escritoireazul (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
escritoireazul) wrote2017-10-03 10:33 am
escritoireazul) wrote2017-10-03 10:33 am
Entry tags:
Fandom: Dear Yuletide Author 2017
Dear Yuletide Author,
Yuletide is my favorite fannish time of the year, and I can’t wait to see what you create. It brings me great joy to write stories for people for Yuletide, and I hope that you have a lot of fun and a wonderful experience this Yuletide.
Below, I’ve provided some general likes and Do Not Wants, as well as a few thoughts about why I like specific fandoms and characters. If there is a discrepancy between the general likes and DNWs and the fandom-specific information, go with the fandom-specific information.
My absolutely favorite things: werewolves, crossovers, and monsters and magic.
You can find me on DW, LJ, and AO3 as escritoireazul.
Likes:
+ werewolves and werewolf packs as families and werewolf alternate universes in any canon and full moons over the ocean
+ chosen families being loving and protective and a little snarly with each other because they trust each other to always be there and adoption stories where adoption is treated as totally normal and not a BIG DRAMATIC SECRET to up the tension and siblings as friends and friends as family
+ poly families, threesomes, foursomes, and moresomes, in all sorts of configurations (Vs, triangles, dodecahedrons)
+ monsters of the week, casefic, adventure stories, mysteries
+ friends and family teaming up to save the world, road trip stories, motorcycles and highways and the open road spooling out before them
+ crossovers and fusions
+ kink: biting, light bondage, impact play, rough body play, bloodplay particularly for supernatural characters, fireplay, marking, sensory overload, orgasm denial/control, pegging -- female top or dom only except for the biting
+ ghost hunting AUs of all types, including this state-mandated idea
Do Not Want:
+ characters dealing with racism, sexism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, fat hate, or ableism within the story
+ character bashing
+ rape, non-con, and dub-con
+ embarrassment/humiliation
+ animal cruelty or death
+ character death (unless it is, for example, a character dying to become a vampire, and therefore still being a part of the story)
+ incest
+ big age difference in romantic relationships (except for supernatural creatures), particularly an older man/younger woman
+ a/b/o or werewolf stories with Big Tough Alpha Male tropes
+ pregnancy, including mpreg
+ spiders (There is a sort of exception in my Down in the Library Basement request.)
Requests
There are spoilers in my prompts.
16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds: Lucy
Source material: An adorable online game about what it says on the tin. It is fun and delightful, makes excellent use of all sorts of vampire lore, and has some fantastic queer subtext (or text, depending on how you play). I would enjoy both light-hearted fun takes on vampire hunting or something dark and frightening and terrible.
I came out of this game wanting a billion stories about queer vampire hunting girls, and ship Lucy (the delightful, smart, creative protagonist) with both Maggie (one of the people who hunt vampires with Lucy, best described in the game as: Maggie looks like Tinkerbell. Five feet tall with short blonde hair and a wide smile. The effect is only slightly ruined by the machete and the spray of blood decorating her face and tank top) and Claire (the adorable cashier).
Prompts:
Though Lucy is already a vampire hunter, finding a vampire in McDonalds is weird even for her team. What other strange places have they found vampires? What’s a more normal hunt look like? What clever ways has Lucy lured the vampires to her and off to be destroyed?
Lucy and team hunt vampires, but do they hunt other things too? If they exclusively hunt vampires, are vampires the only supernatural creatures in this world? Do they know teams of people who hunt other kinds of monsters? What happens if they have to team up with one of them, or even with other vampire hunters to take out a big group of vampires?
Once you find all the endings, you can briefly play as Claire, the adorable cashier, and in some of those endings, she goes off with Lucy to become a vampire hunter. What happens next? Does Lucy take on her training and teach her to also be bait (that would give their team two fighters and two bait)? Does Lucy introduce her to Maggie (maybe just to see the chaos that happens)? Does Claire last as a hunter, and if not, how does Lucy deal with it?
