Dear Yuletide Writer,

Hi! Thanks for writing for me. I am lannamichaels basically everywhere, including AO3. I hang out in the Yuletide IRC chat and the Discord server as Lanna.


Things I like: Character studies! Character-driven stuff! Day in the life! People sitting around and talking, with no discernible plot! I like plot! I like power and exploring power relationships and dynamics. I like queering everything. I like BDSM; my biggest love in BDSM is when the sub just wants the big bad dom to shut up already and do it. So it probably goes without saying that I also like foreplay! I like "just kiss already!" I like fading to black! I also love gen!

I love alternate universes! I love unreliable narrators and non-linear narratives. I have been conducting a torrid love affair with second person, which uses up a lot of commas and breaks grammar into tiny pitiful pieces, and so it goes without saying that I would love second person! Or first person or third, etc. I like parentheses (like these) and fun with sentence structures and people talking over each other. I love dialogue! If you want to write a story entirely in dialogue, I would love to read a story entirely in dialogue!

I love magical or supernatural fusion stuff. I love crackfic. I love futurefic. I love vampires. I love AUs of all sorts. I love mindfucking and mind control! I love telepathic bonds. (Also, bondage.) (And oral sex.) (And telepathically arguing while having sex.) (I like dialogue is I think my point.)

I love happily ever afters. I love old married couples. I love people who still love each other both despite and because of all their flaws. I love friendships. I love shiny happy people holding hands. I love alliteration! I love stream of consciousness! I love a lot of other things not covered above!

If you want to string as many tropes together as you'd like, I am totally here for that, that would be phenomenal. If you have, for example, a wingfic omegaverse sedoretu arranged marriage comedy of manners hurt/comfort AU that you want to write, I would love to receive it!

Things I do not want: Any violence to fingers, eyes, or tongues. (That's the big one.) The Holocaust or WW2. Daemons. Fantastical discrimination (such as discriminating against someone for being an omega). Daddy kink. Non-canonical child abuse. Apocalypse, disaster, or dystopia fic. Spiders or bugs. Rodents. Zombies. Character bashing. Humiliation. Slavery. Unrelenting angst. Non-canonical terminal illness. "My way or the highway" coercion in dubcon. "Didn't know they were dating." For the two American fandoms: Named references to real life Republican elected officials, Republican public figures, and Republican media figures since 1980. If there is going to be sex: no rimming or scat, please. Also, I would prefer that it not be a Christmas-themed story.

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In alphabetical order by English title, my requests are:


Fandom: Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975): Dennis, Constitutional Peasant Woman

It is entirely possible I knew this scene entirely by heart before I had actually seen this movie, just because we had a CD of Monty Python sketches and Constitutional Peasant was on it. I have no idea how that timeline adds up, but there are still to this day Monty Python sketches that I know by heart but have not actually seen.

But this is not really about the sketch. It's about the sketch and how it works in with a King Arthur movie.

Please tell me more about Dennis and the unnamed woman in the scene. Tell me about their commune inside Arthuriana. Tell me how they interact with their neighbors. Are there many like them? Are there many just enough unlike them? How did they get started? What concerns do they have that are much more interesting and vital than what knight lives in the castle? (And what do they use the castle for? Storage? Or do they just leave it as a picturesque ruin? Is it only a model?) What are their interactions like with the other locales/sketches in the movie, such as with the folks who know too much about swallows or who got turned into newts and then got better?

The constitutional peasants clearly have a long history of discussing these topics and know each other's opinions very well. Their argument is well-practiced and good-natured. Are they friends or are they family? IMDB lists her as "Dennis's mother", but I have no idea why. How have their opinions changed over the years? Have they influenced each other in any way? What's the rest of the commune's feelings on things?

Please play this as straight or as wild as you'd like. Is this a serious exploration into these weighty topics? Or do you break the fourth wall? Or both? Does a historian wander through?

If you want to do crossovers with other Arthuriana, I'd love to see how this would also work if Dennis and the unnamed woman interacted with any Arthuriana that takes itself more seriously than Monty Python does.

