Yuletide 2025 reveals!
Jan. 1st, 2026 11:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
estiroseI wrote the following fics this year: As we read the pages (Chants of Sennaar, assignment), Sketches in the Alley (Jewelpet Happiness, pinch hit), Dispel the Shadowed Sights (Stray, pinch hit), Stone-bound Murmurs (Chants of Sennaar, treat), Measures of Words and Gestures (Chants of Sennaar, treat), I didn't mean take her alone (Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, treat), Kept in a Faraway Land (Fantasy Life, treat), A Trabeal, Like a Heart (I Want to be a Wall, treat), and Playing Xiangqi (Mulan (Animated Movies), Treat).
(I also got an awesome gift, which I raved about in another post!)
I picked up four new fandoms, but unfortunately still working my way through two of them (Night in the Woods and Gnosia), maybe next year for those two! I also had some computer issues this year a few days before Christmas and had to rewrite 1 3/4 treats (part of "A Trabeal, like a Heart" and all of "Playing Xiangqi") because they hadn't been backed up. That was fun!
I'm putting these in alphabetical order by title this year, because I want to.
As we read the pages (Chants of Sennaar)
(link to story)
My assignment! Chants of Sennaar is a puzzle game with very few named characters, since the idea is that you are reuniting the peoples by having them be able to communicate.
For this one, since my recipient was cool with unusual formats and worldbuilding I decided to go with the idea of an ex-serf (one of the servants of the Bards) decide to go become an Alchemist, language barrier be darned. The whole fic is her letter to her sister, who remained with the Devotees while she left to go to the Alchemists' level with the Alchemist who had come down to cure the Devotees' plants.
In other words, I got to do some fun worldbuilding on the Alchemists' level from the POV of a person from the Bards' level who spent some time with the Devotees as well! I wanted to kind of go into how the Alchemists managed to feed themselves, education, etc, so that's what I did with this one - I imagined the Alchemists as having a sort of communal/socialist kind of society where every kind of work is valued and kids and even adults are encouraged to find what they love - which is why the nameless Alchemist is so happy to take Etenesh with him!
Dispel the Shadowed Sights (Stray)
(link to story)
This was my second and final pinch hit for the year, and my recipient was pretty open to a lot of things, so they were already on my to-treat list when this pinch hit came up. (The prompt was basically, "what's next for any of the listed characters?" and while I've done that a bit in both of my previous Stray fics, there's more than enough to cover post-game!)
My previous fic plots were were: "Cat comes back to see Clementine" and "Clementine starts chatting with another canon character about getting the elevator repaired" . So this time around, I decided to set Doc and Clementine just spending some time together - not in a romantic way, but just two friends chatting away before the difficult parts started.
I was thinking of how they would eradicate the Zurks, and I figure a combo of UV street lights and reprogrammed Sentinels would do the trick. Thus Doc taking some decommissioned Sentinels home to turn them into anti-Zurk forces.
Also, realistically, there might be a few Companions in Midtown that thought what the Sentinels and the Peacekeepers were needed and their deactivation meant that chaos would suddenly happen, and therefore might not like Clementine too much. I didn't go much into it - maybe I should have - but eh. Clementine is one busy Companion!
I was checking the wiki, and I found that the inhabitants of the Slums actually call the area the SafeZone? So I had to fix that before work reveals, oops.
Leai/Windy is actually a reference to two different video games. Leai herself is a reference to the character of Lee from the video game "Cozy Grove" - a character I wrote for this recipient in a treat during a previous Yuletide. Like him, she has a lot of belongings/trash/treasure. Doc saying "she goes by Windy now" is a reference to My Time at Portia, where a nameless character decides to go by Wendy - though his line actually echoes back to Gale's "She goes by Wendy now" when he shows up in My Time at Sandrock, the sequel!
I Didn't Mean Take Her Alone (Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time)
(link to story)
TheSecondBatgirl got me into the original Fantasy Life and therefore deserves All The Fics!
Ahem.
Even though I'm not a big Kikyo/Paulette shipper, Paulette deciding to do something in honor of her girlfriend/rival just tickled me and so I had to write it. Also, I rarely write in the 5+1 format so I thought it would be fun to do. In this case, five artworks that Paulette made while she was missing Kikyo, and one artwork Kikyo made for her.
