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Dear Yuletide Author,

So you got matched to me. I feel sorry for you, I really do. Thank you for enduring the horror.

I have notoriously bad taste (ask any of my friends!), so it's probably better for you to write something you think is good than try to tailor your story to my taste. Unless you also have bad taste, in which case we may just be fucked. In all seriousness, I try not to be demanding in my letters. The following consists of prompts, because sometimes it can be terrifying to look at a blank page and have to come up with a story on your own. They are not things you need to create for me. They're just ideas that emerge from my wild and wooly and unmanageable brain. I was actually a little mockingly complaining a while back about how the stories I have received in past exchanges have been shockingly good at being exactly what I asked for, whereas sometimes the stories I write have a tendency to wander wherever my brain takes me. So let me be clear: Feel free to wander wherever your brain takes you. I like being surprised.


1. Danger 5

If you don't know the fandom, it's an Australian action-comedy about a team of superspies tasked with trying to kill Hitler. It is hilarious and brilliant.

I maintain that Danger 5 is the best thing on television, despite all evidence to the contrary. See notoriously bad taste.

I ship Ilsa/Jackson pretty hard. I would love to see them in an overly domestic scenario. Curtainfic would be amazing. I would also love to see them beating the crap out of more Nazis. Curtainfic where they beat the crap out of Nazis would be the best.

I'm interested in immediately-to-be-jossed 1980s Danger 5 fic, to get me excited for Season 2. I'm interested in ridiculous crossovers, and I don't care if I know the fandom you're crossing over with. I'm interested in Hitler acquiring a moonbase in any manner possible. I'm interested in time travel fic. I'm interested in seeing how gonzo it can get.

Tucker is probably the character I like the least, but that's like saying that inapt similes are my least favorite literary device. I love Tucker, and his completely broken Imperial values. I love Pierre and his eternal insta-friendships. I love Claire and her self-righteous pseudo-feminism. I love Jackson as the completely deconstructed American cowboy in reluctant love with his godless communist Soviet partner who doesn't have feelings.

And I love how the show handles Hitler, and I am a descendant of Survivors who has very complicated feelings about Hitler. Please, if you're going to write Hitler, tread lightly and carefully, but that doesn't mean you can't have fun with him. I love that Danger 5's Hitler is captive to the shallowest forms of the Deadly Sins: His lust is aimless, leering and repulsive. His envy is not particularized, his pride is built on flash instead of substance. It manages to humanize him, make him less of a cardboard cutout of evil, without making him the least bit sympathetic, and more subtly but more importantly for me, it manages to humanize him without in any way trying to be justificatory. Too often attempts to humanize monsters are making an argument that if we could only understand the monster, appreciate their childhood hardships and the way society has attacked them, we could understand where they're coming from and what made them do what they did. This is not always a bad approach, but it is colossally offensive when applied to Hitler. There can be no justification, there can be no understanding that will make sense out of six million.

More simply and reductively, I think you will be fine with me as long as you ask yourself the question, "Am I sure that the reader is laughing AT Hitler, not WITH Hitler?" I'm pretty sure that's all that Danger 5's writers did.


2. The Influence of Immanuel Kant On Evidentiary Approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria

If you don't know the fandom, that's because it's not a fandom. It's a fictional journal article proposed as a joke by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in an interview last year.

Um... Probably it can argued successfully that this is me trolling Yuletide. I saw the interview with Justice Roberts and immediately said "I want fic," so maybe it isn't trolling Yuletide. But it's probably trolling Yuletide.

The money quote from Chief Justice Roberts: “Pick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria, or something, which I’m sure was of great interest to the academic that wrote it, but isn’t of much help to the bar.” I don't know why I decided this ought to be a fandom in Yuletide, but I did, so here we are.

I feel like its setting in 18th Century Bulgaria means this could be a Baba Yaga or other Slavic folklore story. Kant as avatar of rationalism against Baba Yaga as the superstitious past. It could also be historical RPF of a fashion. It could also be contemporary, with the focus being on the academic Roberts speaks of.

