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Lovely author, here is my theory about letters: how much detail people want in a letter is HIGHLY variable. Some people (such as myself) prefer if their recip gives LOTS of guidance on their wishes. Some prefer as little as possible so they can be free as a bird. Most are somewhere in between. So! Here's everything including the kitchen sink if you find it helpful, but feel free to ignore it if it is not helpful. I would rather get a story you were happy with than "well, she said she liked x, so I guess I have to do x even though I don't like x and/or am just not inspired that way."
I'm fairly easy to please; I've been doing ficathons for over a decade and am very rarely disappointed with my gifts. I write long and detailed Dear Author letters because I find such things helpful when I'm writing for other people; if you are like me, here you go! If your style is different and a detailed letter makes you feel hemmed-in, feel free to do what works for you.
The most important thing for me in a fic is that the characters are well-written and recognizably themselves. Even when I don't like a character, I don't go in for character-bashing. If nothing else, if the rest of this letter is too much or my kinks just don't fit yours, just concentrate on writing a story with everyone in character and good spelling and grammar and I will almost certainly love what you come up with.
One thing: I do have an embarrassment squick, which makes humor kind of hit-or-miss sometimes. The kind of humor where someone does something embarrassing and the audience is laughing at them makes me uncomfortable. On the other hand, the kind of humor where the audience is laughing with the characters I really enjoy.
Please no incest.
Here are some other things to keep in mind (not all of which will apply to all fandoms): I don't like it when characters of color are pushed aside so that white characters can take center stage. I love the acknowledgment that female strength comes in many forms, of which the kinds put forward by modern western feminism are only a few--and women can be compelling and interesting without being "strong". I like cultural diversity, and to know that culture matters to people, and to see how different cultures interact and where the clashes are, but please don't exoticize anything. I like quirky characters. I like unreliable narrators. I like acknowledgment that different people can have different points of view without either of them being wrong. I like stories that engage with problematic aspects of the source, and which deal with privilege in one way or another.
I like plotty, gen stories, and plotty stories in general, but I don't like explicit sex, particularly when it's just thrown in for teh porn. If there's going to be sex, there needs to be a reason for it within the story--it advances the plot, or characterization, or something (and, again, if you have to do it, please don't make it explicit). I'm asexual; a lot of the time I don't even bother to read the sex scenes. Romance is awesome (as long as both are in character and the romantic plot doesn't hinge on one or both of them being an idiot), but sex-for-the-sake-of-sex is pretty boring to me. I generally prefer no slash.
I love worldbuilding. Sometimes I find exploring the corners of a world or universe to be as fun (or sometimes more fun) than reading stories set in it. I want to know what's behind the curtain. I love hearing about the economics, the politics, the religion, the clothing, the history, all of that kind of stuff. And I want to know why it matters--how is all this cultural background stuff affecting the characters, the plot, everything. You don't have to do deep worldbuilding, but I'll probably enjoy it if you do.
I like AUs, but not complete AUs or fusions (i.e. no highschool or college or coffee shop AUs, and especially not mundane AUs--nothing where you keep characters but drop most of the worldbuilding). I like fork-in-the-road type AUs, where one thing is different and the changes all result from that one thing, and you explore what might have been if such-and-such happened. Crackfic is really hit and miss for me, sometimes I love it and sometimes I can't stand it. Basically, if it's the characters we know and love in a ludicrous situation, that's great. If they're OOC or parodied in order to make something funny ... it's not funny to me. I like historical AUs, but only when the author actually knows the history period in question and does thoughtful worldbuilding to meld actual culture of the time with the canon--Regency AUs where everyone's attitude is modern but with a Regency #aesthetic drive me batty. ("But entailments didn't work that way!") I like angst, but not complete and unrelieved angst, and not angst of the type that people cause themselves by not talking to one another. While things can get dark or angsty in the middle, I prefer happy endings.