Or go in the other direction! Extrapolate "future" Arthuriana based on the existence of the constitutional peasants in either this movie, or in previous adaptations. Were they in the Mabinogion? What did Mallory make of them? What encounters did Merlin have with them in the Once And Future King? What does Arthuriana 200 years from now do with these characters? Extracts from someone's thesis would be phenomenal, as well as random fannish metaposts or stream-of-conscious style rants about how it all fits together and how this must have gotten started.

As for what the constitutional peasant woman's name is, the sky's the limit, but if you want to name her Elaine... :D

One wacky, over-specific prompt: The Matter Of Britain's Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune.

Availability: American Netflix (don't know about others), Amazon Prime


Mini-challenge prompts:
Cheftide: period-specific cooking, while being very very vague and incoherent on what the period actually is.

Yulebuilding: How did this even happen in the first place?

Two For One, The Crossover Challenge:

• Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)/Ancient British Stones (anthropomorphic stones): I don't know anything about these stones, but I saw this in the tagset and was very amused by it.



• Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)/Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke: Two magicians shall appear in England, but I didn't vote for 'em.



• Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)/Arthurian Mythology: See above for prompts, but considering the nominated characters for "Arthurian Mythology" specifically, I'd love to see characters who don't show up in Monty Python, such as Kay or Guinevere. (I've always loved Kay so much. It annoyed me that he got fucked over in Lancelot's ascension in Arthuriana.)



• Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)/Westing Game - Ellen Raskin: Sam Westing goes around looking for heirs and is told he only accomplished anything by exploiting the workers. (As this is the correct answer, he immediately makes them heirs.)

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Fandom: 琅琊榜 | Nirvana in Fire (TV): Mei Changsu, Xiao Jingyan

This show is everything I could ever want with political intrigue and plotting in my entire life. Nothing will ever top this.

Give me all the friendship. Give me all the slash. Give me any combination of that. I just love the two of them and their dynamic. Jingyan pulling and pulling and wanting his best friend back and meanwhile MCS is trying to hold back and pull in the other direction and put a stop because he doesn't want hearts and emotions to get engaged, because everyone loves MCS except for MCS himself, because MCS doesn't understand why anyone would love this version of him, that he's a pale shadow of who he used to be, and meanwhile Jingyan falls in love/friendship with him all over again, totally against MCS's will, beautiful :D

Any part of canon would be a+++ wonderful. Pre-canon? Awesome. Mid-canon? Awesome. Post-canon somebody-lives/reflective/time-travel/reincarnation? Awesome.

In terms of AUs, I really wonder what would have happened if Marquis Yan had done his "blow up the Emperor" plot a couple years earlier, while MCS was still planning everything, and Jingyan was off with the army. How does that shift what MCS is trying to do? How do Jingyan and MCS meet again? What does justice for the Chiyan army look like?

Or what if MCS changes his approach when he does come back? What if he comes back as someone who is there to put spikes on the top of people's houses to stop all the flying assassins from landing easily on them? What if he stays where he is and does it all by letter and then Jingyan goes to find him because he notices something in the letters that only Lin Shu would do?

For ships, I ship the two of them together, I'm also open to shipping either/both of them with Nihuang, Yujin, Jingrui, Lin Chen, Meng Zhi, or Jingyan with his wife or his concubine. I'd prefer it if you don't go cross-gen in family shipping (like MCS or Jingyan with Princess Liyang, since she's their aunt). Same-gen family ships (MCS/Jingyan, either of them with Yujin or Jingrui, etc) I am totally fine with. If you feel like doing a sedoretu involving Nihuang, Yujin, or Jingrui, yes please. :D

I feel like the political intrigue is a character in its own right and I'd love to see more of it, but since that's not actually a character and not actually requestable, do not feel the need to write it if you don't want to. ;) But I love the machinations aspect of MCS, the way it's all born out of pain and betrayal, the fires that burn him and yet he's cold all the time. Beautiful. I love the way both of them changed in response to their trauma and how they come back together, Jingyan without knowing it, and how they fit together again so well, even with MCS trying so hard not to let it happen.

As the terminal illness is canonical, I'm fine with it being included in the fic, but I'd prefer it not be the focus of the story, unless it's, like, serious crack and the terminal illness works in with that somehow. (Magical Healing Cock is always welcome in this fandom.)