In general, don't necessarily let Kant win in a landslide. The Germany vs. Eastern Europe social/political/cultural/legal dynamic set up by Roberts is problematic and I would appreciate seeing it problematized. (Of course, the dynamics were different in the 18th century as compared to today, and both might be kept in mind)

And don't forget the fact that the title is intended as farce. It's fine to play it completely straight/deadpan, but it's also fine to treat it as a venue for dealing with Roberts's objections to the absurd abstraction of legal theory in the academy, or as a venue for exploring Roberts's distrust for the law as a unifying system. Kant was used by Roberts as the archetypal figure of 'pure reason' because Roberts was suggesting that law cannot be reduced in that fashion, that Kant's contributions to evidentiary approaches are inherently unhelpful. On the Court, Roberts's jurisprudence has been characterized by a series of ideologically inconsistent bargains struck with the intention of balancing the political and cultural interests of the Court against the demands of the law. This is why he has a contentious relationship with the academy. It would be fun to see a story about a case where Roberts literally had to cite "The Influence of Immanuel Kant On Evidentiary Approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria" because it was relevant to the caselaw.

This is a silly request. If we matched on it, you are probably as silly a person as I am. Have fun with it.

3. Whodunnit - TV Show

If you don't know the fandom, it's a reality show murder mystery in which a dozen contestants live in a house and every day one of the contestants is 'killed' and the rest compete to solve the murder, with the last standing winning $250,000. It was silly summer entertainment this summer.

In general, if you're writing fic for this show, I would kind of like fic for the imaginary version of the show where people are really dying and the murderer actually has motivations behind their actions, rather than just RPF about life on the show. I don't have anything against RPF, I just don't find these people all that interesting outside the context of the mystery. (It's helpful that as the show went on, Melina and Lindsay in particular, but also to lesser degrees Kam and Ronnie and Geno and Dana, seemed to fall completely into the show's spell, freaking out when anyone went missing and acting like people had been killed. I feel like this started after Don's death. That was the one that really emotionally altered the way people played the game, because it was so immediate and in front of them, and they knew it was happening and couldn't stop it. After that, people seemed to really react to the deaths in a different way. So yes, there is a blurry line between their genuine reactions as people playing a reality show game and their reactions as characters in a story about a mad murderer in a locked mansion, and I'm fine with both, but would prefer the latter.

If I ship anything on the show, it's Melina/Ronnie. Their relationship had so many swerves between trust and mistrust, between anger and frustration and clear and genuine affection. In particular I thought the show's editing did a great job of contrasting Ronnie/Melina against Kam/Cris/Lindsay. Kam/Cris/Lindsay (mostly) stuck together, launched calculated gambits aimed at furthering their strategic interests, and carefully pulled the other alliance apart one member at a time. Ronnie/Melina played a frantic, intuitive game of incessant realignment, constantly second guessing their relationships with other players and pulling on every lever they could imagine to try to find something they could manipulate. Nothing summed up Ronnie's game better than his trained monkey hypothesis. Nothing summed up Melina's game better than her unexpectedly brilliant deductive ability with her back to the wall in the 3 vs 1 penultimate day. They're just fascinating, fascinating players, very creative, very smart, but not brilliant at planning ahead.

I would also love to see looks into the minds of Kam and Cris, the show's final duel of the minds. I loved Kam's response to the finale revelations. I was less pleased with Cris's... I wanted more story out of her. I wanted more motivation.

I also think Melina/Lindsey is an interesting dynamic, because Lindsey aligned herself with the dominant team, a team that triumphed on information control, and yet she spent just as much time as Melina did trying to play both sides against each other without any clear semblance of a plan. Was Lindsey just better at the intrigue than Melina? Was she just lucky to have ended up on the team with master riddle solver Cris and chessmaster Kam? Where do Melina and Lindsey meet in the middle?

I'm also interested in the class questions that the Whodunnit cast implicitly asks. Kam the lawyer and Lindsey the engineer against Melina the flight attendant and Ronnie the bounty hunter was the effective final four, and if you didn't see class undertones to that competition you weren't paying attention. Also, the machinations about hiding your job against not hiding your job... Don's choice not to admit he was a police detective, against everyone's near-instant conclusion that he was; Ronnie's fake job and the more genuine surprise when he admitted his profession. How does this feed into Cris's motivations? How does this feed into Melina and Ronnie's motivations? How does this play with the audience's expectations for a mystery story, with its tropes of the lone genius piecing together the clues competing against the complicated interpersonal dynamics the puzzles engineered?

I'd also probably enjoy alternate endings with different killers. The show's fatal flaw was that the killer never really did anything that marked them as the killer, but in an AU fic that's a strength- the killer could just as easily have been anyone else from the final three, right? I mean, I think any of the final five were plausible, but that requires a bit more rewriting.

A final observation I would make is that this show is fundamentally about matching wits. All of the characters I'm talking about have done stupid things on the show, fallen victim to misdirection, made poor choices under pressure, believed lies from other players, told lies that other players found unconvincing. But they are all smart people, racing against each other to solve challenging riddles with a lot at stake. I would love a story that counterbalances that well, that is founded on the idea that smart people can do stupid things, that there are different kinds of intelligence and different levels of competence, and that we learn about them by setting them against each other under varied challenges.



