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and who did you say is calling?
Dearest darlingest yuleingest goat (my dear santa),
thank you for writing a story for me! I have no doubts whatsoever that I will love the pants off of whatever you write :)
I'mma talk about canons first and then get to general reading preferences.
I'm massively in love with Mary Shelley, her life, her works, her position as The Teenaged Girl Who Invented SF. Her family history. But I have kind of a hard time getting emotional fulfillment out of the text of Frankenstein itself, because of the way that Mary writes through a male "I" - it's a perfectly cromulent trick, used by many, in this case it doesn't work for me. Broadly, I'm asking for fic that re-injects teenaged-girl-ness into the story. Here are some specific prompts:
-Gender changes. Monster is a girl? Victor is Victoria? Someone is genderqueer/variant/trans*? A big theme of Frankenstein is Victor prerogating women's reproductive role - something playing off of that?
-there's also a reading of Frankenstein as Mary's youthful indictment of her father William Godwin's parenting strategies. Mary was the daughter of a pair of radical luminaries, and after her mother's death in childbirth she was basically apprenticed to her dad as a writer, and so was unusually well-educated for a woman in her time but also really closely managed by her father for a long time. And Godwin had weird views about the role of the family - because the institution of heterosexual marriage was problematic, he saw all traditional parenting as potentially toxic. Victor's refusal to parent the monster has been seen as a portrait of his absentee fathering. (Mary's followup book to Frankenstein, the novella "Mathilda," is an even more intense take on her relationship with her dad - the story is about a father using his daughter to fill the romantic void left by his wife's death, and after Mary sent it to her dad to read he locked it away; it wasn't published until the 1950s. Here's a Project Gutenberg link to the piece, if you're interested; it's a much shorter and easier read than Frankenstein.) So - pull this subtext up to a textual level? Or, a meta-text fic with marginal commentary? Some mingling of fiction and biographical realities?
-(god you could also mock the shit out of The Monster as Girly Emo Teenaged Diarist. I'm super protective of teenaged girls, though, and while they can be ridiculous I also think they get way too much grief. If you can poke (gentle) fun while still maintaining the overall Celebration of Teenaged-Girl-Ness that's what I'm really looking for from this request, that would be cool.)
I love the way this movie explores the love triangle between author, story, and listener. From the very beginning, Alexandria's imagination is shown as actively transforming Roy's stories - for example, when her "Indian" is desi instead of NDN, or when she casts Roy, not her father, as the masked bandit. As Roy gets more depressed she fights for her rights to their shared imaginative space - he wants to kill it all, she tells him that it's not fair for him to unilaterally destroy something that they share. She even punches through into the text itself as the Bandit's Daughter, taking control of the story.
What I find really enchanting about the movie is how empowered she is in this. The camera usually backs her up, showing her interpretation of the story rather than Roy's intended one. The storyline backs her up, not letting Roy get away with the cruelty of that "burn it all down" mode, calling it out as a cruelty. Alexandria herself is totally unselfconscious about her rebellious readership - it's just what she does. But she's also a titchy wee baby. As Alexandria gets older, will she be able to maintain that "no fucks given" creative freedom? What role does storytelling end up playing in her life, at fifteen, twenty-six, forty-two? Her family are shown to be migrant workers - how do class, culture, and ethnicity impact her ability to create transformatively? enable her, or hold her back?
(I didn't request Roy as a character, because it seems a little incredible that he and Alexandria would ever manage to re-connect, and I'm interested in this fandom in a less id-tropey way than that. But I can really see Roy being a distinct and vital part of Alexandria's mental landscape, either as a memory or as an imaginary friend, fulfilling a need for someone who understands creativity and pain.)
I'm looking for gap-filler fic with this request. How do Aral and Ekaterin connect with each other? We get a sense of how Ekaterin relates to - at least the idea of - Cordelia through her conversations with Miles on Komarr, but there's very little in-text about her relationship with her second father-in-law, or his with her. In a way, I think they're more alike than she and Cordelia; both are what Miles would call "true Vor," and Ekaterin's turning-to-stone habit seems like something Aral would understand. He would get the references to the Maiden of the Lake that Cordelia might well miss, or at least not fully comprehend experientially. I do request, though, that you eschew Bujold's habit of having Aral comment on Ekaterin's sexual attractiveness, which bothers the hell out of me :(
some prompts:
-like Ekaterin, Aral also had a disastrous first marriage that ended in the violent and gruesome death of his spouse - although, arguably, he was his first marriage's Tien. Aral speaks to Miles of it, but not to Ekaterin. What does Aral Vorkosigan understand about the emotional highs and lows of successful and improved remarriage?
-could you do something about the dreadful dissonance of the green silk wallpaper in the Vorkosigan residence? I can't stand the idea that Ekaterin unknowingly set up a major trigger for Aral in his own house, it sets off all of my embarrassment and poor-communication squicks. Is there any way that the creation of the second green silk room could be spun as not appallingly unfortunate? This might be a tall order, but if anyone can think of anything, I'd feel you'd done me a great service.