I like crossovers, but am picky about them. I have to know both fandoms, and they have to be well done so that the two fandoms mesh well in terms of worldbuilding. To use non-Yuletide examples: I can buy the Doctor popping up anywhere, because that's a feature of the show; I can buy Jack O'Neill from SG-1 meeting the Watchers from Buffy, because those two fandoms could plausibly exist in the same world; I can't buy Babylon 5 showing up in the Star Trek universe, because the worldbuilding, technology, history, and everything of the two shows are so different. (My AO3 bookmarks and pinboard bookmarks probably aren't a TOTALLY exhaustive list of fandoms I know, but pretty close, if you're interested in crossovers.)
Formats I'm open to: Traditional prose, narrative poetry, in-universe texts.
Fandoms:
Caprica
Tamara Adama. Things what I would love (pick any, all, or none as you like): something exploring Tauron culture, and culture clashes thereof. We know all about Joseph and Sam Adama's delicate relationship with their homeland, and a little bit about the first William Adama's relationship with all things Tauron, but not much about Tamara and Tauron. So, that would be great. Also! Cylons! I want to know what happens with the Cylons! We know (basically) what happened with Lacy and Zoe after the show ended, and their interaction with Cylons, but Tamara didn't get a new body and she didn't become the Reverend Mother, so what happened to her? Was she still around during the Cylon War, and if so what was her role? Was she still there, a ghost in the machine, when the Final Five showed up? What was her role in the Cylon culture? Not to mention, what does she think of her Dad and his new family?
There cannot be too much Tamara fic. I LOVE her, and wish the show had focused on her and her family more than on the Graystones and Sister Clarice. (Lacy, also, is awesome, and I suppose Zoe wasn't bad either, if she hadn't been the focus.) This was truly the show of the awesome girls, and it had potential if it hadn't been cancelled. (If you wanted to do something about her and Bill Adama from BSG meeting--particularly in some kind of complicated plot involving the Rebel Cylons and the Final Five--that would probably not be in the spirit of Yuletide but I would not complain. At all.)
Random Harvest
For me, this story cries out either for AUs or for post-canon stories. What if he hadn't recovered his original memories? What if he'd remembered, but hadn't forgotten Paula? What if the baby lived? What if she'd told him the truth, either right away in the interview for secretary or when he started seeing Kitty or when he asked her to marry him? What if they'd gotten caught leaving town and he'd had to go back to the hospital? And if canon stays the same, what happens now that he knows the truth? Is he upset that she knew and didn't tell him? Is Charles the same personality as Smitty? They've both changed and grown a lot over the course of the movie--how does that affect their relationship? Was she expecting that magically everything would go back to the way it was when they were young and in love? Was he expecting that knowing the truth would magically make him feel more whole?
I love this movie for its melodrama, for the luminous Greer Garson, for the way I spend the last half of the movie crying into my hanky and pleading with Paula to just TELL HIM already. I love how deliciously angsty it is, with such a wonderfully happy ending. (This movie is one of the rare exceptions to my avoidance of plots that hinge on people in love being idiots and not talking about it.) But I would also love a good dose of common sense put in somehow.
Dirty Computer - Janelle Monáe
As usual with Janelle Monae's work, the worldbuilding is GORGEOUS and I would LOVE something that explored it. The underground subculture that they're part of has so much richness to it. And, like, where's the money for those amazing outfits coming from? What do they do BESIDES hang out and party and be queer and subversive? Is this a post-scarcity world where everyone has a universal basic income? If there's such uber-tight control over society, how does the Pynk rest-inn stay in business? Is the tight social control universal, or only in some places? Could Jane and Zen have stayed in Pynk, but only if they were willing to never see Che again? Is Zen some kind of religious leader, and if so, how does that fit into everything? The Cleaners were some kind of hellish concatenation of bureaucracy and religion, how does that work and how does the religious part of it affect Jane and Zen's experiences? What was it like for Jane and Zen in there OUTSIDE of the cleaning? Are there lasting repurcussions of the nevermind, physically or neurologically (how does disability and neurodiversity affect things in this world)? Or you could do future-fic where they're political activists working to subvert the system. Or you could just do happy poly threesome! DNW darkfic or depressing endings.
