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Nov. 5th, 2009 11:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
person4Dear Yuletide Writer,
Thank you so much for writing for me this year! First of all, I always like to start with the note that gen is always okay if you find yourself staring at whatever pairing I've asked for wondering what crack I'm smoking. I'm primarily a gen writer myself, so I'm definitely a fan of it.
I'm not a big fan of PWPs. I usually skim sex scenes, but I'm fine with them being there as long as there's some sort of plot involved. It's hard to squick me (play with any sort of body waste products is my one big one), but I need to be in the right mood to want to seek out kink so if you do decide to write sex in it's safe to keep it pretty vanilla in case I'm not in the mood for it.
Usually this is the point where I say I like fluff but am fine with darker fic as long as it at least ends on a hopeful note, but this year things IRL really suck and I'd really prefer a happier fic if at all possible. At the very least, please please stay away from death-fic or serious illness or injury, because it would strike too close to home for me right now.
I love humor. I love conversations where the characters just bounce off each other. I love both character-centric and plot-centric stories, and quiet slice-of-life tales as much as action-packed adventures. I love slow-building relationships, but I'm also perfectly happy to accept that most or all of that build-up happened off-screen before the story started as long as there's at least a little nod towards it having happened at some point. I love platonic relationships that are friendly, or familial, or antagonistic as much as standard fanfiction romances, as long as the characters play off each other well.
Going into the actual notes on my request, I should mention that and plot ideas I drop in them are completely optional. They're there in case you're the type of writer who needs some type of prompt to go off, but if you aren't (or if none of them strike your fancy) feel free to ignore every one of them. Come Christmas it's doubtful I'll even remember what I said, so it's not like I'll be disappointed if you don't go with one of them. *g*
Requests are listed in alphabetical order, not any order of preference; I always have so much trouble narrowing it down to just four requests (or even six nominations before that!) that you'd better believe these are all things I'd seriously love to see fic in. And wherever possible I'll try to provide the canon, so if you have no idea where to go with the request you were matched to you might be able to get into one of them instead.
Download: You can download the game itself here (you need something like Daemon Tools Lite to load the .iso, but once it's installed you can just get rid of that because the game doesn't need its CD to run), here are the patches that fix a bug that makes the game unwinnable and restore the original game images (instructions are in the file), and here is a walkthrough. If you try playing, reach the chapter "Outbreak of War", and suddenly the game's text becomes unreadable, just save and exit the game completely and it should be fine when you start it back up. And if you try playing it more than once to see different storylines I suggest setting the game to skip through text automatically then doing something else with one ear open for the sound of a ticking clock telling you it's time to make a choice (the game is a visual novel, which means the only "playing" you do is picking what to do next from time to time; more like a Choose Your Own Adventure story than a game in the traditional sense) until you reach a section you haven't seen before; I love the game, but the first several chapters get really boring on a replay if you do it right away.
(And I just realized that since it is a canon nobody's ever heard of before, you might want some information on the actual plot to know if you'd even be interested in trying it out. You can check my Yuletide letter from last year for that if you'd like.)
Characters: Any
Request: First of all, don't get worried that I might be one of those people who selects "Any" then obviously has some favorite characters they'd be disappointed about not getting; I made the whole Animamundi character list, so obviously it's already stacked with my favorites whom I'd love to get fic about *g*. I'll go into what I love in the fandom more in my "Dear author" letter, because I know that chances are you've never even heard of Animamundi before, which makes me get more babbly than usual, and little sign-up boxes aren't the best place to ramble!
First of all, this is the only request where I won't mind if you totally ignore my "please, no dark fic" request, just because I know it's dumb to ask for something like that when the canon itself is gothic horror.
I love Georik paired with any of the other characters. I love the weird bond he and Timothy form even though he treats the poor kid horribly. I love how even when things are batshit insane horrible in his own life he can still take the time to try to help his friends (even if he's so distracted that it takes him awhile to notice somethings going on). I'm a big fan of Mikhail even though I know many people don't like his over-zealous piety combined with the fact that he can be a jerk. Something set in the past, when he, Georik, and St. Germant were growing up together before everything went pear-shaped might be interesting! I have great heaps of love for Sylvie; if you want to do something based off of her Queen of Hardland ending, or about her secret identity (I was so hoping we'd get to see more of that in her game path, but alas) that would be great! One thing that always fascinates me is the implication that during Mikhail's "Crown" ending Georik gains the memories of all the various game paths he's been down, not just the one connected to that ending, and then ends up in a position where he's actually able to change things. That would be a lot of fun to play around with, I think; deciding whether he'd focus on keeping Bruno from gaining power, or taking down the Hellfire club, or just making sure the people he cares about are in safer situations once the shit hits the fan. If he could use that knowledge to get poor Dashwood the happy ending he was denied in-game, that would be sweet.
