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yuletide

Hi, Yuletider! Thank you for writing me a story! My optional details are long, and the commentary here even longer, but it is all optional. I'm just giving you ideas of the sort of thing I'd like!

I keep trying to think of general "what I like" tips and just utterly failing. I like realism in my fic, rather than idealised fantasy. I like stories about queer people (which is why I requested so many) and I really hate Gay For You and We're Not Gay We Just Love Each Other and all variations on that theme. I like sex if it serves a purpose, and I love fumbly awkward sex (see preference for realism over fantasy), especially when it comes to teens. I like sex and relationships that aren't heteronormative. I like humor, but have a huge embarrassment squick. I don't like sappiness or romantic declarations or love at first sight.

(Comics Curmudgeon is a bit of an outlier. Obviously I'm not expecting the same sort of fic for it that I would from the other three fandoms I've requested.)

You can also get an idea of the things I like in general by browsing my fic (I write what I would like to read) and my recs.

Code Monkey (song)
I really love this song (so catchy!), but the heteronormativity and gender steretypes give me the eye-twitch. What I really want is a queer reimagining of this song. If you could make them a queer couple (m/m or f/f is fine), that would be awesome, and if you also made one or both of them transgender and/or genderqueer that would really make my day. If you make one or both characters trans, I don't mind a het relationship. I just would really prefer it not to be het and cis. However, if you really can't write them as queer and/or trans, just switching up their jobs would be cool (guys can answer phones, too!). I just want something that fixes the song at least a little bit.

I'd prefer a story in prose form rather than a reworking of the lyrics. And don't feel you need to stick really close to the events in the song (and some things like You watching hir weight would be best not to include at all), I just like the idea of a cute geek romance. (Or an angsty geek non-romance, if you don't want to go the happy ending route, which is totally fine by me.) If you want to include sex, that's fine, though I'd rather it not be all sex.

Oh, and if you wanted to make one or both of the characters people of color, that would be great, too.

If you were assigned to me for some other fandom and are interested in this one instead, here are the lyrics on Jonathan Coulton's official website and if you want to listen to the song it's at the top of this page (and if you want to buy it, you can buy it through his site, too).

Comics Curmudgeon
I didn't specify which comics I wanted on this, so if you have a favorite, go ahead with that one (and I forgot to include Luann in the list when I nominated this fandom, but if Luann is what you want to write about, go ahead!), but if you can, I'd prefer something with Apartment 3-G, Mark Trail, or Mary Worth. Or Beetle Bailey, though I only have ideas for the first three.

I assume if you've volunteered for this fandom, you understand that what I'm looking for here is not a straight story in these fandoms, but a story using some of the Comics Curmudgeon canon. It could be humor or it could be a serious scenario that's based on comments at CC.

Earlier this year I made a post listing a few ideas I had for this fandom, so I'll c&p them here:

The commentary for these two Mary Worth strips is "These two strips on either side of the transition to 2010 promise that we’ll be seeing father and son teaming up to become a pair of demon hunters, purging the earth of sinister supernatural forces once and for all." Awesome! I would read about that!

Or how about a strip where Margo goes into a church to pay her respects to Eric and we get "Against all expectations, Margo managed to enter a church without bursting into flame and crumbling into dust. This can only mean that, while we were wasting our time with the Professor’s boring love life, Margo beat God in a fight off panel." Margo vs God! Yes! Will her finger quotin' skills be what gives her the edge?

Or Mark Trail. "Mark and Rusty managed to survive only because this gentle small-town sheriff was too much of a wimp to shoot an unarmed man in the back. I was all excited when it seemed like only Rusty’s head would be saved, leaving him a malformed skull in a jar that Mark would have to tote from place to place." Head-in-a-jar!Rusty!

