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Oct. 11th, 2018 03:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretDear Yuletide Author,
Thank you for writing for me. I am weird and so my Yuletide letters are weird, please just accept that and move on. Please take everything to follow as suggestions and brainstorm starters, not as prescriptions for what I want to receive. I do not know what I want. Sorry, life would be easier if I knew my own mind.
A few notes on the fandoms I am requesting:
Autonomous - Annalee Newitz
What it is: Scifi biopunk novel, about a cop and his robot friend hunting down a drug smuggler. Everyone is more complicated than they seem, lots of interesting identity play happens, and there is a Jewish Doctor Robot.
What I want: I want more about the Jewish Doctor Robot.
I adored Med Cohen, the autonomous Jewish doctor robot, and would love to see more about their backstory, interaction with their family, what happens after Autonomous, anything you want to say.
A Serious Man (2009)
What it is: A semi-autobiographical Coen Brothers movie about the tribulations of a middle class Jewish family in 1960s Minnesota, powerfully grounded in an engagement with both the Torah and the Jewish folklore tradition.
What I want: I want more about the Three Rabbis.
The sequence in the film where Larry Gopnik visits the three Rabbis is my favorite part of the movie, a surreal and funny and secretly profound take on a traditional Jewish folktale formula. One of the things I really like about the presentation is that the Rabbis never interact with each other, and yet they clearly exist with relation to each other. They're constantly measuring their power against their colleagues, but in a comfortable way where they all understand the rules of the game. They know that the only way three Rabbis in one shul works is if they each keep control of their own domain and don't step on each others' toes. I'd love some twisty internecine shul politics where they continue to battle with each other for power and influence without ever talking to each other, acting through unsuspecting intermediaries. I'd love fic where they do engage with each other in spite of themselves- a family who requests all three Rabbis speak at their daughter's Bas Mitzvah and they all speak on the same Pasuk because they didn't coordinate would be hilarious and perfect.
And I'd love re-examining the folktale constraints of the Coen brothers' storytelling, or connecting them to other folktale elements of the film, like the dybbuk story at the beginning. There is a theory on A Serious Man that the meaning of the dybbuk story is to suggest that Larry is being haunted by this dybbuk because of the sins of his ancestors... If Larry did get to see the Marshak, perhaps he could have exorcised the dybbuk.
1850s London Cholera Epidemic RPF
What it is: In the 1850s, there was a cholera outbreak in London. A heterodox doctor teamed up with a priest to discover the origin of the outbreak. Science ensued. I mean, it's like the plot of a bad TV procedural... only it's about cholera in Victorian England.
What I want: I want more of anything. Seriously, anything. I got a great post-apocalyptic fic two years back and it was amazing and if anything I have become more obsessed with the weirdness of the history of disease since then. Feel free to cross Snow and Whitehead over with literally anything you want to. Their relationship is so interesting, as odd couple science detectives and best buddies for life. Have them track down the cause of a zombie epidemic! Fudge the timeline a bit and have them go toe to toe with Jack the Ripper, bioterrorist! Or just tell a heartfelt story about their lives and their fight to save London from itself.
Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
What it is: A gentle novel about a traveling acting troupe roaming a post-apocalyptic Midwest.
What I want: Ugh, this is going to be one of those super gauche requests that I usually hate getting, so I'm sorry. I liked a lot of the things Mandel does in Station Eleven, but I got so frustrated with the world-building, so I am asking first of all for fixit fic that describes a world where the response to the disease makes a little more sense, where people aren't so damned befuddled by the existence of technology and where people consult libraries for lost knowledge and figure out how to actually rebuild society in a new way. That was the setting I wanted Station Eleven to take place in.
If you're not interested in that, that's okay. I'm open to other stories, too. I really like the way texts, particularly Shakespeare, are reinterpreted in the post-apocalyptic setting and would appreciate meditations on how any other texts have changed, and how the characters of Mandel's story changed with them. Or, obviously, ignore any of these suggestions and do your own thing. Like I said above, I don't really know my own mind.