Dirty Computer focuses far more on queer themes than on racial themes than Janelle's previous work, but there are still racial themes present. It can't be an accident that the people running the cleaning (both the cleaners and the mother superior) were white, and the three victims we saw were black. It harkens back to all the times white people have decided that people of color were dangerous and subhuman and evil and needed to be made more like the white people. The destruction of memories was a literal version of things white culture has metaphorically been trying to do for centuries. The renaming, the "it's for your own good," all of it.
I love the songs of this album. Django Jane and I Like That are my favorites, but Screwed and Pynk are also awesome and I love the lush, lyrical way they feed into one another, the visuals and the lyrics and the beat together. I also love the themes: love, and being true to yourself, and at the end refusing both to give in and to respond violently. Please, please, please, give some sort of a happy ending. Like, you don't have to magically wave a magic wand and make all the screwed up things of this society go away, but I want the three to end up happy together.
Black Lightning
I love the whole family. You could focus on any of them: stuff at work or school (how do you balance academics and being a SUPERHERO?) You could deal with the legal and/or political ramifications of the show (and oh, boy, howdy are there a lot of them, both personal and familial and educational and....). You could explore the different ways the three powered ones feel about their powers. You could do a mission. You could focus on the love lives of any of the characters. You could do future missions cleaning up the city's corruption and working with Billy Henderson to do so. You could do a really satisfying thing where the ASA gets publicly exposed and they all go to jail and everybody they hurt gets helped. You could do a family game night! DNW: please nothing too dark and nothing where the bad guys win.
BTW: normally I hate redemption arcs because they're too slick and too "oh, nevermind, he's good now (and hot) so it doesn't matter that he did horrible things! :)" But Khalil's arc was amazing and awesome AND THEN THEY KILLED HIM and I was so mad. If you want to do an AU where he survived, I would be delighted! (And then continue dealing with AAAAAALLLLLLL the issues that would stir up.)
What I love about this show is that everybody feels like real people, not the cartoonish thing you sometimes get with superheroes (much as I love them). And their family is a good family, which (despite its secrets) is supportive and loving and there for each other. And the sisters give each other grief like real siblings do. And everybody is an intelligent, thoughtful person, so that plots don't depend on people being idiots.
Rivers of London
Caroline Linden-Limmer. Really, anything with Caroline is great. Further adventures with Peter! Knowledge exchanges between practitioners of her mum's type and the Folly! Her connections with the demi-monde! Flying! Her perspective on British society, as an African transwoman adopted by English nobility, if you want to go a more serious route.
I love this series for many reasons (the snark! the vivid characters! the worldbuilding! the digressions! the wry-but-pointed social commentary on race and class and bureaucracy!). I love the fandom, too, but much as I love Peter and Nightingale, there's already a decent amount of very high quality fic about them, which is why I would prefer focusing on other characters. I only listed one character, but the more supporting characters pop up, the more excited I will be. I've read/listened to most of the supplemental material--including the micro-short stories that are impossible to get ahold of, which I can supply copies of on request--so you can use any of that material if you want. If Elsie "Hatbox" Winstanley shows up, for example, I would be delighted. One note on characterization. Caroline's mother Helena strikes me as one of those "of course I can't be racist, I'm a Good Liberal White Person Here To Uplift People." See, for example, the way she has more sympathy for the tiger than the local (African) children killed in that one story she tells about Growing Up In Africa. You don't have to go that route, but if you choose not to you're going to have your work cut out to convince me.