One wacky, over-specific prompt: Jingyan and Mei Changsu have had a telepathic bond since childhood. Despite this, MCS still attempts to keep lots of plotting a secret from him by doing the equivalent of mentally playing a lot of elevator music over the bond.

Availability: Viki streaming


Mini-challenge prompts:
Yuleporn: *jumps up and down, chanting Magical Healing Cock! Magical Healing Cock!* And, er, you know, other stuff. But magical healing cock would be fantastic for this. :D

Two For One, The Crossover Challenge:

• 琅琊榜 | Nirvana in Fire (TV)/Dune Series - Frank Herbert: The nearby kingdom of Arrakis seems to be going through some problems.

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Fandom: The President's Daughter series - Ellen Emerson White: Beth Shulman, Meghan Powers

Time period: I'd prefer the book parts of things be kept to the original time period rather than the updated version. If you have only read the updated versions: the first three books originally took place in the 80s. My impression from looking at the updated ones is that essentially the only changes were some minor editing of pop culture references, although I think also Katharine Powers somehow got Barack Obama's convention speech. So, yeah, if you've only read the updated ones, I'd prefer if you'd just handwave that it takes place instead of the Reagan years, and, no, Meg still makes absolutely no topical pop culture references. But if you want to keep it taking place in the '00s, please make no reference to anything of the Bush Administration. (for instance, having Meg and Beth attend high school during the Bush years would be fine with me; having Meg and Beth attend high school and someone talk about torture is not for me).

This book series was one of my childhood favorites. I read Long Live The Queen first and that trauma recovery narrative was there for me when I needed it most. These books have given me so much wisdom, such as something I say to myself often "why ruin good clothes by wearing them" as a reminder that the purpose of clothes is to actually wear them. Katharine Powers: source of much wisdom about my wardrobe :P

I really love Meg and Beth's relationship. With all the changes in Meg's life, it'd be so easy for her to lose touch with all her old friends, but she and Beth hold on to each other. I love how they interact with each other and how they're both so committed to staying friends. If either of them hadn't wanted to stay friends as strongly as they did, they wouldn't have. It's a really great bond. They share their sense of humor and really, truly understand and trust each other.

Also, I ship them. This is one fandom where I would be completely on board with a coming out narrative. What's would it be like for Meg to come out to her family in the pressure cooker they're in, either before or after her kidnapping? What would it be like, for someone of Meg's fame, post Long Live The Queen, with all the speculation that must have happened, to put herself out there as a queer person? How does her mom react? How does her mom support her? I've also always viewed Preston as gay, so if you share that view, how does this play out in their friendship? How do she and Preston support each other? (If you do go that path, considering the time frame, please have AIDS be Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Fic.)

If you do not ship Meg and Beth, I'd also love anything that explores the strength of their relationship over time, how that evolves as they go to college, or slices of life during the books. What are Meg and Beth doing five years down the line? Ten? Fifteen? How do they keep influencing each other's sense of humor? What were they doing on December 31, 1999? I'm fully on board with AUing Meg's choice of college.

I'm also on board with anything that explores the aftermath of LLTQ. Beth coming to visit when Meg was recuperating is so great. She has no idea what she's doing, but she's doing it. She's helping by leaning into their friendship as much as possible, and it's hard, and she doesn't know if she's making it worse. But if she keeps treating Meg like Meg, if she keeps their friendship going the way it always has, then maybe it'll all be okay? But if Meg tells her to leave, she will. Beth is going to Be There. She had to endure not knowing if Meg was dead chained up in a cave somewhere, and in comparison, dealing with Meg being a terrible patient is so much better. I just really love Beth's visit. Beth could have not come. She could have flinched away. But she was there for her best friend, in the way only she could, the way Meg's family was too scared to be.

