Yuletide letter - 2020

[suitablyskippy]

Dear Yuletide writer,

Hello! I’m really glad we both love at least one of these canons, and it’s great to sort-of-meet you. Predictably, I’m also suitablyskippy on AO3.

First of all, please don’t worry about writing something I wouldn’t enjoy! I always have a wild old time doing Yuletide, and I’ll be very happy just to receive fic for any of my requested canons. This year I have five requests, with two characters requested in each fandom, and so long as the relationship between those characters is the focus then I’d be more than happy with ship fic or gen, in any fandom.

I’ll give some very general likes/dislikes at the top here, and get more specific in my individual requests.

General likes:

•  humour!!! I’ve requested some pretty dark fandoms this year, but I love black comedy, so please feel free to treat that dark content just as irreverently as you like.
• weird and wacky tropes showing up in serious (or not-so-serious) settings: bodyswaps, time loops, trapped-in-a-confined-space... the weirder the better, as far as I’m concerned
• missing scenes, missing episodes, missing chapters
• pre-canon and post-canon
• road trips
• lotus-eating machines
• case fic
• canon-divergent AUs
• ensemble casts
• a strong sense of setting
• anything that feels like it could slot right into canon, in one way or another
• bad endings – all kinds, any kinds: unhappy endings, downer endings, abandon-hope-all-ye-who-enter-here endings, endings where the characters are happy but under the circumstances they really shouldn’t be, endings where all seems well but the reader has the context to know things will soon get worse...

 

Relationship likes – all apply to both ship & gen:

• generally speaking: THE WORSE THE BETTER, I like toxic character dynamics that stay toxic (and/or get even more so); I’m not really interested in unhealthy relationships getting healthier.
• co-dependency
• obsessiveness (mutual or one-sided)
• intense claustrophobic intimacy of all sorts
• manipulation – overt, covert, emotional, for a specific purpose, purely for the hell of it, etc.
• relationships which are damaging to one or both parties involved, but they don’t know or don’t care, and won’t stop
• people who don’t much like each other but still can’t stay away
• people who are so different they just can’t/won’t understand each other
• people who are the worst possible influences on each other
• all of the above at once at the exact same time
• and just to reiterate, I like all of these exactly as much for gen relationships as for ship dynamics! I’ve requested five pairs of characters who all have more or less nightmarish relationships to each other in their respective canons, and in all cases I love the level of dysfunction that canon already provides.

 

Things I don’t want:

• PWP, graphic sex scenes, fic that’s heavily focused on porn, etc.
  • I don’t mind sexual content in fic, especially not if canon already contains it! But that isn’t what I read fic for, so I’d prefer not to receive fic of any kind that’s primarily pornographic.
• non-canon character death (of requested characters)
  • and for Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun specifically, since they’re already dead: non-canon exorcism of requested characters, or anything else that would result in ghost characters being permanently erased in a way which would be equivalent to death for human characters
• AUs which change the setting of canon (e.g. in space, coffee shop)
• crossovers

 

~

 

Arrested Development

George Michael Bluth, Maeby Funke

It’s too bad for George Michael that he’s the only member of his entire family who possesses both a moral compass and any internalised sense of the incest taboo, because you know that if literally any other Bluth wanted to get with a family member they wouldn’t feel a moment of shame or hesitation before making it known to that family member (...and have already demonstrated as much in canon). I love that Maeby is absolutely a self-absorbed, self-interested Bluth to the core; she’s sly and manipulative and conniving and she’s frequently very good at it, which already sets her apart from most of her other equally nightmarish relatives. She’s a more-than-usually terrible girl, and George Michael is a more-than-usually virtuous boy; Maeby lacks all sense of shame or morality but luckily George Michael has double the normal amount, to compensate – they’re the perfect, awful balance.

I really, really love George Michael/Maeby, and I’d love to receive ship fic for this fandom! Fic where any feelings remain unrequited on Maeby’s side, or deliberately not acted on, is also very welcome; I love how unstoppable George Michael’s crush remains in the face of so many failures, and how every tiny encouragement renews his hopes sky-high anyway. Canon has covered requited, unrequited, and every messy moment in between, so I’d be happy with any flavour of relationship between them so long as that relationship, whatever it is, is the focus.

