Dear Yuletide Writer

I'm very excited to be taking part in Yuletide this year! Thank you for writing for me. I will love anything you write, and I also love treats.

My DNWs are: preachy/modern-issue-focused fic, vignettes with zero plot, cute stories with zero conflict, bleak stories with zero hope, focus on non-canonical character death, terminal illness especially cancer, death of children, non-canon-divergence AUs, black and white morality, unrequested noncanonical identity labels, rape, pedophilia, and sexual violence.

If my DNWs conflict with canon, it's fine to include the canon element but please not as the main focus of the fic.

Things I like in fanfic:

• Stories where something happens or changes over the course of the story, even if it's just coming to an internal realization. I especially love plotty stories where the emotional and relationship-based plots are interwoven with a more traditional plot -- the classic "casefic"
• Dialogue and interaction between characters -- I especially love people interacting who are very different, or who you wouldn't expect to see together
• Relationships including: Light romance, intense romance, romance with explicit sex, friendship, complicated families, teamwork, grudging rivals, and enemies. I don't really enjoy relationships without conflict, especially "found family" relationships.
• Darkness, humor, darkness with humor
• Worldbuilding and exploration of the canon setting
• A canon-like tone, even if the content goes beyond what canon would explore -- or a bold choice of a deliberate non-canon-like tone.

My requests:

Cuckoo (2024 movie)

Characters: worldbuilding

What I most want is fic exploring more about the cuckoo species and how they operate. I had many unanswered questions after watching the movie! Among them were:

• How intelligent are the cuckoos?
• How much do the children inherit from their human parent? Do the cuckoos ever impregnate other species? 
• What does the cuckoos' scream do exactly? Is it causing seizures? Could it actually be rewinding time? (that would be very cool to explore) What is the pulsing in the neck that seems to come with it?
• Do the cuckoos form relationships in nature? How do they feel about their children? About each other? About humans?
• Where do they come from? How did they evolve? Are they present in any other parts of the world?
• What do they eat?
• How else do they differ biologicially from humans?
• How exactly does their reproductive system work? Are there any male cuckoos?

• More about Walter Keene's life as a dashing robin-hood-esque adventurer, how he got involved with the brotherhood, and how he coped with becoming old
• Walter and Edmund and how they began working together
• More about how the world is different from our own -- what other countries are different? How did the brief reign of Lazarus's party affect the world?
• Mary, and her adventures going from pampered upper class lady to dissident on the run, her relationship with her dad and her two suitors
• Focus on characters not in the tag set is fine: the servants in Edmund's house, the dysfunctional Cloudsley family, the underworld of criminals, the Brotherhood -- love them all!
• We see the golden idol used in some pretty creative ways in canon -- is there more untapped potential there?
• What is the world of the game like in the modern day?
• Fic in some kind of unusual format that mimics the found documents in canon, or maybe even a puzzle to solve

The Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay

Characters: Matt Soren, Loren Silvercloak

My only character-focused request! I love this strange old fantasy trilogy, which I imprinted on fairly early in childhood, and there are a lot of fics I would love to read about it, but I'll be 100% honest: what I would most love is to see these two as a couple! 

I love their loving but fraught relationship in canon, and I love the moment near the end when Matt is shocked that Loren gets up to leave after he orders all the non-dwarves away. I would love to see some ship fic for them. Some ideas are:

• Maybe they didn't get together until after the end of the series, when the end of the war and their new status as king and advisor rather than source and mage made it feel more possible -- how would they manage all those changes?
• Conversely, maybe they've been together more or less since they first met. We don't know the full story of their first meeting or how Matt agreed to be Loren's source -- how did it happen? Clearly others don't know they're together romantically -- how did keeping it secret affect them?
• Give them a whack at some of the classic old fanfic tropes such as huddling for warmth, sharing a bed, having telepathy, sex pollen, all the old standbys.
• Is it a bigger deal for Matt to be with a man or to be with a non-dwarf? That there are no gay couples in canon tells me that there is some level of heteronormativity in the setting, and I don't want an AU that ignores this (though what level it's at is up to you). But on the other hands dwarves are very insular and Matt has just re-committed to very traditional dwarf-hood. Is being with a non-dwarf compatible with this? Does the king usually marry a dwarf?
• Loren's one-night-stand with Kim under the influence of divine magic -- was he sublimating something? Feel free to give Kim interesting things to do if you go this route, I love her and don't want her bashed or made purely a plot device.

If you don't see the ship at all, don't force it! In that case, I would love whatever inspires you for the setting and characters -- maybe a plotty fic about Matt post-canon with Loren supporting him, dealing with becoming king, moderating disputes between the dwarves with some fun worldbuilding thrown in.

My Ao3 name is Proud_Human.

I think that is all, but feel free to contact me through the mods if you have any questions! Happy Yuletide!