Dear Yuletide Writer 2015

Hey, dear Yuletide Writer!

First of all thanks for offering one of my fandoms – you’re awesome! This is my first Yuletide so I’m still trying to get the hang of things; this letter got a bit wordy, I’m sorry, but I got started writing and then it was suddenly very difficult to stop. But please don’t worry, anything you do with these characters I will be super happy with! I’ve included some prompts if you want inspiration, but they’re really just there for ideas so don’t feel like you have to use them.

(In case you want to find me elsewhere: My AO3 is cadmean, and I’m on tumblr as teumesia. I’m really only here on DW because it’s easier for letter formatting/readability, haha.)

General likes: Worldbuilding, character studies. Missing scenes. Comfortable established relationships, banter, us against the world, couples kicking ass together. People in general being competent at what they do. UST, snark. Loyalty and betrayal and their respective consequences.

General dislikes:  Pregnancy/kidfic. Any overly graphic descriptions of bodily fluids. A/B/O. Noncon. Tentacles. AUs of the coffee shop/high school/etc variety. Mechanics-focused smut, if that makes sense? I am totally fine with smut! But I like it more when it’s character-focused rather than bits going boink.

On to requests!

THE MALAZAN BOOK OF THE FALLEN - STEVEN ERIKSON
Characters: Dancer|Cotillion, Dassem Ultor, Surly|Laseen, Kellanved|Ammanas

I fell in love with Malazan the moment Cotillion and Shadowthrone showed up in Itko Kan, and by the end of Gardens of the Moon I was hooked. There are two main drawing points for me: one of them is the massive amount of worldbuilding that can be found, and the other is the underlying theme of compassion going on.

Dancer – My favorite thing about Dancer is how much he grows as a character over the course of the story. In the beginning there are a lot of hints and implications that while he was always a really gifted assassin, as a person he was, well, kind of a douche. (Urko Crust wanted to throw him into a canal!) I feel like that starts to change once he possesses Sorry, until we get that awesome scene between Lostara Yil and Cotillion in the beginning of The Crippled God. I love the development he goes through.

Kellanved, on the other hand, I find interesting because we really don’t get to see him all that much in the books. And when he does show up, Ammanas comes across as very probably totally insane, but also  very, very good at the whole lord of shadow thing. He’s the mysterious schemer type and that’s a lot of fun, but I’m also really curious as to what’s going on in his head.

Dassem is sort of the odd man out in that he shows up a whole lot later on as Traveller, but you get the sense that he’s changed a lot after the death of his daughter and his own disappearance. He must have been close to the rest of the Old Guard going by the way they all talk about him, but in the present time he’s pretty dedicated to staying undercover. His single-minded focus to kill Hood is really fascinating in light of all the people he left behind to get close to being able to kill Hood. Character-wise he seems kind of the opposite of Cotillion: he was kind and compassionate before his daughter’s death and Surly’s rise to power, but afterward he seems to lose a lot of that in his quest for revenge. Not all of his compassion! But a good deal of it. I also ship him and Dancer in a sort of low key, UST way, and them more or less switching their outlooks on life works great into that.

And Surly. What I like about her is that she realized that the two top men of the empire were gone for way too long and that, really, there were better people around to take the throne, her right up at the top of the list – and so she went right ahead and became empress. That’s really impressive in and of itself, and I’m a big fan of that sort of decisive mindset in characters. Plus, she just really kicks ass.

Prompts: Anything from the early days of the empire, basically. I’m a huge sucker for the Found Families trope, especially when it comes to all of the Old Guard huddling in the Deadhouse together and plotting to take over the world.

--How did they all end up together? We know Surly came with the other Napans, but what about Dassem? And how did him becoming Knight of Death factor into everything later on?

--Likewise, how did Kellanved and Dancer even meet in the first place, and how did they come to decide to build up an empire together? They trust each other a lot and have that sort of camaraderie that comes with years of knowing the other person, so I’m interested in how that all began.

--What was Laseen thinking when she heard of the new gods of shadow? Did she make the connection between the comrades she murdered and the two gods? (Did Dassem?)

--Present-day, does Shadowthrone just sit on his shadowy throne all day and complain about his increasing immaterialness? What are his thoughts on the goings-on, like Tavore leading the Bonehunters and Mallick Rel becoming the next emperor? He tries to come across as detached and whimsical, but underneath all that he still seems to care for his empire.

Addendum: I requested those four characters, but please don’t feel as if you have to fit them all into a single fic; I’d be delighted to read about any of them in any combination or on their own! Likewise if you want to include some of the other characters in the tagset or from the canon in general.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT ANNIKA – SIMON STÅLENHAG
Characters: Any

Quick link if you’re just browsing: ‘We Need To Talk About Annika’ is a series of pictures by Simon Stålenhag, depicting a young teenage couple investigating some strange contraption while some sort of robot/technology apocalypse seems to be going on. It’s really worth checking out!

The image post showed up on my dashboard, and I was instantly intrigued. All the barely touched-on details of the world (robots! Weird technology!) are super cool and offer a whole lot of different opportunities for interpretation which I really like. I’m a big fan of that kind of background apocalypse trope in general, and the creepy technology thrown in is a huge plus as well.

