Dear Yuletide Writer

Hi! Thank you for making me a thing!

Edit 12/12: It has come to my attention that my letter might be... difficult. I know it's a bit late to say this, but if you're here because you're having a last minute freak out over DNWs, cut yourself some slack and don't overthink it. If you stuck to the spirit of it, I'll be alright. Thank you! <3

This letter will include general likes and dislikes (slightly edited from my general Dear Creator letter), the optional details copied from my sign-up (I only copied fandom specific DNWs from there, the rest is in the general DNW list), and a little bit more.


Here are some things that I love:

Polyamory, qpps and alterous relationships, relationships growing out of working together, friendly sex, good consent, ace and aro stories, flirting and bantering, UST, bisexuality, fluff, canon divergence AUs, trans characters, exhibitionism, sexting, masturbation, soft loving group sex.

Here are some things that I definitely DO NOT WANT (but see per-fandom elaboration):

• darkfic (dystopia/character is secretly evil)
• non/dub-con (except for sex pollen in Oh My General if you really want to, but this is permission, not a request)
• incest
• pedophilia
• suicide
• omegaverse
• gore
• very immersive extreme angst
• hopeless endings
• jealousy portrayed as sexy
• Christmas-themed fic (emphasis on themed. Focusing on the family gathering side of it or a specific gift is fine, but please don't add Christmassy details to make it more festive. It's not my holiday and it's not going to be as fluffy and comforting to me as it might be to you. Also, please no mistletoe kisses)

Here are some more things that I dislike:

Possessiveness, penetrative sex as the only sex that counts, sex as the consummation of a relationship, magical mpreg (but trans mpreg is very welcome), character bashing, love triangles that are better solved by polyamory, misunderstandings as a device for slow-burn.

Please warn me for: ableism, character death, suicidal ideation in relation to loneliness and/or unemployment.


Some more general stuff:

I listed some likes related to smut and I have some smutty prompts, but I'm not going to be any less happy with a G-rated fic! And actually if you're shy about it I'd rather do without because I don't like euphemisms very much.

To elaborate on angst: sometimes angst is interesting. Sometime I'm fragile. I can be okay with angst but if the character is feeling extreme anguish, I don't want to relate to it completely. I'm not gonna say don't make me cry because I cry easily, but don't make me ugly-cry. Poetic writing is less likely to upset me than realistic inner monologue. Either way, even if I'm feeling fragile and have to put off reading my gift, I promise I'll come back to it and I will read it.

If you want to set an AU in actual real world 2020, I'm fine with what that implies.


Onto the fandoms!

Superstition by Superstition_hockey
Requested characters: Luc Chantal, Oliver Jackson

The shortest description I have for this is "codependent hockey husbands".
For a longer one, I don't think this is the kind of story in which "spoilers" matter, so here it is: Luc and Jacks meet when they're seven and become instant bffs, and they kind of grow up together, determined to make it to the NHL and win the Stanley cup together. Then they accidentally get married in Vegas, except that's no accident, it may be a drunk mistake but they were acting pretty married the whole time... Jacks, who is gay, was a normal alloromantic kind of in love with Luc the whole time, and he's a practical thinker so he wants the marriage annulled. Luc has had no sexual interest in men by that point, but he's aro and Jacks has been his person the whole time, so he just goes "nope, he's mine now, I'm not giving him back", and convinces Jacks to stay married, but fails to explain the "you're my person" thing. Then it's years of long distance marriage and hockey successes and failures while they try to make their way to the same team so they can win the cup together like they promised.

Main series (most of my prompts are about these)
Podfic of main series
Podfic of part 1 from the alternate POV
Depth of the Bench (more stories)
Pee-Wee League (parenting and next gen stories)

Two of my prompts refer to Luc climbing mt. Everest, but you don't actually need to read the canon for that for the therapy one, you just need to know that it happened, a few years after retirement when the kids were little, and Luc was gone for months training and could have died, so you know, therapy's gotta happen. The canon for this is pretty hard to find, but I think the biggest one is this one, which only gets smutty and kinky in a very unique way after the bit where Jacks talks to Luc's doctor, and there's this chapter from Kinktober that has no smut in it, and this chapter that is smutty but also has a bit about Jacks's novel and how he felt when Luc was gone, it's mixed in with the smut.

I have so many prompts for this one! Of course you don't have to use one of them, but probably looking through a bunch of them will give you a good idea of what I like.

From sign-up form:

Fandom specific DNWs: Luc/Sveta smut, smut set earlier than juniors

I don't mind Crash and/or Sveta (or anyone else) being in the story, even a big part, just no Sveta/Luc smut.


