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Dear Yuletide Author, 2017
Oct. 6th, 2017 07:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carlyinrome>>Yuletide letter for AO3 user thecarlysutra
Dear Yuletide Author,
Hello! Yuletide is my favorite event on the fandom calendar, which makes you one of my favorite people! Below, I have outlined some optional details for each fandom, as well as some general likes and dislikes.
Normally for Yuletide I ask for happy stories, or at least happy endings, but I'm going to suspend that request for this year because of my chosen fandoms and the way I'm feeling this year, I guess. The following, however, are actual triggers, so please do not include: sex that is anything less than enthusiastically consensual; and anything about institutionalization or graphic details of severe mental illness, especially with regards to suicide and self-injury.
Unpleasantness aside, let's talk about what I do like!
I love stories. I love how they fit together, how the elements mesh and work like little machines. I love characters. I love tiny little details about characters like the freckles on the bridge of their nose and the bedtime story their mother read to them when they were five. I love tiny connections between things, and sense memory and intuition and fate. I love found families, and I love relationships where the characters love and trust their family more than they do themselves, more than the laws of physics. I love characters who try to be brave and try to be strong, even when everything is against them. I love characters who hope. This year, I'm not asking for happy stories, but I don't want stories without hope. Please don't write me torture porn. Write me characters doing hard things and enduring hard things, but never letting it erode them.
Here are my specific requests, and a little more information on each.
What Happened to Monday? (2017)
Character: Saturday Settman
What Happened to Monday?is a Netflix original movie in which Noomi Rapace (the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) plays identical septuplets in an overpopulated world where siblings are illegal. The girls’ grandfather spends his life constructing an elaborate system so that all seven sisters--named for the days of the week--can live safely, but their carefully constructed world begins to fall down around them when the oldest, Monday, disappears suddenly and without a trace.
This movie blew me away, and I was less than 20 minutes into it before I desperately craved fic. I am so intrigued by this family, and the way they've had to fit themselves into this world, how they've sacrificed to live in the world just one day a week, how most of the world they see through each other. I love them all, but Saturday, Saturday. The girl who has dance recitals instead of school, who goes to bars instead of the office, the girl who bleaches her hair and wears bright makeup… the party girl who loves life, but has never been touched, the beautiful girl who is nervous about men and sex, who swallows her fear to put her sisters’ lives above her own. I want to know about her. I want to know all about her.
Thunderheart (1992)
Characters: Ray Levoi, Walter Crow Horse
Thunderheartmirrors the American Indian Movement’s struggles with the federal government in the late 1970s. Mixed race FBI agent Ray Levoi is sent to Indian land because of the Sioux blood he inherited from his long dead father, a PR stunt that completely remodels Ray’s world.
I request this almost every year, and I will probably continue to do so, because I have an endless appetite for stories from this fandom. For this fandom, I really want post-canon stories, not just what happens after Ray leaves the rez, but further down the road when Ray is less shell shocked. I ship Ray and Walter and their snarky star crossedness hard, but if that's not your flavor, I would still adore them working together as friends and partners. Please not too much pain for this fandom. Obviously there is the potential for darkness, especially if you delve into either man's past, but let's not meditate on the bad parts too hard. I love fluffy domestic shenanigans from the Levoi-Crow Horse household--stuff like hurt/comfort (I just really enjoy Ray being forced to let his armor down long enough for Crow Horse to play doctor), putting together new furniture or an appliance or a bicycle (For a child? For Christmas? For their child?! I'm getting myself worked up.) … I would adorea story where they have to go to a somewhat formal event, a family wedding or a political fundraiser, quietly united as each other’s solid ground in an unfamiliar terrain.
Popular (TV)
Characters: Sam McPherson, George Austin
Popularwas the first outing of today's television super guru, Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story, Scream Queens, Glee, Nip/Tuck, etc.) It’s still one of my favorites, a gutsier, more Scream Queens-esque Gleewith more character development than song numbers. The show centers around the battling factions led by perfect teen queen Brooke McQueen and passionate outsider Sam McPherson, and how life at Kennedy High changes once Brooke’s single father and Sam’s widowed mother start dating and cohabitating.
A lot of what I love about this show is how bizarre and ridiculous and dramatic it is, but for this story, I am really hoping for something different tonally, something… adult. Sam McPherson is going to grow up and be something; she will have a life after Kennedy, and I want to know about it. I really like Sam and George together, and I wish she had gotten to have a relationship that was about Sam, and not that girl living in Brooke McQueen’s shadow. I would really like this story to be Sam-centric, to show how she blooms once she is able to disentangle her roots from the strangleholds of Kennedy High; of a family where she is an afterthought at best and a pariah every other week; of a world where she is a romantic consolation prize to every boy whose eye she's ever caught; of Brooke McQueen, Homecoming Queen. I'm sure there's probably a lot of shit for Sam to wade through, like Andy Dufresne crawling through the sewer pipes to freedom, and I am also sure that, once she can breathe free and feel the rain on her face, Sam McPherson is going to stand up.
no subject
Date: 2017-11-13 06:01 am (UTC)Mike