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damkiannaWhoever you are, writer, I'm so glad you signed up for Yuletide, and I hope this letter is helpful! Because I always worry about this myself: don't feel bad if you find yourself defaulting this year, no matter the reason. What I want most out of this is for you to enjoy your Yuletide, have a good time writing a story, and receive a gift yourself that you love; and if that can't happen, please don't feel guilty about it on top!
As always, optional details are completely optional. If you'd like to x away right now because you can already tell that my ridiculous longwindedness is going to bore the hell out of you/fetter your muse/suffocate all your inspiration, go ahead! Write me the fic idea you were considering when you put our matching fandom in your signup, or the one that popped into your head when you saw your assignment, or the one that will ambush you halfway through December. This is half an extended director's cut of my signup and half my excuse to flail on about my small fandom loves for thousands of words—if neither one of those things appeals, backbutton away!
If you're the kind of person who likes to poke around, feel free. I'm Damkianna everywhere (DW, LJ, AO3, Tumblr); my fic is all posted to my AO3 account, and my movies tag, books tag, and tv shows tag contain basically every thought I've ever had about any piece of media I've encountered.
In General | Banlieue 13 (Movies) | Frank Herbert's Children of Dune (2003)
Hercules (2014) | Maleficent (2014) | Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
In General
The unfun stuff out of the way first, here. I have no triggers relating to but would generally like to avoid: deathfic (except where I have specifically noted otherwise); vividly detailed sexual assault or dub-con where the con is really, really dub; vividly detailed torture. (Violence is okay with me, especially where there is already a decent helping of canonical violence; really explicit dwelling on what severe wounds look like and how much agony the person or animal who has them is going through might very well end with me tossing my cookies on Yuletide morning.)
Completely separately from that, and solely in terms of my own personal taste: I'm not particularly into BDSM or generous servings of kink, and wall-to-wall porn isn't really my thing. If you love any of those things and really adore writing them, don't let this stop you from writing the fic of your heart! But if you're trying to decide between two different ideas and want to know what I would tell you, there it is.
I love:
:: ladyslash, dudeslash, het, gen! Pairings, threesomes, moresomes! I'm a chronic multishipper and easy to please. I've added notes about specific ships as I thought about them, but generally speaking you're probably in the clear no matter what ship you'd like to write about.
:: stories where people are kind to each other! Obviously this can't reasonably apply to all fandoms or characters, so don't feel obligated to force this where it doesn't make sense. But, speaking in general, I tend to really enjoy stories that have generous helpings of the following: strong friendship or chosen family, especially with bonus gentle teasing or fond mockery; unexpected or unlooked-for kindness or trust or generosity or forgiveness (I will eat this up like glorious id-flavored candy); characters who are a ~team~ or ~have each other's backs~ or ~never leave a person behind~ (CANDY), especially when they spend the rest of the time making fun of each other or pretending to care less than they totally actually do (CANDY). As an extension of this, also, stories where people are good—where they want to do the right thing or are trying to do the right thing, where they care about what the right thing is (even/especially when they're also trying to pretend they don't) or where they want to be the kind of person who cares about doing the right thing even though they don't think they are.
:: AUs! All kinds of AUs, both the variety where someone makes a different choice in canon and the variety where the characters are IN SPACE or at summer camp together or working at rival bakeries. (By no means do you have to write an AU, of course; I love canon or I wouldn't care about the source material so much, and all my canon prompts are quite sincere! But if you like writing AUs, go for it.) There are some fandoms where I feel like the latter type would be a bit tough to pull off, but if you want to try, please do!
:: tropes and clichés! Want to write amnesia fic? Five things/five times? Going undercover in a gay bar? Huddling for warmth? Zombie apocalypse? Hurt/comfort? Consider this your hand-embossed invitation. There is no situation, setup, or story framework too cliché/overused for me, I ADORE IT ALL.
I like fight scenes; I like curtainfic; I like navelgazing. I enjoy backstory fic; I enjoy long, plotty stories; I enjoy 1004 words where two characters have a bleary exhausted conversation as they fall asleep. I'm completely okay with OCs and worldbuilding, with first-person, second-person, and third-person, and with past tense, present tense, or even future if you're feeling really experimental! Mostly I just want you to feel like you can write a story you'll a) enjoy writing and b) like when it's finished. If you have questions about anything at all, feel free to leave an anon comment here, or PMidriya if you have a DW account; she is my sister, we live together, and she's excellent at keeping secrets, so she can tell you anything I could tell you but I won't know about it.
One last thing: I know the rules say you have to unless I say otherwise, so I'm saying otherwise. You DON'T need to include all my requested characters in your fic. I request characters because I like them and like anything about them: I like them in combination, I like them alone, I just like them! For fandoms where I've requested more than one character, I'm going to talk about each of them separately and also together, because this letter wasn't going to be long enough already; write about any of them, all of them, or any combination.
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Banlieue 13 (Movies)
Any
I love both of these movies to a totally ridiculous degree, and would enjoy anything set before, during, or after either one that incorporates either or both of them, and any combination or all of the nominated characters. I am equally enamored of Damien's stubborn conviction, Leïto's devotion to B13, Lola's quickness and strength of mind, and Tao's relentless awesomeness. Slice-of-life backstory fic about Lola and Leïto growing up in Banlieue 13? Introspective fic about Damien's or Tao's opinion of the decision to build the wall? What Damien or Leïto was thinking during their final fight on the rooftop? YES PLEASE. An AU that ignores the second movie entirely and is all about how Damien is reassigned to the rejuvenated B13 and kind of accidentally moves in with Leïto? A missing section from between movies where Leïto and Lola talk about whatever stopped the wall from coming down? GO FOR IT. How Tao came to be in charge of her gang? Who taught her to do that with her hair and when? The first time she meets Lola after B13:U? All four of them coming together after B13:U to rebuild? :D :D :D :D :D B13 as a quarantined planet in a Francophone space empire? Superpowers AU? AU where Damien and Leïto meet before the wall ever goes up, while Damien is on one of his utterly ridiculous undercover jobs? OMG YAY. Anything you want to write about any of these people will fill me with joy. Leïto/Damien, Lola/Damien, and anybody/Tao are all 100% welcome.
I should start off by saying this is a repeated request from last year, and I'm asking for it again because I just love this universe so much; I received two absolutely marvelous fics, Home by![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
Niki and One Spark by russian_blue, for which I am endlessly grateful!
The thing I love the most about these two movies, aside from all the incredibly hot people doing incredibly hot things, is how much both movies care about everybody in them. The central conceit, the whole point, everything both movies are built around is the fundamental idea that no one is disposable: no one is trash, no one is a waste of space or energy or effort. These movies are full of addicts and drug dealers, gunmen and street gangs, cops and cop-killers, but all of them are people. People are imperfect, people make bad choices and are terrible to each other, but that doesn't mean you get to wash your hands of them and ignore them—that means you keep trying, you reach out, you make an effort. UGH MY HEART. I just absolutely love it so much when things and people and places widely considered Not Worth It are worth it to someone, and that's what these movies are made out of. ♥
But let's rewind back to the part about hot people doing hot things: I also love these movies because David Belle puts on a parkour exhibition, Cyril Raffaelli goes undercover in a hot pink dress with an ass window, Dany Verissimo would rather set herself on fire than let the bad guy get away, and Elodie Yung unites the gangs of B13 beneath her banner of badassery. You do not in any way need to write me some kind of ultra-serious fic full of devastating and keenly-edged social commentary about modern France; you do not need to know anything about France at all, in fact, since these movies were supposed to be set in the handwavy ~not-so-distant future~ when they were made anyway. (And I'm okay with any kind of setting AU, although I do think it would be easiest to retain some elements of B13's situation: high fantasy where the wall around B13 is instead a ward maintained by imperial mages? Go ahead!) I love all of these characters in pretty much any combination I can think of—the only caveat I have, if incest is your Yuletide jam, is that I am totally okay with Leïto/Lola as long as it's the mutual-dependency/I-love-you-a-little-too-much kind, not the vaguely-or-outright-coercive creepy underage molestation kind.
