Yuletide 2026 Nominations Open

Sep. 13th, 2026 12:09 pm
yuletidemods: A hippo lounges with laptop in hand, peering at the screen through a pair of pince-nez and smiling. A text bubble with a heart emerges from the screen. The hippo dangles a computer mouse from one toe. By Oro. (Default)
[personal profile] yuletidemods posting in [community profile] yuletide_admin
Why should I nominate?
To create the pool of fandoms available for this year’s Yuletide. More at AO3.

What can I nominate?
Up to 5 rare fandoms and up to 4 characters in each fandom that you want to request or offer. See what’s eligible here. When you sign up, you will request between 3 and 10 fandoms, and offer between 4 and 10+ fandoms.

When can I nominate?
From now until 24 September, at 9pm UTC (and see countdown). Please check the date and time in your own timezone! Until then, you can also edit your nominations.

Where can I nominate?
Tag set.

Who can nominate?
People with AO3 accounts who intend to take part in Yuletide. You may use only one account for nominations. If you don’t have an AO3 account, add yourself immediately to the invite queue or email the mods.

How do I nominate?
First, check what's eligible. Then go to the tag set on AO3, and make sure you're logged in. Click "Nominate" at top right, enter your fandom and character choices, and click Submit at the bottom. Check the results on the page to make sure you entered them correctly. You don't have to submit all your choices at once - you can change your mind and add or edit your nominations until nominations close.

If you need to explain or argue for your fandom, please make a case for it on the Evidence Post as well as nominating on AO3.

Do I have to use fandom tags that exist on AO3?
Please do, unless:
  • There is no tag for your fandom (it's totally okay to nominate something with no fic!). Make one up, following this guide.

  • The tag that exists on the Archive describes a larger fandom with many parts and your fandom is one distinct part or subset. In this case, instead of using the tag that exists already, please use a tag that describes your specific subfandom.

  • The tag that exists on the Archive has the words 'All Media Types' or '& Related Fandoms' in it. Please don't use a label that includes those words without arguing for it on the Evidence Post
  • .

Please label fandoms according to the Archive's wrangling style. If you’re not sure how to label your fandom, please ask.

When will I see what was nominated?
Not for a while, sorry! You can share what you've nominated and coordinate with other participants at [community profile] yuletide. Moderators will approve tags starting approximately 26 September, and will release the tagset in early October. We will post questions about nominations between now and sign-ups, so please keep an eye on this community.

The Additional Tags at the bottom of the tag set are a feature we added in 2023. Here is a post explaining how they work and some background (1, 2).

Disambiguation
When a character name could appear in more than one fandom, or is common, or short, please put information in brackets after the name to show where it belongs. For example:
-Bonnie Parker (Bonnie and Clyde 1967)
-Robin Hood (Prince of Thieves)
-Tulku (The Shadow 1994)
-Leonardo da Vinci (Da Vinci's Demons)

Disambiguation will also solve your problems if you receive the error message: “This character was rejected because it was nominated in another fandom.” If that happens, add more information to the name and resubmit.

Worldbuilding "character"
In most fandoms, you may nominate worldbulding as a character tag, in the format Worldbuilding (Your Fandom Name). However, mods will not accept "worldbuilding" nominations for RPF fandoms or where it is nominated without explanation for a purely mundane canon - there should be a clear fictional element to worldbuild around. See 2021's discussion post about worldbuilding; you may also find recent requests helpful to see how people have used this option.

Other character tips
If you submit a character that is new or rarely used on AO3, a suggestion from AO3 may appear in bold and in brackets next to your nomination after it has been submitted. This is okay, and does not mean that your nomination will be automatically changed. However, if you don't have any disambiguation information in brackets after the name, you may want to add it, because there may be another character with that name. Even if your character has two names, such as “Harrison Chase” or “Elizabeth Burke”, that name may appear in multiple unrelated fandoms.

RPF and Anthropomorphic fandoms must be nominated with characters. Other fandoms will be approved without characters if none are nominated.

Superhero and similar names may belong to more than one character. For example, Batman’s Robin could mean Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, or Stephanie Brown, among others. Please make sure it’s clear which one you mean - in cases where it’s ambiguous, please use their “wallet” name.

