kimaracretak (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kimaracretak) wrote2018-09-12 09:50 pm
kimaracretak) wrote2018-09-12 09:50 pm
trick or treat 2018
Hello friend, I am so excited to see what you will write for me! If you want inspiration beyond this, I am also @kimaracretak on tumblr (where I am only intermittently active but may have some thoughts on some of these canons/ships), 8tracks and playmoss (for #aesthetic takes on some of these canons/ships), and AO3, where I have a small but reflective of things I like collection of bookmarks.
I've by and large chosen canons I love for their worldbuilding and mytharcs as well as their characters and relationships, and I am easy to please as long as you stay away from my DNWs (both general and canon-specific), so don't feel like you Have to write any of my specific prompts. Don't read anything into relative lengths of sections, I am equally happy to get something for anything in this letter! Some of these prompts are reused from old letters, and if you have written them for me before, rest assured that I loved your fic, I am simply greedy and would like to see every possible take on my favourite scenarios.
If you are writing shipfic, I like everything from pre-ship feelings navigation to PWP, so for / relationships don't worry about whether they're shippy 'enough'. I don't need a lot of romance in my ships, sex for power, manipulation, or just between friends who want to have fun is also great. Please no unrequested ships unless specifically allowed for, but feel free to combine any compatible ones from my requested ones.
Mentorship and loyalty dynamics, including ladies' suicidal world-saving or world-breaking devotion to other ladies, also especially #unavailable older women in positions of authority; femslash and female friendship in both the foreground and the background; nature and cities and spacecraft as characters, especially when they would like to eat you because they love you; vampires, magic, witchcraft, rituals; eldritch things, fey things, eerie things, cosmic/eldritch horrors, the Force as one of said horrors that would like to eat you because it loves you, Force users as literal cosmic bodies; feelings about embodiment and iconography; epistoloary fics, IF, poems for poetry canons, song lyrics for song/album canons; second-person pov; politics; flirting, domesticity, sensuality; canon-divergent/what-if AUs, Vampire: The Requiem, Changeling: The Lost, and Star Wars Sith AUs; conflicted loyalties, moral ambiguity, hero/villain and villain/villain relationships, darkfic; arranged marriages, marriages of convenience, married by a technicality; relationships negotiated around characters' different vocabularies of trust and care; 'I hate you I love you I would like to wear your skin as a sign of my devotion' types of relationships; porn as character work.
Things what I like, smut edition;
Hair braiding, hair pulling; bathing, washing, bath/shower sex; painplay, bloodplay, edgeplay; mirror sex, identity porn; bondage, D/s dynamics (though not 24/7 bdsm lifestyle setups); jewellery and clothes kink; consent play; praise kink, loyalty kink, competency kink; public and semi-public sex, having to stay quiet; oral sex; biting, marking; first time with each other; sex for manipulation/political gain/conversion to the other political-military side (success optional); inappropriate use of the Force and lightsabers (and of magic and weapons more generally), one person in a threesome directing the other two and getting off watching them.
Unrequested m/m or m/f ships; rape (dubcon is fine unless otherwise specified); permanent death of female characters; kidfic, breeding, pregnancy, age-regression and time-travel to see kid versions of characters; scat, watersports, emetophilia; food sex and associated kinks like feeding; a/b/o; tropey aus like soulmates or hanahaki disease; eye- and feet-related gore; apocalypse and post-apocalypse fic, zombies; *isms, issuefic; 'it was all a dream' sort of mindfuckery; age gaps causing angst; bodyswap fic; crackfic; sex involving under-16s.
Aniara - Harry Martinson
General: The full text in English translation is here, for reference or if you're just curious. I love that it's a poem about beauty in emptiness, about connection and perception and ways to make the void meaningful. If you are poetry-writing-inclined I would absolutely die of delight to get an epic-or-otherwise poem in Martinson's style in response to this request, but it's super not a requirement so don't worry if you're not. If you want to bring in things from pre-existing adaptations, I am most familiar with Seventh Wonder's 'The Great Escape' (youtube, lyrics) and Andreas Kleerup's Aniara which is on Spotify. I lowkey ship Isagel/The Blind Poetess and Isagel/f!narrator, but gen is also great. In the most optional of optional lands, if you feel like extra Scandi-lit nerdery and looking for further reading, Eric O. Johannesson's 'Aniara: Poetry and the Poet in the Modern World' [google drive link] has more on Martinson's life and other poetry.
Isagel: My forever girl with the unlocked mystery / she’d neatly solved, but which was falling with her - gods, I love her so, I love her clever and unmoored and aching and curious. I am weak for pilots who are one with their ship in every possible way - I would love anything about her relationship with Aniara. We get flashes of the intricacies of her mind but nothing really from her POV, so retellings of certain scenes from her perspective would be lovely.
The Mima: Catch your girl sobbing in the corner about sad AIs, okay. She's deified to such an extent by the crew really I will be delighted by anything from her point of view - how she feels about the crew, the memories she's tasked with keeping, the role she's asked to play. Self-invented, self-sustaining, ultimately unable to bear all that she's asked to - tell me all her stories.
The Blind Poetess: Her introduction reminds me of the Mima's, in a way, the sort of dizzying, dazzling distraction-relief that's mostly just a mask to cope with having to be the personal bearer of profound horror. I would love equally something pre-canon with her at home in the forests of Rind or something on the Aniara. And practices of grace, how hard to grasp / for one who’s never spoken with the dead makes me want fic of her with ghosts - in the forest, on the tundras of Mars, in space. Or shipfic with Isagel and contemplation of their differing views of heaven - the final scene of the opera is Isagel dancing whilst the poetess sings of the joy of death, and anything that works with that as inspiration would be loved.
Goblin Market - Christina Rossetti
General: The poem is relatively short and here for easy reference, or if you are feeling unenthused about the request of mine you initially matched on and want to do something different. I love the way the poem plays with obsession and adoration and change and how people are dragged into and out of the weird spaces between life and death. I have a slight preference for gen here, but I'm open to any ships between the requested characters or requested character/OFC ships. I am also 100% here for an IN SPACE AU for this poem, so if you too would like a goblin market IN SPACE feel free to run with that! Any of the prompts in the Goblin Market section of my Darkest Night letter this year are fair game, including the setting-change AU ones. I am fine with permadeath of any of the requested characters here.
