worryingly jolly batman

Yuletide letter 2021

2021-10-21T19:03:29Z

Dear YT writer,

I'm excited to have you write for me! The number one thing you need to know is that I’ve participated in a lot of exchanges and I’ve read a lot of fanfic and I’m pretty relaxed about what you give me because I care a lot about you having fun, so feel free to go off the rails a bit, do something creative, do something sadder or more difficult or more kinky or less tropey and ridiculous or MORE tropey and ridiculous or something you wouldn’t normally do in an exchange - do what your heart tells you. (But if your heart tells you to follow my prompts, don’t worry, I am excited about them, too.) More stuff under the cuts!

Jump to:
General likes and dislikes
The Expanse
Emelan
Murderbot Diaries

GENERAL LIKES

- I like stories that make me Feel Things, and I’m OK if sometimes those feelings are complicated and not all the way happy. (Although I also like the stuff that’s unabashedly all the way happy.) I like tropes played straight and tropes that are inverted, questioned, played around with unexpectedly. I like fanfic that explores what happens when people fail or make mistakes, and whether, and how, they can resolve them. I do like shippy fic a lot, but I also enjoy gen - even though lots of the likes I talk about here are usually seen in shippy fic, I like them in gen, too.

- breakup-makeup/getting back together stories are favourites of mine. I never get tired of reading those plots. I love the agony of the break-up and then the cautious learning to trust again. I love people holding themselves apart because they’re in pain. And I love the sense of recreated love, new, more honest, better relationships that have genuinely resolved what was wrong with the first relationship, whatever that was - secrecy, dishonesty, lack of self-acceptance, lack of communication, differing expectations, whatever - relationships that are stronger because they resolved those problems. Starting years after the breakup and just focusing on the getting back together is good for me :)

- I love the classic slash tropes, especially fake dating, wake up married, kidfic, emotional misunderstandings, pining. Wacky dilemma tropes like bodyswap, sudden mind reading, cursed to tell the truth, etc are also really fun for me. I’m especially fond of established relationship, navigating relationship problems inside a steady relationship. I also like the classic first-time sex experiences that are treated as casual but gradually become serious and feelingsy, as well as inarticulate-about-feelings people accidentally bumbling towards a relationship dynamic they don't fully understand.

- I like a range of different tones, many different styles of AU, etc. I like reading stuff close to the tone of whichever canon and I like reading stuff that takes those characters and puts them in stories of different tones - darker, lighter, different contexts, pornier, etc

- I love canon-divergence AUs where one thing happened differently and then …

- I’m happy to receive porn. My significant porn squicks are bloodplay, scat, and daddy kink. Dubcon is not a squick. You can feel free to be adventurous here if you wish.

GENERAL DISLIKES

Please don't focus on or ideally refer to parental death. I find stuff set in ICU rooms, especially things where a character is on a ventilator, very distressing. Other than that there’s not much I truly DNW other than sickfic, deathfic, and rape recovery as a plotpoint. Sometimes I struggle with truly, unambiguously unhappy endings, but I don’t think characters breaking up is necessarily an unhappy ending - that can be happy or hopeful. Endings that are a bit unresolved, that leave questions, can be tantalising.

( The Expanse )
( Emelan )

( Murderbot Diaries )

Thanks again, yuletide writer, I'm really looking forward to reading whatever you come up with :)

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A letter to the AO3

2020-06-16T18:42:41Z

I woke up early this morning and wrote a letter to the AO3 that I submitted as feedback. I wanted to do something other than tweet impotently around AO3's continued refusal to deal with racism in fandom and racist abuse of its tools. Here it is for the public record.

Hi there,

I trust that the brave people protesting police violence across the US and the world at the moment are causing everyone, especially white people, who volunteer and works at the AO3 to reflect, as I am, deeply on their lives and the ways they contribute to structural racism. I am writing to urge the AO3, from the top down, to use this moment to reflect also on what AO3 can do to improve the experience of fans of colour. I love the AO3 and consider it one of my fannish homes. But it is becoming increasingly evident that, because the AO3 does not choose to actively address the widespread racism in fandom, it is becoming a tool that supports racism in fandom. The AO3, like the rest of us, is part of a racist society and if it is not actively working against racism, it will be for racism.

