minebyrights | Yuletide 2022 letter!

Happy Yuletide! I hope you find this pleasing, rewarding, and low on stress.

The following skirts the lines of TL;DR, but I want to emphasize up front that I am genuinely in love with all of these fandoms, as well as desperate for content for them, so anything you produce that doesn't hit my squicks will be A++. Prompts are mostly me throwing wild ideas at the walls and seeing what sticks; if you have something roiling around in your brain you really want to do that doesn’t hit squicks/DNWs, go for it! In general, all ratings from gen to depraved NC-17 porn are good, and all gender combos are fine for background ships or whatnot.

Any differences in length of section below are mostly due to writing this piecemeal over a couple days and not because I'm more excited for some canons over others.

If you want to find me in the wild, I'm:

theoldgods

minebyrights

And with that, on to the letter itself!

Likes and Dislikes | The Founders Trilogy - Robert Jackson Bennett | The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting - K. J. Charles | The Goblin Emperor Series - Katherine Addison | Teixcalaan Series - Arkady Martine

LIKES AND DISLIKES

General Likes
—worldbuilding, historical settings, SFF settings
—social, magical, religious, etc. rituals
—cults, grifters, conmen
—creative arts/industries and the sausage of how art is made
—pianos
—Holmes/Watson dynamics
—mentor/mentee, teacher/student, May/December if relationship is m/m, f/f, older!f/younger!m (everyone involved should be above age of consent for their society, and teacher preferably will stop teaching student first before any romance/sex)
—undercover work, casefic, spies
—bedsharing/only one bed
—huddling for warmth
—fake relationships/fake married
—bickering and bantering like old marrieds
—clothing descriptions (especially period clothing, suits, kilts, tall boots, gloves)
—jewelry (especially rings and necklaces, especially on men)
—bathing and cleaning each other
—hands and feet
—hair (curls; long hair, especially on men; dark/black and red hair are particular faves)
—adrenaline junkies/partners in crime
—found families
—snow/winter/autumn settings and holidays
—beaches and oceans and other large bodies of water
—5+1s/vignettes with some thematic growth/resonance
—daemons/daemon AUs, magical familiars, human-animal bonds in general
—cats/felines, birds, horses/horseback riding (I used to ride for years but am not picky about its depiction in fiction!)
—messy family dynamics, codependent siblings
—competency in something, even if it's obscure or bizarre
—old men falling in love (especially with other old men)
—terrifyingly powerful old women
—ice kings and ice queens, especially when they start to thaw
—gambling, clubs (both dance and Regency etc. social), recreational drug/alcohol/intoxicant use
—politicking, jockeying for position in court settings, characters trying to pull strings behind the scenes
—geniuses/very creative people being quite hapless/helpless in love/sex
—open relationships/polyamory (especially if they're just...there, not really discussed/philosophized about in detail), though I don't mind more strictly monogamous interpretations

NSFW Likes/Kinks
—clothed sex, sex with one partner fully dressed and one naked, sex where the only exposed thing is the genitals
—coming in pants
—frottage/intercrural/nonpenetrative sex
—oral sex
—dubcon (drunk/high/intoxicated sex, sex pollen, etc.)
—light to moderate BDSM

subby men
younger women subbing to older women
bondage
caning, whipping, spanking
informal/undernegotiated kink
femdom, pegging (of both men and other women)

—consensual nonconsent scenes (as long as not m/f with female as "victim")
—men being called sluts/whores/desperate
—women calling other women sluts/whores/desperate
—loving description of thighs and asses (especially on men)
—topping from the bottom/power bottoms
—dirty talk, praise kink
—voyeurism/exhibitionism
—outdoor sex, public/semipublic sex in general
—sex on floors, awkward furniture, desks, indoor places that aren't beds
—sex in water/tubs/pools/showers, on beaches
—sex in cars/boats/carriages/planes/moving vehicles
—threesomes/moresomes
—masturbation
—people walking in on/interrupting sex or masturbation, whether the person(s) fucking know they're there or not
—bloodplay (as long as in world/time period where HIV transmission is impossible)
—knifeplay
—younger partners being more experienced sexually than older partners
—people wagering themselves sexually/romantically in games of chance (as long as not a woman wagering her body to a man)