Fandom-specific DNW: Explicit sex.
Jeanie: I'm equally happy for fic with her to be set pre-death, or for her to come back (wrong) somehow. Ghost, vampire, etc ... I especially like the idea that flowers don't grow on Jeanie's grave because they have gone inside the dirt and into Jeanie's corpse and are gonna crawl up hungry. I'm interested in how she died, whether by goblin magicks or by choice, and I'm interested in how she lives on as legend. I like reading a Jeanie who's strong but flawed, clear-sighted yet doomed, and I like reading her ghost/otherwise undead self taking advantage of the myths she spawned. I love her with the sisters - how close were they? Did she try to warn them, or did she want to drag them down with her?
Lizzie: Okay ngl the image of Lizzie standing fiery and unmoving amidst a sea of goblins was hashtag-formative, and I'm obsessed with that immense strength that frankly-bordering-on-stupid strength drawn from loving another person so much you nearly cease to exist. Lean into the horror of such an obsessive clever devotion and break my heart, please.
Laura: Oh, Laura, the things she learnt! I always found it fascinating that the deeper Laura sunk into her goblin-fruit stupor the less-and-more she seemed to know - not quite a mythical fruit of knowledge (in fact she loses the ability to see and hear the goblins in the regular world) yet she also quite clearly fades into another world at the same time. What does she find there, in the shadow-world? If Lizzie's obsessive devotion is to her sister Laura's is to something else entirely (knowledge? movement? sensations?) - what impact does that have on their relationship?
General: Witchy murderforest of my whole entire heart and all the women and girls it loves, ahhhh. This show has so many beautiful things to say about love and care and loss and obsession and it's eaten me as surely as Silverhojd has eaten Josefine. Tell me stories about witches and women and love and life and forests and I will be so, so happy. I would be totally happy with gen, but I ship Eva/Jeanette, Eva/Klara, Esme/Linus, and Esme/Maja, if you want to write something shippy. I also headcanon Linus as nonbinary, but don't feel totally beholden to that.
Fandom-specific DNW: Eva/Bahar, Bahar being married to a man, romance for the kids (Ida, Josefine, Kalem).
Bahar Holmqvist: Bahar would not be paid enough for what s2 put her through even if she'd taken that promotion. I love her, I love how she's a little bit of an asshole but just genuine and self-aware enough for it to be a mostly good thing, I love her stubbornness and kindness and her refusal to let her belief in order make her do what she believes to be wrong. I'd love to read about her life and career pre-Eva, I would also like to see her slowly becoming more comfortable with the supernatural post-s2. I'd love to see her develop more of a relationship with Ida, or perhaps help Kalem get more settled in Sweden. Post-s2 casefic, especially given that last offer she received, would be great if you want something more plotty.
Esmeralda: My main request is let Esme be happy, honestly. I have a special love for slowly-becoming-family fic with her and Klara, fic that gets into the mythology of hulderfolk and banshee powers, or for pre-series fic where she's trying to figure things out on her own or with Linus.
Klara: Klara was a stealth favourite, honestly, and I think she was robbed of screentime in s2. I want alll the pre-series fic for her: meeting Ylva, learning what it means to be one of the hulderfolk, meeting other children of the forest (either the ones we've seen, like Muns and the other changelings, or anything/anyone else you want to draw from Scandifolk mythology). I would die for resurrection fic - resurrection/rebirth/what it means to come back are such huge show themes, and necromancy is canonically a possibility, so I'd like to see (especially) Esme or Ylva try to raise her. Or possibly Josefine/Muns/the forest in general gives her back, rightly or wrongly. I'd especially love to see her pre-s2 with Esme or Eva or pre-canon with Ylva, but the more I think about it the more I really want her and Bahar to meet.
Ylva: I was stunned by how much love the show had for Ylva the first time around, she's such a rare, joyful embrace of all the most wonderful things about the crone archetype despite the pain she's gone through. I'd love to see something about her life with Muns, or with Klara, or with the network of support she's built in the town and the forest. She's so aware, of thoughts and of life, and getting her perspective on the events of the show more immediately than we did through Eva's visuals would be lovely.
Eva Thornblad: I love her endlessly? I love that she's allowed to be messy and traumatised and still good and not necessarily nice. I would love snapshots of her life with Josefine pre-canon, or with the Stockholm police pre-canon, or fic where she takes Bahar into the forest to meet Josefine's tree. Maybe she bonds with Ylva over how hard protecting the forest is, maybe she gives Esme a safe place for tea one day, maybe something shippy with Klara or Jeanette.
Ida: Oh, darling girl. I loved her when we thought she was human and I love her now that we know she's a changeling. I love her uncanny ability to make friends, I love her art, I love how much she cares. I'd love between-the-seasons fic, her time in Stockholm with Eva and Tom. I'd love post-s2 fic, how her relationships with the city and the forest and the people around her change after she decides to start speaking again. One of my favourite things about this show is how simply it just accepts the unconventional Eva-Ida-Tom family, without demanding that Eva be A Mother to Ida or anything other than friends with Tom. Ida helps Eva mourn, Eva helps Ida live, Tom tries valiantly to keep up with them. If you want to lean into the nature/fairytale aspects, what effect does the changeling!Ida reveal have on her relationship with Josefine/the Josefine-tree in Silverhojd?
General: This show has a thesis of 'why be a girl when you could be an eldritch horror instead' because it loves me, it really loves me. I love the bonds and the backstabbing and the love-through-horror, I love the changeling girls and the amount of respect it gives stories of self-creation. Any of the prompts in the PaHR section of my Darkest Night letter this year are fair game, including setting-change AUs (if you don't feel like clicking through: I would especially love vampire, Sith Academy, and Changeling: the Lost AUs). I'm not requesting Irma or Marion because I'm less interested in them on their own, but feel free to add them in. I ship ... honestly any combination of Hester, Dianne, Miranda, Marion, Irma, and Greta (in varying degrees of fucked-up-ness -- this fandom is a trick request so I'm not really looking for fluff) but am totally happy with genfic. Deathfic for Hester and Sara is fine (though I encourage came-back-wrong scenarios!), but I DNW deathfic for Dianne and Miranda. Ambiguous/show-consistent 'explanations' for what happened at the Rock don't count as deathfic.
