measured_words (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
measured_words) wrote2016-10-05 04:08 pm
measured_words) wrote2016-10-05 04:08 pm
Entry tags:
Yuletide Letter 2016!
Dear Amazing Yuletide Author:
Thanks, first of all, for writing! That is really the most important thing, and I will be delighted with whatever I wind up getting. I am scamming most of this from my last year’s letter (including this line!), so hopefully it will retain some amount of coherency.
So first of all.... Generally speaking, I like stories that tell me a little bit more about the characters or the world they live in. I like stories with plot - with adventure, intrigue, and wacky hijinks. I also like stories that are more focused on character exploration – I don't need action if I have interesting introspection. I like both insider and outsider PoV stuff, and I feel like it is perfectly legit to write a story about a character that isn't from their perspective. I enjoy stories that are very emotionally intense, whether that means they are spilling over with ~feels~ or dark and unrelenting in tone – I enjoy horror, especially psychological horror, but also feel-good fluff. I am into both Crueltide and Yuleporn, so if those are your jam, please have at! I plan to post to the challenge posts with some ideas for each. I'm also open to other sub-challenges, if my requests fit the bill and you're inspired :)
I like porn, but I do not require it. If you have a preference for or against in whatever you wind up writing, knock yourself out, I will appreciate it. If you include porn, I prefer it to be somehow relevant to the story – either it develops character relationships, or is vital to some zany caper or what have you. I’m not a big fan of pwp, though I think porn can certainly *be* the main action, so to speak, as long as it is showing me something new about characters or their relationship. I'm really hard to squick, so don't be afraid to show me your kinks! More than anything, when it comes (heh) to porn I want to be able to believe that the sex I'm reading is in character for whoever I'm reading about – not necessarily that it is something they want, but that the reactions I'm reading are true to whoever is having them, if that makes any sense.
If you are looking to find out more about me, I have a more mundane and fairly neglected lj/dw over atelanya, and I am I am often online in the yuletide chat (which you can find out how to access here), either as Lan-home, hippo-Lan, or some other similar configuration of Lan- somethingorother. I am also Measured_Words on AO3 :)
On to the specifics! Please note that these are in no meaningful order. Also, Optional Details are Optional - I hope these will give you some ideas if you need them, and some helpful insights into what I love about the canons and the characters, but if you have other ideas I haven't thought of feel free to run with them as well :D
18th Century Pirate RPF
Requested Characters: Howell Davis (18th Century Pirate RPF), William Snelgrave (18th Century Pirate RPF)
I wound up making a pimp post about this, so I am going to scam a lot from that. Howell Davis is my all-time favourite pirate, hands down.
In 1718, a slave trader named William Snelgrave was captured by pirates off the coast of Sierra Leon, near Princes Island. He suffered greatly at the hands of his initial captor, Thomas Cocklyn, who was a total jerk, pretty much all the bad things you hear about pirates.
However, Cocklyn wound up hanging out with another, Totally Cool Super Awesome pirate named Howell Davis. You might not have heard of him, but you might have heard of Bartholomew Roberts - he learned everything from Davis, basically. Davis was a true gentleman-pirate. He was super charismatic, and was well liked and respected by his crew. He basically saved Snelgrave's life, and Snelgrave considered him his friend, and in his memoir took to saying things like how he was one of the greatest, most generous gentleman he'd ever known... Basically he had a *huge* crush on the guy. Davis apparently claimed he knew Snelgrave from "Somewhere" though he never elaborated and Snelgrave claimed not to know. He seemed to go out of his way a lot of the time to help Snelgrave out - it's pretty slashy if I do say so myself (And I do. So slashy.) But you don't have to take my word for it!
In 1734, Snelgrave wrote a memoir about his experiences in the slave trade (which included an early account of the rise of Dahomey, though that's not really relevant to my pitch here). At the end, he tacked on an account of his time with the pirates, sort of as an aside. If this sounds like something you might want to read (and it does, I'm sure, because pirates are awesome, and especially Howell Davis) - you can!
