Yuletide Letter
General Info:
AO3 name: mari4212 (what can I say, I'm consistent)
Quick and dirty rules:
If you love the canon and you love writing your story, I will probably love it. Every prompt I throw out is a suggestion to have fun playing with or to spark ideas, it is not set in stone. I will read any rating from straight G to very explicit, though most of my prompts will start off gen based. I'm fine in most cases with m/m, m/f, f/f, and myriad threesomes, but if I've indicated a ship below, please don't break them up. Setting your story before they were together in canon and dwelling on the friendship is fine.
Things I love across all fandoms:
Female characters with agency (ie, making choices, having consequences, going out and doing the things themselves because they want them done). Friendships, especially female friendships. Friendships and respect into love. Unrequited love/pining, as long as the pining character figures out how to go on with the rest of their life. Unrequited/pining turning into mutual love as respect and friendship builds. Time travel, especially with older versions of the characters going back and interacting with younger counterparts/younger versions of their group (ie, tvtropes’ Peggy Sue). Lawful good characters not being lawful stupid. Lawful good characters in general (think Steve Rogers, 90% of Star Trek, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Keladry of Mindelan, most Heralds in Valdemar). Trickster/guile heroines. I enjoy canon typical stories and canon divergent AUs, the kind where you ask what would have happened had this person made this key choice differently.
Do Not Wants:
Rape/Non-con/Dub-con. Racism/homophobia/misogyny being portrayed positively, if you have to portray it at all. Graphic descriptions of character/animal harm. Character bashing; even if it's not one of my nominated characters please assume I love everyone in all my canons and you'd be right more often than not. I squick on infidelity, so if you want to ship a couple that have significant others in canon, please set it in an au where the original couple never got together or somehow broke it off. On the other hand, I do like OT3 and consider it a very useful alternative to jealousy/shipping wars. Not so fond of coffee shop/modern/no powers aus, because I normally really like the setting and how it shapes the characters.
Fandom-Specific:
The Lost World - tv
Requested Characters: Marguerite Krux, John Roxton
What I love: It's a post WW1 adventure setting with dinosaurs, shifting planes of reality and found family aspects, what's not to love? Moreover, I love the relationship between Marguerite and Roxton, how good they are for each other, how much they challenge and build one another up, and the chemistry was fantastic between the actors.
So in this fandom, Marguerite is my best beloved character and I love things that deal with how honestly complex she is as a character, how she is both extremely selfish and yet will sacrifice a lot for those she cares about, how she can be petty, cruel, and vindictive but also kind and compassionate with her own sense of honor. I love how she is unapologetic about being manipulative and using deception/leverage to succeed, especially when pretty much everyone else in the Treehouse charges straight ahead with no thought process/plan B. I love how she’s so strong and so vulnerable at once, and how she keeps going even when she’s the most wounded. Roxton is my next most beloved because he’s so much the lawful good archetype instead, and his courage/integrity and compassion play well. He’s also the one to stand toe to toe with Marguerite and call her on her worst. He can bring out her best, but he’s also correspondingly the one who often hurts her the most. I like how he sometimes loses his temper with her, because she can honestly be incredibly frustrating, but that when he’s in the wrong he apologizes. I love his protective streak, his nobility, and his sense of duty.
Play with something about their friendship/relationship, anything from super fluff to high drama, as long as they don’t end up permanently broken up. If you don't actually ship them, I'm fine with something along the lines of a strong friendship instead, but I'd prefer that to be set early on in canon. Give me character studyish something on one or both of them. Or give me something from one of the semi-AU episodes they had, like the one where Roxton went back to the Old West, and write a continuation of those characters. Or hey, the one episode in the first season with the Druids, where Marguerite, Roxton, and Malone ended up forgetting what they'd done. How would things have potentially changed if they'd remembered that incident? It gave a very different perspective of Marguerite for the first season.
I'm also fine with family-style fluff around the camp, especially the dynamics we saw in season 3 where they had gotten used to each other and had some trust built up. Feel free to include any of the other tree house characters in that. Or if you have some long and elaborate adventure story that you've always wanted to do with this series, go with that. I'm a sucker for time travel and older versions of characters meeting the younger, so if you want to play with third season versions of the characters seeing first season versions of characters again, it will make me squee high enough to make all the nearby bats start flying in circles.