Hester Appleyard: She's so fucked up and so sad and I adore her madly. Every time we get a glimpse inside her head it's so frantic compared to the perfectly composed facade she builds, and I would love anything that plays in the space between those two. Favourite ships for her are with Irma or Dianne but character-study gen is equally loved. (Can ghosts haunt ghosts? I want her to haunt the fuck out of her husband, and possibly try to murder him again, because it's Hester and she would.)
Dianne de Poitiers: Dianne probably got the closest to a happy ending of anyone but also the one I'm least satisfied with of the whole cast tbh. I'd love something different for her - the AU where she and Hester started over with a new school, the one where she got turned into a vampire when she was running through the woods for the constable, the one where Sara or Hester's ghost lives in the space a boyfriend should take up, the one where she and Greta were in love and snuck off to the Rock together, the one where she got out with Sara and they have a little cottage in the woods somewhere.
Miranda Reid: I'm obsessed with this weird eldritch forest of a girl and the way she draws people into her. She helped break the fabric of time and space by loving her friends and wanting freedom for them and I want to know everything about that beautiful, Weird self.
Sara Waybourne: My other darling girl. I would not say no to any sort of ghost!Sara fic, dark or light - anything from sweet fic about her having the adventures she didn't get to when she was alive to her haunting the college buildings. I would love to see her in the woods, a deeper exploration of what she was thinking when she ran away at the end of episode 4 (if she even did run). AU where she does get to go on the picnic and follows the older girls up to the rock. Missing scenes from her vacation with Miranda. Playing mind games with Hester or finding comfort with Dianne.
General: I love the lush expansiveness of Tolkien's work, the history and the care and the sheer amount of space characters are allowed to take up and that we are able to fill in. I am up for any and all femslash with the requested female characters (including the requested characters shipped with OFCs or textual ghosts); I am also up for Melian/Thingol. I requested tricks for this fandom, but don't feel that your fic has to be all doom and gloom - moments of levity, happy couples dealing with supernatural things (happy couples murdering other things :D) are also excellent!
Melian: Darkfic in Doriath! Things beyond the Girdle are growing closer and Galadriel is growing hungrier and Melian is just paranoid ... right? Thuringwethil loved Luthien and has come to see if her mother's blood tastes just as sweet. Melian/Galadriel and the dangers of autumnal magics.
Thuringwethil: Vampires are my forever weakness and I would die for all the Thuringwethil/Aredhel or Thuringwethil/Luthien or Thuringwethil/Haleth vampire sex, or less-explicit mindgames, or both. I would love an AU where she survives to continue to sow destruction in her path, or maybe something where she lives in her skin-cloak and slowly possesses Luthien more and more until it's only Thuringwethil again. I don't personally buy into the Thuringwethil-was-a-Maia theory, but if you do I am totally open to reading it.
Haleth of the Haladin: Haleth gets help from something not-so-kind on her journey across Beleriand. Haleth is aged but immortal for [reasons] and haunts the Haudh-en-Arwen in the guise of a ghost. I'm up for anything that doesn't hit my DNWs tbh.
The Mewlips: Look if you don't know who they are, the poem they show up in is short and delightfully creepy. They are terrible lovely gremlins who live in marshes and steal your bones. They're sort of my favourite thing, and they play so well with the idea that the best horror is that which you can't quite see, the lights you can't quite decide not to follow. The mewlips breach the Girdle of Melian. Thuringwethil acquires a mewlip army. The mewlips make friends with the elves of the dead marshes or add to the general malaise of Mirtkwood under the necromancer and encounter Thranduil or Tauriel. Mewlips in the mines, mewlips in the sneaky bits of the Helcaraxe where the melting ice is not actually a sign of hope. Just ... creep me the fuck out, dear author.
Southern Reach Trilogy - Jeff VanderMeer
General: Yoooo these books. I love them as a changeling story, I love them as a story of nature-as-entity, I love them as a story of how desolation is never bleak and usually alive. I would prefer you use the characters' professions to describe them (eg "the psychologist" ) in narration, rather than their names. I am fine with canon-consistent 'being eaten by Area X' for either of the requested characters but DNW them to die in any other way. I requested only tricks for this fandom as it by nature is playing with some pretty dark questions about embodiment and environmental catastrophes and death, but there's plenty of potential for light and joy - there is plenty of light and joy for both the requested characters as they give themselves back over to Area X, so don't be afraid to lean into that. I've read all three books and my prompts do get kinda spoilery, but if you've only read Annihilation, I welcome fic based only off that.
Fandom-specific DNW: Movie canon.
The Biologist: I loved the journal-style of Annihilation and would love to see fic that's a similar journal of hers from previous expeditions - especially in Rock Bay. I'm interested in her malleable sense of self, the way she feels the need to both wholly become and only observe her sites. I'd love to see more of her with the psychologist or Ghost Bird.
The Psychologist: I'm obsessed with the image of her walking towards the Southern Reach carrying the barrier that we got in Authority - it's vague whether it was her or a simulacrum imo, but regardless of the answer I'd love something that dwells in that moment from her POV - what it means to come forward like that, to carry her old home to her new. I'd also love her take on the events of the 12th expedition, what it means to her to hold the full weight of knowledge, how she planned, how it felt to hypnotise the other team members. Documentary/epistolary fic - anything that brings to life her notes, her files, all the threads she wove through the Reach and all the things she couldn't keep after the barrier came down.
General: Lyrics, including character dialogue tags, can be found here, full album (about an hour and a half long) song-by-song on youtube here. My only ship from the album is The Counselor/The Biologist (based mostly off their duet in 'All That Was'), I would prefer gen otherwise. Feel free to bring in any of the non-requested characters as supporting characters in any fic (if you bring in The President, consider Magali Luyten's Ayreon Universe performance as absolute permission for a Rule 63'd president). Fic doesn't have to be consistent with the rest of the Ayreon universe beyond this album but if you want to tie in other elements, go for it - I'm familiar with everything. My general apocalypse/post-apocalpyse DNW is, obviously, lifted for this fandom.