The images throw up so many questions: What’s going on with the teleportation/transfer thing the boyfriend steps into? Why is he holding his head – what happened in there? To me it looks like whoever steps into one of the chambers gets taken apart and then reassembled or maybe cloned in the other chamber? Annika and her boyfriend are just exploring so I’m not sure they have any idea what they’ve gotten themselves into, but she did lead him to it in the earlier pictures and she does look back at the lake of gore while guiding her boyfriend away. Did she know something weird was going to happen or was something strange going on in the first place – really, why do we need to talk about Annika?

And then of course there’s the whole robot apocalypse thing going on in the background, which as I said earlier is super awesome! Annika and her boyfriend seem to just kind of accept it all, so I’m curious as to how long the robot/technology weirdness has been going on and what it was fought over and who was fighting and all that, and how Annika and the boyfriend feel about the whole thing.

Prompts: Basically, dear writer, I’d be delighted with whatever sort of worldbuilding fic you come up with! As I said earlier there's a whole lot of room for interpretation in this canon, so I'd love to know what other people make of it. A few possible starting points:

--The technology in general. What’s going on there, what’s the world like? The technology all looks sort of alive, or at least very organic-like. Is all of it like that, or is the teleporter machine an especially creepy exception?

--The teleporter machine. What’s it for, and why is out in the middle of a field somewhere? How does it work, what happens in the pods? And how does the pool of bloody remains play into it?

--Annika and her boyfriend. Did they explore other strange structures, or was the one in the field the first? Are they always that adventurous, or was this an exception?

--Relatedly, does whatever happened in the teleporter have any effect on their relationship? Does it mean anything in the context of the world in general?

--And what’s life in that world like? Annika and her boyfriend seem like your average teenage couple, but I’m curious how all of that plays out in front of the weirdness of the rest of the setting. Where and how do they live, what about their hometown? Family?

Really, throw some cool worldbuilding my way and I will be over the moon.

WARHAMMER 40,000
Characters: Ahzek Ahriman, Magnus the Red, Malcador the Sigillite

I could go on about how I love that this canon is incredibly lore-rich, and the over the top grimdark, and how the hilariously on-the-nose naming for things is, well, hilarious, but basically I am so here for all the loyalty kink and war and betrayal in space. Yes.

Now, I’ll be completely honest here with you and say that I love Malcador a whole lot. I think it’s awesome how in a setting with superhumans and aliens and evil gods and sentient butts of gas and all that Malcador is just a human, and yet the right-hand man of the Emperor, Sigillite of Terra, Lord of Assassins, you know the drill. Yes of course he’s a powerful psyker, but still human! With all the pitfalls and constraints that come with that, and I find it super interesting how he interacts with the primarchs and the Emperor, who are at least nominally on a different level than him. (Plus there’s that whole thing about him hoarding lots of ancient art and stuff – he has the Mona Lisa hanging in his rooms! That’s pretty awesome.)

As for the traitors, I’m going to lump Ahriman and Magnus together here, because I think they’re both very similar: smart, highly ambitious, and they both more or less ended up making the same mistakes. Basically what I find super interesting about these two is that even though in 40k they’re very much antagonistic, there’s also nevertheless a lot of respect left between them. Magnus might have banished Ahriman for the Rubric but still considers him his best son; Ahriman likewise still seems to have a lot of respect for his primarch despite everything that happened. I see it as this old bond of loyalty existing between them in face of everything that happened – from the early days of the Crusade to the burning of Prospero and then the Planet of Sorcerors they went through so much stuff side by side, and I imagine it’s really difficult to just forget all that.

I ship them, too, because again they’re very similar but just different enough that it causes friction, and with the primarch and first captain thing they’re bound to see a lot of each other. And then it all backfires spectacularly with the Burning of Prospero and the Rubric, of course, which is super fun!

Prompts: For Magnus and Ahriman I know I talked a lot about 40k, but if you want to do pre- or actual Heresy with them, go for it! (Sadly 40k isn’t really an option with Malcador…)

--Anything with Malcador, really; what does he do all day in the palace? Does he meet up with the Emperor to discuss things, does he get bogged down by bureaucratic stuff a lot? Really, if you want to write him I’ll be over the moon no matter what else you write about.

--Malcador talking with Magnus would be really cool, too – they’re both psykers, and we know that Malcador canonically takes a sort of uncle role for at least a couple of the primarchs. So what would they talk about if they met, what do they think of one another?

--Ahriman’s Wacky Warp Adventures post-Rubric. He’s a resourceful guy and the Eye of Terror is a big place – what sort of shenanigans does he get up to? Unfortunate run-ins with Space Wolves or Khorne Marines? Eldar trying to outsmart him? Tzeentch being a dick again? Go wild.

--Similarly, Magnus’ not quite as spectacular life on the Planet of Sorcerors. It’s a question I seem to be asking a lot here, but: what does he do all day? In John French’s Ahriman novels he seems to be aware of what’s going on off his planet at least vaguely, and he’s also keeping an eye on Ahriman, but that’s not a lot to be doing when you’re stuck in the warp.

--Ahriman and Magnus in 30k, kicking ass in a battle or nerding out dramatically over some ancient text or the like together. Ahriman was Magnus’ First Captain, so they spent a lot of time together doing things, and they have that huge library on Prospero and they had to acquire that somehow, right?

Again, I requested those three characters but feel free to mix and match as you want!