femslashex 2021 (in progress)

[kimaracretak]

Hello friend, it is time for femslash and I am so excited to see what you will write for me! If you want inspiration beyond this letter I am also kimaracretak, where I have a small but reflective-of-things-I-like set of bookmarks, and kimaracretak on 8tracks if you want #aesthetic musical inspiration.

I love these canons for the 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. A lot of my prompts are very horror-slanted, but if your muse is inclined to things less murderous, feel free! That being said, I'm extremely not into plotless/conflictless fluff or 'soft' takes on these characters/relationships, and would prefer you avoid them.

I love everything from short introspection bits to long plotty missionfic to sex scenes as ways to explore character/setting/worldbuilding, and 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.

Borgen || River || Scott & Bailey || Shetland || Shirley (2020) || The Bletchley Circle || Y Gwyll

Likes

• Arranged marriages, marriages of convenience, married by a technicality


• Canon-divergent/what-if AUs, Aniara, Vampire: The Requiem, Changeling: The Lost, Scandinoir, Morrowind, and Star Wars Sith AUs


• Conflicted loyalties, moral ambiguity, hero/villain and villain/villain relationships, 'I am the only one allowed to hurt you' hero/villain relationships


• Conversations in mundane liminal spaces, conversations in liminal spaces on the border between one world and another


• Darkfic


• Femslash and female friendship in both the foreground and the background


• Flirting, domesticity, sensuality, friends-and-lovers


• Mentorship and loyalty dynamics, including ladies' suicidal world-saving or world-breaking devotion to other ladies, #unavailable older women in positions of authority


• Nature and cities and houses and spacecraft as characters (especially when they would like to eat you because they love you), architectural horror


• Vampires, magic, witchcraft, rituals, eldritch things, fey things, eerie things, cosmic horrors


• Feelings about embodiment and iconography, body horror (especially flowers growing out of people's bodies)


• Epistolary fics, IF, poems for poetry canons, song lyrics for song/album canons


• First- and second-person pov, unreliable narrators


• Politics, worldbuilding


• Philosophical, legal, and academic debates


• 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


• 'Look what I can make you do to me' kinds of emotional manipulation in relationships


• 'You don't get to save me but you will kill me' types of relationships, especially when the killing doesn't actually happen and they both have to live with that


• Getting back together after messy breakups


• Reunions with former lovers in general, no matter what they look like - casual/platonic over coffee, ill-advised one-night stands, etc


• Desire, women who aren't afraid of desire, women who lean too far into desire, women who desire to kill and eat their gods


• Porn as character work.


• Time loops with both characters trapped, time loops while one character is trapped and the other is there to help or hinder but can leave whenever they want.

Dark Likes

• Accidental apotheosis, non-consensual apotheosis


• Arousal from killing, sex in the blood of their enemies


• Blood magic, blood kink, blood rituals, blood as art medium


• Body horror


• Conflicted loyalties, abuse of loyalties, loyalty leading people into really bad decisionmaking


• Died and came back wrong, died multiple times and comes back wronger each time


• Doomed ships, ghost ships, ships that should be abandoned but aren't, cursed ships (spaceships/airships/sailing ships all good!)


• Eerily pristine abandoned places, ruined castles/fortresses/villages, other eldritch places


• Flowers growing out of people's bodies, flowers growing out of people's empty eye sockets


• Folk horror


• Ghosts


• Human sacrifice, ritual scarification, what happens when sacrifices to higher powers aren't accepted


• Identity Issues, especially those stemming from close bonds with another person


• In-universe regional horror, myths, (urban) legends, and folklore


• Killing and eating your gods as a form of worship


• Memory loss


• Nature that wants to crawl inside you and never come out, nature that wants to eat you, sentient malevolent nature


• Necromancy, the unpleasant aftereffects/costs of necromancy


• Oneiromancy, dreamsharing, dreams that bleed into reality, cursed dreams, prophetic dreams


• Non-fatal and oddly romantic vivisection


• One character dressing another up to die


• Repeatedly killed and resurrected


• Ritual gone wrong


• 'There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls' trope


• Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms


• Unintended consequences of having your future told

Smut Likes

• Bathing, washing, bath/shower sex


• Biting, marking


• Bloodplay, knifeplay, wax play, edgeplay, edgeplay to the edge of death


• Bondage, shibari/kinbaku, suspension, honour bondage, blindfolds, gags, D/s dynamics (though not 24/7 bdsm lifestyle setups)


