Yuletide letter
Oct. 19th, 2021 08:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lemniskathHere's my yuletide letter! I'm Gammarad on AO3.
General likes: cats (including cat-like fantasy creatures or spirits), aliens (including cat-like and human-like aliens as well as ones like nothing at all on Earth), friendship, rivalry, enemies, eerie supernatural stuff, unusual settings, ancient history (BCE), science fiction, technology, AI, robots, cyborgs, worldbuilding. Older mature characters. Intelligent non-humans or people who are not quite human (whether they originally were or not), learning to get along despite differences, working out misaligned goals. Worldbuilding asides or info dumps in the middle (or beginning or end) of stories.
& ship likes: Loyalty - either one way or mutual, enemies who have a certain understanding, colleagues who rely on each other, colleagues who undermine each other, employee & employer relationship either with loyalty or with one using the other, parent & child relationships with protectiveness, student & teacher relationships with mutual desire to learn, criminal & victim relationships with complexities, bounty hunter & target relationships where they have to be taken alive (or where the target is just that hard to kill), stranger & potential new friend (but also potential new threat) relationships, allies of convenience. One character noticing things about the other and sharing insights (or not, as their character dictates). Doing something meaningful without being asked. Bickering. Using someone's observed weakness against them. The way only someone close to them can hurt them like that.
/ ship likes: Pining, previous and/or background ships, cheating or adultery, equal partnerships, casual consensual D/s elements, different sorts of beings (like AI/human or vampire/human or AI/vampire or alien/different kind of alien, you get the idea) in love. Being able to see what makes that person the one they want. Being perfect for each other but not knowing it yet. Characters struggling to figure out how to show their love. Characters who have good reason to think the person they want isn't right for them but can't help it. Obsessive unhealthy love. Complicated relationships with give and take and balance issues. Canon poly.
Plot likes: Myth inspired plots or fairy tale retellings, mysteries, ghost stories, adventure stories, coming of age stories, romances, case or mission fic, noir style, pastiche of canon, pastiche of something other than the canon you're actually writing. Happy endings, tragic endings, bittersweet endings, knowing what you have won't last forever. Emotional resolution following or during plot resolution. Character-driven plots. Plots that are confusing until the end when it all comes clear. Plots that are more thematic than structural.
Smut likes: Older human characters having explicit sex. Saying with physical affection what they can't say out loud. Solving problems in sex (difficulty climaxing, premature ejaculation, injury does not allow for their usual sex, that kind of thing). Sex toys, improvised sex toys, edging, honor bondage, orgasm denial. D/s (with equal amounts of experience or with the submissive person more experienced, I also like couples who switch who is dominant), vampires with sexy blood drinking, aliens with strange genitalia, robots or cyborgs with technological genitalia.
Style likes: I like a whole broad variety of styles. First person, second person, omniscient narrator (like a historian or telepath or seer or deity), same as canon, totally different from canon for reasons, carefully preserved realism, blend of realism vs fantastical elements, fourth wall breaking, epistolary, unreliable narrator, close third person, out-of-order storytelling, time jumps, dream scenes, surreal or stream-of-consciousness interludes, main character viewpoint, outsider viewpoint including POV of AI, cats, ghosts, deities, or other unusual being. Reallly, go with whatever best suits your personal style or your chosen story.
DNWs: Any sexual activity with children under 16, any explicit sex with any character under 18 or who is not an adult in their setting and culture, stories focused on serial killers, nonconsensual sex with a member of a gender they aren't attracted to (you don't have to establish that they're attracted to that sex, just don't establish that they aren't), setting change AUs like coffeeshop AU or omegaverse AU or unrequested crossover AU that takes my requested characters to another story's setting.
(It would be completely fine if you want to bring characters from another canon into the world of one of my requests as cameos, though, as long as the story has focus on the requested setting/worldbuilding, and you give enough information about the imported characters that I don't need to be familiar with the canon they're from.)
