(no subject)

Dear Invisible Ficcer,

Thanks for writing a fic for me! As I write in most letters for exchanges like this, I have notoriously bad taste in fiction, so you should not let yourself be restrained by my taste. Write something that you will enjoy and everyone will be better off. Below, some thoughts on the fandoms.


The Escapist - Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay

I'm more a fan of Golden Age Escapist than Silver Age Escapist, so please keep the nonsensical visits to alien worlds and parallel worlds out of the fic if at all possible. On the other hand, I greatly prefer the Silver Age origin story of the Escapist, so it'd be cool if you could retcon the Silver Age version of the story of how he got the Key into a story about a Golden Age villain like Swastika Man or the Panzer. Please include Luna Moth, or make the story all about her and drop the Escapist from the fic altogether. We need more strong women in comics.


The Entertainment- J.O. Incandenza

This is really all about the fans, right? The Entertainment is only interesting because of what it says about the people who are drawn to it, those of us who have built a fannish community around our shared love of the Entertainment. Please celebrate our fan culture in your story.

Galaxy Girl - TV Show

Galaxy Girl is due for a really grimdark reboot, wouldn't you say? I always loved the adventures, growing up, but I thought the morals at the end of each episode were really saccharine and problematically uncomplicated. What if Galaxy Girl had to confront something genuinely difficult, like the dilemma from Tom Godwin's The Cold Equations? How would she emerge? I think Galaxy Girl is a great figure to use to talk about real heroism in contrast to the types of simplified 'heroism' our children's television misguidedly teaches today.

Robert Templeton Series- Harriet Vane

Preferably casefic. I'd love to see one of the throwaway cases mentioned in Death 'Twixt Wind and Water. The case of the Elysian Traveler sounds particularly intriguing to me. Or write me something about his early days, before Vane started writing him. How did he acquire such strong arms?

I ship Robert/Henry, like everyone else in the fandom, and would of course welcome a cute moment the two of them share in between cases, but... here's a thought. Remember Dorothy, that young writer who was falsely accused of murder? i always thought there was something between Robert and her. Obviously there are issues to be worked through- Dorothy's family hates Robert- but I think it could be interesting to see what happened if the two of them ran into each other again. Possibly while working on a case?

Sefer Milhamot Hashem - the Book of the Wars of the Lord

I really like the alternate take on the conquest of Jericho in this scroll. Presenting it as a purely military victory without any overt miracles is fascinating! I'd like fic about one of the characters in that story- Joshua, faced with the challenge of besieging a walled city without the ability to just collapse the walls with shofar blasts, struggling to come into his own as a general, or Rahab, the spy torn between her loyalty to her city and her loyalty to her handsome foreign lover, or the King of Jericho, overconfident and ultimately tragically doomed.


The Leather Mask - Benno von Archimboldi

I really can't say why this is my favorite of Archimboli's novels. It's solidly mid-career, with neither the naive brilliance of his first novels or the sad wiseness of his last books. I think it's the alliance of kink and politics that makes it so compelling to me. Archimboldi manages to convey the sheer horror of encountering the woman (or is it truly, in the end, a man?) who wears the leather mask, and then flips the perspective on us to show us what it is like to wear it, how it both empowers and limits its wearer's choices about identity and presence.


Anyway, feel free to disregard all of that and just write whatever the hell you want.