I happen to have a pdf available, which you can check out here! This is just the account of his capture by pirates, and warnings for 18th century printing conventions ;p
In terms of what I'd like to see - some more details of their time together while Snelgrave was captive would be cool - maybe some other situation where Davis saved his ass, or some kind of more intimate encounter, perhaps (challenging with so little privacy!). Or maybe you could tell me more about how they *did* meet before, why Snelgrave might not know, or why it might be something he's not willing to admit in print? Or some other encounter they may have had (I know Davis dies not too long after this, sadly, but we can pretend!)? Feel free to engage with as much historical realism as you are comfortable - I acknowledge they were both pretty problematic people in their own ways, but their encounter and relationship are pretty interesting to me!
Colonel Blood | The King's Rogue - Max Peacock
Requested Characters: Any!
Nominated Characters: Christopher Hallam (Colonel Blood), Nancy Edwards (Colonel Blood), Peter Mason | Pietro Masoni, Thomas Blood (Colonel Blood)
This book is amazing. It was released in Canada (and maybe the US?) as Colonel Blood, and The King's Rogue in the UK, in 1954. I picked it up on a whim from a display of 50s pulps at a used bookstore - I know that this is a longshot request because god knows if anyone other than me and the handful of people I've forced to read it will have even heard of it. But that's what Yuletide is for! Maybe your local library has it! You should check it out even if you don't write this request - it is pretty much the definition of a rollicking adventure story. Probably if you look up 'Rollicking' in the dictionary you will see a picture of this book. It looks like this:
It is a product of its time, and has a lot of casual racist/sexist/ablist tropes. It's also loosely based on actual 17th century English History. There really was a Colonel Blood, and he really did a lot of the things attributed to him in the book.
Colonel Blood is not actually the protagonist though. He's the antagonist. Our actual protagonist is Christopher Hallam, a hapless member of Yorkshire's landed gentry, come to eek out his fortune in the Big City until his brother (crippled at a young age by a tragic carriage accident) conveniently dies. He finds employment first in the fencing school of "Pietro Masoni", really Peter Mason, a fellow Yorkshireman who realizes the only way he can get fencing students is to engage in ...Italian brown face, I guess? By dyeing his skin with walnut juice to look more swarthy and adopting a ridiculous fake name and accent. Later, Christopher works for the Duke of Ormund, Blood's nemesis. There is also a love interest, Nancy Edwards, who is actually pretty cool for a woman in a mostly sausage fest adventure "romance", but who is first introduced as a maguffin in a ploy by the Earl of Rochester (yes that Rochester) to win a bet. It's convoluted and ridiculous and its very own special brand of amazing. I want fic! I really would be interested in just about anything based on the shenanigans that constitute this novel, but here are some more concrete ideas:
-Any of the other exploits of Colonel Blood, whether as part of his vendetta with the Duke of Ormund, after he starts 'working' for the crown, or whatever, really!
--Colonel Blood has to foil a real plot against the throne, or becomes embroiled in one?
-Christopher and/or Nancy get drawn into some other kind of shenanigans against their will/better judgment
--Shenanigans involving Colonel Blood!
-Something from Peter's past - we know he used to be a Highwayman, and was saved by Colonel Blood. Tell me more?
-Take me further! I'd be interested in explorations of any of the following pairings form the nommed characters - Christopher/Blood, Nancy/Blood (or the failure of Blood to seduce her because she remembers him mostly as a boring parson), Christopher/Peter, Peter/Blood. Or surprise me! There are a lot of male relationships in the book, with Christopher particularly, that could be taken further. Nancy is just about the only female character with lines though. There's Henrietta, a femme fatale witha very brief apearance, and I guess Nancy's mother? But whatever. Nancy is mostly too good for this lot, but there's always an AU where Rochester abducts her himself, then she gets away on her own and takes over London's criminal underground on her own (or with Henrietta?), or something? I dunno- bring it!