Characters nominated: Ledo, Ix, Worldbuilding
(Any requested) What I love is the whole thing, see my canon promo: Ledo and Ix Promo As of this, I'm the only one to have written it, so please go wild with your own ideas and don't feel bound by my prompts.
Some prompts should you care to try them:
Prompts:
- What do you think would have happened in the second season if the kickstarter-added character hadn't sort of taken over?
- Do Ledo and Ix ever get a real answer to whether the Princess can talk/think/feel/pass a Turing test?
- Are Ledo and Ix people, or AIs, or does that question even make sense? Is the answer the same for them both or different for each of them? What if Ledo is an AI and Ix is a player interacting with her and trying to figure out how she became self-aware? What if Ledo is a person who was embedded into the game world because of (physical or psychological) damage and Ix is an AI trying to help her? Or what if it's some other sort of thing like those that you come up with...
- What's with the brain fungus? Did everyone in the world used to be a person and then brain fungus got them?
- What if one of the monsters started talking to Ledo or Ix like a person? What would they do?
Character: Worldbuilding
Feel free to use any canon characters, and to create original ones as needed. I loved this canon when I read it, which I did out of order (already a Tanith Lee fan in my teens, I found a used copy of Drinking Sapphire Wine and read that well before I found the previous book).
What I like about this canon: I love the wild setting with the desert and the six and eight legged alien creatures (the white-furred pet Thunder-Flower, the splay foots, the Grey Eyes), intermixed with the regular ones (swans, cats, etc) and the mythical ones as well (lots of dragons, for example). What if the whole thing is set on some alien, partiallty-terraformed planet and some of the creatures are native to that place? Or alternatively, what if everything odd is a result of genetic engineering and body-creation that's been let to go feral? What if there's a whole parallel society of aliens there, since many of these creatures seem fully intelligent even if much lower technology than the Fours?
Also, the paternalistic AI Committee and their prescriptions for their humans. In particular, the seamless gender fluidity that nearly everyone exhibits contrasts to the incomprehension of anything but heterosexuality by the narrator and other Jang: if two people currently in female human bodies feel attraction, their only thought is one of them should become male. How interesting of a setup, what potential transgressions might occur to a 21st century reader's enjoyment! What would happen if two Jang girls like Nilla and Felain had love (which they clearly do in exile in the end, but what if in the Fours)? Or two Jang boys? What about Older People, do they ever, given their less structured sexual practices... do the narrator's makers have love with each other when they're both male as they typically are at the start of the book, but keep it from the narrator because it would scandalize her?
Where do the narrator's random knowledge of mostly-unheard-of things like God and perverts and adventure-novel-plot-structure come from (in an in-world sense, rather than 'they just come from the author') - does she have a memory of a previous life in our time perhaps? It often seems that way. If you've read Silver Metal Lover the author pulls that sort of premise in sometimes and perhaps the Fours world is a distant future of the Silver Metal Lover world, when they'd just started making androids...
Characters nominated: Hal, Tim, Entity, Worldbuilding.
What I requested: Worldbuilding
What I like about this movie, and some prompts: Cults formed around alien presences. Narratives that intersect in concentric interlocking rings. Time loops. Time loops!
10 seconds, 10 minutes, 10 hours, 10 days, 10 weeks, 10 years... however long a time loop is, it goes around again. Is there any escape?
Please feel free to use any canon characters, nominated or not, in this request. I consider worldbuilding to be very broad, and any filling-in of back story of how some particular situation portrayed in the movie came about would count, as well as detail as to how it connects up with other movies that may or may not be related, and also, who knows what's going on? How do they know? What do they do with the knowledge?
Are there other entities or just the one? What else has it done/can it do...
What other places, people, and stories might be involved, even...
Characters nominated: Chris Shane, Leslie Vann, Worldbuilding
My request: Worldbuilding
Feel free to use either or both of the nominated characters, or any other canon characters, or to create original characters as needed for the worldbuilding story.
