Dear Yuletide Writer 2024

[eloquentalias]

Hello hello, welcome to AO3 user elo_quentalias’s Yuletide letter. My general approach to exchange letters is that if you are writing for me and already have a clear idea of what you want to write just from my sign-up, I want you to ignore my letter and go after that idea! I want anyone who has me as a recipient to have fun and to not worry too much about producing The Perfect Gift, this letter is meant as a springboard for you if you don't have ideas right off the bat.

I also want to stress that if I've written more about one fandom than the other that does not reflect how excited I am about each fandom - please trust me when I say I've looked hard at my requests and pruned the fandoms I wasn't as excited about. Everything here will net you 100% excitement from me, I just have different amounts of my own ideas for different fandoms.

My AO3 account is open for treats, and I welcome them if you are interested.

Do Not Wants
Explicit sex scenes (sexual jokes/references, fade to black are always fine), rape/non-con, homophobia/transphobia as a central plot element, infidelity, soulmate AUs, Christmas/Christian themes (*), completely hopeless endings

(*) This DNW does not apply to Misericorde, where Christianity is very relevant. I still do not want it in fic for the other canons I am requesting.

General Likes
Canon divergence & role swaps, character studies with serious introspection, case fic, missing scenes, developing relationships/friendships, characters being part of a community, gen where characters who don’t interact in canon meet each other, wilderness survival situations, cohabiting shenanigans, food themes, dealing with the mundane in fantasy/sci-fi settings, quiet moments together, pre-relationship ~tension~, friends to lovers, secret identities and the drama that results from them

Opt-Ins (a.k.a. content that is often DNWed that I am okay with)
Trans headcanons, kidfic/parenting as a focus

魔尊也想知道 - 青色羽翼 | Devil Venerable Also Wants to Know - Cyan Wings
Qiu Congxue

Everything about Devil Venerable is so charming to me. A silly premise that is never treated as such by the characters, a sweet love story between two guys who are supposed to be Arch Villains, a well-developed cast of side characters... What's not to love? I have trouble talking about it without sounding like I'm marketing it, but I enjoyed Devil Venerable so so much and I'd simply love to spend some fannish time with it.

While reading I was particularly taken with everyone's favourite one brain cell ghost cultivator, Qiu Congxue. I loved her so much I kept sending Qiu Congxue Highlights to a friend of mine who has no interest in danmei, and that friend loved her too. Such is the overwhelming charm of the character concept "blunt evil woman who's mad that all her hard work to become a skeleton has been ruined". Her dynamics with Shu Yanyan and Baili Qingmiao were particularly good to me if you want a starting point for other characters to include, but genuinely and sincerely you do not need anyone else. Put Qiu Congxue in a situation and I will be delighted to watch her go.

Prompts:

• Day to day life at Xuanyuan Sect I would absolutely love to see what you think Qiu Congxue actually does when she's not participating in the plot. Does she simply go around getting in fights with people who want her spot? Is there some kind of bureaucracy among the ghost cultivators?
• Post-canon dynamic with Baili Qingmiao When I think about QCX post-canon, what I most want to see is where her relationship with Baili Qingmiao goes from here. BQM's in such a different place after being genuinely freed from her obsession with He Wenzhao, and since her biggest advances came from Wenren E's plotting rather than QCX's teaching, I wonder what BQM thinks of her off-beat mentor now? Do they move towards being equals, or are things just too weird for that to be the trajectory? I welcome this prompt going shippy, but I'd be just as interested in gen answers to these questions.
• Missing scenes with the Baili Qingmiao travel party Which is to say shenanigans/adventures that take place when QCX was travelling with Baili Qingmiao, Zhongli Qian, and Su Huai. We get told they travelled together for quite some time but don't see much of it directly so I'd love to see some more details.
• Backstory Seriously though, how did she get like this? Did she begin cultivation on the ghost path or was she a conventional cultivator at some point? Was she morbid and ghost-obsessed from childhood, did she pass for "normal" until suddenly she didn't, was she genuinely an average citizen of fantasy!China until Something Happened? Is forgoing the flesh only a way to get stronger or does she have a secret, more emotional reason to want to abandon her body? I'd welcome a more serious take on QCX's character for this prompt if you're game for it also, though of course being a bit stupid is part of her charm and if you write a goofy origin story for her I'd be just as happy to read that.

Misericorde (Visual Novel)
Any Character in Tagset (Hedwig, Catherine, Darcy, Eustace)

I nominated Misericorde and wrote a promo post for it, so suffice to say I enjoy Misericorde a whole lot. The story isn't even halfway done and there's such a feeling of depth to the characters, to say nothing of how atmospheric it is. When reading Misericorde I feel wholly inside of it, and I love that feeling. When it comes to what I want from fic my feeling is... I just want more? If you are offering to write for it, I believe you know what's interesting about it and I want to see what you do with it.

I'm also open to any of the sisters that aren't in the tagset play a larger role in the story - I chose the characters I did to serve as a starting point rather than a total limit on what characters can appear.