-there could also be babies. Babies are good. There aren't enough bits with babies in the books.
I ship the PANTS off of Thomas/Victor, anything from gen smarm to full porn. I really like the complicated way that the boys express love and antagonism simultaneously, the fistfights and inappropriate questions that are almost like recognition of intimacy, or a demand for more. They're there for each other and they fuck each other up, and the two things are connected by the overarching gentleness of the community formed by the Rez.
Also, Thomas is my BOO, and the bottom and/or sub, plz. I have a real and pressing interest, I confess it, in him getting fucked.
some prompts:
-forced intimacy scenarios: on the Rez, on the journey, in the hospital. Snoozing together on the bus. Have to share a motel bed. Left alone together as children. Something that doesn't let them get away from each other, that makes them sit in the presence of their real connection.
-first time fic with angst and pining and tropey goodness and stuff.
-so I'm really into Thomas-as-shaman thing, I know that Victor deconstructs it with the "dances with wolves" point but Thomas follows this intense patterns in his interactions where he plays the fool and smiles sweet and by so doing confronts his interlocutor with themselves. Even in the "dances with wolves" conversation where Victor absolutely has a point, you end up hearing a lot of anxious masculinity in what he finally says, you see the psychological cracks that his identity performance is pasted over. I think about what media fandom tried to do with shamanism through Blair Sandburg from The Sentinel back in the day and think about how much better a fit Thomas Builds-the-Fire is for those stories. But I also want to say - I'm a white USian, and I know that the over-generalized fantasy of the "Indian Shaman" has massive real-life negative impacts. So - if you, dearest Yule Goat, feel up to telling the story of Thomas's relationship with the specific spirituality of the Couer d'Alene rez with accuracy and depth, oh my god go for it, do that thing, but if not maybe avoid this prompt.
I'm easy for hurt/comfort, found families, legacies and history, creative and diverse worldbuilding, domesticity, figurative language, women's liberation, and meta elements. I don't have that many iron-clad squicks; most are context dependent. Like, gothic violence is great but grimdark or "gritty realism" is nah, shaming and bullying are upsetting unless they're hot, happy endings are great but bitterness can be so elegant. I like stories about sex that don't make assumptions about how sex should be done. I like explorations of non-normative gender and sexual identities that reflect the reality of biodiversity and extend the erotic imagination. I'm into stories about emotionally intense relationships and don't mind if familial ones cross incestuous lines. I've mentioned some DNWs about specific canons above. If you're interested, my del.ici.ous bookmarks can be found here, with pull-quote bits of the part that got me to fall for the fic.
thank you for writing a story for me! I have no doubts whatsoever that I will love the pants off of whatever you write :)
I'mma talk about canons first and then get to general reading preferences.
I'm massively in love with Mary Shelley, her life, her works, her position as The Teenaged Girl Who Invented SF. Her family history. But I have kind of a hard time getting emotional fulfillment out of the text of Frankenstein itself, because of the way that Mary writes through a male "I" - it's a perfectly cromulent trick, used by many, in this case it doesn't work for me. Broadly, I'm asking for fic that re-injects teenaged-girl-ness into the story. Here are some specific prompts:
-Gender changes. Monster is a girl? Victor is Victoria? Someone is genderqueer/variant/trans*? A big theme of Frankenstein is Victor prerogating women's reproductive role - something playing off of that?
-there's also a reading of Frankenstein as Mary's youthful indictment of her father William Godwin's parenting strategies. Mary was the daughter of a pair of radical luminaries, and after her mother's death in childbirth she was basically apprenticed to her dad as a writer, and so was unusually well-educated for a woman in her time but also really closely managed by her father for a long time. And Godwin had weird views about the role of the family - because the institution of heterosexual marriage was problematic, he saw all traditional parenting as potentially toxic. Victor's refusal to parent the monster has been seen as a portrait of his absentee fathering. (Mary's followup book to Frankenstein, the novella "Mathilda," is an even more intense take on her relationship with her dad - the story is about a father using his daughter to fill the romantic void left by his wife's death, and after Mary sent it to her dad to read he locked it away; it wasn't published until the 1950s. Here's a Project Gutenberg link to the piece, if you're interested; it's a much shorter and easier read than Frankenstein.) So - pull this subtext up to a textual level? Or, a meta-text fic with marginal commentary? Some mingling of fiction and biographical realities?
-(god you could also mock the shit out of The Monster as Girly Emo Teenaged Diarist. I'm super protective of teenaged girls, though, and while they can be ridiculous I also think they get way too much grief. If you can poke (gentle) fun while still maintaining the overall Celebration of Teenaged-Girl-Ness that's what I'm really looking for from this request, that would be cool.)
I love the way this movie explores the love triangle between author, story, and listener. From the very beginning, Alexandria's imagination is shown as actively transforming Roy's stories - for example, when her "Indian" is desi instead of NDN, or when she casts Roy, not her father, as the masked bandit. As Roy gets more depressed she fights for her rights to their shared imaginative space - he wants to kill it all, she tells him that it's not fair for him to unilaterally destroy something that they share. She even punches through into the text itself as the Bandit's Daughter, taking control of the story.