Leïto
I love basically everything about Leïto. I love how much he loves B13, I love how much he loves Lola; I love how hard he works for the things he loves, how much effort he goes to, the sheer grinding day-in-day-out responsibility he takes for the place where he lives and what he sees in it, what he wants it to become. Even just the very first part of the first movie tells you everything you need to know about him: he tries to keep his building clean, he tries to keep his building safe, he tries to keep Taha's hooks out of the people around him, and everybody knows it. And he does it carefully—the guard at the elevator knows to lie about Leïto's apartment number (and is willing to do it, too, which speaks to a pretty astounding degree of loyalty). He's so smart and so fast and so strong—physically and mentally, in the way where he leaps off roofs and the way where he holds on to the things that matter to him even through his lowest low points.
So! I will enjoy anything you want to write about him. Pre-canon about him growing up in this banlieue, learning its ins and outs and how to love it, or what he was thinking and feeling the day the wall went up, or how he managed to establish himself as in charge of one of the buildings and gather together a community that would support him? Missing scenes from the first movie about his time in prison, or his POV on meeting Damien in the back of that prison van, or his POV on finding Lola with a match on that rooftop? Something set between movies about him learning how to support Lola while she deals with her addiction? Something in the second movie about him breaking Damien out of prison, or what he thinks about going to Tao for help? (What makes Tao so different from Taha for him? What does he know about her and her gang beforehand?) ANYTHING.
Damien
Damien! I love Damien's sheer bullheaded unrelenting commitment to doing The Right Thing, and I love that he never lets go of it. Even when he learns he was an inch from doing the totally wrong thing, that doesn't turn him into a self-hating amoral nihilist; he just takes a look around, figures out what The New Right Thing is, and starts doing that, even though it could easily cost him everything. ♥ He does what he does because he believes in it, not because he's been told to: absolutely everything he does in the first movie is driven by the idea that he's saving Banlieue 13, and when he finds out otherwise, he instantly reverses course, even though he understands by then what all of his superiors actually wanted from him. And even after all of that, he goes back to being a cop; even after the second movie and being betrayed again, he might very well go back to being a cop, because he wants to do good things and he wants to help people and that's the best way he knows how to do it. DAMIEN.
Things you could write about Damien that I would love: pre-canon about how he became a cop in the first place, or one of his other ridiculously amazing undercover assignments; mid-canon about his perspective on being sent into B13, or his perspective on whatever happened between movies that stopped the wall from coming down, or what it felt like to be sitting in prison after having been framed and have Leïto open that door; post-canon about him taking on some kind of liaison position to help Leïto and Lola and Tao rebuild B13. Or anything else you can think of! Did he ever have a partner on the police force? How did he have a working number for Leïto in the second movie, even after all that time? Who is his girlfriend in the second movie, and how did he meet her?
Lola
YAY LOLA. She was one of my favorite things in the first movie and I will always wish she had been in the second. I love her temper, hot enough to give a roomful of thugs the finger but cool enough to serve underwear-eating revenge cold; I love her bravery, grabbing K2's gun and turning it on him, tackling Damien away from the bomb on the strength of her trust in Leïto alone; I love the sheer rock-solid iron-willed badassery that had her willing to set herself on fire rather than permit Taha's plans to work out. Her storyline is so incredibly awful and painful, but it doesn't ever break her, doesn't make her lose who she is; even after everything she goes through with Taha, she's still so sharp and smugly flirtatious with Damien at the end of the first movie. Lola.
For Lola specifically: did Leïto ever teach her any parkour? Where does she live in B13—somewhere in Leïto's building, or somewhere else? How did she get and hold down that job at the grocery? When did she first handle a gun? What is she thinking when K2 yanks her into Taha's office and then she sees Leïto with a gun to Taha's head? How and when did she learn to drive? What is she thinking while Damien and Leïto are fighting, or during that moment of decision when she shoves Damien down to keep him from reaching the keypad? What was it like working through her involuntary addiction after the first movie? Where was she during the second?
Tao
Tao's awesome-per-frame is basically completely off the charts; she doesn't actually get that much screentime, but every single instant she has is basically solid 100% FANTASTIC. I'm not even the least bit objective when it comes to Tao and her Secret-Service-destroying Hairknives of Death—every time I see that scene, I watch it in spellbound silence with my mouth hanging open. It's ridiculous and completely over the top and not at all feasible, and I can't get enough of it. TAO. I love Tao's coolness and unflappability, how basically impossible it is to truly surprise her or throw her off her game, how easily and readily she volunteers to take down all those soldiers with nothing but hairknives and an MP3 player (and how everybody else leaves her to it, because they all know she can do it).
And the movie really doesn't tell us very much about her, so there's plenty of stuff to fill in. Has she always lived in Banlieue 13? How did she end up in the position she occupies? What's the thought process that leads to her throwing her lot in with Damien and Leïto—does she know about what happened in the first movie, and if she does is that a factor? What does she do after the second movie? Does her gang participate in the rebuilding process? How? What does she think of Damien, of Leïto, of the other gang leaders she brings together—or of Lola, if they meet after the second movie?
Combinations
If you are looking to write dudeslash this Yuletide, I ship Leïto with Damien SO BAD, and would be 1000% okay with any sort of burning UST set during the first movie/desperate hurried makeouts set during the second movie/full-on slow-build first-time fic set after either movie; or any kind of joyously tropey AU (they meet while Damien is undercover in a gay bar! They meet when Damien gets shot while on patrol in B13 and Leïto finds him and takes care of him! Damien is one of the cops assigned to the B13 station in the beginning, and doesn't let the station chief get away with handing Lola over to Taha!) If you are looking to write ladyslash this Yuletide, I ship Lola and Tao in a gloriously hypothetical way where they never met in the movies but I can't help imagining how they'd react to each other—Lola is tiny and prickly and loud, talks back and drives like a maniac and doesn't back down; Tao is tall and calm and impenetrable and beats people up like she's dancing. Just a thousand words where they meet each other at all would be gold. AND if you are looking to write het this Yuletide, I ship pretty much either of these dudes with either of these ladies. I would love to read about Leïto and Tao being quiet and intense and taking care of their banlieue together; or Damien's pit-bull unstoppable force meeting Tao's impervious immovable object, his clearly-delineated idea of right and wrong coming up against all the shades of gray Tao must have had to learn to run a gang in B13; or Lola's spitfire sharpness with Damien's seriousness and solidity (can you imagine how thoroughly she would enjoy his sober recounting of the job he's working at the beginning of B13:U???); or an exploration of just how close Lola and Leïto are after spending years keeping each other alive through everything B13 threw at them. A threesome of any combination or a foursome would be a-okay—even a sedoretu AU! I LOVE EVERYONE IN THIS BAR. (And of course gen variations on any of these combinations of characters would also be entirely fantastic.)
