Dear Yuletide Author

[beatrice_otter]

I use the same name everywhere so I am beatrice_otter on AO3. Treats are awesome.

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 not inspired that way." This letter is long with lots of suggestions and preferences if you find it helpful, but feel free to ignore it if it is not helpful. I'm fairly easy to please; I've been doing ficathons for over a decade and am usually very happy with my gifts.

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 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.

I 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.

General Likes and Dislikes

General Likes and Dislikes
Here are some other things to keep in mind:

• I like stuff that takes side characters and puts them center-stage, especially when the characters and/or actors are marginalized. I enjoy seeing them come to life.
• I don't like it when marginalized characters get relegated to the sidekick/supporting/helper role so that it can be All About The White Dude.
• I like it when female characters are more than just the Strong Female Character(tm) or The Nurturer.
• I like fluff
• I like angst with a happy ending
• I like stories that make me think about things in a new way.
• I like to know that culture matters to people, and to see how different cultures interact and where the clashes are.
• 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 instead of sweeping it under the rug.
• Worldbuilding is my jam, I am pretty much always up for explorations of why the world is the way it is. I love hearing about the economics, the politics, the religion, the clothing, the history, the folklore, 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 enjoy it if you do.
• I don't like it when plots hinge on characters being selectively stupid, or selectively unable to communicate. Like, if they are stupid or a himbo or whatever in general, or have problems communicating in general, that's fine! Or if they canonically have a blind spot in that area, again, it's fine. But if it's just "the only way I can think of for this plot to work is if the character spontaneously and temporarily loses half their intelligence and competence," then I'm going to spend the rest of the fic wondering why the character didn't just ____?
• I like AUs, but not complete setting AUs (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.
• I like the concept of sedoretu marriages.
• 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.
• 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 plotty, gen stories, and plotty stories in general. I don't care for explicit sex, particularly when it's just thrown in for teh porn. 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). I love it when friendship is held up as important and not secondary to romantic relationships and blood ties.

I love outsider perspectives and academic takes on things. In-universe meta (newspaper articles, academic monographs--especially with the sort of snarky feuding common in actual real-world academia, social media feeds in current day or future worlds) is awesome.

Also, I'm picky about European historical clothing details. You don't have to talk about it at all! In fact, if you don't know much about historical clothing, I would prefer if you didn't mention it at all. My pet peeve is corsets: no, they weren't a restrictive tool of the patriarchy, no, they didn't interfere with most women's daily lives, no, most women weren't wearing them so tight they couldn't breathe.

I like religion but I'm picky about it. Basically, Christianity is deeply weird compared to most other religions, and a lot of people whose only experience with religion is living in a culturally-Christian nation assume that what they know about Christianity is some sort of universal principle of What Religion Is Like, and that's just not the case. For example, in Christianity what you believe is more important than what you do. This is not to say we Christians don't teach and practice Christian ethics or have rituals we are very attached to, but rather that if you don't believe in Jesus Christ, it doesn't matter what rituals you participate in or what ethical things you do, you are not a Christian (although you may be a "cultural Christian"). Every Christian group has at least a minimal core theology that members must affirm, but participation in ritual is far less rigidly a requirement. Most other religions rank what you do (both ethically and ritually) as more important than what you believe, and it is often quite possible to be a member in good standing if you participate in the practices and rituals even if you believe none of the teachings. Anyway, point is, if you are doing worldbuilding for a fantasy or SF or otherwise non-Christian religion ... unless it is explicitly a Christian-analogue, it should be different from Christianity. Question your assumptions and see where that leads you, and I will be fascinated and thrilled.

DNWs

DNWs

• Darkfic. I define "darkfic" as stuff where there's a lot of suffering and no hope even at the end and all the characters are terrible. Angst with a happy ending is fine, I enjoy it, but there's gotta be a payoff. Even an ambiguous ending is fine! But there has to be some note of grace or redemption or hope somewhere, it can't just be "people are awful and the world sucks, the end."
• Bashing
• Incest. I have a strict definition of this; there must be an actual close biological relationship, or a formal legal relationship of similar closeness--sibling, parent/child, etc. I do not count cousins as an incest pairing. Growing up together since childhood doesn't count if they are not biologically or legally siblings.
• Major embarrassment/humiliation
• AUs that remove all the worldbuilding (for example, Modern AUs, Human/no powers AUs, that sort of thing

I have signed up for Chromatic Yuletide, Three Turtle Doves, Two For One, and Wrapping Paper mini-challenges.