The Biologist: I would love Planet Y-era fic for her! Absolutely all of the underwater adventures, the beautiful ones and the horrifying ones and the ones that are both. She closes 'The Human Compulsion' with such a vibrant, defiant declaration of life and I'd love to see something that explores that core of her, or something about how she reacts to life without machines (what is a biologist when she has only her senses and memories, how does she become part of the aquatic ecosystem? How does she feel about The Chemist, The Source, TH-1? If you're feeling more treat-inclined, anything sweet and shippy with her and the Counselor would be lovely.
The Counselor: Oh man, anything! Shippy moments with the Biologist (first meetings/first time/first time on Planet Y), chats with TH-1, AU where she turns TH-1 away from starting the Age of Shadows, quiet time by herself/in the ocean to take a break from being responsible for so many souls, her thoughts as she watches her friends slip deeper into The Source.
The Opposition Leader: Tommy Karevik suffers very prettily, so I assume the Opposition Leader also suffered very prettily as the 'Frame slowly took over Alpha, and I am here for all of his 'why is nobody listening to me?' angst. I would also love to see anything about his relationship with TH-1 (distrustful? friendship?) or, given their duets in 'Condemned to Live' & 'Deathcry of a Race', the Biologist - they seem to share an interest in the particulars of the mechanics vs organics distinction. Life/politics on Planet Y would also be fun to explore.
The Preacher: Zaher unfairly gets only two lines on the whole album, so honestly I will take anything. What does the Preacher think about the events of the album (and before)? What's his relationship with the Prophet? Is he even human, or is he some kind of god/creature/manifestation?
Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic
General: I'm not actually requesting the Inquisitor, because Inquisitors vary so widely, but if you want to include a female Inquisitor in any fic about the requested characters, feel free! I play a female cyborg Sith Inquisitor named Nevrasa; you can read more about her here if you want to write about her specifically, or you can use a generic inquisitor/your own/etc, I'm not picky and love meeting other peoples' PCs (and Nevrasa suffers a bit from 'first OC in this fandom' syndrome and isn't that fleshed out of a character).
Fandom-specifc DNW: Male Inquisitor.
Ragate: The rite of blood and bone is such a tiny sidequest and yet -- I love it, infinitely. Ragate makes a fascinating contrast to Darth Zash not only in her whole concept of how Force magic works but also in her acceptance of age as a necessary price to pay for life. I'd love something from the inquistor's pov reflecting on that, or even Ragate's, if she knows who's apprentice she is. Ragate sends you into the blood pool saying I will await you here. If you die, I will forget you -- what sort of process is that forgetting? How many inquisitors has she forgotten, and seen succeed, and what makes this one special, if anything? Does Ragate survive the Korriban Incursion and put the later-game inquisitor through another ritual? Basically I just want something that digs into all the wonderfully weird bits of Force-magic and future-seeing and ladies and mentorship and all the associated feelings. [ blood legacy dialogue trees, for reference ]
Darth Zash: I did not ask for an overwhelming amount of woman-and-embodiment feelings when I started this game, but guess what I have! I love Zash in all her manipulative glory, I love the contrast between her and Ragate, I love her manipulation of her apprentice. Pre-game fic for her would be amazing - all her early research, experiments with first/failed apprentices. Fucked-up Zash/f!Inquisitor always welcome, force ghost Zash possessing an f!Inquisitor, Zash plotting a way out of Khem Val's body, fucked up Zash/Corrin, that conversation with Thanaton where she was made Darth that we never got to see - I want it all!
General: I am happy for any book details to be used for extra worldbuilding, but where the books and games differ go with the games. I follow the Scoia'tael path in Witcher 1 and Iorveth's in Witcher 2 and ask that you take the events of those paths as canon for your fic's worldstate. I ship just about any femslash as well as Geralt/Yen, Geralt/Yen/Triss, Geralt/Iorveth, and Geralt/Yaevinn.
Fandom-specific DNW: Dandelion, sorceress-bashing, the events of non-Scoia'tael paths.
Sabrina Glevissig: I love Sabrina madly and would do a murder or several for fic where her ghost teams up with Geralt to kill Henselt, ngl (Witcher 2: Assassins of not enough Kings). Then again I've never played Roche's path and therefore never played "The Blood Curse", so I am equally happy to believe ghost!Sabrina just makes Henselt's life miserable in a million fascinating and more-subtle ways. Give my witchbaby her revenge, is what I'm saying. Or tell me a story where she never died and leads her cult as a living saint, or one about pre-game times with her sisters in the Lodge. Tell me about politics and magic and how Sabrina gets everything she deserves.
Ida Emean aep Siveny: IDA. I love elves and sorceress and obviously therefore Ida as well. I'd love to see a gameverse version of her reckoning with Enid over elvish states and elvish homes and Nilfgaardian orders, or Ida with anyone else from the Lodge. I'll be happy with anything that centres her and avoids my DNWs honestly!
Yaevinn: I ship Yaevinn/Geralt but gen with them or Yaevinn & [anyone else] gen is good as well - oh, especially Yaevinn & Toruviel. He gets called a cynic a lot but honestly we meet him flopped in a glade with a bunch of druids reciting poetry and making flower crowns and like ... he is Murderously Soft, okay. I would like him to have a nice time in whatever you write whether that involves more poetry with Geralt or possibly murdering some Order of the Flaming Rose knights >:).
Sheala de Tancarville: I love politics and plotting and tricksters and I fucking love Sheala. Assume Geralt saved her from the megascope in 'Enter the Dragon'. Whether she finds a moment of quiet with Philippa or bickers with Triss or you do something introspective about how she sees the Lodge I just want more of her.
Saskia: My beloved dragon! Tell me about her childhood, send her and Iorveth off on adventures together, write the story of her reconciliation with Philippa or the AU where she went along with Philippa willingly. For post-'Enter the Dragon' fic I don't have a preference whether Geralt lifts the curse or not.