Someone has put up four huge torrents worth of Archie comics, but I'd say if you want to check it out just to randomly pick ten or so digests out of the most recent one and tell the rest not to download; Archie's unchanging enough that that'll give you a chance to get a grasp of the characters, and then you won't need to download those whole massive things. Also, if you don't know what .cbr and .cbz files are, they're just normal .rar and .zip files that have been renamed to open with a comic book reader. You can just change to file names back if you want to view the images some other way.
Characters: Betty and Reggie
Request: My desire to read a Reggie/Betty fic can be traced back to one specific thing: reading this comic back when it showed up on scans_daily (I'm so glad I was able to hunt it down again to share, and it didn't just vanish along with the old community!). Ever since then I've had a craving for it. If it works for you I'd rather they get past their crushes on Archie and Ronnie while still in high school instead of years down the line when they've had plenty of time to get over it, just because people inevitably change at least a little as they get older and I'd prefer them to remain as they are in-canon, but go ahead and ignore that if it doesn't work for you. Heck, if you wanted you could have them hook up at the much-maligned Archie/Veronica wedding and it wouldn't upset me.
If you match me on this request, you're kind of lucky! It's been years since I last read Archie comics aside from occasional stories posted on scans_daily, and even as a kid I only rarely bought the digests, so you if you fudge canon facts or screw up characterizations a little in favor of making the plot flow more smoothly I probably won't even notice.
Like I said, that one not-even-complete story made me really crave Reggie/Betty fanfiction. Since then I've found plenty of other people who admit to shipping it (it's a topic that's come up bizarrely often in the last year, probably because of the Archie/Veronica wedding thing) fanfic is not so easy to find. Probably because the company is so twitchy about it.
I can't really come up with any plot bunny jumping off points for them because my knowledge of the canon is so hazy. Hopefully that won't pose a problem for you!
You can watch The Big Bang Theory online over here.
Characters: Howard Wolowitz and Penny
Request: It is always so hard to pick my final request, but I've finally decided on the one I'll probably never see anywhere else: Howard/Penny. You know that scene in The Friendship Algorithm when they're all hanging around Kripke, Howard mutters to Penny "Suddenly I'm looking pretty good, eh?" and she starts giggling? It's such a real response that all of a sudden it made me want him to win her over, at least for a little while. "Win her over" can mean obvious friendship--just them hanging out for awhile without the others--as much as romance if you can't get your mind around the pairing. It could also mean a drunken rebound one-night-stand that she feels guilty about afterwards as long as she does feel bad for using him, since even if it's not nice guilt's still a sign that she really does care about him on some level.
This seems to be the year of me asking for things that one tiny bit of canon made me crave. *g*
Honestly, you could leave Penny out entirely and just have a story focused on Howard if you'd like. The only episode so far where his plotline has been the main focus of the episode didn't exactly treat him well, so he could use a Howard-centric story that turns out well for him.
I like the way all the main characters interact with each other, so feel free to pull in anyone else that you want. Just please don't bash Leonard if you do; I'm not a fan of his relationship with Penny myself, but I can't see it lasting past March sweeps, the end of the season at the most, so it's easy enough to just set a story in the future. I also always like it when Penny gets drawn into one of their hobbies and actually ends up enjoying it (Age of Conan, Halo night).
One thing that might be interesting to play with is that even though Howard gets poked at for being the only one in the group without a Ph.D, because work in engineering is so much more tangible than work in physics, he might be the only one in the group who could have a conversation with Penny about his job and actually have her follow it, provided that he's doing something that catches her interest and he keeps his descriptions to "drive a car on Mars" levels that a layman can easily understand.
