Dear Yuletide Author 2017
Oct. 3rd, 2017 04:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penitence_roadDear Yuletide Writer,
Hello, and thanks for clicking through to my letter! I've tried to lay out the kinds of things I like and the ones I don't in a hopefully-helpful way! I've also 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 prompt you like, that's great! These are just prompts,f though, not specific requests, so if you come up with your own idea that seems like something I'd like, feel free to run with that too! These characters have little-to-nothing written about them, so pretty much anything 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. Fade-to-blacks are fine, and 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 all 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 venomous 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?
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?
Or were they perhaps more like Sabaaku? Because I'm so curious about how and why the whole Sabaaku thing played out. Sabaaku was looking for information on the Heart Tree, and was in France when he had his fateful meeting. But why France? Are the Precure battles enough a matter of historical record that he actually found information about Cure Ange and her battle, and went to France looking for answers? But Sabaaku doesn't work for Baron Salamander; he works for Dune. Given how much Salamander surely hated Dune by that point, how did he wind up passing Dune a new general? Had Salamander and Dune still been connected up to that point? Was Dune trying to draw Salamander back into the fold as he was back on the approach to Earth, and Salamander threw Sabaaku in between them? Or did Dune already have an eye on Sabaaku, and Salamander was acting on more direct orders? And how much must Salamander have been seething the entire time in either case?
In summary, 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, Sabaaku and eventually the Heartcatch girls. Please, tell me anything.
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.
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.
Too, I'm deeply 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 love his awkwardness and his practicality. I love that he's normally a total stoic, but he has a distinctly hot-blooded streak that crops up when he's raring for a fight. I was also interested in Chad right away; I'd been admiring the relative diversity in CGS and he caught my eye. He went on to become my favorite character, one who I was stunned managed to survive everything the second season threw at him, and it's really that season where he comes into his own--responsible, fiercely loyal, almost thoughtlessly brave, and still so clumsy about his own emotions. And Dante--how did he come out of a backstory like all the Debris characters have with such a chipper, upbeat attitude? When did he learn hacking, of all things, when all the Third Division kids were treated like expendable battle bots?
Once you're looking for them, of course, 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, and they only get more prominent in the second season. 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?
How did they welcome Aston, Derma and the other Brewers' red stripes into Tekkadan, given that Derma is clearly under Dante's wing by the time of the second season. How did they react to Chad having to go tend to the Earth Branch, and him coming back so much heavier with death? How do Dante and Chad remember Akihiro in the epilogue, and how often do they spend time together given the different careers they're now in? 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--I also ship Yamagi and Chad like crazy, if you're going for something more epilogue-y. If you do want to write something set in the epilogue, it's okay to leave just reference Akihiro. Whatever you choose, though, just please give me something about their lives that reflects their pasts.
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: Any (Minami and Asuka, or Shut or Kanata; see below)
I've asked for all the characters, but I should note that I would be perfectly happy to read fic about Shut or Kanata individually, and most of my prompts below are written with that assumption in mind. By all means, if you have an idea that involves them together that seems in line with my prompts below, I'd love to read that too. Minami and Asuka, however, I really want to read about together, and my prompts for that are also written with that assumption in mind.
On that note, 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.
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?
Summary: 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. Intended to be an homage to manga author Yokoyama Mitsuteru's career body of work, it draws from such diverse genres (many of which Yokoyama had a hand in defining, back in the 60s and 70s) as super robots, magical girls, and super-powered teenagers, as well as Yokoyama's massive manga adaptation of the Chinese classic novel Water Margin: Outlaws of the Marsh.
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.
Why I love it: It just works. I truly admire the way Giant Robo tackles its hodgepodge nature with complete dedication. Get past its deeply retro design sensibility, 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 only real 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.
I will note that my main familiarity with the show is its original dub--I appreciate its bombast and occasional self-aware sarcasm. You're welcome to write whatever version of the characters you like, of course, but the original dub is my favorite, so if you want to lean into its characterizations, its names for the cast, and of course, its piles of ridiculous accents, I'd be beyond delighted.
