegory couldn't be any more blatant. Twenty minutes later, after affirming to her brother that 'something happened' when she met Asuka, Minami was tearfully apologizing to her parents for a lifestyle change she never actually specified, leaving me gobsmacked that the series was getting away with the barely veiled coming-out scene it was getting away with right in front of me. And then Asuka's with them on their vacation?? OH COME ON!
Long story short--I ship it. I ship it so hard. Asuka didn't just pull Minami out of her school-princess archetype, she levered her onto a whole different life path. They're very different people, from very different backgrounds, and I want to read a whole manga about how they fall in love despite and because of those differences. I would read about dates they go on, significant firsts, moving in together, getting through college, how their careers intersect, joint projects they undertake, working lunches, meeting the parents, discovering each other's hobbies, lifestyle clashes, or anything else you want. You can be as tropey as you want--lord knows the series was! You can involve other characters if you want--everyone in Princess was great. Does Minami ever tell Asuka about all the Cure stuff? Do they ever get to see Hope Kingdom again, perhaps with Asuka along for the ride, far newer to this than e.g. Yui, to whom it's all pretty old hat? What would their wedding look like, with a fashionista like Kirara involved in the planning stages and the amount of money the Kaidou family has to spend? Would that get overwhelming for Asuka? What would she do about it? (There are some complications involved there, but I really don't require strict realism in my fluffy shipfic, and anyway, it's not like Minami can't afford a trip overseas.)
Basically, anything about the two of them would make me happy. As to the other two…
Kanata is really great, a storybook prince who's introduced fighting tooth and nail to evade the people who've brought his kingdom to ruin, a perfect fairy tale character who gets dragged down to nothing and has to build himself back up from scratch. I loved the entirety of his amnesia arc, ridiculous trope though it is, because I never knew quite how or when the show was going to resolve it, and especially as it became clear that Kanata did not blindly accept the ideals the other characters were preaching to him and was in fact drowning under the weight of them. When his and Haruka's roles become fully reversed, and he takes up his memories and beliefs again because of the way she inspires him, it was a perfect end to the arc, and the solidification of the La Resistance group dynamic that was rapidly becoming one of my favorite aspects of the show.
I would love to read anything about him in those rougher parts of his life--how much rest was he ever able to grab when he was fighting alone against Dyspear? How did he manage to hold out so long? Where could possibly have been safe for him? How were he and Dyspear able to sense each other's stirrings? And what happened to him after Towa's rescue? There's a huge, glaring gap between his staff breaking and him washing up on the beach with amnesia, and the series doesn't touch that space with a ten-foot pole. I would read approximately all the darkfic about that missing time. Towa carried her guilt forward with her from her time as Twilight--what does Kanata carry forward with him? Even something set post-series touching on that question as he tries to get back into the rhythms of princely life would quite delight me.
With Shut, he's hands-down my favorite minion character in the franchise. I spent the whole back third of the show yelling at the screen, "Just get out of there, you poor stupid man!" I adored that he chose his own arc at every turn; that all the Pretty Cure/Miss Shamour ever really do for him is pull him out of the deepest part of his despair and then let him know it doesn't have to be that way. Everything else, he does on his own. And he finishes the series not going back to Hope Kingdom with Towa, who he so adored as Twilight, but rather staying in the human world--even keeping his makeup and fishnet stockings, which as far as I know, makes him a first among Pretty Cure villains, who typically get more "normalized" over the course of their redemption arcs.
Shut's just really great, is the point, and I'd love to read anything about his history or his future. What is he, exactly? Lock is some sort of Evil Yarn Elemental, Close may in fact have been a crow all along, but what about Shut? Dyspear created all three of them in some measure, but they're all kind of different, too. Was Shut made from nothing, a spirit of despair who found another way? Is he an empowered cat? Was he ever an actual resident of Hope Kingdom? What's his story, exactly? And likewise, if you want to tell me any bit of frivolity about what he and Lock get up to post-series, I'd love that too. The ridiculous roommate dramedy that is going to be the rest of their lives together makes me laugh and laugh and laugh.
Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service
Summary: Kuro Karatsu is a senior at a Buddhist university, wondering how he's supposed to take all his average grades and translate them to anything meaningful in real life. He has one notable talent, though, and maybe Ao Sasaki knew it all along when she recruited him into her little group, fellow students with no temples to inherit, no family legacy to speak of, but all with some little quirk or special field of study. One's an embalmer. One's a dowser (dead bodies only). One's a channeller (aliens preferred). Sasaki herself is an internet whiz, and definitely hangs out in some dark places on the web. Kuro is the one who brings all this together into a marketable enterprise, though, because Kuro can actually talk to dead people--and sometimes, the dead want to do a lot more than talk.
Why I love it: 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 its main cast 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.
Man, though, it really is the cast that sells it. They're 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. So as well as making a living, they're perhaps also making a family for themselves, and it's a tremendously gratifying thing to watch develop. They're perpetually broke, but racking up the karma, and this makes it a lot of fun whenever they happen across competition.
Characters and Prompts: Mr. Nire and Shinuhe. I thought Nire was pretty fun the first time he showed up and managed to karma Houdini his way out of the ending, and loved him even more when he showed up again with a literal, for-real mummy in his employ in the form of Shinuhe. I love Nire's tendency towards smarm, his total unrepentance about getting disgustingly wealthy on the backs of the desperation of the ultra-rich, and the ambiguity in how much of this is related to the circumstances surrounding his wife and how much is, in fact, just Nire's personality. Shinuhe is much more affably clueless, which is interesting, as he's by far the more mystical of the two. They're great foils for the main characters, I wish they'd show up more, and I really just want to read more about the two of them on any level.
So, 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? How about the snooping from law enforcement--does Sasayama ever have to deal with their nonsense, or are they above his usual paygrade? Do they have an equivalent annoying authority figure of some kind?
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?
And that's what I've got. Thank you again, Yuletide Writer, and I eagerly await reading what you come up with. Happy writing, and happy holidays!