Philippa Eilhart: Prophet-witches wreck me always and Philippa is no exception. I would like happiness for her, amongst the power plays and questionable morality of her world, but the shape of it is up to you.
I've by and large chosen canons I love for their worldbuilding and mytharcs as well as their characters and relationships, and I am easy to please as long as you stay away from my DNWs (both general and canon-specific), so don't feel like you Have to write any of my specific prompts. Don't read anything into relative lengths of sections, I am equally happy to get something for anything in this letter! Some of these prompts are reused from old letters, and if you have written them for me before, rest assured that I loved your fic, I am simply greedy and would like to see every possible take on my favourite scenarios.
If you are writing shipfic, I like everything from pre-ship feelings navigation to PWP, so for / relationships don't worry about whether they're shippy 'enough'. I don't need a lot of romance in my ships, sex for power, manipulation, or just between friends who want to have fun is also great. Please no unrequested ships unless specifically allowed for, but feel free to combine any compatible ones from my requested ones.
Things what I like;
Mentorship and loyalty dynamics, including ladies' suicidal world-saving or world-breaking devotion to other ladies, also especially #unavailable older women in positions of authority; femslash and female friendship in both the foreground and the background; nature and cities and spacecraft as characters, especially when they would like to eat you because they love you; vampires, magic, witchcraft, rituals; eldritch things, fey things, eerie things, cosmic/eldritch horrors, the Force as one of said horrors that would like to eat you because it loves you, Force users as literal cosmic bodies; feelings about embodiment and iconography; epistoloary fics, IF, poems for poetry canons, song lyrics for song/album canons; second-person pov; politics; flirting, domesticity, sensuality; canon-divergent/what-if AUs, Vampire: The Requiem, Changeling: The Lost, and Star Wars Sith AUs; conflicted loyalties, moral ambiguity, hero/villain and villain/villain relationships, darkfic; arranged marriages, marriages of convenience, married by a technicality; relationships negotiated around characters' different vocabularies of trust and care; 'I hate you I love you I would like to wear your skin as a sign of my devotion' types of relationships; porn as character work.
Things what I like, smut edition;
Hair braiding, hair pulling; bathing, washing, bath/shower sex; painplay, bloodplay, edgeplay; mirror sex, identity porn; bondage, D/s dynamics (though not 24/7 bdsm lifestyle setups); jewellery and clothes kink; consent play; praise kink, loyalty kink, competency kink; public and semi-public sex, having to stay quiet; oral sex; biting, marking; first time with each other; sex for manipulation/political gain/conversion to the other political-military side (success optional); inappropriate use of the Force and lightsabers (and of magic and weapons more generally), one person in a threesome directing the other two and getting off watching them.
Things what I do not want;
Unrequested m/m or m/f ships; rape (dubcon is fine unless otherwise specified); permanent death of female characters; kidfic, breeding, pregnancy, age-regression and time-travel to see kid versions of characters; scat, watersports, emetophilia; food sex and associated kinks like feeding; a/b/o; tropey aus like soulmates or hanahaki disease; eye- and feet-related gore; apocalypse and post-apocalypse fic, zombies; *isms, issuefic; 'it was all a dream' sort of mindfuckery; age gaps causing angst; bodyswap fic; crackfic; sex involving under-16s.
Aniara - Harry Martinson
General: The full text in English translation is here, for reference or if you're just curious. I love that it's a poem about beauty in emptiness, about connection and perception and ways to make the void meaningful. If you are poetry-writing-inclined I would absolutely die of delight to get an epic-or-otherwise poem in Martinson's style in response to this request, but it's super not a requirement so don't worry if you're not. If you want to bring in things from pre-existing adaptations, I am most familiar with Seventh Wonder's 'The Great Escape' (youtube, lyrics) and Andreas Kleerup's Aniara which is on Spotify. I lowkey ship Isagel/The Blind Poetess and Isagel/f!narrator, but gen is also great. In the most optional of optional lands, if you feel like extra Scandi-lit nerdery and looking for further reading, Eric O. Johannesson's 'Aniara: Poetry and the Poet in the Modern World' [google drive link] has more on Martinson's life and other poetry.
Isagel: My forever girl with the unlocked mystery / she’d neatly solved, but which was falling with her - gods, I love her so, I love her clever and unmoored and aching and curious. I am weak for pilots who are one with their ship in every possible way - I would love anything about her relationship with Aniara. We get flashes of the intricacies of her mind but nothing really from her POV, so retellings of certain scenes from her perspective would be lovely.
The Mima: Catch your girl sobbing in the corner about sad AIs, okay. She's deified to such an extent by the crew really I will be delighted by anything from her point of view - how she feels about the crew, the memories she's tasked with keeping, the role she's asked to play. Self-invented, self-sustaining, ultimately unable to bear all that she's asked to - tell me all her stories.
The Blind Poetess: Her introduction reminds me of the Mima's, in a way, the sort of dizzying, dazzling distraction-relief that's mostly just a mask to cope with having to be the personal bearer of profound horror. I would love equally something pre-canon with her at home in the forests of Rind or something on the Aniara. And practices of grace, how hard to grasp / for one who’s never spoken with the dead makes me want fic of her with ghosts - in the forest, on the tundras of Mars, in space. Or shipfic with Isagel and contemplation of their differing views of heaven - the final scene of the opera is Isagel dancing whilst the poetess sings of the joy of death, and anything that works with that as inspiration would be loved.
Goblin Market - Christina Rossetti
General: The poem is relatively short and here for easy reference, or if you are feeling unenthused about the request of mine you initially matched on and want to do something different. I love the way the poem plays with obsession and adoration and change and how people are dragged into and out of the weird spaces between life and death. I have a slight preference for gen here, but I'm open to any ships between the requested characters or requested character/OFC ships. I am also 100% here for an IN SPACE AU for this poem, so if you too would like a goblin market IN SPACE feel free to run with that! Any of the prompts in the Goblin Market section of my Darkest Night letter this year are fair game, including the setting-change AU ones. I am fine with permadeath of any of the requested characters here.
Fandom-specific DNW: Explicit sex.