For that matter, has Lucy lost other friends/team members/family to vampires before? Why does she do this? How did Lucy and her team come together? Lucy may play at being bait, but she can kill a vampire just as well as her team can. What did her training look like? Did she work with Maggie (and Luke) from the beginning?
I love the glimpses of the supernatural world we get here, particularly the use of various pieces of vampire lore, and would love to see that world expanded (with the focus still on Lucy experiencing it). One of my (many) favorite parts is that the ghosts of the people the vampire kills lingers around him, calling out for help, which is handled in a pretty damn creepy way for a lighthearted quick game.
Down in the Library Basement - sleepyhollow_101: Cassie
Source material: A story posted to NoSleep in three parts (one, two, three) and then adapted to a podcast story (and it is GREAT), it’s about a young woman, Cassie, who has to step in to run a small-town library for her mother when her mother breaks her leg. There’s something special about this library, something in the basement, and Cassie has quite an adventure with it, her mother, and eventually a cadre of confident, fierce, wonderful librarians.
I love Cassie and her story so much; she goes from reluctantly helping her mother to being terrified of the thing in the basement, to being protective and smart and loyal. Her mother is also great, and the rest of the librarians who show up in the last part absolutely delightful.
The thing in the basement is giant and spider-like, which means my DNW sort of doesn’t apply here (and also, I have no idea why I love this story so much, because normally I would have noped out of this the second I figured it out). It is also, somehow, a delight.
Prompts:
By the end, Cassie is pretty much signed up for life at the library and with the thing in the basement, and there are now things in the basements of many libraries thanks to Cassie and her mother. What does Cassie get up to with the other librarians at the other libraries? Since the library protectors could be considered supernatural-esque creatures (if not purely supernatural), what other sorts of things exist in library space? Do they start working to introduce children to the idea of a world bigger than it originally seems?
Not all of the creatures are safe. There’s one particular one in the story that is a maneater, but there are likely more out there, too. I really want to see Cassie, her mother, and the other librarians forming a team to hunt them down and protect the world, using the safe creatures to help.
These are basically giant spiders and therefore terrifying and some of them are maneaters. Kids disappear. Kids are eaten. Tell me a horror story about one in another town, or one coming to this town now that the big male has been killed. (I still can’t believe how much I want a horror story about a giant spider.)
Cassie seems absolutely delighted by some of the women who come to hunt the big maneating male creature. Does she go on to hook up with them? If she gets serious about someone who isn’t already a librarian in the know, at what point does she tell them about the guardian of the library? Does she ever? If she doesn’t, do they accidentally find out?
While I always love crossovers, I think this canon in particular sets itself up with great crossover potential, because many other canons have libraries, either front and center or in the background, and real world, there are so many different types of libraries to choose from.
United States of Asgard - Tessa Gratton: Amon Thorson, Astrid Glyn, Glory | Fenris Wolf, Soren Bearstar
Source material: A three novel and three novella series about a world where the Norse gods are real and present in modern-day life. It is mostly the story of three teenagers who change their world, and the characters, gods and mortals alike, who surround them. Dot Hutchison once described the three books in an absolutely perfect way: If Soren’s journey was about accepting himself, and Signy’s about anchoring herself, then Astrid’s journey is about making herself.
I love the world Gratton built. I love the ways the gods are and are not involved with the human world, I love how they can and can’t be trusted, all at the same time, I love the details of how the world has changed because the gods are real and active and what that means for the USA. (One thing I hate is the treatment of the Native American tribes and [lack of] characters; though there are a handful of references to what happened when the Norse gods and their followers came over, mostly they are erased from the narrative, with the exception of Soren’s Pacific Islander ancestry.)
Mostly, though, I love the characters. They are young and strong and weak and fierce, afraid and brave and driven, loved and loving, and, always, hungry to make the world better in whatever way that means to them. I love all of these characters, and would love to see their adventures, together and apart.
You do not need to include all four characters.