I love Superstition because it's an aro love story, and that's really important to me, but also for other reasons. I love that it's poly, I love team stuff, I love Luc's attitude towards sex and how the story depicts sex (or fades to black when it doesn't matter), I love the way Luc reads autistic to me in such a relatable way, and I also just love the sheer amount of love in the story. Luc loves so strongly. So aro qpp feels (the ones Luc tried to explain with "you're my husband!") would be lovely, but if that's not something you relate to, that's fine. I would prefer in that case that you didn't write about Luc's feelings for Jacks, though. Jacks's POV, gen, smut that doesn't touch much on feelings, those would all be great.

Prompts:

AU:
I would love love love to get an AU fic for this. I've been posting a lot of ideas on @what-if-superstition on tumblr, it's mostly either canon divergence (what if Jacks never moved to Moncton, what if one of them had to stop playing, ways they could have started fucking earlier and as a result realized they could maybe be a thing) or ways in which Jacks was literally gifted to Luc so he can play hockey: supernatural being, android, soulmates. I'd love any of those, especially those that I had more to say about, but my favorites are probably these:

• What if Jacks got injured before Juniors and had to quit, and then started coaching and works his way up to coaching AHL, and finally, when Luc is already reluctantly thinking about retiring, Jacks makes it to assistant coach on the Nordiques and they win a cup together just like they promised when they were kids.
• Jacks is a supernatural being that was created specifically for Luc and continues to magically be exactly what Luc wants, and one day Luc finds out and that's some veeeery delicate work figuring out consent and autonomy between them (this one can go a bit angstier).
• Luc makes a vaguely human-shaped pile of old hockey gear and prays to the hockey gods to send him a friend to play hockey with. In the morning, the gear is gone and a redheaded kid he’s never seen before shows up out of nowhere, asking to practice shots with Luc.
• I don't like any specific one more than the others, but I believe that there are many possible catalysts to Luc propositioning Jacks for the first time, and I'd enjoy reading about one that happens earlier than in canon (how does that affect their reaction to the wedding?)

If you don't like AUs, here are some other things I might like:

• In couples therapy after mt. Everest, they end up addressing how Luc is never critical of Jacks and always assumes everything is his own fault, how he's expected to believe that other people, and Jacks specifically, just understand things better, so their view of reality must be the correct one and it's Luc's fault for not getting it. Maybe Luc has been diagnosed as autistic by that point?
• After the big revelation at the awards, Jacks tries to tell Luc he's been in love with him since forever. Luc, unsurprisingly, doesn't get it. He's loved Jacks since forever too, duh?
• A threesome with Crash
• Something about Jacks's novel (literal excerpts might be cool) and/or his life with the rest of the family while Luc is training for mt. Everest 

Oh My General
Requested characters: Ye Zhao, Zhao Yujin

Chinese period drama web series: general Ye Zhao returns victorious from a big campaign and confesses to being female. She is forgiven for the deception and rewarded among other things with marriage to a beautiful prince, Zhao Yujin. Yujin is terrified of Zhao and absolutely not interested, but it's a match made by the emperor himself so they give it a go. Zhao struggles a bunch with gender roles and gender in general, which is only more complicated by the fact that she still has military duties and thus can't fully take on the traditional role of wife and daughter-in-law. Then there's a bunch of scrapes and mysteries and politics that force Zhao and Yujin to work together, and as a result they become a real couple, not just in name. There's a whole lot more series after that happens, with antagonists and intrigues and more politics, which I have not watched all the way through just yet.

Content warning for a lot of sexual harassment and at least one forced kiss by Zhao when she's trying to get her husband to be intimate or at all romantic with her. And it's not called out as bad in general, just that it's not her place in the marriage, only the husband is allowed to harass the wife... So, not great, but fits in with how the marriage was forced in the first place.

Full series on YouTube

From sign-up optional details:

The DNW on non/dub con stands, canon is canon but that doesn't mean it has to be in the fic.
Other fandom specific DNWs: the character Liu Xiyin, AUs set in a different culture


So, I have to confess, I haven't actually finished this yet. But I'm still excited about fic! I absolutely loved the beginning, but lost interest about halfway through, when the politics stopped being a device to move relationships along and became too much of a focus. I might still finish it by the time Yuletide fics go up, but either way I don't mind spoilers so it's fine if you write about something I haven't seen yet. Sorry if some of my prompts are unhelpful because they appear in canon later...

Anyway, I love it because of how gay it manages to be despite the main pairing being or appearing to be M/F, and how that pairing in itself is subversive to how M/F is supposed to go in the setting, and how the whole thing plays around with gender.

