#guess the theme is P posting about Magda

[alexbkrieger13]

[reconditarmonia]

Dear Yuletide Writer

Hello, lovely writer!

I’m reconditarmonia here and on AO3 (and have been since LJ days, but my LJ is locked down and I only have a DW to see locked things).

General likes:

-- Relationships that aren’t built on romance or attraction. They can be romantic or sexual as well, but my favorite ships are all ones where it would still be interesting or compelling if the romantic component never materialized.

-- Loyalty kink, whether commander-subordinate or comrades-in-arms, and the trust associated with it. Sometimes-but-not-always relatedly, idealism. I guess the two combined might be, in general, the idea of nobility of character and what that means.

-- Heists, or other stories where there’s a lot of planning and then we see how the plan goes.

-- Femslash, complicated or intense relationships between women, and female-centric gen. Women doing “male” stuff.

-- Stories whose emotional climax or resolution isn’t the sex scene, if there is one.

-- Uniforms/costumes/clothing.

-- Stories, history, and performance. What gets told and how, what doesn’t get told or written down, behavior in a society where everyone’s consuming media and aware of its tropes, how people create their personas and script their own lines.

-- Eucatastrophe.

General DNW: rape/dubcon, torture, other creative gore; Christmas/Christian themes; unrequested AUs, including “same setting, different rules” AUs such as soulmates/soulbonds; PWP; food sex.

Fandom: Dòu Máah Dáan | Peking Opera Blues (1986) 

Characters: Tsao Wan

This film is so much MORE than I ever dreamed. More hilarious, more shippy, more dramatic. I think what I want most from this fandom is something on a similar emotional scale - not necessarily something where the plot itself has a national or international scope, but something that has room for opera slapstick, corpse puppetry, and torture; material concerns, and high aspirations; saving each other’s lives, and having sleepovers. Thematically, I’m really interested in the way the film shows friendship and familial love sometimes dovetailing with ethics and ideological goals and sometimes conflicting with them, and in the various ways women can find, or seek, their own independence.

Tsao Wan is the only character I’ve put in my request. I was fully expecting to come out of the film with femslash ships, and instead I have a big OT5 and a huge crush on Brigitte Lin (okay, that part I could see coming), so I’d be happy with any combination of the main five, including the two men, who were not nominated, as long as Tsao Wan is there. Some combination possibilities: how do any of them meet up again after the events of the film, whether by chance - do Bai Niu and/or Sheung Hung happen to be making a tour stop somewhere Tsao Wan has a mission? does Tsao Wan and Ling’s work take them near Tung’s village farm? - or intentionally - how would a new opera about Tsao Wan and Ling’s exciting adventures be created by Bai Niu and/or Sheung Hung, in terms of research and role creation? Or maybe Tsao Wan needs Bai Niu’s skills for a mission. In fact, maybe she needs everyone’s skills for a mission. Recruitment road trip! Some solo possibilities: what was Tsao Wan’s time in Europe like? Was she involved in any political activity there? What does she do post-film as History continues? In anything set post-film, I’d like to know that all five characters are important to each other, even if they’re not actually in the fic and/or sexually involved.

If you want to get really plotty, I love heist and con stuff like Leverage, Ocean’s Eleven (remake), and The Italian Job (original), where there’s a Plan with steps and roles, and then it plays out. If straight-up casefic isn’t your style, it could be fun to throw some shippy tropes at this canon (fake marriage where Tsao Wan is pretending to be the husband? hurt/comfort or sickfic? hell, I’d read accidental baby acquisition), but tropey stuff is not necessary - I’m just trying to throw out some ideas to get things moving. Ideally there’d be at least a figleaf of plot in the background, even if it’s not casefic.

Fandom-specific DNW: Explicit references to torture are still a hard DNW (I covered my eyes during the scene in question when watching the film), but I recognize it’s part of canon and consequently might be part of the world of the fic. If someone is tortured or creatively executed in your story, it’s fine to mention it but I do not want to know how.

