Yuletide letter - 2021

[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 four 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 four 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)
• AUs which change the setting of canon (e.g. in space, coffee shop)
• crossovers 

 ~

 

Arrested Development

George Michael Bluth, Maeby Funke

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:

• Literally any classic sitcom teen crush storyline that can be made awful, Arrested Development-style, SUCH AS:
  • 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 acquires an alarming new hobby, so George Michael immediately acquires it too
  • 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 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
• 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
• Bodyswap! Time-loop! Go weird, go wacky, they’re already legally married in canon so there’s no limit on how weird things can get! After a big night at her latest wrap party Maeby wakes up and finds herself legally married to George Michael yet again, though he wasn’t even at the party and just stayed home studying all night.

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 love the surreal and awful pitch-black humour of this book, 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 a relationship more painfully charged with unrequited sexual tension in my entire life – and I’d seriously love ship fic, 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 listed PWP fic in my DNWs, but that doesn’t count for this fandom! Canon-typical sexual content is more than welcome, and in fact I’d love to know 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.)

 

~

 

The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

Frank Cauldhame, Eric Cauldhame

I think I’ve reread this perfect and horrible book more times over my life than anything else, so I don’t know why it took this long to occur to me I could nominate it for Yuletide! The total self-confidence and total lack of self-awareness with which Frank goes about his horrifying daily life, the serenely matter-of-fact authority with which he holds forth on his horrifying opinions, the fact that even the most banal of details in his life also manage to be horrifying details – I LOVE IT ALL. I love that the comedy is horrific and that the horror is so fucking funny; I love the extreme clash between Frank’s lofty subjective view of himself and the objective reality of what he’s doing. He thinks he’s the king of the castle, but his castle is just a tiny little fucked-up petri dish and every specimen that’s ever been left in it has gone extremely wrong.

Some prompts:

• life on the island before Eric left for med school: how much awareness of Frank’s rituals did Eric ever have, if any? How much interest in Eric’s departure did Frank take? How did they react to their separation, after a lifetime of such prolonged isolation?
• staying in touch while they were apart! I’d love epistolary fic – Frank is so utterly convinced of his own mature and highly sophisticated social skills that I’d love to see the extremely normal letters he’d have written to Eric over the years, with the gradual deterioration of Eric’s letters in return.
• post-canon: ANYTHING! Will they leave the island? Will they stay and rebuild? Will they stay but not rebuild, and just live an even more freakishly isolated existence in the ruins? How long will they be able to dodge the consequences?
• - slice-of-life: from any point before, during, or after canon – I feel a lot of the novel itself has that slice-of-life feeling, and Frank and Eric’s lives are both so extraordinarily strange and revolting that any slice of them at all would surely be entertaining. Frank goes to the supermarket, very normally. Eric breaks into the supermarket, very normally. Frank and Eric play a board game, both incredibly normally.  

I’d really prefer that the matter of Frank’s gender isn’t a focus of any post-canon fic involving him, and especially that (contrary to the final line of the book) he doesn’t immediately start thinking of himself as Eric’s sister.  

And just to be clear, given the nature of canon: graphic violence against animals, against people, misogyny, gaslighting, torture, over-the-top grotesquery about everything including mental illness – it’s all fine with me; canon-typical everything is more than welcome.

 

~

 

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 love to receive ship fic, but I’d also be happy with 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! 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? Does Constance insist on going all out for Christmas?
• Merricat gets furiously jealous 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?
• Pre-canon: they’ve already been shrinking the borders of their world for a long time before the novel starts – were there any particular events that pushed them into new levels of isolation?
• Even further pre-canon: 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 unintentionally 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?)
• And 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