Demure

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Yuletide Discord for Hippos & Exchanges After Dark Discords for Namespace drama 18+ discussion. Google Group for PHs.

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Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

What are your Yuletide-related dilemmas? Fanfic ones, real-life ones? Maybe coal can help you solve them.

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

Anyway mine is that my recip DNW'd non-canonical MCD but one of the characters they requested is dead at the beginning of the canon. I kind of want to write a fic with a fair bit of grief in it because there's canonical grief over this character, but I don't know if this will be upsetting to the recipt if they've DNW'd non-canonical MCD.

I know it's not against the DNW, but idk. Would you be upset to receive grief hurt/comfort for a canonical death if you've DNW'd non-canonical death?

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

To me, non-canonical MCD is about being surprised by it in the fic. I don't want to read a fic and then get surprised by the death of my favourite character. So, the canonical death and grief over that would be just fine with me.

However, in this case, it might be best to just ask through the mods? Or look at the recipient's likes to see if they enjoy angst and darker narratives, or if their likes are full of fluff and comedy tropes, in which case it might not be the sort of fic that would make them happiest.

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

I would be a bit wary of writing that for them, TBH. Like, I don't think it would be a dick move or anything, but I also don't think there's necessarily any easy way to predict whether they just don't want any additional main characters to die but would be cool with a fic focused on grief, or they mean it's okay to mention or imply that canon death still happened but aren't necessarily considering the possibility of a fic heavily focused on it, or they actually would rather not have any death at all but thought it would be a bit unreasonable to DNW the canonical death of a character who's been dead the whole time. Not that you can be expected to read their mind if they didn't give any other details, but it's still an area where I'd tread a bit carefully if they didn't explicitly opt in to it.

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

I can't tell from what you are describing here if the dead character gets resurrected somehow later in canon?

Because if someone requested Jesus as one of their characters, I think it might be fine to write fic about the Marys crying over his death if the fic ends with him popping back up alive at the end and everyone gets to hug it out.

But if they requested, like, Ned Stark, who dies in Season 1 and remains dead, my instinctive assumption would be that the recip is looking for early canon or pre-canon fic where the character was still alive, not for a story that features one of the requested characters being sad about the other requested character's death.

In general, if there's so much uncertainty about how the request and the DNW go together, I think asking the mods is always a good idea.

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

That sounds fine to me. If they didn't want you to dwell on the death of the character who dies, they could have DNWd grief themes more generally, or DNWd death more generally.

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

As someone with that DNW, I'd be so fucking hype to receive grief/mourning, but I'm also pretty sure it's in my likes. /checks
Shit, it's not in my likes anymore, but it used to be. I guess I better put it back in for my next exchange!

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

I think there's a good chance they specified non-canonical MCD in their DNW so that it wouldn't rule out fic that deals with a canonical death.

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

My potential treat recip says they like sex scenes that serve characterization, and have no specific smut likes. I started reading a new canon based on their request, and I desperately want to write porn for their requested ship. To PWP or not to PWP, coal?

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

This sounds like a case for classic "porn with feelings" to me?

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

To me this suggests definitely no PWP (I'd consider that a borderline malicious gift in this case, like they're more or less asking for no pointless sex scenes and your fic is one long pointless sex scene?)

I'd write a fic where the central plot is something else but a reasonably smutty sex scene happens to serve this plot and the accompanying character development. Like, idk, a character's death-seeking tendencies that are a part of the larger plot manifest in them consenting to unsafe sex, for instance.

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

Not to PWP.

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

I mean, they have a smut like? It's "with characterization". If you think you can do a PWP with characterization, go for it - you don't need "plot" for characterization-heavy smut.

If you aren't confident you can do the kind of sex scene they like, maybe no.

(If you want help figuring out what "with characterization" means - to me it's either that the smut scene illuminates some kind of canon character arc, or it's a sex scene that's very specifically about those two characters having sex that wouldn't make sense for any other two characters, or, preferably, both.)

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

I'd write it but then I'd get help from a beta who is familiar with the canon.

One thing to check: are the emotional dynamics for the characters clearly specific to a particular point in canon or pre/post canon?

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

Would it be a dick move to change canon to make your idea work?

Like if you wanted Kirk and Spock to play a game of dabo on Deep Space Nine, but obviously it wasn't built yet in Kirk's lifetime.

Does it make a difference if it's for a treat?

