[the most wonderful time of the year]
Oct. 18th, 2014 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tellitslantMy dear Yuletide writer!
I’m so excited that we’ve matched on one of the tiny fandoms of my heart. I already know you have impeccable taste, so I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with. ;) I’ve tried to give you some sense of the things I like about each canon as well as some potential jumping-off points. If you have other ideas, though, go for it!
If you want to see what I’ve written lately, you can check out my fic on AO3 under kathryne. You can also follow me on tumblr at sapphoshands if the urge strikes.
Generally speaking, I’m a big fan of off-panel or canon-derivation in fic. I like to discover moments that we know must have happened but didn’t get to see, but that give added depth to what we find on-screen or on-page. I also like fic that spins off what we know into plausible future scenarios. When I do read AUs, I tend to be really fascinated by the ones that ask “what if” – what if this one thing was different? How would that play out? I prefer them to high school AUs or coffee shop AUs or the like.
99% of the time, what drives me to fannishness is not the world but the characters, and that’s certainly true for the longer canons here. Some of these fandoms lend themselves to casefic, which would absolutely be great, but I love these characters – their complexities, their flaws, their intricate relationships with each other. I prefer developed stories rather than vignettes strung together, but more of these ladies being wonderful in any shape would be grand. If you do write casefic, then, I'd like to see it expanding what we know of the characters, not just being there for them to solve/learn about.
You’ll see if you look at my fic that I write a fair bit of porn. I do love it, and I’d be happy to get some character-driven smut for some of my fandoms here! That said, I do write, read, and love gen as well, especially for these particular fandoms.
I enjoy fluffy fic and serious fic, angst and happy endings, humour that is dark and light and inappropriate as required. All of these depend on the tone of the canon, though.
I do not want to read: rape or abuse; animal abuse or death; self-harm; kid!fic.
I do not have a problem with violence, if necessary to the story.
Some fandom-specific comments and suggestions:
Killers Kill, Dead Men Die - The Aristocrat, The Maiden Aunt
I love the idea of queering the noir using the fabulously powerful, beautifully dressed women of this photoshoot. I'd love to see some femslash for this fandom – I'm open to including some of the other characters, not just my chosen two – or a good old-fashioned noir story with some badass lady criminals at its heart.
So, I have seen the Helen Mirren-Judi Dench photo from this going around tumblr for aaaages, but I only recently learned that it was from a larger photoshoot, with many other celebs, and that there was a tiny little fandom around it! I am delighted by this. Of course, a lot of what I say about being character-driven doesn't apply here; this fandom is pretty much about me being shallow and liking shiny pretty things.
Because I didn't know the context, I have long theorized that that particular picture was Mirren and Dench – or, as it turns out, The Aristocrat/Tilda and The Maiden Aunt/Alma – as queer underworld mavens who've been shag partners and confidantes for each other in the male-dominated criminal underground for years. (I mean, LOOK at the expression on Alma's face. That is not a platonic expression.) The actual text doesn't support that, but if you wanted to give me a story about how they've bald-facedly lied about being half-sisters (I'm not really looking for incest) and Alma's 'slowness' and gone on adventures, awesome. If not, I'd love to read about how either of them – singly or as business partners – have been scrimping and surviving in the underworld.
I've got just enough knowledge to be dangerous about the Golden Age of Hollywood – if you wanted to include an entanglement with the studio system, that could be fun! If you ship either of these ladies with any of the other female characters, I'd absolutely love to read that. I think the moniker "The Maiden Aunt" is setting its owner up for a bit of age-difference, don't you? Perhaps she teaches one or some of the younger girls the hard truths about life in this kind of world. And "The Aristocrat" – well, sounds like she and The Society Broad might have a few run-ins. And what does The Mystery Woman have to do with it all?
I'm more than happy with gen for this as well, but what has always struck me about this shoot is how in control the women look, even more so than most of the men, and I'm keen to keep that as a key part of whatever story I get. I also have a fairly good familiarity with noir tropes, so if you want to spin out a story that plays with/queers those – be it the backstory hinted at in the photoshoot or something different – that would be great. OR: criminal road trip? :D?