The Broken Earth Trilogy - N. K. Jemisin
Requested Characters: Any
Nominated Characters: Alabaster Tenring, Corundum (Broken Earth), Damaya | Essun | Syenite, Hoa (The Broken Earth), Innon (Broken Earth), Nassun (Broken Earth), Schaffa (Broken Earth), Tonkee (Broken Earth), Uche (Broken Earth)
I'm not even really sure how to go about describing this amazing series. I love all of Jemisin's stuff that I've read, but this series especially. It is both post-apocalyptic in the sense that a long long looooooooong time (geological time) ago, something happened to fuck up the Earth (the moon is gone), and that the aftereffects of this are sill being felt in what's called Fifth Seasons - little mini apocalpyses based on drastic climate changes usually brought about by geological instabilities (supervolcanos, etc). Also, in the first book one of the characters opens a rift to the earth's mantle to fuck things up again/more, for Reasons. There are wild mages, Orogenes, who can do really impressive kinds of earth-related magic, but can't always control it very well. The main character is one of these. She's trying to find her daughter after her husband murdered her son, after finding out the rest of his family were secret earth mages (no one likes them, because they can freeze people to death and cause earthquakes if they get cranky), and trying to survive the new Season. There's a lot of other things going on, but that's the heart of it.
I nominated this series not yet having read the second novel, but I have now consumed it, so this request is spoilery for the second book. But really I'd be happy for stuff based only on the first book, if you have only read it, and you have ideas there, please write what you want! I really just want there to be fic for this! I would even be happy (for serious) if you wanted to play with world building - run with one of the history bits that we hear about, tell me something about a past season, write me snippy historian debates, whatever. I'm here for that as much as for the nommed characters, all of whom I find fascinating in different ways. I'm here for pairings - whether canonical (any of the canonical pairings/groupings, any of the ones mentioned but not elaborated on much (Alabaster I'm lookin' at you). I'm here for non-canonical pairings - Tonkee/Essun? Hoa/Essun (Adult!Hoa, anyway), Schaffa/Essun - hell, Schaffa/Nassun if that's your jam (hello Crueltide, my old friend). I'm here for family stories (Essun and any of her kids and her partners), I'm here for found family stories (so many ways to slice this one!), I'm here for backstories (HOA! Schaffa! Innon!) and stories that fill in spaces between when we meet characters and they show up later (More about Tonkee! More about Schaffa!). I'm really here for anything - if you have an idea please run with it, and if not, hopefully something in the above blathering will give you some ideas. I love the characters and their relationships and the deeply personal reactions that they have to things, and how they don't have to be right - they don't always get along, they don't always succeed, they are allowed to have inconvenient feelings and act on them, they have different levels of sociability and self-awareness, and basically I'm super interested in all of them. The nommed character we know the least about is Uche, but if you want to write something about him alone (being his mother's kid, living with secrets, being so powerful... there are some interesting things to poke at even if we barely see much of him in-text), have at! Also - please feel free to write in whatever style and PoV you feel works best for your story. If you want to have Hoa (or someone else! Steel? Antimony?) narrate, please do, but if second person writing is not something you feel comfortable with, that's absolutely fine.
Pokemon GO
Requested characters: Candela (Pokemon), Blanche (Pokemon), Spark (Pokemon), Dr. Willow | Professor Willow
So, I love this game. I am not a die-hard Pokefan, though, and am not thoroughly familiar with the other games and the show (though not utterly unfamiliar, either). But I love this game, and I am amused by what people have done with the very little we know about the four characters that came with it. I have some questions! In this fandom especially, I am here for crack, and I am equally here for serious explorations. I'm on Team Mystic, but I don't take the rivalries seriously (but I will take your gyms ;) I tend to think of Blanche as female if I give it much thought (that was my mother's middle name), but I'm not married to the notion if you see them some other way (though I'm less interested in a story that focuses on that question than I am about other things)! I basically see the team leaders as grad students, competing for Willow's attention (academically or otherwise ;) I'm interested in team-based stories, or stories about how their rivalries play out, but I'm also interested in stories that are more plot than character driven. They don't all need equal time, but I do want to see them all!