DNWs
—first or second person POV (unless canon is that way)
—pregnancy (background mention ok, especially if canonical, but please no focus)
—body horror/extreme body modification
—general horror/extreme gore (canon-typical violence, peril, etc. is fine)
—piss/scat/watersports (blood is OK in worlds/times where HIV transmission isn't possible)
—tentacles
—omegaverse
—most mundane/setting-switch AUs (canon divergence, future fic, and daemon AUs are all great though)
—deathfic
—100% angst without some light at the end of the tunnel (the light can be faint!)
—rape/noncon where perpetrator is male and victim is female
—rape/noncon between two halves of a ship unless it's obvious roleplay
—sexual degradation of women by men in general, even in fully consensual kink scenes
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THE FOUNDERS TRILOGY - ROBERT JACKSON BENNETT
Berenice Grimaldi

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My favorite trilogy of the year, books where I cried multiple times every read, and canon awkward gays? God yes. I love everyone in this bar but I chose Berenice specifically because I think she is fascinating to look at, from her own small background and her father to her relationships with Orso growing up to how she relates to Sancia and really has to come into her own, alone as a person and as part of her relationship with Sancia and as part of a society where she has increasingly large amounts of responsibility. And, of course, her position at the end of Locklands has SO MANY plot hooks. (Spoilery prompts/examples in my letter, marked appropriately where needed.)

What I Love
I love love love how grim and yet heartfelt the whole trilogy is, the hypercapitalist/feudal/weird tech dystopia aspects wrapped in faux-Italianness. And gods-–literal? Manmade? Great aesthetic. I love the blurring of tech and magic and how the magic/tech system works, and I love how the series ultimately comes to be about what it means to be an individual human but also what it means to be a member of the human race and a society and what magic/tech can and can’t do to save people/humanity. I love the "fuck capitalism" and cyberpunk vibes in addition to the heist set-ups and love EXTREMELY strong found family vibes–-the desperate set of family-society-without-blood-or-genetics set-up that is wonderful. Lots of "dealing with the trauma your blood relations passed on to you" as well and attempting to stop chains of intergenerational abuse. (Let me tell you how much I cried somehow while reading things like Clef and Crasedes and company, and Sancia’s entire deal, and Gregor and Berenice’s positions at the end of Locklands.) For Berenice in particular I love her brilliance, and yet the uncertainty she has at her heart about how lovable she may or may not be, her slowly getting roped into the more practical/applicable side of things. I want to know everything about her upbringing, or how she thinks of Orso, or her radicalization into hating the campos, or her relationship with Sancia, or…

More Prompts/Ideas

Backstory!! What was Berenice’s upbringing like? Her training as a scriver? How did she come to be with Orso and what were the early stages of their teacher-student relationship like? What does young Berenice think about the campos and the political situation in Tevanne? Is she willing to go long to get along? When does she get radicalized? Does any of it happen before meeting Sancia?
Everything with Berenice scriving in general, getting to show off her intelligence, general Berenice competency porn.
Outside POVs on Berenice from Orso, Gregor, and the like? Or from Locklands spoilers the cadences, both once Berenice is in them and in when she’s forcibly separated, when Sancia is still around and when she’s gone? end spoilers
Every little bit of Berenice/Sancia you want, especially with a focus on how Berenice feels (which we don’t really get in canon in detail until Locklands). What do they do in the early days of setting up their own company? What do they do in the early days after the fall of Tevanne? How do they court and date one another in down times? Sex/smut/PWP welcome, of course, either happy or of an angstier kind in Locklands etc.
More specifically to the Berenice/Sancia relationship: Mind melding. Their sex on it? Their wedding night? What Berenice thinks and feels during Locklands spoilers the epilogue once she’s cut off from everything? end spoilers
Locklands spoilers I want absolutely everything about Gregor and Berenice together in the epilogue/in those last 10? 15? years where they’re alone separated from the rest of the cadence. What do they talk about? What do they do? Does Berenice help Gregor through his own immense trauma? What words of wisdom can Gregor, traumatized as he is, offer to a lonely Berenice? Does Berenice truly think she’ll see Sancia again; does she believe in the power of the worlds beyond the worlds? What does Berenice think and do once Gregor, too, is gone into the cadence? end spoilers
Locklands spoilers What happens when Berenice and Sancia are reunited? Does Sancia come back into the real world, for lack of a better term, or does Berenice give in and come into the great beyond with Sancia? Do they try to split turns and hop in and out of the worlds? Do they explore the ruins of empty Old Tevanne? Do they have reunion sex, and what is that like without the mindmeld end spoilers