I know "woman who rescues herself" is a trope and LLTQ uses that trope, but it seems very lonely to me, that it's packaged in the idea that you can't rely on anyone, that no one will help you. And I think that's part of Meg's trauma for sure. It's undeniable how many people tried to find her. She still had to save herself. She only survived because of herself. If it had been up to everyone else's efforts, she'd have died. And so she struggles with interpersonal relationships and with trust, she puts on a brave face and won't admit to weakness, because when she needed most to rely on anyone, she couldn't. (And that feeds into her abuse-survivor feelings about her captor, because she wants to believe that he helped her, while knowing that he didn't, while everyone else is going "that dude abandoned you to die slowly and horribly", and she knows that, but yet... she wants to feel like someone helped, and she blames herself so much.) She confides a lot in Beth about what happens, what can't she tell her, what does she only tell her years later, what does she think she's told her but hasn't, does everything eventually find its way out?

Also, if you're familiar with assistive technology of the kind that Meg might find useful, it'd be great to see Meg using any of it. I'm personally not familiar enough for specifics in requests, but I recently reread LMSR (because this paragraph was originally gonna be like "hey, paralympic skiing!") and it struck me a lot about how Meg just disdains so much of it and dismisses a lot of it out of hand. Even that knife she has, she doesn't actually use it. So if you're familiar with the kinds of things she might be trying and using, I'd love having that included in this fic. (It's a bit of a Watsonian/Doylist thing for me in how I feel about it in LMSR. Because, yeah, sure, Watsonially it makes sense for Meg for be resisting it, but I can't stop being very Doylistic in all my readings these days and I'm like "why did the author make those choices". So if you, the yuletide author, want to make different choices, I am 100% there for it.)

In terms of the elephant in the room of how did it/how it happened, I appreciate that that isn't this book's genre. This isn't a spy thriller; it's instead a hurt/comfort narrative, with a lot of focus on both sides of it. My own impression was that obviously and of course the villains were American white supremacists and this was home-grown terrorism. I am totally fine if you don't touch at all on how/why it happened and just focus on pre-kidnapping or post-kidnapping recovery, because that's what the books do. :D

I'm okay with real life politics and politically-adjacent folks showing up, such as Rachel Maddow and the Daily Show Alumni from the Fake News RPF fandom. But please no Republican elected officials or public figures (see DNW: basically, if someone has a Republican dad or you create a fictional Republican, that's fine with me. But I'd ask for nothing along any of the categories of John McCain, Condoleezza Rice, or Rush Limbaugh).

One wacky, over-specific prompt: The evolution of Meg and Beth's relationship as told through music they've sent each other over the years, from mix tapes, to burned CDs, mp3s, internet playlists, etc.

Availability: The series is available on Kindle. Long May She Reign is available for borrow from archive.org.

(Note: due to RL stuff, I'd ask that you not focus too much on the damage to Meg's hand. This is a little above my usual "no damage to fingers", and I can handle discussions in the abstract, and her feelings about doing it, how it saved her life. But please no graphic descriptions of the actual damage?)



Mini-challenge prompts:
Cheftide: Meg and Beth try to bake a cake from scratch.

Femslash Festivus: The life and times of Beth Shulman, official best friend and unofficial girlfriend.

Two For One, The Crossover Challenge:

• The President's Daughter series - Ellen Emerson White/Westing Game - Ellen Raskin: Meg and Beth are on the East Coast in the 80s, Judge Ford and Turtle are in Wisconsin in the late 70s and early 80s, but Judge Ford ends up in DC, and Turtle's life as a corporate lawyer will involve some travel. What kind of interactions do they have?



• The President's Daughter series - Ellen Emerson White/Fake News RPF: Meg promotes her latest book on the Colbert Report. If she makes Stephen break is up to you.

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Fandom: Westing Game - Ellen Raskin: Sam Westing, Josie-Jo Ford, Turtle Wexler

Yuletide Towers faces east and has no towers, and this request is for three characters, but if you want to only do two of them or one of them, that is fine with me.

LET ME TELL YOU OF MY LOVE FOR THE WESTING GAME. Good golly, this book. This book is so fantastic. Like all great mysteries, it rewards re-reading and it doesn't get boring, you just get more and more out of it the more times you read it. I know this because I have reread it a lot.