Characters and Prompts: Alberto and Ivan. Alberto is excellent for a load of very obvious reasons--he's slick, he's passionate, he's intelligent and highly observant, and he has a level of determination that would make him a great hero if he weren't so obviously a total villain. Alberto is great and everyone who's watched the show knows it. Ivan? It's a little easy to lose track of Ivan, I think. He falls early on, and he has a big silly nose, and he doesn't seem to have an interestingly unique supernatural power like most of the rest of the cast. I think he's really great, though, and I love his and Alberto's few scenes together.
They seem to have such a strong, well-defined partnership, despite Ivan not being a member of the Magnificent Ten. I'd love to know more about their relationship and its history. Like, where did Alberto pick Ivan up, and why does he keep him around? What satisfaction does Ivan get in working for Alberto? How much does Ivan know about Sunny and her unnamed mother? How did Ivan handle the loss of Bashtarlle--was he in the BF Group already, or was it his country's destruction that drove him there? How much does Alberto know about that period of Ivan's life? Was Ivan already serving Alberto when Cervantes was killed? What must that have been like?
I'd also be delighted to see the two of them used as a vehicle for some world-building--while I imagine Big Fire is run less like a business than the Experts of Justice, I still have a lot of questions about how it actually works, day to day. How much are agents of Big Fire paid, and by what method? How do they recruit? How does one climb the chain of command? How are they structured? How are decisions made short of gathering the entirety of the Magnificent Ten--and how often are the Ten gathered in the normal running of events? Big Fire has so many giant robots (far more than the Experts of Justice); how does a member secure their very own giant robot--how did Ivan get Neptune?
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. Is Big Fire the stuff of heated conspiracy theories, or are they a household name, albeit one whispered in hushed fear? Or do they have any kind of legit front, and their evil deeds are what are secrets? Are there sighting reports? Primitive internet newsgroups? The possibilities are endless and mindboggling. Anything you can tell me about the two of them and their history together would be greatly appreciated.
You have reached the end of the letter. Thank you for reading the whole thing, happy writing, and happy Yuletide!
Hello, and thanks for clicking through to my letter! I've tried to lay out the kinds of things I like and the ones I don't in a hopefully-helpful way! I've also 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 prompt you like, that's great! These are just prompts,f though, not specific requests, so if you come up with your own idea that seems like something I'd like, feel free to run with that too! These characters have little-to-nothing written about them, so pretty much anything 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. Fade-to-blacks are fine, and 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
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 all 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 venomous 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?
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?
Or were they perhaps more like Sabaaku? Because I'm so curious about how and why the whole Sabaaku thing played out. Sabaaku was looking for information on the Heart Tree, and was in France when he had his fateful meeting. But why France? Are the Precure battles enough a matter of historical record that he actually found information about Cure Ange and her battle, and went to France looking for answers? But Sabaaku doesn't work for Baron Salamander; he works for Dune. Given how much Salamander surely hated Dune by that point, how did he wind up passing Dune a new general? Had Salamander and Dune still been connected up to that point? Was Dune trying to draw Salamander back into the fold as he was back on the approach to Earth, and Salamander threw Sabaaku in between them? Or did Dune already have an eye on Sabaaku, and Salamander was acting on more direct orders? And how much must Salamander have been seething the entire time in either case?
In summary, 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, Sabaaku and eventually the Heartcatch girls. Please, tell me anything.
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.
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.
Too, I'm deeply 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 love his awkwardness and his practicality. I love that he's normally a total stoic, but he has a distinctly hot-blooded streak that crops up when he's raring for a fight. I was also interested in Chad right away; I'd been admiring the relative diversity in CGS and he caught my eye. He went on to become my favorite character, one who I was stunned managed to survive everything the second season threw at him, and it's really that season where he comes into his own--responsible, fiercely loyal, almost thoughtlessly brave, and still so clumsy about his own emotions. And Dante--how did he come out of a backstory like all the Debris characters have with such a chipper, upbeat attitude? When did he learn hacking, of all things, when all the Third Division kids were treated like expendable battle bots?
