Dear Yuletide Writer 2018

[penitence_road]

 Dear 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, 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: It depends on the fandom.  Please no for The Orphan's Tales; for Kurosagi, I'm fine with canon-accurate levels of gore and body horror, but please not happening to the main characters.  For Heartcatch, on the other hand, if you want to go pretty psychologically dark with Salamander, I'm fine with that, so long as it seems in-line with his eventual character arc. 

 

Porn: Definitely not for Kurosagi or The Orphan's Tales.  For Heartcatch, I'm fine with non-con and dub-con within the bounds of darkfic, as above, if it's between Salamander and Dune or Sabaku.  Between Salamander and Ange, though, if you go a romantic route, I'd rather the power dynamics stay pretty equal--no non- or dub-con. 

 

AUs: I'd prefer no AUs this year.

 

The basics 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.  Tsubomi is about to have some much weirder new hangers-on, though, in the form of a pair of hapless mascot animals that run 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 Sabaku 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 and how many of them exist or existed in the past.  Or if you think Dune was a unique entity, did he pick Salamander up somewhere, perhaps from a previously destroyed planet?  What was his childhood like, under a ruler like Dune?  Why did Salamander get so curious about Dune and his heart, and why did that anger Dune so?  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 much connection remained between the two of them despite Salamander's venomous hatred?  And what's with all the white coats?  (It's apparently enough an enemy-of-the-Precure thing that it carries over to the Mirage Cures and Coupe-sama when he test-fights them; even Sabaku and the minion trio play with the motif.  I am ravenously curious about this bizarre dress code.)

  

Likewise with Cure Ange, I have so many questions.  What did Salamander think of humans, and why did this drive him to, well, be a Pretty Cure final boss?  How long was it between his arrival and the beginning of his battle with Ange?  How long between that and his last?  With Cure Ange being the first Cure, what was that process of discovery like for her?  She looked on him with pity in the end--how much did she ever find out about him personally?  Had they had personal interaction prior to those discoveries, or did he have minions or his own, empowered like Olivier or brainwashed like Sabaku and the minion trio, and she only found out the truth via villainous monologuing?  Is he who the Mirage was made in response to, and that's how Ange defeated him in the end, or was it a later development that calls on Ange's image?  It is not much in her aesthetic, color-wise, but I think she must be connected to it, given how the Heartcatch Orchestra attack changes in the movie, seemingly specifically in response to Salamander.  And whatever the answers to any of this, how much of a driving motivator was Dune's presence or lack thereof? 

 

For Sabaku, I'm so curious about how and why that whole thing played out.  Sabaku 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 went to France looking for answers?  But Sabaku doesn't work for Baron Salamander; he works for Dune.  Dune claims that Sabaku came to him, rather than the other way around, but is that entirely true, or did Salamander have to lay down some breadcrumbs?  Sabaku clearly had misgivings about the mask--was he convinced to put it on in a single meeting, or did Salamander court him for a while first?  Yet given how much Salamander surely hated Dune by that point, why was he involved at all?  Had Salamander and Dune still been connected up to that point, or was Dune reaching out an ugly, out-of-the-blue shock?  Was Dune trying to draw Salamander back into the fold as he was back on the approach to Earth, and Salamander threw Sabaku in between them?  Or did Dune already have an eye on Sabaku, 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.  You can use his perspective or view him through the eyes of one of the other characters in the tag set, but please, tell me anything. 

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 channeler (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.

 

It really is the cast that sells it, though. 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 fighting to keep the business afloat, though, 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 modern-day Japan?  How about Nire--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?  What do they think of each other?  What does Shinuhe think of Nire's circumstances, and is Nire impressed at all by Shinuhe's background, or is he fairly blasé about it?  They're friendly with each other, but how deep does that go, and how did it get there?  I'd love to see anything exploring this most staggeringly bizarre of friendships.