My Fair Lady
I really don't like the pairing canon tries to push on us. I think Eliza and Higgins make great friends, but any kind of romantic or marital relationship between them would be horrible for all concerned. But I love all of the characters as individuals and I love the banter when they're together. So! Ideas, take as much or as little of them as you like, mix and match, whatever. Eliza starts up a business, either a flower shop or a phonetics tutor (if teaching phonetics, bonus points if she uses the "Hungarian Princess" mystique and totally pwns Zoltan Karpathy), while Higgins and Pickering are "confirmed bachelors" together (wink, wink) and Eliza and Mrs. Higgins commiserate. Eliza marries Freddy, because he's a good person despite being brainless, and she likes being adored, and he's good with the kids and she uses his social cachet to keep her business and the whole family afloat, and when his brainlessness gets too much they go and have dinner with the Professor or Mrs. Higgins or Colonel Pickering. Or what about Eliza, Higgins, and Pickering settling down together in a poly relationship, either as a romance or just committed good friends, while Mrs. Higgins sighs because they're happy but it's terribly scandalous, and if any of her friends (or the Bishop!) found out, egads. Or Eliza marries the Colonel because they're good friends and she respects him, and when they're no longer dealing with the training every day and Higgins is a visitor instead of their host and Eliza has a woman friend in Mrs. Higgins, they actually are quite happy and content together. Or Eliza stays with Mrs. Higgins for a while as she's getting on her feet (possibly starting a business?) and Colonel Pickering keeps coming by to smooth things over and ask Eliza back, and he and Mrs. Higgins get together and pair up while the Professor is loudly aghast and Eliza thinks it's awesome. Whatever you choose, banter and humor is the key to this (though I do have an embarrassment squick, so laughing with=good, laughing at=bad).
It's been years since I've read any of the George Bernard Shaw play that this is based on, but definitely, go with the Shaw-esque witty banter. If you marry any of the characters off, it doesn't have to be romantic--these people are from an era and classes where romance and love are not the primary reasons for marriage. For the rich it's about alliance and preserving the family name/money/honor, and for the poor it's about needing to pool resources to survive, but in both cases love is a benefit not the main goal. Even Eliza, who objects to being sold on the marriage market, would probably think differently if it wasn't just "beauty and perceived classiness being exchanged for money," but rather a mutual exchange and partnership. I can see all of these characters (except Freddy) deciding that friendship and a permanent alliance are what they really want in life, and taking steps to achieve it. I don't think that Eliza and Professor Higgins could manage to live together without her killing him unless a) Pickering is there all the time for a buffer or b) Professor Higgins grows up and realizes that he can't get his own way all the time and starts to genuinely respect Eliza. As of the end of the movie, he's beginning to respect her (but it's still a new and fragile thing) and he assumes that having her back means that everything is going to go back to the way it was before. If you want to do the Eliza/Higgins thing with no Pickering, that's okay, but you're going to have to work to make me believe that Higgins can man up and change.
I'm fairly easy to please; I've been doing ficathons for over a decade and am very rarely disappointed with my gifts. I write long and detailed Dear Author letters because I find such things helpful when I'm writing for other people; if you are like me, here you go! If your style is different and a detailed letter makes you feel hemmed-in, feel free to do what works for you.
The most important thing for me in a fic is that the characters are well-written and recognizably themselves. Even when I don't like a character, I don't go in for character-bashing. If nothing else, if the rest of this letter is too much or my kinks just don't fit yours, just concentrate on writing a story with everyone in character and good spelling and grammar and I will almost certainly love what you come up with.
One thing: I do have an embarrassment squick, which makes humor kind of hit-or-miss sometimes. The kind of humor where someone does something embarrassing and the audience is laughing at them makes me uncomfortable. On the other hand, the kind of humor where the audience is laughing with the characters I really enjoy.
Please no incest.
Here are some other things to keep in mind (not all of which will apply to all fandoms): I don't like it when characters of color are pushed aside so that white characters can take center stage. I love the acknowledgment that female strength comes in many forms, of which the kinds put forward by modern western feminism are only a few--and women can be compelling and interesting without being "strong". I like cultural diversity, and to know that culture matters to people, and to see how different cultures interact and where the clashes are, but please don't exoticize anything. I like quirky characters. I like unreliable narrators. I like acknowledgment that different people can have different points of view without either of them being wrong. I like stories that engage with problematic aspects of the source, and which deal with privilege in one way or another.
I like plotty, gen stories, and plotty stories in general, but I don't like explicit sex, particularly when it's just thrown in for teh porn. If there's going to be sex, there needs to be a reason for it within the story--it advances the plot, or characterization, or something (and, again, if you have to do it, please don't make it explicit). I'm asexual; a lot of the time I don't even bother to read the sex scenes. Romance is awesome (as long as both are in character and the romantic plot doesn't hinge on one or both of them being an idiot), but sex-for-the-sake-of-sex is pretty boring to me. I generally prefer no slash.