When you think of it, the setting/plot involving the Strangelings is pretty terrifying. You rescue people from their object forms just to apparently strand them in the future, with no way back to where they came from. In addition, several of these people are either rulers or heirs (Olivia, Damien, Laura) or guild masters (Duglas, Mustang, Fern, Flamel) in the original game.
I didn't want to go into that, but I did want to semi-cover how it would feel to have someone missing, so I had Paulette missing Kikyo while Kikyo was in the future!
I also enjoyed figuring out what Paulette would make (some of them are not up to a master artist's standards, oh well, but Paulette seems game to craft anything that she wants thanks - same for Kikyo!). And I also really enjoyed incorporating references to the original lands - Paulette has visited Port Puerto, Al Maajik, and Terra Nimbus. I also mentioned the original game's Bliss mechanic because you need it to normally buy Black Opals in Fantasy Life from the gem merchant in Al Maajik. (In Fantasy Life i, they're only available from a boss ore in the present-day depths, and I Was Not Going There.)
Nur was my Player Character name for this game, their name means "Only" in Esperanto. It wasn't in reference to anything, it was just that Paulette kept referencing the Player Character and Nur was the first name that popped into my head!
Since Kikyo shows up at the player's Master Celebration, I just had her move back permanently at that point - the only reason she doesn't show up before that, as mentioned in the story, is because she wants to see Nur grow into a Master Artist. Or maybe she sees the future as a temporary artist retreat. Who knows!
This was the only story that didn't have a completely random title - it's slightly altered from Penelope Scott's Rät - the actual lyric is "When I said take me to the moon, I never meant take me alone", which I thought was very fitting for the situation!
Kept in a Faraway Land (Fantasy Life 3DS)
(link to fic)
If I was writing Fantasy Life i, of course I was also writing Fantasy Life 3DS!
This time around, I wanted to have Ophelia meet Divinus (I think she never did in canon!) and them talk about their kids, and while I was at it, cover my theory about the weird multiple gods/contradiction of the Fantasy Life i canon with Divinus, Celestia, and the Starlight Garden in the original Fantasy Life (the idea originated in Fantasy Life Online and carried over to the new game, and causes me to figuratively bang my head against the wall). Which was simply, Fantasy Life i is in an alternate universe to Fantasy Life. So yeah. Short little treat so I could have Divinus talk about how he severed his connection to the other gods.
Measures of Words and Gestures (Chants of Sennaar)
(link to fic)
I decided to write fics for all three people requesting Chants of Sennaar this year! This time I was exploring one of those scenes that happens after we start translating for various groups, specifically the Alchemist that comes to help the Devotees.
One of the fun bits of Chants of Sennaar is that everybody seems to communicate in symbols - that is, the spoken word is translated the same as the written word. This is for the convenience of players and not very realistic, but can easily be explained away by the fact that the character we are playing can pair sounds with words, but not know what they mean.
So, with this one, I set out to handle the question "what would it be like to have a first conversation with someone whose language you do not speak?"
Now, I'm not good at creating conlangs, but I did a couple of years back pay a one-time membership fee for a website that does generate random conlangs for fantasy settings, and also allows some customization. I generated five languages, for each of the five groups in the game.
When I wrote Sonal's dialogue, I used one of those five languages for his speech, with minor adjustments. Hyas' guesses are reasonably accurate, only off at one or two points.
I was hoping to write this as interactive fiction, but I couldn't figure out how to write it coherently enough! So Sonal remembered to write the dialogues down so that he could communicate with Hyas (the IF would have had Hyas trying to guess a lot more than he had to in the fic). I did have a lovely time with the first meeting and a lot of fun getting them to communicate, at least! (I did have to go correct some tenses post- reveal on my phone, which was not fun an introduced hysterical typos. Oops.)
Also, some stuff that didn't get guessed at by Hyas:
"Oup depzau yau. Kaudyu yuh oup." - "I can help you. Please show me."
"Ku!" is essentially "Ah!"
"Oup i yau puz dokyok." - "We'll try this potion/formula (first)."
