raspberryhunter

This year the kinds of stresses my brain was under were the sort that meant I wrote a lot of Yuletide fic (at least comparatively to other years) :)

My assignment was Scholomance, and the recip indicated they would like Scholomance worldbulding and non-El POV, so I happily wrote the Scholomance-POV fic that I desperately wanted after reading The Last Graduate :) A very large amount of credit goes to

sprocket, who did a lot of alpha and beta work on this one, batted all kinds of ideas around with me and went through multiple drafts poking me to get more of an arc in there, and at one point made a (invaluable) whole timeline of everything that had happened in the books.

To Offer Sanctuary and Protection (4054 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Scholomance - Naomi Novik
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Scholomance (Scholomance)
Additional Tags: sentient building, Worldbuilding, POV Nonhuman, the canon is the warning, Canon-Typical Death Rates, Canonical Character Death, School
Summary:

The Scholomance watches its children die, in direct violation of its charge, for a hundred years and more.

Many if not most years I start writing something while waiting for assignments to come out -- this year, I saw Waste Land in the tagset and thought, "you know, for Yuletide, December is the cruelest month..." and it just... sort of happened from there. I tried to keep most of the iconic lines from the poem (it's kind of amazing how little I had to change sometimes), but also put in stuff I made up myself (or quoted from other sources, like Eliot) that at least vaguely fit the mood and meter of the particular part. I'm particularly proud of the repurposing of "Unreal City" to reflect the problems of a fic that needs a lot of beta help, and the death of Phlebas the Phoenician becoming the defaulting of A. Nonnimous. It was super fun and I came out with much more of an appreciation of Eliot than I'd had before. It's hard to write good poetry! While I'm not sure I'd call mine good poetry, at least I think I got to the point where it is reasonable parody :) and I may be the most proud of this of everything I wrote this Yuletide, I think. Thanks to

sprocket for beta, and for

mildred_of_midgard for finding a suitable Latin quote for me!

The Yule Land (1193 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Waste Land - T. S. Eliot
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Poetry, Parody, Pastiche, Literary References & Allusions, Fandom Allusions & Cliches & References, Quotations, Yuletide, Yuletide Treat, Possible implicit time travel
Summary:

December is the cruelest month, breeding
Bears out of the wordless desert, mixing
Canons and desire, stirring
Dull minds with ideas filled with dnws.

So this is the third year that I swore up and down I wasn't going to write any Frederician RPF, and the third year that mildred was supposed to write Frederician RPF and wasn't able to, so I had to write it, because obviously V_V_lala ought to get Fritz/Katte fic from salon! And there exists, well, quite a lot of

rheinsberg material for this ship. Also I remembered, back when salon talked about Katte's last letter and how impersonal and obviously-masterminded-by-Fritz's-dad it was, I'd really wanted Katte to be sending another message with his last letter, so then I had a plot! This took the longest to write -- it takes me forever to write even short history RPF, sigh. But many thanks to

mildred_of_midgard for fixing all my mistakes, the very many historical and the perhaps slightly fewer non-historical. (I would have really liked to also write something for

selenak, who ended up writing me three presents! But one history RPF is, I think, kind of my limit.)

The Last Letter (2753 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great/Hans Hermann von Katte
Characters: Hans Hermann von Katte, Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great
Additional Tags: letter writing, Loyalty, First Kiss, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Canonical Character Death, Secret Messages, Angst and Tragedy, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Katte has a chance to send a last letter to Prince Friedrich before his execution -- and he hopes that Friedrich will remember what he remembers.

I'd told

cenozoicsynapsid that I really liked their prompts but couldn't write them myself, but I kept thinking about their Tanakh prompt, which I absolutely loved, and... eventually... apparently I was able to write it :) I like Jezebel rather more than I did before writing it -- or, well, maybe "like" isn't quite the word... Thanks to seekingferret for answering questions about naming conventions, and to sprocket and iberiandoctor for beta :)

Triptych (2677 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: תנ"ך | Tanakh
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ahab/Jezebel
Characters: Ach'av | Ahab, Izevel | Jezebel (Abrahamic Religions)
Additional Tags: Revisionist History, Polytheism, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Ahab and Jezebel were successful monarchs who struck a balance between the god of Tyre and the god of Judah, and their prophets. Until they weren't.

And lastly, the one that wouldn't have gotten written, except that because of canceling of Christmas plans, I turned out to have an extra evening (and, fortunately, morning after to fix issues I'd slept on) that I hadn't thought I would have -- so I looked at the app and found this amazing canon and that no one had written for it so far, and clearly someone needed to. And, haha, I guess a couple of years ago I'd spent some time thinking about ants for Giant Ant alienfic, so maybe I was already primed for writing something like this? I meant the end to be slightly hopeful if one had read canon and knew that the human scientists came back and did indeed give them a way to escape, but most people seem to be reading it as straight horror, which, yeah, considering the fic ends before the humans come back, fair.

Go Falling One by One (1323 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Cannibal Ants in a Polish Bunker, Undisclosed Fandom
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Characters: Original Female Ant
Additional Tags: Cannibalism, Decentralized organization, the canon is the warning, Ants are basically alien, finding meaning in life, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

There is no light and no honeydew here, but there is still the Colony.