yuletide 2021, whoop whoop!

[delga]

dear yule writer, hello, i love you. please do come in and take a seat; i'm delighted you're here.

every year yuletide creeps up on me unexpectedly... except not this year! growth.gif

all my previous letters are under my yuletide tag, and these should give you an idea of what i do or don't like. as before, my tumblr is linked in some of those, but i am not great at tagging? i will share tags where i think they're appropriate but i suspect you'll just see the same gifsets over and over again.

first rule is the most rule: please have fun! if you have a plotbunny, chase it where it may lead. as long as it doesn't hit my DNWs, i promise you, i will be ecstatic. i'm just grateful you're here! thank you. did i say that yet? thank you!

i will read basically anything, and i have, but i very strongly prefer not to read: sexual assault; abuse; vomit; zombies; schmoop; unhappy endings. (i don't mind D/s, and i do read it, but i'd suggest staying away from the SM portions of BDSM, just because my tastes are contextual and fickle.)

otherwise, it really sort of is a free-for-all. in my ships i like angst with a happy ending, especially mutual pining; in all cases i love backstory, plotty fics, character-specific fics, slice-of-life, ep-tags, AUs, everything. i read all ratings, and het/slash/femslash. everything!

for the first time ever, i'm writing this letter before submitting my sign-up, so it's very long, but i hope it's useful.

• disco elysium. like everyone who has played this game, i fell in love pretttttty hard with kim kitsuragi, but saying that, i have a soft spot for harry who is post-broken and keeps stumbling wildly into intuition. nothing has made me quite so feral as stumbling onto literally any dialogue where revachol tells them she loves them. nothing. NOTHING. every time i tear at my hair and rend my clothes. fic that explores that would be delightful.
  
  (un jour je serai de retour près de toi. ?????? UNHINGED.)
  
  there are some heavy implications about the future of the world of de, and i am obsessed with the way the pale is described as being a place of memory, but a place that therefore rejects memory. but i'm also very much into the growing bud of partnership / friendship / dare i say it LOVESHIP between harry and kim, two people who responded very differently to their circumstances, but are two sides of the same coin.
  
  i will love basically anything about harry, kim, the squad, revachol, ideas of fate, ideas of kinship in a void (bahdumtsh), revachol's view on her city, vignettes about kim and harry at jamrock, casefic, slice-of-life, in-game asides a n y t h i n g.
  
  here is my unhelpful disco tag.



• exandria unlimited. the sheer combined force of chaos in this campaign was enough to keep me hooked through every single episode. so much happened every week! delightful.
  
  i would love anything that builds on their found-family-ness, either building on canon moments, or following up after the first season ended. opal in the aftermath of everything is a pretty interesting starting point, but i have a very, very soft spot for how ashley johnson plays fearne who is just eeeeeever so slightly left of centre in how she approaches things. every choice she made was gold.
  
  otherwise, i do, genuinely, have fondness for them all, so feel free to pick a character and run with that, or a combination of the characters. i'm interested in what motivates a group to stay together, and this group in particular run on momentum, but also care of each other. between them they have shared possession of a single braincell, and usually orym has it, but they make it work regardless.
  
  this will not help you at all, but it's my exu tag.



• devolver digital showcase. how do i explain this. every year, indie game maker devolver digital puts out a showcase of upcoming games. it's a promotional thing. however, devolver digital's showcases, which are a parody of things like apple showcases, have internal narrative. what is essentially a marketing presentation now has, like, 5 years of Actual Lore, which follows some absolutely trippy goings on with Chief Synergy Officer Nina Struthers.
  
  i actually can't explain it more than that. sometimes it's cartoonishly gory, sometimes it's about time travel, but the secret is that mostly it's about authenticity. you can watch all the videos from tumblr user elision's helpful masterpost. in an unusual turn of events, i am also going to recommend her devolver digital tag, because it's a lot more useful than my nina tag.
  
  if you get through that - or if you know it already - then i would like to request nina, marge and, sure, why not, zane, shenanigans. i think i also nominated linda from marketing, because who doesn't need an unhinged antagonist. i look forward to any and all dispatches from the future's future's future! go wild on the lore. nina's a robot now? holy shit. did marge invent time travel, uh, yes, possibly, and what the hell was that process even like. does zane regret his life choices, or is this just a regular day in corporate shillery for him? (unlikely. it's, uh. nuts.)
  
  have. fun.

so i also nominated things that you can get up to speed with in a jiffy. i'm actually maxing out my requests for once, so you may actually match with me on one of these, but no pressure if you decide to pick anything else on here.

• the nautilus ark: a johnson corp odyssey (web series). uggggghhhhh i love space narratives, and i love how hard this one went on the tropes of the 80s movies. i loved Mother, and i loved the crew, and i think there's a lot of rich ground in the context of the show. what did it mean to each of this crew to be picked to help carry this cargo? what was Mother doing whilst they slept? how did nomen end up on this crew? are frog folk a thing? i think this one is rich for character studies, and going in deep on the decisions they made.
  
  if you don't know what this is, it's a one-shot rpg, which means you can watch the whole thing in about 4 hours. it's based on things like contact and alien and moon and other space-thrillers, where people are put into a precarious and confined space, and then forced to deal with an unexpected outside threat. it was GREAT. i loved it so much! i would enjoy fic about anything to do with it.

and lastly, two very different films.

• the gentlemen (2019). i really liked a few things about this film more than others, and that was mostly visual. (ray's tailoring? look, we all have our foibles, okay?)
  
  i'd really enjoy more of the same, frankly. what happens after the end of the film? what are they like in ten years? lord, what were they like ten years ago? how does someone like ray meet someone like mickey? how does that allegiance become a thing? how do you build loyalty in a world where no one really trusts one another? i will never get over that scene in the car where ray faffs over mickey's car belt, things like that, because these hulking stereotypes of toxic masculinity are worried about... dangerous driving?
  
  i also really enjoy the weird interconnected-ness of guy ritchie's organised crime films - how group a are tangentially related to group b, and that can result in a mess, because of person c. that can be a little tricky to get a handle on, but if you play with that, that could be fun!
  
  there is a very small subset of characters in the tag set, which is fine, but if you want to throw ros, or basically anyone else in, please do. what a violent, motley, rag-tag bunch they all are.
  
  (i don't ship anyone with anyone, but, like, i'll read it? joyfully? i prefer zero ros erasure, though, and no ray/fletcher. that's a dnw.)



• the half of it (2020). what a lovely, lovely film about making connections, and about missing them, and about what happy endings look like in life. i would love pretty much what i put in the request: some sort of future fic, That One Reunion, or the many times they fall in and out of each others lives. what a tender, lovely thing this film was! what a kindness! i would like more - more kindness, more bittersweet-ness, more of everything delicate and dancing that made up these lonely people whose lives intersected right at the point where they had to leave each other.

whoo, that was a LOT. optional details are optional, dear yuletide friend. i'm excited! i hope you are too. i can't wait to talk to you when this is done.

<3 delga