Dear Yuletide Writer letter

[eye_of_a_cat]

Dear Author,

Thank you so much for writing for me! With all these fandoms I’ll be happy with anything that avoids my DNWs, so the prompts below should be taken as suggestions only - if none of them speak to you I’m happy with you writing something that does. 

General likes:

I like angst, complicated feelings, stories that dive into a character and what motivates them, questions of loyalty and of how the past affects the present. Fluff and humour are fine too! Happy with any degree of smut from ‘none at all’ to ‘E-rated’. Other things I like in fics: parenthood/kidfic (prefer if it’s about the emotional feels of the adult characters rather than cute kid things); canonverse AUs of the ‘what if this thing happened differently?’ variety; worldbuilding in fantasy/sci-fi fandoms; and established relationships being complicated. I am cool with shippy stories about characters getting together, but my absolute favourite thing at the moment is characters trying to make established relationships (canon or otherwise!) work. I am also a big fan of ships overlapping or otherwise getting all mixed up together whether that’s in terms of painful emotional feels or cheating or all flavours of angst - go wild. I prefer things not to get neat resolutions and I love ambiguous endings.

DNWs:

Bashing of characters or ships (individual characters can say what they like about whatever but I’d prefer the narrative wasn’t weighing in behind them); traumatic birth or pregnancy loss; omegaverse; noncon as a major plot element (dubcon is fine); heavy dom/sub dynamics with a male dom and female sub (if it’s more of an undertone I’m fine with it); underage; watersports and scat. I prefer my AUs to be canonverse but I’m not 100% wedded to that one, as long the characters feel recognisable to you. 

Rings of Power

I love love LOVE both Galadriel and Elrond as individual characters, and also love love love their friendship. I would love to read a platonic friendship story about that - maybe about Elrond learning who Halbrand really was and how Galadriel feels about that, or some pre-series scene with Elrond trying to talk her out of her increasingly obsessive hunt for Sauron. 

Or you could also write about either of them individually! What I like about Galadriel is her determination, her pride, her grief, her increasing sense of being alone even among her own people, her absolute devotion to her cause and what that means to her. (If you want to ship her with either Sauron or Celeborn then I am cool with either and indeed both of those, but please don’t be mean to the other character/ship - I’m a fan of both.) What I like about Elrond is his generosity and warmth, his sense of having a heavy legacy on his shoulders from his father and the elves’ past, of being something of an outsider both from being ‘half-elven’ and from being young enough in elf terms that he’s still treated as youthful by Gil-galad and others; that he doesn’t remember much of the past that the others have lived through, and he’s dealing with the legacy of it all the same.

You 100% do not have to know any Tolkien to write these characters for me in this fandom and I am happy if you’re writing them on TROP alone. But, if you are into Tolkien stuff beyond the show, then other things I like from both of their backstories: how Galadriel left Valinor out of pride; what it must have done to her to lose most of the Noldor she knew including brothers and cousins; how Elrond has been effectively orphaned at a young age in a horrible way and was raised by a very non-ideal parent figure in Maglor and is carrying about three different families’ worth of generational trauma and has, somehow, still emerged kind as summer.

Archer’s Goon

My favourite thing about this book is the world-building and I would love to read more about exactly how the ‘farming’ works. How do their everyday lives work? What sort of issues do they deal with outside what we see in the book, and what’s it like to be a local authority bureaucrat reporting to a strange wizard (somebody’s got to be dealing with them directly, surely)? I’d love to read a story about that from either perspective.  

I absolutely love the dynamics that the siblings have, and while I’m only asking for either Torquil or Hathaway I’d be more than happy if you want to include both or bring in some or all of the others too. There must be so much bickering. How do they manage if there are, say, some complications about a festival of historical music - is that Hathaway or Torquil’s domain? Do they fight over who gets it (or who doesn’t)? Do they make deals and trade-offs? Anything in this vein would be great too!

The Expanse (TV)

I would love any of these characters, or other canon characters too if you like. Things that interest me about each of them:

• Amos: his and Naomi’s relationship where he treats Naomi as a kind of externalised conscience, but in a way that works surprisingly well for both of them. I’d love to read anything about how he sees that, or about how she does. This can be romantic or platonic; I didn’t get a shippy vibe from them in the show so I’m not set on it here, but if you want to go there I will absolutely go there with you. 

• Naomi: as above re: Amos but also, how she thinks about her past, and her loyalties, as a Belter and as one of the Roci crew. I’d love to read about how she thinks about her divided loyalties; about how good she is at her job (and how that’s both got her to the place she is now in a positive sense, but has also been used against her); or what she’s hoping for from the future. 

• Bobbie: she is so principled and keeps coming across things that press her to compromise on that, and there is a deep toughness in her that won’t just cast aside what she values. I’d love to read about how she thinks about Mars and her loyalty to it, and how that has or hasn’t changed at any point for her.

• Avasarala: honestly I would read about her sitting and watching paint dry, she’s amazing, but I especially love how competent she is (and the brief moments when she isn’t!). I loved her interacting with Bobbie and would love to read more of that in any variety. 

For All Mankind

I love all the women in this show and would like to read more about any or all of these characters, and I’d be happy if you want to bring in any others, too, especially Molly. Any combination of shipping here would be great although is not required. Any kind of character study of any of them individually (especially Margo and how she thinks about her career, or Tracy and how she thinks about her past, how what she wants from life has changed over time). 

One of the things I love most about this fandom is how long a time period it spans, and how much people’s lives change over that period, and I’d love to see some of that reflected in fic, whether looking back or looking forward.

Elidor

Any story you want to tell about the world of this novel would be more than amazing. My favourite thing about it is how the world of Elidor slips through into 1960s slum-clearance Manchester; you could write more about that, or about how the child characters feel about that. Is it something they continue to watch for as they grow up? Do they ever see signs of anything similar happening elsewhere?

Station Eleven (book)

I tagged Kirsten as the character and if you want to bring in anyone else she interacts with (or even doesn’t in canon but could in fic!) then that’s great too. 

My favourite thing about the novel is the sense of hope it has after tragedy and pain, and I would love to read something that captured the sense of that in any way - especially, for Kirsten, how she found the Travelling Symphony, what it means to her, or what any of the Shakespeare plays they put on (or any other plays they might put on, choose anything you like!) mean to her.

Thank you!
Cat (eye_of_a_cat on AO3)