2021 Yuletide Letter
Dear Yuletide Writer,
Hi! Thanks for writing for me. I am lannamichaels basically everywhere, including AO3. I hang out in the Discord server as Lanna.
General information and stuff:
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." If there is going to be sex: no rimming or scat, please. Also, I would prefer that it not be a Christmas-themed story.
For American fandoms: Named references to real life Republican elected officials, Republican public figures, and Republican media figures since 1980.
In alphabetical order, 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? Chemistry experiments? Tourism money? Or do they just leave it as a picturesque ruin?) 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
Two For One, The Crossover Challenge:
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)/Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion... - Sandia Labs (a report on how to tell people in the future about the locations of nuclear waste): Places of honor derive from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical scientific ceremony!
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)/Grand Designs (TV UK): The castle gets a renovation. (Note: while the nominated fandom is the UK version, I also watch the Australian and New Zealand versions, so if you want to swap hosts for those hosts instead, that's fine with me.)
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)/Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke: Two magicians shall arise in England, but I didn't vote for 'em.
- 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.)
Fandom: The Princess Bride - William Goldman: Simon Morgenstern
You know when you write a scathing political satire and some asshole comes around a generation later and turns it into a children's adventure novel and completely misses the point of that entire enterprise? Simon Morgenstern sure does!
I'd love to know all about the original Princess Bride. How does it differ from the Goldman version? What specific parts of it does the original book fandom hate, which parts are they grudgingly okay with? Do any of them think any part of it is an improvement? How did the abridgement change characterizations or motivations? How did it change the essential story that Morgenstern was telling? How did it change the purpose of the narrative? The new intended audience for the book is targeted at Goldman's childhood self, so it's morphed its way into being a kid's book, full of action, adventure, etc. But the original Morgenstern was absolutely not that. I'd love to see that explored.
I'd love to see un-abridged extracts of the original novel. I loved the bits of it we see from Goldman's redactions, and it's a great peak into the potential.
Please tell me all the meta things about Simon Morgenstern. There's all this worldbuilding that Goldman has been shoving in about the overall context around the original Morgenstern and its place in Florinese history and culture. It's this great important novel. The meta possibilities are endless and I'd love to see them. How many in-universe books have been written about it? What other kind of adaptations exist of the original Morgenstern? What did those adaptations prize that Goldman doesn't?
On the academic side of things, I'd love to see Morgenstern's process in writing this lengthy historical satirical epic and what he chooses to include and what doesn't, and how he makes these choices, and how he decides to structure it. Morgenstern himself seemed to have an interesting life and that would be cool to see, too. Did he write his own life into the narrative in any way?
I'd also be interested in the metanarrative of the metanarrative. In the 30th anniversary prologue, Morgenstern is tempted to change history to make for a better story. Did he ever do that in any other place? Did he try to do to the historical events to put it into the narrative the way Goldman's father had finished doing, to turn it into an exciting story?
What's in Morgenstern's original notebooks? How did the story morph as it was written and how did that end up in Goldman's version? What kind of research did Morgenstern do?
How did the abridgement change the nature of the argument the book was making? The original Morgenstern was very pointedly anti-monarchy; by making it a children's story, Goldman softens the edges. Humperdinck is the villain but it's as himself, not as a condemnation of royalty. That wasn't what Morgenstern intended in his version. How do those elements change back in his version?
In terms of editions of the canon, I will add -- with perfect knowledge of the sheer meta-ness of this paragraph -- that I'm fine if you want to toss out all the later additions that Goldman added about Morgenstern in later editions and just go with what's in the original abridgement of this great work of Florinese history.
In any case, I'd ask that you please don't include Goldman's fictional family and all that stuff from the metanarrative. Keeping his dad is fine with me, but not the extended stuff about his wife and son and all that, please.
A note on the religion of Simon Morgenstern: Since this letter is in alphabetical order by fandom, I just want to make it clear that I wrote the note on the Wexlers before this one. And then I was like... uh, Morgenstern is also Jewish (it's in the parenthetical where Goldman is defending that Max and Valerie "sound Jewish"). If you want to explore that, I am all for this. Especially if you want to pull it into all the Jewish textual *waves hand vaguely* stuff. And Goldman was of course himself Jewish, so it's all within textual commentary traditions!
One wacky, over-specific prompt: a scene from Morgenstern's annotated copy of Goldman's Princess Bride, where he adds political satire to Goldman's adventure book. (This was before adventure, but after cartoons.)
Availability: The Princess Bride (Goldman edition) is available for borrow from archive.org
Fandom: Westing Game - Ellen Raskin: Sam Westing, Josie-Jo Ford, Turtle Wexler, Angela Wexler
Spoiler-free fandom promotion post
Yuletide Towers faces east and has no towers, and this request is for four characters, but if you want to only do two of them or one of them, that is fine with me.
I was going to just repeat, mostly verbatim, my request from last year. But then someone nominated Angela Wexler and I just had to include her. It's Sam Westing And The Daughters He Didn't Have And The Daughter He Did Have And Still Doesn't Care About.
Westing looms large over both Judge Ford and Turtle's lives and 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.
And then there's Angela, who doesn't have much to do with Sandy, unlike both Judge Ford and Turtle, and who had much more to do with Crow: Crow and the daughter she did have and the daughter she deeply mourns. Crow, who married young and gave up education to do it. Crow, who left Westing and who Westing hired someone to make sure Crow didn't embarrass him. Crow, who is the "queen's sacrifice", the one who Westing arranged all the clues to point to. Crow, who is used by Westing over and over again.