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, and no, respectively.

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

Check either via mods or their previous treats how attached they are to strict canon compliance. Some people really, really hate when even tiny details don't match up.

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

Overly focusing on your random example, I know, but Kirk showing up to Deep Space Nine without time travel or Q or something would irritate the shit out of me because if it existed at all, it would be Terrok Nor and full of Cardassians, not dabo tables. It just makes no sense within canon as we know it, and I would expect an in-universe explanation and for this to be plot significant.

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

If they don't DNW anything AU related, then you're fine making canon changes, although if it's the sort of thing that anyone reasonably familiar with canon would notice, you probably want to explicitly either tag it or A/N it if you don't want the anon memes talking about how badly you messed up canon and it must be kittyfic two months from now. (If it's, like, there's a five minute change in timing that you would only notice if watching with a stopwatch, you're probably fine.) If they have AU related DNWs it's trickier.

With a larger, major canon contradictory change like "Kirk and Spock are on Deep Space Nine with no explanation", I might also avoid it for a crack DNW just in case, even if you aren't treating it like crack (And similarly would avoid major character backstory/personality type changes for an OOC DNW, unless you do the AU work to justify them.)

(But like. If Kirk and Spock are playing dabo on Deep Space Nine they've clearly time traveled, it wouldn't have to be crack or AU.)

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

Honestly this kind of canon change would probably bug me more than an outright "they are now both mermaids who run a coffee shop" total setting-change AU, just because it feels more half-assed and less purposeful, like the author was trying to write something that should have been canon compliant but either goofed on canon or just went, "Eh, who even cares about canon?" (Which, to be clear, is a perfectly legit approach to writing fic! But possibly a high-risk strategy in a gift to someone who has not indicated they share it.) But to be fair I'm not big on AUs other than canon-divergence anyway, and many people are much less fussed about canon compliance than I am. I certainly wouldn't go so far as to call it a dick move, just a potentially risky one. Like other coalies say, indicating it was a deliberate choice rather than a sloppy mistake would probably go a long way.

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

I tend to be irritated about this kind of canon change if it isn't warned for in tags or an author's note or the summary. If it's warned for then I may not mind something in canon being different to make things work, but if it feels like the author didn't know or just didn't care about canon then I'll probably be annoyed.

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

My recipient states in not so many words that they’re fine with extensive world building, but they want the two characters they requested to be very very present.

If I write a very long and very character A centric fic full of introspection, but said introspection comes about mainly because of situations revolving around character B, would this end up as being too A heavy and therefore something the recipient wouldn’t enjoy?

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

Two questions:

First, is B actually present in these situations? Like if you have a fic where A is pining for B and it has extended passages of A struggling with their attraction to B in between scenes where the two interact, that's fine.
If it's A pining for B while B is off paragliding in Brazil and just occasionally sends a postcard that triggers more introspection, that might be toeing the line.

The other question I had is that I'm not clear on what the relationship is between character introspection and worldbuilding. Maybe I'm just reading you wrong, but it sounded like you consider character introspection a form of worldbuilding? If that's the case, then my question would be: why? how? in what way?

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

I discovered this canon too late for yuletide. As in, I started reading it very recently and realized that I ship these two like crazy half an hour after nominations closed.

She accidentally shoved her down the stairs! Come on, if that's not great ship fodder, what is?

Re: Yuletide dilemmas

[(Anonymous)]

I matched on a completely fandomless 25-year-old canon that I loved at the time and thought I would have a blast rereading and writing fic for.

Coal, it's really really racist/sexist/transphobic in that ironic early 2000s "liberal" way where characters say horrible things (that absolutely would not get a pass in 2024 fandoms) so we can all make a joke about it, and my rosy college memories had edited all of that out. Other than that it's still a fun fandom, and I think it is good at heart if you peel off the veneer, and I could enjoy writing a good fic for it, but what do I do about .. all that?

Stay canon-compliant and IC but try to avoid the worst bits? Address it directly in story by having the characters mention they learned better? Write it out/write around it and ignore it? Write a AU for "What if they weren't in an irony-poisoned 2000s comedy?" Do I need an author's note disclaimer? help.

The signup doesn't address it at all but based on signup summaries past this person has been requesting it with no fills for years (I think I'm the only person ever to offer, and never matched before) and it's entirely possible they haven't reread in a decade either.