( I know that there is tremendous concern about creeping problems ... )

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Yuletide letter 2k19

2019-11-04T06:01:04Z

When fanfic gives you weird feelings

2019-01-02T07:47:03Z

Happy New Year, dreamwidth! I have no particular resolution to post here more often or anything like that but I read a fanfic yesterday that I want to talk about, and after embarking on a very long thread telling a friend about it I thought I'd write it up because that seemed like fun.

So! Yesterday I read this fic that I really enjoyed, Take from me by ymorton. Ymorton writes fic that I would often classify as having an unhappy resolution or being what I would describe as fanfic countercultural - my friend asked me on twitter whether I meant by this "performatively political" and I don't. Some fanfic writers seem to me to deliberately or unconsciously write against fandom tropes, whether that's people writing fic where Dean tops in SPN fandom in 2006, or this endnote on [one of my favourite] Inception stories, or soulmate AUs where the OTP aren't soulmates, or anything in the trope inversion tag, or something as conscious and deliberate and careful as the way Take Clothes Off As Directed responds to General and Dr Sheppard. In discussions previously I have got the general impression that some people's enjoyment of this stuff is affected by whether they think the author is just coincidentally divinely inspired to do something totally different to what a fandom generally does or whether they think the author is Deliberately and Meanly Lecturing Fandom About What They're Wrong About. Me, I don't care. I almost always love these stories and the stories they're responding to. I really like this kind of fannish dialogue and I like a varied read. Also, I like a bit of an unhappy ending sometimes. Not always! Just sometimes.

Anyway, so ymorton writes this kind of story sometimes. For example, here's Dweller on the threshold. Dweller on the threshold is about two characters who are one of the big pairings in the fandom, F and L. (I'm doing initials because this is a small RPF fandom and this story is locked to the AO3. I encourage people to not share it outside fandom.) In real life (yuck, but this is the foundation for canon in an RPF fandom, after all) F is married to a woman and L is in a long-term relationship with a man, and F and L have been friends for some time. In DOTT, set about 10 years into the future, F leaves his IRL wife and comes out. Parts of this are unusual for fanfic - thank god, we often don't have IRL partners involved in divorce fic any more - but otherwise this might be a not-unusual premise, and what I would typically expect to see from this kind of premise is F rebuilding his life and ultimately finding happiness in a relationship with L, who is the other prominent character in the story and who, I think the story is clear, F has strong, complicated, romantic feelings for. But that doesn't happen. ( spoilers for the end of that story )

So now we come to Take from me. This story features two characters who are also a common pairing, V and L - same L from the first story and V, who is also IRL married to a woman. This fic is 20k long and about 15k of it is about V & L about 10 years ago buddybanging in a period where this fic is 20k long and about 15k of it is about T & L about 10 years ago buddybanging in a period where V has a huuuuuge amount of angst (engagement breakup, bereavement, stressful job). V is theoretically heterosexual but they're having actually quite tender sex even as V is a bit a dick because he is not well managed emotionally. and to be fair L is not in PERFECT emotional shape either.

So this is a CLASSIC set-up for a pining story where L is in love with V and vice versa but V doesn't realise it because of Presumed Heterosexuality. In the expected story, L moves away because he is in love with V and needs space bc he thinks V is heterosexual, and 10 years later V moves to where L lives and everyone's more emotionally mature and adult and has processed their own bisexuality and talks about their feelings and they get together. I have read 20 stories with this exact plot in this fandom and I have loved them all, because I am a cliche.

This story does not end like that.

( spoilers for the ending of this story )

After I read this story I left a comment talking about how painful the story/the ending was but then I haven't been able to stop reinterrogating that. This story ends with these men IN THE SAME POSITION THEY ARE IN IRL, and while I'm not in a position to say whether either of these people are truly happy, they are both wealthy, making money from talking shit on a podcast twice a week, and in apparently happy relationships. I would not call that an unhappy ending, you know? But the story made me feel as if this ending was devastating. So now I'm full-on interrogating myself. Why is this story unhappy to me?