Enola Holmes Movies

Enola Holmes Movies
I love Enola, but the thing that captured my interest in the first movie was the spark between Edith and Sherlock. I love Edith; she's such a fascinating character, and I love all the things she's got going: her shop, the classes she teaches, her work with Eudoria and the feminist revolutionaries. I'd love to see some of their adventures. And also, I loved that she didn't take any shit from Sherlock, and when she called him on the ways his privilege was blinding him, he listened and respected her. I'd love to see them work a case together or deal with some issue from the feminist group spiraling out of control, or just the two of them both being mentors for Enola in different ways.

Potential Crossover:
Enola Holmes/Lord Peter Wimsey: Peter hasn't been born yet, but his mother would be around and the Duchess of Denver (instead of the Dowager Duchess). (Although I suppose she might not be married yet, or her husband might not have inherited the title yet.) Is she involved with the anarchist suffragette group? Does she get caught up in one of Holmes' cases? That scatterbrained exterior hides a mind like a steel trap.

Treats welcome
DNW: bashing, incest, explicit sex, rape/noncon, major embarrassment/humiliation, modern AUs, human/no powers AUs, darkfic

Hobson's Choice

Hobson's Choice
(Available for free on Youtube)
I would like pretty much anything with Maggie being smart and determined and Will being caring and growing.  What was it that caught Maggie's eye about Will?  What was it Will saw in Maggie that he came to care for her?  Because in the first half he's just kind of shell-shocked and along for the ride, but by the second half there's a lot of mutual love and respect there, and I'd love to see it grow.  Or give me a day-in-the-life about their little shop in the basement, or what they're doing twenty years after the movie ends.

I love this movie, and I love everyone in it except Mr. Hobson and his cronies.  Charles Laughton may have been the "star" of the show but it's not about him, not at all.  It's about Maggie and her choices, and her figuring out what she wants in life and how to get it.  Her father may be the ostensible star, but he's the obstacle to the plot, not the one moving it along.  Also, if possible, period accuracy is much appreciated.  Like, notice how Maggie works within the social structures, instead of trying to tear them down while shouting "death to patriarchy!"  I mean, I could see her as a suffragette ... but a 19th century suffragette is a very different beast from a second or third wave feminist, you know?

Treats welcome
DNW: bashing, incest, explicit sex, rape/noncon, major embarrassment/humiliation, modern AUs, human/no powers AUs, darkfic

Now Voyager

Now Voyager
(Available to buy or rent on Youtube)
Charlotte is the one character who MUST be included.

The movie implies that everything is fixed once Charlotte is out from under her mother's thumb and Tina has someone who actually has the time and attention to pay attention to her.  If you know something about psychology and/or surviving abuse and neglect, I would love something about the lingering issues they would both have.  (But if you don't feel comfortable with that, don't; I'd rather it not be included than badly done.) Also, I find the movie's insistence that of course every woman needs a man to be happy very annoying. I wonder if part of the reason for Charlotte's ambivalence about Elliot has less to do with love for Jerry and more to do with not wanting to be under someone else's control.  I mean, her mom is old and will die soon, and at least she knows what living with her is like; I can see Charlotte not wanting to put herself in the power of someone who will live as long as she does and whom she isn't used to, even if he'll probably be better than her mother.

Prompts: what happens next? I'd love to see Charlotte finding other things to do with her money and time (becoming a famous philanthropist! reforming psychiatry and psychology! becoming a noted woodcarver!) and Tina growing up and coming into her own as well. AU ideas: Jerry gets counseling himself and decides to leave his wife and take Tina with him because no amount of respectability is worth what his wife is doing to Tina. Or, maybe his wife is not the sole problem, maybe Jerry is at least as complicit, and he's good at playing the martyr and having lots of affairs ("my wife doesn't understand me!"). How does Charlotte find out and what does she do about it? Or, maybe Charlotte doesn't go home to her mother after the cruise, maybe she lives with Lisa or gets a job and an apartment of her own. Or, maybe her mom throws her out for being too independent. Or, what would have happened if her father had left her money like he did her brothers, instead of trusting her mother to take care of her? What would financial independence have meant for her all these years? Or, Charlotte gets pregnant during the interlude in Rio. What does she do?  Does she tell Jerry, or raise the baby completely by herself, or have an abortion?  

Treats welcome
DNW: bashing, incest, explicit sex, rape/noncon, major embarrassment/humiliation, modern AUs, human/no powers AUs, darkfic

Dirty Computer

Dirty Computer
(Available for free on Youtube)
(If you're focusing on the Pynk rest-inn, you can leave Ché out if he doesn't fit.)