We don’t accept group nominations if the group contains named, distinct characters (for example, under Chalion Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold, we wouldn’t accept The Five Gods as a character). However, we will allow distinct groups that do not contain individual, named characters. If it may be difficult for us to determine whether this applies to your nomination, please comment in the Evidence post.

Check your nominations!
After submitting, check that your nominations have gone through: click away from the tag set, click back, and, if still logged into the same account, you should be able to see "My Nominations" at top right. Check the spelling and formatting! You can edit your nominations until the nominations period ends.

Enjoy!

PS: as pre-approved nominations can only be seen by mods, consider discussing your nominations with other participants on [community profile] yuletide or at the Discord. In particular, please see this year's RPF discussion post.


Schedule, Rules, & Collection | Contact Mods | Tag Set | Community DW | Discord | Pinch hits on Dreamwidth

Please either sign in to comment, or include a name with your anonymous comments, including replies to others' comments. Unsigned comments will stay screened.

RPF Coordination Post: Yuletide 2026

Sep. 13th, 2026 10:21 am
yuletidemods: A hippo lounges with laptop in hand, peering at the screen through a pair of pince-nez and smiling. A text bubble with a heart emerges from the screen. The hippo dangles a computer mouse from one toe. By Oro. (Default)
[personal profile] yuletidemods posting in [community profile] yuletide_admin
Please use this post to talk about the RPF or RPF-adjacent fandoms you're interested in nominating, requesting, or offering this year!


RPF nomination categories can be fluid in Yuletide, so we encourage RPF fans to coordinate with each other about the social circles, career groups, and characters you're interested in, to help ensure the resulting categories suit as many people as possible.

Coordinating your RPF nomination with other fans is the best way to make sure we can approve RPF fandoms quickly and easily. You are also welcome to reach out to us directly at yuletideadmin@gmail.com to discuss a potentially sensitive nomination.

This year's eligibility post covers what characters and fandom labels you can nominate. Key points: A person who is tagged in over 1,000 complete works, in English, over 1,000 words, on AO3 is not eligible in any RPF category. RPF characters must be famous in their own right, regardless of whether or not they have a relationship with a famous person.

Here is a post from 2023 that explains why we may reject some RPF nominations.

While each RPF fandom must still meet Yuletide rules for size (no more than 1,000 complete works in English), we won’t reject an RPF fandom label for being too broad (i.e., for covering too wide a topic). However, we prefer not to approve two fandoms if one of them is a subset of the other, so please use this post to make sure your nomination doesn't clash with someone else's.

Click for links to some previous tagsets
2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014.


Schedule, Rules, & Collection | Contact Mods | Tag Set | Community DW | Discord | Pinch hits on Dreamwidth


Please either sign in to comment, or include a name with your anonymous comments, including replies to others' comments. Unsigned comments will stay screened.

Yuletide 2026 Sticky

Sep. 12th, 2026 03:02 pm
yuletidemods: A hippo lounges with laptop in hand, peering at the screen through a pair of pince-nez and smiling. A text bubble with a heart emerges from the screen. The hippo dangles a computer mouse from one toe. By Oro. (Default)
[personal profile] yuletidemods posting in [community profile] yuletide_admin
Yuletide is an annual fic (1000+ words) exchange for rare and obscure fandoms run through this community and through the Archive of Our Own.

Current phase: Nominations are open and will end 9pm UTC September 25!
Works for past prompts can be posted to the New Year's Resolutions 2026 collection.

