Dear Yuletide Writer,

[paleomnesis]

Thank you very much for choosing one of my fandoms - I love each and every one of them to a ridiculous degree and I'm looking forward to seeing what you'll write! Prompts here are just suggestions - I'm pretty flexible about most things so I hope you feel free to write what makes you inspired. Happy Yuletide!

Also, treats are very welcome!


The King in Yellow - Robert W. Chambers

In The Court of the Dragon Narrator (The King in Yellow)
The King In Yellow (TkiY)
Aldones (The King in Yellow)
Cassilda (The King In Yellow)

The King In Yellow is:
1. A book of short stories by Robert W. Chambers.
2. A fictitious play that links several of the stories together and loosely centers around the fall of Carcosa and the family that ruled it.
3. The supernatural entity that caused Carcosa to collapse, who has a habit of randomly showing up in different guises.
4. Very hard to disambiguate.

I'm deeply fascinated by this whole mythos – everything about The King in Yellow in all its forms, but my particular favorite story within Chambers' collection is “In The Court of the Dragon.” It's such a deeply creepy story – the narrator who reads the play and naturally bad things happen to him, though it's implied that there may be a particular reason why he's the one being haunted/hunted by the creepy organist. Then at the end, he's whisked off to Carcosa and told that “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!” So I'd love something that explores the events after the story – how does our narrator fare in Carcosa? Is there a reason The King In Yellow whisked him off in particular? I do ship our hapless protagonist with the eldritch deity, so if you'd like to explore what The King In Yellow exactly means about hands, I'd be thrilled to read it!

DNWs: No animal harm, extreme underage, body fluids (blood is fine), focus on unrequested pairings involving nominated characters (mentions of past canon relationships are fine), permanent nominated character death (transformations are fine).

Prompts:

In The Repairer of Reputations, one of the characters believes he's the last descendant of the Carcosan royal family and although he's proven horribly wrong, it did spark an intriguing idea. What if our narrator is really the doomed scion and The King In Yellow sees a chance to mess with Carcosa some more by corrupting its bloodline?

I did nominate Aldones and Cassilda, the royal king and queen who also fell at the hands of The King in Yellow, but unlike the narrator or the aforementioned entity, they're strictly optional. However, it might be fascinating to see how they'd interact with a new stranger arriving on their doorstep (perhaps even The Stranger himself, our narrator having been forced into being the King in Yellow's emissary since time travel in Chambers' work seems to work as a self-fulfilling prophecy).

So Carcosa is technically in space and even though Chambers doesn't really feel the need to explore that beyond cryptic mentions of the Hyades, I'm all about horror in space! Body horror, creepy technology that resembles magic, alien languages and creatures – perhaps even a doomed empty planet that our narrator explores, finding desolation and abandonment and a pair of eyes always watching him, waiting for him to fall once more.


A Night in the Lonesome October - Roger Zelazny

The Count (Night in the Lonesome October)
Jack (Night in the Lonesome October)

What if you picked up a book and the cover made you think Count Dracula and Sherlock Holmes were having a battle of wits while a dog looked on? Then you read it and no, that's not what happens. It's even better. It's a whole bunch of public domain supernatural creatures and killers running around to either bring about or stop the end of the world with some terrific Mythos references and fun illustrations by Gahan Wilson. Also, if they made it into a board game, it would be Arkham Horror. Seriously.

I was so pleased to see this in the tagset – it's always lurked at the back of my mind for Yuletide, but I never remember to nom it, so yay! I'd really love something with Jack and the Count and their whole dynamic, especially at the end. All throughout the book, you're never quite sure whose side the Count is on, until the end, where he magically shows up, puts a hand on Jack's shoulder, and is like, yeah, I'm with this guy. It got me thinking some fun thoughts and while I do like Jack and Jill, I was shipping The Count pretty hard with Jack at that point. So anything where Jack and The Count are working together would be great – maybe it's a new game, maybe it's something else entirely, but I'd love to see more of them as a duo.

DNWs: No animal harm, extreme underage, body fluids (blood is fine), focus on unrequested pairings involving nominated characters (mentions of past canon relationships are fine), permanent nominated character death (transformations are fine). I recognize that one of the characters is a thinly-veiled historical serial killer, but given that the book doesn't dwell on that aspect, I'd like the same level of canon ambiguity about his identity here too.

Prompts:

I'd love another glimpse at a Game where Jack and The Count are once again on the same side, having to technically try to hide this fact from other participants and possibly other things as well (look, Snuff doesn't disapprove since Bubo did save the day in the end the last time, but he knows how this will end – in blood as it always does). And who knows what Party City monsters are involved this time? Perhaps a Mummy or an Evil Sorcerer or A Creature From Some Body Of Water That We Shall Not Name.

Or it doesn't have to be about the end of the world. Maybe Jack's on the run, having been framed for a murder he didn't actually commit and The Count shows up to give him a hand and a room in his castle. Perhaps The Count is the one that needs sanctuary since there's a pesky hunter and his merry boy band around and honestly, he just needs a vacation from the torches and the stakes. Even something where there's a spooky new monster in town and the two have to team up to stop it and then they're holding hands over the corpse and you know there's something there that wasn't quite there before...

