The Tradëscan Codex

(N.B.: Portions of this letter have been lifted from previous years' letters: 2010 2009 2008 2007.)

Thank you for signing up to write a story for me! You're one of 4 people who offered to write for Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? and/or one of [x] people who offered to write for The ILLUMINATUS! Trilogy , and I love you for that alone. It looks like I was the only one to offer for Tart, sadly, but I'll leave that part of my letter in too in case you decide you'd like to give that a try, or you are a pinch hitter or a treats writer. (The movie's available for free on Hulu, and is embedded below.)

If you check out my userinfo, you'll find a 'thon policy which implores that you be true first and foremost to the prompt and your muse, and to consider whether I'd like a story as, at most, a secondary concern. I stand by that, but I also recognize there is a sense that a yuletidestory is explicitly a gift in a way which most 'thon fics aren't, so feel free to surf through this journal to get a feel for me, and here's a little bit more, if you are interested, to help you understand how I relate to the specific texts and characters in the fandoms I've requested and what I might like. OTOH, don't be intimitated; this letter might demonstrate that I've thought long and hard about why I want what I want, because I'm full of myself and like to navel-gaze so you can get a feel for my tastes, but the specifics of what I'd like are intentionally vague even in my own mind.

As you can probably tell from my requests, I'm interested in female characters--in particular, adolescent female characters with agency--and the relationships between them. I talk more about my love of radically autonomous young female characters in this post from 2006 and provide more examples of the specific dynamic I like and why I think it rings for me; I go on to talk about incest, but since that's not relevant for any of my requests this year you can feel free to ignore that part.

Beyond that, I like to think I'm easy to write for. I have few squicks--I'm fine with character death, BDSM, mpreg, dubcon, noncon, chan, incest--you name it, I'm probably okay with it. Just please no bashing of my favorite characters. Happy, uplifting fics are good, but so are soul-crushingly depressing ones so long as the pairings and characters get to be awesome. Ambivalent fics where we're not sure whether we should cheer or cry are probably best of all. If I didn't like existentialism and pseudo-nihilism in my fic, I wouldn't be a Joss Whedon fan.

( more on where on earth is carmen sandiego? )

( more on illuminatus )

( more on tart )

Thank you again for writing a story for me. Be true to your own muse, make sure the girls have agency, and I'm sure I'll love the result!

Yours in La Mancha,



alixtii/ alixtii/ alixtii
Alixtii O'Krul

Anything by Robert A. Heinlein
A Little Princess - Frances Hodgeson Burnett (someone is considering nominating The Secret Garden, though)
Man and Superman - George Bernard Shaw
Pygmalion - George Bernard Shaw (although The Devil's Disciple is going to be nominated!)
Firefly RPF
Buffy/Angel RPF
Dollhouse RPF
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card (and I'm not the only one wishing for it, either)
Parent Trap (1999)
Parent Trap II (1986)
My Summer of Love (2004)
Truman Show (1998)
Anything by Mark Twain
As You Like It - William Shakespeare
Taming of the Shrew - William Shakespeare
Into the Woods - Sondheim/Lapine
D.E.B.S. (2004)
D.E.B.S. (2003)
D.E.B.S. RPF
Gray Matters (2006)
Winter Passing (2005)
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm - Kate Douglas Wiggin
Beautiful Girls (1996)
Legally Blonde (2001)
Boxcar Children - Gertrude Chandler Warner
Brides of Christ
Sunshine Cleaning (2008)
Sunshine Cleaning RPF
Escape to Witch Mountain (1975)
Escape to Witch Mountain (1995)
Race to Witch Mountain (2009)
She's All That (1999)
She's All That RPF
A.I. Gang - Bruce Coville
The Man in the Moon (1991)
Mars Attacks (1996)
Small Wonder
The Guild RPF
Ghostwriter
Freaks and Geeks
Freaks and Geeks RPF
American President (1995)
Boy Meets World
Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
She's the Man (2006) (this one really breaks my heart)
Tart (2001)
Triple Dog (2009)
Camp (2003)
Adventures of Pete and Pete
Amanda Show
'Tis Pity She's a Whore - John Ford
Twelve Days of Christmas (song)
Naissance des pieuvres | Water Lilies (2007)
Runaways (2010) RPF

Of course, the above list is using this spreadsheet, which doesn't actually include everyone ever who is going to sign up for Yuletide.

In related news, if you look at the actual characters people say they're going to nominate, the annual sidelining of female characters continues unabated. (It'd be interesting to find out the actual statistics, but since that'd involve looking up the genders of characters in fandoms one isn't familiar with, it'd be a really huge amount of work.)