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THE GENTLE ART OF FORTUNE HUNTING - K. J. CHARLES
John Hartlebury, Robin Loxleigh

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I really love GENTLE ART and most everything about it--hanging out at gaming hells, balls and awkward shenanigans therein, etc. Please give me anything more with these two that doesn't hit my DNWs, as I desperately want more awkward big man/scapegrace who wagered his own ass content.

What I Love
I love KJC's stuff (I've read all of it) and of her less ficced canons, I think TGAOFH is my favorite. Wagering yourself to someone else is apparently bulletproof content for me, especially when the man “winning” (both of them win of course) is as awkward and uncertain and stony and sweet as Hart is. I love Robin’s scapegrace self and horribly sad backstory and him eventually realizing he can use his own viciousness to stand up for Hart, and I love Hart’s love language being small practical acts of devotion. I just love Robin being insanely thirsty for Hart’s thighs. And I love all the background characters too, from Marianne and Alice to Hart's fuck-up with Evangeline.

More Prompts/Ideas

Hart bottoming. I really wanted to see that in canon and my one nitpick was that we didn’t get one last sex scene with it. I love big men bottoming to smaller men and with Robin’s thigh obsession, I’m betting he would be in heaven getting to give Hart a strong tupping.
Anything with Robin obsessing over Hart’s thighs and arse-–intercrural, analingus to watch Hart fall apart, stroking them under a dinner table in polite company…
More of their “loveplay” scenarios, especially as time goes on and they get more comfortable with each other. What sort of things do they come up with a year, ten years down the line?
Anything involving Hart’s roses, flowers, a subtly sweeter side of Hart.
How’s that beer coming along? (Can they…get drunk off their own beer and have tipsy sex? In general, what is tipsy Hart even like and why is it adorable?)
What do they do in the future with Alice and/or Marianne? What sort of shenanigans can all four of them get into? (I do ship Alice/Marianne if you want to slide that in as a background thing!)
I love Hart's friendship with Evangeline, and I think seeing more of her somehow would be cool too--do they go to her gaming hell as a couple for some reason? Does Hart tell Robin more about Evangeline and their aborted sex attempts? (How hard does Robin laugh at Hart sleeping with a woman?)
As I said I've read everything KJC, so if you want to throw in some of her other Regency-era characters in the background, I'm cool with that too, as long as the focus stays on Hart and Robin. (They have so little content just to themselves!) I love the SOG crew and the Murder, especially Julius/Harry, Silas and every non-noble, David/Richard, and Corvin/John.

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THE GOBLIN EMPEROR SERIES - KATHERINE ADDISON
Iäna Pel-Thenhior, Thara Celehar

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I love the worldbuilding, the loyalty kink, the playing around with language and formality and customs and blending of elves and goblins. I love how the Thara spin-off has such a focus on the minutiae of life as opposed to its courtliness. I simply love Thara as a very sad melancholy man with a good heart and an ability to get into trouble, along with the set-up of his death-related detective cases, and I adore his burgeoning relationship with Iäna and the bittersweetness of its excruciating slow burn.

Note that despite my stated 1st person DNW in general I am completely fine with 1st person here, whether it’s from Thara’s POV a la canon or from Iäna, though you can also use 3rd person if you want. Please no 2nd person though.

