yuletide twenty sixteen

[intrikate88]

Dearest author, thank you so much for writing for me! I love this time of year, and I'm so excited about what's in store this time around. Yuletide is truly the most magical time of year.

I am here for ALL THE FEELINGS. I love characters exploring how they relate to one another and how to trust each other even when trust seems impossible. I especially love if they can do that while being inconvenienced with adventures and adversaries who are out to capture or kill them and were perhaps prepared for people who fight back, but maybe not for people who barely pause bickering with each other in order to do so.

Other things I love include competency porn, found families and the choices that go into making them, bedsharing, a fake relationship becoming real or a real relationship that for some reason needs the pretense of not existing, historical AUs (Prohibition era is especially my jam), polyamory that’s healthy and well-negotiated, ladies having friendships with each other that are just as valid as any romantic relationship (or friendships that are also romantic relationships!), casefic, and people just generally being sappy stupid in love with each other.

DNWs include: outright non-con/dub-con, intergenerational incest, infidelity, a lot of angst in general but particularly for detailed descriptions of rape or sexual assault, animal death, or non-canon major character death. Less extreme: you can include pregnancy if you want (like, it would be relevant with Claire’s pregnancy with Bree, for example) but generally speaking stories centered around pregnancy aren’t really my thing.

Outlander

This show is such good relationship porn exploring the connection between Jamie and Claire and how they support each other in the face of oncoming history that they can’t stop but they do their damnedest, nonetheless, and I love that. But there are so many other relationships in their lives that are also impacted by Claire’s travels, her background, and their determination to change the history books, and I’m so curious about all of those, and especially about Claire herself beyond this one time-traveling period of her life. (Which is why I didn’t request Jamie. It’s not that I don’t like him, I just want a look at the stories that don’t get told partially because he’s not in them.)

• What was Claire's life like while she was growing up? What was the first wound she stitched? In how many languages did she have to learn to negotiate for food? How did she get tired enough of living in history so that she isn't taking it in as much as Frank is on their second honeymoon?
  
  
  • I don’t know much about people who go through the stones other than Geillis, but it seems like Claire was uniquely prepared by her entire life to be a woman of the eighteenth century. I’d be curious to see a fic that explored the specific things that prepared her for this life and how, in the way that the show walked them all towards history they knew and couldn’t prevent, she was also being pushed by history to end up at the stones in the end.
  
  


• Frank and Bree's relationship. They seem like they would have more in common than Claire has with either of them, so what is that like?


• What did Frank do during the war? (This may be covered by one of the novellas but his skills do make for a rich set of possibilities; I’ve read a lot about spies and their lives and he certainly seems like he could have been doing some covert work.)


• How do Frank and Claire deal with the fact that her husband and man she shares her bed with has Black Jack's face? What does Claire share with Frank (and how does she have those conversations) to make him cease research of the man and say he isn't who he thought (apart from being not his actual ancestor because Alex Randall is)?


• What was it like for Claire in medical school? She's a very hands-on and naturally inventive clinician, and becoming a physician (especially a surgeon) puts her at a much greater emotional distance from her patients and practical distance from the creation of her medicines. Is that a purposeful move or does she miss the immediacy of triage nursing?


• What is Claire and Murtaugh’s friendship like? They became so close while traveling the country in the first season, but Murtaugh doesn't find out about the time travel until season 2, and seems to just accept that Claire's got some witch about her and that's that. It’s an incredible story to tell, though, and even more incredible to simply believe— are there things that Claire says earlier that make that make sense? What things about the future is Murtaugh most interested in (like Jamie was so fascinated by cars)? Murtaugh has great faith in Claire's prediction of Culloden; why is he so certain of her knowledge?

The Americans

The slow burn of this show has been incredible and I love it. I am absolutely all about how Paige is slowly learning not just that her parents are spies, but all that that entails, from her unknown Russian heritage to the truth that there is more violence in Elizabeth and Phillip’s world than they wanted her to have to face. For all that they’re sharing their lives with her, nominally at the behest of the Centre which wants her to be a second-generation Illegal, their hesitance at her involvement is wonderfully complicated: they’ll have her monitor Pastor Tim and Alice, but they’re desperate for her to know she doesn’t have to show interest in Matthew Beeman to get FBI secrets out of him. On the other hand, when Paige asks Elizabeth for self-defense lessons, Elizabeth says that they can do that. I’d love any kind of fic that just explores how they’re living in this odd balance; maybe a fic about how both Phillip and Elizabeth teach her ways to defend herself, or what kind of things Paige asks to learn about Russia, or about their life, and what things they wish she’d ask.

Tomorrowland

For all that this movie was a disaster of plot, it’s really a great watch, and I love Athena and Casey and Frank so much. My favorite scene of the movie was when the three of them are in the truck together and Casey looks like she doesn’t know how she got stuck between her two bickering parents, especially when one of them looks about twelve years old and is also driving. Frank and Athena have so much history and no matter how you see them, it’s undeniable that they were absolutely formative in each other’s lives very early on and the division between them only served to make them seem more like an old married couple by the present. Casey has such stubborn curiosity and won’t let anyone hold her back, and it’s great how she and Athena together are an unstoppable force, and how Casey and Frank together make each other better. I’d take road trip fic of them, I’d take the three of them years down the road running Tomorrowland, basically anything that has all of them being stubborn and argumentative and absolutely devoted to each other would suit me right down to the ground.

I’d also take historical AUs! I’m sure Prohibition would be a great time for Casey to stumble upon an old bootlegger and Athena, the fastest driver outrunning the cops in Tennessee. Or whatever other setting (and, perhaps, degree of fantasy) takes your fancy!

(In this one, the DNW about non-canon character death also sorta applies to canon, most of my thoughts about Athena and the end of the movie are fix-it fic, and if you wanted to ignore her death entirely, find a way to bring her back, whatever, I’d welcome it. It just feels so dreadfully unfair that she and Frank just barely work out their disagreements only for her to die! I would much prefer she continue comfortably arguing with Frank forever.)

Comments

[recessivejean.livejournal.com]

Oh thank goodness you remembered the bootlegging prompt, I had completely forgotten that one.

East bound and down . . !

[intrikate88.livejournal.com]

She's gonna do what they say can't be done...

Other prompts that weren't too close to things I'm already writing didn't come to mind very easily, but I'm sure there's a wealth of possibilities already here!