I'll leave some ideas here, but please feel free to ignore them if you have a story in mind!
-What happens to all the transferred Pokemon? Is Willow doing something nefarious? Or is he trying to offset the unnatural selection that comes from selecting pokemon for battling? Are the gym leaders up to their elbows in it? Do they have other ideas? Do they run their own experiments?
-Give me the Grad school picture. Are they gym leaders bogged down by having to respond to trainer questions and requests for assessments all the time? Is their main function to provide a buffer between trainers and Willow (I am envisioning the professor from PhD Comics now.... and man would some kind of crossover/fusion be amazing now that the thought has entered my mind)? Do they have to do annual program evaluations? Compete for funding? ...are those even their real names?
-As a player, I'm amused at the stock responses - if so many pokemon's stats exceed Blanche's calculations, how good is she at math really? Or if they are bigger or smaller than what are on record, how crap are the records? If the pokemon are the best or biggest that the leaders have seen - are they just being nice or do they have really bad memories?
-What do their rivalries look like on a day to day basis? Do they actually get along? Is everything the internet says about Spark true? I do like the idea that when it comes down to the wire, they have each other's backs. Show me this! Do they have to go on fetch quests for Willow? or is their time really mostly spend managing their teams? How seriously do they take the team rivalries? What does it mean to them how many gyms the teams hold or what level they are?
-Pairings! Give them all to me! I don't have a preference, though I do think it is amusing to think of the leaders all having hate/rival sex while they are all pining for Daddy Willow.
-Daddy Willow. That's a legit prompt, right?
-How did they all get to be where they are now? Did they know each other before? I'm always up for a good backstory.
Whatever you write, I hope it is something you enjoy. I'm sure I will! Thank you and happy Yuletide!
Thanks, first of all, for writing! That is really the most important thing, and I will be delighted with whatever I wind up getting. I am scamming most of this from my last year’s letter (including this line!), so hopefully it will retain some amount of coherency.
So first of all.... Generally speaking, I like stories that tell me a little bit more about the characters or the world they live in. I like stories with plot - with adventure, intrigue, and wacky hijinks. I also like stories that are more focused on character exploration – I don't need action if I have interesting introspection. I like both insider and outsider PoV stuff, and I feel like it is perfectly legit to write a story about a character that isn't from their perspective. I enjoy stories that are very emotionally intense, whether that means they are spilling over with ~feels~ or dark and unrelenting in tone – I enjoy horror, especially psychological horror, but also feel-good fluff. I am into both Crueltide and Yuleporn, so if those are your jam, please have at! I plan to post to the challenge posts with some ideas for each. I'm also open to other sub-challenges, if my requests fit the bill and you're inspired :)
I like porn, but I do not require it. If you have a preference for or against in whatever you wind up writing, knock yourself out, I will appreciate it. If you include porn, I prefer it to be somehow relevant to the story – either it develops character relationships, or is vital to some zany caper or what have you. I’m not a big fan of pwp, though I think porn can certainly *be* the main action, so to speak, as long as it is showing me something new about characters or their relationship. I'm really hard to squick, so don't be afraid to show me your kinks! More than anything, when it comes (heh) to porn I want to be able to believe that the sex I'm reading is in character for whoever I'm reading about – not necessarily that it is something they want, but that the reactions I'm reading are true to whoever is having them, if that makes any sense.