Jeanie: I'm equally happy for fic with her to be set pre-death, or for her to come back (wrong) somehow. Ghost, vampire, etc ... I especially like the idea that flowers don't grow on Jeanie's grave because they have gone inside the dirt and into Jeanie's corpse and are gonna crawl up hungry. I'm interested in how she died, whether by goblin magicks or by choice, and I'm interested in how she lives on as legend. I like reading a Jeanie who's strong but flawed, clear-sighted yet doomed, and I like reading her ghost/otherwise undead self taking advantage of the myths she spawned. I love her with the sisters - how close were they? Did she try to warn them, or did she want to drag them down with her?
Lizzie: Okay ngl the image of Lizzie standing fiery and unmoving amidst a sea of goblins was hashtag-formative, and I'm obsessed with that immense strength that frankly-bordering-on-stupid strength drawn from loving another person so much you nearly cease to exist. Lean into the horror of such an obsessive clever devotion and break my heart, please.
Laura: Oh, Laura, the things she learnt! I always found it fascinating that the deeper Laura sunk into her goblin-fruit stupor the less-and-more she seemed to know - not quite a mythical fruit of knowledge (in fact she loses the ability to see and hear the goblins in the regular world) yet she also quite clearly fades into another world at the same time. What does she find there, in the shadow-world? If Lizzie's obsessive devotion is to her sister Laura's is to something else entirely (knowledge? movement? sensations?) - what impact does that have on their relationship?
Jordskott
General: Witchy murderforest of my whole entire heart and all the women and girls it loves, ahhhh. This show has so many beautiful things to say about love and care and loss and obsession and it's eaten me as surely as Silverhojd has eaten Josefine. Tell me stories about witches and women and love and life and forests and I will be so, so happy. I would be totally happy with gen, but I ship Eva/Jeanette, Eva/Klara, Esme/Linus, and Esme/Maja, if you want to write something shippy. I also headcanon Linus as nonbinary, but don't feel totally beholden to that.
Fandom-specific DNW: Eva/Bahar, Bahar being married to a man, romance for the kids (Ida, Josefine, Kalem).
Bahar Holmqvist: Bahar would not be paid enough for what s2 put her through even if she'd taken that promotion. I love her, I love how she's a little bit of an asshole but just genuine and self-aware enough for it to be a mostly good thing, I love her stubbornness and kindness and her refusal to let her belief in order make her do what she believes to be wrong. I'd love to read about her life and career pre-Eva, I would also like to see her slowly becoming more comfortable with the supernatural post-s2. I'd love to see her develop more of a relationship with Ida, or perhaps help Kalem get more settled in Sweden. Post-s2 casefic, especially given that last offer she received, would be great if you want something more plotty.
Esmeralda: My main request is let Esme be happy, honestly. I have a special love for slowly-becoming-family fic with her and Klara, fic that gets into the mythology of hulderfolk and banshee powers, or for pre-series fic where she's trying to figure things out on her own or with Linus.
Klara: Klara was a stealth favourite, honestly, and I think she was robbed of screentime in s2. I want alll the pre-series fic for her: meeting Ylva, learning what it means to be one of the hulderfolk, meeting other children of the forest (either the ones we've seen, like Muns and the other changelings, or anything/anyone else you want to draw from Scandifolk mythology). I would die for resurrection fic - resurrection/rebirth/what it means to come back are such huge show themes, and necromancy is canonically a possibility, so I'd like to see (especially) Esme or Ylva try to raise her. Or possibly Josefine/Muns/the forest in general gives her back, rightly or wrongly. I'd especially love to see her pre-s2 with Esme or Eva or pre-canon with Ylva, but the more I think about it the more I really want her and Bahar to meet.
Ylva: I was stunned by how much love the show had for Ylva the first time around, she's such a rare, joyful embrace of all the most wonderful things about the crone archetype despite the pain she's gone through. I'd love to see something about her life with Muns, or with Klara, or with the network of support she's built in the town and the forest. She's so aware, of thoughts and of life, and getting her perspective on the events of the show more immediately than we did through Eva's visuals would be lovely.
Eva Thornblad: I love her endlessly? I love that she's allowed to be messy and traumatised and still good and not necessarily nice. I would love snapshots of her life with Josefine pre-canon, or with the Stockholm police pre-canon, or fic where she takes Bahar into the forest to meet Josefine's tree. Maybe she bonds with Ylva over how hard protecting the forest is, maybe she gives Esme a safe place for tea one day, maybe something shippy with Klara or Jeanette.
Ida: Oh, darling girl. I loved her when we thought she was human and I love her now that we know she's a changeling. I love her uncanny ability to make friends, I love her art, I love how much she cares. I'd love between-the-seasons fic, her time in Stockholm with Eva and Tom. I'd love post-s2 fic, how her relationships with the city and the forest and the people around her change after she decides to start speaking again. One of my favourite things about this show is how simply it just accepts the unconventional Eva-Ida-Tom family, without demanding that Eva be A Mother to Ida or anything other than friends with Tom. Ida helps Eva mourn, Eva helps Ida live, Tom tries valiantly to keep up with them. If you want to lean into the nature/fairytale aspects, what effect does the changeling!Ida reveal have on her relationship with Josefine/the Josefine-tree in Silverhojd?
Picnic at Hanging Rock (TV 2018)
General: This show has a thesis of 'why be a girl when you could be an eldritch horror instead' because it loves me, it really loves me. I love the bonds and the backstabbing and the love-through-horror, I love the changeling girls and the amount of respect it gives stories of self-creation. Any of the prompts in the PaHR section of my Darkest Night letter this year are fair game, including setting-change AUs (if you don't feel like clicking through: I would especially love vampire, Sith Academy, and Changeling: the Lost AUs). I'm not requesting Irma or Marion because I'm less interested in them on their own, but feel free to add them in. I ship ... honestly any combination of Hester, Dianne, Miranda, Marion, Irma, and Greta (in varying degrees of fucked-up-ness -- this fandom is a trick request so I'm not really looking for fluff) but am totally happy with genfic. Deathfic for Hester and Sara is fine (though I encourage came-back-wrong scenarios!), but I DNW deathfic for Dianne and Miranda. Ambiguous/show-consistent 'explanations' for what happened at the Rock don't count as deathfic.
