the yearly Yuletide reveals post 2021

[merryghoul]

Unlike last year, I actually want to talk about writing my fics. Don't ask why; I don't even know why myself.

On a slightly different tangent, I'm glad I got this in before I have to shift gears for Who Daily tonight. 😬

This year I wrote the (Netflix) GLOW fic for armadillo1976:

Words Get in the Way (2505 words) by merryghoul
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: GLOW (TV 2017)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Debbie Eagan/Ruth Wilder
Characters: Debbie Eagan, Ruth Wilder
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, 1980s, 5 Times, New Year's Eve, Sitcom, Angst, Season's Treatings, Holidays
Summary: Five doors standing in Debbie’s path to Ruth.


I had all sorts of ideas for armadillo1976's request; they didn't have specific characters and a general idea (for lack of better words on my part) of what they wanted for their requests. I went through various ideas for the characters listed in this year's tag set before I found the episode of a sitcom called We Got It Made via the Reddit community r/GLOW (for the Netflix show). The cast of the actual GLOW wrestling promotion appeared on that sitcom before the sitcom was canceled again (it's a long story). I ended up writing about the Netflix GLOW cast doing a sitcom similar to We Got It Made while incorporating some ideas about how the post-season 3 GLOW promotion could've been similar to the Powerful Women of Wrestling promotion (e.g. the OC based on POWW's Sasha the Russian). And since my brain specifically went into femslash mode for this story, I found it easier to write about Debbie and Ruth than the other characters specifically in the tag set. (To go on further would be a rant about the actual Netflix GLOW canon, and I feel that's out of taste for Yuletide. Maybe in a separate post.)

I also added some wrestling names to name various OCs in the fic. As I said in my AO3 notes, the most blatant OC name is "Pamela Bayley." The wrestler Bayley was gimmick-checked in an episode in the first season of Netflix's GLOW. The line "But what if your gimmick is hugging people?" from the episode "The Dusty Spur" is a reference to her old face gimmick of "The Hugger/The Huggable One." Her old gimmick did involve, in part, hugging people (sometimes to perform a belly-to-belly suplex she uses as a finisher). (Currently her gimmick is a heel gimmick where she's a coward at times and often cheats to win. She's ironically known as [WWE's] "The Role Model.") And Bayley's actual first name is Pamela. (I stumbled upon Bayley being used as a surname and I wanted to do something different than WWE fanfic fanon. WWE fanon usually calls the wrestler "Bayley Martinez" if the writer wants to give her a surname. Martinez is Bayley's actual surname.) I also named a character very similarly to the wrestler Timothy Thatcher and used various other wrestler first names and/or surnames for minor characters, as long as they felt like names parents named their children in the United States in the 1960s.

Of course I did some general research for 1986-87 things as well like television sign-offs, champagne brands that existed during that time, and shows the WWF aired in syndication.


I wrote one of the 17776 (really, it's more a part of 20020) fics for woodironbone:

County of San Diego, California. The Mountain Empire. 19304. (1297 words) by merryghoul
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future - Jon Bois
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Manuel "Manny" Baez/Nick Navarro
Characters: Manuel "Manny" Baez, Nick Navarro, Juice (17776)
Additional Tags: Racing, Desert, Mountains, California, Embedded Images
Summary: Manny and Nick’s run to the Boise State field in 19304, with Juice on commentary.

Me: I picked up this pinch hit and worked on it for a week, using woodironbone's suggestion of writing about Manny and Nick's run. The fic was inspired in equal parts by me being lonely watching sports at times, by how Bois tends to tweet on Twitter—lower caps and sarcastic jokes, and, of course, by 20020 itself. And I had it formatted initially like this paragraph, thinking I was going to remix this fic and actually make it look somewhat like 17776 and its sequels after Yuletide.

Then I found this 17776 skin tutorial for AO3. I spent a few days before Yuletide doing some basic photoshop work, figuring out hex code colors, and tweaking the skin slightly from the original tutorial alongside some other HTML work.

My gift was from boasamishipper.