yuletide 2025 - dear author letter

[deepestbluesky]

Dear Author Letter

hello! if you’re making something for me, i’m already guaranteed to love you and whatever you write, but i also know that personally, i love getting a ton of info to work from in exchanges, so i’ve written a bunch here! feel free to look through it for ideas, but also please please don’t feel beholden to it. this is intended as a bouquet of options that you can pick one or two things from, not something you should feel obligated to check boxes off for. not all of it is even going to be relevant to all the fandoms i’m requesting!

treats policy: definitely open! i would be honored to receive treats.

generally, i love rarepairs and genfic and poly ships - i really enjoy character interactions between characters who don't always interact a lot in canon, and stuff like genfic and rarepairs gets you a lot of that. found family is one of my always-favorite tropes too! i’m also very big into pairings in fic that aren’t necessarily OTPs - casual sex, friends who hook up sometimes, queerplatonic relationships, relationships that change over the course of the story, complex relationships that don’t fit neatly into a platonic vs romantic vs sexual divide; those are all things i find really fun, and as a person who likes multishipping, i’ll check out anything as long as it has cool stuff going for it, even stories that “contradict” ships i generally enjoy. of course, i’ve loved many many stories that are classic romance between two characters too! i just tend to like them more if there are also important relationships with other characters.

in terms of tropes and themes, i love a good future fic that digs into what ways a character might have changed since we knew them in canon. i love stories that play with POV, either using something unusual like second person or an unreliable narrator whose POV hides things from the audience until a crucial moment. i always enjoy any sort of magical/supernatural/fantasy au (especially if it’s regular setting- But Now With 200% More Magic! OR in the case of canons with magic, modern AU but there’s still magic around). similarly, i love TTRPG AUs, whether that’s character in a modern setting playing a game together or fantasy AUs based on something like D&D. i love a good queer genderbend AU, especially if it’s trans characters or if it engages with how changed genders might change the characters. i also love a good ‘take your fandom to work’ or Very Specific Setting AU. i am somewhat ambivalent about omegaverse in general, BUT i love omegaverse that focuses on betas or has a focus on worldbuilding, especially if it’s not the classic omegaverse setup. with AUs, part of the joy for me is seeing how the creator plays with canon, whether that’s a canon divergent au where you get to see how a small change can make a big impact, or a complete AU that still echoes canon in interesting ways, or a fusion where you get to enjoy how the creator has “cast” characters in roles or combined/split up roles from one canon to fit another.

some more likes
HEISTS! love a heist
road trips (or canon-appropriate road trip equivalent)
stories About queerness
bondage (as a kink or as something like a d/s au)
circus au
banter/snarking
tattoos (just as a thing or as a tattoo store au)
superheroes
vampires
tentacles (but only if everyone involved enjoys it)
multimedia or non-traditional-narrative fic
characters poking fun at each other as a form of affection

extra special likes
polyamory where everyone’s relationship with each other is different and they get different things from each person
Queer Themes (including/especially characters struggling to articulate queerness or feeling settled in a form of queerness they can’t clearly explain)
original characters and/or outside POV
that moment where someone sees something new in someone else for the first time and is taken aback by it
significant changes in how one character refers to another character (names)

DNWs
(non-canonical or non-temporary) major character death
rape/non-con
stories centered around the terminal illness of a main character
cutting in a realistic self-harm sense. i don't mind descriptions of cuts, or general self-harm behaviors, or fantasy things where a character cuts themselves for magic reasons, or anything else adjacent to this basically. i only mind this specific thing.
pregnancy as a major focus
amnesia

dislikes

high school au
big power imbalance
age difference as a feature (like, i don’t dislike age difference pairings, but it’s not an appeal for me)
cheating/infidelity
angsty endings
PWP (i'm happy to read fics that revolve around sex but i'd like there to be something else too - porn with plot is a-ok with me!)

definitely feel free to check out my bookmarks, works, and gifts on ao3 for more of an idea of what i like! or other posts i’ve made on this here dreamwidth or on my tumblr at the same username!

Fandoms and prompts!

Western Stars
i love bruce springsteen and i really liked this album! the most basic of prompts would be: write me a story about what's going on in any of these songs! i'd obviously love if it was queer (love me a queer springsteen interpretation). i'm also fascinated by the way this album uses actors/performers/stuntmen and the like... artifice of it all while also feeling classically springsteen Authentic. but on the other hand, a like scifi reinterpretation of any of these songs would rule. so truly DO WHAT YOU WANT!

