Yuletide Letter 2021

Hello! 

My ao3 account can be found here under the same username. Layout is fixed!

Specific dislikes (i.e. please no): non-con, underage (overtly romantic or sexual situations between minors and adults, or explicitly sexual situations between minors under 16 (romance is fine)), student/teacher dynamics, or overt animal abuse.

Specific likes: Equal time for women characters, zaniness, fun & whimsy, worldbuilding, sci-fi/fantasy/horror weirdness, solarpunk, time travel, queer relationships, kidfic, poetry, and pretty much any story the author had fun writing/piece of art the artist enjoys making. I'm all about the non-traditional story structures and I also enjoy any tense, any POV, any length. I know there's a minimum wordcount, but if you did a 10-drabble story cycle, you would have my respect forever. Any gender(s) for pairings is great (I ascribe to the argument that "himbo" is a state of mind), and I welcome nonbinary characters as well. Any rating is a-okay. 

Specific in-universe worldbuilding likes: Give me all of it! Emails, text conversations, overly descriptive set pieces, I love it all.

Fandoms: 

Because I Will Never Be Able to Eat Lava (Tumblr)

I love Yuletide. This weirdness is extremely my shit. I had not heard of this fandom (read: it hadn't crossed my tumblr feed) but now that I have heard about it, I couldn't stop thinking about it! 

Prompts:

• What is the courtship like between these two?
• Backstory: why is the himbo so obsessed with this?
• Clearly the volcanologist is into the himbo. What about them was attractive in the first place? How does the himbo reciprocate and take care of the volcanologist, who is not tempted to eat lava? 
• Maybe the volcanologist also secretly wants to eat the lava but knows better? Could they bond over this shared fantasy?
• Smut/romantic eating together: do they roleplay with not!lava but like... wax or warm honey or something?

moon's haunted - dustinkcouch (tweet)

This to me reads like the perfect synopsis of my favorite Twilight Zone episode that was never made. I love it!! (I would not be averse to a straight up treatment of this as a Twilight Zone episode, complete with Rod Serling saying "Goddamn did you see that shit?! That was crazy. Anyway, I'm Rod Serling.")

This fandom tells so much of a story in so few words that I'm really curious to see what you can build out of it. To me this would be the perfect prompt for some non-traditional formatting, be that epistolary fic or a series of brief scenes that draw together into a bigger plot. It could also just be the beginning of some sort of sprawling space epic. Anything!

Prompts: 

• What (who?) is haunting the moon
• What was the discovery of the haunting like?
• What was the trip back like? 
• What happened when they got back to the moon?
• Does the gun even work on moon ghosts?
• Is there a romance brewing between the astronauts, ground control, or the ghosts? Could there be?

Unsleeping City

Unsleeping City my beloved! Gosh I am a sucker for magical realist NYC. I love all the characters and the depth and light they bring. I love Kingston and Liz's relationship, I can't wait to see Kingston as a dad, I love Esther and Ricky (though he wasn't nominated). I would love to see a team fic, or some aspect of the city we haven't visited yet.

I'll try to stick close to the selected characters for prompts (as that's what we matched on), but I requested Any for a reason. I love all of the characters equally, and I think any interaction between any of them would be worth exploring. If you also wanted to, please bring in other characters from canon, or OCs of your own design (outsider perspective, anyone??), or characters from Drawfee's "Artists Draw Urban Fantasy D&D Characters (ft. Brennan Lee Mulligan)." If you choose to focus mostly on characters from outside of canon, I would love for worldbuilding to be a focus.

(A note on ships within the tagset: I ship Esther/Ricky, Esther/Ricky/Sophia(/Dale), Kingston/Liz, and Iga/her husband Oskar, and maybe Kug/Perry the Pigeon. I can be swayed to other ships as well -- but I'd prefer if things were open among canon characters or a "they were never together in the first place" AU. It can be pretty handwavey (feel free to enter into the middle of a scene where everyone involved is already together). Please don't kill or vilify anybody's canon partners, and please no explicit cheating. The only tagset possible pairing that would squick me is Kug/Esther.)

Prompts: 

• What is growing up in magical NYC like? Does Langston take after his dad or his mom or both/neither? Who babysits all the next gen heroes of NYC? Also, what's it like PARENTING in magical NYC?
• Esther and Kug didn't have the best time in canon, but he's all of everything now. Do they work on their relationship?
• Iga's experience as an immigrant (and hoping to inspire her kids' interest in their heritage while also making space for their experiences as native New Yorkers) is so interesting! Do you know what else is interesting? Her tiny pet dragon. I would love to have anything that focuses on her, her family, her pet dragon, pre-canon or post-canon, etc!
• More adventures! What is the next SantaCon like? Does anyone actually ever make it out to Staten* Island?
  

* Shamefully I made a spelling mistake in my sign up. I know how to spell Staten!

And, after all, optional details are optional! If you have an idea already, go for it!