Prompts:
Amon Thorson: I love Amon so damn much. I love that he rebels against being the son of oh-so-beloved Thor, how difficult it can be for him to be black and biracial in a world that, in many ways, worships the whiteness of the gods (as with Soren, their dark skin marks them as not “true” Asgardians to many people), how he buries his queerness because of the sharp heterosexuality of Thor and many of his followers. I love how he loved the elf Eirfinna, and how he and Sune clash together and then tear apart. I love how he sells black market goods mostly to thumb his nose at his father, and how he loves his sister and his mother deeply and wants to make them think the best of him despite everything.
I’m very intrigued by Amon’s relationship with his sister, Gunn-Elin, and the ways their different life choices bring them together and apart. (Unlike Amon, Gunn-Elin has dedicated herself to Sif [Thor’s wife], and she finds purpose in identifying bones in an ossuary, where they wait for Thor to call them to fight.) I would love to see them together growing up or them as adults having an adventure together. (Gunn-Elin plays a small but important role in The Apple Throne, but flat out tells Astrid that her adventure and fate does not lie with their adventure; I would love to see a time that her adventure and fate aligns with Amon’s.)
In the final book, Amon publicly acknowledges Thor as his father in a way that surprises and pleases both his parents. There’s some implication that this will change things for him. What does that look like? How does he interact with people now that he’s actually taking his place as Thor’s son?
Amon now knows Astrid and Soren and Signy. Do they get up to new adventures together? Amon is a relic-hunter and a black market dealer and a delightful troublemaker. That’s a great contrast to Soren and, in some ways, to Astrid, but Signy acts similarly in her own way. Do their friendships continue? How does that look for them?
I ship Amon with pretty much everyone in the tagset except for Vider, and I also ship him hardcore with Sune the hunter. I’d love to see them finally figuring out how to be together, or how Amon fits into Astrid’s life with Soren, or how Amon hooks up during his adventures.
Astrid Glyn: The thing I love most about Astrid is that she weaves herself back into the strands of fate after she’s been pulled from them to become Idun. She makes her own fate, and gives herself adventures, and finds a way to be both a goddess and a girl.
I love her seething and her roadtrips with her mother before the start of the series, and would love to see more of that, the adventures they had, the futures they foretold. Astrid having romances in the Lokiskin camps where they stayed, Astrid dancing and spinning out into that great void between stars to see the future. I love her seething after she weaves herself back into the world, visceral and dangerous and amazing.
I’d love to see more of how she makes life work, being both a goddess and a girl. She finds a way for Idun to publicly love the Sun’s Berserk, the same way that Astrid loves Soren, but that changes a lot of things for them. How do their lives, together and apart, look now? Astrid is interested in making Idun more available to the public; does she ever manage that? What sort of adventures does she get up to now that she is maybe not quite so tied to her orchard but also accepts that she wants to be there with her trees?
I ship Astrid and Soren hard, and would love to see more of them together during any of the books or after, the way they build their lives together, a girl goddess and a very public berserker who would rather not be public at all. I also ship the two of them with Baldur, both during the first book, when he is mortal and gentled without his memories, but also after, when he’s back to being his glorious, flirtatious, overwhelming self. While I love any two of them together as well as all three, the core of this for me is how Astrid and Soren love each other, and I prefer that reflected no matter what else is going on.
I think that Astrid and Soren have the freedom to take lovers apart from each other (though, again, their love is the core of everything), and while I’m not sure Soren ever will, I think Astrid does, particularly of the gods and goddesses who come to her as friends. I love the hints in the canon that Astrid is maybe queer (there’s a scene in particular where Loki becomes a girl and they two of them spend the night together, possibly with sex -- I would love to see that part, actually), and I want to see that reflected elsewhere. (I particularly love Astrid and Signy, because they are so, so different, and the ways they each love Soren are different, and I think the two of them would clash in glorious ways. Same for Astrid and Glory.)
