Yuletide 2020

Hi there! Firstly, all these prompts are provided as a jumping off point. If you see something in my likes list that you want to play with instead, please feel free to go in a different direction! I’m happy to see where it takes you.

Secondly, this letter is mostly complete, but I may be adding some Crueltide-specific prompts to it later, as well as possibly other mini-challenge prompts.

And finally, feel free to use past letters on this DW for ideas, but this is my first time requested all of these canons, so you won’t find much about them elsewhere! Hopefully I’ve provided enough rambles though <3

Yuletide Mini-Challenges
General Likes
Smut Likes
DNWs
Detective Grimoire
Hex
Polygon RPF
The Ten Thousand Doors of January

Mini-Challenge Opt-Ins

For ease, here are my prompts from mini-challenges and the like:

Crueltide - includes a list of darkfic tropes I enjoy
Wrapping Paper - includes some art prompts for each of my canons
Season Treating’s - includes new holiday-flavoured prompts for all my requested canons
Yulebuilding - opting-in for Ten Thousand Doors & Hex, same prompts as seen in this letter
Yuleporn - opting-in, same likes as seen in this letter
Two for One/The Crossover Challenge - opting-in for Polygon RPF, same prompts as seen in this letter
Interactive Fiction - opting-in with all my canons

General Likes

- Casefic
- Darkfic
- PWP
- Angst"
- Hurt/comfort & whump
- Characters suffering, especially for reasons they bring on themselves or due to self-hate, but any reason for suffering is good stuff
- Bathing/washing, being dried with a towel, being fed
- Power dynamics being explored
- Bed sharing, fake dating, snowed in, trapped together, huddling for warmth, all those fun tropey setups!
- Being emotionally overloaded or overwhelmed
- Height differences
- Touch-starved or stoic characters
- Sad characters
- Bisexual characters
- Ghosts
- Weddings and wedding nights
- Cooking and food especially food sharing
- Enemies and annoyances to lovers, rivalries especially flirty ones
- Getting together, first kisses, feelings realisation
- Clothes sharing
- Soulmate aus especially words/last words, especially when this trope is twisted to be horror
- Horror in general
- Team as family and found family
- 5+1
- Nonsexual intimacy
- Guilt-laden infidelity
- Messy characters in extremely messy situations

Things I opt-in to: mentioned past relationships or background ships, major character death, experimental formats inc. interactive fiction, pregnancy, second person POV, graphic violence, sad or ambiguous endings, suicide

Smut Likes

Rough sex, vanilla sex, hand kink, cunnilingus, public use and gangbangs, being held down, biting/scratching, bittersweet sex, noncon (except my DNW stipulation), dubcon, praise kink, heat cycles, face-fucking, extremely emotionally charged sex, spanking, first times, humour and awkwardness, aftercare, femsub, finger fucking, public and semi-public sex, bad guys made them do it, pining while fucking, sex pollen inc. only one partner being pollened, strapons, affectionate use of the word "slut/whore" (like "you’re a good little slut"), showing trust through sex acts, voyeurism, masturbation (solo, mutual and guided), frottage, clothed and semi-clothed sex, handholding while fucking

I’m okay with either come/cum as spelling and with pussy and cunt as terminology for vaginas.

DNWs

- Anyone under 17 for smut (but mentioned off-screen or ages not being specified is fine)
- Anal in het or femslash
- Noncon where the victim receives no pleasure whatsoever (they don’t have to enjoy it, but I want them to receive pleasure whether they want to or not)
- Scat, watersports, emetophilia, belly kinks (inc. feeding & inflation), pussy slapping, fisting, oviposition, breeding
- The phrase “to the hilt”
- Mpreg
- Readerfic

Detective Grimoire

Requested Characters:: Sally Spears, Detective Grimoire

Preferred Ships: Penelope is definitely my little black dress, I’m happy to see her paired with any character, f/f or f/m. Otherwise, Sally/any female character (original female characters are fine) or Sally/Grimoire.
Where to find it:
- Detective Grimoire: iOS, Android, Steam (Mac + Windows), Linux
- Tangle Tower: Apple Arcade, Steam (Mac + Windows), Switch
Some of my prompts require knowledge TT, but many of them can take place in the gap between DG and TT and so you’d only need to play the first game for it.
Length: Each game is about 1-2 hours long

Disclaimer: Not all characters requested need to be included. In fact, for this canon, neither of the requested characters actually need to appear, if you instead want to concentrate on Penelope (who I also nominated, but haven’t requested).

