Dear Yuletide Writer 2021....

[betony]

 Another year, another Yule! Thank you so much for writing for me, or at least taking the interest in my requests to check this letter out! 
Requests are all arranged alphabetically by fandom name, and all equally beloved and woefully rare in the wild. Most important of all, I hope you write something you love and enjoy creating; but if you'd like a bit more guidance, read on:

AO3 name: betony

General likes: humor/snark, plotty fic, ALL THE AUs, and women being awesome in multiple (not just Strong Female Character, to quote Kate Beaton) ways. I also adore backstory or behind-the-scenes fic, and will always, always love outsider POVs and unreliable narrators. Slow-burn relationships and wry banter. I'm a quick reader, so long fic is totally fine, should the question come up, and I have no particular preferences for POV or tense. 

General dislikes: E-rated sex/violence/gore (M or milder is fine), consent issues, fics that hinge solely on angst/hopelessness.

Georgian History RPF
David Soslan,Tamar Queen of Georgia

(Please note no knowledge exceeding the Wikipedia article is necessary for this prompt! I have a great deal to learn myself.)I can't help but think that Queen Tamar was awesome, omigosh, but I must admit that there is still a great deal I could stand to learn about her, so anything you want to teach me about her would be great! I find her relationship with David Soslan really interesting too, particularly as compared with her relationship with her first husband; unlike Yuri, David was notable for his complete support of her (he seems to be satisfied with the status of prince consort), and what's more, he was apparently a student of Tamar's Aunt Rusudan, which means it's possible for them to have known each other when younger. So something dealing with their relationship would be neat--but I must admit Tamar fascinates me far more, so if you want to focus more on her, I will absolutely not complain. 

(Because my brain has this bizarre tendency to cross fandoms, a simpler way to explain this might be as follows: I sometimes find myself thinking of Tamar as a rather nicer Irene of Attolia, with David as her Attolis--with the rocky road to queenship and the backstabbing, antagonistic nobles, and even the disastrous first marriage! Er, not that I see Tamar and David as having the same sort of ah, history or relationship, but a version of their story with the same sort of feel would be really great. But if you're not familiar with the Queen's Thief series, feel free to ignore this! That said, if you're not and you like cleverly written novels of intrigue, do check them out for your own enjoyment!)

Hazard (Short Story)- Georgette Heyer
Helen Morland, Granville Marquis of Carlington
For one of Heyer's shorter works, "Hazard" involves a surpringly lot of plot, and a couple who--despite the reader's less than promising introduction to them--actually seem to like and respect each other. Helen in particular is a delight--steely and jaded and <i>angry</i> in a way few Heyer heroines are allowed to be. At first, the prospect of a woman being won at the card table was decidedly offputting, and certainly I have to wonder why Carlington associated with Helen's horrible half-brother and his cronies, but then! the implied mutual pining in the backstory (tell me more about that! How did they fall so in love that drunk Carlington behaves so outrageously, and that Helen seem supremely confident in taking her bets with him over Brother Ralph?), and the turn into hilarious farce with Carlington's fiance (I laughed through the scene of them talking at cross-purposes as much as Helen did)--basically, "Hazard" is a set up both for tropey delight and silly humor, and I would be so pleased to read more of both!

The Mask of Zorro (1998)
Elena de la Vega, Alejandro Murrieta
I would really like something Elena-centric; I always have to wonder why the creators never spend much time, in either this movie or the sequel, on the character who arguably undergoes the most upheavals during the running time. How in the world does Elena react to finding out that her father isn't really her father, the random servant she's been talking to actually is her biological father, the man who's been courting her is a peasant instead of a nobleman (and also, y'know, Zorro.) More intriguingly, she also gets a chance to reevaluate her impression of her mother--what does she find out about Esperanza? How do any or all of these affect her? Judging from the sequel, it seems Alejandro was the one to inherit the de la Vega title; how, why, and how does Elena feel about that?If you're up for plotty adventure fic, Alejandro implies in the sequel that she joined him on his exploits as Zorro, and certainly her behavior implies she's no stranger to self-defense, so Elena being heroic and awesome, either with Zorro or on her own? If you like AUs, a story where Diego isn't identified/imprisoned, Esperanza lives, and Elena (either with or without her parents' blessing) takes up the masked fight for justice, maybe crossing paths along the way with a horse bandit named Alejandro Murrieta? (I think Elena/Alejandro also needs a fair bit of development, in both canon and AUs, to get us to where they are in Legend of Zorro, so dealing with that is also something I'd be interested in!)  

Hopefully at least one of these prompts fired the imagination! More than anything I hope you find something that you have fun writing, and I'm sure I'll love anything you produce for one of these fandoms. Thank you, once again, and I hope you have a seriously fantastic Yuletide as well!