4. Awoken - Serra Elinsen

If you don't know the fandom, it is a book written as a deconstruction of the Twilight-knockoff genre, in which our pseudo-Bella falls in love with Cthulhu and lives happily ever after because suddenly Cthulhu has a reason not to bring about the end of existence.

Let us stipulate that it is a terrible novel with awful characters. Let's take that as a given. So here are some terrible prompts:

I would be interested in you taking the transparent sequel-bait about the Alignment next year. Where is Riley and Andi's relationship one year in, has she found things about him that she finds unattractive or is she still wholly under his spell?

I'm also interested in figuring out where the hell Bree disappeared to in the second half of the book. Some best friend, huh? I'm a sucker for the trope where it turns out the the apparently mundane best friend has been running around in the background clearing a path for the hero without the hero ever realizing it, but given that this is a terrible book, I think I would also enjoy a story where Bree was just off having normal high school kid adventures while the second half of the book was going on, and wondering where her best friends were.

I also think it'd be kind of interesting to try to write deconstructive fic in the tradition of Twilight deconstructions: to pretend that Awoken is serious and needs fix-it fic that restores Andi's agency and shows what Riley being a good boyfriend would look like. The wankier and more ooc you make this, the better.

And it'd be fun to see more of the Cthulhu mythos... A fleshing out of who this version of Yog-Sothoth is, more about Chloe, other Deep Ones and Old Ones. I have an inexplicable fondness for Tsathoggua. Also, it'd be nice if Neil got to finish one of his stories... I kept wanting to hear what happened.

Also, I found it consistently hilarious when Riley or Neil dismissed the bad guys by saying "Oh, those are just cultists." I mean, completely consistent with the way Lovecraft often wrote cultists, but hilarious. They literally exist as cannon fodder to be mowed down by Cthulhu's mind-sucking powers. It would be fun, though, to treat the cultists as human beings with lives, and deconstruct/break the joke. What kind of cult were they members of? What were its beliefs? How did they recruit? What happens to THEM after the book ends?


5. Now You See Me-
Bradley and Tressler

If you don't know the fandom, it's a heist movie about a group of magicians.

That pair fascinated me. Tressler more than Bradley, really, because Caine's performance as Tressler gives you so little. I would not have been all that surprised to find that he was, wheels within wheels, the man running the show. You don't get involved in the world of magicians...I mean, the world of the ridiculously powerful magicians of this movie... if you're as smart as Tressler is, unless you have an angle. I want to know what his angle is. I refuse to believe that the front end gate receipts are what draws a man like that to the Four Horsemen.

Bradley I get. I don't think Atlas is incorrect in suggesting an envy of magicians with stage ability. For all of the film's emphasis on the technical chops, it's showmanship where magicianship really expresses itself. The Four Horsemen are mediocre showmen who somehow in the combination become a brilliant spectacle: Before their teamup, they wouldn't have been worthy of Bradley's takedown. Bradley plays the game, the technical chessmatch of stage magic, as well as anybody but the Eye, but he doesn't know how to perform it.

The scenes that Bradley and Tressler play together, you get the feeling that they have history, even if it's not a history of knowing each other. They have crossed paths indirectly, trails of electrons and paper manifests linking their destinies (and I make only the barest necessary apology for that pun). I mean, dear lord, it's Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman sharing the stage.. every look between them communicates so much.

I'd also be interested in a story that ties in Hermia, Bradley's assistant. Recall the movie's line about magicians' assistants being the ones who are really doing the magic. If that's the case, if that is Bradley's philosophy of magic, what do we make of her? I'm not sure she has a single line in the film, but she is everywhere Bradley is, watching, acting in unison with him. She's the one who approaches the truck with the safe. Is she part of the Eye's trick, acting against Bradley? Is she her own agent, with an agenda of her own that Bradley is the witting or unwitting stalking horse for? Could it be that she is in Tressler's pocket, part of whatever play he is intending to make?

One of the things that Now You See Me says about performance that I really think is interesting is that performances can be private even when they're in public. That is to say, sometimes you are apparently performing for the whole public, but really your audience is much narrower. When the Eye had the Horsemen perform the rabbit trick, whilst explaining that it was tied in and an integral part of the whole performance of the evening- really it was for the benefit of Bradley, right? To make him think he had figured out what was going on in New York and distract him from the important questions. I suspect a close-reading of Bradley's actions in the movie would suggest that he is constantly engaged in these private performances.