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Fandom: Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

Characters: Bathsheba Everdene

I didn’t nominate this and it didn’t occur to me that it would be in the tagset, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it! One thing that always sticks in my mind about this novel is the way Hardy calls Bathsheba “the young farmer” just as he refers to the men as farmers - which, just saying, is more than most people writing about this story can do - and so, that being the case, what I’m most interested in is something about Bathsheba as farmer. One day in the life or four seasons in the life or five plantings/harvests in the life, or pseudo-academic fic about a case study of a woman farmer in the Victorian era, or a conflict between the farm and nature that Bathsheba has to decide how to solve.

Feel free to bring in the other nominated characters or other major characters if it suits what you’re trying to do, but what I’m really looking for is a focus on Bathsheba’s work, determination, and process of learning. I’d also love to read something like a merchant ship AU (as the first alternate setting that came to mind where it would be not exactly the done thing for her to captain her inherited ship and make commercial decisions herself - although I do have to point out that contrary to popular belief, there were a lot of women on shipboard in the age of sail, may this be useful - but also where nature and luck/fate are as influential as they are in the original setting), or something in which the land, superstition, and ritual were more overtly magical.

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Fandom: 月刊少女野崎くん | Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun

Characters: Kashima Yuu, Nozaki Umetarou

Pick a trope. Have them fuck it up.

That’s one of the things that makes me love this canon - the simultaneous send-up of and indulgence in tropes, in a very good-natured way. (Another way I’ve described its genre: “nothing happens, but very dramatically.” Everything is shocking or devastating or the pinnacle of bliss.) Kashima and Nozaki are two of the characters whose propensity to do this is most likely to set a story in motion, due to Nozaki’s experimentation/observation for his manga and Kashima’s princely self-fashioning and going 120% on everything; I also love Kashima’s bifauxnen-ness, acting talent, and earnest failboating, and the way that Nozaki could have been written as a tall-dark-handsome-stoic cipher guy and instead is just as quirky as anyone else. That said, this is an OR request, not an AND, and I’d also be happy to read stories about pretty much anyone from the nominated tagset (except Mikoshiba or Mayu; I don’t know Mayu very well because I originally got into this through the anime, and Mikoshiba just isn’t my fave, although I have no objection to his appearing in the story).

There are all sorts of lists out there of common shoujo(/romcom/fanfic) tropes if you’re not sure where to start. And, because Nozaki is all about subverting gendered characterization and role-boxing, and also about people trying to make their lives conform to narrative, go ahead and apply those tropes to whichever characters you feel would be the most interesting or fun. Feel free to pick non-high-school-setting ones, too, if there's magical/historical/high-society shoujo you want to see them tackle, or to take a play that Kashima (and whoever else) is involved in as a jumping-off point.

As you may have gathered, I love the way the canon plays with romance tropes, but I would prefer no overt Shipfic. If you’d like to include a ship, whether slash/femslash or het, I’d like for it to be handled without much seriousness, and for friendship with characters who aren’t part of the ship to be a significant part of the fic, as per canon. I do really like the show’s variety of friendships between characters of different temperaments, interests, and sexes.

If you’re really getting a “why don’t you just rewatch/reread the canon, reconditarmonia” vibe off this, which I’m kind of giving myself, you could try sex comedy future fic? Give them magical powers? What I’m most interested in, wherever you go with this, is the playing-with-tropes thing.

Fandom-specific DNW: I love Hori and Kashima’s relationship, but I’d strongly prefer that her feelings for him not be written as overtly romantic. High levels of ambiguity/intensity/tropey-ness are fine and great.

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Fandom: Monstrous Regiment - Terry Pratchett

Characters: Any (Alice “Wazzer” Goom, Jack Jackrum, Magda “Tonker” Halter, Maladict, Polly “Ozzer” Perks, Tilda “Lofty” Tewt)

Give me all the loyalty kink for this fandom. Characters rescuing each other from peril, risking their reputation or position or ethics to defend each other, accomplishing the impossible or sacrificing things without even thinking twice because one trusts the other’s orders or judgment. Or A not going off the leash or into danger to defend B because B said not to, to protect A’s conscience or life or reputation. Can be romantic or platonic - I ship Polly/Mal and Tonker/Lofty, but I would also be delighted with Polly&Jackrum, Wazzer&Polly, or other non-romantic twosomes or moresomes in situations of loyalty and trust. Maybe Polly sends Mal on a dangerous mission, or Tonker is captured after she and Lofty burn down another place where women and girls are being abused, or Polly protects Jackrum’s secret/s from someone who could reveal them, or Wazzer ends up in the field again with the general’s retinue and Polly and Mal rescue her from danger (or vice versa!!). What strengths or sacrifices do they have at their disposal for each other?