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Frank Herbert's Children of Dune (2003)
Ghanima, Leto II
This miniseries! I love this miniseries—I'm one of those awful Dune fans who only ever cared about the first book and then this miniseries met all my remaining needs. I love the cast, I love the costumes, I love the entire aesthetic, and the ways in which the plotting and characterization differ from the books are one of my favorite things about it. And Leto and Ghani are two of my other favorite things about it! :D I love the way Leto flickers between seriousness and laughter, delight, wonder; I love that he avoids Paul's trap, that he chooses his path because it's worth it to him instead of feeling like he's been shackled by destiny. I love Ghanima's cleverness, her sense of humor, her iron—I LOVE the conversation she has with Irulan in the garden room when she's decided to kill Farad'n, I love the way she talks to Farad'n after she's decided not to, I love that she has her own subplot even after she and Leto are separated. I absolutely cannot get enough of their relationship, how well they understand each other and how infinitely close they are to each other; I would be delighted by fic that heavily references that closeness, whether platonically or otherwise.
Basically I would read anything about these two: a boardgame session when they were younger, full of giggling and teasing and instant understanding; any kind of missing scene from the latter part of the miniseries, during the portions where they're together or separated, when Ghani thinks Leto is dead or when Leto has to continue on his path (alone, for pretty much the first time in his life); post-canon where Ghanima rules the Imperium or Leto runs the desert and thinks about fate; an AU where Ghani and Leto accept the skin that is not their own together. Anything!
This miniseries OWNS ME, no lie—as noted, I'm the worst Dune fan, because I like this as well or maybe even better than bookverse in a lot of ways. I love how it streamlines and alters the story from the later books, which for me became an increasingly bizarre and nonsensical philosophical tract; I love the simultaneous grandness and simplicity of its scope, the vast star-system-spanning empire in the background and this handful of people, their relationships and hurts and loves and decisions, in the foreground. There are a lot of things I like about Dune, but the way Paul handles his destiny quite frankly isn't one of them—I read miniseries!Leto as genuinely having a choice, and I love that he decides to embrace the Golden Path and all that it entails, even though he knows it will come with a price. I love that the miniseries doesn't forget about Ghanima, that she has a destiny of her own even if it isn't as mystical or all-consuming. I love that they're hurt and separated and alone, and they both find their own strengths and become incredibly individually powerful, and then they get each other back; the moment Ghani finds out Leto is still alive so often makes me tear up. I just adore their entire story a lot, pretty much.
Leto II
I absolutely adore Leto II; I love composed and vaguely smirky Leto in all his high-collared space fashion and I love awestruck shirtless Leto sinking his hand into a bed of baby sandworms. His composure and his confidence and his knowledge never stop him from appreciating the wondrousness of the things he comes to understand about Arrakis and the universe and the path he's set himself on, and I'm easy for that combination of ageless wisdom and fascinated delight. And the sacrifices he makes to take on that path—I don't think there's any doubt that he realizes doing what he's doing will mean he spends the majority of the rest of his life running alone in the desert, but he sees that and accepts it and chooses to do it anyway, and I couldn't love him any more for that if I tried.
The miniseries pretty much blipped over his childhood, but I would love it if you chose to spend time on what it was like: growing up in a household with Alia and Irulan fencing their way around each other, being a child but also pre-born and knowing and understanding so much more than most of the adults trying to care for him. (I am 100% okay with Alia and Irulan having cameos, I'm fascinated by them both—please feel free to include as much or as little of either or both of them as you'd like.) There's plenty of missing scenes in the latter parts of the miniseries that could be filled in, too; and if you feel like poignant futurefic about the vast aching loneliness of running the desert in a skin that is not his own, please go ahead! I think this is one fandom where setting details are too intrinsic for it to be easy to transplant these characters, but I wouldn't mind a fork-in-the-road AU in the least—a roleswap, Ghani leaves him behind to rule while she becomes the desert incarnate; or they never run away in the first place; or even a quieter domestic AU where Chani never dies and she takes the twins back to the sietch to be raised as Fremen after Paul wanders off. ♥
Ghanima
GHANI. I don't even know where to start—I LOVE that Paul never saw her, that she evaded the reach of his visions; in my heart of hearts I sometimes wish this had meant that she was the one who would save the universe by becoming a half-sandworm goddess-queen. (Canonically speaking, I choose to read the miniseries as implying Ghanima took the throne as empress regnant, which is an equally awesome and universe-changing fate, so really I have no complaints.) I love the combination of compassion and mercilessness in her, that she can see Irulan's worries at a glance and reach out to comfort her, and then vow without remorse to kill Farad'n on their wedding night just because he might have had something to do with Leto's apparent death. (And yet she still doesn't descend into simply hating him mindlessly; when he turns on his mother, she's equally able to let it go.) She alternates gravity and wisdom with affection and joy as readily as Leto does, and I adore that about both of them.
Again, as with Leto, the miniseries blips over her childhood, but there's so much about living as a pre-born girl in the palace in Arrakeen to be mined—please feel free to poke around in that space (and don't feel like you need to draw on book canon or worry about contradicting it; go ahead and make things up if you enjoy worldbuilding). Anything from the latter part of the miniseries is also completely fair game: how does grown-up Ghani feel about Irulan, when she has Chani's genetic memory? What process does Ghani go through between waking up believing Leto's been killed and deciding to kill Farad'n? What's her perspective on Alia's long slow Baron-driven self-destruction? As noted, I read the miniseries's ending as supportive of the idea that Ghanima ruled as empress while Leto was busy sprinting around in the desert being a sandworm-god—absolutely anything about what that might have been like would be TOTALLY AWESOME.
Both of them
As noted, I ship this but also just fundamentally love them being ridiculously close and having tremendous broccoli together and caring a lot about each other—if you want to write incest, this is absolutely an excellent fandom to do it in, and if you want to write twins who are each other's best friends and just plain enjoy each other's company, this is absolutely an excellent fandom to do it in. If you're a miniseries-only fan who also ships this, I'm very pleased to be able to tell you that it's book canon that Leto and Ghanima get ~symbolically~ married; I would be over the moon about a miniseries-verse story that is every tropey ridiculous marriage-of-convenience cliché ever, where both of them secretly love being married to each other but are trying to pretend it's just politics because they don't want to freak each other out, and then idk there's kissing. /o\ JUST ONE IDEA. On the platonic side of things, there's so much left out about their childhood: did they run shrieking through the palace hallways together playing games? Did they like to freak out guests at Alia's imperial banquets with their weirdly personal knowledge of galactic history and ability to talk like extremely well-educated adults—and then cackle together over it later? Did they ever talk together about the things they both genetically remember—about Chani, about Liet-Kynes, about the long, long line of Fremen whose memories are packed in there alongside their Atreides ancestors? What is it like for them to meet Jessica as adults when they both remember half her life as well as she does (but only half)? Tell me about one of the times an exhausted and lonely Leto comes back to rest a while with empress!Ghanima. ANYTHING.
