Lost in Lualand

Thank you in advance, kind stranger! I have requested some rather niche fandoms and I'm SO delighted by the possibility of any fic for any of these. I'm pretty easygoing & omnivorous when it comes to fic-reading, so please have fun writing, and follow your inspiration where it leads, even if it doesn't entirely match the prompts here!

(Also: I'm happy to receive treats!)

( General Likes )

I mostly read gen, but I also enjoy very shippy or smutty fic, so long as there's still significant plot and/or character study elements. To that end I also have a list of:

( Smutty Likes )

I mostly enjoy things that stick close to canon facts/settings. However, I do enjoy setting-based AUs when the new setting has a ton of flavor (e.g. coffee shop AUs or standard college AUs tend to be too bland for me, but I've enjoyed stuff like "they're all national park rangers" AU or "US Revolutionary War" AU, etc). Canon divergent AUs / "what if?" AUs are also great if you've got a cool idea for one!

What I've written, bookmarked, and been gifted on AO3 does a pretty good job of showing the range of things I'm most delighted to read.

Do Not Wants (DNWs): AUs where the primary focus is erotic (e.g. omegaverse, d/s verse, slavefic, etc), vomit/feces/piss

Okay, on to the fandom-specific stuff~

( Gilead Series - Marilynne Robinson )

( The True Deceiver - Tove Jansson )

( Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 )

( Teixcalaan Series - Arkady Martine )

Thank you in advance, stranger! I adore each of these fandoms and will be delighted to see more fic for any of them. I'm pretty easygoing & omnivorous when it comes to fic-reading, so please have fun writing, even if it doesn't entirely match the prompts I gave—they're only meant to be jumping-off points, and I'm most interested in whatever is exciting to you.

In case you need something beyond the prompts/ideas offered in the sign-up, please find my general likes and DNWs below!

General Likes

* gratuitous meta / worldbuilding, backstories, character studies, strong settings / setting-as-character
* working through bitterness / badfeels with family and friends (and other complicated relationships), MESSY relationships in general, (inverted) power dynamics (and exploration thereof), depictions of "home", melancholy & reminiscing, people who are very different from each other struggling & striving & learning to understand each other
* people avoiding their feelings with various varieties of self-destructive behavior, scoundrel-y characters being scoundrels, smart characters being smart, heists

I mostly read gen, but I often enjoy very shippy or E-rated fic, so long as there's still significant plot and/or character study elements.

I mostly enjoy things that stick close to canon facts/settings. However, I do enjoy setting-based AUs when the new setting has a ton of flavor (e.g. coffee shop AUs or standard college AUs tend to be too bland for me, but I've enjoyed stuff like "they're all national park rangers" AU or "US Revolutionary War" AU, etc). Canon divergent AUs / "what if?" AUs are also great if you've got a cool idea for one!

What I've written, bookmarked, and been gifted on AO3 does a pretty good job of showing the range of things I'm most delighted to read.

DNWs

AUs where the primary focus is erotic (e.g. omegaverse, d/s verse, slavefic, etc), scat, emetophilia, ageplay/raceplay, mpreg, hanahaki disease, inflation

Thank you in advance, kind stranger! I have requested some rather niche fandoms and I'm SO delighted by the possibility of any fic for any of these. I'm pretty easygoing & omnivorous when it comes to fic-reading, so please have fun writing, and follow your inspiration where it leads, even if it doesn't entirely match the prompts here!

This is my first Yuletide, so feel free to contact the Yuletide mods if you need more information on any of my prompts or DNWs.

In case you're stuck on the fandom we matched on: Dragon Shield has a very small canon, so you could pick it up quickly if you'd like! There's more details below, but tl;dr, just click through the lore section of their website and you know everything that I know :) The True Deceiver is a very short (approx. 50k words), very lovely novel; if you can get your hands on a copy it's a quick read. Finally, Sea of Fertility is a series of novels; however, the prompt I'm offering only covers the first novel, Spring Snow.

( General Likes & DNWs )

( 豊饒の海 - 三島由紀夫 | Houjou to Umi | Sea of Fertility Series - Mishima Yukio )

( The True Deceiver - Tove Jansson )

( Dragon Shield: Kingdoms (Book & Podcast & Card Game Sleeves) )

Someone once told me about the idea of a "paired reading"—basically, two books that, if read in succession, may lend particularly interesting insights/connections, due to some set of similarities/contrasts/etc between them.