So, I posted here about Sam Westing And The Daughters He Didn't Have, and that is kind of my thinking here for this request. Westing was this huge part of both Judge Ford's and Turtle's lives in such vastly different ways, and because of that, they have such vastly different perspectives on him, but I feel like they would both fully understand the other's. Also, it doesn't escape my notice that Judge Ford last saw Westing when she was 12, and Turtle meets him when she's 13. There's a nice narrative split there.

I love how both of them treat their past with Westing. Judge Ford is fully aware of what Westing could have been trying to buy with educating her, and won't let that happen; he may have tried to get himself a judge, but she's not letting herself be gotten. And Turtle, at the end, uses that same kind of history to tease him, to say, you may have paid for my education, but I'm not gonna play around. It's different perspectives and contexts. It's the same answer.

By the end of it, Turtle really does know who Westing is, and knows enough to lie to him to give him some peace at the end. And at the end of it, Judge Ford knows she doesn't know what happened, and seems to have some peace with it. She confronted her past, she got to insult Westing to his face, she got to pay him back. And then she got to pay it forward.

And the book ends with Turtle paying it forward, too. Are we supposed to think that Turtle is moving toward a Westing Jr personality? Or is she twisting it into something else?

The shadow Westing casts over everyone's lives is vast and, to some extent, extremely intentional. So what's that like for him? He crafts personas constantly, what does he put into them? How does he feel about his creations? Are some more personal than others?

I'd love explorations of these characters's dynamics within canon, and I'd also love any kind of AU. What would have happened if Judge Ford recognized Sandy? What would have happened if she'd trusted her own memory of what Crow had looked like back then to say, hey, wait, Sandy is lying to me. What if she'd tried a different private investigator? What if she'd figured it out later?

And on the subject of parents and children, Turtle gets herself a replacement mother in Flora Baumbach, and a new uncle in Sandy. It would be really cool to see Judge Ford and Turtle explore a mother/daughter mentor/mentee relationship, especially as Turtle grows up and starts studying law. Turtle is more corporate-focused than Judge Ford (who likely stayed the fuck away from corporations), but they both have that tie of being Westing heirs.

Judge Ford is also, notably, the only adult Westing heir to have no romantic relationship at all. There could be many reasons for that, but I'd really love to see a queer!Judge Ford, if you would like to write that. (I'd also love to see queer!Turtle and any queer mentorship would be amazing).

This also spanned out a rambling meta post about the women of the Westing Game and careers, if you want to see me project my head onto a wall about it. But it'd be really great to see themes on that. A fic about Turtle and Judge Ford and careers would be fantastic.

In terms of timeline, anywhere in the book timeline or backstory is fine with me. There's also about twenty years or so post-Game where all three are alive, so what happens, say, if Judge Ford has to encounter Julian Eastman for any reason? There's so many different ways Sandy's secret could come out. Does Judge Ford ever take a step back and look at the Westing Game years onward and, maybe with some hindsight, maybe with having more documents and references and resources available, does she see it differently?

Speaking of Sam Westing and the daughter he did have, to go wildly AU, too, it'd be cool to see a fic where Violet doesn't die. That wouldn't change Judge Ford's trajectory, but what difference would it make in Turtle's? Would Westing reach out to the rest of his family, looking for heirs and/or shenanigans? Would Violet have divorced her rotten husband?

One wacky, over-specific prompt: Julian Eastman, Turtle Wexler, and Judge Ford are all in DC at the same time, all for different reasons. Turtle knows both of them are there. They each know Turtle is there. Farce happens.

Availability: The Westing Game is available for borrow from archive.org.


Mini-challenge prompts:
Two For One, The Crossover Challenge:

• The President's Daughter series - Ellen Emerson White/Westing Game - Ellen Raskin: Meg and Beth are on the East Coast in the 80s, Judge Ford and Turtle are in Wisconsin in the late 70s and early 80s, but Judge Ford ends up in DC, and Turtle's life as a corporate lawyer will involve some travel. What kind of interactions do they have?



• Westing Game - Ellen Raskin/Mathnet: when the fourth thing in a set of four goes missing, Mathnet is on the case. Let's learn about compasses and directions!



• Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)/Westing Game - Ellen Raskin: Sam Westing goes around looking for heirs and is told he only accomplished anything by exploiting the workers. (As this is the correct answer, he immediately makes them heirs.)