I’d love to see the friendships/lovers Astrid builds now that she’s determined not to lock herself away from the world. What does it look like, for a goddess who is also a girl to be friends with the gods? She and Glory spark off each other, and Glory is, for a long time, forbidden from Astrid’s orchard because of her hunger. Astrid opens her orchard to all, including the elf-as-a-trollmother, and I would love to see more of that in the future, and Glory being welcomed, too.
Glory | Fenris Wolf: Glory is basically a werewolf, and she’s fated to devour the sun and signal Ragnarok. She’s bound to teenage girl shape, and her hunger rages unchecked. She is amazing.
Glory’s been alive a long, long time, and I would love to see the different ways the world looks to her at different times. She’s seen the rise and fall of countries, the changes to the ways the valkyries get to be valkyries, Soren becoming the first berserker in New Asgard history to swear to a god other than Odin; she’s seen and she’s done and she’s become bored of so many things. What sparked her interest, historically? What will catch her eye in the future? What does it look like, when she finally breaks free of her chains and devours Baldur, the sun?
She’s viciously sexual and violent and only lets the people she’s going to fight or fuck call her Fenris. Her hunger rages in all things. Show me these moments, painful, hot, dangerous, fucking and fighting, violence in the sex. Who does she fuck or fight? What does it take for a human to draw her attention? Soren intrigues her, but who else and what else can (even if only temporarily) sate her hunger? In short: vicious, violent, sexual, basically-a-god werewolf.
Soren Bearstar: My love for Soren grows each time I reread the books (which is often). He’s so scared of his own power and rage, and he fights to control it and, when it breaks free, to focus it in a way that does the least amount of damage. I love that about him. He’s described a couple of times of holding to a path once he chooses it until fate itself bends to what he wants; he doesn’t choose between what fate has given him (and fate is very literally in this world), but makes his own strands (options) to choose. He changed the world by remembering Astrid and by becoming the Sun’s Berserk, and he is wonderful.
He is the focus of the first book in the series, of course, but also plays a strong part in both the other books and one of the novellas. He has these grand adventures with the main characters, and they all end up loving him in one way or another. What other adventures does he get up to? He’s rescued a missing god, faced a powerful trollmother, fought a damn dragon: what don’t we get to see? Glory is terribly fond of him, and I’d love to see her drag him off onto more adventures. What sort of monsters does he fight? How else does he change the world?
He’s very different from all the other berserkers in a lot of ways, but at least one wants him to be his mentor. Signy once tells Soren that people push him away because he shuts them out first. Does he ever find any comfort with the berserkers? He is not the only “strange” one now, what with Vider not only being the only female berserker in generations, but eventually leaving her training to make her own life as a berserker. Do Soren and Vider start a trend of some berserkers finding their own way? (Soren’s father rebelled as well, for Soren and his mother, and was punished for it so harshly it triggered his berserker rage and ended badly. I hope Soren and Vider have happier endings.)
I ship Soren and Astrid with all the fire of a billion suns, and would love to see more of then. At the end of the third book, Astrid-as-Idun has fought for an even better way to have Soren in her life and to be public about it, has fought to make herself a place in the world after Astrid the girl has been ripped out of it to become Idun. Now that they are public, now that Soren is tied so strongly to the gods Baldur and Idun, what does that change for him? What does Astrid and Soren’s relationship look like as they get older? Now that they can be public, do they dance at the gods’ feasts? Do they date? Are they the subject of all the gossip rags?
I also ship the two of them with Baldur, both Baldur when he is both a god and a vulnerable mortal in the first book, but also as the series continues. Astrid loves the gods in wonderful, terrible ways, but Soren only learns to love them through Baldur, and I love the three of them together. Baldur is gentled when he is mortal in the first book, and I would love to see their deep friendship, their commit, explored further, but he’s glorious and flirtatious and overwhelming when he gets his memories back, and I would love to see how he, Soren, and Astrid figure out the new boundaries of their commit.
I think that though Astrid is the core of Soren’s heart, and he of hers, that they each have the freedom to take other lovers away from each other. I’m not entirely convinced Soren would actually act on this (except for Baldur, see above, and always with Astrid as their third, even if she’s not physically there), but I think the opportunity is there, and I’m curious as to whether he ever became comfortable enough in his own strength and rage and control to act on it.