What I especially love about George Michael/Maeby is the way that it’s played like such a sweetly ordinary crush on George Michael’s side: he does everything Maeby wants, hangs off her every word, starts blushing and stammering around her, constantly embarrasses himself trying to impress her; he’s re-treading the same ground as so many tired old sitcom storylines about a teenage boy making a fool of himself for his crush, and he’s such a sweet, normal boy that compared to the rest of his family his storylines really do seem sweet... except it’s incest. Wacky, unlikely situations are always managing to push him into proximity with Maeby, like any other cheesy old sitcom crush storyline... except it’s incest. He’s a nice, normal teenage boy with a nice, normal teenage crush... except it’s incest.

It’s that clash between the superficial innocence of his puppy love and the fact it’s incest that I love best about it, and I’d love to read anything that takes that puppy love and runs with it. I’m also much more interested in fic set during seasons 1-3, while they’re both still teenagers in that scandalous on-again, off-again relationship territory. As for prompts:

• Any other classic sitcom teen crush storylines that can be made awful, Arrested Development-style?
• Maeby and George Michael go on a school trip?
• Michael suggests a character-building weekend of family camping, and he knows of course Maeby and George Michael will want to share a tent, being cousins and such good friends?
• Maeby decides to run away from home to make her parents notice her, and George Michael at once accepts that the time has come to fake his death, abandon his father, and commit to life on the road with Maeby forever and ever, or at least until she gets bored of it next week?
• Maeby pulls George Michael in as a last-minute extra for her latest blockbuster?
• An incredibly unlikely series of events leads to a masquerade event at the high school, which in turn leads to thrilling plausible deniability for cousin-kissing in public?
• Maeby acquires an alarming new hobby, so George Michael immediately acquires it too?
• Maeby gets herself arrested for any of a number of frankly very likely crimes, so George Michael promptly vows to pursue a life of crime too?

One of the main things I love about Arrested Development is how readily (and how often) it goes joyfully for the crushing downer ending – no lessons learned, everyone’s plans frustrated, all hopes squashed, no one’s situation improved, no one changing unless it’s for the worse – so please don’t feel any need to go for a happy ending here, either!

 

~

 

Basic Eight - Daniel Handler

Flannery Culp, Natasha Hyatt

I was very happy to receive fic for this fandom last year, but I love this book so much that it’s always the more, the merrier! I love its surreal and awful pitch-black humour, I love the endless layers of weird meta tricksiness, I love how vivid the prose is, I love Flan’s preoccupation with pedantry over remorse and/or responsibility, I love how she constantly butts in on the past with the present to remind us that where she is now she obviously knows everything already, I love how shamelessly she keeps reminding us about her own unreliable narration but still somehow turns out to have been a hundred times more unreliable than you ever could have guessed. I just really love this book, and I’d be overjoyed with anything written for it at all!

As for Flan and Natasha, I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything more painfully charged with unrequited sexual tension in my entire life than the scene in Flan’s bedroom before V__’s party, when they’re watching each other get changed – and I’d seriously love ship fic for these two, never mind the logistics (especially since Flan herself clearly didn’t, given how often they’re physical together in canon). I love the sensuality of their relationship, and how often Flan’s diary slides sideways into just admiringly describing Natasha’s sex appeal; I love how much they love each other, and how often they tell each other that they do. Their relationship is so intimate that it feels like they’re locked together in their own intense and passionate little co-dependent bubble long before the truth about Natasha comes out, and it gets so much worse/better on rereads: how often Natasha talks about how she’ll always be there for Flan, how she’ll do anything for her, her brashness and aggression towards everyone else compared to her tenderness with Flan... The layers of nightmarish dramatic irony go about five miles deep, and I love it; it breaks my heart for them but I love every last word of it.

Literally anything involving them would make me incredibly happy, but as for specific prompts:

• more unrequited sexual tension
• requited sexual tension
• Flan and Natasha go haring off on a spontaneous BFF roadtrip, heavy on the drink driving
• Flan and Natasha always seeming to end up playing gay chicken, except only in an ironic and very sexy intellectual classic Hollywood kind of way, obviously
• assorted parties they’ve been to, assorted wild nights they’ve spent, assorted memories of the night before that Flan manages to dig up from her post-blackout haze the next morning
• five times Flan blamed her devastating level of sexual attraction to Natasha on the alcohol, and one time she couldn’t quite manage it
• slice-of-life scenes that would be entirely ordinary if it weren’t for how bizarre their relationship is
• snapshots of other past moments when their ultra-intense friendship has nearly overbalanced on the brink of becoming something more 

I really like the surreal being treated like it’s completely normal, so I’d especially love anything that dives into the bizarre reality of Flan-and-Natasha with a totally straight face. Flan might be oblivious to the nature of Natasha’s existence, but everyone around her can see exactly what’s going on, and it’s nothing like the way Flan herself perceives it.