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Hercules (2014)
Atalanta, Ergenia
The second I saw a trailer for this movie, I knew it was right in my wheelhouse: The Rock + swords-and-sandals-and-sorcery + more than one woman with speaking lines = YESSSSSS. And then I watched it, and, indeed: YESSSSSS. :D I would absolutely love basically any story about either or both of these women, because for me they encapsulate two completely different but equally fantastic kinds of awesome. I love Atalanta's stone-faced strength and speed and INCREDIBLE AIM, her confidence and loyalty and commitment; and I love Ergenia's determination, her willingness to step up and do what needs doing—whether that's teaching herself how to tend to horrifying battle wounds, or finding Hercules and asking for his help even though she has heard and at that point seems to believe the most common rumors regarding what happened to his family, or giving a publicly despised prisoner a drink of water.
So! Pre-canon about Atalanta and her Amazon sisters, or some more of the truths behind Hercules's labors from her POV, or the early days of Ergenia's marriage, or the moment Ergenia first realized Lord Cotys was bad news; missing scenes from somewhere during the movie, Ergenia asking Atalanta more questions about her background or Atalanta teaching Ergenia the basics of archery, Ergenia trying to come up with a new plan to keep her son safe when it looks like the mercenaries are going to leave or Atalanta mentally preparing for that GLORIOUS chariot ride of merciless sharpshooting death; or post-movie fic about Ergenia ruling as regent until her son comes of age with Atalanta as her personal bodyguard are all equally welcome! If your tastes run toward ladyslash, I'd love some for these two, but am equally delighted by the prospect of gen. (That post-movie prompt ends with ladyslash in my head; Ergenia tending any minor wounds of Atalanta's could also go there, and so could the archery lessons. :D)
Line by line, the writing for this movie didn't strike me as particularly good, but I don't even care because I loved the rest of it SO MUCH. It was sort of halfheartedly trying to be all grim! with realism! everyone is dirty! Hercules is just some orphan who grew up to be The Rock! the labors were three-quarters bullshit! all Greeks are liars! and then the end was all NEVER MIND EVERYTHING IS HEROES :DDDDDDDDD ♥ A ragtag band of misfits who would die for each other + people insisting they don't believe in heroism and then turning around and being heroes when it matters the most is basically what my id is made out of. I loved this movie. /o\ Even all the stuff about training Cotys's troops so they were less terrible at everything and then having half of them switch sides at the end—YES. THAT WAS EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED TO HAVE HAPPEN. (I mean, I'm firmly convinced it should have happened earlier and that scene was not well put together; but the outline of that part was everything I could have asked for.)
I enjoy historical details a lot, but I do not in any way feel like you should have to do research to write fic about this movie—knock yourself out if you want to, but I will love a story that captures the handwaviest parts of the mood of this movie just as much as a fic that carefully uses Ancient Greek terms for every article of clothing these people were wearing. I feel like a lot of things about these characters and situations do rely on preserving certain elements of the setting, but I would be 100% okay with transposing this into other genres (ancient Greek steampunk: Rhesus's army is rumored to be terrorizing the countryside with war machines called "iron centaurs" and automaton thralls! sci-fi: Atalanta shoots laser arrows, Eurystheus's wolves are cybernetically enhanced and sentient, and Amphiaraus's predictions are the result of the computational matrices implanted in his brain! superpowers au: this is a story about a ragtag band of superheroes for hire!) And of course I only asked for Ergenia and Atalanta, but you may very well find yourself including the rest of Team Hercules or other side characters—that's totally fine.
Atalanta
YAY ATALANTA. I am so incredibly easy for warrior women, and was so pleased that they included A Chick (I wouldn't have minded if they had gone as far as two women in the ragtag band of misfits, even, but I know that's a lot to ask of any action movie). And I love Atalanta's strong silent sniper thing—it made me roll my eyes that they included That Heavyhanded Scene where The Chick's capability gets questioned and she shuts it down with her awesome, but seriously that trick shot was SO GRATE. RIDICULOUSLY IMPLAUSIBLE ARCHERY STUNTS FOREVER. I also love that her stone-faced confidence and strength and badassery goes hand-in-hand with such simple and total loyalty: she's a cool, composed, extremely experienced warrior who SHOULD be all practical and detached, but instead is all in with this band of failboats and won't turn her back on Hercules even for an entire chariotful of money, despite the part where she's supposedly a mercenary. ♥ YES PLEASE.
Obviously there is a tremendous amount of pre-canon space to explore with Atalanta, if backstory is your thing: what was her life like back when she lived among her fellow Amazons? Who taught her to shoot? What exactly was that first meeting with Hercules like? What was the reality behind some of the other labors of Hercules, from Atalanta's POV? Was she in the city for what happened to Hercules's family—did she see or hear anything, or was the first she knew about it Amphiaraus shaking her awake to tell her they needed to get out of there? What was it like for their little band afterward? And then anything during the movie from her POV would be great—her work with the archery recruits, her perspective on the realization that Cotys has tricked them into securing his rule, that whole ridiculous final battle scene and what she's thinking and feeling during it. Or, of course, post-canon: what is the cleanup like immediately after the movie ends? Do they stick around for a little while to help Ergenia straighten things out? Do they head out again to right more wrongs? Does Atalanta ever find any other surviving Amazons?
Ergenia
HI ELIZABETH WOODVILLE HI. Ahem. Ergenia! I love the complexity that's gradually introduced after Ergenia's "help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi" introduction—first she's some princess who needs a task accomplished, but then, oh, she's also the mother of a son she loves fiercely; oh, and she's learned a bunch of medical skills because she realized there was a need for it; oh, and she actually knows a bunch more about Hercules than it seemed and simultaneously realizes she doesn't know the whole story; oh, and she's actually been trapped in the middle of Cotys's despotic schemes, immediately following the death of a husband who she at the very least seemed to like, and has somehow managed to keep herself and her son alive, maintain a front sufficient to make Cotys believe she's reasonably willing to go along with him, AND is still an excellent enough human being that even knowing Cotys won't like it, she still stands up and tries to take water to Rhesus. \o/ YES. There were things I didn't like about watching her nearly get her head cut off, but I loved how hard she yelled and screamed and pleaded and cursed, how red her face got—that was not a pale and lovely tragic statue, that was an angry, desperate, loud woman who really wanted to live. ♥
There's even fewer details about Ergenia's past than Atalanta's, actually—what was her relationship with her husband really like? How did she end up marrying him? Where is she from? What's her family like? What was it like for her in those early days after his death? How did she first realize Cotys was a despotic asswagon? Who did she learn the healing arts from, and when? What did she think about being sent to ask for assistance from Hercules—was she afraid, given what she'd heard about him? Was she secretly hoping he might figure it out and stop Cotys even that early on, even though she knew the odds weren't very good? And during the movie, she's offscreen a lot—what was it like waiting in Thrace while Hercules &c faced Rhesus? What did she think when they brought Rhesus back? Did she ever get to a point where even though she liked them she was still half hoping Rhesus would slaughter them all if it would only stop Cotys? And then post-movie—what happens? Does she take over Thrace? Does a relative, and if so, does she help them? How does she feel about Thrace and its people afterward? THERE'S SO MUCH.