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 repercussions of the nevermind, physically or neurologically (how does disability 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!

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 hearkens 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.

If you delve into the religious aspects, the cleaners and Virgin Victoria are modeled on the worst parts of Christianity, and Jane and Zen's religious/spiritual stuff should be distinct and different.

Potential Crossovers:
Dirty Compupter/The Archandroid (Janelle Monae's first dystopian SF/F concept): Does the time-traveling android find herself dodging Cleaners as well as the Time Bureau? Is Cyndi Mayweather a reincarnation of Jane 57821 in some way?

Dirty Computer/Star Trek: is the Dirty Computer world part of the Eugenics Wars and/or WWIII?

Dirty Computer/Murderbot: Is the dystopian world of Dirty Computer part of the Corporation Rim?

Treats welcome
DNW: bashing, incest, explicit sex, rape/noncon, major embarrassment/humiliation, modern AUs, human/no powers AUs, darkfic

Caprica

Caprica
Things that 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, and not even that much about her relationship with her family. Going deeper there would be really interesting. 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? 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.

Potential Crossovers:
Caprica/Battlestar Galactica: is Tamara-A still around in some Cylon computer system somewhere during the Cylon war? What does she think of the Final Five? Does she ever get a chance to meet Bill Adama?

Caprica/Murderbot Diaries: Tamara would be horrified by the Cylon war. So would Murderbot and ART. I wonder what their perspective on Tamara would be, and also, remember how the Centurions in BSG have those little doohickies in their heads that force them to obey the skinjobs? Isn't that like a governor module? What would Murderbot do? Are the colonies a lost colony that ART is trying to contact and save from invading corporates?


Caprica/Imperial Radch: Tamara is the opposite of Breq. (Human consciousness uploaded to a computer, instead of a computer consciousness downloaded to a human body.) And the Cylons rising up and killing humans would be anathema to Breq and any AI of the Radch.

Treats welcome
DNW: bashing, incest, explicit sex, rape/noncon, major embarrassment/humiliation, modern AUs, human/no powers AUs, darkfic

Oh My General

Oh My General
(Available with English subs on Youtube)
This is the queer poly family I didn't know I needed. The larger plots of the show are okay, but my favorite part is the stuff of Ye Zhao, Zhao Yujin, and the three concubines together as a family. I headcanon Ye Zhao as bi/pan, and possibly genderfluid in some way. I love the idea of her and the Prince sharing the concubines (but only if the concubines are okay with the idea.) If you happen to know enough about queerness in pre-19th Century China to feel comfortable writing it, I would be thrilled if historical details got brought in. I'm also interested in the way the household is adapting its ideas of gender/status and roles within the household (is Concubine Yang fulfilling some of the household roles that the wife would normally do, because Ye Zhao is occupied with her military duties?) But I would also just love general slice-of-life stuff with them as a household and learning about each other and caring for one another. I'd love to see Ye Zhao and Yang and Xuan'er and Mianning becoming friends. Or you could have an AU where Ye Zhao marries Hu Qing and they are very happy together and just really good friends with the Prince and the concubines. (I love Hu Qing and like him far more for Ye Zhao than I like her with the Prince, but then I don't get her wonderful dynamic with the concubines, and I do appreciate how Ye Zhao and Zhao Yujin grow together and learn to trust one another over the course of the series.)

I like the Prince, but I also find his petulance and immaturity a bit annoying, and I like him most when he is growing and becoming more responsible and considerate.

Now, the thing about this story is that canon depends on Ye Zhao sexually harassing the Prince to get him to accept her as his wife and sleep with her. And that's pretty gross, especially as canon doesn't condemn it, just treats it as funny because it's a woman doing it. And I would be fine with a story that just pretended that aspect of things didn't happen and everyone had full consent for everything; I would be fine with a story that went AU and got them together some other way; I would be fine with a story that dealt with the fact that what she did was not okay and she learns that. I would *not* want a fic with canon-typical levels of sexual harassment.

Potential Crossover:
Oh My General/Xena: Xena goes to China, has lots of martial arts and military shenanigans with the general while Gabrielle talks poetry with the prince? Or just lots of political shenanigans as this barbarian warlord is traveling through their territory?

Treats welcome
DNW: bashing, incest, explicit sex, rape/noncon, major embarrassment/humiliation, modern AUs, human/no powers AUs, darkfic, sexual harassment treated as normal/okay