I love worldbuilding. Sometimes I find exploring the corners of a world or universe to be as fun (or sometimes more fun) than reading stories set in it. I want to know what's behind the curtain. I love hearing about the economics, the politics, the religion, the clothing, the history, all of that kind of stuff. And I want to know why it matters--how is all this cultural background stuff affecting the characters, the plot, everything. You don't have to do deep worldbuilding, but I'll probably enjoy it if you do.
I like AUs, but not complete AUs or fusions (i.e. no highschool or college or coffee shop AUs, and especially not mundane AUs--nothing where you keep characters but drop most of the worldbuilding). I like fork-in-the-road type AUs, where one thing is different and the changes all result from that one thing, and you explore what might have been if such-and-such happened. Crackfic is really hit and miss for me, sometimes I love it and sometimes I can't stand it. Basically, if it's the characters we know and love in a ludicrous situation, that's great. If they're OOC or parodied in order to make something funny ... it's not funny to me. I like historical AUs, but only when the author actually knows the history period in question and does thoughtful worldbuilding to meld actual culture of the time with the canon--Regency AUs where everyone's attitude is modern but with a Regency #aesthetic drive me batty. ("But entailments didn't work that way!") I like angst, but not complete and unrelieved angst, and not angst of the type that people cause themselves by not talking to one another. While things can get dark or angsty in the middle, I prefer happy endings.
I like crossovers, but am picky about them. I have to know both fandoms, and they have to be well done so that the two fandoms mesh well in terms of worldbuilding. To use non-Yuletide examples: I can buy the Doctor popping up anywhere, because that's a feature of the show; I can buy Jack O'Neill from SG-1 meeting the Watchers from Buffy, because those two fandoms could plausibly exist in the same world; I can't buy Babylon 5 showing up in the Star Trek universe, because the worldbuilding, technology, history, and everything of the two shows are so different. (My AO3 bookmarks and pinboard bookmarks probably aren't a TOTALLY exhaustive list of fandoms I know, but pretty close, if you're interested in crossovers.)
Formats I'm open to: Traditional prose, narrative poetry, in-universe texts.
Fandoms:
Caprica
Tamara Adama. Things what I would love (pick any, all, or none as you like): something exploring Tauron culture, and culture clashes thereof. We know all about Joseph and Sam Adama's delicate relationship with their homeland, and a little bit about the first William Adama's relationship with all things Tauron, but not much about Tamara and Tauron. So, that would be great. Also! Cylons! I want to know what happens with the Cylons! We know (basically) what happened with Lacy and Zoe after the show ended, and their interaction with Cylons, but Tamara didn't get a new body and she didn't become the Reverend Mother, so what happened to her? Was she still around during the Cylon War, and if so what was her role? Was she still there, a ghost in the machine, when the Final Five showed up? What was her role in the Cylon culture? Not to mention, what does she think of her Dad and his new family?
There cannot be too much Tamara fic. I LOVE her, and wish the show had focused on her and her family more than on the Graystones and Sister Clarice. (Lacy, also, is awesome, and I suppose Zoe wasn't bad either, if she hadn't been the focus.) This was truly the show of the awesome girls, and it had potential if it hadn't been cancelled. (If you wanted to do something about her and Bill Adama from BSG meeting--particularly in some kind of complicated plot involving the Rebel Cylons and the Final Five--that would probably not be in the spirit of Yuletide but I would not complain. At all.)
Random Harvest
For me, this story cries out either for AUs or for post-canon stories. What if he hadn't recovered his original memories? What if he'd remembered, but hadn't forgotten Paula? What if the baby lived? What if she'd told him the truth, either right away in the interview for secretary or when he started seeing Kitty or when he asked her to marry him? What if they'd gotten caught leaving town and he'd had to go back to the hospital? And if canon stays the same, what happens now that he knows the truth? Is he upset that she knew and didn't tell him? Is Charles the same personality as Smitty? They've both changed and grown a lot over the course of the movie--how does that affect their relationship? Was she expecting that magically everything would go back to the way it was when they were young and in love? Was he expecting that knowing the truth would magically make him feel more whole?