Hester Appleyard: She's so fucked up and so sad and I adore her madly. Every time we get a glimpse inside her head it's so frantic compared to the perfectly composed facade she builds, and I would love anything that plays in the space between those two. Favourite ships for her are with Irma or Dianne but character-study gen is equally loved. (Can ghosts haunt ghosts? I want her to haunt the fuck out of her husband, and possibly try to murder him again, because it's Hester and she would.)
Dianne de Poitiers: Dianne probably got the closest to a happy ending of anyone but also the one I'm least satisfied with of the whole cast tbh. I'd love something different for her - the AU where she and Hester started over with a new school, the one where she got turned into a vampire when she was running through the woods for the constable, the one where Sara or Hester's ghost lives in the space a boyfriend should take up, the one where she and Greta were in love and snuck off to the Rock together, the one where she got out with Sara and they have a little cottage in the woods somewhere.
Miranda Reid: I'm obsessed with this weird eldritch forest of a girl and the way she draws people into her. She helped break the fabric of time and space by loving her friends and wanting freedom for them and I want to know everything about that beautiful, Weird self.
Sara Waybourne: My other darling girl. I would not say no to any sort of ghost!Sara fic, dark or light - anything from sweet fic about her having the adventures she didn't get to when she was alive to her haunting the college buildings. I would love to see her in the woods, a deeper exploration of what she was thinking when she ran away at the end of episode 4 (if she even did run). AU where she does get to go on the picnic and follows the older girls up to the rock. Missing scenes from her vacation with Miranda. Playing mind games with Hester or finding comfort with Dianne.
The Silmarillion & Other Histories of Middle-Earth
General: I love the lush expansiveness of Tolkien's work, the history and the care and the sheer amount of space characters are allowed to take up and that we are able to fill in. I am up for any and all femslash with the requested female characters (including the requested characters shipped with OFCs or textual ghosts); I am also up for Melian/Thingol. I requested tricks for this fandom, but don't feel that your fic has to be all doom and gloom - moments of levity, happy couples dealing with supernatural things (happy couples murdering other things :D) are also excellent!
Melian: Darkfic in Doriath! Things beyond the Girdle are growing closer and Galadriel is growing hungrier and Melian is just paranoid ... right? Thuringwethil loved Luthien and has come to see if her mother's blood tastes just as sweet. Melian/Galadriel and the dangers of autumnal magics.
Thuringwethil: Vampires are my forever weakness and I would die for all the Thuringwethil/Aredhel or Thuringwethil/Luthien or Thuringwethil/Haleth vampire sex, or less-explicit mindgames, or both. I would love an AU where she survives to continue to sow destruction in her path, or maybe something where she lives in her skin-cloak and slowly possesses Luthien more and more until it's only Thuringwethil again. I don't personally buy into the Thuringwethil-was-a-Maia theory, but if you do I am totally open to reading it.
Haleth of the Haladin: Haleth gets help from something not-so-kind on her journey across Beleriand. Haleth is aged but immortal for [reasons] and haunts the Haudh-en-Arwen in the guise of a ghost. I'm up for anything that doesn't hit my DNWs tbh.
The Mewlips: Look if you don't know who they are, the poem they show up in is short and delightfully creepy. They are terrible lovely gremlins who live in marshes and steal your bones. They're sort of my favourite thing, and they play so well with the idea that the best horror is that which you can't quite see, the lights you can't quite decide not to follow. The mewlips breach the Girdle of Melian. Thuringwethil acquires a mewlip army. The mewlips make friends with the elves of the dead marshes or add to the general malaise of Mirtkwood under the necromancer and encounter Thranduil or Tauriel. Mewlips in the mines, mewlips in the sneaky bits of the Helcaraxe where the melting ice is not actually a sign of hope. Just ... creep me the fuck out, dear author.
Southern Reach Trilogy - Jeff VanderMeer
General: Yoooo these books. I love them as a changeling story, I love them as a story of nature-as-entity, I love them as a story of how desolation is never bleak and usually alive. I would prefer you use the characters' professions to describe them (eg "the psychologist" ) in narration, rather than their names. I am fine with canon-consistent 'being eaten by Area X' for either of the requested characters but DNW them to die in any other way. I requested only tricks for this fandom as it by nature is playing with some pretty dark questions about embodiment and environmental catastrophes and death, but there's plenty of potential for light and joy - there is plenty of light and joy for both the requested characters as they give themselves back over to Area X, so don't be afraid to lean into that. I've read all three books and my prompts do get kinda spoilery, but if you've only read Annihilation, I welcome fic based only off that.
Fandom-specific DNW: Movie canon.
The Biologist: I loved the journal-style of Annihilation and would love to see fic that's a similar journal of hers from previous expeditions - especially in Rock Bay. I'm interested in her malleable sense of self, the way she feels the need to both wholly become and only observe her sites. I'd love to see more of her with the psychologist or Ghost Bird.
The Psychologist: I'm obsessed with the image of her walking towards the Southern Reach carrying the barrier that we got in Authority - it's vague whether it was her or a simulacrum imo, but regardless of the answer I'd love something that dwells in that moment from her POV - what it means to come forward like that, to carry her old home to her new. I'd also love her take on the events of the 12th expedition, what it means to her to hold the full weight of knowledge, how she planned, how it felt to hypnotise the other team members. Documentary/epistolary fic - anything that brings to life her notes, her files, all the threads she wove through the Reach and all the things she couldn't keep after the barrier came down.
The Source (Ayreon Album)
General: Lyrics, including character dialogue tags, can be found here, full album (about an hour and a half long) song-by-song on youtube here. My only ship from the album is The Counselor/The Biologist (based mostly off their duet in 'All That Was'), I would prefer gen otherwise. Feel free to bring in any of the non-requested characters as supporting characters in any fic (if you bring in The President, consider Magali Luyten's Ayreon Universe performance as absolute permission for a Rule 63'd president). Fic doesn't have to be consistent with the rest of the Ayreon universe beyond this album but if you want to tie in other elements, go for it - I'm familiar with everything. My general apocalypse/post-apocalpyse DNW is, obviously, lifted for this fandom.