I listed PWP fic in my DNWs, but I’d like to be clear that I’m totally down with canon-typical sexual content for this fandom! And in fact I’m pretty curious about how the two of them could pull it off, if they ever let that unrequited sexual tension get a little more requited – both logistically, and also just in terms of the convoluted mental hoops Flan would have to create and then jump through in order to convince herself it was actually happening at all. Does any awareness of the reality break through? How would she reframe it all to avoid acknowledging the truth, either in the moment or after the fact?

If possible, I’d prefer something set before or during canon, rather than afterwards – I prefer Flan with Natasha, rather than without. (Present!Flan narrating events in past!Flan’s life with the awareness that she’s going to lose Natasha anyway is fine, though! More than fine, in fact – I’m fully down with her canon-typical loneliness for Natasha.)

 

~

 

Beyond Black - Hilary Mantel  

Alison Hart (Beyond Black - Hilary Mantel), Colette (Beyond Black - Hilary Mantel)

This whole book is like a layer cake of human cruelty, and that’s what I love so much about the relationship between Colette and Alison. Of all the horrors Alison’s experienced in her lifetime, Colette is one of the least of them – but that’s hardly saying much. The spiteful, envious bullying, the mockery, the resentment, the vicious petty acts of control and humiliation, the way that it started off so happily between them and brought both of them genuine friendship and success, and then went so rotten so fast, and continued on for years only growing more and more rotten all the time, both of them openly believing Alison would be useless now without Colette... Their relationship is foully toxic in all the most mundane kind of ways; it benefits them both as much as it damages them, and I’m as obsessed with it as they are with each other.

• Anything set during those claustrophobic years of their near-constant road-tripping around the ringroads of Middle England – the tense, forced intimacy of more nights on the road? The aftermath of a show gone very well, or very poorly?
• They live together, work together, travel together, rarely spend time with anyone but each other: their lives are reduced to each other, and although at first they love it that way, over time they grow to loathe it – and I’d really like to see anything that focuses on the clash between the happy, successful honeymoon period after they first got together, and the sour misery of later years.
  • A disagreement from the early years, vs. a disagreement from the later years? Colette’s genuine (if cynical) interest in the psychic world, vs. Colette’s scathing disdain for the whole thing? A dinner they shared on the road, vs. a dinner they shared at their home on the hill?
• For most of the book I was on the edge of my seat wondering if Alison/Colette was actually going to happen – and I still feel that there’s a whole lot of space for it to have happened between the lines of canon anyway! I’d really love ship fic for this fandom, in whatever rotten, dysfunctional way you’d like to write it.
  • An ill-advised drunken one-night hook-up, which Colette aggressively blames on Alison while explaining that she is of course so physically revolted by Alison that obviously it couldn’t have been her own fault...? Or the lingering aftermath of that hook-up: does Colette keep bringing it up for months as her newest source of resentment to hurl at Alison? Or does she refuse to talk about it and only obsess over it in private instead, adding it to the pile of reasons to hatefully fixate on her? It’s easy to imagine their painful emotional intimacy overspilling into something else, which would have felt real and meaningful to both of them at the time but which Colette, being Colette, would later reject and repress and despise Alison for, because the alternative is self-examination.

Colette’s obsessive focus on Alison’s body, on that advert for lesbian anal fun, on the way so many people assume they’re in a lesbian relationship, on the terrible risk that Alison really might be a lesbian and/or attracted to her, on her own years-dead failure of a relationship with a man she never even liked to begin with: all of it adds up, and to me it feels a lot like she’s in denial of even the possibility of attraction to women – particularly to that woman. And with Alison’s kindness, and perceptiveness, and unwillingness to protect herself from acts of kindness even knowing they might hurt her, I can easily see how she might take steps to indulge Colette’s interest, knowing it was what Colette wanted but knowing that Colette would never ever act on it herself.