I love this movie for its melodrama, for the luminous Greer Garson, for the way I spend the last half of the movie crying into my hanky and pleading with Paula to just TELL HIM already. I love how deliciously angsty it is, with such a wonderfully happy ending. (This movie is one of the rare exceptions to my avoidance of plots that hinge on people in love being idiots and not talking about it.) But I would also love a good dose of common sense put in somehow.
Dirty Computer - Janelle Monáe
As usual with Janelle Monae's work, the worldbuilding is GORGEOUS and I would LOVE something that explored it. The underground subculture that they're part of has so much richness to it. And, like, where's the money for those amazing outfits coming from? What do they do BESIDES hang out and party and be queer and subversive? Is this a post-scarcity world where everyone has a universal basic income? If there's such uber-tight control over society, how does the Pynk rest-inn stay in business? Is the tight social control universal, or only in some places? Could Jane and Zen have stayed in Pynk, but only if they were willing to never see Che again? Is Zen some kind of religious leader, and if so, how does that fit into everything? The Cleaners were some kind of hellish concatenation of bureaucracy and religion, how does that work and how does the religious part of it affect Jane and Zen's experiences? What was it like for Jane and Zen in there OUTSIDE of the cleaning? Are there lasting repurcussions of the nevermind, physically or neurologically (how does disability and neurodiversity affect things in this world)? Or you could do future-fic where they're political activists working to subvert the system. Or you could just do happy poly threesome! DNW darkfic or depressing endings.
Dirty Computer focuses far more on queer themes than on racial themes than Janelle's previous work, but there are still racial themes present. It can't be an accident that the people running the cleaning (both the cleaners and the mother superior) were white, and the three victims we saw were black. It harkens back to all the times white people have decided that people of color were dangerous and subhuman and evil and needed to be made more like the white people. The destruction of memories was a literal version of things white culture has metaphorically been trying to do for centuries. The renaming, the "it's for your own good," all of it.
I love the songs of this album. Django Jane and I Like That are my favorites, but Screwed and Pynk are also awesome and I love the lush, lyrical way they feed into one another, the visuals and the lyrics and the beat together. I also love the themes: love, and being true to yourself, and at the end refusing both to give in and to respond violently. Please, please, please, give some sort of a happy ending. Like, you don't have to magically wave a magic wand and make all the screwed up things of this society go away, but I want the three to end up happy together.
Black Lightning
I love the whole family. You could focus on any of them: stuff at work or school (how do you balance academics and being a SUPERHERO?) You could deal with the legal and/or political ramifications of the show (and oh, boy, howdy are there a lot of them, both personal and familial and educational and....). You could explore the different ways the three powered ones feel about their powers. You could do a mission. You could focus on the love lives of any of the characters. You could do future missions cleaning up the city's corruption and working with Billy Henderson to do so. You could do a really satisfying thing where the ASA gets publicly exposed and they all go to jail and everybody they hurt gets helped. You could do a family game night! DNW: please nothing too dark and nothing where the bad guys win.
BTW: normally I hate redemption arcs because they're too slick and too "oh, nevermind, he's good now (and hot) so it doesn't matter that he did horrible things! :)" But Khalil's arc was amazing and awesome AND THEN THEY KILLED HIM and I was so mad. If you want to do an AU where he survived, I would be delighted! (And then continue dealing with AAAAAALLLLLLL the issues that would stir up.)
What I love about this show is that everybody feels like real people, not the cartoonish thing you sometimes get with superheroes (much as I love them). And their family is a good family, which (despite its secrets) is supportive and loving and there for each other. And the sisters give each other grief like real siblings do. And everybody is an intelligent, thoughtful person, so that plots don't depend on people being idiots.