2026 Schedule

Nominations: Sunday 13 to Thursday 24 September (9pm UTC )
Sign-ups: Tuesday 13 to Friday 23 October (9pm UTC)
Assignments out: Sunday 25 October (may be earlier)
Default deadline: Thursday 10 December (9pm UTC)
Assignment deadline: Thursday 17 December (9pm UTC)
Main collection works reveals: Thursday 24 December (9pm UTC)
Madness collection works reveals: Saturday 26 December (9pm UTC)
Author reveals, end of event Friday 1 January (9pm UTC)

LINKS
Schedule, Rules, & Collection | Contact Mods | Tag Set | Community DW | Discord | Pinch hits on Dreamwidth

Yuletide 2026 Evidence Post

Sep. 12th, 2026 02:49 pm
yuletidemods: A hippo lounges with laptop in hand, peering at the screen through a pair of pince-nez and smiling. A text bubble with a heart emerges from the screen. The hippo dangles a computer mouse from one toe. By Oro. (Default)
[personal profile] yuletidemods posting in [community profile] yuletide_admin
Yuletide 2026 nominations begin on September 13 and end at 9 PM UTC on 24 September. See what can be nominated on the eligibility post. You can brainstorm, coordinate, and promote your fandoms at the participant community on DW.

Some fandoms need evidence to be approved. Comment on this post if:
  • The fandom you are nominating has too many stories to be eligible, but only because a tiny pool of authors has written most of it, OR because a significant majority are unrelated but tagged as crossovers, OR because a significant majority tagged as 'English' aren't in English

  • The fandom you are nominating appears on AO3 as part of a larger “umbrella” fandom, but you can clearly show that the fics for your fandom are under the limit

  • The fandom you are nominating is a fanwork (please include a link to the creator’s permissions statement and also describe how the fanwork is distinct from its source fandom)

  • The fandom you are nominating is an original work shared on a fan archive (please include a link to the creator’s permissions statement)

  • The fandom you are nominating is a social media post (please check RPF restrictions), headline, meme, or other “ephemeral” canon (please include the URL for the canon)

  • The fandom you are nominating includes a Worldbuilding nomination for an RPF or other real-world fandom

  • The fandom you are nominating includes the words “All Media Types” or “and Related Fandoms” and you believe you need to use that label

  • The fandom you are nominating is closely related to another fandom, especially if the other fandom is ineligible (ex: a Star Wars cartoon or tie-in novel, a prequel to a popular book series, or an audio drama sequel of an ineligible TV show)

  • The fandom you are nominating does not yet exist on AO3 and is hard to google (very common name, few sources in English, etc). Note: Most new fandoms do not need evidence

  • The fandom you are nominating is a music video and you wish to nominate characters within it

  • The fandom you are nominating is an SMP that includes creators/figures/character tags who appear in over 1,000 works - we need to know how these characters and their fandom stand alone

Mods will not consider the following evidence:
  • Use of original characters

  • Fic quality

  • Ambiguous endings in stories that are marked 'complete'

If your fandom has more than 1100 eligible works on AO3 after filters are applied, we will consider evidence for it on a case-by-case basis, with a preference for simple rules and filters that can be easily applied. If you want to argue for a fandom of this kind, please discuss your approach with mods before assembling lists, spreadsheets, or similar evidence.

If your fandom needs evidence, you must leave evidence this year (or link to previous evidence) even if the fandom has been approved in the past. Otherwise, mods may reject the fandom if it’s nominated without evidence.

You must submit evidence before nominations close at 9 PM UTC on 24 September. It may take us some time to review and respond to your post, so if your nomination slots depend on our response, we recommend posting your evidence as early as possible!

Please put the fandom name in the subject line of your comment as well as inside your comment.

Suggested template:
<b>Fandom</b>:
<b>Possible issue with the fandom</b>:
<b>Why this fandom should be considered eligible</b>:
<b>Link to source (music videos, ephemeral fandoms, fanworks, and original works on fan archives)</b>:
<b>The character names you intend to nominate (music videos)</b>:
<b>Link to creator's permissions statement (fanworks, and original works on fan archives)</b>:

You are welcome to link to documents containing your evidence, if your post is long.

You can use bookmarklets for checking how many of your fandom’s works on AO3 are in English, complete, and over 1,000 words long, for any rating.

If your fandom appears too big before you use those filters, and is easily under 1,000 works after you apply the filters, then you don't need to tell us about it.

