Dear Yuletide Writer 2024

[machiavellijr]

 

Dear Yuletide writer,

It’s that time of year again…

Thank you for doing this. I still can’t quite believe Yuletide happens and works every year, it feels like it’s wandered over from a more agreeably cooperative world where *flails* all of all this isn’t happening. 

I tend to chuck in a few potential plot bunnies by way of potential inspiration and to give you a sense of what sort of things interest me about the fandom and characters - use or ignore entirely as you will.

General likes:

Plot. Worldbuilding. Casefic. Melodrama. Keeping your head whilst all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. Competence porn. Costume porn. Actual porn. Humour. Farce. Epistolary. Wordplay. Swordplay.

General Do Not Want:

Explicit slash

Non-con

Tight focus on babies/pregnancy (OK, not such a problem for some of these)

Addiction plots front and center - like I know there are addicts in I think all of these canons, and that's fine, but I don't want a whole story about it.
RL contemporary politics - I know I’ve got a couple of fandoms here that are quite ‘political’ and I don’t think the characters deserve to have to deal with Trump, Brexit, Covid etc., much less the horrors in the Middle East.

A year and a day in Old Theradane - Scott Lynch

Any character

 

Available legally for free here: https://www.uncannymagazine.com/article/a-year-and-a-day-in-old-theradane/. Even if we didn’t match on this, it’s short and accessible enough you might want to take a look at it anyway, I think there’s plenty for a Sarah Caudwell or John M. Ford fan in there.

This story is such a tiny glimpse of such a great fantasy setting that there’s amazing scope for anything you want to do and I’ll love all of it. I’m interested in the place of magic in the world, there’s a pretty heavy layer of magitek in there, an almost Discworld feeling of being right on the edge of an industrial revolution powered by minor wizardry. Maybe one that’s going to swallow the Parliament of Strife whole, if the gang don’t get it first. I also wonder how the rest of the world thinks of the crazy wizards poking holes in the fabric of spacetime.

I dearly love a good heist, but totally understand that they are very very hard to write and not everyone's cup of tea.

Some plot bunnies:
Backstory with one of the heists referenced in canon - or one you made up.

What happens if and when the gang actually win and suddenly the wizards aren’t ru[i/n]ning Theradane any more?

Or if the “sanctuary in reverse” thing works out and the gang have to start again, again? This has crossover potential into vaguely compatible settings if e.g. they buy their way into Lankhmar, Camorr, Lystourel … King’s Landing or Ankh-Morpork might be harder but I can see it?

Any worldbuilding around the economy/politics/history of Theradane. Shraplin’s not in the tagset but his emancipation is a lovely touch, let’s have the glory days of the Automaton Rights movement, or their revival?

Hilary Tamar Mysteries

One or more of:
Hilary Tamar
Julia Larwood

This is one of those canons where what I really want is more-of. I love Hilary’s narrative voice, I love the knots our heroes tie themselves with the red herrings and wrong genre savviness, and particularly any and all appearances by Julia where she gets to be her gloriously chaotic and occasionally surprisingly competent self (perish the thought that I might have a Julia in my own life, love ya T., never change).

Plot bunnies:
Hilary’s gender is never overtly specified, though I think it’s a bit difficult to read them as female given the setting, period, and the way they relate to the boys. That said, difficult is not impossible and I’ve never seen anyone write an explicitly female / nonbinary Hilary that I can recall.

Julia and Cantrip’s serial thriller being published. The reactions of the publisher’s legal reader, who of course would be someone who has daydreams about achieving the professional eminence these two clowns take totally for granted?

We very seldom see these barristers in court; some courtroom antics (especially if for sadistic reasons they’re way out of their professional comfort zone) would be fun.

Hilary being forced to do some actual work?

House of Cards (UK)

One or more of:

Francis Urquhart
The King
Tim Stamper

 

Oh for those more innocent days when if the PM’s family were caught insider-trading he would be expected to resign, the suggestion the government had connived at starting a small war would destroy the PM’s reputation, and blackmailing closeted politicians was portrayed as wrong even if they had awful politics. Really it only seems to be FU preventing the BBC version of 1990s England being a utopia [/s]. Though he’s a pretty big obstacle.

I think there’s a bit of a contradiction in what FU wants to do in power in S2-3; he wants to preserve everything in aspic the way it was in his youth, but on another level he gets bored and makes things happen almost for the hell of it, he can’t help keeping poking away when he could just leave well enough alone and stay peacefully on top. But then there wouldn’t be a plot, would there? And it’s very Richard III. Stamper has a bit of the same bug, I think - he wants so much to be FU (even more, I think, than he wants to fuck him, though probably that too) and he’s probably not quite sure why, or what he’d do if he ever became the dog that caught the car.

Come to think of it, there’s a plotbunny - the FU version of the Richard III Society. After all his misdeeds are public knowledge, some people will still argue that he was completely and totally in the right or at worst the lesser evil, not just his politics but personally… how, and why, and what do the survivors (including the ex-King) make of it? FU’s England will have avoided some of the real-life catastrophes of his chronologically-impossible reign (he serves 12 years as PM between 1991/2 and about 1998) and had some other, probably worse ones instead.

It’s noticeable that whilst FU tells us all the thinly-veiled caricatures of the potential Thatcher successors in S1 are bad people (except Collingridge who’s just weak), they don’t really do anything onscreen to justify that interpretation - we’re supposed to just supply that from their models’ general IRL unpopularity. Woolton’s having an affair with a much younger woman but that’s about the worst of it, and it’s Roger, not him, who makes skeevy remarks about her race. I don’t think FU sees anything particularly evil about racism, or xenophobia, or exhibitionism, he just thinks it’s déclassé to show them publicly.

What is the King up to by the time of The Final Cut? I’d quite like to see how he handles life post-abdication; is FU right that he’ll be irrelevant in politics, does he take it lying down or want to find out for himself?

Or give me a day in the life of the Urquhart administration when there’s no earth-shaking constitutional shenanigans going on.

Or throw an outside-context crossover at them - they can deal with Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, wizards, first contact, etc.

The Dragon Waiting (John M. Ford)

Any Character

I really do mean any character here - don’t feel limited to the ones in the tagset; if you want to write about Margaret of Anjou, or Lorenzo de Medici, or everyone’s favourite freelance gunner Gregory, or those usurping Palaeologi, feel absolutely free.

I feel like on every page there’s another story that could spin off and be just as interesting as the main one, whether that’s vampirism as early-Renaissance AIDS metaphor, the life of a mercenary captain in the Space-Filling Byzantine Empire, any kind of shenanigans at the overstuffed “French” court (what a gorgeous setting for, well, anything), young Richard III in the bizarro Wars of the Roses, Owain Glyndwr calling spirits from the vasty deep with some expectation they’ll actually turn up (OK I admit it my sense of the Wars of the Roses owes more to Shakespeare than scholarship, OK hang on, TDW!Shakespeare?), Gregory and Hywel riding off into the sunset to fight the Empire somewhere else, and somewhere else after that, and so on until the Empire finally gets lucky…