Do I think this is an unhappy ending because this story is conveying an idea that in this story V is bisexual but unable to come to terms with that and that lack of ability to accept himself fully is tragic to me?

Or because, again in this story, V's lack of acceptance of his sexuality makes L feel like V and L's history is somehow invalidated, like V's inability to treat their sexual and emotional relationship as a real thing is damaging to L, and ultimately to L and V's friendship?

OR do I think this story is unhappy because I have been PROGRAMMED BY FANFIC to think that a story where the juggernaut pairing doesn't get together is inherently unhappy?

My twitter friend had a really insightful comment that I think mainly, but not completely, resolves this for me. She said that in fanfiction, and in other types of fiction, and even in real life, there is an expectation that strong emotional experiences have to result in something or achieve some resolution. We have an expectation that emotional experiences form part of a narrative. They don't necessarily have to resolve in any particular way, but we do expect a resolution from them. We narrativise those experiences with the believe that our pain and suffering won't be in vain.

I think this is especially true of fanfiction, because I think for a lot of people fanfiction is an important source of narratives about certain kinds of emotional experiences - coming out narratives, tender relationships with friends, and undefined relationships with strong sexual components. In fanfiction coming out is almost always ultimately positive and provides positive resolution for many relationships. Close friendships are preserved when sexual components are added, emotional experiences strengthen relationships and lead to happiness, and casual sex with strong emotional components tends to lead to permanent relationships.

And this fic turns all that on its head, really. Casual but emotional sex didn't lead V to come out to himself, the strength of the emotional connection doesn't move both these characters into a relationship or even into happy singledom, and because in this story everyone's a bit too fucked up to actually talk about anything, there isn't even the negative resolution of a big break-up fight. Instead the characters go on being vaguely unhappy. And that is Real and also real painful.

So, I guess, that feeling is why this story felt like it had an unhappy ending even though I'm not sure it actually did. But it's a good story and you should read it :)

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Yuletide!

2017-10-09T03:12:29Z

Oh man, it's Yuletide time already!

To my author, it's important to me that you have fun, so if there's anything in my sign-up or letter that you find obnoxious or whatever please feel free to toss it out the window and go with what you need. Read as much as you need & want to and no more :) I will be very happy with anything in my requested pairings/characters, so if the muse takes you in a different direction from my prompts and letter, please do just go with it.

General Likes
- For the purposes of Yuletide, hopeful (or outright happy) endings are my jam. I would prefer for all of my requested characters to still be alive at the end of the story. I don't mind if the story goes in a darker or angstier direction before that, though (in fact I quite like it).
- I love many of the classic slash tropes, especially fake dating, wake up married, kidfic, emotional misunderstandings, pining. Wacky dilemma tropes like bodyswap, sudden mind reading, cursed to tell the truth, etc are also really fun for me.
- breakup-makeup/getting back together stories are the greatest trope of all time. I love the agony of the break-up and then the cautious learning to trust again.
- I like a range of different tones, many different styles of AU, etc. I like reading stuff close to the tone of whichever canon and I like reading stuff that takes those characters and puts them in stories of different tones - darker, lighter, different contexts, pornier, etc
- I love canon-divergence AUs where one thing happened differently and then ...
- If the porn muse takes you, go with it with my blessing. My significant squicks are bloodplay and scat, and although I love noncon I think probably not for the fandoms I'm requesting this year. Dubcon is not a squick.

General Dislikes
- I don't enjoy rape recovery as a plotpoint
- Deathfic, sickfic, and H/C are also things I would prefer not to receive.

( Fandom-specific stuff under the cut )

Thanks again, dear author, and I hope you have a great time this Yuletide. You can stalk me as required labellementeuse here/AO3/LJ/twitter and birdhead on my (rarely updated) tumblr.