I also love the pitch black comedy of this novel, and the sense of dry mockery running below just about everything that happens. The level of mundane detail in the setting is something else I love, too: the relentless grinding banality of these characters’ lives surrounds them in every possible way, and the grey, exacting accuracy of the scenery descriptions is very beautiful to me. 

If there's sex involved, I'd prefer that it's not the detailed focus of the fic, in line with the vagueness of the sexual content in the novel too. And just to add: there’s obviously a huge amount of physical/emotional/sexual child abuse in this novel, and while I don’t have a problem with any of that content if you want to touch on it in some way, I’d strongly prefer that it isn’t the focus of any fic.

 

~

 

地縛少年花子くん | Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun | Toilet-bound Hanako-kun (Manga)  

Hanako | Yugi Amane (Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun), Yugi Tsukasa (Jibaku Shounen Hanako-kun)

Since this is an ongoing manga, I’ll say upfront that if any major new Yugi information comes to light between now and reveals, then I don’t mind at all if you choose to ignore it – no worries about staying up-to-the-minute canon-compliant!

My interest in this manga is 100% laser-focused on the relationship between the Yugi twins, which is a trainwreck-in-motion that’s been coming screaming and burning off the rails at a thousand miles per hour for approximately the last sixty years and is showing no signs of stopping, to my joy. I love that the entire basis of Hanako’s existence as a ghost is how fucked up he is about his brother; I love that Hanako is unquestionably in charge of every situation he’s involved in... until Tsukasa reappears, and the natural twin hierarchy reasserts itself; I love how soon Hanako stops having a debilitating emotional meltdown every time Tsukasa’s around, and starts treating him like a nuisance again instead – and, most of all, I love how much it’s clear that Hanako genuinely loves and cares for Tsukasa, despite everything. He’s horrified by Tsukasa’s behaviour, and also murdered him that one time, but he doesn’t hate him; he isn’t scared of him. The genuine strength of feeling vs. the genuine nightmare fuel of the actual context here: I love it, I can’t get enough.

And, on the other hand, I’m in love with how much Tsukasa loves his (after)life: he’s having a fantastic time every second of every day, doing whatever the hell he wants to whoever he wants, and doing it whenever he wants it. He adores Hanako, he hugely enjoys emotionally manipulating Hanako, he wants to be as physically close to Hanako as possible at all times, and yet Hanako is also virtually the only character in canon who Tsukasa hasn’t committed grievous bodily harm against in one way or another – but why waste the effort, when all he has to do is talk for a minute or two and Hanako will fall to pieces anyway? Tsukasa is a nightmare and he knows it and he loves it, and he enjoys it so much that every moment he’s around is pure comedy gold to me.

Like I said at the start of this letter, I’m happy to receive ship fic or gen fic – but there’s also literally no way I can get my head around any interpretation of canon that has Tsukasa not being extremely hot for his brother and extremely upfront about letting Hanako know that, so if you’d prefer to write gen fic, then I’d strongly prefer if it’s gen the same way that canon is, i.e. full of very creepy subtext.

As for prompts, I’m just going to throw it all at the wall here, classic-fandom-trope-wise:

• bodyswaps (canon-era or pre-canon) – YES, they’re identical twins; NO, I don’t believe that would make the experience any less ecstatically thrilling for Tsukasa or alarming for Hanako/Amane, assuming either of them even notices it’s happened before the effect wears off again.
• time loops (canon-era or pre-canon) – I can barely even narrow this prompt down, every possibility is golden. Pre-canon: maybe Amane tried again and again, but murder/suicide(?) really was the best ending available, and/or the only escape he could find? Only Tsukasa caught in the loop, having a great time, taking full advantage of the endless resets and lack of consequences? Both of them together: Hanako/Amane wants to break it, Tsukasa is enjoying it too much to cooperate? Tsukasa set it up for his own purposes?
• lotus-eating machines (canon-era) – I love that canon already gave us Hanako trying his hardest to get stuck in one, but how would it play out in a context where he wasn’t aware his perfect world was fake? With or without Mei’s involvement; maybe this is just a new case-of-the-week supernatural, or maybe the whole thing is being secretly facilitated by Tsukasa... and maybe also secretly manipulated behind the scenes, to make sure Hanako has exactly the right kind of dream. A lotus dream of the old days together, in life before death? Rose-coloured glasses of a wonderful world where he and Tsukasa are both alive and in school and perfectly happy together with no interpersonal issues whatsoever?
• outsider POV (canon-era and/or pre-canon) – what the hell does this relationship look like from the glimpses anyone else gets of it? Nene and Sakura both have a ringside seat, but a ringside seat to Tsukasa’s fixation must be a vastly different experience from a ringside seat to Hanako’s... How does it seem to Tsuchigomori nowadays? How did it seem to him, back in the day? To Kou, who hates Tsukasa? To Teru, who hates Hanako? Take this prompt however (un)seriously you like – I feel like outsider POV could be comedy as easily as it could get dark.
• and, since they’re both more than shameless enough: five times someone raised their eyebrows at the questionable behaviour of the Yugi twins, and one time they covered their eyes and walked out of the room