Valdemar Series - Mercedes Lackey
Requested Characters: Karal Austreben
Valdemar as a series is one of my feel-good reads, I enjoy the fact that most of the characters are good people trying as hard as they can, and even though they sometimes fail or make mistakes, they keep trying to do what is right. It hits my idealist kink, okay?
With the Mage Storms trilogy subset of the Valdemar series, I love Karal as a person and his interactions with pretty much everyone. I love the mentorships between Karal and Ulrich, and Karal and Altra. I love the "you are practically an alien creature to me but I respect you and might fall in love with you if we ever spend more than a day with each other outside of crisis mode" that he and Natoli fell into. I love that Karal is sincerely devout, but his understanding and approach towards his religious calling shifts and deepens as the series goes on. I love that his story isn't over, that there's a lot of things that he still will develop and grow with in the new world after the storms ended.
Specific prompts: I'd love to see something set after the trilogy ends. We know Firesong and Silverveil end up with Darien and K'Valdemar vale, and that And'esha ends up back with the Shin'a'in. Karal goes back to Haven as the new Karsite ambassador, what goes on then? How do things develop with the Alliance after the Storms subside and the hard work of living with each other post-crisis comes in to play? What happens when/if Karal visits Karse again, how do his fellow sunpriests view him and Altra (especially given that most of his agemates were not exactly friendly and accepting to him in general)? Or, give me an alternate universe where Ulrich was injured but not killed in the assassination attempt. How does that change the rest of the story? Does Karal take on the same levels of responsibilities? What things would come in to play? Or, we see Karal mostly from within his own viewpoint, with limited bits from a few other characters. How does Selaney, or Natoli, or Ulrich view Karal as he goes on in the story? What do the Heralds in general feel about a man who isn't Chosen spending all this time with a specific Companion? How does Alberich feel about Ulrich and Karal, before, during, after the Mage Storms crisis hits? For farther-future, what does Karal become as he ages? Does he become another Ulrich, mentoring the young? I can kind of see Karal ending up with a flock of young Herald trainees following after him in years to come, or his own protege Sunpriest to teach. Does he end up meeting or working more with Tremane and the new Hardorn royal court?
Order of the Air - Melissa Scott and Jo Graham
Characters: Mitchell Sorley, Stasi (Order of the Air)
So this is also a post WW1 semi-fantasy adventure setting about a group of found family characters doing cool things. But instead of dinosaurs and shifting planes of reality and the occasional very badly written episode, this is well written storytelling about ordinary people several steps away from the movers and shakers of the post-war/Depression/pre-war period that is the late 20s-30s. It’s more a story of ordinary people who dare to be extraordinary, who when faced with a problem and a danger to the world step up and try to fix it. It’s about a bunch of wounded people who still carry on and find new ways to love, to live, and to strive forward.
Stasi: So Stasi is a trickster manipulative complicated jewel thief gone semi-straight (looks up at Lost World’s Marguerite). She’s been hurt and wounded, left to fend for herself in a dangerous world, and has learned to survive things that would kill most others. She also talks to the dead and occasionally reads the future, because yes she does. She also loves baking and children, her token “normal” traits, and willingly adopts orphans because she’s known what it was to be friendless and isolated. And with all that, she is still unapologetically the woman who wears bright lipstick and dances scandalously with her husband.
Mitchell: So here’s this guy who could find it so easy to blend into the normal world and be welcomed and accepted with open arms. He’s the token straight white guy from a good family in the books. And yet he refuses to take that easy way when it would cut him off from every one of his friends who couldn’t blend: Alma the business woman and pilot in an era where she is expected to be a homemaker, Lewis with his strong Mexican background and a non-white last name, Jerry who is homosexual and down one leg from the war, Stasi the Hungarian Jew pretending to be Russian nobility, who reels off long complicated stories from Russian literature when asked about her past. He looks at them, and he looks at the world which would only welcome him, and he chooses them, because the world that has no place for them doesn’t have a place for him to love them.
I fell in love with these two and their relationship in Silver Bullet, and I don’t even know if I have any good prompts other than more of them, more of their interaction and story. I love their dances and their relationship, so writing something about them learning a new dance and seducing each other with it would be fantastic. I love them finding ways of sharing intimacy and comfort when the normal ways don’t work right. I love how their roles within the Order play off of each other: The Psychopomp and the Medium, and if you want to write caseficish anything about them using their talents together in between the books that would be so much fun to read. I love how they adapted to find a way to be parents, and how each of them worked past their pain to love each other. Maybe something about setting up how they parent/learning how to be Mom and Dad as well as Mitch and Stasi, or how they settle their expectations and ideas about parenting? What things do each of them want to teach or pass on to their adoptive children? Play with literally any of these or your own story ideas and I will love it. And of course, I love like literally all the characters in the story as well, so anything you choose to play with can include the other characters to your heart's content.
