Voyagers

fandomtrees pulled through with reveals this weekend! I got an adorable harried spider prepping for the holidays, a lovely crop of Discworld icons from illustrations and movie adaptations, and the cozy Elis & John AU of my dreams.

I left some recs/recipes, but my creative endeavors this time around were limited to this:

sysann requested, among many other fun crossover ideas, a Dragaera/Ghosts UK crossover wherein the Dragaerans find themselves in Button House. Here’s what I wrote:

(If you’re not familiar with Dragaera, all you need to know is that Aliera is a particularly haughty member of a Proud Warrior Race who are en masse extremely touchy about their honor and love to fight duels about it. She is sensitive about her height and levitates to appear taller, and her normally-green eyes turn blue when she’s angry.

If you’re not familiar with Ghosts UK, all you need to know is that Thomas is the ghost of a (bad) Regency era poet, who is an oblivious romantic who died in a duel over a lady’s honor.)

( Dragaera/Ghosts UK, Thomas Thorne, Aliera e’Kieron, terrible poetry )

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Challenge #9: Talk about your favorite tropes in media or transformative works. (Feel free to substitute in theme/motif/cliche if "trope" doesn't resonate with you.)

I think this time around, I’ll just go with the tropes that are making my current reading – To Shape a Dragon’s Breath – such a fun and this-book-was-written-just-for-me reading experience :)

( magic as science, magic school, animal companion, alt history, Sweet Polly Oliver )

Challenge #5: In your own space, create a list of at least three things you'd love to receive, a wishlist of sorts.

- fandomtrees reveals got pushed to Jan 17 because there are still some trees (16 as of this posting) that don’t have the minimum amount of gifts (at least 2) necessary for reveals. So, any fills for the needy trees listed here (real-time updates at the Google spreadsheet). Most of the fandoms I don’t know anything about (but hopefully some of you do!), but of the ones I do, there’s a request for the Raven Cycle, Discworld, and some Original Work requests, and a niche rec request.

- My tree does have the minimum number of gifts, so is not holding up the fest opening, but does list all kinds of things I want (fandoms: Chronicles of Amber, Discworld, Dragaera, Rivers of London, Taskmaster, Terra Ignota, Vorkosigan Saga, and critter art).

( More specific requests for Dragaera, Taskmaster, Elis&John fandoms and crossovers/fusions )

- I included this in last year’s Snowflake wishlist and it worked really well, so doing it again: I'm planning on Doing the Hugo Awards (and hopefully Worldcon) this year, and have just recently come to the realization that if I'm going to nominate some short fiction, I should actually, like, read some that was published in 2025. So, looking for recs for "Hugo-worthy" SFF short stories and novelettes published in 2025 that are ideally accessible online. Authors who tend to semi-reliably work for me in short form are Sarah Pinsker, Kelly Link, and Naomi Kritzer, to give some sense of what I like. And also happy for any recs for published-in-2025 novellas, Related Works, and dramatic presentation short form things (<90 min) that are standalone (i.e. not episodes of a serial show, but either a short(ish) film or part of an anthology show but standalone), and Astounding-eligible authors to check out.


Challenge #6: Top 10 Challenge. The category(ies) you choose are up to you. You can give top 10 Fics you read last year, the top 10 songs to create to, the to 10 guest stars on your favorite show, top 10 characters in your favorite book series, top 10... well, you get the idea.

After some consideration, I’m going to do my Top 10 Dragons :) I’m currently reading a book with dragons (To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, which I’m enjoying a lot), whose dragons are, so far, somewhat different than I’d been expecting, and that’s been making me think about various other fictional dragons I’ve known and loved and the universes they come from, so I figured I’d make a list of my favorites.

They can be dragons that can assume human form, or even spend most of their time in said human form, but they can’t be just humans who are for some reason called Dragons (i.e. no Sarkan from Uprooted or the Dragaeran Dragonlords). Moreover, I tried to keep it to one dragon per canon. So here we go!

( Top 10 dragons )

What about YOUR favorite dragons? Introduce me / sway me over to any I might've missed, or squee with me about my favorites :)

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I think I was actually low-key avoiding the Taskmaster New Year Treat because I subconsciously resented it for being 2 episodes when I wanted CoC to be 2 episodes, lol. But I have watched it now, and it was fun!

Part 1 – Ooh, I knew one of the contestants (Rose) was deaf, but it was still jarring to see her interpreter sitting there next to Alex. Alex’s banter (OBE/oboe) and the several layers of bad joke was pretty fun. ( More, with spoilers )

My midpoint impressions are that I do enjoy Susie, but in exactly the same way I enjoyed her on Catsdown, so the “revelations” are Sam and Rose, who are both extremely adorable cuties whose cheeks I want to pinch. I’m very meh on the others – Jill’s doing well, but is a bit deadpan for me, and also I’m not a fan of how she brings up football all the time – like, I don’t feel like I’ve learned anything about her outside of her football career (in stark contrast to David James, who mentioned some footballers or travels associated with playing football, but talked about things like painting and just came across as a delightful massive weirdo – IDK, goalkeepers are different, I guess, was the consensus at the time). Apparently even the cat costume, which I did find cute, is a football reference, to her local football team, which someone on Reddit said she said in the studio taping. And Big Zuu is just kind of there… It sounds like he’s a charming person to work with, from all the podcasts, but as a viewer I have not been charmed.

Anyway, I don’t mind spending another episode with these guys!

Part 2 – Greg made me laugh out loud with his Alex intro: ( More, with spoilers )

And of course there was also the Series 21 cast reveal. ( Spoilers? )

I still have some Taskmaster stuff to catch up on – Acaster’s ultimate episode, the next installment of Taskmastermind, and some outtakes. But meanwhile ( WILTY has returned and is being a lot of fun )