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Fandom5k Letter

2017-02-23T20:14:29Z

Hi, author! I'm so excited to write a longer exchange story, and I hope you are too. It's important to me that you have fun - especially in the context of an exchange where you have to write quite a long story - so if there's anything in my sign-up other than DNWs that you find obnoxious or whatever please feel free to toss it out the window and go with what you need. Read as much as you need & want to and no more :) I will be very happy with anything in my requested pairings/characters, so if the muse takes you in a different direction from my prompts and letter, please do just go with it. Also, the same is true of the freeform genre tags - I've picked a handful for each fandom, but feel free to treat them as guidelines rather than specific instructions, and if there's a prompt you like that you feel works better in a genre I haven't ticked, go for it.

General Likes
- Hopeful (or outright happy) endings are my jam. I would prefer for all of my requested characters to still be alive at the end of the story. I don't mind if the story goes in a darker or angstier direction before that, though (in fact I quite like it).
- I love many of the classic slash tropes, especially fake dating, wake up married, kidfic, emotional misunderstandings, pining. Wacky dilemma tropes like bodyswap, sudden mind reading, cursed to tell the truth, etc are also really fun for me. Even if I haven't specifically suggested it for a fandom, I'd be thrilled to receive them.
- breakup-makeup/getting back together stories are the greatest of all time. I love the agony of the break-up and then the cautious learning to trust someone who hurt you again.
- I like a range of different tones, many different styles of AU, etc. I like reading stuff close to the tone of whichever canon and I like reading stuff that takes those characters and puts them in stories of different tones - darker, lighter, different contexts, pornier, epistolary ...
- I love canon-divergence AUs where one thing happened differently and then ...
- If the porn muse takes you, go with it with my blessing. My significant squicks are bloodplay and scat. My significant kinks are the gamut of power exchange, d/s, etc kinks. I am never married to any particular character being the top or the bottom (I do have some preferences for original work, but I'll note those in that section).

General Dislikes
- I don't enjoy rape recovery as a plotpoint
- Deathfic, sickfic, and H/C are also things I would prefer not to receive.

NOTE: there are Shadowhunters spoilers under the cut, and probably also vague Critical Role ones.

( Fandoms: Critical Role, Young Wizards, Shadowhunters, Gilmore Girls )

I hope there's something that inspires you here - good luck and have fun! I can't wait to see what you come up with.

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Yuletide 2016!

2016-10-08T08:42:12Z

Hi, author! I can't believe it's that time of the year again! I'm very happy to be doing Yuletide again and I hope you will be too.

It's important to me that you have fun, so if there's anything in my sign-up that you find obnoxious or whatever please feel free to toss it out the window and go with what you need. Read as much as you need & want to and no more :) I will be very happy with anything in my requested pairings/characters, so if the muse takes you in a different direction from my prompts and letter, please do just go with it.

QUICK NOTE: There will be Critical Role spoilers through episode 70 in this letter, and I typically watch the episodes within 24 hours of them airing, so you don't have to worry about spoiling me. Don't worry if you get jossed halfway through your story, though, I'll totally understand. I have moved Critical Role to the last part of the letter just in case you've matched me for something else and are trying to avoid spoilers!

General Likes
- For the purposes of Yuletide, hopeful (or outright happy) endings are my jam. I would prefer for all of my requested characters to still be alive at the end of the story. I don't mind if the story goes in a darker or angstier direction before that, though (in fact I quite like it).
- I love many of the classic slash tropes, especially fake dating, wake up married, kidfic, emotional misunderstandings, pining. Wacky dilemma tropes like bodyswap, sudden mind reading, cursed to tell the truth, etc are also really fun for me.
- breakup-makeup/getting back together stories are the greatest trope of all time. I love the agony of the break-up and then the cautious learning to trust again.
- I like a range of different tones, many different styles of AU, etc. I like reading stuff close to the tone of whichever canon and I like reading stuff that takes those characters and puts them in stories of different tones - darker, lighter, different contexts, pornier
- I love canon-divergence AUs where one thing happened differently and then ...
- Watch this space, I will probably do a Yuleporn comment this year. However, short form, if the porn muse takes you, go with it with my blessing. My significant squicks are bloodplay and scat, and although I love noncon I think probably not for the fandoms I'm requesting this year.

