Honorverse Discord Exchange 2024 letter

Hello Shannon (and others)! My AO3 is Brachylagus_fandom, and my discord is tiredandcold. Feel free to trawl through my old letters here for more of my likes, as well as my AO3 and tumblr (brachylagus-fandom). Anything I posted in the server is also fair game.

For AUs, I'm down for receiving the One More Time 'verse or Marianne-based AUs, and I'd also love to see your take on my Havenite treecats AU if you so choose.

DNWs: explicit sex (fade to black fine), gore/graphic injury, major character death, completely unhappy endings, setting change AUs like a modern au (canon divergences or canon but with additional stuff, like soulmates, tacked on, is great!)

Likes: my likes are broad and ever-expanding. Just because something's not on the list doesn't mean I won't enjoy it; so long as it's not under my DNWs, I'm totally down for it to happen.

• Hurt/Comfort
• Humor, crack treated seriously
• Hijinks and misadventures
• Mystery
• Character study - how did [X] get to be this way? What is their normal day like?
• Worldbuilding - how does [thing] work? Why does it work like that? How has that changed over the years? What are the logistics involved?
• Canon Divergence, especially of the "butterfly flaps its wings" sort
• Outsider POV - I love when canon/the reader takes a bunch of things for granted because the protagonist knows them, but if you take a step sideways everyone not in the know is going "wtf"
• Complicated, intense relationships
• Characters being competent in their area of expertise
• Playing with tropes or implications of canon
• All sorts of "weird" stylistic choices - flowery prose, first or second person POV, non-past tense, etc.

Manticore
Michelle Henke

• I really love Mike as a character; her confidence counterbalances Honor's anxiety very well.
• I'd love to see her building that relationship during their time in the Academy (buzzing the regatta!), or her various adventures as an officer since. How does she hear about Honor's latest misadventures, and what does she think of them?
• It's mentioned that a royal serving in the Navy is relatively atypical, and she's almost as close to the throne as Michael is; how does she deal with the same pressures of external rank? Do they ever bond over it?
• Paul's her (somewhat distant) relative, and she got both sides of the Paul/Honor Pavel-induced awkwardness and then equally awkward pining. How does she build the bridge between them without betraying their respective confidences? What's it like for her in the aftermath of the duel?

Haven
Haven is pretty underexplored as a setting in its own right, especially in the early books. I'd love to see more exploration of any era of it, from the Legislaturists (the formulation of a lot of these people's ethos and identities, and also very much the building block of what's to come in terms of interstellar policy and political repression) to the Committee (so many conflicting personae and loyalties! so many internal factions obviously or subtly positioning for power) to the post-Theisman-coup period. (Though especially the early days of that last one, when a considerable amount of the capital city's infrastructure is a smoking, radioactive wreck and we've got a six-way civil war on our hands. And we get a stable democracy out of it in pretty short order!)

Victor Cachat

• Cachat is a human embodiment of "refuge in audacity", and I love that about him. Even if the rest of my faves really, really don't.
• I'd love to see his childhood and training at the StateSec academy, how his skills as a slum kid transferred over to his work as an agent, and how he still didn't really grasp the full nature of the job until From the Highlands.
• The period between the end of From the Highlands and the start of Fanatic, aka how the murder baby gets radicalized. How long is he on Earth after the Manpower plot gets foiled? What does he learn over that year-ish between saving Helen and ending up in La Martine?
• I'd love to see more of Victor's relationship with the Ushers, either pre-Coup or after they come to get him from La Martine.
• What is his life on Torch like, and what was the process of establishing the kingdom like?

Shannon Foraker

• I love Shannon! Her tech skills, her lack of social graces, her determination to do what she thinks is right - it's all catnip to me.
• I'd love to see the process of her growing up and gaining those skills (particularly if she isn't Nouveau Parisian - it feels like all the Havenites come from that city, and it could be interesting to see how coming from a non-Haven Havenite world impacted her childhood and experience in the Navy). What other things did she learn during that period, and what did she have to circumvent to learn them?
• I'd also love to see more times when she used them, or a deeper look at the times we see her tech wizardry on page.
• It'd be great to see her growth post-coup, as she rapidly takes on a bunch of responsibility with Bolthole. (And, as a result, gets a full-time minder in the form of a steward; a day in the life of that poor sucker would be hilarious.)

Eloise Pritchart

• I like how Pritchart is fiercely principled and dedicated to her cause, even when she appears to have outlasted it.
• I'd love to see her as Brigade Commander Delta (or working her way up to that position), or in the short period immediately after the Harris assassination, where she's not exactly commanding a brigade but not yet a commissioner, and it looks like everything might just work out for the revolution. (And then dealing with it when things do not just work out.) What happens to the people under her command, in the aftermath? Does she fully know, or does she find herself checking the ex-Hades lists to see what might have become of some of her old problem children?
• I'd also love to see more of her as a Citizen Commissioner, slowly building up a rapport with Giscard and then conspiring with him to get what they want from the Committee. (And how that reputation backfires a little bit, in the immediate post-oops period when I have to imagine that the plan, should any plan exist, was to run like hell and beg for asylum somewhere.)
• It would also be excellent to see her as President of Haven, trying to rebuild her country and dealing with the responsibilities. (I headcanon that she's got a decent amount of civilian support - if she saw the Committee coming it's reasonable she warned her people to keep their heads down, so her faction of the Aprillists is probably pretty strong in any modern movement, and we know that Ninon Bourchier, who Pritchart personally recruited, was one of the early post-coup civilian leaders - and that's why Theisman picks her at first, but I'd love to see how that conversation went. Especially since Theisman didn't know her beforehand!)