Thank you for writing for me. I am weird and so my Yuletide letters are weird, please just accept that and move on. Please take everything to follow as suggestions and brainstorm starters, not as prescriptions for what I want to receive. I do not know what I want. Sorry, life would be easier if I knew my own mind.
A few notes on the fandoms I am requesting:
Autonomous - Annalee Newitz
What it is: Scifi biopunk novel, about a cop and his robot friend hunting down a drug smuggler. Everyone is more complicated than they seem, lots of interesting identity play happens, and there is a Jewish Doctor Robot.
What I want: I want more about the Jewish Doctor Robot.
I adored Med Cohen, the autonomous Jewish doctor robot, and would love to see more about their backstory, interaction with their family, what happens after Autonomous, anything you want to say.
A Serious Man (2009)
What it is: A semi-autobiographical Coen Brothers movie about the tribulations of a middle class Jewish family in 1960s Minnesota, powerfully grounded in an engagement with both the Torah and the Jewish folklore tradition.
What I want: I want more about the Three Rabbis.
The sequence in the film where Larry Gopnik visits the three Rabbis is my favorite part of the movie, a surreal and funny and secretly profound take on a traditional Jewish folktale formula. One of the things I really like about the presentation is that the Rabbis never interact with each other, and yet they clearly exist with relation to each other. They're constantly measuring their power against their colleagues, but in a comfortable way where they all understand the rules of the game. They know that the only way three Rabbis in one shul works is if they each keep control of their own domain and don't step on each others' toes. I'd love some twisty internecine shul politics where they continue to battle with each other for power and influence without ever talking to each other, acting through unsuspecting intermediaries. I'd love fic where they do engage with each other in spite of themselves- a family who requests all three Rabbis speak at their daughter's Bas Mitzvah and they all speak on the same Pasuk because they didn't coordinate would be hilarious and perfect.
And I'd love re-examining the folktale constraints of the Coen brothers' storytelling, or connecting them to other folktale elements of the film, like the dybbuk story at the beginning. There is a theory on A Serious Man that the meaning of the dybbuk story is to suggest that Larry is being haunted by this dybbuk because of the sins of his ancestors... If Larry did get to see the Marshak, perhaps he could have exorcised the dybbuk.
1850s London Cholera Epidemic RPF
What it is: In the 1850s, there was a cholera outbreak in London. A heterodox doctor teamed up with a priest to discover the origin of the outbreak. Science ensued. I mean, it's like the plot of a bad TV procedural... only it's about cholera in Victorian England.
What I want: I want more of anything. Seriously, anything. I got a great post-apocalyptic fic two years back and it was amazing and if anything I have become more obsessed with the weirdness of the history of disease since then. Feel free to cross Snow and Whitehead over with literally anything you want to. Their relationship is so interesting, as odd couple science detectives and best buddies for life. Have them track down the cause of a zombie epidemic! Fudge the timeline a bit and have them go toe to toe with Jack the Ripper, bioterrorist! Or just tell a heartfelt story about their lives and their fight to save London from itself.
Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
What it is: A gentle novel about a traveling acting troupe roaming a post-apocalyptic Midwest.
What I want: Ugh, this is going to be one of those super gauche requests that I usually hate getting, so I'm sorry. I liked a lot of the things Mandel does in Station Eleven, but I got so frustrated with the world-building, so I am asking first of all for fixit fic that describes a world where the response to the disease makes a little more sense, where people aren't so damned befuddled by the existence of technology and where people consult libraries for lost knowledge and figure out how to actually rebuild society in a new way. That was the setting I wanted Station Eleven to take place in.
If you're not interested in that, that's okay. I'm open to other stories, too. I really like the way texts, particularly Shakespeare, are reinterpreted in the post-apocalyptic setting and would appreciate meditations on how any other texts have changed, and how the characters of Mandel's story changed with them. Or, obviously, ignore any of these suggestions and do your own thing. Like I said above, I don't really know my own mind.