Yuletide is my favorite fannish time of the year, and I can’t wait to see what you create. It brings me great joy to write stories for people for Yuletide, and I hope that you have a lot of fun and a wonderful experience this Yuletide.
Below, I’ve provided some general likes and Do Not Wants, as well as a few thoughts about why I like specific fandoms and characters. If there is a discrepancy between the general likes and DNWs and the fandom-specific information, go with the fandom-specific information.
My absolutely favorite things: werewolves, crossovers, and monsters and magic.
You can find me on DW, LJ, and AO3 as escritoireazul.
Likes:
+ werewolves and werewolf packs as families and werewolf alternate universes in any canon and full moons over the ocean
+ chosen families being loving and protective and a little snarly with each other because they trust each other to always be there and adoption stories where adoption is treated as totally normal and not a BIG DRAMATIC SECRET to up the tension and siblings as friends and friends as family
+ poly families, threesomes, foursomes, and moresomes, in all sorts of configurations (Vs, triangles, dodecahedrons)
+ monsters of the week, casefic, adventure stories, mysteries
+ friends and family teaming up to save the world, road trip stories, motorcycles and highways and the open road spooling out before them
+ crossovers and fusions
+ kink: biting, light bondage, impact play, rough body play, bloodplay particularly for supernatural characters, fireplay, marking, sensory overload, orgasm denial/control, pegging -- female top or dom only except for the biting
+ ghost hunting AUs of all types, including this state-mandated idea
Do Not Want:
+ characters dealing with racism, sexism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, fat hate, or ableism within the story
+ character bashing
+ rape, non-con, and dub-con
+ embarrassment/humiliation
+ animal cruelty or death
+ character death (unless it is, for example, a character dying to become a vampire, and therefore still being a part of the story)
+ incest
+ big age difference in romantic relationships (except for supernatural creatures), particularly an older man/younger woman
+ a/b/o or werewolf stories with Big Tough Alpha Male tropes
+ pregnancy, including mpreg
+ spiders (There is a sort of exception in my Down in the Library Basement request.)
Requests
There are spoilers in my prompts.
16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonalds: Lucy
Source material: An adorable online game about what it says on the tin. It is fun and delightful, makes excellent use of all sorts of vampire lore, and has some fantastic queer subtext (or text, depending on how you play). I would enjoy both light-hearted fun takes on vampire hunting or something dark and frightening and terrible.
I came out of this game wanting a billion stories about queer vampire hunting girls, and ship Lucy (the delightful, smart, creative protagonist) with both Maggie (one of the people who hunt vampires with Lucy, best described in the game as: Maggie looks like Tinkerbell. Five feet tall with short blonde hair and a wide smile. The effect is only slightly ruined by the machete and the spray of blood decorating her face and tank top) and Claire (the adorable cashier).
Prompts:
Though Lucy is already a vampire hunter, finding a vampire in McDonalds is weird even for her team. What other strange places have they found vampires? What’s a more normal hunt look like? What clever ways has Lucy lured the vampires to her and off to be destroyed?
Lucy and team hunt vampires, but do they hunt other things too? If they exclusively hunt vampires, are vampires the only supernatural creatures in this world? Do they know teams of people who hunt other kinds of monsters? What happens if they have to team up with one of them, or even with other vampire hunters to take out a big group of vampires?
Once you find all the endings, you can briefly play as Claire, the adorable cashier, and in some of those endings, she goes off with Lucy to become a vampire hunter. What happens next? Does Lucy take on her training and teach her to also be bait (that would give their team two fighters and two bait)? Does Lucy introduce her to Maggie (maybe just to see the chaos that happens)? Does Claire last as a hunter, and if not, how does Lucy deal with it?
For that matter, has Lucy lost other friends/team members/family to vampires before? Why does she do this? How did Lucy and her team come together? Lucy may play at being bait, but she can kill a vampire just as well as her team can. What did her training look like? Did she work with Maggie (and Luke) from the beginning?
