Dear Yuletide Author

[christycorr]

Hi there!

I love Yuletide and I'm super into each of these tiny fandoms, so I'm glad to hear someone out there is on the same boat :D This goes for every prompt in this letter, but let me say it right upfront: I’m a very non-picky recip and I will be happy with anything that you have fun with.

I did my best to come up with helpful suggestions, but please feel free to go 100% Optional Details Are Optional regarding anything and everything in the prompts below. If these canons inspire you to write something completely different, I’ll be delighted to read it. Please share with me what you like about them.

General likes/dislikes • Ted Lasso • The Kingdoms • The Interdependency • Terra Ignota

general likes/dislikes

Things/tropes I love: UST, banter, angsty and/or fucked-up characters and interactions, clever characters actually being clever, court intrigue, found families, crime/heist fic, unusual world-building, time travel/time loops, outsider POV, poly relationships, sex magic of any kind, dubcon, infidelity (A/B with either already in a relationship), kidfic, domesticity, post-break-up second chances, fake relationship, enemies- or fuck-buddies-to-lovers, hatesex, denial/delay, voyeurism, pining, and soulbonds.

I love short PWPs and long plotty fics alike; go for any tense, rating and genre you prefer. I’m equally happy with gen and shippy fic. Feel free to go full-on AU if you wish, or to stick closely to canon; I’ll never mind either way. Also, regarding ships: I’m a multishipper at heart and will never be unhappy about your shipping choices, no matter what you go for.

Things I dislike: daddy kink, the word ‘cum,’ watersports, scat, graphic rape as plot device to lead to h/c.

In case you happen to want to poke around my accounts for any reason, your best bets are Pinboard (christycorr), AO3 (christycorr) and Storygraph (christycorr).

Fair warning, I have written more below about some fandoms than others. Please don't take this as a sign of lack of enthusiasm on my part! I enjoyed every one of these fandoms a lot and I had a really hard time this year choosing which ones to leave out of this list.

Ted Lasso (TV)

Roy Kent, Keeley Jones, Jamie Tartt

Okay, so, full disclosure: I fell hard for this ship a couple of episodes into season 1 and I have yet to recover. Above all, I adore Roy Kent. I love the narrative arcs the show's given him so far. I love his gruff and no-bullshit yet absolutely mature and honest way of talking about what he's feeling (and how that still doesn't always work out as intended!). I love how soft he is with people he cares about while still being extremely himself. His relationship with Keeley is brilliant—the way they're both learning to still be honest without hurting one another, the way they're making space for the relationship in their lives and are learning to have it grow (with all the bumps along the way), the way Keeley calls Roy out on his bullshit unrelentingly. I love it that the show gave even Jamie the opportunity to call him out, too, and that he listens.

The progression of both Keeley and Roy's and Roy and Jamie's relationships is just *chef's kiss* for me. It melts my heart that there are gaps in Keeley and Roy's relationship that they're struggling to learn to talk about. That being supportive and loving still may still not be enough even when it's done right. That it can still get you hurt even when you're all supposedly on the same page. (Sometimes your girlfriend just wants to be a tree, Roy!) I also love it that Keeley still has a tender spot for Jamie, and it's endlessly adorable to me how much he's grown since the show started. Baby steps, sure, but each of them is so great.

I also—look, to be honest, I just really want Jamie to get a good railing. He is such a brat sometimes, and even this softer Jamie is still a brat. I really enjoy how he can bring out the worst and the best in both Roy and Keeley. I also enjoy it that they both get under his skin like almost no one else—and that they both know well which buttons to press. They're both so good for his praise kink, and he is so eager for it. (For the record, I'm not remotely picky about who literally tops or what kind of sex anyone has.) I think that OT3 would be a fantastic combination.

Here are some prompts in case that's helpful (but please feel free to go in a different direction if you prefer!):

• A missing moment anywhere in the show (or an AU branching off from any scene/arc, e.g. Man City!Jamie) that turns into the three of them interacting more. Maybe Jamie drives home with either of them one day, or maybe Roy finds Jamie at Keeley's. I'd love to see them interact more in any capacity; I'd love to see them banter regardless of whether you actually have it building up to sex.
  