I requested only Zhao and Yujin just because I didn't want to request that many characters, but I don't mind Huli and I'd be more than happy with Yang, Xuan'er, and Meiniang in the story if you want to include them. They're mentioned in a couple of the prompts below, but I also wouldn't mind them as side characters to anything you write, or even as outside POV characters if it serves the story. They're not my favorite to focus on, but they're fun. And if you're inspired to write something that ends up sidelining Yujin in favor of F/F, I'm okay with that. I just figured I'd better request him because nearly all my prompts include him and that would probably not be much fun for someone who doesn't like him.

I use she/her for Zhao here but you can totally use different pronouns in your fic if you like. There's a strong case to be made for it, I think. Same for Yujin, or anyone else.

For prompts related to sex, if you want to just write about the negotiations or conversations around it, I really don't mind if there's no actual smut in the story.

Prompts:

• They finally get those new concubines "for Yujin". Zhao picks them, of course. There's two, and it turns out they're lovers.
• Yujin wants an experience with a man. Whoever that ends up being (Huli seems a good candidate), Zhao oversees the encounter and threatens him to treat her husband well and show him a good time.
• Zhao/any of the concubines, with or without Yujin, with or without smut, as a continuation of how enamored they are of her when she practices martial arts.
• One or more of the concubines ask Zhao to let/ask Yujin sleep with them when they're fertile because they want to get pregnant.
• Something with family feels about all five of them? Maybe the first baby in family, maybe something else.
• Gender exploration for either or both of them. Zhao especially seems to see gender as a role so her self-perception depends where she is and with who.
• A less creepy fix-it for how they got actually romantically involved after their disaster of a wedding. More talking, less sexual harassment, that kind of thing.

Anne of Green Gables
Requested characters: Anne Shirley, Gilbert Blythe

An classic book series about a sensitive, smart orphan girl in 19th century rural Canada with a great imagination and a tendency to daydream, who gets adopted by a pair of middle-aged siblings: Marilla, who teaches her to conform to her role in the world, and Matthew, who isn't in charge of raising her and thus able to just appreciate her as she is. The series follows her into adulthood as well, and eventually changes focus to her children.

The series is available on Project Gutenberg, including audiobooks (at least for some?). Check the list of books for the titles to search for. The most popular books are the first three.

From sign-up optional details:

Fandom specific DNW: underage smut (not super excited about smut in general in this one, actually)

It's okay if you write about just Anne, or Anne and Rilla, or Anne and Diana. I'm not really interested in Gilbert without Anne, though.


Anne was my comfort as a child, I felt like she was weird and didn't fit in in similar ways to how I was weird and didn't fit in. I was also super into antagonistic flirting, so I loved Gilbert. Now I'm an adult, so I'd like something about Anne as an adult, but it doesn't have to be that.

Prompts:

• Married with kids!Anne/Gilbert flirting over the heads of the children
• Married with kids!Anne/Gilbert solving a problem together, like something related to the children or the house
• Young Anne being completely oblivious to the fact that what she and Gilbert are doing is totally flirting
• Modern AU!Anne writing fanfic (any age; some room here for Diana if you want)
• Adult Anne realizing the ways in which she was mistreated as a child for being neurodivergent

Enola Holmes Series - Nancy Springer
Requested characters: Enola Holmes, Cecily Alistair

This is similar in spirit to the movie but quite different in details and plot, so it's not the same! Movie Tewksbury is great and all, but that romantic plotline is pasted on even in the movie, and it's just not there at all in the books. I don't mind if he's in the fic as a friend or ally, though, as long as it focuses on Enola and Cecily.

Enola is the younger sister of Sherlock holmes. Her distant mother runs away when Enola is 14, and leaves her a lot of money to finance her own escape. Enola runs away because her brother Mycroft, who is in charge of her, is sending her to boarding school, where girls have to endure tight-lacing. She becomes a "perditorian", finder of lost people and things, posing as the adult secretary and later assistant to a man who she made up so that people take her office seriously. Victorian sensibilities tend to be a plot point - places a man can't go, things a woman wouldn't talk to a man about, women's undergarments. Class comes up a lot as well. Loneliness is also a theme: being on the run from her brothers means Enola has to be alone, even though she craves affection, acceptance, and attention from her family.

You can find a list of links to buy each book on the publisher's site. Check your library, too. Scribd has the last three books available as audiobooks, if you have a subscription. The books are quite short!

From sign-up optional details:

Fandom specific Do Not Wants: underage smut, Enola marrying a man


So I don't have fifty prompts for this like I have for my other requests, but I think the ending of the series gives us the prompts. Enola's first visit to Cecily. Maybe she stays with her and her mother for a while. Enola and Cecily at University. Enola and Cecily as spinsters living together, or "spinsters" living together.

Could be nice to see Enola question some of her views on class, since she's not quite there yet.

If you want to include Enola's brothers, that's more than fine. I think having a good relationship with them is part of Enola's happy ending. Maybe their first visit to Enola and Cecily's new home. Maybe siblings bonding over being gay.