I have two suggestions for such pairings:

(1) I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith and The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle.

When I first read The Last Unicorn as an adolescent, I remember turning the last page and thinking: this is the last fairy tale that can ever be told. All the themes in the book are of endings—the mundane and mortal treading into the realm of fairy-things, postmodern butterflies that flutter around giving confused advice, and the traveling companions are a two-bit magician (instead of a sagely wise wizard) and an old woman. The unicorn is forever changed by what happens to her, in a way that haunts me to this day—what it's like, for an immortal creature to feel regret.

I Capture the Castle, similarly, feels like the very last "Austen-ish" novel you could ever write. I've touched on it before, but to reiterate: it's got all the sweetness of an Austen romance, but with all these modern complications. Money actually matters, and not in the convenient "everyone gets to marry for love AND money" in the end way in Austen's books. The shadow of World War I hangs heavy over everything. Even in the book, the narrator thinks sadly of how she's probably "grown out of" her childhood "midsummer rites", that she'll never be able to do them again in the same way, and there's something nostalgic and heartbreaking about that.

(2) "Solitude" by Ursula Le Guin and "The Beast That Shouted Love At The Heart of the World" by Harlan Ellison.

This pairing is perhaps a bit less obvious. It's also a pair of short stories rather than novels!

"The Beast" gives us an almost cosmic portrait of the nature of evil. (Kinda-sorta. It's a delightfully strange story.) It hinges on the question of—what if the badness, the madness, the chaos of our world comes from elsewhere? And what if that happens because of a distant act of mercy, or self-preservation?

Makes more sense after you've read the story but—essentially, it puts you in a frame of mind to wonder, what's the rot at the heart of the world, which puts you in the right frame of mind for...

"Solitude," which is more lucid but in some ways stranger. Essentially, an anthropologist/scientist mother from a futuristic Earth-like culture decides she wants to study the people of the distant planet Eleven-Soro, so she lives among them for years, raising her two children in their culture. Her son eventually decides he wants to return home, but her daughter takes to the culture so much that she doesn't want to go back.

From her mother's perspective, the people of Eleven-Soro suffered some sort of catastrophic population decline, and now have become primitive, and developed all kinds of superstitions to prevent the society from ever becoming industrialized/large-scale again. So they call airplanes and modern medicine evil sorcerer, and they live in communities separated by gender, and spend a great deal of their time alone.

From the daughter's perspective, however, it's not the airplanes that are the evil sorcerery; it's the mindset that created the plane that's the sorcerery. Protecting the solitude of oneself and one's people is a sacred thing, not a superstition, and her soul feels more whole in this culture.

While "Solitude" is more interested in human relations (or, rather, solitude-within-relations) than "The Beast", in a way, it's asking a similar question—does the root of "evil" rest in the machines that caused some long-past catastrophe, or in the minds that made them? and can it be restrained in this deliberate, weird, seemingly-stilted culture? where's the root of it?

(I may or may not update this post in the future with other paired reading suggestions as I think of them.)

ETA (3/25/2019): Silently and Very Fast by Cat Valente, and The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang.

Both wonder what it'd be like for robots to become sentient.

Valente takes a dreamlike, Sandman-esque approach, drawing parallels between an AI's "birth" and various myths, parables, and fairy-tales. Chiang goes for a disability-studies sort of metaphor. Both are lovely tales but stand in striking contrast to each other.

ETA (3/1/2021): The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse and the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. I have yet to test this one, haha, I've only read the former, but from what I hear of the latter, they play with similar ideas? Will report back here if I ever get around to reading Mr. Banks

ETA (7/28/2021): Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde and The Emergence of Probability by Ian Hacking

ETA (1/3/2022): The Player of Games by Ian M. Banks and any of: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata, "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forester, and The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse

ETA (4/27/2024): Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

links are disappearing from the internet all the fucking time.

whenever i have to search more than two minutes to find something i'm pasting it into DW & linking it in this entry.

links are presented without comment, beyond "it was something interesting enough i felt like digging it up again."

gone home by anna anthropy
i didn't dream of dragons
impertinence on trigger warnings
on losing faith