• Jamie and BDSM. Just literally anything based on this setup, if it's your cup of tea. I don't even care if it's Keeley whipping him or if he gets Roy to finally call him good or what, but just. Yes. Please.
  
• If you don't want to write this ship or if you're only into any two of them together, that's absolutely fine, too! Any fic that explores their relationships, shippy or no, will be welcome.
  

The Kingdoms - Natasha Pulley

Missouri Kite, Joe Tournier

This ship, omg, it destroyed me so much. As soon as I finished this book I just wanted to grab everyone I've ever met and tell them about these two. I love ships that hinge on the conflict between duty/loyalty and emotion, and I love repressed disaster assholes with a heart of gold; Missouri Kite delivers in spades. He is so amazingly incompetent regarding any part of dealing with Joe's everything. It's a trainwreck you can't look away from. Couple that with Joe's unfathomable genius — between taking the whole book to read a goddamn important letter and being entirely unable to put two and two together at any point whatsoever, jesus christ — well, they sure do deserve each other.

I feel like the book ultimately handwaved away the personal complications that might've kept them apart with overly conveniently-timed deus ex interventions, and I would be happy to see them explored in any kind of AU setting: say, Missouri with Joe's children, or Missouri-Joe-Agatha negotiations, or anything else you like.

Here are some prompts in case that's helpful (but please feel free to go in a different direction if you prefer!):

• What if Joe borrowed Kite's lone brain cell to have a full pair for once figured things out earlier? Maybe he comes up with a brilliant plan that backfires, maybe he confronts Kite, maybe they fuck about it?
  
• The flashback glimpses into their lives in London fascinated me, and I feel cheated that we didn't get to see them struggle through Society Life all that much. What shenanigans did they get up to? I'm all for hearing more about Kite's Stoic Sacrificial Pining and Joe's utter lack of chill.
  
• I feel like there was an unnecessary level of angst on Kite's part about Joe's wedding given that the latter had said directly that he loved both of them. If you'd be up for exploring what their arrangement could've been like, either in past!timeline or AUing her survival, go for it! (I'm happy with any kind of poly configuration there, with or without direct incest.)
  
• I would also greatly enjoy POV shifts of any kind: we seem to often get the most oblivious character's perspective of any scene, and it could be interesting to have anyone else's perspective of what was going on.
  

The Interdependency - John Scalzi

Rachela I, Worldbuilding

I found the worldbuilding in The Interdependency fascinating and when we learned that the prophet at the heart of the Empire’s foundation was a marketer with a really good eye for spin—be still my heart, that is an amazing long con I want to hear all about. I feel like what we got about their traditions and the power balance in the Interdependency was scarcely enough—I'd love to hear more about it.

The glimpses of Rachela's personality that we got through the Memory Room seem incredibly interesting and full of contradictions: she tries to present herself as perfectly reasonable and dispassionate, yet clearly has a sizeable ego and an excessive attachment to secrecy. I love it that she’s had a thousand years to achieve self-awareness but presenting a nice image of herself is still more important. And that Grayland sees right through her. A+.

If you’d like to show her interacting with other emperoxs, Thomas Chenevert or with Grayland herself—or honestly, anything else that comes to mind!—by all means, go for it! The prompts below are all focused on the founding of the Interdependency but I’m not at all married to that timeframe.

Here are some prompts in case that's helpful (but please feel free to go in a different direction if you prefer!):

• Why did Rachela decide to start a religion, specifically, out of any number of PR moves she could've chosen? What rituals did she imbue her new religion with and how did she make that choice? How did they affect the balance of power in the fledgling Interdependency?
  
• What prophecies did Rachela choose to make and why? How did she create faith in her religion among her subjects, among her own family, among the Houses? Were there any true believers?
  
• How did she get the Houses on board? How did she shape the role of Emperox given the conflicts between the Houses and the need for balance?
  