General Dislikes
- I don't enjoy rape recovery as a plotpoint
- Deathfic, sickfic, and H/C are also things I would prefer not to receive.

( specific fandom stuff under the cut - big Critical Role spoilers through E70 )

Thanks again, dear author, and I hope you have a great time this Yuletide. You can stalk me as required labellementeuse here/AO3/LJ/twitter and birdhead on my (rarely updated) tumblr.

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meta???

2016-08-22T01:51:55Z

I wrote a little meta in response to this post about creator participation & its effect on fandom spaces over at my tumblr but I thought I might replicate it here because it's a couple of paragraphs long so why not.

I feel like fan attention towards canon and canonical authority was always pretty prominent in het spaces - thinking about the last het fandom space I operated in, which was Harry Potter, huge amounts of the fannish focus there was on what would/might/should be canon. But it is new for slash, maybe, which is a sign of social progress I guess, but like hotgaydumbledore I am not sure I like it.

I do know that I find increasing creator presence in fandom to be … oppressive is the wrong word, but depressive in the sense that it feels to me like it presses down on the fanworks that are created. My issues with the way this affects the Young Wizards fandom space are on record. I’m not a conspiracy theorist about this, I don’t think it’s deliberate, but I do find it to be a flattening presence. It does push people towards canon ships, especially canon het ships; it does push people away from weird/sideways ships; I think it kinda pushes people away from ATG slash.

I know many people might be happy about that last one and there’s an extent to which I agree, but I do think that the one positive characteristic of ATG stories is that they just don’t give a fuck about what the creator intends, are often written in total opposition to what the creator intends. That means that great relationships are tossed aside for, well, two white dudes, but I do kinda like that insouciance. ATG shippers never or rarely expect their ships to become canon, and I do think that’s a better relationship dynamic - or at least, it’s a dynamic I prefer - with showrunners, a you-do-you-and-I’ll-just-kick-around-in-this-sandbox vibe rather than a give-me-what-I-want-now vibe that I find frustrating.

I want more representation, doesn’t everyone, and I don’t think it’s wrong to demand representation, but I am not a big fan of demanding representation in *this* character and *that* character. Demanding representation doesn’t mean you get to put your ships in your show. It’s OK for your ship to not be canon.

I should say I’m thinking specifically of LGB representation here. That was careless, sorry.

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this week's critical role

2016-08-12T11:32:35Z

( I'm not even finished yet but )

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labellementeuse @ 2016-05-06T00:34:00

2016-05-05T13:09:42Z

( captain america: civil war )

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hockey exchange letter 2k16

2016-02-19T07:28:30Z

hi friend! I'm excited to do this exchange and I hope you are too. I also hope my sign-up didn't seem intimidatingly crammed or overly sparse - I had some trouble figuring out how much information would be needed in hand-matching and just kind of guessed. I want you to have a great exchange experience, so if you feel you need to go in a different direction to my suggestions I am happy for you to do so. Especially if there's anything you think is obnoxious or inimical to your preferred characterisation, just chuck it. I will be happy for anything in my pairings!

( letter below )

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Yuletide Reveal 2016

2016-02-04T05:23:43Z

Wow, I forgot to do a reveals post for Yuletide! Gosh. I received a wonderful Mansfield Park story that was a Northanger Abbey fusion - WHICH I KNOW SOUNDS CRAZY BUT OMG, it's terrific. Brilliant pastiche. I adored it.

