Yuletide

[extrapenguin]

Time for the Yuletide Reveals post!

But first, in news utterly unrelated to Yuletide, I wrote a The Goblin Emperor ficlet: Thwap! is 700+ words of G-gen fluff with Maia participating in a good-mannered snowball fight. Blame #thegoblinemperor.

My gift, Root and Bough and Branch and Leaf was written by the lovely gileonnen, who has an excellent taste in literature! (Go read it, it's got tags like "Heraldic Symbolism as an Intimidation Tactic".) Summary: When Cheris and Khiruev discover a scoutmoth drifting in space, they immediately suspect a trap. Instead, though, they find a message of hope.

On the other half of the equation, I wrote multiple things! Let's go in chronological order.
How far I came for you, for lalalalalawhy, was a treat written during sign-ups, and was the first fic in the collection! (I even got the pleasure of poking the mods to open the collection – it's a separate ticky box on a separate page that one will always forget when running matching and sending assignments.) It's 1k of Space Vehicles Anthropomorphic, and the pairing is Cassini/Saturn. Yes, the space probe and the planet. It's also got poetry that was praised by lots of commenters.

Then, with that posted, I opened my assignment e-mail. I got the best prompt in all Machineries of Empire fandom, and wrote Mirror Dance, for indigostohelit, 1.8k of Kel Cheris/Shuos Jedao porn. It may be the least popular of my works this Yuletide, but whatever, I aced my assignment. Also, it's hot. In addition to the dubcon mirror sex and masturbation, it's also got a bit of glovekink as a spice, and of course power gradients galore. (Because really, what is porn without power gradients? Certainly not a thing I can write.)

I was in a bit of a creative slump and unfannish for a bit, but then I checked out Nirvana in Fire (reactions etc here) With new fandom energy, I went through the Yuletide prompts and ended up writing two things!

The first, What Sorrow Still Binds, for realface, is 3.7k of post-canon fix-it fic that gives Mei Changsu and Jingyan a happy ending. Lin Chen also makes an appearance! Tbh, I didn't have much of a ~creative process~ for this beyond thinking a bit about where to put the Jingyan plotline in relation to the MCS plotline. It took a few tries to get one where Jingyan didn't disappear for a huge chunk and MCS's recovery and journey to Jinling took place at a reasonable juncture.

The second, Never Gonna Give You Up, for telarna, is 4.5k of canon divergence AU! I'd already done one post-canon thing, so I thought about how to change reality so that MCS would believe he deserved a happy ending. (As a side note, I am not 100% wedded to the One True Interpretation for most characters; it's more of a cluster of interpretations that make sense, of which I'll choose the one that makes most sense for the fic I want to write.) Now, that objection about how he'd "taint Jingyan's rule"? The best way to get rid of that is to force MCS to be morality and virtue. And the best way to do that is to make Jingyan evil. (Or, rather, convinced of his own evilness.) Also qualifies as a terrible thing to do for MCS! All his plans about being the evil plotty one of evil in the shadows, down the drain! I'd have wanted to make this fic a bit longer, but there's really only so much canon retread that people are willing to read, and had I written it longer, I would've had to diverge from canon more explicitly and thus put way more thought to it, and I had scant hours to go before I had to get on a train and sod off with only my phone for company, so I did a quick spellcheck and posted it. As for the title, well, I did my classic "how does titles" dance, then got Never Gonna Give You Up stuck in my head when thinking about how MCS won't give up on Jingyan, went "fuck it, that's a remarkably decent title", and rickrolled everyone.

The recs post I made still stands. The Yuletide collection is still there. I might do a look-through for fandoms I've missed.

For 2018, I'll continue with some Nirvana in Fire fic, and for the spring/summer exchange circuit, I'm eyeing smutswap (with wiser offers than last year), space_swap, fandom5k (for the challenge to myself), jukebox_fest, and auexchange. worldbuildingex is good and nice, but the stuff I want worldbuilding in is all space stuff and thus falls under Space Swap's mandate quite nicely. Coronation Ceremony will run in the autumn in its usual time, and I'll participate in Yuletide and the Nirvana in Fire exchange, should that run again.

I'll see about doing snowflake_challenge; it typically has niceish prompts. However, I won't be properly home at my desktop until partway through it, so I might just grab the cream of the crop when it's ongoing and do the rest on my own time later on.

Happy 2018!

Comments

[schneefink]

Yesss write more NiF fic in 2018, I approve :D