Playing Xiangqi (Mulan (Disney Animated))
(link to fic)
I did not have plans to write in Mulan. Then I saw that someone wanted Mulan fic that might be slightly more accurate historically, and that is kind of my catnip!
So the whole matchmaker scene in the movie - along with her taking care of her chores - establishes Mulan as a bright tomboy who's not good at this feminine stuff. (It also shows her interfering with two men's xiangqi game, which is actually part of the inspiration for the fic. For her to figure out what was going on with that match after only seen it for less than a minute indicates she's probably a very good player and likely beats her father in matches regularly.)
Thing is, the whole Matchmaker sequence was not historically accurate at all. My take on things isn't either - I claim some artistic license here with Mulan and Shang meeting under the watchful eyes of the matchmaker, which is at least a little bit more historically accurate. (I do not have an issue with the whole sequence being what it is - it establishes her character and to some extent the setting in a way us Westerners can understand! It's just a very interesting artistic choice.)
One of the main duties of a matchmaker is to check astrological charts and see if potential couples are compatible - it's less about how graceful the woman is, or how well she can entertain, or even if she can manage a household. Really, the matchmaker should be coming to the family as they seem to be a very prominent local one and not Mulan going for a makeover and then to the matchmaker, but again, artistic license.
Shang, incidentally, is a nightmare to match and causes veteran matchmakers to cry. Mulan was one of several potential matches that this matchmaker even thought might be remotely compatible, thus the various interviews. Technically, the parents of the possible intendeds should also be present, but for dramatic/artistic purposes Shang and Mulan are meeting under the watchful eyes of the matchmaker, who is acting as a chaperone.
(Mulan's charts basically say she may both be too fiery to be Shang's wife but other parts of her chart indicate that she would either be his greatest ally or his worst enemy. They definitely needed a meeting! Her chart also makes veteran matchmakers cry.)
One thing I tried to emphasize here was that this was not Shang's or Mulan's decision. The marriage discussions would have only involved the parents normally, and the respective families' statuses could have influenced whether they could match up at all. I don't know if it's historically accurate in the mix of eras that Mulan is set in to have people betrothed as kids, but it's not impossible. This is also why Shang goes out of his way to make sure he flatters Mulan's father via the matchmaker.
The matchmaker would have advocated for the match, incidentally! She can spot a couple that fits together, even if Mulan isn't as feminine as she would like (and some of their responses made her hair stand on end!). Mulan would have been expected to be feminine - that was the ideal for women of that era - but the matchmaker also figured her lack of femininity would be something for the parents to argue about and not her job thanks.
Mulan knowing how to use a staff hearkens back to China's traditional reliance on that weapon.
Shang asks Mulan about untrustworthy servants. I'm honestly not sure that this was a known or pressing issue in their time, but I was thinking about insider threats (said untrustworthy servants) as part of the whole "can this woman make sure I come back to an intact home" bit. I would think that the women would be doing the hiring with the permission of their husbands, since their sphere was the domestic one.
I realize that the Fa family themselves don't seem to have any servants, but that could be because the film didn't have to budget or they weren't rich enough to have any. It seemed to me that someone like Mulan would have to be fairly educated in some ways (know how to run a household including balancing the books and maybe being able to handle minor sicknesses among the kids). Just because she wasn't trained in strategy/tactics outside xiangqi doesn't mean that she didn't know other things!
I did make a little mistake in the story due to recalling canon instead of actually reviewing the media, thankfully very minor! I remembered that Mulan had a "little brother" but a brainhiccup made me think it was actually a little human brother, not a dog. Oops! At least Mulan mentioning that she takes care of her father and 'little brother' could be interpreted to mean that she is used to taking care of the family animals as well as the humans! (And Shang's information is just plain wrong!)
Sketches in the Alley (Jewelpet Happiness)
(link to story)
One of the awesome things about Yuletide is that you will inevitably pick up new fandoms! I was only familiar two enough to write about them (Jewelpet Happiness and Chants of Sennaar).
So I have to give the recipient of this story a huge amount of thanks for introducing me to the Jewelpets franchise! This little-known Sanrio toy line/anime is very much worth the time to check out, and there are multiple seasons of anime, none of which have anything to do with each other. (Also, as a person who watched Power Rangers/Super Sentai/Kamen Rider for many years on top of well as watching a lot of cartoons that wanted to sell you things during my childhood, the fact that these are glorified toy commercials didn't bother me at all.)