Those ideas were all from this post. There was also a more recent post featuring a Mark Trail strip where it looked like some horses were talking and Josh said, "Have you ever had a moment when something you’ve looked at every day, for years, suddenly reconfigures, and your entire worldview shatters and reforms with searing clarity? Well, that’s what happened when I read this Mark Trail, which reveals that “Mark,” “Cherry,” and “Rusty” are actually three adorably frolicking horses — horses that like to imagine what it would be like to be human. Everything is explained: the unnatural dialogue (based on the deliberately child-like and stilted speech that humans use when they talk to animals), the freakish morphing forms (can we really expect interspecies facial recognition to go off without a hitch?), the fact that human society as depicted has less and less basis in reality the further we get from Lost Forest. It’s sort of heartbreaking that the weirdly malformed humans we’ve spent so much time with are actually these beautiful galloping animals. Too bad Frank is going to lure them into his hunting pen and let his political buddies shoot them for sport."

I love that idea, so if that's something you wanted to work with, too, have at it! Honestly, this site has made me laugh so much over the years. I feel like any story incorporating any bits of CC canon would be awesome. I would really prefer not to get a crossover, though if that's what you want to do and you think you can make it work, have at it, as long as they're fandoms that would crossover okay (like, not Pluggers and a human comic). I'd also prefer not to get get something fourth-wall-breaking (like, not a fic about the characters realising they're on Comics Curmudgeon, etc).

Baby-Sitters Club
I would really like a story where one of the babysitters is trans. The obvious one is Kristy, because she's such a tomboy in canon, and you can totally go with Kristy if you want, but I think it would be cool if it were someone not obvious. Not every trans guy was a tomboy as a kid and I'd like to see a fic like that. How about Claudia? Guys can love fashion, too!

Also, I know the books are set in an eternal present, but I read them when they first came out and the girls are approximately my age (born in the mid '70s), so I that's how I tend to think of them. That means, of course, that trans issues weren't really something most people knew about, so Claudia probably wouldn't come out as trans until college or later. However, if you wanted to write something modern-day with the babysitters are teens right now, and Claudia realising he's trans as a teenager, that would also be cool.

I would love to see other queer characters in the story, too, either one of the other babysitters, or one of the kids Claudia sat for, plus non-canon friends.

If you don't think this is something you can write, by all means write something else. I would also love something about Claudia trying to connect with her Japanese heritage, or a story about her and Janine, or just anything about Claudia and the BSC (either with individual babysitters or all as a group, or with one of the kids)! If she's queer in some way, that's even awesomer.

For any story, romance is cool, as is sex, but obviously from the suggestions I've given, I'd prefer not to have it be nothing but sex.

Huge
I went and added a fourth fandom at the last minute!

The show ended with it being ambiguous whether Alistair was a femmey gay boy, a trans girl, or maybe genderqueer, and it looks like we'll never know for sure. I would love to read a story where Alistair is trans. It could be gen or het, and could take place at camp or sometime in the future or it could be about Alistair and Chloe as kids. For camp fic or future fic, I would love it if it featured Becca as well (I love their friendship), and Ian or any of the other kids would be cool, too. Alistair's crush on Trent is canon and I like Trent as a character and if it's set at camp, interaction between them would be cool, but I don't particularly ship them, so it doesn't have to be some sort of happily-ever-after thing. I just really love Alistair and would love any sort of story. If you prefer to have Alistair be gay or genderqueer, that's cool, too.

Oh, and although Alistair is clearly interested in guys in canon, if you write Alistair as trans and want to have her friendship with Becca develop into something more, that would be awesome, too. (Or Becca could just be her lesbian best friend. For some reason Becca is totally gay in my head, and was crushing on Will in the show (and maybe Chloe the year before). Not that you have to stick with my head canon or anything!)

What I don't want is a story about losing weight and becoming a hot skinny person or anything. I would hope that would be obvious, but you never know. I like Alistair as-is and I love that the focus of the show is not really on losing weight, but on fat people interacting in a place where fat is the norm.