• Rachela mentions that her first successors were her direct descendants and that Jiyi was particularly important as a distancing measure in the Memory Room for their benefit. How did Rachela-the-human-being deal with her own feelings about leaving her family and being restricted to a room as Rachela-the-AI?
  

Terra Ignota - Ada Palmer

Worldbuilding

(I’ve read Perhaps the Stars, so you're welcome to include spoilers if you wish. This section was written before the book's release and does not contain spoilers.)

I've been rereading this series lately and falling in love with it all over again. The intricate, geeky worldbuilding fills me with delight at every turn, and I keep coming across morsels of story hinted at in throwaway passages that I would love to hear more about. I reckon the experience of reading Terra Ignota is in all likelihood rather unique, so above all, author, tell me what about this world interests or intrigues you. Whether it's kitchen trees or religion as kink, Romanovan senatorial procedures or the Anonymous' succession—was there anything that made you go 'ooh,' go back to reread a paragraph or a page, and then it just kept bouncing around in your brain?

Here are some prompts in case that's helpful—fair warning, it's a long list of random possibilities, but you are very VERY welcome to choose something of your own that has nothing whatsoever to do with the items below.

• Literally everything about the Mardi bash' and their war fascinates me to no end. What were the discussions like? What were their priorities? What did they consider acceptable losses, and how did they decide? What games did they play together? What exactly was Mycroft's relationship with each person in the bash'? How did each of the bash' members contribute to the war planning?
  
• Also: everything about Mycroft's rampage. In what way was each death tailored to each character? What was the whole thing like for the media? For random citizens having their first taste of violent spectacle after such a long peace? What did it feel like to be a Mardi waiting for your turn, what was on the Mardis' minds?
  
• I love how much the narration is entwined, in-universe, with a sense of fictionality. Mycroft is all kinds of unreliable; Achilles is part fiction and part fanfiction (badfic writer Apollo!); Bridger's existence itself is hazy at best; and who even knows what's going on with JEDD at any point in time. If you want to explore this and show an alternate POV for something, take a stab at writing a scene from Apollo's Iliad, talk about in-universe art trends based on Mycroft and the Mardis or other characters, or even explore in-universe RPF fanfiction, which I'm sure would have responded brilliantly to the news about Madame's, have at it! Alternately: what other stories/characters did Bridger hear about from Mycroft and how might they have come to life?
  
• The Hives: The passages where someone sums up the worldviews of each Hive as different perspectives on the same thing (e.g. JEDD to the Mitsubishi directors, Felix at Madame's) are fascinating to me, and I kept coming back to them. If you find this interesting too, I would love to have one aspect of life/history/whatever and what each of these baseline Hive POVs makes of it.
  
• I find Masonic institutional storytelling and their playacting when it comes to longstanding tradition and stability amazing (so dramatic!). If you want to explore more about how this or any other Hive self-mythologises through narrative, institution, stereotypes and more, I'd be thrilled to read it. Also, in connection with the two previous points, it would be very interesting to see what different Hives/factions make of Mycroft's book—how the tale gets interpreted and retold and used for propaganda for different POVs.
  
• Related: the restrictions and stereotypes connected to language usage in this world are also really interesting to me. It's hard to tell how much of it is Mycroft being Mycroft, but we also get glimpses of these complicated language feelings from Ancelet, Martin, and others, plus JEDD's whole...thing. Less clear is how widespread less popular languages are, and whether their survival is reliant on specific nation-strats, like Mycroft and Papa's Greek. If this is your cup of tea, you could tell the story of a language and who treasures it, for example; or who most definitely isn't allowed to do so. (Or how/why Mycroft learned so many of them.)
  
• The Sanctum Sanctorum: Mycroft shares some of the things that [are/were] kept there, but what else did the Masons (or other Hives) hold dear enough to warrant a place there? What does that tell us about each Hive's priorities, about what this world treasures?
  

(Disclaimer in case it's relevant: I don't care which pronouns you decide to use for anyone in this series in English or otherwise. Take your pick!)

General likes/dislikes • Ted Lasso • The Kingdoms • The Interdependency • Terra Ignota

Thank you so much, mystery author!