The Story of Owen - E. K. Johnson
Requested Characters: Siobhan McQuaid, Courtney Speed, Declan Porter
So this is my newest fandom, having just recently finally read the books. And of course, I fell in love with Siobhan and her world. I love the world building within the stories: the history, the changes in the course of events because dragons had an impact, the places in the world changed forever because of human interaction with dragons. I love the sense of place: the places they were at mattered, the town and its environment in the first book, the plains and the mountains in the second. I loved the fact that choices mattered and had an impact, I loved that every character had agency and consequences, and that the consequences were serious. I loved the foreshadowing in Prairie Fire, I could tell how it was going to end a few chapters ahead of time, and dreaded the climax, even when I admitted to myself that it was a truthful and right ending. I loved Hannah’s confession to Siobhan that the family had known how it was going to end, that they’d chosen that ending even when it hurt them because it was the right thing to do.
Prompts: I’d love more after the end of the book. We know Siobhan chose to move on with Courtney and Porter, and I’d love to see how that shakes out. They’ve had a bit of time to get to know each other and to tell their stories, but there is still a lot to learn from and adapt to one another, and I’d love to see that play out. What happens after the initial grief is processed? How does Porter adapt to having a team again? Do they stay where they were stationed or will they move on to another post in the Oil Watch? If that doesn’t give you a springboard, I’d also love inter-text moments within Prairie Fire, some more of the life on duty and early interactions. I love, love, love how the sisterhood within the barracks developed, all the ways in which Courtney and the others helped Siobhan with the practical tasks because she needed to be there and they needed to help her be there. I love the storytelling in the bunkers, the social dynamics at play, and would love to see more of that.
For this fandom, I'm absolutely fine with none of my requested characters being shipped together, any pairing within these three, or to go full-fledged threesome if that's how you view it. I could see all of the above working well.
AO3 name: mari4212 (what can I say, I'm consistent)
Quick and dirty rules:
If you love the canon and you love writing your story, I will probably love it. Every prompt I throw out is a suggestion to have fun playing with or to spark ideas, it is not set in stone. I will read any rating from straight G to very explicit, though most of my prompts will start off gen based. I'm fine in most cases with m/m, m/f, f/f, and myriad threesomes, but if I've indicated a ship below, please don't break them up. Setting your story before they were together in canon and dwelling on the friendship is fine.
Things I love across all fandoms:
Female characters with agency (ie, making choices, having consequences, going out and doing the things themselves because they want them done). Friendships, especially female friendships. Friendships and respect into love. Unrequited love/pining, as long as the pining character figures out how to go on with the rest of their life. Unrequited/pining turning into mutual love as respect and friendship builds. Time travel, especially with older versions of the characters going back and interacting with younger counterparts/younger versions of their group (ie, tvtropes’ Peggy Sue). Lawful good characters not being lawful stupid. Lawful good characters in general (think Steve Rogers, 90% of Star Trek, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Keladry of Mindelan, most Heralds in Valdemar). Trickster/guile heroines. I enjoy canon typical stories and canon divergent AUs, the kind where you ask what would have happened had this person made this key choice differently.
Do Not Wants:
Rape/Non-con/Dub-con. Racism/homophobia/misogyny being portrayed positively, if you have to portray it at all. Graphic descriptions of character/animal harm. Character bashing; even if it's not one of my nominated characters please assume I love everyone in all my canons and you'd be right more often than not. I squick on infidelity, so if you want to ship a couple that have significant others in canon, please set it in an au where the original couple never got together or somehow broke it off. On the other hand, I do like OT3 and consider it a very useful alternative to jealousy/shipping wars. Not so fond of coffee shop/modern/no powers aus, because I normally really like the setting and how it shapes the characters.
Fandom-Specific:
The Lost World - tv
Requested Characters: Marguerite Krux, John Roxton
What I love: It's a post WW1 adventure setting with dinosaurs, shifting planes of reality and found family aspects, what's not to love? Moreover, I love the relationship between Marguerite and Roxton, how good they are for each other, how much they challenge and build one another up, and the chemistry was fantastic between the actors.