Virtue & Virtuosity (22143 words) by Firerose
Chapters: 6/6
Fandom: Mansfield Park - Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Mary Crawford, Fanny Price, Henry Crawford, Isabella Thorpe, James Rushworth, Mrs. Rushworth (Sr)
Additional Tags: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Pastiche, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, No Northanger Abbey knowledge assumed, Female-Centric
Summary:

'Fanny was the mute earth to Mary's leaping fire, the gnarled oak to her fluttering songbird, the mirror-bright millpond to her restless waves. If one could somehow, with propriety, squeeze both ladies into a single body, the resultant heroine would be beyond anything shewn by Mrs. Radcliffe! She might paddle down the Amazon, contest a knotty theological point with the Pope, battle venomous water snakes with a hat pin and a bottle of hartshorn, and sink into a dead faint at the villain’s merest glance, as if he were some species of basilisk!' Or, Mansfield Park meets Northanger Abbey

I also got a terrific story in Hockey Holidays! It's Saad/Leddy bodyswap/soulmates and I loved the worldbuilding.

Who Knows What We Are In The Morning? (All I Know Is I Want You) (21156 words) by Firalla11
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Hockey RPF
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Nick Leddy/Brandon Saad
Characters: Nick Leddy, Brandon Saad, Andrew Shaw, Johnny Boychuk, Nick Foligno, Scott Hartnell, Columbus Blue Jackets Ensemble, New York Islanders Ensemble
Additional Tags: Columbus Blue Jackets, New York Islanders, Bodyswap, Soulmates, Telepathic Bond, Slow Burn, Friends to Lovers
Summary:

Nick wakes up to an aching mouth and sunlight shining bright behind his eyelids. One is expected. The other is not.

Or, some people have switch-partners - someone they switch bodies with when they're far apart. Nick's is Brandon. They work it out.

I also wrote stuff for these exchanges! For Yuletide, I wrote a Northanger Abbey post-canon story:

The Newlyweds, Or, Catherine Tilney Thinks Again (6270 words) by labellementeuse
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Catherine Morland/Henry Tilney, OFC/OMC
Characters: Catherine Morland, Henry Tilney, Original Characters
Additional Tags: Cosy crime, Humour, curtainfic, there are literal curtains
Summary:

Catherine really must stop reading horrid novels.

and for Hockey Holidays I wrote a Tyler Seguin/Jamie Benn story, a close-canon Greek gods/Hercules' labours AU.

as journey'd Heracles, and onward (13159 words) by labellementeuse
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Hockey RPF, Dallas Stars RPF
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Jamie Benn/Tyler Seguin
Characters: Tyler Seguin, Jamie Benn, Αθήνα | Athena (Hellenistic Religion & Lore)
Additional Tags: Dallas Stars, mythology in a modern context, Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, redemption arc
Summary:

Tyler doesn't want to fuck up his new team, but freaking Athena keeps messing with him.

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Games Wizards Play: Scattered Initial Thoughts

2016-02-02T11:57:10Z

( extensive spoilers, probably, and some ... not entirely squeeful comments )

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Star Wars: The Force Awakens

2015-12-19T08:50:34Z

( spoilers )

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labellementeuse @ 2015-11-22T07:55:00

2015-11-21T19:10:53Z

( I've been marathoning Jessica Jones, which I recommend, and I have two spoilery-ish thoughts. some discussion of suicidal themes )

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AO3 stats meme

2015-10-25T20:37:52Z

Via china_shop. Just cos I finally have more than, like, 5 stories on the AO3 ...

Account Created: 18/11/2009
Link to AO3: labellementeuse

Total Works: 16
Total Wordcount: 70,552
Average Wordcount: 4409.5
Longest Story: Camaraderie and sense of belonging
Shortest Story: Momentum? I hardly know him

Total Kudos: 1786
Average Kudos: 111
Story With the Most Kudos: Camaraderie and sense of belonging with 348

Total Comment Threads: 165
Average Comment Threads: 10
Story With the Most Comment Threads: Second Time Lucky (22)

Total Author Subscriptions: 21???
Total Story Subscriptions: 8 (I have never posted a work on the AO3 that was unfinished so ??? why???
Story With the Most Subscriptions: and remember who I am

Total Bookmarks: 363
Story With the Most Bookmarks: Camaraderie and sense of belonging
Stories With No Comments or Kudos: All of my earliest stories on the AO3 are Yuletide stories (in fact, 10 of the stories on there are Yuletide stories and 2 of the others are for other exchanges) so everything has at least one comment ported over from the old archive.