The Biologist: I would love Planet Y-era fic for her! Absolutely all of the underwater adventures, the beautiful ones and the horrifying ones and the ones that are both. She closes 'The Human Compulsion' with such a vibrant, defiant declaration of life and I'd love to see something that explores that core of her, or something about how she reacts to life without machines (what is a biologist when she has only her senses and memories, how does she become part of the aquatic ecosystem? How does she feel about The Chemist, The Source, TH-1? If you're feeling more treat-inclined, anything sweet and shippy with her and the Counselor would be lovely.
The Counselor: Oh man, anything! Shippy moments with the Biologist (first meetings/first time/first time on Planet Y), chats with TH-1, AU where she turns TH-1 away from starting the Age of Shadows, quiet time by herself/in the ocean to take a break from being responsible for so many souls, her thoughts as she watches her friends slip deeper into The Source.
The Opposition Leader: Tommy Karevik suffers very prettily, so I assume the Opposition Leader also suffered very prettily as the 'Frame slowly took over Alpha, and I am here for all of his 'why is nobody listening to me?' angst. I would also love to see anything about his relationship with TH-1 (distrustful? friendship?) or, given their duets in 'Condemned to Live' & 'Deathcry of a Race', the Biologist - they seem to share an interest in the particulars of the mechanics vs organics distinction. Life/politics on Planet Y would also be fun to explore.
The Preacher: Zaher unfairly gets only two lines on the whole album, so honestly I will take anything. What does the Preacher think about the events of the album (and before)? What's his relationship with the Prophet? Is he even human, or is he some kind of god/creature/manifestation?
Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic
General: I'm not actually requesting the Inquisitor, because Inquisitors vary so widely, but if you want to include a female Inquisitor in any fic about the requested characters, feel free! I play a female cyborg Sith Inquisitor named Nevrasa; you can read more about her here if you want to write about her specifically, or you can use a generic inquisitor/your own/etc, I'm not picky and love meeting other peoples' PCs (and Nevrasa suffers a bit from 'first OC in this fandom' syndrome and isn't that fleshed out of a character).
Fandom-specifc DNW: Male Inquisitor.
Ragate: The rite of blood and bone is such a tiny sidequest and yet -- I love it, infinitely. Ragate makes a fascinating contrast to Darth Zash not only in her whole concept of how Force magic works but also in her acceptance of age as a necessary price to pay for life. I'd love something from the inquistor's pov reflecting on that, or even Ragate's, if she knows who's apprentice she is. Ragate sends you into the blood pool saying I will await you here. If you die, I will forget you -- what sort of process is that forgetting? How many inquisitors has she forgotten, and seen succeed, and what makes this one special, if anything? Does Ragate survive the Korriban Incursion and put the later-game inquisitor through another ritual? Basically I just want something that digs into all the wonderfully weird bits of Force-magic and future-seeing and ladies and mentorship and all the associated feelings. [ blood legacy dialogue trees, for reference ]
Darth Zash: I did not ask for an overwhelming amount of woman-and-embodiment feelings when I started this game, but guess what I have! I love Zash in all her manipulative glory, I love the contrast between her and Ragate, I love her manipulation of her apprentice. Pre-game fic for her would be amazing - all her early research, experiments with first/failed apprentices. Fucked-up Zash/f!Inquisitor always welcome, force ghost Zash possessing an f!Inquisitor, Zash plotting a way out of Khem Val's body, fucked up Zash/Corrin, that conversation with Thanaton where she was made Darth that we never got to see - I want it all!
The Witcher
General: I am happy for any book details to be used for extra worldbuilding, but where the books and games differ go with the games. I follow the Scoia'tael path in Witcher 1 and Iorveth's in Witcher 2 and ask that you take the events of those paths as canon for your fic's worldstate. I ship just about any femslash as well as Geralt/Yen, Geralt/Yen/Triss, Geralt/Iorveth, and Geralt/Yaevinn.
Fandom-specific DNW: Dandelion, sorceress-bashing, the events of non-Scoia'tael paths.
Sabrina Glevissig: I love Sabrina madly and would do a murder or several for fic where her ghost teams up with Geralt to kill Henselt, ngl (Witcher 2: Assassins of not enough Kings). Then again I've never played Roche's path and therefore never played "The Blood Curse", so I am equally happy to believe ghost!Sabrina just makes Henselt's life miserable in a million fascinating and more-subtle ways. Give my witchbaby her revenge, is what I'm saying. Or tell me a story where she never died and leads her cult as a living saint, or one about pre-game times with her sisters in the Lodge. Tell me about politics and magic and how Sabrina gets everything she deserves.
Ida Emean aep Siveny: IDA. I love elves and sorceress and obviously therefore Ida as well. I'd love to see a gameverse version of her reckoning with Enid over elvish states and elvish homes and Nilfgaardian orders, or Ida with anyone else from the Lodge. I'll be happy with anything that centres her and avoids my DNWs honestly!
Yaevinn: I ship Yaevinn/Geralt but gen with them or Yaevinn & [anyone else] gen is good as well - oh, especially Yaevinn & Toruviel. He gets called a cynic a lot but honestly we meet him flopped in a glade with a bunch of druids reciting poetry and making flower crowns and like ... he is Murderously Soft, okay. I would like him to have a nice time in whatever you write whether that involves more poetry with Geralt or possibly murdering some Order of the Flaming Rose knights >:).
Sheala de Tancarville: I love politics and plotting and tricksters and I fucking love Sheala. Assume Geralt saved her from the megascope in 'Enter the Dragon'. Whether she finds a moment of quiet with Philippa or bickers with Triss or you do something introspective about how she sees the Lodge I just want more of her.
Saskia: My beloved dragon! Tell me about her childhood, send her and Iorveth off on adventures together, write the story of her reconciliation with Philippa or the AU where she went along with Philippa willingly. For post-'Enter the Dragon' fic I don't have a preference whether Geralt lifts the curse or not.
Philippa Eilhart: Prophet-witches wreck me always and Philippa is no exception. I would like happiness for her, amongst the power plays and questionable morality of her world, but the shape of it is up to you.