Angela is Violet and Angela is Crow. Judge Ford sees the game as a way for Westing to have his revenge on his ex-wife. And Turtle is the one who wins the game. Turtle is the one who is molded to become the new Westing, all the way down to playing chess in the end.
But while Westing tries to hurt Crow, Turtle protects Angela. Turtle takes the blame for Angela. Turtle is much better at making and keeping human connections than Westing is, Turtle values more than Westing does, who only seems to value people like himself; he pays for Judge Ford's education because she's smart and needs the help, he mentors Turtle, because she's like him. Westing sees people as chess pieces, sees the world as a play with him in the lead, with him playing all the parts that matter, with him setting the stage and nudging the plot along. Turtle keeps secrets, but she protects Angela and she invites Mrs. Baumbach to live with her, a surrogate mother who treated Turtle better than her own mother did.
Turtle got treated as a surrogate daughter by two people who lost their daughter: Westing and Mrs. Baumbach. She embraced them both and stuck by them.
Angela, interestingly enough, is paired in the game with someone older than both her parents, but gets no surrogate parents at all: she gets a friend, someone who sees her, someone who also wants to be seen.
Judge Ford has her own Westing moment but in a totally un-Westing way: Judge Ford sells her shares and pays for Chris's education. Judge Ford is paying it forward.
Turtle and Judge Ford seem to both be aware of the connotations of Westing paying for their education and have different feelings toward it based on their history with him and their interactions with him, but in the end have the same answer: "you paid for it, but I reject the strings you might try to tie on this money after the fact". 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 from both of them.
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? Is she seeing what her Uncle Sam did and saying, no, or is she saying "I'll do it better"?
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? How intentional are the consequences of his actions?
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 that 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.
I'd also like to see that connection explored with Angela, if Angela had chosen to pursue law instead of medicine. What kind of mentor could Judge Ford have been to someone who, she once realized, she thought of as a "sweet, pretty thing", and who, iirc, is the only character to have figured out Angela was the bomber? (Sydelle eavesdropped.)
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 or queer!Angela and any queer mentorship would be amazing).
An exploration of careers would also be great. I've got a rambling meta post about the women of the Westing Game and career and I think it'd be a really great thing to explore, especially when it comes to Judge Ford, Turtle, and Angela. And how does Sandy view Career? He is invested in the legend of Sam Westing, but he also plays around with his other identities, but those have built-in end dates and the narrative doesn't even engage with their permanency (there was no such person as barney northrup).
And what about extended families and the connections there? Turtle (who is not Violet, but who is the daughter Sandy chose) marries the son of the man who Violet wanted to marry. Chris is both Turtle's brother-in-law and the person whose education is paid for by Judge Ford. Do they keep meeting up at Theodorakis family events? What's that like?
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 before the final scene in the book, 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 and Angela's? Would Westing reach out to the rest of his family, looking for heirs and/or shenanigans? Would Violet have divorced her rotten husband? (Or go in a major crack version and lean into the fact that Grace and Angela are said to resemble Violet, and have Violet run away and change her name to Gracie Windkloppel?)
And what about the family connection? Would Westing have ever reached out to that side of his family, however they are related (and it does seem like they are)? What kind of relationship might they have had if Westing had tried to play his kindly Uncle Sam shtick with family? Grace and Crow-as-Mrs.-Westing have a similar sense in the storyline, as trying to climb the social latter and maintain the position (with a certain amount of laundering their origins/splits with bio family, with the change of the Westing name happening after Crow married him -- and with such a total break from their previous lives that Crow's childhood friend didn't know Crow was Mrs. Westing --, and with Grace's bio family breaking off contact with her because she married a Jew), and they both try/tried to use their daughter's marriage to help with that. What if Sam Westing had come in and said, hey, Angela may not be the genius that Judge Ford and Turtle are, but what if I paid for her to go to college? What if Westing had seen Angela = Violet and thought, you know, the problem with Violet was that I didn't help her, and so instead he decides to try to help a replacement? What if Westing had decided to help Turtle without making Turtle win a game first?
Speaking of which, what if Turtle never won the game? What if no one won, or someone else won? What if Crow had recognized Sandy? What if Sydelle wasn't a mistake? What if nothing had gone to plan?
A note on the religion of Angela and Turtle: Jake is Jewish, Grace's silver cross is a plot artifact. Angela and Turtle's feelings on this matter aren't specified beyond Turtle borrowing her mother's necklace. I'm open to a fic involving exploration on this, but, uh, staying in the spirit of the Westing Game? I'd rather there not be religion-related angst. Or even religion-related sincerity. I'd rather not a fic about Angela and Turtle meaningfully celebrating Chanuka; OTOH, a fic about Sandy giving Turtle tips on getting just the right dentures for her Purim costume is right up my alley. (A Westing Game Purim Shpiel where the clues can spell arur haman or baruch mordechai? Here for it!)
One wacky, over-specific prompt: The Westing Game gets a true crime/weird unsolved mysteries treatment. What do a Supreme Court Justice, the CEO of Westing Paper Products, an orthopedic surgeon, and a dead union organizer who didn't exist have in common? (Along with an Olympic gold medalist and a famous ornithologist!)
Availability: The Westing Game is available for borrow from archive.org
Two For One, The Crossover Challenge:
- 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.)
- Westing Game - Ellen Raskin/March of the Jobless Corps - Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird (Music Video): Themes of capitalism and the exploitation of labor run through The Westing Game. I have no idea how that could interact with March of The Jobless Corps, but I would love to see it.
- Westing Game - Ellen Raskin/Wishbone (TV): In which somebody is played by a dog.
This entry was originally posted at https://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/1220472.html.