Both of them
As noted, ladyslash is 100% welcome, and you should feel free to take any prompt I give for these two together and add a bunch of making out. The movie doesn't really show Ergenia and Atalanta interacting in any significant capacity, but there's plenty of opportunities! What does Ergenia think when she first meets Atalanta, or vice versa? Has Ergenia heard of the Amazons—and if she has, is what she's heard accurate or inaccurate? (Does Atalanta correct her, or, with deadpan gravitas, agree and even elaborate with increasingly ridiculous fictions until Ergenia realizes Atalanta's fucking with her? :D) Does Atalanta receive any injuries—during battle or even by accident during training—that Ergenia helps take care of? Does Atalanta ever teach Ergenia any archery? (Does Ergenia ask her to, or does she offer because she thinks it might be a good idea for Ergenia to know?) And post-movie! Immediately after, I can imagine that they maybe end up sitting next to each other after the storm, talking about what's going to happen to Thrace; longer-term, as mentioned, I'd love something where Ergenia rules Thrace as her son's regent and Team Hercules as a whole or Atalanta in particular stick around to help her out. And a genre-swap or fork-in-the-road AU of any kind would be awesome: what would have happened if Ergenia had brought her son, escaped her escort on the road, and asked Hercules to help her dethrone Cotys from the start? What would have happened if Ergenia had fled Thrace with her son right after her husband's death, and run into an Atalanta who never joined up with Hercules after her tribe was slaughtered? (If you somehow watched this movie and went away thinking, "Gosh, I really want to write ladyslash kidfic for that!"—THIS IS YOUR CHANCE.)
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Maleficent (2014)
Aurora, Leila, Maleficent
THIS MOVIE. I totally adored this movie, it was like a really big-budget high-quality vid of an AU Sleeping Beauty fic and it was GLORIOUS. I loved Aurora's sweetness and brightness, the way she smiled, that she got angry but then also forgave, how blissfully unintimidated she was even with all Maleficent's ~dark and terrible~ trappings; I loved Maleficent's anger, the ways it strengthened her and weakened her at the same time, the way she never quite lost herself (still that sly pranky fairy sense of humor!) but didn't quite find herself until the end, how she learned to be happy again; and I loved the wee glimpses we got of who Leila was and could have been: reaching out and encouraging fairies to meet her baby daughter, even though she was the child of a man who wanted to crush the Moors and the wife of a man who never wanted to see another fairy again.
Any of these women individually or together would be a marvelous gift! Leila with a baby Aurora, looking out a window and imagining what the Moors are like; or meeting Maleficent in the woods instead of Stefan doing it; or how and from whom she learned what she knows about fairies (how was she so sure they were there to give Aurora gifts? Is that fairy lore she learned at some point, or did she invite the fairies behind Stefan's back?). Maleficent in her youth, exploring some of the wonders of the Moors; or meeting Leila in an AU where Leila became queen regnant of the human kingdom after the old king's death; or struggling with her fondness for Aurora, the first time she lets Aurora come to the Moors awake (she spells Aurora asleep that first time, and then delivers her back to her bed—did Aurora think that time was a dream? Or once upon a dream, even. :D When was the first time Maleficent trusted Aurora enough to let her visit and leave while awake the whole time?). I ship Maleficent/Aurora something fierce, though I'd like Aurora to be at least eighteen before either one of them acts on anything; and I would love a snippet of Maleficent/Leila AU SO MUCH.
I was expecting to like this movie, because it was fairytale-based and it had Angelina Jolie in it; but I went to see it and LOVED IT. ♥ Honestly that post has most of what I thought about it anyway, so instead of repeating myself I'll move on!
Aurora
AURORA. I enjoy a lot of modern fairytale revamps, but to be honest I am still and will always be into the classic "just flat-out a really good person" Disney princess, and Aurora is one of my favorites. She's so generous and adventurous and kind, so ready to be delighted, so willing to reach out to absolutely everybody—UGH MY HEART. I just find that so hopelessly awesome. And it's not like she's some kind of porcelain doll; she gets angry, she gets afraid, she gets disappointed. She just doesn't let herself become embittered by it—she forgives Maleficent, when she's ready to, and she doesn't let anything that's happened to her stop her from embracing the Moors as a whole. ♥ OH AURORA. That scene where Maleficent makes awful faces at baby Aurora through the window and Aurora just defaults to smiling back at her is everything I love about Aurora: I'm not sure I can quite call it bravery when she isn't even really afraid, but that openhearted acceptance, that willingness to treat absolutely everyone as though they are probably wonderful—♥♥♥.
Obviously there isn't exactly a pre-canon option for Aurora! But I'd love a story from any part of her life: another one of her very early encounters with Maleficent (the first one she can remember later? Or make a Five Things out of it!), or her playing as a child with Diaval (the first time she realizes he isn't like most other birds?); her perspective on the three fairies as she gets older, or on the woods where she lives, or on the kingdom (she knows where the castle is, even though she presumably hasn't been to it that she can remember—does she like to look at it? Does she daydream about it? Is the story of the cursed little princess who's now missing public enough for her to have heard it from anyone?), or on the Moors (why did she wander up to the border in the first place? Has she been told stories about the Moors, or does she not really know why there's a wall of thorns there? Has she been told it's an awful place but finds herself not believing it?); or something post-canon, political fic where she has to learn how to deal with the nobles Stefan left behind or road-trip fic where she decides she needs to really get to know both her kingdoms. (I am totally okay with Phillip/Aurora, if you'd like to write that—they're both so adorably brimming with bright-eyed goodwill. ♥)
Leila
Oh, Leila—obviously we don't know a lot about her, but I'll try to stick to things that are plausible considering what little we did see of her. I think the most important thing we know about her is that she's totally okay with having the fairies at the christening and talks Stefan down when it looks like he might turn them away. Considering how her father felt about the Moors, I find this FASCINATING—in a Doylist sense, it may very well have been done just to code her as a decent person, but in a Watsonian sense, I would love some exploration of where her attitude comes from. She seems pretty certain the fairies are there to give Aurora gifts—did she talk to them about it beforehand? Is this a thing fairies used to do all the time, back in the day, and Leila somehow found out about it (has read the few books still extant in the castle library about fairies? Was told about it when she was a child by a tutor or nurse?)? I think any answer you decide to run with will automatically say something about who Leila is, and there must be an answer, even if the movie didn't tell us which it was! I also really loved her effort to redirect Maleficent—it didn't work, of course, but the kind of person who can look up at the towering storm of cold rage and disdain that was Maleficent in that scene, be as afraid as that image deserves, and still try to head her off with a compliment is the kind of person there should be more fic about.
There's plenty of room to worldbuild around her backstory. Did she grow up in the castle, or did her father depose the last king somehow and install himself? Who was her mother, and what was she like? Leila seems to have been something of a diplomat at heart, the way she tries to smooth things over between Stefan and the fairies even before Maleficent shows up—it's hard for me to imagine that she agreed with her father's decision to attack the Moors. Did she try to talk him out of it? Was she almost sort of relieved when he came back injured, because it meant he wouldn't try again? Did she ever visit the Moors, or want to? Did she have some kind of experience with fairies or sprites as a child that led to her seemingly positive attitude toward the Moors? Did she like Stefan at any point, or was she horrified from the start that he seemed to have murdered what could have been the very queen of the Moors just to earn her father's throne? Did she want to be queen regnant but couldn't win enough support, or did she spend most of Stefan's rule wishing she could live in a cottage in the countryside and not have to deal with all these ambitious noblemen? Did she ever visit or talk to Maleficent's wings? (What would have happened if she'd snuck into the room where they were kept and let them out before the christening ever happened?)