Once you're looking for them, of course, 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, and they only get more prominent in the second season. 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?
How did they welcome Aston, Derma and the other Brewers' red stripes into Tekkadan, given that Derma is clearly under Dante's wing by the time of the second season. How did they react to Chad having to go tend to the Earth Branch, and him coming back so much heavier with death? How do Dante and Chad remember Akihiro in the epilogue, and how often do they spend time together given the different careers they're now in? 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--I also ship Yamagi and Chad like crazy, if you're going for something more epilogue-y. If you do want to write something set in the epilogue, it's okay to leave just reference Akihiro. Whatever you choose, though, just please give me something about their lives that reflects their pasts.
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: Any (Minami and Asuka, or Shut or Kanata; see below)
I've asked for all the characters, but I should note that I would be perfectly happy to read fic about Shut or Kanata individually, and most of my prompts below are written with that assumption in mind. By all means, if you have an idea that involves them together that seems in line with my prompts below, I'd love to read that too. Minami and Asuka, however, I really want to read about together, and my prompts for that are also written with that assumption in mind.
On that note, 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?
Giant Robo: The Day the Earth Stood Still
Summary: 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. Intended to be an homage to manga author Yokoyama Mitsuteru's career body of work, it draws from such diverse genres (many of which Yokoyama had a hand in defining, back in the 60s and 70s) as super robots, magical girls, and super-powered teenagers, as well as Yokoyama's massive manga adaptation of the Chinese classic novel Water Margin: Outlaws of the Marsh.
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.
Why I love it: It just works. I truly admire the way Giant Robo tackles its hodgepodge nature with complete dedication. Get past its deeply retro design sensibility, 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 only real 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.
I will note that my main familiarity with the show is its original dub--I appreciate its bombast and occasional self-aware sarcasm. You're welcome to write whatever version of the characters you like, of course, but the original dub is my favorite, so if you want to lean into its characterizations, its names for the cast, and of course, its piles of ridiculous accents, I'd be beyond delighted.
Characters and Prompts: Alberto and Ivan. Alberto is excellent for a load of very obvious reasons--he's slick, he's passionate, he's intelligent and highly observant, and he has a level of determination that would make him a great hero if he weren't so obviously a total villain. Alberto is great and everyone who's watched the show knows it. Ivan? It's a little easy to lose track of Ivan, I think. He falls early on, and he has a big silly nose, and he doesn't seem to have an interestingly unique supernatural power like most of the rest of the cast. I think he's really great, though, and I love his and Alberto's few scenes together.
They seem to have such a strong, well-defined partnership, despite Ivan not being a member of the Magnificent Ten. I'd love to know more about their relationship and its history. Like, where did Alberto pick Ivan up, and why does he keep him around? What satisfaction does Ivan get in working for Alberto? How much does Ivan know about Sunny and her unnamed mother? How did Ivan handle the loss of Bashtarlle--was he in the BF Group already, or was it his country's destruction that drove him there? How much does Alberto know about that period of Ivan's life? Was Ivan already serving Alberto when Cervantes was killed? What must that have been like?
I'd also be delighted to see the two of them used as a vehicle for some world-building--while I imagine Big Fire is run less like a business than the Experts of Justice, I still have a lot of questions about how it actually works, day to day. How much are agents of Big Fire paid, and by what method? How do they recruit? How does one climb the chain of command? How are they structured? How are decisions made short of gathering the entirety of the Magnificent Ten--and how often are the Ten gathered in the normal running of events? Big Fire has so many giant robots (far more than the Experts of Justice); how does a member secure their very own giant robot--how did Ivan get Neptune?
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. Is Big Fire the stuff of heated conspiracy theories, or are they a household name, albeit one whispered in hushed fear? Or do they have any kind of legit front, and their evil deeds are what are secrets? Are there sighting reports? Primitive internet newsgroups? The possibilities are endless and mindboggling. Anything you can tell me about the two of them and their history together would be greatly appreciated.
You have reached the end of the letter. Thank you for reading the whole thing, happy writing, and happy Yuletide!