• Consent play


• Dressing or undressing each other


• First time with each other


• Fucked with the hilt of a weapon/barrel of a gun


• Hair braiding, hair pulling


• Jewellery and clothes kink


• Mirror sex, identity porn


• Mutual masturbation


• Needleplay, sewing pretty patterns into people's skin, sewing a partner to the bed


• One person in a threesome directing the other two and getting off watching them


• One person trying to read, their partner getting more and more distracting until they put their book away


• Oral sex


• Overstimulation


• Painplay, manipulating broken bones, wound fingering


• Praise kink, loyalty kink, competency kink


• Semi-public sex (especially under-desk cunnilingus), having to stay quiet


• Sex for manipulation/political gain/conversion to the other political-military side (success optional)


• Somnophilia


• Spanking, especially as a show of forgiveness or as penance for fucking up at work


• Temperature play


• Thigh riding, especially if the one riding her partner is wearing a skirt with her underwear pulled aside.

Do Not Want

• A/B/O, any type of biologically determined heats/'must fuck now' situations including sex pollen


• Bodyswap fic, crackfic


• Breeding, pregnancy including unconventional forms like fpreg/oviposition, age-regression, ageplay


• Characters under 13 unless requested (mentions of childhood happenings are fine), de-aging


• Characters magically conjuring themselves dicks/being given dicks/giving other people dicks (sex toys like strap-ons are fine)


• Detailed descriptions of injuries to feet, amputated feet (minor/referenced injuries are fine)


• Fictional non-American police forces having the same history/current issues/social norms as real-world American police forces.


• Food in/on genitalia or used as sex toys, weight gain/stuffing kink (fantasy body horror and metaphors are fine)


• 'I am too old to be loved' angst


• Issuefic, non-canonical trans or ace interpretations of characters unless requested, fic focussing on characters' romantic/sexual/gender identities, characters describing themselves with canon-atypical or anachronistic romantic/sexual/gender identity terms


• 'It was all a dream' sort of endings


• Mentions of/references to Brexit (explicit Remain-won AUs welcome but not necessary, just let me pretend)


• 'Only one destined true love' AUs like soulmates or hanahaki disease, single-target sexuality where the characters have never been and will never be sexually/romantically attracted to anyone else. (You don't need to explicitly reference past relationships, just no 'Now I finally know what romantic love is and I will never feel it for anyone else ever' sort of things.)


• Unrequested m/m or m/f ships, unless specified.


• Rape/noncon (dubcon is fine)


• Permanent death of female characters unless otherwise specified (ghosts fine unless otherwise specified, references to pre-canon dead female characters fine, in ESO requests 'technically killed but also just hanging out in Coldharbour/the Deadlands/other Oblivion realm' is always fine).


• Safeword/colour checkins, extensive kink/relationship negotiation


• Scat, watersports, emetophilia, enemas


• Sex involving under-16s.


• Zombie apocalypse fic, day-to-day survival in the postapocalyptic wasteland fic (exploration of ruins from dead civilisations is fine)

Borgen

General: I want to say something intelligent about this show but I'm extremely 'no thought head Birgitte and Hanne and Katrine' about it. Where I've requested both & and / versions of all these combinations I will truly be happy with whichever version you choose to write. Feel free to combine them as well - I'd be delighted by, say, Birgitte/Katrine & Hanne.

Note: Referenced/past Birgitte/Phillip and Kasper/Katrine are fine. I'd prefer if you pretended Birgitte/Jeremy never happened, even if we didn't match on one of my / ships for Birgitte.

Fandom-specific DNW: Contemporary European political landscapes in futurefic. I like futurefic, I have some prompts for it, but if you go for something set closer to now than 2013, I'd like a Denmark that was kept more thoughtfully & compassionately to the left because of Birgitte's politics, a UK that didn't leave the EU, that sort of thing (this does not apply to American politics - keep them as is or go alt-history as you wish).

Birgitte/Katrine: Did I love what season 3 gave me? Yes. Do I want more? Also yes.

• AUs where Katrine is Birgitte's ex, instead of Kasper's. Either romantic ex or an Anne-Sophie type figure, and what that means for their (re)developing relationship after the Moderates are elected.


• Post-s3, Birgitte back as Staatsminister in a leftist government with Katrine as her spin doctor.


• Fic set in one of the between-seasons gaps - Katrine covering an event Birgitte is speaking at, a legislation-of-the-week fic like some of the early s1 episodes.


• AUs where Birgitte's ill-advised one night stand is with Katrine instead of her driver.