What I find really noticeable about this is what a difference it makes writing in a juggernaut pairing. My Benn/Seguin story has more hits than anything I've ever written and it's only been up since May (it's also very long, and I think it's quite good). The Yuletide comment culture is also notable. My Howl's Moving Castle story from last year is the only story giving Camaraderie and a sense of belonging a run for its hit-count money, and it's leading in comments. Similarly, my 392-hit Swallows and Amazons story, Dispatches, is beating, comments-wise, seven different stories with at least twice the number of hits and kudos.

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Yuletide Letter 2015

2015-10-24T23:57:40Z

Hi, author! I'm very happy to be doing Yuletide again and I hope you will be too. It's important to me that you have fun, so if there's anything in my sign-up that you find obnoxious or whatever please feel free to toss it out the window and go with what you need. Read as much as you need & want to and no more :) I will be very happy with anything in my requested pairings/characters.

General Likes
- For the purposes of Yuletide, happy or hopeful endings are my jam. I would prefer for all of my requested characters to still be alive at the end of my stories
- Some of the classic slash tropes, especially fake dating, wake up married, kidfic, emotional misunderstandings, pining. Wacky dilemma tropes like bodyswap, sudden mind reading, cursed to tell the truth, etc are also really fun for me.
- breakup-makeup/getting back together stories (the greatest trope of all time)
- I like a range of different tones, many different styles of AU, etc. I like reading stuff close to the tone of whichever canon and I like reading stuff that takes those characters and puts them in stories of different tones - darker, lighter, different contexts, pornier
- canon-divergence AUs where one thing happened differently and then ...
- I haven't done anything for Yuleporn chiefly out of laziness. If the porn muse takes you, go with it with my blessing. My significant squicks are bloodplay and scat, although I would prefer for noncon and humiliation not to show up in Young Wizards stories or between John and Nancy. (Noncon would be a way to take my Mansfield Park request to a ... very dark place that would probably conflict with my happy/hopeful ending Prime Objective as well as my Be Nice To Mary request but, um, I think I would. enjoy that.)

General Dislikes
- I don't enjoy rape recovery as a plotpoint
- Deathfic, sickfic, and H/C are also things I would prefer not to receive.

( requests under the cut )

Thanks again, dear author, and I hope you have a great time this Yuletide. You can stalk me as required labellementeuse here/AO3/LJ/twitter and birdhead on my (rarely updated) tumblr.

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Hockey Holidays Dear Author Letter

2015-10-11T19:36:44Z

Hi, author! I'm very happy to be doing this exchange and I hope you will be too. It's important to me that you have fun, so if there's anything in my sign-up that you find obnoxious or whatever please feel free to toss it out the window and go with what you need. Read as much as you need & want to and no more :) I will be very happy with anything in my requested pairings/characters.

( letter under here! )

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Wellington on a Plate Week 1

2015-08-17T10:11:26Z

So tamarillow wrote up last year's Wellington on a Plate and this inspired me to do the same thing for this year! I'm going to try to go weekend by weekend and here's a post for this last weekend. At some point in the near future I might do a life stuff update too?! Anyway. Click on the links in posts below for menus and arysteia's food photos.

( Friday! Foxglove )

( Saturday: Mishmosh )

( Sunday: El Matador and Little Beer Quarter )

Next weekend: the Epic Weekend of stickmarionette's visit, with Fratelli, Cafe Polo, Coco at the Roxy, Duke Carvell's, Ti Kouka and Basque. We might die.

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Why am I taking a picture of my face every day?

2015-05-29T23:10:34Z

A couple of weeks ago there was a really bad article posted on Stuff about the amount of time women purportedly spend taking selfies. (Supposedly 48 minutes a day, but since they include the time it takes women to dress and do their makeup - stuff they would probably be doing whether or not they took a picture at the end - it's pretty transparently bullshit in my opinion.) In response to this and the seemingly never-ending criticism of selfies by everyone who doesn't take selfies, my pal S decided she'd take a selfie every day. (She does great selfies where she's, like, doing stuff! Mine normally end up being me up against the wall in the bathroom, which has the best light in my house.)