Thomas Theisman

• I really enjoy the way he and Honor are foils to each other - both with strong moral compasses and senses of duty, but while Honor is often able to push past her duties to do the right thing, Theisman doesn't really have that ability until "Good-bye, Citizen Chairman". (And then he does, and he makes very strong use of it.)
• I'd love to see Theisman's path to joining the Navy, especially as a Dolist in a time when Navy officerships were heavily associated with Legislaturists. Why did he make that choice? What was his childhood like before then, and what was his time in training like? What was the worst drunken night he has ever had (and why does it top "accidentally signing your maybe-friend's death warrant")?
• I'd love to see him planning out the coup, and trying to rebuild a government in the image of some long-ago ideal in the aftermath. What do the initial weeks of the republic look like, and what about the longer-term civil wars?
• I'd also love to see him as an officer, before, during, or after his meetings with Honor. How did life shipboard practically change post-Harris assination?

Lester Tourville

• Citizen Admiral Cowboy! I have a soft spot for characters putting on a front to distract from their true emotions/thoughts, and Tourville does it outrageously.
• When did he first starting putting on that facade, and how has it shifted over the years? I have to assume it's based on something he had, if probably exaggerated since, back during the Legislaturists, but to what extent and why did he create it in the first place? What are some times it came extremely in handy, and what does stepping back from it feel like?

Grayson
Warner Caslet

• Filed here for his current star nation, but going first in part because a lot of what I like about him comes from his Havenite years, as a deeply pragmatic leader trying to keep his people safe and do the right thing in a politically fraught environment.
• I'd love to see more of Vaubon's crew, both before and in the aftermath of the Harris Assassination. How does the crew's dynamic shift as the political situation does back home? (Especially since it's more or less the crew from before the Committee to at least Third Yeltsin and probably up through the Silesian campaign.) How does his relationship with Shannon change, especially with her status as politically unreliable? (And how does his estimation of her skill increase, especially since the post-Harris Assassination period is one where Haven is extremely strapped for working equipment and crew?)
• Another interesting relationship to explore: his with Citizen Commissioner Jourdain! It's not as actively rebellious as some of the other commissioner/captain pairs we get (...mostly because they get split up - and Caslet is already defected - by the time coup attempt 2 rolls around), but there's definitely the seeds of something like Tourville's camraderie with Honeker in Honor Among Enemies. Had they had more time pre-reassignment, how would their relationship continued to change? What's Jourdain's impression of Caslet post-defection?
• I think that Caslet is the only major Havenite character who explicitly isn't from the planet of Haven itself, and I'd love to see how that impacts his perspective and relationships. Is there a form of snobbery towards those from Haven's other planets, or mistrust because of potential lingering resentments over those planets' "acquisition"? (I think Danville was one of the pre-conquest worlds, so not necessarily relevant here, but Haven has plenty of homegrown resistance movements in addition to the ones on planets it's conquered.) Alternately, is there an additional sense of camraderie between those who aren't from the capital planet? What kind of culture shocks were involved when he first went to Nouveau Paris to join the Naval Academy?
• What is the defection process like once Caslet's in Grayson space? He's not the only ex-Havenite they've got, but Grayson's changed a lot since Yu defected, and Caslet's also returning with a pretty badly mauled Honor. (Objectively silly idea: before he's fully debriefed, he's teaching at the Grayson naval academy in between GONI debriefs, and the notion of someone who fits into the slot of The Grayson Ideal of Authority Holder - possessing command, male, deeply honorable, with enough age to confer authority on its own, did I mention male - just... completely alien to Grayson gender politics breaks a couple brains. Because while Manticorans also hold no time for this bullshit, the penetration of that ideal into some steadings is... slow, and I imagine that a lot of the rough awakenings for those home-trained officers comes once they get into service.)
• What's his life like on Grayson more generally?
• What's it like once the Grand Alliance forms and Caslet's working with a lot of the same people again?

Abigail Hearns

• I love Abigail as a manifestation of how Honor has shaped Grayson.
• What was Abigail's life like before Second Yeltsin, and how did her idolization of Honor (and desire to join the Navy like her) manifest over the years? How did that conversation in the aftermath of Honor's "death" go?
• I'd love to hear more about her time at Saganami Island. How was she regarded by her Manticoran peers (who don't really have the context for why her presence is a Big Deal) - and by her Grayson ones? As of Obligated Service, there are a handful of other Grayson women in uniform; what was Abigail's relationship with them like?

Rachel Mayhew

• All of the Mayhew daughters are so cute, and I love seeing them grow up throughout the course of the series. 
  
• What's Rachel's childhood like? What things is she expected to do, and what things does she enjoy doing? What does Rachel remember of Grayson pre-Honor (and of her first, disastrous visit to the Protector's home)? How aware is she of the changes to society around her as she's growing up, and how does she push for more changes herself?
  
• Allison's talk with the Mayhew parents after Rachel's adoption is one of my favorite bits of that whole sequence because it really highlights the way that treecats change their human's life - and not always in ways the people around them find easy to handle. I'd love to see any of the things Allison mentioned come into play as Rachel grows up, but I'd also love a look into the things Allison didn't bring up, because Honor's experience gaining a bond as a single child in a society acclimated to treecats doesn't map cleanly onto Rachel's experience as one of several children on a planet that isn't. Does jealousy from her sisters come into play? What problems and/or social upheavals arise when a Grayson princess wants to bring an adorable, furry death machine everywhere she goes? I know Honor has some armor in much of her clothes to make Nimitz hopping on safer and easier; does Rachel spark a trend for Grayson tabards to incorporate such a material (perhaps after a scandalous new trend among The Youths to have slashes in the shoulders of one's gown)?