Unfortunately, Star Ocean: Till the End of Time is a PS2 game, so I can't give you a download. If you have a PS2 it's pretty cheap, but I really don't expect anyone to go out and buy something on my account.
Characters: Cliff Fittir, Fayt Leingod, Maria Traydor, Nel Zelpher
RequestDetail3: First of all, you don't need to include all four characters if you don't want to! If possible I would love a story with the Cliff/Fayt pairing (or the even more rare Nel/Cliff/Fayt threesome) but any gen combination is also just fine. I'd love to get to see more of Quark suddenly finding themselves basically raising a daughter when Maria showed up, since we got to little of that. I love the period of the game when it's just Nel Cliff and Fayt traveling around. We never get to see much of Maria and Nel interacting with each other, but with their similar careers I bet they could click off each other awesomely if you wanted to!
As I said, if you were matched with this fandom and could wrangle a Cliff/Fayt story (or Nel/Cliff/Fayt) I would love you, since they're my OTP/3 for the fandom and you can't find much of either, but I totally understand if you can't.
Let's see... I think I gave a good amount of springing off points in the request itself, but if you want to know some other things I'm a fan of, I like how Cliff seems like you're typical big dumb bruiser, but is actually pretty clever. I'm really interested in all the history you can read in books scattered around--the way you can find books about the same period of time in both Airyglyph and Aquaria and see the differences in how the two sides view things--though I'm not sure how you could really work that into a story with the characters in question unless they went off trying to find out which side's story is more accurate. If they could stop awhile on Vanguard III it would touch a soft-spot of mine; I've always wished that there was an ending where Fayt settled down there to take care of Niklas and Meena. I'm also fond of stories involving inventing; Fayt and Cliff teaching Nel about Engineering (even though they're not supposed to do things like that), since there's no way she'd know how to make the fancy bombs and things they make on her own with her world's level of development. Or pure shallow fanservice about Fayt looking cute in the glasses he only wears when inventing. Or something about their cover stories! It always amuses me a little when I go through the party's inventor profiles and see how they dragged every last person from space into their "inventors from Greeton" cover story even when it gets incredibly tenuous.
Anyway, thank you again for writing me a story! I hope this letter helped!
Thank you so much for writing for me this year! First of all, I always like to start with the note that gen is always okay if you find yourself staring at whatever pairing I've asked for wondering what crack I'm smoking. I'm primarily a gen writer myself, so I'm definitely a fan of it.
I'm not a big fan of PWPs. I usually skim sex scenes, but I'm fine with them being there as long as there's some sort of plot involved. It's hard to squick me (play with any sort of body waste products is my one big one), but I need to be in the right mood to want to seek out kink so if you do decide to write sex in it's safe to keep it pretty vanilla in case I'm not in the mood for it.
Usually this is the point where I say I like fluff but am fine with darker fic as long as it at least ends on a hopeful note, but this year things IRL really suck and I'd really prefer a happier fic if at all possible. At the very least, please please stay away from death-fic or serious illness or injury, because it would strike too close to home for me right now.
I love humor. I love conversations where the characters just bounce off each other. I love both character-centric and plot-centric stories, and quiet slice-of-life tales as much as action-packed adventures. I love slow-building relationships, but I'm also perfectly happy to accept that most or all of that build-up happened off-screen before the story started as long as there's at least a little nod towards it having happened at some point. I love platonic relationships that are friendly, or familial, or antagonistic as much as standard fanfiction romances, as long as the characters play off each other well.
Going into the actual notes on my request, I should mention that and plot ideas I drop in them are completely optional. They're there in case you're the type of writer who needs some type of prompt to go off, but if you aren't (or if none of them strike your fancy) feel free to ignore every one of them. Come Christmas it's doubtful I'll even remember what I said, so it's not like I'll be disappointed if you don't go with one of them. *g*
Requests are listed in alphabetical order, not any order of preference; I always have so much trouble narrowing it down to just four requests (or even six nominations before that!) that you'd better believe these are all things I'd seriously love to see fic in. And wherever possible I'll try to provide the canon, so if you have no idea where to go with the request you were matched to you might be able to get into one of them instead.