What I find really enchanting about the movie is how empowered she is in this. The camera usually backs her up, showing her interpretation of the story rather than Roy's intended one. The storyline backs her up, not letting Roy get away with the cruelty of that "burn it all down" mode, calling it out as a cruelty. Alexandria herself is totally unselfconscious about her rebellious readership - it's just what she does. But she's also a titchy wee baby. As Alexandria gets older, will she be able to maintain that "no fucks given" creative freedom? What role does storytelling end up playing in her life, at fifteen, twenty-six, forty-two? Her family are shown to be migrant workers - how do class, culture, and ethnicity impact her ability to create transformatively? enable her, or hold her back?
(I didn't request Roy as a character, because it seems a little incredible that he and Alexandria would ever manage to re-connect, and I'm interested in this fandom in a less id-tropey way than that. But I can really see Roy being a distinct and vital part of Alexandria's mental landscape, either as a memory or as an imaginary friend, fulfilling a need for someone who understands creativity and pain.)
I'm looking for gap-filler fic with this request. How do Aral and Ekaterin connect with each other? We get a sense of how Ekaterin relates to - at least the idea of - Cordelia through her conversations with Miles on Komarr, but there's very little in-text about her relationship with her second father-in-law, or his with her. In a way, I think they're more alike than she and Cordelia; both are what Miles would call "true Vor," and Ekaterin's turning-to-stone habit seems like something Aral would understand. He would get the references to the Maiden of the Lake that Cordelia might well miss, or at least not fully comprehend experientially. I do request, though, that you eschew Bujold's habit of having Aral comment on Ekaterin's sexual attractiveness, which bothers the hell out of me :(
some prompts:
-like Ekaterin, Aral also had a disastrous first marriage that ended in the violent and gruesome death of his spouse - although, arguably, he was his first marriage's Tien. Aral speaks to Miles of it, but not to Ekaterin. What does Aral Vorkosigan understand about the emotional highs and lows of successful and improved remarriage?
-could you do something about the dreadful dissonance of the green silk wallpaper in the Vorkosigan residence? I can't stand the idea that Ekaterin unknowingly set up a major trigger for Aral in his own house, it sets off all of my embarrassment and poor-communication squicks. Is there any way that the creation of the second green silk room could be spun as not appallingly unfortunate? This might be a tall order, but if anyone can think of anything, I'd feel you'd done me a great service.
-there could also be babies. Babies are good. There aren't enough bits with babies in the books.
I ship the PANTS off of Thomas/Victor, anything from gen smarm to full porn. I really like the complicated way that the boys express love and antagonism simultaneously, the fistfights and inappropriate questions that are almost like recognition of intimacy, or a demand for more. They're there for each other and they fuck each other up, and the two things are connected by the overarching gentleness of the community formed by the Rez.
Also, Thomas is my BOO, and the bottom and/or sub, plz. I have a real and pressing interest, I confess it, in him getting fucked.
some prompts:
-forced intimacy scenarios: on the Rez, on the journey, in the hospital. Snoozing together on the bus. Have to share a motel bed. Left alone together as children. Something that doesn't let them get away from each other, that makes them sit in the presence of their real connection.
-first time fic with angst and pining and tropey goodness and stuff.
-so I'm really into Thomas-as-shaman thing, I know that Victor deconstructs it with the "dances with wolves" point but Thomas follows this intense patterns in his interactions where he plays the fool and smiles sweet and by so doing confronts his interlocutor with themselves. Even in the "dances with wolves" conversation where Victor absolutely has a point, you end up hearing a lot of anxious masculinity in what he finally says, you see the psychological cracks that his identity performance is pasted over. I think about what media fandom tried to do with shamanism through Blair Sandburg from The Sentinel back in the day and think about how much better a fit Thomas Builds-the-Fire is for those stories. But I also want to say - I'm a white USian, and I know that the over-generalized fantasy of the "Indian Shaman" has massive real-life negative impacts. So - if you, dearest Yule Goat, feel up to telling the story of Thomas's relationship with the specific spirituality of the Couer d'Alene rez with accuracy and depth, oh my god go for it, do that thing, but if not maybe avoid this prompt.
I'm easy for hurt/comfort, found families, legacies and history, creative and diverse worldbuilding, domesticity, figurative language, women's liberation, and meta elements. I don't have that many iron-clad squicks; most are context dependent. Like, gothic violence is great but grimdark or "gritty realism" is nah, shaming and bullying are upsetting unless they're hot, happy endings are great but bitterness can be so elegant. I like stories about sex that don't make assumptions about how sex should be done. I like explorations of non-normative gender and sexual identities that reflect the reality of biodiversity and extend the erotic imagination. I'm into stories about emotionally intense relationships and don't mind if familial ones cross incestuous lines. I've mentioned some DNWs about specific canons above. If you're interested, my del.ici.ous bookmarks can be found here, with pull-quote bits of the part that got me to fall for the fic.