Storywise, I ended up writing Lapis even though personality-wise, I'm more like Sapphie. Lapis is an awesome minor character in the Jewelpets franchise - regal (and kind of smug) but mischievous, a cat who knows what she wants and is willing to do what she needs to do to get it. One of her powers is to detect evil, and so of course villains tend to promptly mind control her in some way. (Admittedly, in some series she has a cameo/barely shows at all, and in one she was playing bartender for mostly the bad guys.) She also obviously loves the company of other mischief-makers, see her inclusion in the gang in the Halloween episode.
I honestly don't ship Lapis/Sapphie, but I did want Lapis to do something nice in her own way (to get Sapphie to kind of notice her!). Also, I really liked how Lapis contrasts with law-abiding but naive Charlotte, which is why Charlotte features so heavily - she's also the type that would fall prey to Lapis' schemes, and why she could be convinced to do the chalk drawing.
Originally, I was going to write something less shippy and more introspective (there are some remnants of that at the beginning of the fic), but I think Lapis does some introspective here? I just reread the recipient's request (and maaaaybe all of their Lapis/Sapphie fics) and I felt that I should at least get some pre-shippiness in there.
Trivia: The nurse's muttering about "Looking down at a gnome sends you flying" is a reference to a beloved glitch in PowerWash Simulator 2; if you pick up a gnome statue in that game and look down at it, you and the gnome start flying. It's sometimes used by players in levels with gnomes to get to the top of what they're washing quickly without using ladders or other equipment.
Stone-Bound Murmurs (Chants of Sennaar)
(link to story)
This fic was conceived shortly after I got my assignment, but I didn't complete it until after I finished "Sketches in the Alley". I wanted to do something for Sir_Bear, whose letter introduced me to Chants of Sennaar (we share the Magical Diary series in common, and I thought "this person writes awesome prompts but I really don't feel like writing Grabiner, what other fandoms are they into?" and then promptly took to Chants of Sennaar).
I also wanted to try something with embedded images, which is the norm in this particular fandom due to the glyphs not being any standard font. So I wrote the poem/prayer first, making sure I wrote it in the Bards' syntax, grabbed the in-game glyphs I needed from many of the community resources, plunked them into GIMP, and spent... probably too many hours kerning glyphs haha. I used some of the built-in patterns to give the background a slightly more paper-like effect, and grabbed more glyphs to make the page number at the bottom.
One of the glyphs I used is scrapped/not in the game, but even for those who hadn't read the wiki or other sources it's something that most people could probably figure out from the in-game glyphs. It's there because the unknown writer came from the Bards' level and therefore needed a question mark thankyouverymuch.
The words in the 'transliteration' were generated from a conlang generator (I also used this for Sonal's words in "Measures of Words and Gestures", but that was a different random conlang). I had generated five languages, and used four of them (I never used the one I generated for the Bards). There was one exception: the question word (seme) is from an actual conlang, Toki Pona!
A Trabeal, Like a Heart (I Want to be a Wall)
(link to fic)
I was looking for people to treat, and of course I couldn't resist writing for my tiny LGBTQIA+ manga!
I also wanted to write an outsider POV, so here we get Sousuke shortly after the events of the main story trying to figure himself out. I strongly believe he might be bisexual but aromantic, but of course that's just my headcanon. And I used Sousuke's questioning to look at how Yuriko and Gakurouta are perceived as a married couple/why they are together (they are in love, it's just a very platonic love instead of a sexual or romantic love, or at least that's how I see it).
Also, "trabeal" means "beam-like", as in a wood or similar beam for a structure. I found it on a list of old words and fell in love with it. I know that the title is pretty nonsense, but it's poetic nonsense?