Maleficent
I'm easy for any character played by Angelina Jolie in general, but Maleficent hits my buttons in LIKE 5783249 DIFFERENT WAYS. The entire arc of someone being hurt, lashing out in what turns out to be the wrong direction, healing through affection despite themselves, realizing they made a huge mistake, and expecting everyone to be as reluctant to forgive them as they are reluctant to forgive themselves—every single part of that is DELICIOUS to me. And then the particulars—the glorious flight sequences, Maleficent as trusted guardian/shieldmaiden of the Moors and how that becomes twisted into her Dark Queen thing, her almost involuntary affection for Aurora, how much she simultaneously craves and tries to reject acceptance from Aurora, her resigned unhappiness when Aurora learns the truth, how hard she works to avert the curse even though she already thinks she's lost Aurora entirely—it SLAYS ME, ALL OF IT. Her working her way through the iron thorns, the way she hissed when they burned her and then kept going, her eyes as she watched Phillip through that screen, MY HEART. MALEFICENT.
Ahem. Pre-canon and/or early-movie fic about Maleficent as a young fairy in the Moors would be totally awesome—if you enjoy fantastical worldbuilding, knock yourself out! If you have a headcanon as to why Maleficent is so much more powerful than the other fairies we saw, go ahead and use it. Were there other humans who crossed the border besides Stefan? Did Maleficent ever return the favor and go exploring along the edge of the human kingdom? How much of the Moors has Maleficent seen? Mid-canon, what did Maleficent first think when she heard Stefan's wife was going to have a child? What other tricks did Maleficent play on the pixies while they were trying to care for Aurora? What other attempts were made to break through the border of the Moors, and how did Maleficent foil them? (Or a "five people Maleficent found at the border of the Moors" story!) Maleficent POV on any scene you particularly loved would be wonderful, honestly, or any kind of futurefic—does she go off and wander the Moors for a while? Become Aurora's chief court fairy representing the Moors' interests when Aurora has to negotiate with other human kingdoms? How do Aurora's people feel about Maleficent, and about their newly reopened border with a land that's very strange to them? The concluding voiceover doesn't suggest there were huge problems, but there must have been an adjustment period.
Combinations
Maleficent/Leila and Maleficent/Aurora are both completely okay with me (though I would rather not have both in a single fic, I think). I would absolutely love to see Leila with baby Aurora in the very early days of Aurora's life (I imagine this would be bittersweet in tone), or in an AU where Leila doesn't die; I'd also love a story where Aurora learns more about Leila, by talking to fairies or humans who knew her or by asking Maleficent for everything Maleficent can remember about her. For Maleficent and Leila, I'd pretty much love anything where they actually interact for more than two seconds—an AU where Leila was Maleficent's human love instead of Stefan, or where Leila became queen after her father's death and approached Maleficent to apologize for her father's actions/negotiate a truce; or a much smaller AU/missing scene where Leila goes to find Maleficent after the christening to plead for Aurora, and they actually talk for a minute. For Maleficent and Aurora, I would love any platonic fic about one of Aurora's trips to the Moors, or an AU where Aurora actually does move to the Moors with Maleficent before her birthday, or an AU where Aurora is raised in the castle but still ends up meeting Maleficent (maybe this, again, would have the wings being released well in advance of the scene in the movie?). For Maleficent/Aurora, I'd much prefer post-movie or an AU that extends to a point where Aurora's a bit older. Does Aurora find out exactly what happened while she was cursed? Does she know it was Maleficent who kissed her awake—or does she begin to suspect it over time? Does Maleficent intend to retire quietly to the Moors but end up helping Aurora defend their joined kingdoms from other human kings, or find that Aurora just keeps visiting her even though Maleficent was silently expecting the visits to taper off and stop? (Anything that wallows gloriously in how much Maleficent adores Aurora and how little she expects or thinks she ought to receive in return—and how sincerely Aurora believes otherwise—will really hit me where I live. :D YAY PINING.)
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Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
Ravenna, Snow White
Yay, I'm so glad this got nominated again! Write me anything about either or both of these women and I'll absolutely love it. For me, Snow White and Ravenna capture two different but equally awesome variants on the theme of women who are incredibly strong and determined and really want to rule things—Snow White is awkward and kind, brave and compassionate, and learns to really want to rule things, while Ravenna is bitter and ambitious, clever and cynical and knife-edged, and already knows she really wants to rule things. In some ways they're each other through a glass darkly (accidental mirror joke /o\), and that FASCINATES me, I never ever get tired of examining it. I adore Snow White wholeheartedly, and I find Ravenna simultaneously sympathetic and magnetically terrible (I love her and I think she's fantastic and interesting but also she kills people and snacks on bird hearts! help).
Feel like exploring Ravenna's earlier years—where she's from, how long exactly she's lived, how many kings and kingdoms she's already seen rise and fall? Or Snow White's childhood—more about what her mother was like, or more about her tutors and nurses and experiences as a child-princess? Or a missing scene from anywhere in the movie, from either of their POVs? Or post-canon—Queen Snow White taking over her kingdom, learning about it, reaching out to the magical creatures within it in ways her predecessors never did, or an AU where Snow White lets Ravenna live and they manage to slowly forge some kind of enemy-mine understanding? YES TO ALL THOSE THINGS. If you want to write ladyslash, I would absolutely love that—if you want to go creepy, I'd prefer it stay abstracted and DNW to read about assault, but love eerieness and obsessiveness; and if you want to write straight-up love-heals-at-least-some-wounds, I would be 100% into Snow White slowly and even almost unintentionally teaching Ravenna that she maybe doesn't have to destroy everything all the time, or an AU where Ravenna tries the box trick on Snow White's kingdom twenty years later than she did in canon and ends up with an armored Snow White willing to marry her.
I enjoyed pretty much everything about this movie a totally ridiculous amount, which is why I'm asking for it again even though I received a marvelous treat for it last year (Mirrored byNiki). This was basically Maleficent for me before Maleficent came out, and now there are two beautiful movies about evil queens who kiss good princesses that I love! Anyway: I really enjoy the aesthetic of this movie, the ways it changes the story and the ways it keeps it the same, and how firmly it really is focused on Ravenna and Snow White (much as I like the huntsman and William). I love that Snow White is defined in terms of goodness and strength, that goodness is strength (I HATE the idea that good people are inherently bland or boring or foolish); I love that Ravenna is doing what she's doing for reasons that are understandable, even though those reasons obviously can't validate doing terrible things to people. I adore watching Snow White transition from running the hell away from the castle to charging up the beach with a sword to reclaim it for herself, and I love Ravenna's combination of brilliant glittering distance, deliberate inhumanity, and so-human fear of age and loss and death.