Again, I'm okay with violence, including, for this canon, gendered slurs and violence (when I say 'no abuse,' I particularly mean no abuse in the context of a relationship – thugs beating up a woman as part of their job, or similar, is fine; thugs raping that same woman, not so much). I'm fine with period-appropriate representation and discussion of and attitudes towards homosexuality; in fact, I'd prefer it to trying to paper it over from a 2014 POV. I'd prefer no death; if we go by the photoshoot, Tilda dies at the end of that sequence, but you could set something earlier – or perhaps she and The Undercover Lady Cop pulled a double bluff and ran away?
Lumberjanes - Mal, Molly, Jen Rosie
I adore this comic! I'd love to see either some backstory or some future fic – how this cabin met, since some of them clearly knew each other, and/or whether they stay in touch past this summer. I've picked Mal, Molly, Jen and Rosie as focus, but would love the other characters included.
Oh, writer, I went to the comics store this month and my box had three comics in it aimed specifically at younger female readers. THREE. I'm over the moon about it. Lumberjanes is one of my favourite new comics, and that's saying a lot of late. I would love to roll around in the possibilities of this universe. I've picked Mal, Molly, Jen and Rosie as my focal points, but please feel free to include any of the other characters as well.
I'd love to know whether this is their first summer at camp – are they only just newly bonded as a friend group, or have they been writing letters all winter long? Jo and April knew each other before camp – did the rest? For a Mal and Molly angle on this, it'd be great to see some youthful love letters or note-passing (with codes?), if they're together through the year; for the rest of the group, do they send emails? Written letters because they don't trust who might be spying on their computers? If they did meet the summer previous, or even this summer, how did they form up as a group?
I'd also love to see some future-fic – do they fall out of touch and meet up again as counsellors at the camp in the future? Do they all go to the same college and end up continuing their supernatural adventures? What happens next summer?
For Rosie, I'd be very interested to see something about how long she's been working at/involved with the camp. Did she attend it as a girl? Did she start it? Was the bear-woman the original director? Similarly for Jen - what brought her there? Has she been there before? Is she a legacy counsellor - maybe her mom attended?
I don't really want to see anything set around or in the current storyline, because I think it will get jossed very quickly and that would make me sad. But any other spinoffs or ideas, any other random mythological monsters, anything else that's occurred to you? Please feel free to play around with it! Definite bonus points if you come up with some great badge names along the way. I'll be keeping up with the comic weekly (what the junk just happened in issue 7 oh my gosh), so don't worry about spoilers!
I was a Girl Guide, though I never really did sleepaway camps for longer than long weekends, but if you have any experience in those institutions then in-jokes will probably work for me. ;) For this fandom, I would prefer no violence greater than what we see in canon, and probably no explicit sexytimes unless you age them up. They don't have to be over the age of consent, necessarily, but they read pretty young in canon.
Scott & Bailey – Gill Murray
I love that this canon is full of complicated women with complicated relationships and challenges and lives. I'd love to read about Gill and her relationships – platonic or romantic – with Rachel, Julie, and/or Janet. Also, uh. Bonus zombie apocalypse prompt? Click on through!
I discovered this show this summer and immediately devoured it. I absolutely adore almost everything about it: it's the unabashedly feminist hard-boiled cop show I should've realized I needed in my life. My initial pimp/squee post on it is here. I've been recapping/flailing about this season under the tag tv: scott & bailey, and also the tag scott & bailey on tumblr.
I'd love to read about Gill and her relationship/s with any of the other three. Gill and Rachel in their powerfully-charged dance of mentorship and mutual admiration? Gill and Janet, quietly safe spaces for each other until they aren't? Gill and Julie and their years of friendship? How any of these interact or contradict?
I ship Gill and Julie – the weight of their history! their teasing and caring! There's so much there about their comfort with each other. They have clearly built a relationship where they feel incredibly safe. (The end of season four looks like it might play with this a bit. If it does, I will probably comment on my journal with many more thoughts than you really want to hear.) They also spark off each other so much – look at the way Gill smiles when Julie calls, or how they know each other without words. Tell me about other cases they've worked when Gill was on the Crime Faculty, or how Gill leaned on Julie during Dave's leaving, or what happened after the end of 3x08. Tell me whether it's always been platonic, or when it slipped over the edge into sexual.
