Dear Yulemouse
10 October 2013 07:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
larryhammer[Context: I'm participating again in Yuletide, a massively multiplayer online fanfic gift-exchange (MMOFGE) for rare fandoms. As usual, I'm participating in only public-domain fandoms, this time specifically non-European ones -- though we'll see if that's too limiting. Anyway, this is a public letter to my anonymouse gifter explaining my requests.]
Dear Yulemouse,
Oh wow -- you actually wanted to write one of these things. *pause to emit animated ♥s all over the screen*
Ahem. Seriously, though, I'm not a picky recipient -- if you write something in one of these fandoms, I'm pretty sure I'll to love it. And not just because it'll be a fic in a genuinely rare fandom, which will add significantly to the number of fics in it. Plus, yanno, you wrote it for me. I have some comments below on my requests below and general notes on my tastes, but you should write what you want. Write with the love you have for the fandom you offered, and the love will come.
Man'yoshu, any characters -- Japan's oldest poetry collection, compiled in the 8th century.
When I said "anything," I meant it. The field is wiiide open. If you're looking for some prompts, there are some especially fruitful choka, especially by Hitomaro (the farewell to his wife, the journey he meets a corpse) and Yakamochi (his exchanges with his friend while a provincial governor -- not to mention his tanka exchanges with Ôtomo no Sakanoe no Iratsume). Other possible incidents include Tabito's infamous plum blossom party (wouldn't you hate to be one of the untalented attendants who had to produce a poem anyway?), or Okura's exchange with three random river-women (talk about a setup for a fantasy PWP fic). Any of these could get a story wrapped around them. Or, yanno, you could just string together random love poems as a songfic.
There's a whole lot of story goodness in this enormous anthology -- imperial entanglements, funeral elegies, love affairs, thinly disguised fertility rites, poems of home by frontier guardsmen. All of it with only minimal scaffolding. So much to work with.
Resources: Aside from the handful of poems from various anthologies of Japanese poetry, I know the canon mainly from Edwin Cranston's The Gem-Glistening Cup (which I highly recommend) -- all the above prompts were inspired by poems translated there. There are a few older translations of selections, including one from Dover Books, as well as at least one recent translation of some love poems, but I cannot recommend them -- those more than 50 years old that I've looked at were of dubious quality and accuracy, and I haven't seen at the love poems.
Ise monogatari | Tales of Ise, character Ariwara no Narihira -- A Japanese collection of stories about poems and the circumstances of their composition, reportedly organized around the love affairs of 9th century courtier Ariwara no Narihira.
I requested Narihira as a character, but given he's not actually named (who knows how many of the episodes not credited to him in the Kokinshu are also about him) this is a pretty flexible request. Optional detail which is optional: what I'm really hoping for is something based on the last part of chapter 82 (which is also Kokinshu 418-9), the story of a strayed hunter (whom we can assume is Narihira himself) who arrives at the Banks of the River of Heaven and asks for lodgings of the Weaver Maiden (so in effect, a Tanabata story crossover). But I'd be happy with Narihira/anyone-who-moves -- or Narihira being a mope -- or Narihira drunk with the power of poetry.
Keep in mind that while not every tale in the collection is a love story, given so many of them are (and Narihira's reputation), it's easy to assume (for the sake of a premise) that even those that claim not to be really are. And given how brief the stories are, there's a lot of openings to work with.
Resources: The only full translation of Ise monogatari I'm familiar with is Helen Craig McCullough's, which is out of print but can readily be found online (at scribd, for example). My translation of the Kokinshu version of the hunter episode is here (another poem from the chapter is here); given the rest of the chapter is potentially useful context, you may want to track down Ise itself, though. Especially if you go with other episodes instead. If you do go with chapter 82, possible further context is all the Tanabata poems in the Kokinshu.
Changhen Ge | Song of Everlasting Regret, character Yáng Yùhuán -- Chinese narrative poem by Bai Juyi about a Tang dynasty revolt and its cost to the emperor and his favorite concubine.