(For historical reasons, I also like to record how my fics did as of reveals. This year: (Playing Xiangqi, 280 hits, 64 kudos; Measures of Words and Gestures, 47 hits, 16 kudos; As we read the pages, 41 hits, 14 kudos; Dispel the Shadowed Sights, 40 hits, 10 kudos; Stone-bound Murmurs, 30 hits, 8 kudos; A Trabeal, like a Heart, 14 hits, 3 kudos; Sketches in the Alley, 9 hits, 2 kudos; I didn't mean take her alone, 9 hits, 1 kudos; Kept in a Faraway Land, 5 hits, 3 kudos)
(I also got an awesome gift, which I raved about in another post!)
I picked up four new fandoms, but unfortunately still working my way through two of them (Night in the Woods and Gnosia), maybe next year for those two! I also had some computer issues this year a few days before Christmas and had to rewrite 1 3/4 treats (part of "A Trabeal, like a Heart" and all of "Playing Xiangqi") because they hadn't been backed up. That was fun!
I'm putting these in alphabetical order by title this year, because I want to.
As we read the pages (Chants of Sennaar)
(link to story)
My assignment! Chants of Sennaar is a puzzle game with very few named characters, since the idea is that you are reuniting the peoples by having them be able to communicate.
For this one, since my recipient was cool with unusual formats and worldbuilding I decided to go with the idea of an ex-serf (one of the servants of the Bards) decide to go become an Alchemist, language barrier be darned. The whole fic is her letter to her sister, who remained with the Devotees while she left to go to the Alchemists' level with the Alchemist who had come down to cure the Devotees' plants.
In other words, I got to do some fun worldbuilding on the Alchemists' level from the POV of a person from the Bards' level who spent some time with the Devotees as well! I wanted to kind of go into how the Alchemists managed to feed themselves, education, etc, so that's what I did with this one - I imagined the Alchemists as having a sort of communal/socialist kind of society where every kind of work is valued and kids and even adults are encouraged to find what they love - which is why the nameless Alchemist is so happy to take Etenesh with him!
Dispel the Shadowed Sights (Stray)
(link to story)
This was my second and final pinch hit for the year, and my recipient was pretty open to a lot of things, so they were already on my to-treat list when this pinch hit came up. (The prompt was basically, "what's next for any of the listed characters?" and while I've done that a bit in both of my previous Stray fics, there's more than enough to cover post-game!)
My previous fic plots were were: "Cat comes back to see Clementine" and "Clementine starts chatting with another canon character about getting the elevator repaired" . So this time around, I decided to set Doc and Clementine just spending some time together - not in a romantic way, but just two friends chatting away before the difficult parts started.
I was thinking of how they would eradicate the Zurks, and I figure a combo of UV street lights and reprogrammed Sentinels would do the trick. Thus Doc taking some decommissioned Sentinels home to turn them into anti-Zurk forces.
Also, realistically, there might be a few Companions in Midtown that thought what the Sentinels and the Peacekeepers were needed and their deactivation meant that chaos would suddenly happen, and therefore might not like Clementine too much. I didn't go much into it - maybe I should have - but eh. Clementine is one busy Companion!
I was checking the wiki, and I found that the inhabitants of the Slums actually call the area the SafeZone? So I had to fix that before work reveals, oops.
Leai/Windy is actually a reference to two different video games. Leai herself is a reference to the character of Lee from the video game "Cozy Grove" - a character I wrote for this recipient in a treat during a previous Yuletide. Like him, she has a lot of belongings/trash/treasure. Doc saying "she goes by Windy now" is a reference to My Time at Portia, where a nameless character decides to go by Wendy - though his line actually echoes back to Gale's "She goes by Wendy now" when he shows up in My Time at Sandrock, the sequel!
I Didn't Mean Take Her Alone (Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time)
(link to story)
TheSecondBatgirl got me into the original Fantasy Life and therefore deserves All The Fics!
Ahem.
Even though I'm not a big Kikyo/Paulette shipper, Paulette deciding to do something in honor of her girlfriend/rival just tickled me and so I had to write it. Also, I rarely write in the 5+1 format so I thought it would be fun to do. In this case, five artworks that Paulette made while she was missing Kikyo, and one artwork Kikyo made for her.
When you think of it, the setting/plot involving the Strangelings is pretty terrifying. You rescue people from their object forms just to apparently strand them in the future, with no way back to where they came from. In addition, several of these people are either rulers or heirs (Olivia, Damien, Laura) or guild masters (Duglas, Mustang, Fern, Flamel) in the original game.