So in this fandom, Marguerite is my best beloved character and I love things that deal with how honestly complex she is as a character, how she is both extremely selfish and yet will sacrifice a lot for those she cares about, how she can be petty, cruel, and vindictive but also kind and compassionate with her own sense of honor. I love how she is unapologetic about being manipulative and using deception/leverage to succeed, especially when pretty much everyone else in the Treehouse charges straight ahead with no thought process/plan B. I love how she’s so strong and so vulnerable at once, and how she keeps going even when she’s the most wounded. Roxton is my next most beloved because he’s so much the lawful good archetype instead, and his courage/integrity and compassion play well. He’s also the one to stand toe to toe with Marguerite and call her on her worst. He can bring out her best, but he’s also correspondingly the one who often hurts her the most. I like how he sometimes loses his temper with her, because she can honestly be incredibly frustrating, but that when he’s in the wrong he apologizes. I love his protective streak, his nobility, and his sense of duty.
Play with something about their friendship/relationship, anything from super fluff to high drama, as long as they don’t end up permanently broken up. If you don't actually ship them, I'm fine with something along the lines of a strong friendship instead, but I'd prefer that to be set early on in canon. Give me character studyish something on one or both of them. Or give me something from one of the semi-AU episodes they had, like the one where Roxton went back to the Old West, and write a continuation of those characters. Or hey, the one episode in the first season with the Druids, where Marguerite, Roxton, and Malone ended up forgetting what they'd done. How would things have potentially changed if they'd remembered that incident? It gave a very different perspective of Marguerite for the first season.
I'm also fine with family-style fluff around the camp, especially the dynamics we saw in season 3 where they had gotten used to each other and had some trust built up. Feel free to include any of the other tree house characters in that. Or if you have some long and elaborate adventure story that you've always wanted to do with this series, go with that. I'm a sucker for time travel and older versions of characters meeting the younger, so if you want to play with third season versions of the characters seeing first season versions of characters again, it will make me squee high enough to make all the nearby bats start flying in circles.
Valdemar Series - Mercedes Lackey
Requested Characters: Karal Austreben
Valdemar as a series is one of my feel-good reads, I enjoy the fact that most of the characters are good people trying as hard as they can, and even though they sometimes fail or make mistakes, they keep trying to do what is right. It hits my idealist kink, okay?
With the Mage Storms trilogy subset of the Valdemar series, I love Karal as a person and his interactions with pretty much everyone. I love the mentorships between Karal and Ulrich, and Karal and Altra. I love the "you are practically an alien creature to me but I respect you and might fall in love with you if we ever spend more than a day with each other outside of crisis mode" that he and Natoli fell into. I love that Karal is sincerely devout, but his understanding and approach towards his religious calling shifts and deepens as the series goes on. I love that his story isn't over, that there's a lot of things that he still will develop and grow with in the new world after the storms ended.
Specific prompts: I'd love to see something set after the trilogy ends. We know Firesong and Silverveil end up with Darien and K'Valdemar vale, and that And'esha ends up back with the Shin'a'in. Karal goes back to Haven as the new Karsite ambassador, what goes on then? How do things develop with the Alliance after the Storms subside and the hard work of living with each other post-crisis comes in to play? What happens when/if Karal visits Karse again, how do his fellow sunpriests view him and Altra (especially given that most of his agemates were not exactly friendly and accepting to him in general)? Or, give me an alternate universe where Ulrich was injured but not killed in the assassination attempt. How does that change the rest of the story? Does Karal take on the same levels of responsibilities? What things would come in to play? Or, we see Karal mostly from within his own viewpoint, with limited bits from a few other characters. How does Selaney, or Natoli, or Ulrich view Karal as he goes on in the story? What do the Heralds in general feel about a man who isn't Chosen spending all this time with a specific Companion? How does Alberich feel about Ulrich and Karal, before, during, after the Mage Storms crisis hits? For farther-future, what does Karal become as he ages? Does he become another Ulrich, mentoring the young? I can kind of see Karal ending up with a flock of young Herald trainees following after him in years to come, or his own protege Sunpriest to teach. Does he end up meeting or working more with Tremane and the new Hardorn royal court?