I love the glimpses of the supernatural world we get here, particularly the use of various pieces of vampire lore, and would love to see that world expanded (with the focus still on Lucy experiencing it). One of my (many) favorite parts is that the ghosts of the people the vampire kills lingers around him, calling out for help, which is handled in a pretty damn creepy way for a lighthearted quick game.
Down in the Library Basement - sleepyhollow_101: Cassie
Source material: A story posted to NoSleep in three parts (one, two, three) and then adapted to a podcast story (and it is GREAT), it’s about a young woman, Cassie, who has to step in to run a small-town library for her mother when her mother breaks her leg. There’s something special about this library, something in the basement, and Cassie has quite an adventure with it, her mother, and eventually a cadre of confident, fierce, wonderful librarians.
I love Cassie and her story so much; she goes from reluctantly helping her mother to being terrified of the thing in the basement, to being protective and smart and loyal. Her mother is also great, and the rest of the librarians who show up in the last part absolutely delightful.
The thing in the basement is giant and spider-like, which means my DNW sort of doesn’t apply here (and also, I have no idea why I love this story so much, because normally I would have noped out of this the second I figured it out). It is also, somehow, a delight.
Prompts:
By the end, Cassie is pretty much signed up for life at the library and with the thing in the basement, and there are now things in the basements of many libraries thanks to Cassie and her mother. What does Cassie get up to with the other librarians at the other libraries? Since the library protectors could be considered supernatural-esque creatures (if not purely supernatural), what other sorts of things exist in library space? Do they start working to introduce children to the idea of a world bigger than it originally seems?
Not all of the creatures are safe. There’s one particular one in the story that is a maneater, but there are likely more out there, too. I really want to see Cassie, her mother, and the other librarians forming a team to hunt them down and protect the world, using the safe creatures to help.
These are basically giant spiders and therefore terrifying and some of them are maneaters. Kids disappear. Kids are eaten. Tell me a horror story about one in another town, or one coming to this town now that the big male has been killed. (I still can’t believe how much I want a horror story about a giant spider.)
Cassie seems absolutely delighted by some of the women who come to hunt the big maneating male creature. Does she go on to hook up with them? If she gets serious about someone who isn’t already a librarian in the know, at what point does she tell them about the guardian of the library? Does she ever? If she doesn’t, do they accidentally find out?
While I always love crossovers, I think this canon in particular sets itself up with great crossover potential, because many other canons have libraries, either front and center or in the background, and real world, there are so many different types of libraries to choose from.
United States of Asgard - Tessa Gratton: Amon Thorson, Astrid Glyn, Glory | Fenris Wolf, Soren Bearstar
Source material: A three novel and three novella series about a world where the Norse gods are real and present in modern-day life. It is mostly the story of three teenagers who change their world, and the characters, gods and mortals alike, who surround them. Dot Hutchison once described the three books in an absolutely perfect way: If Soren’s journey was about accepting himself, and Signy’s about anchoring herself, then Astrid’s journey is about making herself.
I love the world Gratton built. I love the ways the gods are and are not involved with the human world, I love how they can and can’t be trusted, all at the same time, I love the details of how the world has changed because the gods are real and active and what that means for the USA. (One thing I hate is the treatment of the Native American tribes and [lack of] characters; though there are a handful of references to what happened when the Norse gods and their followers came over, mostly they are erased from the narrative, with the exception of Soren’s Pacific Islander ancestry.)
Mostly, though, I love the characters. They are young and strong and weak and fierce, afraid and brave and driven, loved and loving, and, always, hungry to make the world better in whatever way that means to them. I love all of these characters, and would love to see their adventures, together and apart.
You do not need to include all four characters.