I didn't want to go into that, but I did want to semi-cover how it would feel to have someone missing, so I had Paulette missing Kikyo while Kikyo was in the future!
I also enjoyed figuring out what Paulette would make (some of them are not up to a master artist's standards, oh well, but Paulette seems game to craft anything that she wants thanks - same for Kikyo!). And I also really enjoyed incorporating references to the original lands - Paulette has visited Port Puerto, Al Maajik, and Terra Nimbus. I also mentioned the original game's Bliss mechanic because you need it to normally buy Black Opals in Fantasy Life from the gem merchant in Al Maajik. (In Fantasy Life i, they're only available from a boss ore in the present-day depths, and I Was Not Going There.)
Nur was my Player Character name for this game, their name means "Only" in Esperanto. It wasn't in reference to anything, it was just that Paulette kept referencing the Player Character and Nur was the first name that popped into my head!
Since Kikyo shows up at the player's Master Celebration, I just had her move back permanently at that point - the only reason she doesn't show up before that, as mentioned in the story, is because she wants to see Nur grow into a Master Artist. Or maybe she sees the future as a temporary artist retreat. Who knows!
This was the only story that didn't have a completely random title - it's slightly altered from Penelope Scott's Rät - the actual lyric is "When I said take me to the moon, I never meant take me alone", which I thought was very fitting for the situation!
Kept in a Faraway Land (Fantasy Life 3DS)
(link to fic)
If I was writing Fantasy Life i, of course I was also writing Fantasy Life 3DS!
This time around, I wanted to have Ophelia meet Divinus (I think she never did in canon!) and them talk about their kids, and while I was at it, cover my theory about the weird multiple gods/contradiction of the Fantasy Life i canon with Divinus, Celestia, and the Starlight Garden in the original Fantasy Life (the idea originated in Fantasy Life Online and carried over to the new game, and causes me to figuratively bang my head against the wall). Which was simply, Fantasy Life i is in an alternate universe to Fantasy Life. So yeah. Short little treat so I could have Divinus talk about how he severed his connection to the other gods.
Measures of Words and Gestures (Chants of Sennaar)
(link to fic)
I decided to write fics for all three people requesting Chants of Sennaar this year! This time I was exploring one of those scenes that happens after we start translating for various groups, specifically the Alchemist that comes to help the Devotees.
One of the fun bits of Chants of Sennaar is that everybody seems to communicate in symbols - that is, the spoken word is translated the same as the written word. This is for the convenience of players and not very realistic, but can easily be explained away by the fact that the character we are playing can pair sounds with words, but not know what they mean.
So, with this one, I set out to handle the question "what would it be like to have a first conversation with someone whose language you do not speak?"
Now, I'm not good at creating conlangs, but I did a couple of years back pay a one-time membership fee for a website that does generate random conlangs for fantasy settings, and also allows some customization. I generated five languages, for each of the five groups in the game.
When I wrote Sonal's dialogue, I used one of those five languages for his speech, with minor adjustments. Hyas' guesses are reasonably accurate, only off at one or two points.
I was hoping to write this as interactive fiction, but I couldn't figure out how to write it coherently enough! So Sonal remembered to write the dialogues down so that he could communicate with Hyas (the IF would have had Hyas trying to guess a lot more than he had to in the fic). I did have a lovely time with the first meeting and a lot of fun getting them to communicate, at least! (I did have to go correct some tenses post- reveal on my phone, which was not fun an introduced hysterical typos. Oops.)
Also, some stuff that didn't get guessed at by Hyas:
"Oup depzau yau. Kaudyu yuh oup." - "I can help you. Please show me."
"Ku!" is essentially "Ah!"
"Oup i yau puz dokyok." - "We'll try this potion/formula (first)."
Playing Xiangqi (Mulan (Disney Animated))
(link to fic)
I did not have plans to write in Mulan. Then I saw that someone wanted Mulan fic that might be slightly more accurate historically, and that is kind of my catnip!