Samalamadingdong
last year, i wrote this about Escape the Greenroom: “this seems very ripe for 'what if sam is no longer on the outside but in the episode/puzzle too' which is a scenario i think is very tasty.” AND THEN WE GOT IT!!! but that just means THIS episode is ripe for ‘what if BRENNAN is no longer on the outside but inside the Scenario’. what if sam defeats the brenataur and then… somehow it doesn’t end… what if the knights and henchpeople unionize against brennan (and sam?). what if we get a buffy-halloween-episode-esque moment where people start to become their costumes? i think generally my feelings on gamechanger fic are always: what if something out of their control Went Weird? i'm not opposed to some shipping in a fic for this fandom, but i'd also be delighted to have it be completely gen.

Challengers
ah okay hm lemme try to be coherent: i loved this movie SO MUCH bc it hits a lot of things i really enjoy. i love an ot3 and i also love a 'these three people are obsessed with each other and i genuinely can't tell in what way' and that's so much the vibe here. i love SPORTS NARRATIVES and the ways that being a professional athlete kind of means being completely out of touch with the vast majority of people and the requisite intensity about something that ultimately isn't very important. i love people who are kind of horrible, especially to each other, but also maybe it's genuinely for the best if they're doing it together. i'm more interested in them as adults than as teens/college students, whether that's post-canon or alternate events of the last few years before new rochelle. i'm less interested in a totally AU for this canon because i think the history is so important to their relationship, but if there's an AU that you think preserves that history and would be really cool: sure why not! (and i do always love a future/sci fic sports au lol)

Pitch
am i still mad Pitch got cancelled? ABSOLUTELY. anyway. i’m big on the team-as-family concept, and i still think about the naked photo shoot episode for that reason, that so many of the team was willing to do that for ginny because they care about each other! anything with ginny+the team and just. being a Team. i would especially love if livan was included in this, but it’s not essential. i would be happy with any stage of mike/ginny, but i’d prefer it take background to ginny and her friendships with the other players (or with mike, regardless of if you decide to write them in a relationship). please feel free to include as much actual baseball as you want! i loved how real the sports felt in the show.

Heir Apparent
so, every time i go to write or talk about time loops and groundhog day concepts, i realize that actually personally, the foundational time loop text for me is Heir Apparent. so literally anything that plays with the time loop nature of what Giannine goes through in the book would be excellent by me! i also think something looking at her trying to go back to normal life after all this would be neat.

Cyberchase
I watched this show SO much as a kid and i love it so much! honestly i’d love to read anything about it at all. but some ideas: what does digit do when the kids aren’t there. what if digit and buzz and delete have to team up for some reason. (obviously the kids are not in the tag set, but i do love the kids, so anything with them would be fun!) what if some random OC tries to convince the robots to unionize against their bosses for some reason. i always love the weird new places they go to in cyberspace, and the jokes that tend to get built into them (there’s a very characteristic sense of humor to educational kids shows, i feel, and it delights me lol), and the ways that things can just work however you want them to because they’re in a computer.

Time of Iron Series (Long Live Evil)
the thing about this book. is that we know it has a fandom in universe (well. in rae’s universe lol). but we also know that the story keeps CHANGING as people transmigrate into it. so WHAT does the fandom make of all this?? do people have different versions of canon and does it cause a ton of Discourse? what do people who were fans before eric make of the golden cobra? truly ANYTHING about what the in-universe fandom is like would be a DELIGHT to me, whether it’s like in-universe social media or eric and rae discussing their own fandom takes and experiences even tho they’re In It now, or anything else

Couple of Mirrors
i just watched this last year and let me just say: lesbians. thank you for your time. i think youyi should get to wander around being an amateur detective, bc she's honestly quite good at it, and yan wei can be her watson. also, given how much yan wei feels like a comic book character, with her wild backstory and cartoonish booby traps in her house and general vibes, i would love a superhero AU hehe. i also would love just like... post canon slice of life! or: do they get to be happy can they get away from whatever of yan wei's life seemingly caught up to them in the last baffling 5 minutes of the show! I Just Think They're Neat! (would i also be fascinated by something where youyi has to think through her very close friendship with a'wan and wonder if maybe there was more to it but also mourn that bc of how it ended? yeah absolutely, but i realize that's quite far away from the nominated characters for this fandom lol.)