Also, what's better than one vampire! Two! Jack ends up getting turned by The Count, maybe to save his life or just because The Count is kind of an asshole and doesn't want to be alone and he's back to square one in the whole bride situation. So Jack is a vampire and while he's not particularly thrilled about it, he does take to it like a duck takes to water, if the duck had fangs and the water was blood.


Original Sin (2001)

Julia Russell | Bonny Castle
Luis Antonio Vargas

It's the one where Angelina Jolie is hot and Antonio Banderas is hot and then they have sex and they're hot and everyone gets to stare very intensely at each other. So he's got money and she's a mail-order bride and look, you know it's not going to end well because it's a thriller based on a Cornell Woolrich novel and he wasn't satisfied unless everyone was as miserable as him. So there's double crosses and false identities and dramatic throat-cutting gestures, but at the end, Antonio Banderas is dying, Angelina Jolie is in prison and it's hopeless... oh wait, it's not. Carry on then.

Also, TV Tropes, you may think people are only into this movie for the steamy sex scenes and they are really hot, but I'll have you know I was into it for the plot as well and I loved seeing how the two of them changed each other for the better and for the worse. Plus, I don't care how utterly unrealistic the happy ending was, I adored Luis and Julia/Bonny getting to run off to Morocco and be partners in crime together, utterly besotted with each other. So more of the two of them getting to really know each other, looking out for one another, and yes, sleeping with each other in a variety of creative places would be great!

DNWs: No animal harm, extreme underage, body fluids (blood is fine), focus on unrequested pairings involving nominated characters (mentions of past canon relationships are fine), permanent nominated character death (transformations are fine).

Prompts:

So there's a lot of unanswered questions left after the movie: How did they get to Morocco? How long did it take Luis to recover from the poisoning? Where did Julia ditch her priest clothes (or did she hang onto them because she saw the gleam in Luis's eyes when she was wearing them?) There's so much to explore between the climax and the final scene and I'd love to know how they got from a pretty bad place to scamming people in fancy clothes.

Canon divergence would be fun too! What if their positions were reversed and Julia was the one that needed to get married quickly (perhaps a previous disposable husband died unfortunately and she needs to keep the estate) so she ropes in some servant she just hired with the promise of some quick cash. Then it's the usual morass of scheming and plans and poisoning, but probably not some poor nice lady getting killed off right at the beginning

And look, I will never turn down a vampire AU where Julia is a vampire and she wants Luis's blood as well as his money (which explains his miraculous recovery at the end when Julia turns him and everyone lives happily and bloodily after).


Cowboy Bebop (Live Action TV)

Spike Spiegel (Cowboy Bebop TV)
Vicious (Cowboy Bebop TV)

Look, I liked this show a lot and I was actually bummed when it was canceled, because there was still so much potential for hilarious chaos, especially with a Vicious that was at the mercy of all the bad decisions that he had made, a Spike that was still perfectly free to keep making bad decisions, and a number of other delightful people that could sit back, eat popcorn, and watch it all unfold. And I'm not going to lie, I definitely appreciated that finale where Spike was gratuitously tied to a pillar, Vicious was talking about family crypts and brotherhood and definitely not being a rejected ex-boyfriend, and everyone was watching them, like should we interrupt this? Is this something they do?

So yeah, a story focusing on the two of them and their intensely terrible relationship would be great. How far did they get in their past – is Vicious angry because he never actually got to sleep with Spike and the gun thing is a metaphor for all the penetration he's not getting? Or did they actually hook up and now look at Spike, running around with that floozy (turns out he doesn't mean Faye, which is a treat for her). Also, I don't mind references to their triangle with Julia but please don't make it the focus of the piece.

DNWs: No animal harm, extreme underage, body fluids (blood is fine), focus on unrequested pairings involving nominated characters (mentions of past canon relationships are fine), permanent nominated character death (transformations are fine).

Prompts:

Vicious is the fair “princess” who demands rescue from the mess he's definitely responsible for and then constantly criticizes it, Spike's only doing it because he wants info on the organization and for no other reason, and Julia's so sick of their shit that she goes “you know what, take him because I'm tired of all of this mess and he's your problem now.” It's s the best revenge anyone can think of, which is why Jet decides that the punishment fits the crime perfectly.

Amnesia! Someone gets it – maybe Vicious gets it and can't figure out why everyone is like, don't you want Spike dead and he's like, but that's my brother/guy I want to bang? And then Jet goes, nope, didn't sign up for this and Spike's the one stuck babysitting a guy that's turning on the charm because he hasn't figured out that he hates Spike now. Or Spike loses his memory post-Julia's appearance and Vicious sees an opportunity to just throw more gasoline on the trashfire that is his life and reclaim his “brother” back for his own good. No one buys that.

Vampires where Vicious meant that family crypt thing in a different way and Spike wakes up to a whole new set of problems.... and teeth. At least now if there's a fight and someone gets pushed through a window, it'll just be a minor inconvenience, unlike the rest of the major ones Spike now faces.