Dear Yuletide Author

[magibrain]

Hello! I've never done one of these before, so forgive any messiness. Thanks for tackling a story for me, though - hope you have a ton of fun working on it.

I'll ramble for a bit about me, so you can get an idea of my tastes and sensibilities, and then ramble about the fandoms I've requested.

.

Me!

I'm an aromantic asexual, and I tend get tired easily of the prevalence of sexual and romantic plots in the media I consume, so gen is my happy place – especially gen which takes seriously and ascribes importance to platonic relationships, and explores ways in which relationships can be intimate without sex or romance.

I tend to enjoy character-focused things, things which don't spell everything out, well-rendered subtext, and people who don't (or can't) always say exactly what they mean. I'm a big fan of best plans going awry, moral grey, and situations that don't always have easy answers. And realistic detail in things like science, survival situations, preparedness, etc. make me really happy.

I'm not big on fluff or schmoop (except in extremely small doses), and like my angst to be somewhat restrained – which isn't to say that things can't go really dark. I just tend to groove more on crushing, silent despair than wailing and gnashings of teeth. ;)



Alphas

I'd love to see something post-canon, dealing with the aftermath of Grand Central Station: the team putting themselves back together without Rosen and confronting how they were basically a therapy group that got shanghaied into special ops, or maybe Parish in custody/interrogations/isolation/whathaveyou and confronting the fact that he killed the person who was going to be his great hope for leadership in the brave new world he failed to create, or maybe the team dealing with alphas whose ability was woken up or pushed into overdrive and regain consciousness surrounded by the dead. Alternately, It'd be fun to see daily life in the offices - the little negotiations that go into existing with each other, and the extent to which the team is aware of each others' weak spots and the extent to which they address or ignore those. Prefer messy and complicated (but still moving forward) with no easy answers over happy endings and things neatly squared away.

The thing that jumped out at me about this show, and the thing that kept me watching, was the way in which no one actually had the answers – and it was a really good portrait of two different sides coming to a complex social issue and trying to solve it by throwing more and more force at it.

I like the messiness of the show. How everyone has rough edges and occasionally digs their heels in when it's not a good idea, how they're not a team naturally suited to working together but they do work together because they have to, how every is so quickly thrown out of their comfort zones and makes mistakes and has to confront parts of themselves they might not want to. In short, I love complexity, and layered shades of grey.



Bel Dame Apocrypha

Anything that explores Nyx's mass-of-contradictions-and-sharp-edges self would be amazing. Particularly the ways in which she cares for people, but doesn't let that care interfere with her ruthless pragmatism. It's be neat to see a series of vignettes about the people she left her house to, or maybe just some extremely understated team aftercare after a job, for example.

Oh, this series. I got hooked in hard by how realistically bleak and brutal it was. None of the sides are exactly good; no one really has the moral high ground. And people get injured, people get killed, and no one is really immune from their life royally screwing them over.

And Nyx. Oh, Nyx, and her unyielding, uncompromising nature, and her utter pragmatism. You hear a lot about how people are discouraged from writing female characters who are so much as assertive, because they'll be labelled a "bitch" – well, Nyx goes right on over to the other side of that, and owns it. And that is amazing. She's not all sweetness and light, she's not even right some of the time, but she doesn't need to make any apologies for that.



Space: Above and Beyond

Love to see anything in-series with Shane and McQueen discussing leadership (and how odd their relationships to their positions are – Shane didn't start off wanting responsibility for anyone, and I'm betting that McQueen, as a tank, wasn't expecting to be in charge of much of anything). Or McQueen and Hawkes talking about being tanks, especially if it involves the lines between knowing that you're never going to quite be on equal footing with the people around you (because there's 18 years you don't get that they did), but still being able to find the rare, precious people you can trust, who do see you as a person and an asset to the team. Or, anything post-canon, with Hawkes (especially) adapting to everything that's changed, and whatever new team is set up around him after they spent so long getting to the point where the 58th worked together as well as it did. (Bonus points for dealing with the tension of him being known as kind of a badass for being with the 58th, but still kinda looked at askance because he's a tank.)

xkcd 1190 (Time)

Anything dealing with reconstruction after the strip ends would be absolutely lovely. So, maybe the beret girl discovering she's a natural mariner, and constructing ships to explore the sea and map the coastline. Or, maybe main female character and main male character becoming the de facto leaders of the scouting and foraging parties, and coming back to a camp where everyone is involved in the various businesses of surviving – constructing shelters, managing supplies and morale, etc. Or maybe when they first re-establish contact with the people they took the maps from, whether that be weeks or months or years later, and how they learn to communicate and set up trade and such.

One of the things that makes xkcd so very charming is the way in which Munroe's sharp sense of humor is tempered with a kind of gentleness, and that came through loud and clear in Time. The characters see the world and will take action when it threatens them – the woman hitting a cat over the head with a plank, or them organizing their entire settlement to escape the rising sea – but you also have moments like them pausing to tell a bird that it's doing a good job, and the soft "It's a pretty big tree. It probably knows what it's doing." moment. So, even beyong the attention paid to the natural world, it's the quality of that attention that really grabbed me – not just keen observation, but a curiosity and engagement that was really quite adorable.