Prompts:
Amon Thorson: I love Amon so damn much. I love that he rebels against being the son of oh-so-beloved Thor, how difficult it can be for him to be black and biracial in a world that, in many ways, worships the whiteness of the gods (as with Soren, their dark skin marks them as not “true” Asgardians to many people), how he buries his queerness because of the sharp heterosexuality of Thor and many of his followers. I love how he loved the elf Eirfinna, and how he and Sune clash together and then tear apart. I love how he sells black market goods mostly to thumb his nose at his father, and how he loves his sister and his mother deeply and wants to make them think the best of him despite everything.
I’m very intrigued by Amon’s relationship with his sister, Gunn-Elin, and the ways their different life choices bring them together and apart. (Unlike Amon, Gunn-Elin has dedicated herself to Sif [Thor’s wife], and she finds purpose in identifying bones in an ossuary, where they wait for Thor to call them to fight.) I would love to see them together growing up or them as adults having an adventure together. (Gunn-Elin plays a small but important role in The Apple Throne, but flat out tells Astrid that her adventure and fate does not lie with their adventure; I would love to see a time that her adventure and fate aligns with Amon’s.)
In the final book, Amon publicly acknowledges Thor as his father in a way that surprises and pleases both his parents. There’s some implication that this will change things for him. What does that look like? How does he interact with people now that he’s actually taking his place as Thor’s son?
Amon now knows Astrid and Soren and Signy. Do they get up to new adventures together? Amon is a relic-hunter and a black market dealer and a delightful troublemaker. That’s a great contrast to Soren and, in some ways, to Astrid, but Signy acts similarly in her own way. Do their friendships continue? How does that look for them?
I ship Amon with pretty much everyone in the tagset except for Vider, and I also ship him hardcore with Sune the hunter. I’d love to see them finally figuring out how to be together, or how Amon fits into Astrid’s life with Soren, or how Amon hooks up during his adventures.
Astrid Glyn: The thing I love most about Astrid is that she weaves herself back into the strands of fate after she’s been pulled from them to become Idun. She makes her own fate, and gives herself adventures, and finds a way to be both a goddess and a girl.
I love her seething and her roadtrips with her mother before the start of the series, and would love to see more of that, the adventures they had, the futures they foretold. Astrid having romances in the Lokiskin camps where they stayed, Astrid dancing and spinning out into that great void between stars to see the future. I love her seething after she weaves herself back into the world, visceral and dangerous and amazing.
I’d love to see more of how she makes life work, being both a goddess and a girl. She finds a way for Idun to publicly love the Sun’s Berserk, the same way that Astrid loves Soren, but that changes a lot of things for them. How do their lives, together and apart, look now? Astrid is interested in making Idun more available to the public; does she ever manage that? What sort of adventures does she get up to now that she is maybe not quite so tied to her orchard but also accepts that she wants to be there with her trees?
I ship Astrid and Soren hard, and would love to see more of them together during any of the books or after, the way they build their lives together, a girl goddess and a very public berserker who would rather not be public at all. I also ship the two of them with Baldur, both during the first book, when he is mortal and gentled without his memories, but also after, when he’s back to being his glorious, flirtatious, overwhelming self. While I love any two of them together as well as all three, the core of this for me is how Astrid and Soren love each other, and I prefer that reflected no matter what else is going on.
I think that Astrid and Soren have the freedom to take lovers apart from each other (though, again, their love is the core of everything), and while I’m not sure Soren ever will, I think Astrid does, particularly of the gods and goddesses who come to her as friends. I love the hints in the canon that Astrid is maybe queer (there’s a scene in particular where Loki becomes a girl and they two of them spend the night together, possibly with sex -- I would love to see that part, actually), and I want to see that reflected elsewhere. (I particularly love Astrid and Signy, because they are so, so different, and the ways they each love Soren are different, and I think the two of them would clash in glorious ways. Same for Astrid and Glory.)
I’d love to see the friendships/lovers Astrid builds now that she’s determined not to lock herself away from the world. What does it look like, for a goddess who is also a girl to be friends with the gods? She and Glory spark off each other, and Glory is, for a long time, forbidden from Astrid’s orchard because of her hunger. Astrid opens her orchard to all, including the elf-as-a-trollmother, and I would love to see more of that in the future, and Glory being welcomed, too.