Schedule, Rules, & Collection | Contact Mods | Tag Set | Community DW | Discord | Pinch hits on Dreamwidth

Please either sign in to comment, or include a name with your anonymous comments, including replies to others' comments. Unsigned comments will stay screened.
yuletidemods: A hippo lounges with laptop in hand, peering at the screen through a pair of pince-nez and smiling. A text bubble with a heart emerges from the screen. The hippo dangles a computer mouse from one toe. By Oro. (Default)
[personal profile] yuletidemods posting in [community profile] yuletide_admin
Yuletide is a fanfic exchange for rare and tiny fandoms. When you nominate, please follow these guidelines to help us approve and organise fandoms.

We have not made any changes to eligibility this year. However, we are requiring comments on the evidence post in some cases (music videos and SMP canons) where we didn't previously require evidence. Additionally, in recent years we loosened our requirements around the scope of individual nominations for anthologies and RPF. Those changes were:
  • You’re welcome to nominate anthology canons (where multiple short installments of canon are different stories) by their overarching title, but if one person nominates an anthology canon, and another nominates individual installments of that canon (episodes, or skits, or stories) we will bring this up for discussion when clarifying nominations, and will approve one or the other, not both.

  • Similarly, you can nominate an RPF tag that covers a large profession or long period of history if you want, provided that the number of qualifying works under that tag on AO3 is under 1,000. However, if two people submit RPF fandoms where one fandom is a subset of the other, we will bring this up for discussion when clarifying nominations, and approve one or the other, not both. We strongly encourage you to coordinate your nominations on this community with fellow RPF fans.

See below for more information on what we need from you - including new points about music videos and SMP fandoms.


Here is what can be nominated for Yuletide 2026! )

The Evidence Post )

Schedule, Rules, & Collection [still being tweaked for this year] | Contact Mods | Tag Set | Community DW | Discord | Pinch hits on Dreamwidth

Please either sign in to comment, or include a name with your anonymous comments, including replies to others' comments. Unsigned comments will stay screened.

(no subject)

Sep. 6th, 2026 06:15 pm
skygiants: the aunts from Pushing Daisies reading and sipping wine on a couch (wine and books)
[personal profile] skygiants
I had sort of a doubled experience of the first half of The Master and Margarita wherein I was a.) having a wonderful time experiencing early Soviet satirical surrealism and also genuinely engaged with the novel-within-a-novel's Pontius Pilate fanfiction and b.) constantly gently shaking the book by its spine waiting for Margarita to fall out.

For those unfamiliar, The Master and Margarita is a Russian novel, written in the USSR between 1928 and 1940, about the arrival of the devil and his crew in Soviet Moscow with chaotic intent: among other things, to prove to the Officially Atheist Muscovites that he exists. The first two hundred present us with various unfortunates whose paths happen to intersect with the devil's chosen entertainments, and their variously useless efforts to appeal to bureaucracy to sort things out, which, of course, it cannot do.

Anyway, the satire in this section is very sharp and I would have been perfectly content with it alone had I not known there was a Margarita to come. My foreknowledge of this book was inaccurate in several respects, actually; I knew there was a Margarita, but not that she didn't appear for 200 pages, and I also knew there was a Master but I was sort of under the impression that he was in fact the devil, which is not true at all. The Master is a writer, one of the only people in the first section whose life was not ruined by the devil at all, but simply by the experience of Soviet literary bureaucracy, which destroyed him by trashing and rejecting the novel into which he poured his heart and soul.

(This is the internal novel about Pontius Pilate, which did in fact give me emotions about Pontius Pilate and his bad headache and his beloved dog. Sometimes Gospel fanfiction is good!)

So this is Book 1. Then in Book 2: at last! Margarita!! Margarita is the Master's lover, who has lost him, and his book which she also loved possibly even more than she loved the Master himself, and is languishing unhappily in her aggressively and unpleasantly normal married life when she receives an offer from the Devil: abandon her life and all social norms, become a witch, and play hostess at his big annual annual party. If she nails it at this crucial social event, perhaps she'll receive her heart's desire.

Margarita does not experience an iota of hesitation about this. Margarita is READY to become a witch. Margarita is not necessarily going to ENJOY the exhausting experience of standing for hours at a Satanic social event but she has COMMITTED and she is going to GIVE IT HER ALL. I was excited for Margarita to appear and I liked her as soon as she did, but I did not really expect her also to give me emotions, and yet by the end here we were. Satire gets you with sentiment when you don't expect it!