Anyway, I decided I wanted to join her. Actually, I've been mostly taking two a day - one without a filter, and one with a random B612 filter, usually just the same photo twice. I've been doing it for just over two weeks now, and I thought I'd post a bit about why. Not that I think I need a reason. If people want to take a photo every day because they're gorgeous, that is A-OK with me. But there was other stuff going on for me, and it wasn't just the resentment of the endless nastiness.

( Selfies and Me )

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Yuletide reveal!

2015-01-01T04:34:55Z

Second Time Lucky (5726 words) by labellementeuse
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Howl Series - Diana Wynne Jones
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sophie Hatter/Howl Pendragon
Characters: Sophie Hatter, Howl Pendragon, Calcifer (Howl Series), Witch of the Waste
Additional Tags: Weddings, Fluff
Summary:

“I refuse to get married twice,” Sophie snapped.

Although as usual for Yuletide I had periods where I felt like everything was awful, I would never come up with anything interesting or pleasing to read, could never capture a fraction of the tone of the wonderful canon, etc, this on the whole went pretty smoothly - perhaps because I've done a bit more writing this year than I usually do between Yuletides, or perhaps because I had a lovely prompt by the very sweet Oshun, or - and this is probably it - perhaps because I had regular write-ins with K and V and it forced me to do heaps. Anyway, it was really great fun and I had a fantastic Yuletide experience.

I was privileged to beta a couple of things although I do regret not getting in my usual beta-for-a-random-stranger this year! However, I beta-read:

Rangers Knead the Way by aworldinside. I don't know the canon but it was supremely fun to do a baking beta :D And even without canon knowledge and feels, I can tell that it's rilly cute and if you do know Justified I commend it to you.

A Trip to Sydney by sixthlight. I *do* know this canon and I love this fic, which is casefic about Mac on the grounds that gdi, Mac deserves some loving attention. I really liked Mac's voice in this and, of course, casefic is the dream.

I had a great Yuletide this year, on the whole :) I have a few recs tucked away in private bookmarks and I might post those this weekend if I can manage.

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!!!!

2014-12-25T06:19:43Z

a) Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it!

b) If you like WORLDBUILDING or JOYFUL POST-APOCALYPSES or CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT, or alternatively if you've read 7 Seeds, YOU SHOULD DEFINITELY READ THE THING I GOT FOR YULETIDE.

Germination (6451 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 7 Seeds
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Asai Semimaru/Iwashimizu Natsu, Aramaki Takahiro/Ayu, Shishigaki Ran/Nijiko
Characters: Asai Semimaru, Iwashimizu Natsu, Ayu (7 Seeds), Aramaki Takahiro, Shishigaki Ran, Saotome Botan, Nijiko (7 Seeds), Kusakari Hotaru, Tendou Matsuri, Suguruno Hana, Taiami Chisa, Amacha Fujiko
Additional Tags: Future Fic, Pregnancy, Dinosaurs, Herbalism, Road Trips
Summary:

It's amazing, the things that can grow in this world.

I am in LOVE with this and it has a whole 3 hits and it deserves to get a MILLION of them and 324983409 comments and kudos, especially because I gave a HORRENDOUS prompt that they absolutely ran with. READ LIKE THE WIND, FLIST.

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Legend of Korra finale spoilers

2014-12-21T06:11:31Z

( SPOILERS FOR THE KORRA FINALE HERE!!!! )

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Yuletide letter 2014

2014-10-23T22:05:39Z

( Dear Yuletide writer, )

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labellementeuse @ 2014-07-01T21:17:00

2014-07-01T09:35:31Z

( edge of tomorrow spoilers )

In completely unrelated news, I'm going to be in the US in October (a few days in San Francisco, New York, at least a day in Boston and a few days in Chicago) so hit me up with recs or let me know if you would like to hang! :)

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