I also ship Gill and Rachel – did I mention power dynamics? and their mutual overinvestment in the mentor-mentee relationship! Season four is just hitting all of my buttons in terms of Rachel's simultaneous growth and neediness, and Gill's uncertainties but dedication to teaching. I think the two of them each idealize the other without necessarily seeing what's really there – Rachel puts too much emphasis on Gill's job without seeing what it's cost her, while Gill praises Rachel's brain but doesn't see how she's often emotionally adrift. Tell me how they adapted to Rachel as sergeant - have they spent late nights at Gill's, or gone over cases over wine? Is there anything Rachel won't do to make Gill proud of her? And does Gill know, consciously or subconsciously?
I would love porny or shippy fic for either of those pairings, but am also more than happy to get gen, like say, character-focussed casefic or fic about the friendships rather than the relationships.
I do not ship Gill and Janet, but I would love to read more about their friendship, like how they met and how it grew, given that they're on very different career paths. How did Janet get on Gill's team – did Gill look for her deliberately? What have they been through together?
I adore the nuanced, negotiated relationships the show gives us and the multiple layers they have, so I'd prefer a fic where Gill interacts with other characters to one that is inward-focussed and just about her. Please feel free to include any of the other characters in the fic as well – if you write Gill/Julie (or Gill&Julie), then that doesn't mean Rachel and Janet, or even Karen Zalinski, shouldn't show up and be part of it.
Also, here is an idea that I cannot quite get out of my head: Scott & Bailey zombie apocalypse fic. I mean, this would clearly be more along the lines of Shaun of the Dead than Dawn of the Dead, but I just think: Rach with a cricket bat. Janet and her mum. Gill being incredulous and competent. If this sounds at all interesting, I'd love to see someone else run with it, but I realize it's way out there. :P
I'm up to date with s4. If you've seen the finale, there are some spoilery post-finale prompts over in this entry here. If you haven't seen the finale, don't click through, and don't worry about it - something mid-series will be fantastic!
Hopefully this has given you some ideas without being totally overwhelming. These fandoms are all very new to me, and I'm really looking forward to having a fic of my very own in one of them. Thanks!
I’m so excited that we’ve matched on one of the tiny fandoms of my heart. I already know you have impeccable taste, so I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with. ;) I’ve tried to give you some sense of the things I like about each canon as well as some potential jumping-off points. If you have other ideas, though, go for it!
If you want to see what I’ve written lately, you can check out my fic on AO3 under kathryne. You can also follow me on tumblr at sapphoshands if the urge strikes.
Generally speaking, I’m a big fan of off-panel or canon-derivation in fic. I like to discover moments that we know must have happened but didn’t get to see, but that give added depth to what we find on-screen or on-page. I also like fic that spins off what we know into plausible future scenarios. When I do read AUs, I tend to be really fascinated by the ones that ask “what if” – what if this one thing was different? How would that play out? I prefer them to high school AUs or coffee shop AUs or the like.
99% of the time, what drives me to fannishness is not the world but the characters, and that’s certainly true for the longer canons here. Some of these fandoms lend themselves to casefic, which would absolutely be great, but I love these characters – their complexities, their flaws, their intricate relationships with each other. I prefer developed stories rather than vignettes strung together, but more of these ladies being wonderful in any shape would be grand. If you do write casefic, then, I'd like to see it expanding what we know of the characters, not just being there for them to solve/learn about.
You’ll see if you look at my fic that I write a fair bit of porn. I do love it, and I’d be happy to get some character-driven smut for some of my fandoms here! That said, I do write, read, and love gen as well, especially for these particular fandoms.
I enjoy fluffy fic and serious fic, angst and happy endings, humour that is dark and light and inappropriate as required. All of these depend on the tone of the canon, though.
I do not want to read: rape or abuse; animal abuse or death; self-harm; kid!fic.
I do not have a problem with violence, if necessary to the story.
Some fandom-specific comments and suggestions:
Killers Kill, Dead Men Die - The Aristocrat, The Maiden Aunt
I love the idea of queering the noir using the fabulously powerful, beautifully dressed women of this photoshoot. I'd love to see some femslash for this fandom – I'm open to including some of the other characters, not just my chosen two – or a good old-fashioned noir story with some badass lady criminals at its heart.