 

And some more general fandom notes: I’m fine with gory violence and I have nothing but respect for Tsukasa’s bloodthirsty passions, so please feel free to go there if you want to. And while I’m fond of Hanako/Nene, I’d strongly prefer not to receive fic where that ship is a major feature – though I don’t have any objection if you’d like to include it in the background of canon-era fic. 

 

~

 

We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson

Merricat Blackwood, Constance Blackwood

I love everything about this book: the very black comedy, the obsessive, claustrophobic intimacy, the way Merricat and Constance make their unbelievable levels of co-dependency look so sweet and gentle and tenderly devoted, the rare glimpses of how objectively horrific their relationship is to anyone but the two of them... It’s so intense, and so funny and so awful, and so long as the relationship between Merricat and Constance is the focus then I’d be overjoyed with literally anything for this fandom! I’d also be equally happy with ship fic or gen, so please feel free to take any of my prompts in either direction.

I really love how, at first glance, Merricat seems to be vastly more unstable, disconnected from reality, and obsessively fixated on her sister than Constance is in return, but as time goes on it gets ever clearer that they’re exactly as bad as each other. Neither of them can function without the other, and neither of them wants to learn, because neither of them ever intends to leave the other anyway. Merricat kills their family to be alone with Constance, Constance rejects all possibility of marriage and social rehabilitation to be alone with Merricat, and at last they both reject the whole world and everything in it to be alone together forever. They’re a hell of a lot closer than sisters should be, they’re closer than romantic partners should be – they’re closer than anyone should ever be, frankly, and I love how that alarming intimacy saturates every weird moment of their everyday life together.

As for prompts:

• the Blackwood version of curtain fic, at any point in time! They’re both utterly absorbed by this lovely dream of sweet, fluffy domesticity they're living in together... and it is sweet and fluffy; it’s just also immensely fucked up, in ways they adore each other too much to notice or care about.
• How do they celebrate birthdays? Holidays? Do they mark the anniversary of the final dinner?
• What gestures of weird, obsessive intimacy do either of them consider normal sisterly affection?
• Merricat repeatedly experiences furious jealousy over anyone else daring to interact with Constance and contaminate her with the outside world – what else has made her jealousy flare up before now, and what happened?
• They’ve already been shrinking the borders of their world for a long time before the novel starts; were there any particular events, pre-canon, that pushed them into new levels of isolation?
• Or even further back: what was their relationship like before the final family dinner? Merricat specifically intended for Constance to be the sole survivor, and Constance was willing to take all blame, punishment, and responsibility without ever implicating Merricat... and yet Constance was already in her early twenties while Merricat still wasn’t even in her teens, which makes whatever dysfunction must have already existed between them even weirder still.

AND MORE SPECIFICALLY FOR SHIP FIC, a.k.a. really just expanding the already vast gulf between how happy, normal, and well-adjusted they both perceive their life to be, compared to how unsettling it actually is: 

• Merricat and Constance blurring the boundaries until the boundaries no longer really exist
• given that they’re already so wrapped up in each other, what tangible difference in their lives would actually be made by an incestuous change in relationship status? What exactly constitutes Merricat’s idea of romance? (How many of Constance’s kitchen utensils have to undergo ritual burial in the meadow first?)
• Constance is very committed to her pursuit of peaceful, picture-perfect domestic harmony, despite the bizarre reality of her circumstances - would she be just as devoted to the pursuit of wholesome, traditional romance, despite… everything about Merricat?

 

~

Happy Yuletide, mystery author! <3

Skippy