So the whole matchmaker scene in the movie - along with her taking care of her chores - establishes Mulan as a bright tomboy who's not good at this feminine stuff. (It also shows her interfering with two men's xiangqi game, which is actually part of the inspiration for the fic. For her to figure out what was going on with that match after only seen it for less than a minute indicates she's probably a very good player and likely beats her father in matches regularly.)
Thing is, the whole Matchmaker sequence was not historically accurate at all. My take on things isn't either - I claim some artistic license here with Mulan and Shang meeting under the watchful eyes of the matchmaker, which is at least a little bit more historically accurate. (I do not have an issue with the whole sequence being what it is - it establishes her character and to some extent the setting in a way us Westerners can understand! It's just a very interesting artistic choice.)
One of the main duties of a matchmaker is to check astrological charts and see if potential couples are compatible - it's less about how graceful the woman is, or how well she can entertain, or even if she can manage a household. Really, the matchmaker should be coming to the family as they seem to be a very prominent local one and not Mulan going for a makeover and then to the matchmaker, but again, artistic license.
Shang, incidentally, is a nightmare to match and causes veteran matchmakers to cry. Mulan was one of several potential matches that this matchmaker even thought might be remotely compatible, thus the various interviews. Technically, the parents of the possible intendeds should also be present, but for dramatic/artistic purposes Shang and Mulan are meeting under the watchful eyes of the matchmaker, who is acting as a chaperone.
(Mulan's charts basically say she may both be too fiery to be Shang's wife but other parts of her chart indicate that she would either be his greatest ally or his worst enemy. They definitely needed a meeting! Her chart also makes veteran matchmakers cry.)
One thing I tried to emphasize here was that this was not Shang's or Mulan's decision. The marriage discussions would have only involved the parents normally, and the respective families' statuses could have influenced whether they could match up at all. I don't know if it's historically accurate in the mix of eras that Mulan is set in to have people betrothed as kids, but it's not impossible. This is also why Shang goes out of his way to make sure he flatters Mulan's father via the matchmaker.
The matchmaker would have advocated for the match, incidentally! She can spot a couple that fits together, even if Mulan isn't as feminine as she would like (and some of their responses made her hair stand on end!). Mulan would have been expected to be feminine - that was the ideal for women of that era - but the matchmaker also figured her lack of femininity would be something for the parents to argue about and not her job thanks.
Mulan knowing how to use a staff hearkens back to China's traditional reliance on that weapon.
Shang asks Mulan about untrustworthy servants. I'm honestly not sure that this was a known or pressing issue in their time, but I was thinking about insider threats (said untrustworthy servants) as part of the whole "can this woman make sure I come back to an intact home" bit. I would think that the women would be doing the hiring with the permission of their husbands, since their sphere was the domestic one.
I realize that the Fa family themselves don't seem to have any servants, but that could be because the film didn't have to budget or they weren't rich enough to have any. It seemed to me that someone like Mulan would have to be fairly educated in some ways (know how to run a household including balancing the books and maybe being able to handle minor sicknesses among the kids). Just because she wasn't trained in strategy/tactics outside xiangqi doesn't mean that she didn't know other things!
I did make a little mistake in the story due to recalling canon instead of actually reviewing the media, thankfully very minor! I remembered that Mulan had a "little brother" but a brainhiccup made me think it was actually a little human brother, not a dog. Oops! At least Mulan mentioning that she takes care of her father and 'little brother' could be interpreted to mean that she is used to taking care of the family animals as well as the humans! (And Shang's information is just plain wrong!)
Sketches in the Alley (Jewelpet Happiness)
(link to story)
One of the awesome things about Yuletide is that you will inevitably pick up new fandoms! I was only familiar two enough to write about them (Jewelpet Happiness and Chants of Sennaar).
So I have to give the recipient of this story a huge amount of thanks for introducing me to the Jewelpets franchise! This little-known Sanrio toy line/anime is very much worth the time to check out, and there are multiple seasons of anime, none of which have anything to do with each other. (Also, as a person who watched Power Rangers/Super Sentai/Kamen Rider for many years on top of well as watching a lot of cartoons that wanted to sell you things during my childhood, the fact that these are glorified toy commercials didn't bother me at all.)