Rivers of London
Caroline Linden-Limmer. Really, anything with Caroline is great. Further adventures with Peter! Knowledge exchanges between practitioners of her mum's type and the Folly! Her connections with the demi-monde! Flying! Her perspective on British society, as an African transwoman adopted by English nobility, if you want to go a more serious route.
I love this series for many reasons (the snark! the vivid characters! the worldbuilding! the digressions! the wry-but-pointed social commentary on race and class and bureaucracy!). I love the fandom, too, but much as I love Peter and Nightingale, there's already a decent amount of very high quality fic about them, which is why I would prefer focusing on other characters. I only listed one character, but the more supporting characters pop up, the more excited I will be. I've read/listened to most of the supplemental material--including the micro-short stories that are impossible to get ahold of, which I can supply copies of on request--so you can use any of that material if you want. If Elsie "Hatbox" Winstanley shows up, for example, I would be delighted. One note on characterization. Caroline's mother Helena strikes me as one of those "of course I can't be racist, I'm a Good Liberal White Person Here To Uplift People." See, for example, the way she has more sympathy for the tiger than the local (African) children killed in that one story she tells about Growing Up In Africa. You don't have to go that route, but if you choose not to you're going to have your work cut out to convince me.
My Fair Lady
I really don't like the pairing canon tries to push on us. I think Eliza and Higgins make great friends, but any kind of romantic or marital relationship between them would be horrible for all concerned. But I love all of the characters as individuals and I love the banter when they're together. So! Ideas, take as much or as little of them as you like, mix and match, whatever. Eliza starts up a business, either a flower shop or a phonetics tutor (if teaching phonetics, bonus points if she uses the "Hungarian Princess" mystique and totally pwns Zoltan Karpathy), while Higgins and Pickering are "confirmed bachelors" together (wink, wink) and Eliza and Mrs. Higgins commiserate. Eliza marries Freddy, because he's a good person despite being brainless, and she likes being adored, and he's good with the kids and she uses his social cachet to keep her business and the whole family afloat, and when his brainlessness gets too much they go and have dinner with the Professor or Mrs. Higgins or Colonel Pickering. Or what about Eliza, Higgins, and Pickering settling down together in a poly relationship, either as a romance or just committed good friends, while Mrs. Higgins sighs because they're happy but it's terribly scandalous, and if any of her friends (or the Bishop!) found out, egads. Or Eliza marries the Colonel because they're good friends and she respects him, and when they're no longer dealing with the training every day and Higgins is a visitor instead of their host and Eliza has a woman friend in Mrs. Higgins, they actually are quite happy and content together. Or Eliza stays with Mrs. Higgins for a while as she's getting on her feet (possibly starting a business?) and Colonel Pickering keeps coming by to smooth things over and ask Eliza back, and he and Mrs. Higgins get together and pair up while the Professor is loudly aghast and Eliza thinks it's awesome. Whatever you choose, banter and humor is the key to this (though I do have an embarrassment squick, so laughing with=good, laughing at=bad).
It's been years since I've read any of the George Bernard Shaw play that this is based on, but definitely, go with the Shaw-esque witty banter. If you marry any of the characters off, it doesn't have to be romantic--these people are from an era and classes where romance and love are not the primary reasons for marriage. For the rich it's about alliance and preserving the family name/money/honor, and for the poor it's about needing to pool resources to survive, but in both cases love is a benefit not the main goal. Even Eliza, who objects to being sold on the marriage market, would probably think differently if it wasn't just "beauty and perceived classiness being exchanged for money," but rather a mutual exchange and partnership. I can see all of these characters (except Freddy) deciding that friendship and a permanent alliance are what they really want in life, and taking steps to achieve it. I don't think that Eliza and Professor Higgins could manage to live together without her killing him unless a) Pickering is there all the time for a buffer or b) Professor Higgins grows up and realizes that he can't get his own way all the time and starts to genuinely respect Eliza. As of the end of the movie, he's beginning to respect her (but it's still a new and fragile thing) and he assumes that having her back means that everything is going to go back to the way it was before. If you want to do the Eliza/Higgins thing with no Pickering, that's okay, but you're going to have to work to make me believe that Higgins can man up and change.