I loved these games so much! I really like the characters, the almost-fantasy feel to them despite not having any real fantastical elements, and the art is just damn gorgeous. The first one feels much more grim, thanks to the swamp, but it works just as well for me as the rich-people-in-a-murder-house of the second one, which is a reliable trope I love!

I’m really taken with Sally. We only get this bored older teenager in the first game, but she seems to have come into her own in the second game and actually enjoys what she’s doing. I also like that she gives Grimoire so much shit. Grimoire himself is pretty fun too — I like him as a younger guy affecting an old time-y detective aesthetic to impress, whether it works or not.

I’d be super up for some casefic, and have some prompts for it, but I’d also love to see more character development or slices in the middle of adventures we just see hints of, or anything else you can come up with. Some hurt/comfort, for instance, will never go amiss. There’s so little fic for this that I would be jazzed with just about anything.

Possible Prompts:
- How did Sally come to join Grimoire after the first game? She didn’t seem much interested in his shenanigans or detective work during that game, so I’d love to know what changed her mind. I’d be cool with epistolary for this prompt, too.
- Sally is captured by someone (Penelope?) and has to figure out how to escape on her own. (I’m fine with Grimoire helping, or being captured too, but I like Sally to be the practical one who gets them out of trouble, rather than as a damsel in distress).
- Grimoire seems pretty young for his gig. How did he become a private detective? If it was some grisly case in the past, I’d love to see him and Sally being forced to revisit it when some new evidence comes to light.
- Penelope seduces Sally to the dark side.
- There’s more going on in Tangle Tower than they thought — a new murder or crime is committed, and Sally and Grimoire are pulled back into the strange house.
- The next case after Tangle Tower! What do Sally and Grimoire tackle next? Or, any cases that happened between DG and TT.

Hex

Requested Characters: Ella, Thelma

Preferred Ships: Ella/Leon, Ella/Thelma, Thelma/Cassie, Leon/Tom, Thelma/Ella/Leon
Where to find it: You can find both season one and season two for free on YouTube.
Length: Season 1 is 5 episodes totalling approx. 4.5 hours, Season 2 is 13 episodes totalling approx. 10 hours

Disclaimer: Not all characters requested need to be included.

I am such a sucker for this canon. I remember a friend lent me the boxsets when I was in high school. I watched the first season quickly, then swallowed the second in a single day. It was definitely part of my bisexual awakening: Jemima Roper and Michael Fassbender are both so gorgeous.

I liked season 1 and all it had to offer, but I fell in love with Ella pretty hard and her whole storyline. I would love to see expansion on that! She was a much more active character than Cassie, so I was bound to like her more. And Thelma will always be my soft spot so I’m always psyched for more of her.

If you also want to go off on some world building and theology for this canon, I’d be very much here for that. How common are ghosts? What magics do or don’t work? What other mythological or theological creatures actually exist? Or show me the faculty dealing with all the wild shit that happens in this school, because there sure is a lot of it.

Possible Prompts:
- What was Ella up to before Medenham Hall? We get some information, but I’d love to see it in action, especially as there are 445 years to plumb.
- Show me what actually happens after the season 2 finale! We have Azazeal’s seal — is he actually back? What do our three survivors do? What happens to Malachi? How does anyone explain any of this to an outsider?
- Relatedly, an outsider POV on any of the in-canon events would be a lot of fun. It’s a pretty wild series and a skeptic might look on with some confusion.
- Thelma meets a new ghost. Romance! But also, possibly, if you wanted to make it plotty, perhaps said ghost had been murdered under mysterious circumstances and they need to puzzle it out. Could it even be one of Ella’s victims from a different event with Azazeal? Or some other malevolent spirit at Medenham Hall?
- After Leon kills him, Tom also becomes a ghost and Thelma shows him the ropes of being a gay ghost in unrequited love. Do they get up to shenanigans? Does Tom help Thelma discover new dimensions to ghost-hood? How does Leon feel about being haunted by his mistake?
- So Ella can use the Stone to travel through time…what happens if she pulls Thelma and/or Leon back with her to help in some past battle with Azazeal or some ancient evil, where she previously failed or messed up something? Past!Ella wouldn’t know them, so Thelma and Leon have to convince her that they are on her side.
- Good old fashioned time loops or body swaps!

Polygon/McElroy Vlogs & Podcasts RPF

Requested Characters: Patrick Gill, Simone de Rochefort

Preferred Ships: Pat/Simone, Pat & Simone, Brian/Pat, Brian & Pat, Jenna/Simone, Jenna & Simone, Pat & Jenna, all of them being platonic buddies
Where to find it: YouTube! Polygon’s Channel, and specifically, here is Overboard, where they are most often together.
Length: Depends really! You probably would need to watch 3-4 Overboards to get a sense of their group dynamics, so let’s say around 4 hours at a minimum?