It's so interesting how the world changed following the epidemic of the lock in syndrome. The books explore some of it. What else might have changed? What is mostly the same but then there's a difference because there's the nonorganic proxy bodies of some participants...
Characters nominated: Angharad Scott, The Other | Valentine Ketterley, James Ritter, Piranesi | Matthew Rose Sorensen, Sixteen | Sarah Raphael, Worldbuilding
What I requested: Sarah Raphael
Feel free to use the other nominated characters and to use other canonical characters and invent original characters as needed. I am not especially interested in Ritter, but I'd be very interested in a story focusing on any of the other nominated characters - Sarah can appear in a more minor role if you do that, and it would be fine.
I would really love to know more about the world setting too, but I don't want to make it seem like I need worldbuilding in the story because I'd also be very happy with a story about Sarah in a world indistinguishable from the real world, as she goes about solving a mystery or figuring out the very weird goings on as she did.
Prompts:
- Sarah investigates
- Sarah explores the House, with or without company of another character
No characters nominated
I really enjoyed listening to this podcast and would love fic for it. Spin off a minor character's story or tell me something set before or after the canon.
No characters were nominated for this canon, so feel free to use any canon characters and to create original ones as needed.
I am interested in all the characters in the story and also in the world setting. The whole concept is so interesting to me, with the deities so easily created by almost any beliefs at all, and so dangerous.
Prompts:
- has anyone developed a practice of purposeful nonbelief so as to avoid the whole deity issue? Are they "atheists"?
- More on the whole radio host sponsored by the caffeine deity thing, and what came before that?
- Did the Trawler-man faith start up as a loose organization of people with similar river-based beliefs and get organized? Or did someone start it on purpose and recruit/proselytize?
- Something with Paige set before the canon would be interesting. Maybe her hobbies, or stuff about her education and when she applied for her job?
- Something with Carpenter before the canon would also be good. She seems to have had a complicated past. Maybe she had a close call before that would make a good story?
Fandoms requested (alphabetical order):
Click to jump ahead to fandom specific detailsLikes:
General likes: cats (including cat-like fantasy creatures or spirits), aliens (including cat-like and human-like aliens as well as ones like nothing at all on Earth), friendship, rivalry, enemies, eerie supernatural stuff, unusual settings, ancient history (BCE), science fiction, technology, AI, robots, cyborgs, worldbuilding. Older mature characters. Intelligent non-humans or people who are not quite human (whether they originally were or not), learning to get along despite differences, working out misaligned goals. Worldbuilding asides or info dumps in the middle (or beginning or end) of stories.
& ship likes: Loyalty - either one way or mutual, enemies who have a certain understanding, colleagues who rely on each other, colleagues who undermine each other, employee & employer relationship either with loyalty or with one using the other, parent & child relationships with protectiveness, student & teacher relationships with mutual desire to learn, criminal & victim relationships with complexities, bounty hunter & target relationships where they have to be taken alive (or where the target is just that hard to kill), stranger & potential new friend (but also potential new threat) relationships, allies of convenience. One character noticing things about the other and sharing insights (or not, as their character dictates). Doing something meaningful without being asked. Bickering. Using someone's observed weakness against them. The way only someone close to them can hurt them like that.
/ ship likes: Pining, previous and/or background ships, cheating or adultery, equal partnerships, casual consensual D/s elements, different sorts of beings (like AI/human or vampire/human or AI/vampire or alien/different kind of alien, you get the idea) in love. Being able to see what makes that person the one they want. Being perfect for each other but not knowing it yet. Characters struggling to figure out how to show their love. Characters who have good reason to think the person they want isn't right for them but can't help it. Obsessive unhealthy love. Complicated relationships with give and take and balance issues. Canon poly.
Plot likes: Myth inspired plots or fairy tale retellings, mysteries, ghost stories, adventure stories, coming of age stories, romances, case or mission fic, noir style, pastiche of canon, pastiche of something other than the canon you're actually writing. Happy endings, tragic endings, bittersweet endings, knowing what you have won't last forever. Emotional resolution following or during plot resolution. Character-driven plots. Plots that are confusing until the end when it all comes clear. Plots that are more thematic than structural.