Birgitte/Hanne: Also known as: the scene early in s1 where someone was like 'no one wants to hire Hanne anymore' and Birgitte responded by giving her the first question made a much bigger impact on me than anyone intended.

• They choose the same bathroom/hallway to hide out in during some boring event.


• Anything set in the s2-s3 timeskip.

Hanne/Katrine: Their relationship is hands-down the best part of s2, and I love that they both truly need each other and are good friends to each other in a way that transcends their (theoretical) mentor-student positions.

• Post-canon, covering the new administration, Katrine readjusting to new journalism after her time with the New Democrats.


• Post-canon, Katrine continues working with Birgitte, Hanne stays in news journalism, and what effect that has on their relationship.


• Working on a story together in the s1-s2 timeskip.


• An exception to my kidfic DNW: the two of them with Gustav post-canon, Katrine offering Hanne the chance to develop some kind of relationship with him the way she didn't get to with her own daughter.


• Uncomplicated friends-with-benefits arrangements.

River

General: Gods, this show has so many beautiful things to say about love and loss and grief and I just want to dwell in it a while longer. I interpret Chrissie has having been in love with Stevie but not having recognised/admitted it even to herself until after she'd died, and my prompts do stem from that interpretation - I would love a story that's both Chrissie/Stevie and Chrissie/Rosa - but if you want to do an AU where there's some element of requited-ness that's great. Permanent death for Stevie as per canon is fine here.

Chrissie/Rosa: I'd love anything about them finding peace together post-series.

• Rosa helping Chrissie rediscover/reclaim her sexuality. You know that Lesley Manville interview where she talks about how women over 50 should still get to have sex up against a fridge if they want to? Chrissie should get to have sex with Rosa up against a fridge.


• I think a relationship with Rosa would be the first time Chrissie allowed herself to consciously appreciate/care about/relate to another woman sexually or romantically, and just - all the joy and exploration that comes with that, and Rosa giving her the space to both feel and process that joy. It's what she deserves!


• Chrissie seemed - unusually for DCIs in television - to have a solid handle on friendships before Stevie died. But she didn't have a partner, at home or at work, and I'd love a story about her discovering a genuine partner in Rosa.

Chrissie/Stevie: John's grief over Stevie takes centre stage for most of the show, so if you go for mid- or post-canon, I would really like something that moves the focus over onto Chrissie and her grief here.

• Anything where Chrissie sees Stevie like River does. So much of what we know - think we know - about Stevie is actually just how River remembers Stevie, so ... what might we learn from the version of her Chrissie creates? What changes?


• Pre-canon almost-get-togethers - slightly drunken kisses that Chrissie pretends can't mean anything, Stevie staying over at Chrissie's a little too late, sleeping on her couch one night too often, the two of them going out with the kids one time too many.


• What does it mean to recognise you were in love with your best friend when you'd convinced yourself you'd forgotten how to be in love? What does Chrissie re-evaluate about the way she approaches affection and care, and how does that affect a future relationship with Rosa?

Scott & Bailey

General: Listen I'll fight Sally Wainwright in the Tesco's car park for many reasons, but this messy show about messy people is so close to my heart, and I'd love anything about these women and their relationships. I love all sides of the Julie-Gill-Janet-Rachel square, so fic combining exploring other aspects of those relationships (e.g. Gill/Julie + Janet/Rachel, past Gill/Janet + present Janet/Rachel, Janet/Rachel + Rachel & Gill) is super encouraged. I've read and enjoyed all three books - use book canon or not as you like. I strongly prefer fic that pretends Rachel/Kevin didn't happen the way it did - Rachel and Janet can still fall out over something else, references to Kevin leaking information are fine, but I'd rather you ignore the rest.

Fandom-specific DNW: Season 5 canon.

Rachel/Janet: I love them as friends-and-lovers and I think trying to pin down the line between the two for them is ... useless at best and counterproductive at worst. They and the show are at their best when their relationship is allowed to be the most important thing to each of them, and just ... lean into that. More of women getting to say yes to each other & having that being fulfilling!

• I live for their friendship, and would love to see them in a friends-and-lovers situation. Or, as the freeform tag goes, '#Let's Not Worry About Defining This Relationship Let's Just Keep Kissing'. Canon, but they keep managing to steal kisses and not think too hard about it until something (Sean's proposing?) makes them.