This is a fandom where I am absolutely actively interested in creepy fic, although I would, as noted, prefer not to receive a story with sexual violence, and I'm more interested in psychological horror/slow creeping dread than I am in torture porn or extreme nonsexual violence. If you'd like to dwell on Ravenna's relationship with the mirror, for example (is she hallucinating? Does she hallucinate other things? Or was Finn the one hallucinating, unable to see the truth of the mirror's nature?), or on what happens to it afterward (creepy post-canon AU where Snow White keeps it and is increasingly affected by it?), or are interested in an AU where Ravenna actually does get what she wants, please go ahead! If you'd like to do some worldbuilding, Ravenna backstory fic would be a great way to do that—the movie doesn't tell us jack about any other kingdoms or countries in this world, but Ravenna seems to have been through some or maybe even all of them, and depending on how long she's been extending her life, a few hundred or even thousand years of this world's history may have happened while she's been around. (Also: I obviously would prefer that the focus be on Snow White or Ravenna, but you don't have to pretend that Finn, the huntsman, and William don't exist! I like them, too, and I realize they might very well come up in responses to some of these prompts.) And this is one fandom where deathfic is something I would be okay with, if you have an idea that revolves around Ravenna's canonical death, or an AU where Ravenna manages to kill Snow White (though I'd rather not lovingly dwell on how ~beautiful and broken~ a dead woman's body is, if possible).
Ravenna
I love Ravenna but also realize that she is deeply messed up, so please don't feel like you need to find a way to make her "nice" in order to make me happy! There is so much to her: her all-shall-love-me-and-despair dark queen thing, her bitterness and loneliness and anger and sadness, the delight or at least satisfaction she seems to take in other people's pain when at the same time she can't escape her own. I realize this is really cliché and overdone, but I LOVE examinations of how weird and amazing and awful it is to be immortal or quasi-immortal in a world full of people who aren't—no, I am not necessarily asking for a Highlander AU (although that would be a hell of a thing), but I'm fascinated and creeped out at the same time by the terrible trap of knowing you've "lived too many lives," having seen so many awful things that no one means anything to you anymore and losing all sense of meaning and purpose, but being so thoroughly horrified by aging and death ... I would love to either wallow in the awfulness of that or read a story that lets Snow White—ameliorate it, at least, even if she can't fix it. (I mean, canonically she sort of does, even, by letting Ravenna rest at last—does Snow White see it that way in the moment she kills Ravenna, or begin to the more she thinks about it?)
There are so many things we never learn about Ravenna: has she done what she does to Snow White's father in other kingdoms? Has she used her quasi-immortality to crown herself god-empress somewhere—or had she at any point before this, a hundred or a thousand years ago? Or is this the first time? Where did she get the mirror? Or did she make it? Did she learn her black-glass-and-crows magic from someone, or did she invent it? What is her perspective on the child Snow White—does she see herself there, or can she no longer really muster any sympathy for other people, who are to her at that point petty fireflies? Does she honestly while away all the time she isn't onscreen carefully slaughtering songbirds by hand, or does she do other things—read (since ideas are perhaps the only other thing able to last as long as she and Finn), or sit alone and remember (depending on how long she's lived, she knows and has experienced things no one else alive can possibly know or experience), or ride/dance/fly (is she a stupendously excellent equestrian after all this time, or do horses refuse to come near her? Can she forget who she is for a little while when she's a flock of crows?)? Her perspective on anything that happens would be wonderful, whether it's getting to pretend to be fond and happy while she's William or what she's thinking while she's standing in the tower watching Snow White's army charge. And of course if you'd like to AU her into surviving for a post-canon story, that would be fantastic.
Snow White
Oh my god, I love Snow White so much! I love all the different ways she connects with everything she meets, whether it's by roaring right back at that bridge-troll or awkwardly but gamely dancing with a dwarf who comes up to her elbow or sitting quietly and making dolls with that girl in Fenland. ♥ And I lovelovelove that being sincerely, thoroughly good is such a highly-valued part of her, that it doesn't take away from and isn't in opposition to her strength. I also love that strength was specifically part of her mother's wish in this version of the story. I really enjoy the arc she travels during the movie—I feel like in the end she's really learned to want to be queen, to be ambitious, and I love that having ambition isn't automatically bad. (This is one of the changes to the story I love the most; passivity is not in any way part of what makes this Snow White virtuous.) I'm intrigued by the hints the movie throws out about how Snow White might be connected to the actual land/health of the kingdom itself (is that a Snow White thing or a Rightful Queen thing? Is it because the white hart is on her side? If Ravenna had captured or killed the hart, what would have happened?). I love how earnest and awkward she is and how much she cares about people and about her kingdom; I love the sense of awe and wonder she has with the dwarves and the fairies and the hart; I love how brave she is, and how hard she works to do the right thing (i.e., retake her kingdom to rule it better). MAN SHE IS SO GREAT.
I would adore anything early-movie about Snow White and Queen Eleanor, or anything about how Snow White coped with being imprisoned for as long as she was—what a revelation it was to be outside again, even wet and dirty and exhausted, or how terrifyingly weird the creepy swamp/dark forest must have seemed (did she almost wish for the cell back, or was terrifyingly weird still better than that?). Any missing scene or Snow White POV on her travels with the huntsman and the dwarves, what she thinks about the fairies (did she know fairies were a thing? Had she heard stories but always thought they were fables? Or did she have no idea fairies existed?) or about the white hart (is the hart a local legend Snow White actually is familiar with, or is Muir's quasi-explanation a piece of dwarven lore that humans wouldn't know?), would be entirely welcome! I personally am kind of fond of the idea that her speech to Hammond's forces was all inarticulate and weird because she'd just been dead for a while, and/or was trying to explain an insight she'd had as she woke that was fundamentally hard to put into words—was she disoriented when she came back to life, or was everything suddenly really clear? What was going through her mind during that long, long charge down the shore, or in the hall with all the black glass, or during that last altercation with Ravenna? And absolutely any post-canon about Snow White's glorious reign as queen would be BLISS. (As "life itself", is there a chance she'll turn out to be functionally immortal? Will she still be ruling in a hundred years—five hundred—ten thousand?)
Both of them
As noted, I'm interested in these women interacting, whether it's platonic or otherwise. I would love any canon-compliant scene that has both of them in it—Ravenna talking a little more extensively to a child Snow White, or visiting Snow White while Snow White is still imprisoned in the castle, or turning out to have been that Fenland girl Snow White was making dolls with. Obviously anything you choose to write about the final battle will probably at least mention them both; and, as I mentioned, any post-movie AU where Ravenna doesn't die but Snow White doesn't either would be right up my alley. I've already talked a bit about my preferences when it comes to ladyslash for this fandom—anything that takes Ravenna's obsessiveness about Snow White's beauty a step further would be lovely. If a snippet of slow redemption fic is more to your taste, I would adore that (I realize it isn't exactly likely with Ravenna, but I pretty much always want my favorite women to find a way to be happy somehow). And any sort of AU that permits your favorite ladyslash trope or cliché is 100% okay—soulbonding fic that means Ravenna can't kill Snow White and ends up experiencing every time Snow White is kind or happy or forgiving? Fic where Ravenna ends up marrying Snow White instead of King Magnus and then never quite manages to kill her, even though she tells herself she will every night? THUMBS UP.
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That got ridiculously long, but if you chose to read it or the relevant portions of it, I hope it was helpful! If you write a story you love, I will undoubtedly love it also, and I can't wait to have the chance to read it. ♥
As always, optional details are completely optional. If you'd like to x away right now because you can already tell that my ridiculous longwindedness is going to bore the hell out of you/fetter your muse/suffocate all your inspiration, go ahead! Write me the fic idea you were considering when you put our matching fandom in your signup, or the one that popped into your head when you saw your assignment, or the one that will ambush you halfway through December. This is half an extended director's cut of my signup and half my excuse to flail on about my small fandom loves for thousands of words—if neither one of those things appeals, backbutton away!