So, I have seen the Helen Mirren-Judi Dench photo from this going around tumblr for aaaages, but I only recently learned that it was from a larger photoshoot, with many other celebs, and that there was a tiny little fandom around it! I am delighted by this. Of course, a lot of what I say about being character-driven doesn't apply here; this fandom is pretty much about me being shallow and liking shiny pretty things.
Because I didn't know the context, I have long theorized that that particular picture was Mirren and Dench – or, as it turns out, The Aristocrat/Tilda and The Maiden Aunt/Alma – as queer underworld mavens who've been shag partners and confidantes for each other in the male-dominated criminal underground for years. (I mean, LOOK at the expression on Alma's face. That is not a platonic expression.) The actual text doesn't support that, but if you wanted to give me a story about how they've bald-facedly lied about being half-sisters (I'm not really looking for incest) and Alma's 'slowness' and gone on adventures, awesome. If not, I'd love to read about how either of them – singly or as business partners – have been scrimping and surviving in the underworld.
I've got just enough knowledge to be dangerous about the Golden Age of Hollywood – if you wanted to include an entanglement with the studio system, that could be fun! If you ship either of these ladies with any of the other female characters, I'd absolutely love to read that. I think the moniker "The Maiden Aunt" is setting its owner up for a bit of age-difference, don't you? Perhaps she teaches one or some of the younger girls the hard truths about life in this kind of world. And "The Aristocrat" – well, sounds like she and The Society Broad might have a few run-ins. And what does The Mystery Woman have to do with it all?
I'm more than happy with gen for this as well, but what has always struck me about this shoot is how in control the women look, even more so than most of the men, and I'm keen to keep that as a key part of whatever story I get. I also have a fairly good familiarity with noir tropes, so if you want to spin out a story that plays with/queers those – be it the backstory hinted at in the photoshoot or something different – that would be great. OR: criminal road trip? :D?
Again, I'm okay with violence, including, for this canon, gendered slurs and violence (when I say 'no abuse,' I particularly mean no abuse in the context of a relationship – thugs beating up a woman as part of their job, or similar, is fine; thugs raping that same woman, not so much). I'm fine with period-appropriate representation and discussion of and attitudes towards homosexuality; in fact, I'd prefer it to trying to paper it over from a 2014 POV. I'd prefer no death; if we go by the photoshoot, Tilda dies at the end of that sequence, but you could set something earlier – or perhaps she and The Undercover Lady Cop pulled a double bluff and ran away?
Lumberjanes - Mal, Molly, Jen Rosie
I adore this comic! I'd love to see either some backstory or some future fic – how this cabin met, since some of them clearly knew each other, and/or whether they stay in touch past this summer. I've picked Mal, Molly, Jen and Rosie as focus, but would love the other characters included.
Oh, writer, I went to the comics store this month and my box had three comics in it aimed specifically at younger female readers. THREE. I'm over the moon about it. Lumberjanes is one of my favourite new comics, and that's saying a lot of late. I would love to roll around in the possibilities of this universe. I've picked Mal, Molly, Jen and Rosie as my focal points, but please feel free to include any of the other characters as well.
I'd love to know whether this is their first summer at camp – are they only just newly bonded as a friend group, or have they been writing letters all winter long? Jo and April knew each other before camp – did the rest? For a Mal and Molly angle on this, it'd be great to see some youthful love letters or note-passing (with codes?), if they're together through the year; for the rest of the group, do they send emails? Written letters because they don't trust who might be spying on their computers? If they did meet the summer previous, or even this summer, how did they form up as a group?
I'd also love to see some future-fic – do they fall out of touch and meet up again as counsellors at the camp in the future? Do they all go to the same college and end up continuing their supernatural adventures? What happens next summer?
For Rosie, I'd be very interested to see something about how long she's been working at/involved with the camp. Did she attend it as a girl? Did she start it? Was the bear-woman the original director? Similarly for Jen - what brought her there? Has she been there before? Is she a legacy counsellor - maybe her mom attended?