Storywise, I ended up writing Lapis even though personality-wise, I'm more like Sapphie. Lapis is an awesome minor character in the Jewelpets franchise - regal (and kind of smug) but mischievous, a cat who knows what she wants and is willing to do what she needs to do to get it. One of her powers is to detect evil, and so of course villains tend to promptly mind control her in some way. (Admittedly, in some series she has a cameo/barely shows at all, and in one she was playing bartender for mostly the bad guys.) She also obviously loves the company of other mischief-makers, see her inclusion in the gang in the Halloween episode.
I honestly don't ship Lapis/Sapphie, but I did want Lapis to do something nice in her own way (to get Sapphie to kind of notice her!). Also, I really liked how Lapis contrasts with law-abiding but naive Charlotte, which is why Charlotte features so heavily - she's also the type that would fall prey to Lapis' schemes, and why she could be convinced to do the chalk drawing.
Originally, I was going to write something less shippy and more introspective (there are some remnants of that at the beginning of the fic), but I think Lapis does some introspective here? I just reread the recipient's request (and maaaaybe all of their Lapis/Sapphie fics) and I felt that I should at least get some pre-shippiness in there.
Trivia: The nurse's muttering about "Looking down at a gnome sends you flying" is a reference to a beloved glitch in PowerWash Simulator 2; if you pick up a gnome statue in that game and look down at it, you and the gnome start flying. It's sometimes used by players in levels with gnomes to get to the top of what they're washing quickly without using ladders or other equipment.
Stone-Bound Murmurs (Chants of Sennaar)
(link to story)
This fic was conceived shortly after I got my assignment, but I didn't complete it until after I finished "Sketches in the Alley". I wanted to do something for Sir_Bear, whose letter introduced me to Chants of Sennaar (we share the Magical Diary series in common, and I thought "this person writes awesome prompts but I really don't feel like writing Grabiner, what other fandoms are they into?" and then promptly took to Chants of Sennaar).
I also wanted to try something with embedded images, which is the norm in this particular fandom due to the glyphs not being any standard font. So I wrote the poem/prayer first, making sure I wrote it in the Bards' syntax, grabbed the in-game glyphs I needed from many of the community resources, plunked them into GIMP, and spent... probably too many hours kerning glyphs haha. I used some of the built-in patterns to give the background a slightly more paper-like effect, and grabbed more glyphs to make the page number at the bottom.
One of the glyphs I used is scrapped/not in the game, but even for those who hadn't read the wiki or other sources it's something that most people could probably figure out from the in-game glyphs. It's there because the unknown writer came from the Bards' level and therefore needed a question mark thankyouverymuch.
The words in the 'transliteration' were generated from a conlang generator (I also used this for Sonal's words in "Measures of Words and Gestures", but that was a different random conlang). I had generated five languages, and used four of them (I never used the one I generated for the Bards). There was one exception: the question word (seme) is from an actual conlang, Toki Pona!
A Trabeal, Like a Heart (I Want to be a Wall)
(link to fic)
I was looking for people to treat, and of course I couldn't resist writing for my tiny LGBTQIA+ manga!
I also wanted to write an outsider POV, so here we get Sousuke shortly after the events of the main story trying to figure himself out. I strongly believe he might be bisexual but aromantic, but of course that's just my headcanon. And I used Sousuke's questioning to look at how Yuriko and Gakurouta are perceived as a married couple/why they are together (they are in love, it's just a very platonic love instead of a sexual or romantic love, or at least that's how I see it).
Also, "trabeal" means "beam-like", as in a wood or similar beam for a structure. I found it on a list of old words and fell in love with it. I know that the title is pretty nonsense, but it's poetic nonsense?
(For historical reasons, I also like to record how my fics did as of reveals. This year: (Playing Xiangqi, 280 hits, 64 kudos; Measures of Words and Gestures, 47 hits, 16 kudos; As we read the pages, 41 hits, 14 kudos; Dispel the Shadowed Sights, 40 hits, 10 kudos; Stone-bound Murmurs, 30 hits, 8 kudos; A Trabeal, like a Heart, 14 hits, 3 kudos; Sketches in the Alley, 9 hits, 2 kudos; I didn't mean take her alone, 9 hits, 1 kudos; Kept in a Faraway Land, 5 hits, 3 kudos)