I really love watching Polygon videos, it’s so comforting especially while the world is on fire. I’m especially fond of Unraveled and Overboard — although Pat’s first interview with Ben Schwartz is honestly my favourite Polygon video of all time.

I really enjoy their friendships, the way they seem to know each other really well. I also like the almost-psychic connections between some of them (Pat and Simone in particular!) and the way they often fall into the same problems every time they play games together (Jeff is always untrustworthy!).

Feel free to include as many other cast members as you wish. I’m also happy for guest stars to be included here too — Brennan Lee Mulligan and Matt Mercer’s Overboard episodes are a lot of fun and add a different dimension to the games. I’m not especially interested in any McElroy involvement, though. My only stipulation is that Pat and Simone are definitely my faves so I definitely want them involved, even tangentially.

Possible Prompts:
- While getting ready for a game of Overboard, they get sucked into the board game, Jumanji-style. It could be actually Jumanji, or it could be the world of Arkham Horror, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Ultimate Werewolf, Terraforming Mars, The Resistance: Avalon…basically any board game you can think of! I especially like Pat as the traitor or bad guy in any scenarios that call for it, and Jeff as the innocent who gets accused (and possibly killed off) early.
- A fusion with Ready or Not — either just Pat or the entire gang go to visit Simone’s family for Christmas or a holiday, or whatever spurious reason. (Or anyone else’s family, I just feel like Simone’s is the most likely to play this kind of thing!)
- Pat and Simone and possibly some of the others get snowed in during a work trip, shenanigans happen
- Clayton has been murdered and all of the gang are under suspicion
- Invited to a mysterious lodge out in the jungle wilds to play a new game, some of them discover the designer is actually interested in playing the Most Dangerous Game…
- Pat gets turned into a vampire and tries to hide it. Simone figures it out annoyingly quickly. Or vice versa.
- Body swap AU! Any of them swapping bodies with any of the others would be so much fun. Actually, so would time loops or an invasion of the body snatchers-style AU.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January

Requested Characters: Any

Preferred Ships: Julian/Adelaide, January/Samuel, January/Jane, but I’m also open to any configurations you can think of!
Where to find it: anywhere you get your books
Length: 374 pages or 12 hours and 20 minutes on audio

Disclaimer: I am happy for any of the tagset characters to appear, but equally happy for it to be all original characters, or character who do not appear in the tagset, as some of my prompts indicate.

Oh man, this book was everything to me last year. It’s the first time I’ve used the note feature on Audible, because I was constantly writing down some of the gorgeous quotes from it. I loved the characters so much, and the love story really hit the spot. I’m such a sucker for "when you know, you know" style romances, and this had that with the parents. I also looooved that there are monsters like the vampire, and all the secret society stuff. It’s just so damn good.

I don’t have as many concrete prompts for this canon, not because I don’t want to see a variety of stories (oh my gosh, I do) but because I would genuinely like to see most things set in this world and it’s hard to prompt for "give me anything!"

I’m also up for in-world documents and other interesting narrative techniques for this, or more story-within-a-story narratives like the book itself. And sorry in advance for the fact these prompts don’t include solid names — because I listened in audio, I can’t actually refer back to the pages to remember some of the more obvious names. But huh, maybe this is a good excuse for a re-read…

Possible Prompts:
- Who else uses has used the Doors? Tell me their stories! Maybe people have fallen through by accident, and had to make a life on the other side, either out of choice, or because their door gets destroyed before they go back home. Maybe there are explorers who find it and use it to traverse worlds, never quite finding the place they are happy with, so always going forward. Maybe we have people who have come back, after finding a right door decades after they slipped through last time. How do they adapt back into "their" world? I loved the small stories we got in the actual books, and I want to see more of them!
- More from our main cast. What happens after they are reunited? How do they heal? How does January come to terms with all that happened to her, to them? How have Adelaide and Julian reconnected? Give me more about Jane and Samuel too, both post- and pre-canon. I want to hear more.
- Give me more from the secret society! How do they find people to induct? Has anyone broken their trust before, and what have they done about it? What is the state of it post-canon?
- And are there any opposing secret societies that exist that work directly against them? What is that like? Who set it up? Perhaps they are also people who came through doors and were barred from going back due to door destruction, so have set up this organisation to protect the doors that remain. How do they go about that? Or maybe we can see the inception of such a society?
- More lore around the doors would be really cool. Is there an architect who has built all of these? Perhaps one of the alternate dimensions is an exploratory society who using them to traverse worlds.

Yuletide 2020 Letter