I don't really want to see anything set around or in the current storyline, because I think it will get jossed very quickly and that would make me sad. But any other spinoffs or ideas, any other random mythological monsters, anything else that's occurred to you? Please feel free to play around with it! Definite bonus points if you come up with some great badge names along the way. I'll be keeping up with the comic weekly (what the junk just happened in issue 7 oh my gosh), so don't worry about spoilers!
I was a Girl Guide, though I never really did sleepaway camps for longer than long weekends, but if you have any experience in those institutions then in-jokes will probably work for me. ;) For this fandom, I would prefer no violence greater than what we see in canon, and probably no explicit sexytimes unless you age them up. They don't have to be over the age of consent, necessarily, but they read pretty young in canon.
Scott & Bailey – Gill Murray
I love that this canon is full of complicated women with complicated relationships and challenges and lives. I'd love to read about Gill and her relationships – platonic or romantic – with Rachel, Julie, and/or Janet. Also, uh. Bonus zombie apocalypse prompt? Click on through!
I discovered this show this summer and immediately devoured it. I absolutely adore almost everything about it: it's the unabashedly feminist hard-boiled cop show I should've realized I needed in my life. My initial pimp/squee post on it is here. I've been recapping/flailing about this season under the tag tv: scott & bailey, and also the tag scott & bailey on tumblr.
I'd love to read about Gill and her relationship/s with any of the other three. Gill and Rachel in their powerfully-charged dance of mentorship and mutual admiration? Gill and Janet, quietly safe spaces for each other until they aren't? Gill and Julie and their years of friendship? How any of these interact or contradict?
I ship Gill and Julie – the weight of their history! their teasing and caring! There's so much there about their comfort with each other. They have clearly built a relationship where they feel incredibly safe. (The end of season four looks like it might play with this a bit. If it does, I will probably comment on my journal with many more thoughts than you really want to hear.) They also spark off each other so much – look at the way Gill smiles when Julie calls, or how they know each other without words. Tell me about other cases they've worked when Gill was on the Crime Faculty, or how Gill leaned on Julie during Dave's leaving, or what happened after the end of 3x08. Tell me whether it's always been platonic, or when it slipped over the edge into sexual.
I also ship Gill and Rachel – did I mention power dynamics? and their mutual overinvestment in the mentor-mentee relationship! Season four is just hitting all of my buttons in terms of Rachel's simultaneous growth and neediness, and Gill's uncertainties but dedication to teaching. I think the two of them each idealize the other without necessarily seeing what's really there – Rachel puts too much emphasis on Gill's job without seeing what it's cost her, while Gill praises Rachel's brain but doesn't see how she's often emotionally adrift. Tell me how they adapted to Rachel as sergeant - have they spent late nights at Gill's, or gone over cases over wine? Is there anything Rachel won't do to make Gill proud of her? And does Gill know, consciously or subconsciously?
I would love porny or shippy fic for either of those pairings, but am also more than happy to get gen, like say, character-focussed casefic or fic about the friendships rather than the relationships.
I do not ship Gill and Janet, but I would love to read more about their friendship, like how they met and how it grew, given that they're on very different career paths. How did Janet get on Gill's team – did Gill look for her deliberately? What have they been through together?
I adore the nuanced, negotiated relationships the show gives us and the multiple layers they have, so I'd prefer a fic where Gill interacts with other characters to one that is inward-focussed and just about her. Please feel free to include any of the other characters in the fic as well – if you write Gill/Julie (or Gill&Julie), then that doesn't mean Rachel and Janet, or even Karen Zalinski, shouldn't show up and be part of it.
Also, here is an idea that I cannot quite get out of my head: Scott & Bailey zombie apocalypse fic. I mean, this would clearly be more along the lines of Shaun of the Dead than Dawn of the Dead, but I just think: Rach with a cricket bat. Janet and her mum. Gill being incredulous and competent. If this sounds at all interesting, I'd love to see someone else run with it, but I realize it's way out there. :P
I'm up to date with s4. If you've seen the finale, there are some spoilery post-finale prompts over in this entry here. If you haven't seen the finale, don't click through, and don't worry about it - something mid-series will be fantastic!
Hopefully this has given you some ideas without being totally overwhelming. These fandoms are all very new to me, and I'm really looking forward to having a fic of my very own in one of them. Thanks!
