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Dear Yuletide Author, Thank you immensely for offering, or even just looking into, one of my incredibly tiny fandoms! I’ve put together some likes and prompts in this letter, but truly these fandoms are so small that I can promise you I’ll be delighted and amazed to see any kind of fic you want to write, for any of them! I like slash, gen, and friendships that occupy some ambiguous, platonically-intimate space in between; I like happy endings, unhappy endings, ambivalent endings, and unresolved endings. You can see some of my trope preferences below, but I really do like all kinds of stories, short or long, plotty or slice-of-life, adventure or domestic, darkfic or humor. Whatever you think suits the canon, the characters, and the story you want to tell. :) General Likes:❤ Stylistic / Thematic Stuff:
❤ Character Tropes:
❤ Shippy Stuff:
❤ Hurt/Comfort Tropes:
Do-Not-Wants:
❌ Unrequested romantic pairings (unless the relationship is canonical or the characters are OCs — those are fine to include, just don’t make them a main focus of the story if they weren’t part of a request). ❌ Alternate universe, unless requested. This includes crossovers/fusions, setting-change AUs, crackfic if that’s not the canon tone, and things like soulmates, wingfic, etc. (Canon divergence is totally fine, canon-typical magical or supernatural-horror elements are fine, ghosts are fine for any of the canons I’m requesting in this letter, and anything specifically mentioned in a request is fine.) ❌ Non-canon pet names like "baby," "honey," etc. (Canonical nicknames are fine, Chinese diminutives with 小 or 仔 are fine.) ❌ Narrative character-bashing. (This DNW goes particularly for Notre-dame de Paris, because I know Claude Frollo is... not widely liked. I’m 1000% fine with dark stories that acknowledge or explore serious character flaws, even damning character flaws! Just please don’t write me something where the narrative itself appears to feel dislike or disgust for the character.) Requested Fandoms:
鹿鼎記 | The Duke of Mount Deer (Hong Kong 1984)   Requested characters: 康熙皇帝 | Hong-hei Emperor • 韋小寶 | Wai Siu-Bou Where to find it: All 40 episodes are viewable with English subtitles here (and also on TVB’s official YouTube channel, but only with traditional Chinese subtitles). As a preview, you can also take a glance at the screencap-illustrated recap of the series I posted in my journal a few years ago. Content warnings (highlight to view): Misogyny, strongly implied non-con/rape. Canon Intro: "The Duke of Mount Deer" is a 40-episode Hong Kong TV series based on a popular wuxia anti-epic by Jin Yong, starring a very young and very adorable Tony Leung and Andy Lau, in period costume and questionable wigs. <3 The premise: Two boys meet one day on the grounds of the palace court at Beijing and promptly become wrestling buddies, neither of them aware that they’re both hiding their true identities. One of them is actually the young emperor of China, while the other is a mischievous trickster kid who grew up in a brothel and is now being used as a spy, by rebels who want to overthrow the empire. The plot goes all over the place from there, but whatever else happens, things always seems to circle back to drive the conflict between the maturing emperor, who is trying to hold his kingdom together, and his problematic fave Wai Siu-bou, who would rather be getting up to hijinks somewhere. One thing I love about this show is how well-meaning and yet deeply flawed both of the main characters are, and the continual strain of politics on their friendship. There are some intense loyalty tropes here, right alongside a lot of deception and mutual distrust and conflict. I love seeing how they struggle to sustain the fiction of an equal friendship in spite of the massive power imbalance between them — e.g. the way the Emperor seems to increasingly fall back on boyish displays of intimacy the more their friendship deteriorates, like referring to himself as "Little Yuen" or going out of his way to make physical contact — and how it becomes increasingly difficult to make out how much of this is genuine and how much is performance. I basically love every single canon interaction between these two, so if you just want to expand on a scene or event that happened, or a different version of an event that happened, or a different time when the same thing happened again, or whatever, those are all great. :) I like the fluffy scenes where they’re just fooling around or getting up to mischief together; I like the darker scenes where their trust issues, identity issues, or power-dynamic issues take the foreground. Slash and genfic are both welcome. Thoughts/Prompts:
Note on Names: For character names, etc., whatever transliteration style you prefer is fine, Mandarin or Cantonese (e.g. 韋小寶 can be "Wei Xiaobao," "Wei Xiao Bao," "Wai Siu Po," "Wai Siu-Bou," etc.). Language opt-in: For this fandom, I'd be happy to receive a story in English, standard written Chinese (繁體字), or colloquial Cantonese. :) 老洞 | The Old Miao Myth (Hong Kong 1983)  Requested characters: 謝尚楚 | Tse Seung-Cho • 展邦 | Jin Bong Where to find it: So, the thing I need to say up front is that this show is in Cantonese, and at present, there does not seem to be any English-subbed version of it available anywhere. The copy on TVB’s official YouTube “Mystery” channel has no subtitles of any kind, and other official releases have Chinese subtitles only. So if you’re thinking of checking it out, you’ll need to be able to either understand spoken Cantonese or read traditional Chinese subtitles. (For what it’s worth, I think the dialogue on this particular show is pretty straightforward and doesn’t require full fluency to be understood—my Cantonese level is pretty basic, but I was still able to follow most of the dialogue, even my first time watching on YouTube with no subtitles at all.) Content warnings (highlight to view): Lots and lots of death, including child death and suicide. Nothing graphic or realistic, but still. Lots of death. Also, generally poor treatment of female characters. Canon Intro: “The Old Miao Myth” is a 12-episode Hong Kong supernatural mystery series, starring Andy Lau, Ray Lui, and Patricia Chong. The story centers around a mysterious statue that’s said to bring wealth and protection to whoever guards it, and total destruction on one’s entire family should one let it fall into other hands. The Tse family, who now possess the statue, are the richest and most powerful family in Shanghai—but other people are after the statue, and will do anything to get hold of it. The mystery about the statue drives the main plot of the story, but meanwhile, there’s also a perpetually-shifting love triangle going on between the youngest son of the Tse family (Tse Seung-Cho, who has been entrusted with protecting the statue), his mysterious sudden-best-friend Jin Bong (who is secretly scheming to steal the statue), and their mutual love-interest, Yan Sou-Sam (whose fiancé has died under strange circumstances). None of these people turn out to be ideal romantic partners (to say the least), but I nevertheless like all three of them, and all possible pairings among them. I’d be happy to see Yan Sou-Sam included in any story for this request. I’m specifically requesting the two guys, though, because I’m mainly interested in their rather fraught relationship with one another, which begins with a somewhat ill-advised friendship (beginning right after deaths occur in each of their families, each caused by someone in the opposite family), and which originally stems from Jin Bong’s desire to steal the Tse family’s blessed/cursed statue. Things become more complicated once Jin Bong finds he doesn’t actually want to harm his new friend by stealing the statue... but maybe he does want to steal his friend’s girlfriend. And if anything, it seems like the growing rivalry only makes both Jin Bong and Yan Sou-Sam more attractive and interesting to Tse Seung-Cho. It’s a bit tricky to say much more without spoiling the mystery plot, so I’m going to try to keep my prompts somewhat vague. As for my two requested characters, I’d be equally happy with shipfic or genfic for them. Thoughts/Prompts:
As an aside, I’d also be interested in seeing worldbuilding about the statue. Like, what actually is the deal with it? Does it really curse those who fail to protect it, or is the “curse” enacted by a separate supernatural force, outside the statue? Is the statue itself evil? If not, why did Tse Gong’s grandson get killed right after touching it? And if the statue protects the family that guards it, why wasn’t the grandson protected, and why was touching it forbidden? Why are other people allowed to touch it later? There are quite a few plot holes regarding how the statue and the other supernatural forces work, but I think most of them could be explained, or at least explored. Does the statue’s power affect people’s personalities and behaviors (is it the statue’s fault when these people are jerks to each other)? If the statue is cursed, would returning it to its original, rightful owners lift the curse from it? Is there still a curse on it when the series ends? Are there still people its power could help or save? Language opt-in: For this fandom, I'd be happy to receive a story in English, standard written Chinese (繁體字), or colloquial Cantonese. :) Notre-Dame de Paris | The Hunchback of Notre-Dame - Victor Hugo  Requested characters: Claude Frollo Where to find it: Any library or bookstore. :) If you haven’t read it and are thinking of picking up a copy, I recommend looking for one that’s unabridged and follows the definitive 1832 edition (not the 1831 edition from which some chapters are missing). One that I like is the Oxford World’s Classics translation. (Content warnings for... uh, pretty much anything you can think of. I'm not even going to try to list them because I'll definitely end up leaving something out.) Canon Intro: If you're not already familiar with Notre-dame de Paris, I’ll just say that it is a very dark but very beautiful novel, full of history and art and religion and passion and violence, humor and tragedy, realism and extravagant Romanticism, blurred lines between “monsters” who are human and men who are monsters, and also a lot of meta stuff about the significance and value of literature itself. The only character I'm requesting is Claude Frollo, but you’re also welcome to include anyone else from the novel. And while I’m not looking for shipfic for this fandom, don’t feel like you need to avoid mentioning Frollo's crazed obsession with Esmeralda, if you're writing a story that takes place during the canon timeline. Thoughts/Prompts:
The Scriblerus Club (18th-century satirists RPF)   Requested characters: none (which is to say: Alexander Pope and/or Jonathan Swift and/or Scriblerian worldbuilding, on which more below) Opting into: Basically any style of media that’s allowable in Yuletide: poetry, epistolary, fictional meta, archive materials, annotations, biography excerpts, whatever. My DNW for crackfic and AU scenarios can be ignored for this fandom. Canon-specific DNWs: Although I’m fine with AUs and crackfic for this fandom, I’d prefer no modern-day politics or modern-day AU settings. I’d also prefer no graphic sexual content, and, uh, maybe tone down Swift’s propensities to scatological humor as well. Where to find it: Everything these guys wrote is in the public domain, so you can find pretty much all of it online (albeit not always very well formatted or with all the original sarcastic footnotes etc. :P ). Much of Pope's writing is available here, and Swift's here. Overviews: Alexander Pope (Wikipedia), Jonathan Swift (Wikipedia), Scriblerus Club (ODNB). (Content warnings for potentially everything that could possibly offend anyone, since that was, well, kind of the point.) Canon Intro / Thoughts / Prompts: I’m going to assume anybody considering offering this already has some idea who Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift are. ;) I am a lit-nerd fangirl of both of them, and would be happy to get a story about either one separately, or both together. They were good friends, and even after Swift was packed off to Ireland, they continued sending letters to each other all their lives. I don’t ship them, but I wouldn't have a problem with the idea, either (if it seemed historically plausible I’d be delighted about it), so no need to make any special point of avoiding it. Or much of anything else, really — lord knows they both wrote enough satiric RPF in their day that they can’t really complain if 300 years later some people end up writing irreverent fiction about them in turn. As for the “Scriblerus Club,” this is the name given to the somewhat loose group of Pope, Swift, and some of their friends, who came together with a shared goal of satirizing... well, possibly almost everything, but especially pretentious critics, bad writers, pedantic philologists, and “modern” cultural trends toward things like consumerism, faddishness in literature, ephemerality of media, and so on. Their plan, as a club, was to write and publish outrageously absurd articles and other “works” under the name of a shared fictional character, Martinus Scriblerus, who would epitomize every failing they associated with the modern world. (And then once that was done, they figured they could go on to spread rumors about Martinus Scriblerus being the “real” author of any published article, book, paper, etc. that they thought was especially stupid, e.g. Richard Bentley’s efforts to “correct” the supposed faults in the text of Paradise Lost.) They never really got this project much off the ground, although they did publish a few zany things like Annus Mirabilis (foretelling the miracle of a world-wide gender-swap in 1722), and Pope, Swift, and Gay went on to write satires of various kinds (poems, novels, plays, Classical imitations, articles, mock-epics, extensive mock-critical forewords and footnotes and marginalia and hilariously bad cliff’s-note-type-things for their own works, and sometimes just... pure 18th-century crack, I don’t even know what else to call some of this stuff). The main text that (very belatedly) came directly out of the “club” was Pope’s book The Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, but basically all of the members’ individual, mature satirical works were in the spirit of the Scriblerus Club. One thing I love about all this is how in spite of themselves, they all seemed to be rather fond of their pretentious imaginary friend “Martin.” Maybe not too surprisingly, given that their impulse to create him at all seems to have reflected a certain perverse delight in producing exactly the kinds of trivial, faddish, commercial, overwrought, nonsensical things they wanted to satirize. In fact a good part of their legacy ended up being the way they managed to raise the trivial/modish/"low" up to the level of lasting art, in the very process of mocking it. Anyway, I requested this fandom with zero characters in order to allow for not only stories about Pope and Swift themselves, but also a sort of “worldbuilding” possibility, which could encompass fiction about the Scriblerus Club as a whole, or fanworks in the form of any kind of Scriblerian-style text, e.g. a story about Martinus Scriblerus, any text ostensibly written (or edited or annotated) by him, or anything else in the general spirit of the club that was named after him. I’m also open to cracky/AU fic about Pope, Swift, or both. Neoclassical poets in space? Neoclassical Horatian country mice? Swift’s books actually come to life? Martinus is real and hangs out with the “Club”? Some afterlife thing with Byron & Friends holding a séance that ends up summoning Byron’s unlikely fave, Alexander Pope? And, though I'm finding it harder to come up with specific prompts, normal, non-crack fanfic is certainly welcome as well!
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