Order of the Air - Melissa Scott and Jo Graham
Characters: Mitchell Sorley, Stasi (Order of the Air)
So this is also a post WW1 semi-fantasy adventure setting about a group of found family characters doing cool things. But instead of dinosaurs and shifting planes of reality and the occasional very badly written episode, this is well written storytelling about ordinary people several steps away from the movers and shakers of the post-war/Depression/pre-war period that is the late 20s-30s. It’s more a story of ordinary people who dare to be extraordinary, who when faced with a problem and a danger to the world step up and try to fix it. It’s about a bunch of wounded people who still carry on and find new ways to love, to live, and to strive forward.
Stasi: So Stasi is a trickster manipulative complicated jewel thief gone semi-straight (looks up at Lost World’s Marguerite). She’s been hurt and wounded, left to fend for herself in a dangerous world, and has learned to survive things that would kill most others. She also talks to the dead and occasionally reads the future, because yes she does. She also loves baking and children, her token “normal” traits, and willingly adopts orphans because she’s known what it was to be friendless and isolated. And with all that, she is still unapologetically the woman who wears bright lipstick and dances scandalously with her husband.
Mitchell: So here’s this guy who could find it so easy to blend into the normal world and be welcomed and accepted with open arms. He’s the token straight white guy from a good family in the books. And yet he refuses to take that easy way when it would cut him off from every one of his friends who couldn’t blend: Alma the business woman and pilot in an era where she is expected to be a homemaker, Lewis with his strong Mexican background and a non-white last name, Jerry who is homosexual and down one leg from the war, Stasi the Hungarian Jew pretending to be Russian nobility, who reels off long complicated stories from Russian literature when asked about her past. He looks at them, and he looks at the world which would only welcome him, and he chooses them, because the world that has no place for them doesn’t have a place for him to love them.
I fell in love with these two and their relationship in Silver Bullet, and I don’t even know if I have any good prompts other than more of them, more of their interaction and story. I love their dances and their relationship, so writing something about them learning a new dance and seducing each other with it would be fantastic. I love them finding ways of sharing intimacy and comfort when the normal ways don’t work right. I love how their roles within the Order play off of each other: The Psychopomp and the Medium, and if you want to write caseficish anything about them using their talents together in between the books that would be so much fun to read. I love how they adapted to find a way to be parents, and how each of them worked past their pain to love each other. Maybe something about setting up how they parent/learning how to be Mom and Dad as well as Mitch and Stasi, or how they settle their expectations and ideas about parenting? What things do each of them want to teach or pass on to their adoptive children? Play with literally any of these or your own story ideas and I will love it. And of course, I love like literally all the characters in the story as well, so anything you choose to play with can include the other characters to your heart's content.
The Story of Owen - E. K. Johnson
Requested Characters: Siobhan McQuaid, Courtney Speed, Declan Porter
So this is my newest fandom, having just recently finally read the books. And of course, I fell in love with Siobhan and her world. I love the world building within the stories: the history, the changes in the course of events because dragons had an impact, the places in the world changed forever because of human interaction with dragons. I love the sense of place: the places they were at mattered, the town and its environment in the first book, the plains and the mountains in the second. I loved the fact that choices mattered and had an impact, I loved that every character had agency and consequences, and that the consequences were serious. I loved the foreshadowing in Prairie Fire, I could tell how it was going to end a few chapters ahead of time, and dreaded the climax, even when I admitted to myself that it was a truthful and right ending. I loved Hannah’s confession to Siobhan that the family had known how it was going to end, that they’d chosen that ending even when it hurt them because it was the right thing to do.
Prompts: I’d love more after the end of the book. We know Siobhan chose to move on with Courtney and Porter, and I’d love to see how that shakes out. They’ve had a bit of time to get to know each other and to tell their stories, but there is still a lot to learn from and adapt to one another, and I’d love to see that play out. What happens after the initial grief is processed? How does Porter adapt to having a team again? Do they stay where they were stationed or will they move on to another post in the Oil Watch? If that doesn’t give you a springboard, I’d also love inter-text moments within Prairie Fire, some more of the life on duty and early interactions. I love, love, love how the sisterhood within the barracks developed, all the ways in which Courtney and the others helped Siobhan with the practical tasks because she needed to be there and they needed to help her be there. I love the storytelling in the bunkers, the social dynamics at play, and would love to see more of that.
For this fandom, I'm absolutely fine with none of my requested characters being shipped together, any pairing within these three, or to go full-fledged threesome if that's how you view it. I could see all of the above working well.