(no subject)

Sep. 5th, 2026 02:39 pm
skygiants: Princess Tutu, facing darkness with a green light in the distance (Default)
[personal profile] skygiants
Patricia McKillip's Song for the Basilisk arrived in our house recently courtesy of [personal profile] genarti's library holds by way of a rec from [personal profile] sovay last time she was over. I am pretty sure I read this one at the time it was published, because I'm pretty sure I read everything Patricia McKillip published between the years of approximately 1995 and 2010, but do I remember anything about it? Of course not! Patricia McKillip's books are infinitely rereadable because they to a one an inherent and somewhat miraculous quality of eluding all recollection.* But I just finished this one last week and I have in fact been trying to hold onto the memory with both hands before it fades.

*with the exceptions of Forgotten Beasts of Eld, my first and most formative McKillip, and sometimes the Riddlemaster trilogy if I concentrate very hard

The premise of this one is that there's been a coup in a Renaissance-esque city of music and magic, and the last survivor of the couped family gets sent to study a different sort of music and magic on an isolated bardic-school island that is much less Machiavelli and much more Mabinogian. There he grows up, has a failed romance, has a son, resolutely refuses to remember anything about his past until circumstances force him into it, and, having remembered, returns to the city of his birth to have his revenge, the city ALREADY being busy with a.) the production of the current ruler's annual birthday opera, this year starring said ruler's regrettably unmusical youngest daughter and b.) a badly-planned counter-coup being conducted by all his distant relatives who didn't get killed in the first coup.

The arrival of a mysterious musical stranger sends both the opera and the counter-coup spinning out in various unexpected directions. Also, the director of the opera is in love with one of the coup-ers, the unmusical daughter is awkwardly crushing on the baffled lost heir, and the lost heir's son has shown up off his own bat to pursue his own plan for revenge, confusing the whole situation further. Also also nobody's revenge plans have taken into account that the ruler has another, older daughter, who is unnervingly competent and has learned all of his sinister skills and is poised to take over as soon as he's off the chessboard.

Look at that! A whole McKillip plot, without reference to Wikipedia, details and all! Because it's McKillip, the book skips through all this in lovely little hops, occasionally pausing for a bit of deeply lyrical and evocative music-evoked magic that fades away like mist the minute you try and explain to yourself why it happened like that. And as usual I enjoyed myself very much, although I don't think the landing fully holds up to itself: spoilers ) I would have liked even more opera but I always want even more opera.

(no subject)

Sep. 3rd, 2026 10:55 pm
skygiants: Rebecca from Fullmetal Alchemist waving and smirking (o hai)
[personal profile] skygiants
[personal profile] genarti and I have been noodling around with another cowritten epistolary thing, which got us talking about epistolary books at our last crit group, which resulted in us going home with our friend's beloved copy of Regarding the Fountain: A Tale, in Letters, of Liars and Leaks, an extremely cute absurdist-epistolary mystery that neither of us had ever previously heard of.

The plot: the Dry Creek Middle School water fountain is broken! In search of a plain and functional replacement, the principal instead accidentally commissions a world-traveling Miss Frizzle-esque artisanal custom fountain artiste, who engages the Dry Creek fifth-grade class in a correspondence about their ideas for the ideal fountain experience [fish] [swimming] [etc].

But wait! The fountain situation is more sinister than it appears! The town of Dry Creek used to be the paradisiacal Spring Creek, until an ominous event thirty years ago dried everything up. Could it have something to do with the school water fountain? Could it have something to do with evil capitalism? Not to worry; the fifth grade class and their public history project are on the case. Despite all attempts to prevent it, Dry Creek Middle School WILL have a spectacular new fountain!

The book has a lot of fun playing with every single tool in the epistolary box -- fonts will change mid-letter as kids trade the page back and forth, Flo Waters frequently corresponds via elaborate foreign postcards, and the villains never fail to write on stationary that advertises their evil business ventures. An extremely charming way to spend a half hour (it will not take you longer.)