Glory | Fenris Wolf: Glory is basically a werewolf, and she’s fated to devour the sun and signal Ragnarok. She’s bound to teenage girl shape, and her hunger rages unchecked. She is amazing.
Glory’s been alive a long, long time, and I would love to see the different ways the world looks to her at different times. She’s seen the rise and fall of countries, the changes to the ways the valkyries get to be valkyries, Soren becoming the first berserker in New Asgard history to swear to a god other than Odin; she’s seen and she’s done and she’s become bored of so many things. What sparked her interest, historically? What will catch her eye in the future? What does it look like, when she finally breaks free of her chains and devours Baldur, the sun?
She’s viciously sexual and violent and only lets the people she’s going to fight or fuck call her Fenris. Her hunger rages in all things. Show me these moments, painful, hot, dangerous, fucking and fighting, violence in the sex. Who does she fuck or fight? What does it take for a human to draw her attention? Soren intrigues her, but who else and what else can (even if only temporarily) sate her hunger? In short: vicious, violent, sexual, basically-a-god werewolf.
Soren Bearstar: My love for Soren grows each time I reread the books (which is often). He’s so scared of his own power and rage, and he fights to control it and, when it breaks free, to focus it in a way that does the least amount of damage. I love that about him. He’s described a couple of times of holding to a path once he chooses it until fate itself bends to what he wants; he doesn’t choose between what fate has given him (and fate is very literally in this world), but makes his own strands (options) to choose. He changed the world by remembering Astrid and by becoming the Sun’s Berserk, and he is wonderful.
He is the focus of the first book in the series, of course, but also plays a strong part in both the other books and one of the novellas. He has these grand adventures with the main characters, and they all end up loving him in one way or another. What other adventures does he get up to? He’s rescued a missing god, faced a powerful trollmother, fought a damn dragon: what don’t we get to see? Glory is terribly fond of him, and I’d love to see her drag him off onto more adventures. What sort of monsters does he fight? How else does he change the world?
He’s very different from all the other berserkers in a lot of ways, but at least one wants him to be his mentor. Signy once tells Soren that people push him away because he shuts them out first. Does he ever find any comfort with the berserkers? He is not the only “strange” one now, what with Vider not only being the only female berserker in generations, but eventually leaving her training to make her own life as a berserker. Do Soren and Vider start a trend of some berserkers finding their own way? (Soren’s father rebelled as well, for Soren and his mother, and was punished for it so harshly it triggered his berserker rage and ended badly. I hope Soren and Vider have happier endings.)
I ship Soren and Astrid with all the fire of a billion suns, and would love to see more of then. At the end of the third book, Astrid-as-Idun has fought for an even better way to have Soren in her life and to be public about it, has fought to make herself a place in the world after Astrid the girl has been ripped out of it to become Idun. Now that they are public, now that Soren is tied so strongly to the gods Baldur and Idun, what does that change for him? What does Astrid and Soren’s relationship look like as they get older? Now that they can be public, do they dance at the gods’ feasts? Do they date? Are they the subject of all the gossip rags?
I also ship the two of them with Baldur, both Baldur when he is both a god and a vulnerable mortal in the first book, but also as the series continues. Astrid loves the gods in wonderful, terrible ways, but Soren only learns to love them through Baldur, and I love the three of them together. Baldur is gentled when he is mortal in the first book, and I would love to see their deep friendship, their commit, explored further, but he’s glorious and flirtatious and overwhelming when he gets his memories back, and I would love to see how he, Soren, and Astrid figure out the new boundaries of their commit.
I think that though Astrid is the core of Soren’s heart, and he of hers, that they each have the freedom to take other lovers away from each other. I’m not entirely convinced Soren would actually act on this (except for Baldur, see above, and always with Astrid as their third, even if she’s not physically there), but I think the opportunity is there, and I’m curious as to whether he ever became comfortable enough in his own strength and rage and control to act on it.