• Any type of canon divergence where Rachel dumps Sean instead of marrying him. I know making the worst possible choice is just Rachel being Rachel sometimes, but I'd like her to not have to for once - to take a step back and realise that won't end well, or for Janet to maybe realise she's projecting her own feelings about (the loss of) marriage onto Rachel and she doesn't have to.


• Like, I mean, 'Do you really want to stay at ours' she wanted to say yes so badly let Rachel say yes to Janet - friendship, sex, romance, any/all/weirdly in between those things - instead of saying yes to a man because she thinks she has to.


• Casefic, and, if you're wanting a specific prompt, what casefic centred on them looks like in the aftermath of Helen Bartlett's death. S2 touched a bit on what the failure of system does to Rachel specifically, but Helen's case was a failure of Gill's, who Janet and Rachel not only trust but model themselves on, and while s4 gestured at some answers ... I'm not completely satisfied with them. So.


• Rachel making a pass at Janet, instead of bringing Kevin home, and Janet's fear of adding - or acknowledging - that dimension of their relationship leading to their fight.


• The potentially disasterous intersection between 'Rachel's entire authority THING' and 'that point in s3 where Janet is absolutely her superior officer'. Because, look, 'I can call you ma'am now if you like' x all those times Rachel's knelt in front of Janet's desk ... that has lived in my head for the better part of a decade at this point. I refuse to be the only one.

Shetland

General: I'm entirely up to date on canon, but any divergences you want are fine. I like selkie!Rhona AUs, fics that explore the challenges of Shetland life vs mainland life, and Scottish mythology. Explicit Remain-won AUs are delightful, but not necessary as long as I can pretend Remain won and there's no Brexit. Fic in Scottish Gaelic super welcome if you speak it. Background/mentioned Jimmy/Duncan welcome. On the whole I liked how Rhona/Phyllis ended, and am interested in stories exploring how Rhona moves on, but AUs where they were never together are also fine.

Fandom-specific DNW: Rhona permanently moving away from Shetland.

Rhona/Anke: They're both dealing with massive professional fallout and personal betrayals (I definitely saw Lars as as close to a friend as Anke had at work) and I think they could bond over that. I definitely see this as a friends-with-benefits/casual long distance thing - Rhona benefitting from not being with someone who makes her think about life-altering moves, Anke getting someone undemanding to be with.

Rhona/Asha: I love Asha a lot a lot, and I really wish we'd gotten more of her outside of Jimmy's perspective.

• Season 3 AUs where Asha's fling was with Rhona instead of Jimmy (Rhona cheating on Phyllis/Rhona-and-Phyllis never happening/the two of them had already broken up all good). What changes, both about how they approach the case and in terms of how they might be able to move on together after everything in a way Jimmy couldn't.


• I think a lot about Asha's 'a life worth living' line, and imagine it would be at the forefront of Rhona's post-Phyllis mind as well.


• Anything and everything about Shetland-as-place and Shetland-as-home, and how the land helps them find a connection together. Long walks, getting caught in the rain, getting drunk on the beach watching the auroras together.

Rhona/Tosh: Mentorship stories that came straight for my heart and did not let go! I like anything for them, first meetings, mentorship snapshots, helping Tosh feel comfortable in her body again post-s3.

Shirley (2020)

General: This is not so much a Shirley Jackson biopic as it is a movie about a Shirley Jackson novel about Shirley Jackson's life. It's on Hulu and I HIGHLY recommend it, because 'two women the world is entirely unprepared for kneeling next to each other in the forest playing sensual mind games over dubiously poisonous mushrooms' is Extremely Made For Me Shit, and I suspect it might be a draw for some of you as well. Everyone is some shade of awful. At least one person is dead (the movie is about the time Shirley was writing Hangsaman). There's a scene on a porch swing that's just A Whole Lot. Please watch this movie and scream with me about it!

Note: Referenced/background Shirley/Stanley fine & encouraged. References to Rose's canon pregnancy fine, but I DNW focus on the pregnancy or sex with heavily pregnant Rose, if you go for smut.

Rose/Shirley: There's a very, well, Shirley-Jackson-esque ambiguity to them - sexual and not, friendship and not, and I'd love something in that weird space.

• One of the things I keep returning to re: the film is that it's ... really uninterested in not even answering but even just asking the question of whether Shirley or Stanley was involved in Paula's disappearance. So ... explore that! What does asking the question look like from Rose's perspective, how do her information-gathering errands look different if she or Shirley are wondering about that?


• Also, like, you know me, you know I can never resist ambiguously sexually-charged murder apprenticeships. Just because the film didn't ask these questions about Shirley doesn't mean Shirley can't answer them for Rose, regardless of Rose's feelings.