Prompts:

• Pre-canon slice of life with Catherine Simply: what was it like when she was there? This could be her work with Eustace, the sword lessons, a meal they all had together, anything you can think of. I think we get the sum total of Catherine from Hedwig's perspective in canon, but what did it look like from her side of that relationship?
• Darcy and Eustace I loooove these two, and I'd love to see more of their dynamic. Did they get along right away, or was it a bit of a process? How did Eustace react to Darcy's visions the first time she found out about them?
• Eustace and Hedwig This is a very interesting dynamic to me, and though I'm sure we'll get more of it in canon, if you have an idea on how things could go between them I'd love to see it.
• Hedwig in the outside world One of the things I love most about Misericorde is the specificity of Hedwig's perspective and just how difficult it is for her to navigate the world. I'd love to see her react to some mundane-but-rare occurrence in the nearby town, or somehow finding herself in a social situation where the stakes aren't quite as high as canon. Maybe a pre-canon glimpse of what Hedwig was like before her seclusion, on the road to choosing a life of solitude but not quite there yet?

The Sacred Dark Trilogy - May Peterson
Rhodry Bedefyr, Violetta Benedetti, Mio Gianbellicci, Tibario Gianbellicci

I could write out praise for these books all day, I absolutely love them - see my promo post for more gushing. They are big faves of mine and if you are considering writing fic about them at all, I am very excited to see what you do.

My intent with the characters I chose was to set up Rhodry/Mio and Violetta/Tibario fic. To borrow from my promo post directly, I simply love these characters and would love to see either of these two couples enjoying their respective happy endings. I would also be interested in less obvious combinations of the characters interacting if you are too; I came out of The Calyx Charm really really wanting Mio and Violetta to interact on page and if you want to pursue that thread I would be more than happy to see it.

Prompts:

• Rhodry/Mio post-canon I'd love to see that trip to Rhodry's home country they decide to take at the end of the book, or anything beyond that if you so please! We get to see only a little bit of the house settling down after the curse is gone, so I'd be really interested in seeing what the household's new normal looks like once Rhodry and Mio are back, too.
• Violetta/Tibario post-canon I adore The Calyx Charm, obviously, but there's not a clear sense of what Violetta and Tibario's day-to-day is going to look like, exactly, when the book ends, and I'd love to see them enjoying that. It seems clear they're going to stay in Violetta's community and build a life there, but what does Tibario do exactly, most of the time? How does an ex-mafioso occupy himself now that he has no orders? Now that Violetta has nothing to fear from her father, what can she do that she couldn't before? I'd also love some simple romantic fluff for them, they deserve it.
• Gianbellicci brothers reunion I understand perfectly well that Lord of the Last Heartbeat establishes that Mio is prepared to never see Tibario again but with everything that changes for Tibario in The Calyx Charm... What if they met again anyways? What if they got to introduce their partners to one another properly, building a family outside of their mother's control?

UFO 50 (Video Game)
Worldbuilding

UFO 50 is just so fun, and I wholeheartedly believe that it would be fun to bring into the world of fic as well. To me, there is a lot of fic potential in both games themselves and the metafiction of the lost console - I am a huge nerd about video games and read a lot of games media, so the idea of “making up the material surrounding a fake console” really makes my brain go brrrrrrrr, so to speak. I’d love to read other people’s takes on that theme! The games are so cute too, and I’d love some elaboration on the bizarre little worlds they create. Based on “worldbuilding” and “UFO 50” alone, I will be excited to read what you make of it.

Fandom-Specific DNW: A focus on the fictionalized real life developers of the game. You’re welcome to reference them, for example if you’re writing a present day interview with one of the fictional devs you can feel free to have the interviewer say that (fictionalized) Derek Yu helped rediscover the console, but I don’t want fictionalized Derek Yu to be a character in the fic.

Prompts:

• Flesh out the in-universe developers We get little, tiny bits of pieces of the in-universe developers through the games’ info sections - elaborate on those! What were their relationships to each other? What game’s particularly contentious dev cycle nearly tore them apart? Are some of them coming out of the woodwork to share 80s stories now that their work has been rediscovered?
• UFOSoft (or its properties) beyond the 80s So far as I can tell, though UFO 50 contains all of UFOSoft’s games for the LX, there’s no fiction saying “they stopped there, making no more games ever”, so what did their catalogue look like beyond the LX? Did they ever try a transition to 3D? Did other developers take up any of their properties for reboots? What was the reception for the inevitable Space Pirate Alpha FPS?
• In-universe 80s games media Did Digital Trends kind of do this in their review? Yes. Do I want more of that? Absolutely. If older games media is your jam, I would love to see it.
• In-universe present day games media What are people writing about this whole scenario in the universe where the LX was genuinely a lost console? Have people written fond blog posts about their memories of the games in the past, and what are their impressions now?
• In-game worldbuilding You could build out the world for any one of the fifty and I will be delighted. What kind of society do the Divers have up there on the surface? Does Porgy have true consciousness? How does literally anything work in the world of Magic Garden, anyways? Anything at all that interests you in the game worlds, I will be here for.