Reunification (3927 words) by Alixtii for shifty_gardener/specialrhino
Fandom: A.I. Gang - Bruce Coville
Relationships: Rachel Phillips & Roger Phillips, Rachel Phillips/Wendy Wendell III, Armand Mercury/Stanley Remov
Characters: Rachel Phillips, Wendy Wendell III, Roger Phillips, Bridget McGrory, Trip Davis, Hap Swenson, Ray Gammand, Dr. Phillips (A.I. Gang), Stanley Remov
Summary: THE A.I. GANG VS. THE SECRET KIDNAPPER! Five years ago, the world's best computer scientists went to a remote, deserted island in the Pacific to work on Project Alpha, a top secret thinking-computer project, and dragged their brilliant but wacky kids with them--who promptly formed their own brain trust, called the A.I. Gang, to work on the same idea as their parents and beat the adults at their own game. But when the island mysteriously sunk into the ocean, the gang disbanded.
Now, a mysterious kidnapper has been targeting the former members of the A.I. Gang, prompting the remaining members to reunite and once again use their crimefighting and computer skills to solve the mystery. But will they be able to do so before the kidnapper comes for them, too?

It was written for me, just for me!

A Living Princess (2992 words) by edna_blackadder for alixtii
Fandom: Blackadder
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warning: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Princess Leia of Hungary, Baldrick (Blackadder), The Witch Queen, Edmund Blackadder, Percy Percy
Summary:

Dead men tell no tales, but a living princess might.

My yule author capably writes about a young Princess Leia who is perfectly reminiscient of the one we see in the show but who we get to see growing and evolving into a young woman with agency who is able to take control not only of her life but also of Baldrick and Percy within the War of the Roses context of the show's first season. Each scene of the fic shows Leia at a different age, and each one is subtly different, highlighting those chances with a deft hand. Also, the fic explains how it is that a prince with no legitimate heirs has descendents spanning the whole of human future history, and really captures the tone and feel of the first series of The Black Adder.

Apparently, two of my three requests--both The ILLUMINATUS! Trilogy (which is an 800-page behemoth of a book which often borders on stream-of-consciousness when it's not being deliberately incomprehensible) and Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? (a series of forty animated half-hour episodes, most not available on DVD, spread over four seasons)--are on the neediest fandoms list.

Which I suppose means it's likely I'll be matched on Blackadder, although if someone's going to be assigned to my request expecting to write m/m slash (or worse, humor), they are going to be in for a surprise.

(I decided in the end to not make a fourth request, although of course I reserve the right to change my mind until signups end. I decide I didn't want Small Wonder fic, Mars Attacks! fic, or any of the other options as much as I did my first three.)

Yay! Yuletide nominations are open, and I've accumulated quite a list of potential options (and wow what a psychologist could do given that list, which is one of the reasons why I keep it in a sticky post at the top of my journal; what better introduction to me and my tastes is there, really?). What do you think I should nominate, from that list (or not)?

So I've posted links to all my Yuletide stories, but here's a place for me to compile all those links into one place and chatter about them.

My main Yuletide assignment was Glories Stream, for reflectedeve. We were matched on Dar Williams' song "Alleluia," from the album The Honesty Room. It was weird being matched on a canon that was shorter than the fic I was supposed to write; at first, the temptation to simply write a novelization of the song, throwing details in until I expanded it out to a thousand words or more.

As I wrote, however, I found ways to make my work transformative, to make it fanfic rather than a mere novelization (which should not be construed as a prescriptive definition of what fanfic is and is not). There are pieces of the song which don't appear in my fic, and parts of my fic which critique the song. There are bits--little bits, but there--that require already knowing the song in order to understand. As far as I'm concerned, these are features rather than bugs; they're what serve to make the fic mine. I don't explain the surfing, for example, anymore than I would explain what vampires are when writing a Buffy fic.

What I did realize once I had read what I had written, however, was that my fic was a lot more explicitly Christian than Dar's song. This too was a feature; reflectedeve had specifically suggested I might examine the theology behind the song a little more deeper. So a number of Christian saints are mentioned in my fic (I couldn't resist pairing St. Francis and St. Clare), as well as references to Christian doctrines. It was fun to write, especially as it freed me to be irreverent and bring something a critical lens to traditional notions of heaven. The fact that I re-read Heinlein's novel Job: A Comedy of Justice in the course of writing the fic probably influenced me as well. And I know conversations with Ari and Elizabeth were in my head as I wrote the line "just two bodies created in the fucking divine image doing what they fucking were designed to do [i.e. lesbian sex]."

My other fic I wrote in a new fandom was If on a Yuletide morn a slasher, one of the several If on a winter's night a traveler fics that made their way into the Archive this year; indeed, norah's fic's title differs from mine by only one word (she used "reader" where I used "slasher").