Pratchett-esque voices would be great. He’s really, really good at sucker-punching the reader with sincerity in an overall satiric mode, and I think that style lends itself well to this sort of thing.

I’m not going to lie, Polly is my fave. I like that this could have been a generic coming-of-age or women-in-war story, where the protagonist learns that she’s brave or worthwhile and then the crisis is past, but instead Polly learns that she’s a cunning bastard and a hell of a sergeant, and being a one-off hero in a country that’s at peace and making slow social progress isn’t good enough for her. That said, just because I’m better able to articulate what I like about Polly doesn’t mean I’d be less excited for fic about anyone else! I think that’s something I’d want to explore for any of the characters who enlist in the course of the story - what are these women good at? What lets them fulfill their potential? What do they want when their hand isn’t being forced? Or for Jackrum, who’s already gone through that whole process by the time the story begins, any more backstory would be fabulous.

If you’re going the Polly/Mal route, I also love ludicrous levels of sexual tension in a military context (I think it’s the unavoidable proximity + the presence of others making it hard to act on it).

Fandom-specific DNW: vampire romance tropes (such as turning and/or immortality) as focus; non-female pronouns/headcanons.

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Fandom: Simoun (Anime)

Characters: Any (Aaeru, Dominuura, Halconf, Mamiina, Neviril, Paraietta, Plumbish Priestesses, Rodoreamon)

Simoun somehow ended up being a really weirdly meaningful show to me. I loved how all these women got to be flawed and fucked-up, noble and loyal. How, in the mold of all my favorite epic shoujo anime, it starts off beautiful and fine and then Shit Gets Very Real and that’s actually one of the themes of the show - we had a little debate a few weeks ago on FFA as to whether or not Simoun was a military canon, and the fact that circumstances have remade a team of priestesses in fancy quarters and magic flying machines who are there to pray to God, put off their choice of sex, use their talents, maintain or claw their way into a social position, into a military force involved in a war - that’s an idea that the characters themselves struggle with in the show. (Neviril’s scene in the hearing is one of my favorites.) How everyone gets character development, in the sense of learning and changing, and even what seem like annoying mandatory straight subplots actually end up serving that thematic or character development, to say nothing of the more focal relationships between the leads (not just Neviril and Aeru, but also Mamiina and Rodoreamon, Neviril and Paraietta...)

I’d really like to read a fic where an individual character’s development or two characters’ relationship is similarly tied in to plot developments; it doesn’t have to be a plotty fic as such, but I was very interested in the way the developments of the war and the pilots/priestesses’ actions in it precipitated changes in their relationships. So how might Neviril and Aeru’s relationship develop in the other world (what are they doing?), or Mamiina and Rodoreamon’s on the Messis when they’re not the narrative focus before Mamiina’s last mission and the braid thing? (Or if this is more your speed, dig into that and see how a character grows or the relationship between characters develops when that’s not being moved along by outside events in the same way, especially if they’re aware of that being an issue. When Neviril and Aeru are outside the normal flow of time, or Paraietta and Rodoreamon are civilians, for example.) I’m also interested in all the permutations of loyalty we see in the show - like loyalty to a position over loyalty to a side (as with the Plumbish priestesses’ siding with our Sibyllae), loyalty that develops before liking or friendship, the devoted loyalty to Neviril. I like the show’s military themes despite its magical-girl visuals. I think this is also a canon where it would make sense for sexual first times to be part of a fic - what does that mean for the characters you choose?

I should also say that due to all the magic and timespace warping in the show, I am more than okay with post-canon fic that gets characters back together who were separated by canon, if that’s what you want. You can resurrect Mamiina, or have Neviril and Aeru visit the main reality/timeline again. Or play with timespace even more - time loop fic? (Edit: This didn’t even occur to me until I found out about the IF post, but this fandom might lend itself to interactive fiction, too.)