Smut likes: Older human characters having explicit sex. Saying with physical affection what they can't say out loud. Solving problems in sex (difficulty climaxing, premature ejaculation, injury does not allow for their usual sex, that kind of thing). Sex toys, improvised sex toys, edging, honor bondage, orgasm denial. D/s (with equal amounts of experience or with the submissive person more experienced, I also like couples who switch who is dominant), vampires with sexy blood drinking, aliens with strange genitalia, robots or cyborgs with technological genitalia.
Style likes: I like a whole broad variety of styles. First person, second person, omniscient narrator (like a historian or telepath or seer or deity), same as canon, totally different from canon for reasons, carefully preserved realism, blend of realism vs fantastical elements, fourth wall breaking, epistolary, unreliable narrator, close third person, out-of-order storytelling, time jumps, dream scenes, surreal or stream-of-consciousness interludes, main character viewpoint, outsider viewpoint including POV of AI, cats, ghosts, deities, or other unusual being. Reallly, go with whatever best suits your personal style or your chosen story.
DNWs: Any sexual activity with children under 16, any explicit sex with any character under 18 or who is not an adult in their setting and culture, stories focused on serial killers, nonconsensual sex with a member of a gender they aren't attracted to (you don't have to establish that they're attracted to that sex, just don't establish that they aren't), setting change AUs like coffeeshop AU or omegaverse AU or unrequested crossover AU that takes my requested characters to another story's setting.
(It would be completely fine if you want to bring characters from another canon into the world of one of my requests as cameos, though, as long as the story has focus on the requested setting/worldbuilding, and you give enough information about the imported characters that I don't need to be familiar with the canon they're from.)
The Adventures of Ledo and Ix
Characters nominated: Ledo, Ix, Worldbuilding
(Any requested) What I love is the whole thing, see my canon promo: Ledo and Ix Promo As of this, I'm the only one to have written it, so please go wild with your own ideas and don't feel bound by my prompts.
Some prompts should you care to try them:
Prompts:
- What do you think would have happened in the second season if the kickstarter-added character hadn't sort of taken over?
- Do Ledo and Ix ever get a real answer to whether the Princess can talk/think/feel/pass a Turing test?
- Are Ledo and Ix people, or AIs, or does that question even make sense? Is the answer the same for them both or different for each of them? What if Ledo is an AI and Ix is a player interacting with her and trying to figure out how she became self-aware? What if Ledo is a person who was embedded into the game world because of (physical or psychological) damage and Ix is an AI trying to help her? Or what if it's some other sort of thing like those that you come up with...
- What's with the brain fungus? Did everyone in the world used to be a person and then brain fungus got them?
- What if one of the monsters started talking to Ledo or Ix like a person? What would they do?
Biting the Sun
Character: Worldbuilding
Feel free to use any canon characters, and to create original ones as needed. I loved this canon when I read it, which I did out of order (already a Tanith Lee fan in my teens, I found a used copy of Drinking Sapphire Wine and read that well before I found the previous book).
What I like about this canon: I love the wild setting with the desert and the six and eight legged alien creatures (the white-furred pet Thunder-Flower, the splay foots, the Grey Eyes), intermixed with the regular ones (swans, cats, etc) and the mythical ones as well (lots of dragons, for example). What if the whole thing is set on some alien, partiallty-terraformed planet and some of the creatures are native to that place? Or alternatively, what if everything odd is a result of genetic engineering and body-creation that's been let to go feral? What if there's a whole parallel society of aliens there, since many of these creatures seem fully intelligent even if much lower technology than the Fours?
