Dear '24 Yuletide Author

Happy Yuletide! I am endlessly grateful that you have offered one of my fandoms, and very excited to see what you do with it!

General likes: Fairy tales, gothic literature, film noir, revenge tragedies, bodice rippers, melodrama, dark comedy, heroine/villain/hero love triangles, heroine/villain dynamics, rescue romance, mythology, maledom (non and dubcon are fine), BDSM, bondage, character studies, what-if AUs, genre swapping AUs, vampires, folklore, knight and lady dynamics, epistolary fic,  interactive fiction.   

General DNWs: Gruesome mutilations described in detail, comeplay, ABO, scat or watersports, pushing away female characters, fetish universes, character bashing, fully mundane AUs for fantastical settings, unrequested identity headcanons, harm to cute animals

Dracula and Miss Lucy in the style of Don Bluth - Jozef Szekeres

Dracula, Lucy, Mice Rescuers

These pictures have been on my mind for years, that’s how affecting they are. This looks like the kind of weird, messed up animated movie that would first intrigue and then terrify children and end up haunting them forever. (If you want to, you could tell the story via a youtuber doing something like The Disturbing Gothic Children’s Movie Everyone But Me Forgot.)

I am so happy to see art depicting Dracula as an actual predator and Lucy trying to actually get away, so I would also love more of that. What are the just-borderline-inappropriate scenes between them? Is Lucy the one who saves Mina from such a fate? And how wacky are all the other Dracula heroes? Which ones became someone’s first animated crush? (No fluffy consensual ships with Dracula and anyone, please, but feel free to make him hot in a villainous way.)

And the mice! Are they rebels against Dracula’s tyranny over rodents? Is Lucy just a Disney Princess so sweet she charms animals into anthropomorphic versions of themselves?

John the Balladeer

John the Balladeer | Silver John, Worldbuilding

These stories are so much fun, I would love a mini one for this challenge! You can set it in the time and place that Manly Wade Wellman wrote, or put it in the modern day- does John use his soundcloud to battle tiktok witches? Or other AUs- what if he was a woman, or from a rural part of another country? Pulling things from local folklore is always encouraged! You can pick your favorite creature or local legend and tell a story about John either fighting or making peace with it.

My only real DNW here is nothing about the confederacy- Manly Wade Wellman sometimes had stories that talked about it in a vaguely nostalgic way, but I would rather not.

BraveStarr

BraveStarr, J.B. McBride, Tex Hex, Thirty-Thirty

Such a fun show, and it’s criminal that it’s so obscure! If you want to do a canon-typical escapade for the gang that would be fun, or you can experiment with alternate setups. I would love to see all these characters in a Spaghetti Western! Or play the terrifying Stampede for eldritch horror, and our heroes as a Call of Cthulhu party! (Try not to kill off the heroes, though.) I was extremely happy for BraveStarr/JB to be confirmed in the movie, and would be happy to see more of that, though friendship is also okay if you’re feeling genfic. And what about Tex Hex teetering on the verge of redemption? I will honestly just be super happy to get fic for this fandom at all!

Regarding characters, you can drop any single one except BraveStarr if your story demands it.

The Wrong Earth

Dragonflyman, The Dragonfly, Deuce | Lady Dragonflyman

I am so happy to have found this comic series capitalizing on the inherent comedy in the differences between Batman incarnations, and I think there’s even more hilarity to be had! I love The Dragonfly not being totally cold-hearted, Dragonflyman not being a total fool, and I love every single thing about Deuce (including shipping her with the Dragonfly!) While I didn’t specifically request Stinger, I’m happy to see him interacting with any of the above, as well. What new situations can you put them in? How would any of them react to another Batman/Dragonfly world- Arkham Asylum a Serious House on Serious Earth? 40s Batman serials? The Dark Knight Returns? Or how would you tie up the currently ongoing plot? I obviously love the humor of this setup, but you can take a more serious examination of how insane this all must be to go through. There’s a lot to have fun with!

Matthew Bourne's Sleeping Beauty: A Gothic Romance

Aurora, Caradoc, Leo

This ballet was just made for me, just absolutely made for me.  A love triangle between a kindhearted maiden, a predatory vampire and an innocent youth?  That’s just my favorite dynamic ever!  And everything was so pretty! You could give me the darkest, wickedest captivity story about Aurora and Caradoc. Rescue at the end by Leo is welcome but optional (this is the character exception- I like Leo, but you can focus on just Aurora and Caradoc.) And if they have escaped, where are they going from there?

You could also flesh out a bit about the vampire world.  How are a pair of sweet kids like Aurora and Leo going to adjust to what they have become?  Will they be outcasts in vampire society or come to rule it? 

And of course, how will all the characters integrate- or not- to waking up in the 21st century?