Anything with Yáng Yùhuán/Yang Guifei. This can be a Her Version retelling, or a fix-it fic, or their reincarnations trying to get it right, or pre-revolt PWP of her and Emperor Xuanzong getting it on, or a space-opera AU (or jazz-age AU, or hard-boiled nior) -- whatever strikes your muse's fancy.
Given the sweep and tenor of Bai Juyi's original (and, yanno, Chinese history in general), more than my other requests this could accommodate a truly tragic story. Or, contrariwise, a fix-it. Your call.
Resources: Here are several translations, some with potentially useful annotations: Wikisource, Barnstone, Ying Sun, YK Kwan, unknown, Bynner, Giles, A.S. Kline. (It's not clear how much that last is original work and how much patched together from ponies/other translations, but I include it for completeness.)
I Ching (Anthropomorphic), any characters -- A Chinese book of divination, organized around 64 hexagrams (signs).
The idea behind asking for a story about anthropomorphized hexagrams is my speculation that the fortune descriptions are close to being descriptions of their personalities. You have 64 possible characters and a wide open field. Go!
AFAIK, no one has written this before. You get to create the genre. And to set how important mathematical symmetries are to its conventions. No pressure, right? Nope.
Resources: Wengu has the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching with a casting widget that pulls up only the right passages. (You could even use this to get a random character and, through its transformation, a second character. Or make the transformation its Jekyll/Hyde alternate form. Or its Transformer form. Or its evolved Mon. Crack premise is crack.) The Divination Foundation uses a modern but basically sane translation by Paul O’Brien. There's also enough books out there to fill an entire crystal shop with barely enough room left over for incense.
About me: I like anything from romcom silliness to literary experimentation to hot-n-heavy erotica (het/slash/femslash/multi), or even mysteries/thrillers. Bonus points for including poetry, especially for the poetry fandoms, but it's not at all required. Ditto puns. I really do not like purported "humor" based on humiliation, or humiliation in general, or sadism. What I most want, though, is your interpretation of something, anything, of the original canon. Write me the thing only you can write, and I'll be delighted. After all, as I said above, the idea that someone else could possibly consider being interested in one of these fandoms delights me.
---L.
Dear Yulemouse,
Oh wow -- you actually wanted to write one of these things. *pause to emit animated ♥s all over the screen*
Ahem. Seriously, though, I'm not a picky recipient -- if you write something in one of these fandoms, I'm pretty sure I'll to love it. And not just because it'll be a fic in a genuinely rare fandom, which will add significantly to the number of fics in it. Plus, yanno, you wrote it for me. I have some comments below on my requests below and general notes on my tastes, but you should write what you want. Write with the love you have for the fandom you offered, and the love will come.
Man'yoshu, any characters -- Japan's oldest poetry collection, compiled in the 8th century.
When I said "anything," I meant it. The field is wiiide open. If you're looking for some prompts, there are some especially fruitful choka, especially by Hitomaro (the farewell to his wife, the journey he meets a corpse) and Yakamochi (his exchanges with his friend while a provincial governor -- not to mention his tanka exchanges with Ôtomo no Sakanoe no Iratsume). Other possible incidents include Tabito's infamous plum blossom party (wouldn't you hate to be one of the untalented attendants who had to produce a poem anyway?), or Okura's exchange with three random river-women (talk about a setup for a fantasy PWP fic). Any of these could get a story wrapped around them. Or, yanno, you could just string together random love poems as a songfic.
There's a whole lot of story goodness in this enormous anthology -- imperial entanglements, funeral elegies, love affairs, thinly disguised fertility rites, poems of home by frontier guardsmen. All of it with only minimal scaffolding. So much to work with.
Resources: Aside from the handful of poems from various anthologies of Japanese poetry, I know the canon mainly from Edwin Cranston's The Gem-Glistening Cup (which I highly recommend) -- all the above prompts were inspired by poems translated there. There are a few older translations of selections, including one from Dover Books, as well as at least one recent translation of some love poems, but I cannot recommend them -- those more than 50 years old that I've looked at were of dubious quality and accuracy, and I haven't seen at the love poems.
