Known Associates

Dear Yuletide author,

I am so pleased that we share an interest in one of these fandoms and I can’t wait to read what you write for me this Yuletide!

I enjoy a wide variety of stories, all year round but especially at Yuletide. I love short, punchy stories and longer, plotter stories, explicitly smutty and/or kinky stories and coy stories that are all about the teasing and the implications, stories with some kind of meta angle to them and stories that engage with the source material 100% on its own terms, stories with ships that are canon and stories with ships that aren’t.

I am mayhap on AO3 as well. I have checked to make sure I have gifts enabled.

L’art du crime | The Art of Crime (TV)
Alexandre Pardo
Antoine Verlay
Florence Chassagne

I came here for the art history and the murders but they sucked me into the will-they-won’t-they relationship! Sometimes it starts feeling strained or contrived when the characters keep not getting together for so long, but with Antoine and Florence I can believe it—they’re both being utterly ridiculous, of course, but Antoine is so alienated from his own emotions and Florence is so overwhelmed by hers, it’s plausible they keep getting in their own way. I do very much want to see them them get together, but I also enjoy the pining and the denial. Established relationship fic that breezes through the actual get-together part is another great option!

Feel free to put in as much or as little of both art history and murders as you like. I really love the device of Florence’s imagined conversations with artists, if there’s anyone you’d like to have offer her their input. The fact that Antoine still doesn’t know that they shared a childhood connection with the little boy in the Monet painting is still hanging out there, waiting to perhaps be resolved at some point. The Louvre is one of the greatest locations in the world and any amount of time spent there with anything in the collection is always a delight.

I’m also extremely fond of Alex! The premise requires something to keep Antoine in OCBC in spite of the fact he so clearly does not belong, but he accomplishes this role so delightfully. I love that he’s determined to save Antoine from himself at the cost of bringing utter chaos into his own department, and he really rocks the combination of the dapper vests and eternally put-upon expressions. I’d really enjoy a story where he continues to be substantially involved in mediating their relationship, maybe even getting even more deeply enmeshed somehow. However, if that aspect doesn’t speak to you or you just have other ideas you want to explore, I don’t want to box you in at all, since I’d also be perfectly happy with a story where he is not a main character or doesn’t appear.

Character exception: okay to write a story that either doesn’t focus on or doesn’t include Alex.


Monday Night Football with Peyton and Eli RPF
Eli Manning
Peyton Manning

The Manningcast is, to me, the best thing to happen to televised football since the computer-generated first down line, and I’ve gotten much more fond of both Manning brothers, their sibling dynamic, their post-NFL career choices, and their roles within the larger Manning Football Universe. I’d love a fic that does something with that dynamic , whether it be directly depicting the production or filming of the broadcast or something more closely connected by being based on the version of themselves and their schtick that they put out on selected Monday nights. I love the bickering, the rivalry, the goofiness, and also the parts where they’re just watching football with us.

What, precisely, you do with all of this is entirely up to you. Feel free to use any real people (or fictional characters, for that matter, why not?) as potential guests on the show—it wouldn’t need to be someone I’m personally a fan of to work in this context! The thing where Eli absolutely torments Tom Brady merely by existing will never not be funny to me. Bill Belichick might not want to come back on the show since he has been very busy imploding his whole life, but what if he did, or what if they at least tried unsuccessfully to get him on? That “ManningCast: The Musical” promo video they did last year is incredible and I particularly enjoyed it because I also happen to love musical theatre, but you could channel that same energy with anything equally off the wall and it’d be fitting. Or, if anyone is interested in changing one letter to change a fandom, I would love to delve into the forbidden realm of Manningcest. Draw up whatever play you like here and feel free to audible.


Plain Girl — Virginia Sorenson
Esther Lapp
Mary

I love how delicately and yet powerfully this book explores Esther’s thoughts and feelings—about her family, the Amish community, their way of life, and of course about her new friend Mary, whom she finds so beautiful, not just for her pretty dresses, but also things like her silky hair and her dimpled elbows as well as her wonderful kindness and tact in welcoming her to school and becoming her bosom friend. It’s written as a seduction and that seduction is a good thing, a fountain that sends forth sweet water and not bitter. I see flashes of an eroticism as well, like Esther touching Mary’s hair and finding it so beautiful that a shiver goes through her fingers and her heart starts to beat very fast, or Mary showing Esther her petticoat when they’re planning to change clothes with each other, which I find really lovely.

Even though they don’t end up wearing each other’s clothes at school they must do it eventually, somewhere, sometime! I’d love for that to be explored in a story, at any age or perhaps more than once, as they get older. Anything exploring their relationship and how it develops in the future would be wonderful. There’s a lot of potential for angst and difficulty but also for love and sharing. Esther, of course, has her new sister-in-law and her brother in her corner when it comes to blending the old and the new, with her parents much more tentatively open, but Mary’s family is wide open for exploration, and so are the rest of their peers. I’d love gen or getting together or established relationship or pre-ship fic all equally.

The Professor — Charlotte Brontë
Frances Evans Henri
Hunsden Yorke Hunsden
William Crimsworth

I am fascinated the role that Hunsden Yorke Hunsden plays in this story, who is of the things that makes it different from Vilette, which is essentially a heavily-revised second draft of The Professor. From the beginning he alternates between needling William and performing these extremely thoughtful favors for him, although it's not always easy for him to get under William's skin as William perversely enjoys some of his bluntness. He brings out such an interesting side of Frances when he meets her, too—I love that promptly she gets into three arguments with him in a row, and the third time she doesn't even believe in the argument she's making; she just wants to fight with him!

I'm particularly interested in a story set when William and Frances are living in England and Hunsden is their neighbor. I love how he has apparently latched onto their family in lieu of starting their own, especially the way he seems to practically be a coparent to Victor when he’s at home. I would love more about their daily life as it's sketched all too briefly in that last chapter, or a story about something that happens as Victor gets older and goes to school, which William worries about.

I would also love threesome fic! William would be almost hopelessly scandalized by the prospect, I think, and surely Frances too, but then with the dynamic both she and Hunsden have with William where they love to tease him I can imagine it working out somehow. I do love stories where characters fumble their way into unusual relationships or sexual practices without quite knowing what they're doing or having the usual vocabulary to talk about it, which is sort of what I would picture here. But I absolutely would be just as happy with a story that explores the dynamic among them some other way.