Download: You can download the game itself here (you need something like Daemon Tools Lite to load the .iso, but once it's installed you can just get rid of that because the game doesn't need its CD to run), here are the patches that fix a bug that makes the game unwinnable and restore the original game images (instructions are in the file), and here is a walkthrough. If you try playing, reach the chapter "Outbreak of War", and suddenly the game's text becomes unreadable, just save and exit the game completely and it should be fine when you start it back up. And if you try playing it more than once to see different storylines I suggest setting the game to skip through text automatically then doing something else with one ear open for the sound of a ticking clock telling you it's time to make a choice (the game is a visual novel, which means the only "playing" you do is picking what to do next from time to time; more like a Choose Your Own Adventure story than a game in the traditional sense) until you reach a section you haven't seen before; I love the game, but the first several chapters get really boring on a replay if you do it right away.
(And I just realized that since it is a canon nobody's ever heard of before, you might want some information on the actual plot to know if you'd even be interested in trying it out. You can check my Yuletide letter from last year for that if you'd like.)
Characters: Any
Request: First of all, don't get worried that I might be one of those people who selects "Any" then obviously has some favorite characters they'd be disappointed about not getting; I made the whole Animamundi character list, so obviously it's already stacked with my favorites whom I'd love to get fic about *g*. I'll go into what I love in the fandom more in my "Dear author" letter, because I know that chances are you've never even heard of Animamundi before, which makes me get more babbly than usual, and little sign-up boxes aren't the best place to ramble!
First of all, this is the only request where I won't mind if you totally ignore my "please, no dark fic" request, just because I know it's dumb to ask for something like that when the canon itself is gothic horror.
I love Georik paired with any of the other characters. I love the weird bond he and Timothy form even though he treats the poor kid horribly. I love how even when things are batshit insane horrible in his own life he can still take the time to try to help his friends (even if he's so distracted that it takes him awhile to notice somethings going on). I'm a big fan of Mikhail even though I know many people don't like his over-zealous piety combined with the fact that he can be a jerk. Something set in the past, when he, Georik, and St. Germant were growing up together before everything went pear-shaped might be interesting! I have great heaps of love for Sylvie; if you want to do something based off of her Queen of Hardland ending, or about her secret identity (I was so hoping we'd get to see more of that in her game path, but alas) that would be great! One thing that always fascinates me is the implication that during Mikhail's "Crown" ending Georik gains the memories of all the various game paths he's been down, not just the one connected to that ending, and then ends up in a position where he's actually able to change things. That would be a lot of fun to play around with, I think; deciding whether he'd focus on keeping Bruno from gaining power, or taking down the Hellfire club, or just making sure the people he cares about are in safer situations once the shit hits the fan. If he could use that knowledge to get poor Dashwood the happy ending he was denied in-game, that would be sweet.
Someone has put up four huge torrents worth of Archie comics, but I'd say if you want to check it out just to randomly pick ten or so digests out of the most recent one and tell the rest not to download; Archie's unchanging enough that that'll give you a chance to get a grasp of the characters, and then you won't need to download those whole massive things. Also, if you don't know what .cbr and .cbz files are, they're just normal .rar and .zip files that have been renamed to open with a comic book reader. You can just change to file names back if you want to view the images some other way.
Characters: Betty and Reggie
Request: My desire to read a Reggie/Betty fic can be traced back to one specific thing: reading this comic back when it showed up on scans_daily (I'm so glad I was able to hunt it down again to share, and it didn't just vanish along with the old community!). Ever since then I've had a craving for it. If it works for you I'd rather they get past their crushes on Archie and Ronnie while still in high school instead of years down the line when they've had plenty of time to get over it, just because people inevitably change at least a little as they get older and I'd prefer them to remain as they are in-canon, but go ahead and ignore that if it doesn't work for you. Heck, if you wanted you could have them hook up at the much-maligned Archie/Veronica wedding and it wouldn't upset me.
If you match me on this request, you're kind of lucky! It's been years since I last read Archie comics aside from occasional stories posted on scans_daily, and even as a kid I only rarely bought the digests, so you if you fudge canon facts or screw up characterizations a little in favor of making the plot flow more smoothly I probably won't even notice.
Like I said, that one not-even-complete story made me really crave Reggie/Betty fanfiction. Since then I've found plenty of other people who admit to shipping it (it's a topic that's come up bizarrely often in the last year, probably because of the Archie/Veronica wedding thing) fanfic is not so easy to find. Probably because the company is so twitchy about it.