What I Love
I love all the little bits of the Ethuveraz worldbuilding and elves/goblins, their hair and tashin sticks and ears and earrings and ribbons, all the jewelry and little finicky bits of status and pleasure even the commonfolk take in this world. I love Amalo-–the tea and teahouses, the airships and their workers and the myriad proto-socialistic politics that sometimes bubble there, the extensive ostro lines, the scholars. I love playing with registers of formality, and the glee that something like Iäna finally informal-izing Thara holds. I love Thara’s solemnity and his heartfelt faith but also all his cynicism that overlays it, his big eyes and ruined voice and the unassuming ideas he has of himself despite his quiet skill and immense competency, how he’s a bit of a woobie but a stoic and competent one nonetheless. I love Iäna's enthusiasm for his work, yes, but also for this strange little offcast priest, how he slowly opens Thara up without even necessarily having to try so hard, how he’s letting Thara into the goblin world of Amalo as well as everything else Thara sees. I just love them together so much–-they’re cozy, yes, but competent at the same time, and full of vigor and feelings and the suppressed gayness (and the tension, potentially, of their worlds colliding in an actual relationship, considering how Iäna can probably be far more out and flamboyant than Thara can).

More Prompts/Ideas

First dates–in teashops? Walking around Amalo? Some sort of musical performance that isn’t one of Iäna's? What sort of food or music or art performances do they take in?
What is the marnis scene/culture like in Amalo? How does it compare to other Ethuveraz cities? Comparisons to our-world queerness welcome (an appreciation for theater/opera, say, or flamboyance in clothes, etc.) but you can also come up with something completely new without any sort of Western Earth equivalence if you like. How much experience does Thara have with wider/more open marnis culture?
What can Iäna teach Thara about, aside from opera and music? What can Thara teach Iäna? (Can be general or something sexually explicit!)
The existence of photography but also its clear level of scumminess in canon is super fascinating to me. Do Thara and Iäna ever play around with photography, or with painting/portraiture? (In potentially sexually risky ways?)
What does Iäna think of the cats????? Do they come to acquire any further animal companions over time?
What is Thara’s life like without his gift–-does any of it come back in any form? (Does it come back wrong, somehow?) How does Iäna fit into this?
Iäna does a lot of helping/stabilizing Thara in canon, which I love, but I’d love to see the tables turned, somehow, with focus on Iäna and how Thara can help him and push their relationship further forward. What emotional problems does Iäna have that Thara can help him work through?
Smut-wise I do enjoy Thara bottoming, but I’d love to see any and all sorts of smut with them, especially if it looks into their relationship further down the line, beyond just their first time, and how it evolves over time. Some sort of 5+1 of sex stuff? Iäna being a surprise excellent power bottom of some sort? Cozy established-relationship old man smut a few years in the future?
Any case fic at all, really, a la canon.

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TEIXCALAAN SERIES - ARKADY MARTINE
Yskandr Aghavn

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I did not expect to love Teixcalaan as much as I did, but man, I love me some Big Language and Empire/Colonization/Imperial Feelings on main, especially with the exquisite queer backdropping. I came out of the series wanting a lot of things, but I am most amused and intrigued, perhaps, by Yskandr, both the live and imago versions, and his slutty slutty doomed silver fox imperial-fucking bisexuality, how empire warped or didn’t warp him and how even in his technological afterlives a version of him can continue to change, potentially forever, or at least for several generations, depending.