Also, the paternalistic AI Committee and their prescriptions for their humans. In particular, the seamless gender fluidity that nearly everyone exhibits contrasts to the incomprehension of anything but heterosexuality by the narrator and other Jang: if two people currently in female human bodies feel attraction, their only thought is one of them should become male. How interesting of a setup, what potential transgressions might occur to a 21st century reader's enjoyment! What would happen if two Jang girls like Nilla and Felain had love (which they clearly do in exile in the end, but what if in the Fours)? Or two Jang boys? What about Older People, do they ever, given their less structured sexual practices... do the narrator's makers have love with each other when they're both male as they typically are at the start of the book, but keep it from the narrator because it would scandalize her?
Where do the narrator's random knowledge of mostly-unheard-of things like God and perverts and adventure-novel-plot-structure come from (in an in-world sense, rather than 'they just come from the author') - does she have a memory of a previous life in our time perhaps? It often seems that way. If you've read Silver Metal Lover the author pulls that sort of premise in sometimes and perhaps the Fours world is a distant future of the Silver Metal Lover world, when they'd just started making androids...
The Endless
Characters nominated: Hal, Tim, Entity, Worldbuilding.
What I requested: Worldbuilding
What I like about this movie, and some prompts: Cults formed around alien presences. Narratives that intersect in concentric interlocking rings. Time loops. Time loops!
10 seconds, 10 minutes, 10 hours, 10 days, 10 weeks, 10 years... however long a time loop is, it goes around again. Is there any escape?
Please feel free to use any canon characters, nominated or not, in this request. I consider worldbuilding to be very broad, and any filling-in of back story of how some particular situation portrayed in the movie came about would count, as well as detail as to how it connects up with other movies that may or may not be related, and also, who knows what's going on? How do they know? What do they do with the knowledge?
Are there other entities or just the one? What else has it done/can it do...
What other places, people, and stories might be involved, even...
Lock In series
Characters nominated: Chris Shane, Leslie Vann, Worldbuilding
My request: Worldbuilding
Feel free to use either or both of the nominated characters, or any other canon characters, or to create original characters as needed for the worldbuilding story.
It's so interesting how the world changed following the epidemic of the lock in syndrome. The books explore some of it. What else might have changed? What is mostly the same but then there's a difference because there's the nonorganic proxy bodies of some participants...
Piranesi
Characters nominated: Angharad Scott, The Other | Valentine Ketterley, James Ritter, Piranesi | Matthew Rose Sorensen, Sixteen | Sarah Raphael, Worldbuilding
What I requested: Sarah Raphael
Feel free to use the other nominated characters and to use other canonical characters and invent original characters as needed. I am not especially interested in Ritter, but I'd be very interested in a story focusing on any of the other nominated characters - Sarah can appear in a more minor role if you do that, and it would be fine.
I would really love to know more about the world setting too, but I don't want to make it seem like I need worldbuilding in the story because I'd also be very happy with a story about Sarah in a world indistinguishable from the real world, as she goes about solving a mystery or figuring out the very weird goings on as she did.
Prompts:
- Sarah investigates
- Sarah explores the House, with or without company of another character
The Silt Verses
No characters nominated
I really enjoyed listening to this podcast and would love fic for it. Spin off a minor character's story or tell me something set before or after the canon.
No characters were nominated for this canon, so feel free to use any canon characters and to create original ones as needed.
I am interested in all the characters in the story and also in the world setting. The whole concept is so interesting to me, with the deities so easily created by almost any beliefs at all, and so dangerous.
Prompts:
- has anyone developed a practice of purposeful nonbelief so as to avoid the whole deity issue? Are they "atheists"?
- More on the whole radio host sponsored by the caffeine deity thing, and what came before that?
- Did the Trawler-man faith start up as a loose organization of people with similar river-based beliefs and get organized? Or did someone start it on purpose and recruit/proselytize?
- Something with Paige set before the canon would be interesting. Maybe her hobbies, or stuff about her education and when she applied for her job?
- Something with Carpenter before the canon would also be good. She seems to have had a complicated past. Maybe she had a close call before that would make a good story?