Ise monogatari | Tales of Ise, character Ariwara no Narihira -- A Japanese collection of stories about poems and the circumstances of their composition, reportedly organized around the love affairs of 9th century courtier Ariwara no Narihira.
I requested Narihira as a character, but given he's not actually named (who knows how many of the episodes not credited to him in the Kokinshu are also about him) this is a pretty flexible request. Optional detail which is optional: what I'm really hoping for is something based on the last part of chapter 82 (which is also Kokinshu 418-9), the story of a strayed hunter (whom we can assume is Narihira himself) who arrives at the Banks of the River of Heaven and asks for lodgings of the Weaver Maiden (so in effect, a Tanabata story crossover). But I'd be happy with Narihira/anyone-who-moves -- or Narihira being a mope -- or Narihira drunk with the power of poetry.
Keep in mind that while not every tale in the collection is a love story, given so many of them are (and Narihira's reputation), it's easy to assume (for the sake of a premise) that even those that claim not to be really are. And given how brief the stories are, there's a lot of openings to work with.
Resources: The only full translation of Ise monogatari I'm familiar with is Helen Craig McCullough's, which is out of print but can readily be found online (at scribd, for example). My translation of the Kokinshu version of the hunter episode is here (another poem from the chapter is here); given the rest of the chapter is potentially useful context, you may want to track down Ise itself, though. Especially if you go with other episodes instead. If you do go with chapter 82, possible further context is all the Tanabata poems in the Kokinshu.
Changhen Ge | Song of Everlasting Regret, character Yáng Yùhuán -- Chinese narrative poem by Bai Juyi about a Tang dynasty revolt and its cost to the emperor and his favorite concubine.
Anything with Yáng Yùhuán/Yang Guifei. This can be a Her Version retelling, or a fix-it fic, or their reincarnations trying to get it right, or pre-revolt PWP of her and Emperor Xuanzong getting it on, or a space-opera AU (or jazz-age AU, or hard-boiled nior) -- whatever strikes your muse's fancy.
Given the sweep and tenor of Bai Juyi's original (and, yanno, Chinese history in general), more than my other requests this could accommodate a truly tragic story. Or, contrariwise, a fix-it. Your call.
Resources: Here are several translations, some with potentially useful annotations: Wikisource, Barnstone, Ying Sun, YK Kwan, unknown, Bynner, Giles, A.S. Kline. (It's not clear how much that last is original work and how much patched together from ponies/other translations, but I include it for completeness.)
I Ching (Anthropomorphic), any characters -- A Chinese book of divination, organized around 64 hexagrams (signs).
The idea behind asking for a story about anthropomorphized hexagrams is my speculation that the fortune descriptions are close to being descriptions of their personalities. You have 64 possible characters and a wide open field. Go!
AFAIK, no one has written this before. You get to create the genre. And to set how important mathematical symmetries are to its conventions. No pressure, right? Nope.
Resources: Wengu has the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching with a casting widget that pulls up only the right passages. (You could even use this to get a random character and, through its transformation, a second character. Or make the transformation its Jekyll/Hyde alternate form. Or its Transformer form. Or its evolved Mon. Crack premise is crack.) The Divination Foundation uses a modern but basically sane translation by Paul O’Brien. There's also enough books out there to fill an entire crystal shop with barely enough room left over for incense.
About me: I like anything from romcom silliness to literary experimentation to hot-n-heavy erotica (het/slash/femslash/multi), or even mysteries/thrillers. Bonus points for including poetry, especially for the poetry fandoms, but it's not at all required. Ditto puns. I really do not like purported "humor" based on humiliation, or humiliation in general, or sadism. What I most want, though, is your interpretation of something, anything, of the original canon. Write me the thing only you can write, and I'll be delighted. After all, as I said above, the idea that someone else could possibly consider being interested in one of these fandoms delights me.
---L.