my yuletide letter

[lotesse]

Yay yuletide signup! I had such a hard time winnowing down fandoms this year, and I ended up offering way more than I usually do. But I couldn't help it; they were all so tasty.

Dear Yule Goat,

Know this first thing: you are so awesome, I don't even.



I'm a happy-ending kind of girl. I like stories about people in love, sexual or otherwise - stories where people care for and help one another. It satisfies my idealistic streak. Hurt/comfort junkie, happy with slash, het, and gen unless otherwise specified. I do love angst, oh do I ever, but I kind of need happy endings afterward. h/c is probably my biggest kink, which I have meta'd on here. I'm also really into family-of-choice tropes, and a sort of hyper-emotional intimacy.

One note: I'm trying, per thingswithwings' observations, to help make Yuletide more diverse this year. My requested fandoms are a pretty white bunch - all these Scandinavian books! - because I'm a Midwestern bookworm who's still overly attached to her childhood favorites, but most of these books allow for a diverse pool of minor characters. Stratton Porter's Indiana could easily have been home to Black or Native peoples, Seaward in no way has to be lily-white, and the postmodern character-world at the end of Sophie's World should be able to hold figures from all world literatures, not just pale Scandinavian stuff. I'm not asking you to, like, create chromatic original characters or anything, because this is a challege and I wouldn't ask you to build new characters from whole cloth, but just to be aware that the world is likely to contain people who are not white/male/straight/young/able-bodied. It would make me really happy if my Yuletide story could in some small way contribute to progressive-izing the party, and I'm definitely going to do this is the story that I write!

I have all the mundane and expected squicks: deathfic, rape, mpreg, embarrassment squick.

Gene Stratton Porter - Limberlost Books, Freckles James Ross MacLean/MacLean/The Swamp Angel. Freckles&MacLean smarm? Freckles/Angel shipping? I just mainly want Freckles cared for and adored - he's my pet character.

My granmum gave me the Limberlost books when I was just a wee thing, because she's an Indiana girl. I'm a Michigan child, but it's all the same rural midwest thing, and these books really resonate with me. They remind me vividly of a childhood outdoors. My Gene Stratton Porter tag is here.

Freckles in particular hits my hurt/comfort kink in a major way. I utterly love him, as a character, and I like seeing him be taken care of. I love the high, fairytale drama of Stratton Porter's writing. Het and gen only for this one, please - too much my childhood for anything heavier than smarm. But smarm is great so! I don't need all three of my requested characters at once; I was more aiming for possible combinations than demanding full inclusion of all of them.

Astrid Lindgren - Ronia the Robbers Daughter, Birk/Ronia. Ronia and Birk during their time living in the woods? After? When they've grown up? When they first met? I love the sweet first-love thing they've got going on.

I possibly have a thing for childhood romance/early sexuality, and this book pings it hard. I've rambled about it a couple times: sex and kidlit and we had a complicated childhood. Not to mention the Ronia/Birk family of choice thing. I love their practicality, and their lovingness, and their freedom from prejudice. I love the space Lindgren gives them to grow up in, free of the constraints of the adult world, just the two of them alone together with nature.

Susan Cooper - Seaward, Calliope/Westerly. I really want to know what Cally and West did after - what a teenage love affair between two people who'd experienced what they have would look like. Sex is definitely a plus!

This book was huge in my own sexual coming-of-age. They actually had sex! And I was little enough that it was still a Big Deal. So all my memories of this books are kind of tinted with a rosy, breathless, adolescent haze of incipient sexuality. But I also love the philosophic nature of Cooper's work, and this book really appeals to my Inner Pagan. I love the selkie thing to pieces, and the complicated morality of the narrative, and all the cool High Fantasy stuff. My Susan Cooper tag is here, though most of it is talk about "The Dark is Rising," but it pretty much summarizes my reasons for loving her writing as a whole.

Jostein Gaarder - Sophies World, Alberto Knox/Sophie Amundsen. Sophie/Alberto postmodern waffling. What does the life of an escaped character look like, once the book has come to an end? How does that much philosophy change the internal landscape of a fifteen-year-old girl? The novel didn't do much with theorizing gender or sexuality, and that would be v. cool.

I read this book when I was fifteen, and I sat up all night hidden away from my mum to do it. It completely gripped on to me - it's remained one of my favorite books. I like how empowered Sophie is - she gets to act, and makes things happen, and is occasionally very impolite to important grownup people who deserve it. And I've always been fascinated by the end, both philosophically and in terms of character. (note: I did a year at a Great Books college, and I kind of have residual Greek Philosophy Issues. Do with this what you will!) Sophie leaves everything she knows and ends up adrift in this strange world with nothing familiar except Alberto. What does their relationship look like once they've escaped? I have a history of liking smart!girl/older!man pairings (Buffy/Giles, Jane/Rochester, Hermione/Snape), and I'd really like shipfic for this fandom. However, I know not everyone is in to cross-generational pairings, so I'm good with gen too!