• There's a lot of focus on what happens to all lost girls? they go mad., and I'd really love anything that explores going mad as a process, and a purposeful one: hallucinogens, dreams, how to construct a reality just for two.


• The porch swing scene. If you are the type of person who was convinced to watch this film by how I pitched it in this letter - or if you've already watched it and you're reading my letter like 'yeah that's the movie that I like!' - you have Feelings(tm) about the porch swing scene. Please write a fic about Your Feelings About The Porch Swing Scene. I trust you.


• Insomnia and weird dreams - shared dreams, influencing each other's dreams, trying to bottle each other's dreams up and drink them so you can write about them better.


• Really just anything surreal and disturbing and how much these two fucking love being surreal and disturbing at/with each other.

The Bletchley Circle

General: I love this show. I love a few postwar murder mysteries about women being smart and relentlessly competent and very good to each other. It brings me so much joy and if this is what we matched on I hope it brings you so much joy too.

Fandom-Specific DNW: San Francisco canon, Jean or Lucy permanently moving away from the UK.

Jean/Lucy: I have once again picked the tiniest pairing in a tiny canon to fall in love with, but, well, here we are. I would love absolutely anything about them, but for a small selection: Any story where Lucy travels with Jean post-war instrad of getting married, any post-canon fic where Lucy makes detective/CID in her own right at the Met and how Jean feels about that, porn with feelings (and spanking), travels in Scotland together, and period-relevant literary references (if you want to be very specific, Virginia Woolf references, and to be even more specific - look, I get why Orlando seems to be the reference point of choice for fandom, but consider instead: To The Lighthouse, and Lily-Lucy parallels.).

Y Gwyll

General: I watched the Welsh version of this on S4C (though I've tried to supply American Netflix episode numbers too), and fic in/incorporating Welsh is welcomed if you speak it! Mentions of/references to any of the canon m/f ships is fine (including past ships), though I'd prefer they not be the focus and DNW present-day or future Mared/John. Character death DNW waived for OFC victims in casefic and canon deaths, though I do have a slight preference for Catrin-survives AUs in post-canon fic.

Mared/Siân: These two immediately caught me from the moment Sian tried to slink in late to the team's first briefing. I'm obsessed with how, despite the very real tensions between them, they're still quite close - the same Siân who makes it obvious repeatedly that she would rather be in Cardiff also chose repeatedly to stay and work specifically with Mared, and looks out for her during the investigation in s3. Despite everything they work well together and are concerned with protecting each other, and they're a really lovely illustration of the show's thesis that trying is important even/especially when it's not enough (but it's really nice when it is!) Things I would love include:

• Casefic, especially of the semi-low stakes cases that have almost more to do with the interpersonal dynamics of Aberystwyth communities than anything specifically criminal sort.


• Things dealing with Welsh mythology! Whether you want to go full-on mythology AU, or they're just discussing their favourite stories, mythology of any sort will delight me.


• Late-night quiet conversations of the friendship- or relationship-building sort — bad office coffee at 11pm, complaining about their colleagues' terrible filing habits, &c.


• Also excellent conversations to have if they end up going to Cardiff for reasons. Yes they are some of my favourite characters. Yes I am encouraging you to inflict the particular torture of the A470 on them. Ships & friendships alike need roadtrips, and North-South travel in Wales is a whole Thing. Or, if you want them to have longer conversations, stick them on a train. Average Aber-to-Cardiff train is over four hours (not direct).


• Anything about the small town/city dynamic in general. Sian showing Mared her favourite places/things, Mared dealing with her feelings of being displaced/overwhelmed.


• Pre-canon fic and first meetings, first case worked together, first times, etc


• Post-canon fic where they deal with the fallout from the s3 finale.


• I very much like the idea that they were together pre-series, recently broken up as of 1x01, and grow back together over the course of the show. It's far from the only take on their relationship that I like, but it is a super under-explored one, and I'd love to see your take on it!


• I know it's a lot to ask to get them to talk about their feelings, but I think a lot about the end of 3x02 (3x01 on the American Netflix version) where Siân asks Mared if they're still a team, and Mared says yes ... and then leaves her alone. The lingering shot on Hannah Daniel's face is an absolute gut-punch, and I'd really like something that builds on that. Mared proving Siân's belonging in words or actions, Siân struggling with her trust in Mared, her lack of trust in Tom, and Mared's trust in Tom.