If you are looking to find out more about me, I have a more mundane and fairly neglected lj/dw over at
elanya, and I am I am often online in the yuletide chat (which you can find out how to access here), either as Lan-home, hippo-Lan, or some other similar configuration of Lan- somethingorother. I am also Measured_Words on AO3 :) On to the specifics! Please note that these are in no meaningful order. Also, Optional Details are Optional - I hope these will give you some ideas if you need them, and some helpful insights into what I love about the canons and the characters, but if you have other ideas I haven't thought of feel free to run with them as well :D
18th Century Pirate RPF
Requested Characters: Howell Davis (18th Century Pirate RPF), William Snelgrave (18th Century Pirate RPF)
I wound up making a pimp post about this, so I am going to scam a lot from that. Howell Davis is my all-time favourite pirate, hands down.
In 1718, a slave trader named William Snelgrave was captured by pirates off the coast of Sierra Leon, near Princes Island. He suffered greatly at the hands of his initial captor, Thomas Cocklyn, who was a total jerk, pretty much all the bad things you hear about pirates.
However, Cocklyn wound up hanging out with another, Totally Cool Super Awesome pirate named Howell Davis. You might not have heard of him, but you might have heard of Bartholomew Roberts - he learned everything from Davis, basically. Davis was a true gentleman-pirate. He was super charismatic, and was well liked and respected by his crew. He basically saved Snelgrave's life, and Snelgrave considered him his friend, and in his memoir took to saying things like how he was one of the greatest, most generous gentleman he'd ever known... Basically he had a *huge* crush on the guy. Davis apparently claimed he knew Snelgrave from "Somewhere" though he never elaborated and Snelgrave claimed not to know. He seemed to go out of his way a lot of the time to help Snelgrave out - it's pretty slashy if I do say so myself (And I do. So slashy.) But you don't have to take my word for it!
In 1734, Snelgrave wrote a memoir about his experiences in the slave trade (which included an early account of the rise of Dahomey, though that's not really relevant to my pitch here). At the end, he tacked on an account of his time with the pirates, sort of as an aside. If this sounds like something you might want to read (and it does, I'm sure, because pirates are awesome, and especially Howell Davis) - you can!
I happen to have a pdf available, which you can check out here! This is just the account of his capture by pirates, and warnings for 18th century printing conventions ;p
In terms of what I'd like to see - some more details of their time together while Snelgrave was captive would be cool - maybe some other situation where Davis saved his ass, or some kind of more intimate encounter, perhaps (challenging with so little privacy!). Or maybe you could tell me more about how they *did* meet before, why Snelgrave might not know, or why it might be something he's not willing to admit in print? Or some other encounter they may have had (I know Davis dies not too long after this, sadly, but we can pretend!)? Feel free to engage with as much historical realism as you are comfortable - I acknowledge they were both pretty problematic people in their own ways, but their encounter and relationship are pretty interesting to me!
Colonel Blood | The King's Rogue - Max Peacock
Requested Characters: Any!
Nominated Characters: Christopher Hallam (Colonel Blood), Nancy Edwards (Colonel Blood), Peter Mason | Pietro Masoni, Thomas Blood (Colonel Blood)
This book is amazing. It was released in Canada (and maybe the US?) as Colonel Blood, and The King's Rogue in the UK, in 1954. I picked it up on a whim from a display of 50s pulps at a used bookstore - I know that this is a longshot request because god knows if anyone other than me and the handful of people I've forced to read it will have even heard of it. But that's what Yuletide is for! Maybe your local library has it! You should check it out even if you don't write this request - it is pretty much the definition of a rollicking adventure story. Probably if you look up 'Rollicking' in the dictionary you will see a picture of this book. It looks like this:
It is a product of its time, and has a lot of casual racist/sexist/ablist tropes. It's also loosely based on actual 17th century English History. There really was a Colonel Blood, and he really did a lot of the things attributed to him in the book.