It, too, was fun to write--I got to use my draft of an unfinished Platonic Dialogues genderswapped space opera AU which I had abandoned because I just couldn't find any point to it as the story-within-the-story, as well as communicate just a fraction of my love for fandom and for Yuletide. Because Calvino's characters would write fanfiction, would get mixed up (and lost!) in the levels of creation and transformative recreation. My story's not as polished as it could have been if I had had more than a couple of hours to write it in, but judging from the comments, that love and affection came through--which is the important thing.

For my other treats, I returned to known and loved fandoms in which I was comfortable. So I finished two Sarah Connor Chronicles fics I had been working on in my Psalm 23 'verse that filled two of the prompts, The Children's Crusade, which is Sarah training Savannah in the (pre-Judgment Day) future leading up to the final scene of "Born to Run," and Though I Walk Through the Shadow, which is the crucial meeting of John and Savannah in the post-Judgment Day "Born to Run" future. selenakwins a ficlet for the observation that I wrote a story with a pairing for whom I am the lone OTPer and which is consistent with my other fics in that 'verse.

I also wrote two Arcadia fics, both of them simple fixits of a sort--one of them, Skasis, a cracky crossover with Doctor Who where Thomasina becomes a companion, and the other, Dancing Lessons, a more serious fic which begins with Thomasina and Septimus' last dance in the play and goes on to get porny. Neither manage to negate the tragedy of the play, though, because in order to fit into canon both fics still end with Thomasina and Septimus separated and Septimus going mad. Oh, play, how you break my heart. ("Skasis" actually started out in my mind as an AU where Thomasina lives and she and Septimus get to be together, but I began to try and picture the magnitude of the changes that would exist in a world where chaos theory was discovered in the time of Lord Byron and then the Doctor showed up to set everything right again. Oh well, maybe next year I'll write the steampunk epic in which the Doctor doesn't appear.)

Last Day on Earth is an Ender's Game fic, another canon I know well, but the first fic I've written in which Val and Peter actually do part as in canon. In the fic I write them saying goodbye. Beleza and the B.E.A.S.T. is a fairy tales fic, a futuristic AU of "Beauty and the Beast" taking place on a space station.

For prettylightsfic, I wrote Deck of Cards, which focuses on Miracle Laurie. My main research for the fic was reading Miracle's twitter feed, and the thing that struck me the most was the way in which being a Jossverse actor was still new and shiny to her. So I thought about the ways in which that might be overwhelming, and how I could use her outsider perspective. I considered making it critical, but I never got the sense that Miracle's reaction to any of it was anything but genuine love and excitement, so I went light and fluffy instead, focusing on a geeky conversation about how best to adapt Alice in Wonderland. I wanted Felicia in it because, Felicia, so I set it in "Epitaph Two," which gave a nice thematic connection to Alice in that I could have Miracle's reflections on Dollhouse ending and how it paralleled Alice leaving Wonderland.

I have to say that "Deck of Cards" is the least anonymous anonfic I've written since I remixed "Incurable" for Ari (even with my SCC fics this year giving it a run for its money). Obviously the fic in which Joss, Summer, and Felicia all appear, and in which Joss wants to get into Summer's pants, was written by alixtii. I'm surprised no one guessed it.

For secret_slasha I wrote Life is Just This, which is Buffy/Willow. It was a fic where I sat in front of my laptop for quite a while not writing anything, then I walked away from the keyboard and put pen to paper and suddenly I had notebook pages full of fic.

Title: The Children's Crusade
Fandom: Sarah Connor Chronicles
Characters: Sarah, Savannah, Cameron
Summary: Sometimes children have to fight the battles of adults.

( The Children's Crusade )

An Ender's Game story from Alixtii that's actually not an AU! Will wonders ever cease?

Title: Last Day on Earth
Fandom: Ender's Game
Characters: Valentine & Peter Wiggin
Summary: It's strange for Valentine knowing that it's her last day on Earth.

( Last Day on Earth )

Title: Beleza and the B.E.A.S.T.
Fandom: Fairy Tales (Beauty and the Beast)
Pairing: Beleza/B.E.A.S.T. (Beauty/Beast)
Summary: Belaza was angry with her father for selling her to the B.E.A.S.T. in order to settle some old shipping debts, but mostly she was frightened--frightened of what her life would be like on the space station, of the empty corridors and the lonely days, and, more than anything else, frightened of the B.E.A.S.T. itself, the Biomechanical Electronic Ahuman Sentience Transfer which was responsible for all of the station's functioning.

( Beleza and the B.E.A.S.T. )