What I Love
I love how fucked-up Teixcalaan is and yet how Lsel is similarly fucked up in its own way, with their own different versions of holding onto horrendous memory and stretching the meaning of what it means to be human. I love how the empire is so apparently queer-friendly and yet still deeply Problematic (™), how tenuous the apparent goodness or badness of someone like Eight Direction is, depending on the direction it’s looked at from, the trap of the Teixcalaan surveillance state and its later use (miuse?) in Shard pilots and similar as compared to the potential warping power of the Stationer imagos. I love all of the minutiae of Teixcalaan culture and the cultures of the other worlds and beings the series encounters. And Yskandr embodies so much of this so well-–his later sleeping around, yes, but also his apparent real attraction to Six Direction and Nineteen Adze and their doomed threesome. I want to know everything of his early years of Teixcalaan and The Threesome and how it developed, what the attraction of Teixcalaan was for him, but I also want to know what imago-Yskandr is like and how that sort of existence is, what it might be like to be inside Mahit’s head, how he changes and dilutes and blends into her over time.

More Prompts/Ideas

Everything with Yskandr’s youth on Lsel-–what he specialized in, what of Stationer culture he felt attached to, how he got so enamored of Teixcalaan and sucked into its cultural orbit, what his favorite pieces of Teixcalaan were, what he felt like upon receiving his imago and how their entwinement and merging went, how he felt upon becoming an ambassador and what he hoped to accomplish beyond the great secret task entrusted to him.
What was Yskandr’s first meeting with Eight Direction like? Or Nineteen Adze? When did he start to feel anything more than professional interest in them? Was there a horrible attraction from the very first sight or did it have to develop over time? What did Yskandr’s imago think of them, and how did this change over time as they further melded into one another?
What did Yskandr think while depositing his imago impression that one time 5 years into his ambassadorship? Did he have any idea it would be the only recording he would leave behind? Did Yskandr imagine what his technological echo/memory might be like and wonder who his future host might be? (Did Mahit and Yskandr’s lives cross in any way beyond being Stationers before Yskandr left for Teixcalaan or while he was an ambassador, before their melding together?) Do Stationers think much about their technological/digital afterlives in their own lifetimes? What is the imago-recording process like in general? (Do imagos all remember their deaths, or is second-Yskandr unique in this because his implant was left inside him for so long?)
What did Yskandr think/feel while coming to terms with the idea of revealing the imago technology existence to Eight Direction and/or any other Teixcalaanlitzim? What did the ghost inside him think? (Was there anything much left to think?)
General competency kink involving Yskandr as an ambassador and his wooing and general scheming in Teixcalaan would be so fascinating to me, as I love that sort of court-politicking and spycraft and similar, be it with the imago machines or with something less fraught in his attempts to make Teixcalaan hurtle itself into the alien unknown.
What was Yskandr’s merging with Mahit like the first time? (Did first-Yskandr have any subconscious endocrinological sense that the implant was sabotaged that never made it into Mahit’s consciousness?) What did it feel like to first-Yskandr and second-Yskandr the second (presumably final?) time? What did imago-Yskandr make of Mahit, either time? What did he make of meeting a younger version of his own self in Mahit’s brainstem that second time? Do the two versions of Yskandr ever…interact?...somehow at all beyond Mahit’s conscious awareness of them? What is pseudo-existence as an endocrinological memory like in general and what sense of self (individual or we-ness or even in triplicate) does imago-Yskandr (either or both versions) hold?
What does imago-Yskadr think of Three Seagrass, or Mahit’s memories of Twelve Azalea, or any of the memories of Mahit’s few friends? What is Mahit having sex like for imago-Yskandr?
In general, Yskandr being a sexy bisexual slutty devil–-who if anyone does he sleep with in the earlier days of his time in Teixcalaan? (Teixcalaanlitzim? Other off-world ambassadors?) What is older, silver fox Yskandr like as a lover? How does his sex technique or his means of relating to his lovers change over time, as he becomes more and more embroiled in political and statecraft misery?
What is imago-Yskandr like 1 year after canon? 5? How long is he detectable as an individual of any sort within the physical/endocrinological/neuronal existence that is Mahit? Does Mahit ever record her own self (and thus traces of Yskandr) for a sort of memory machine somehow, either because Lsel has allowed her to come back or because, due to their contact with the We, humanity in general begins using imago machines more widely beyond just Lsel? If so, what is that third-hand imago-Yskandr like in the future of their line (officially sanctioned or rogue)?

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