Colonel Blood is not actually the protagonist though. He's the antagonist. Our actual protagonist is Christopher Hallam, a hapless member of Yorkshire's landed gentry, come to eek out his fortune in the Big City until his brother (crippled at a young age by a tragic carriage accident) conveniently dies. He finds employment first in the fencing school of "Pietro Masoni", really Peter Mason, a fellow Yorkshireman who realizes the only way he can get fencing students is to engage in ...Italian brown face, I guess? By dyeing his skin with walnut juice to look more swarthy and adopting a ridiculous fake name and accent. Later, Christopher works for the Duke of Ormund, Blood's nemesis. There is also a love interest, Nancy Edwards, who is actually pretty cool for a woman in a mostly sausage fest adventure "romance", but who is first introduced as a maguffin in a ploy by the Earl of Rochester (yes that Rochester) to win a bet. It's convoluted and ridiculous and its very own special brand of amazing. I want fic! I really would be interested in just about anything based on the shenanigans that constitute this novel, but here are some more concrete ideas:
-Any of the other exploits of Colonel Blood, whether as part of his vendetta with the Duke of Ormund, after he starts 'working' for the crown, or whatever, really!
--Colonel Blood has to foil a real plot against the throne, or becomes embroiled in one?
-Christopher and/or Nancy get drawn into some other kind of shenanigans against their will/better judgment
--Shenanigans involving Colonel Blood!
-Something from Peter's past - we know he used to be a Highwayman, and was saved by Colonel Blood. Tell me more?
-Take me further! I'd be interested in explorations of any of the following pairings form the nommed characters - Christopher/Blood, Nancy/Blood (or the failure of Blood to seduce her because she remembers him mostly as a boring parson), Christopher/Peter, Peter/Blood. Or surprise me! There are a lot of male relationships in the book, with Christopher particularly, that could be taken further. Nancy is just about the only female character with lines though. There's Henrietta, a femme fatale witha very brief apearance, and I guess Nancy's mother? But whatever. Nancy is mostly too good for this lot, but there's always an AU where Rochester abducts her himself, then she gets away on her own and takes over London's criminal underground on her own (or with Henrietta?), or something? I dunno- bring it!
The Broken Earth Trilogy - N. K. Jemisin
Requested Characters: Any
Nominated Characters: Alabaster Tenring, Corundum (Broken Earth), Damaya | Essun | Syenite, Hoa (The Broken Earth), Innon (Broken Earth), Nassun (Broken Earth), Schaffa (Broken Earth), Tonkee (Broken Earth), Uche (Broken Earth)
I'm not even really sure how to go about describing this amazing series. I love all of Jemisin's stuff that I've read, but this series especially. It is both post-apocalyptic in the sense that a long long looooooooong time (geological time) ago, something happened to fuck up the Earth (the moon is gone), and that the aftereffects of this are sill being felt in what's called Fifth Seasons - little mini apocalpyses based on drastic climate changes usually brought about by geological instabilities (supervolcanos, etc). Also, in the first book one of the characters opens a rift to the earth's mantle to fuck things up again/more, for Reasons. There are wild mages, Orogenes, who can do really impressive kinds of earth-related magic, but can't always control it very well. The main character is one of these. She's trying to find her daughter after her husband murdered her son, after finding out the rest of his family were secret earth mages (no one likes them, because they can freeze people to death and cause earthquakes if they get cranky), and trying to survive the new Season. There's a lot of other things going on, but that's the heart of it.
