graycardinal | Yuletide: Dear Santa

Now that Yuletide assignments have gone out, herewith the customary Dear Santa letter:

First of all, I am a fairly mellow Yuletider with wide reading interests. That said, my attitude toward much slash (particularly m/m as opposed to femslash) is more or less meh. I'm not opposed to it -- providing it arises plausibly out of the canonical character relationships -- and I've read a fair amount of slash that I've quite liked, but I am generally more interested in fic for story than I am for pairings as such. (This is one reason I tend to specify single characters in Yuletide requests.) Note that I say "story" rather than "plot", because I emphatically do not mean to suggest that I'm not interested in character-driven fic -- quite the contrary; OTOH, plot is also a Good Thing, and much appreciated.

You may also notice, if you glance backward at the fics and drabbles posted here (it's not that big a backlist), that I wander as often as not toward the comic side of the Force. While I don't mind darkness in context, I am a real sucker for well-tuned humor, and I gravitate toward fandoms that incorporate comic elements.

Linda Haldeman: The Lastborn of Elvinwood
As it turns out, I was the only offerer/requester for this; I briefly contemplated changing my requests at the last moment, but time ended up not permitting -- and I kept holding out hope till the last moment, too. That said: whatever else you end up writing, I encourage you to hunt down and read this book; it's long out of print, but your library may possibly have the hardcover, and the paperback isn't impossible to locate online. A very brief summary of the story: English bachelor Ian James is walking home from his village's theater one evening when he notices two of his neighbors slipping quietly into the nearby wood -- and when he follows them, he finds himself in a Faerie court straight out of "Midsummer Night's Dream". Except that the faeries are fading away, and as penalty for snoopiness Ian is recruited to help them exchange one of their own for the infant child of a visiting American family. Haldeman's writing simply charms, in the very best sense of that word, and she weaves Shakespeare, Arthurian lore, Gilbert & Sullivan, Peter Pan, and just a touch of Agatha Christie into a story that absolutely sparkles.

Relic Hunter
Of all the cheesy syndicated action series we got during the last big wave of cheesy syndicated action series, Relic Hunter was one of the first, and to my mind it was one of the very few that actually managed to be fun, and to strike the right balance between playing things straight and recognizing the inherent implausibility of its setup. It certainly didn't hurt that they cast it beautifully, either. On balance, I liked the first season or so better than the last episodes -- toward the end they got a little too serious-minded for my taste, and stopped playing with the highly entertaining UST between Sydney and Nigel in favor of lots of Sydney's past associates. The Sydney/Nigel relationship is just fascinating -- there's definitely chemistry there, and a degree of attraction on both sides, but it's a different kind of chemistry than (for instance) the Laura/Steele chemistry in Remington Steele. In Remington Steele, resolving the UST actually worked, even if some of the surrounding plot was a bit bizarre; OTOH, I think the UST in Relic Hunter works precisely because it's unresolved, yet always simmering.

The other cool thing about Relic Hunter is that -- for an absolute wonder -- it tended to get the broad strokes of its history and folklore more or less right. Sure, it extrapolated wildly into the paranormal, but the writers seemed to have an unusually good grasp of their source material for Hollywood/Vancouver.

Tom Swift: 4th series (1991-1993)
I have been reading the classic teen-sleuth books (Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, etc.) since I was six or so, but had only come across a handful of the classic Tom Swift (Jr.) adventures (Tom Swift and his Flying Lab, or ....Spectromarine Selector, or ....Paracyclic Phase Inverter -- okay, I made that last one up, but you know what I'm talking about). And I had pretty much ignored the short-lived third series of Tom Swift stories, set mostly in outer space. But when the fourth series came along (starting with The Black Dragon), I noticed, because it so happened that at the time I was reading SF novels by the likes of Sherwood Smith and Debra Doyle/James Macdonald -- and Doyle & Macdonald, it turned out, had been recruited to write a couple of the new generation of Tom Swift novels.

I was instantly hooked. The books had the spirit of the earlier series (and did a good job of nodding toward prior continuity), but the setting was very much up to date, the SF elements were handled well, and above all, the characters came across as smart without being square. To my mind, this iteration of the Swift series has one of the best supporting casts in the entire teen-sleuth universe, and I only wish they'd managed to showcase Tom's sister Sandra just a little more in the course of the franchise.

Where On Earth is Carmen Sandiego?
This is the one of my requests held over from last year. As I observed back then, Carmen Sandiego actually does have a body of fanfic attached to it, if a small one -- but a huge proportion of it is focused so closely on Carmen that it drops Zack and Ivy out of the equation, and one of the things I find most fascinating about the series is the evolving relationship between Carmen, Zack, and Ivy as the show progressed. The series also did a superb job of balancing the adventure elements with solid educational content, and maintaining an element of fun throughout.

Now having said that, I did not include Zack & Ivy in my character spec for this request, so you're under absolutely no obligation to humor me in exploring that relationship. I will be entirely pleased with virtually any Carmen story you can come up with -- except, I should observe, that I absolutely do NOT see the Carmen/Zack/Ivy relationship as having a significant sexual dimension. Adventure, romance, swashbuckling, devious Carmen clues, it's all cool, and if you're motivated in that direction, I wouldn't object in the least to a crossover encounter.

Good luck, and good writing!