The Orphan's Tales

 

Summary:  Once upon a time, a young prince met a girl who lived in his father's garden, a girl with words so thickly printed across her eyelids that they seemed black.  They struck up a friendship, and she began to tell him her stories--fantastical stories of firebirds, djinn, holy cities and dying cities, sainted sailors, witches rescuing maidens, talking animals, demi-gods walking the earth, and a whole host of others.  The stories weave in and out of one another, or nest within one another, as a boy on a quest hears the tale of a witch, who tells a story of her grandmother's training, during which she met a wolf who told her the legend of five celestial sisters, or an orphan girl in a frigid port city hearing of the youth of another of the net-menders, who went on a journey with three dog-headed brothers, who tried to kill a woman who had already died once, who was saved by a wizard who had once sought answers from Death.  A character might leave one story as a loose end, an unfinished thread, only to be woven back in later as they appear in a totally different tale, years later, to tell what became of them.  And gradually, gradually, over the course of two books and four arc stories, we begin to see the whole picture, and the point of the framing narrative of the girl in the garden.

 

Why I love it: The writing is lush and sumptuous, heavy with sensory detail, and I've rarely read anything where purple prose is more well-suited to the material.  The nature of the story--characters telling stories about stories they've been told by others--means that there's never going to be a sustained, in-depth look at any given character's life or any particular setting, yet despite that, everything feels vibrant and well-realized.  You get the feeling that anyone, everyone, from princes to fishmongers, in this world has a story they're living; it's only a matter of whether we get to hear it or not.  As someone whose world got rocked by Terry Pratchett's approach to developing e.g. the common city watchman, I really appreciate that.

 

Too, I love the structure.  It won't be for everyone, and it isn't even necessarily what I'm looking for in my request, but I have a formalist streak, so the ways the duology demands you pay attention and rewards mindfulness of what you're reading really appeals to me. 

 

Characters and prompts: Ragnhild, Leander, Seven, or Dinarzad.  Though the book contains dozens of characters rich enough to deserve some expansion, I narrowed my selections down to four characters who provoked broadly the same emotional response in me, that being, "GOD, PLEASE JUST GIVE THIS CHILD A MOMENT OF HAPPINESS, IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK?"  Accordingly, I'd really like to read a story in which any of these people find some measure of peace in themselves, especially if it's set after the last we see of them.  Their stories all end on such uncertain notes, and Leander is the only one we know finds some serenity in the long run.  I'll give some prompts for all of them, but my desires for them are really pretty simple in the end: that they have days where they're mostly okay--a little sad or bittersweet, maybe, but mostly okay. 

 

Ragnhild: What is her training in the Tower of St. Sigrid like?  Does she make any friends, in her tower or outside of it?  What sort of ship does she build, and where does she sail for its first voyage?  What does she wind up taking as her Saint title?  What sorts of tasks does she do with or for the Order?  Does she ever grow to like Al-a-Nur enough to go out into it, or does she find her serenity in seclusion?  Does she ever invite anyone in as she was invited in?  Does she ever deal with Shadukiam again?  What does she think of its fall, if it happens in her lifetime?  (An aside: it's difficult to say for sure, but you can draw a line from Ragnhild through to Leander, and thus to Aerie, and from Aerie to Seven; from Seven's story, we know that Marrow existed for years before it plucked him off his hillside.  So there's a decent chance that Ragnhild was still around when Shadukiam was transformed into the urban undead horrorscape that is Marrow.)

 

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

 

Seven: Most of the slices of his life we see are pretty bleak, but we know there were a few good years with Taglio and Grotteschi, so maybe a look at a successful performance and a happy night afterward?  I'd be very curious to know how a one-armed youth learned to play a fiddle.  But more significantly, how do things go as time stretches on in the Isles of the Dead?  Do Seven and Oubliette age there, since they came as living folk, or has their time stopped in the crossing, somehow?  What more things do they build, seeing as they clearly have the motivation to improve the place somewhat?  Does Seven ever grow close to any of the others abiding there--and do he and Oubliette ever come to a less bitter accord?  ...Maybe he and the Itto twins can figure out how to build a fiddle again?  What could they use to string it, and how would it sound, and might Oubliette dance to it?  I know it's going to be melancholy there on the whole, but cripes, it'd be nice to think it's not just going to be gray resignation for the rest of time. 

 

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

 

I've presented the characters in generally chronological order, and my prompts for them are all separate, but if you are inclined to tie them together or do short stories for more than one of them, you're more than welcome to!  They never exist all in the same place--Ragnhild would have been long dead by the time Dinarzad set out into the world, and Seven is pretty fiercely isolated no matter how you slice it--but who knows what chance meetings might ripple out across the world over the course of their stories?  They could echo a theme with each other, or make up most of a Five Things story.  Cut loose!

You have reached the end of the letter.  Thank you for reading the whole thing, happy writing, and happy Yule!