I nominated this series not yet having read the second novel, but I have now consumed it, so this request is spoilery for the second book. But really I'd be happy for stuff based only on the first book, if you have only read it, and you have ideas there, please write what you want! I really just want there to be fic for this! I would even be happy (for serious) if you wanted to play with world building - run with one of the history bits that we hear about, tell me something about a past season, write me snippy historian debates, whatever. I'm here for that as much as for the nommed characters, all of whom I find fascinating in different ways. I'm here for pairings - whether canonical (any of the canonical pairings/groupings, any of the ones mentioned but not elaborated on much (Alabaster I'm lookin' at you). I'm here for non-canonical pairings - Tonkee/Essun? Hoa/Essun (Adult!Hoa, anyway), Schaffa/Essun - hell, Schaffa/Nassun if that's your jam (hello Crueltide, my old friend). I'm here for family stories (Essun and any of her kids and her partners), I'm here for found family stories (so many ways to slice this one!), I'm here for backstories (HOA! Schaffa! Innon!) and stories that fill in spaces between when we meet characters and they show up later (More about Tonkee! More about Schaffa!). I'm really here for anything - if you have an idea please run with it, and if not, hopefully something in the above blathering will give you some ideas. I love the characters and their relationships and the deeply personal reactions that they have to things, and how they don't have to be right - they don't always get along, they don't always succeed, they are allowed to have inconvenient feelings and act on them, they have different levels of sociability and self-awareness, and basically I'm super interested in all of them. The nommed character we know the least about is Uche, but if you want to write something about him alone (being his mother's kid, living with secrets, being so powerful... there are some interesting things to poke at even if we barely see much of him in-text), have at! Also - please feel free to write in whatever style and PoV you feel works best for your story. If you want to have Hoa (or someone else! Steel? Antimony?) narrate, please do, but if second person writing is not something you feel comfortable with, that's absolutely fine.
Pokemon GO
Requested characters: Candela (Pokemon), Blanche (Pokemon), Spark (Pokemon), Dr. Willow | Professor Willow
So, I love this game. I am not a die-hard Pokefan, though, and am not thoroughly familiar with the other games and the show (though not utterly unfamiliar, either). But I love this game, and I am amused by what people have done with the very little we know about the four characters that came with it. I have some questions! In this fandom especially, I am here for crack, and I am equally here for serious explorations. I'm on Team Mystic, but I don't take the rivalries seriously (but I will take your gyms ;) I tend to think of Blanche as female if I give it much thought (that was my mother's middle name), but I'm not married to the notion if you see them some other way (though I'm less interested in a story that focuses on that question than I am about other things)! I basically see the team leaders as grad students, competing for Willow's attention (academically or otherwise ;) I'm interested in team-based stories, or stories about how their rivalries play out, but I'm also interested in stories that are more plot than character driven. They don't all need equal time, but I do want to see them all!
I'll leave some ideas here, but please feel free to ignore them if you have a story in mind!
-What happens to all the transferred Pokemon? Is Willow doing something nefarious? Or is he trying to offset the unnatural selection that comes from selecting pokemon for battling? Are the gym leaders up to their elbows in it? Do they have other ideas? Do they run their own experiments?
-Give me the Grad school picture. Are they gym leaders bogged down by having to respond to trainer questions and requests for assessments all the time? Is their main function to provide a buffer between trainers and Willow (I am envisioning the professor from PhD Comics now.... and man would some kind of crossover/fusion be amazing now that the thought has entered my mind)? Do they have to do annual program evaluations? Compete for funding? ...are those even their real names?
-As a player, I'm amused at the stock responses - if so many pokemon's stats exceed Blanche's calculations, how good is she at math really? Or if they are bigger or smaller than what are on record, how crap are the records? If the pokemon are the best or biggest that the leaders have seen - are they just being nice or do they have really bad memories?
-What do their rivalries look like on a day to day basis? Do they actually get along? Is everything the internet says about Spark true? I do like the idea that when it comes down to the wire, they have each other's backs. Show me this! Do they have to go on fetch quests for Willow? or is their time really mostly spend managing their teams? How seriously do they take the team rivalries? What does it mean to them how many gyms the teams hold or what level they are?
-Pairings! Give them all to me! I don't have a preference, though I do think it is amusing to think of the leaders all having hate/rival sex while they are all pining for Daddy Willow.
-Daddy Willow. That's a legit prompt, right?
-How did they all get to be where they are now? Did they know each other before? I'm always up for a good backstory.
Whatever you write, I hope it is something you enjoy. I'm sure I will! Thank you and happy Yuletide!