I can't really come up with any plot bunny jumping off points for them because my knowledge of the canon is so hazy. Hopefully that won't pose a problem for you!
You can watch The Big Bang Theory online over here.
Characters: Howard Wolowitz and Penny
Request: It is always so hard to pick my final request, but I've finally decided on the one I'll probably never see anywhere else: Howard/Penny. You know that scene in The Friendship Algorithm when they're all hanging around Kripke, Howard mutters to Penny "Suddenly I'm looking pretty good, eh?" and she starts giggling? It's such a real response that all of a sudden it made me want him to win her over, at least for a little while. "Win her over" can mean obvious friendship--just them hanging out for awhile without the others--as much as romance if you can't get your mind around the pairing. It could also mean a drunken rebound one-night-stand that she feels guilty about afterwards as long as she does feel bad for using him, since even if it's not nice guilt's still a sign that she really does care about him on some level.
This seems to be the year of me asking for things that one tiny bit of canon made me crave. *g*
Honestly, you could leave Penny out entirely and just have a story focused on Howard if you'd like. The only episode so far where his plotline has been the main focus of the episode didn't exactly treat him well, so he could use a Howard-centric story that turns out well for him.
I like the way all the main characters interact with each other, so feel free to pull in anyone else that you want. Just please don't bash Leonard if you do; I'm not a fan of his relationship with Penny myself, but I can't see it lasting past March sweeps, the end of the season at the most, so it's easy enough to just set a story in the future. I also always like it when Penny gets drawn into one of their hobbies and actually ends up enjoying it (Age of Conan, Halo night).
One thing that might be interesting to play with is that even though Howard gets poked at for being the only one in the group without a Ph.D, because work in engineering is so much more tangible than work in physics, he might be the only one in the group who could have a conversation with Penny about his job and actually have her follow it, provided that he's doing something that catches her interest and he keeps his descriptions to "drive a car on Mars" levels that a layman can easily understand.
Unfortunately, Star Ocean: Till the End of Time is a PS2 game, so I can't give you a download. If you have a PS2 it's pretty cheap, but I really don't expect anyone to go out and buy something on my account.
Characters: Cliff Fittir, Fayt Leingod, Maria Traydor, Nel Zelpher
RequestDetail3: First of all, you don't need to include all four characters if you don't want to! If possible I would love a story with the Cliff/Fayt pairing (or the even more rare Nel/Cliff/Fayt threesome) but any gen combination is also just fine. I'd love to get to see more of Quark suddenly finding themselves basically raising a daughter when Maria showed up, since we got to little of that. I love the period of the game when it's just Nel Cliff and Fayt traveling around. We never get to see much of Maria and Nel interacting with each other, but with their similar careers I bet they could click off each other awesomely if you wanted to!
As I said, if you were matched with this fandom and could wrangle a Cliff/Fayt story (or Nel/Cliff/Fayt) I would love you, since they're my OTP/3 for the fandom and you can't find much of either, but I totally understand if you can't.
Let's see... I think I gave a good amount of springing off points in the request itself, but if you want to know some other things I'm a fan of, I like how Cliff seems like you're typical big dumb bruiser, but is actually pretty clever. I'm really interested in all the history you can read in books scattered around--the way you can find books about the same period of time in both Airyglyph and Aquaria and see the differences in how the two sides view things--though I'm not sure how you could really work that into a story with the characters in question unless they went off trying to find out which side's story is more accurate. If they could stop awhile on Vanguard III it would touch a soft-spot of mine; I've always wished that there was an ending where Fayt settled down there to take care of Niklas and Meena. I'm also fond of stories involving inventing; Fayt and Cliff teaching Nel about Engineering (even though they're not supposed to do things like that), since there's no way she'd know how to make the fancy bombs and things they make on her own with her world's level of development. Or pure shallow fanservice about Fayt looking cute in the glasses he only wears when inventing. Or something about their cover stories! It always amuses me a little when I go through the party's inventor profiles and see how they dragged every last person from space into their "inventors from Greeton" cover story even when it gets incredibly tenuous.
Anyway, thank you again for writing me a story! I hope this letter helped!
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Date: 2009-11-11 07:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-11 07:53 pm (UTC)