If you're the kind of person who likes to poke around, feel free. I'm Damkianna everywhere (DW, LJ, AO3, Tumblr); my fic is all posted to my AO3 account, and my movies tag, books tag, and tv shows tag contain basically every thought I've ever had about any piece of media I've encountered.
In General
The unfun stuff out of the way first, here. I have no triggers relating to but would generally like to avoid: deathfic (except where I have specifically noted otherwise); vividly detailed sexual assault or dub-con where the con is really, really dub; vividly detailed torture. (Violence is okay with me, especially where there is already a decent helping of canonical violence; really explicit dwelling on what severe wounds look like and how much agony the person or animal who has them is going through might very well end with me tossing my cookies on Yuletide morning.)
Completely separately from that, and solely in terms of my own personal taste: I'm not particularly into BDSM or generous servings of kink, and wall-to-wall porn isn't really my thing. If you love any of those things and really adore writing them, don't let this stop you from writing the fic of your heart! But if you're trying to decide between two different ideas and want to know what I would tell you, there it is.
I love:
:: ladyslash, dudeslash, het, gen! Pairings, threesomes, moresomes! I'm a chronic multishipper and easy to please. I've added notes about specific ships as I thought about them, but generally speaking you're probably in the clear no matter what ship you'd like to write about.
:: stories where people are kind to each other! Obviously this can't reasonably apply to all fandoms or characters, so don't feel obligated to force this where it doesn't make sense. But, speaking in general, I tend to really enjoy stories that have generous helpings of the following: strong friendship or chosen family, especially with bonus gentle teasing or fond mockery; unexpected or unlooked-for kindness or trust or generosity or forgiveness (I will eat this up like glorious id-flavored candy); characters who are a ~team~ or ~have each other's backs~ or ~never leave a person behind~ (CANDY), especially when they spend the rest of the time making fun of each other or pretending to care less than they totally actually do (CANDY). As an extension of this, also, stories where people are good—where they want to do the right thing or are trying to do the right thing, where they care about what the right thing is (even/especially when they're also trying to pretend they don't) or where they want to be the kind of person who cares about doing the right thing even though they don't think they are.
:: AUs! All kinds of AUs, both the variety where someone makes a different choice in canon and the variety where the characters are IN SPACE or at summer camp together or working at rival bakeries. (By no means do you have to write an AU, of course; I love canon or I wouldn't care about the source material so much, and all my canon prompts are quite sincere! But if you like writing AUs, go for it.) There are some fandoms where I feel like the latter type would be a bit tough to pull off, but if you want to try, please do!
:: tropes and clichés! Want to write amnesia fic? Five things/five times? Going undercover in a gay bar? Huddling for warmth? Zombie apocalypse? Hurt/comfort? Consider this your hand-embossed invitation. There is no situation, setup, or story framework too cliché/overused for me, I ADORE IT ALL.
I like fight scenes; I like curtainfic; I like navelgazing. I enjoy backstory fic; I enjoy long, plotty stories; I enjoy 1004 words where two characters have a bleary exhausted conversation as they fall asleep. I'm completely okay with OCs and worldbuilding, with first-person, second-person, and third-person, and with past tense, present tense, or even future if you're feeling really experimental! Mostly I just want you to feel like you can write a story you'll a) enjoy writing and b) like when it's finished. If you have questions about anything at all, feel free to leave an anon comment here, or PM
idriya if you have a DW account; she is my sister, we live together, and she's excellent at keeping secrets, so she can tell you anything I could tell you but I won't know about it.One last thing: I know the rules say you have to unless I say otherwise, so I'm saying otherwise. You DON'T need to include all my requested characters in your fic. I request characters because I like them and like anything about them: I like them in combination, I like them alone, I just like them! For fandoms where I've requested more than one character, I'm going to talk about each of them separately and also together, because this letter wasn't going to be long enough already; write about any of them, all of them, or any combination.
Banlieue 13 (Movies)
Any
I love both of these movies to a totally ridiculous degree, and would enjoy anything set before, during, or after either one that incorporates either or both of them, and any combination or all of the nominated characters. I am equally enamored of Damien's stubborn conviction, Leïto's devotion to B13, Lola's quickness and strength of mind, and Tao's relentless awesomeness. Slice-of-life backstory fic about Lola and Leïto growing up in Banlieue 13? Introspective fic about Damien's or Tao's opinion of the decision to build the wall? What Damien or Leïto was thinking during their final fight on the rooftop? YES PLEASE. An AU that ignores the second movie entirely and is all about how Damien is reassigned to the rejuvenated B13 and kind of accidentally moves in with Leïto? A missing section from between movies where Leïto and Lola talk about whatever stopped the wall from coming down? GO FOR IT. How Tao came to be in charge of her gang? Who taught her to do that with her hair and when? The first time she meets Lola after B13:U? All four of them coming together after B13:U to rebuild? :D :D :D :D :D B13 as a quarantined planet in a Francophone space empire? Superpowers AU? AU where Damien and Leïto meet before the wall ever goes up, while Damien is on one of his utterly ridiculous undercover jobs? OMG YAY. Anything you want to write about any of these people will fill me with joy. Leïto/Damien, Lola/Damien, and anybody/Tao are all 100% welcome.
I should start off by saying this is a repeated request from last year, and I'm asking for it again because I just love this universe so much; I received two absolutely marvelous fics, Home by
The thing I love the most about these two movies, aside from all the incredibly hot people doing incredibly hot things, is how much both movies care about everybody in them. The central conceit, the whole point, everything both movies are built around is the fundamental idea that no one is disposable: no one is trash, no one is a waste of space or energy or effort. These movies are full of addicts and drug dealers, gunmen and street gangs, cops and cop-killers, but all of them are people. People are imperfect, people make bad choices and are terrible to each other, but that doesn't mean you get to wash your hands of them and ignore them—that means you keep trying, you reach out, you make an effort. UGH MY HEART. I just absolutely love it so much when things and people and places widely considered Not Worth It are worth it to someone, and that's what these movies are made out of. ♥
But let's rewind back to the part about hot people doing hot things: I also love these movies because David Belle puts on a parkour exhibition, Cyril Raffaelli goes undercover in a hot pink dress with an ass window, Dany Verissimo would rather set herself on fire than let the bad guy get away, and Elodie Yung unites the gangs of B13 beneath her banner of badassery. You do not in any way need to write me some kind of ultra-serious fic full of devastating and keenly-edged social commentary about modern France; you do not need to know anything about France at all, in fact, since these movies were supposed to be set in the handwavy ~not-so-distant future~ when they were made anyway. (And I'm okay with any kind of setting AU, although I do think it would be easiest to retain some elements of B13's situation: high fantasy where the wall around B13 is instead a ward maintained by imperial mages? Go ahead!) I love all of these characters in pretty much any combination I can think of—the only caveat I have, if incest is your Yuletide jam, is that I am totally okay with Leïto/Lola as long as it's the mutual-dependency/I-love-you-a-little-too-much kind, not the vaguely-or-outright-coercive creepy underage molestation kind.
Leïto
I love basically everything about Leïto. I love how much he loves B13, I love how much he loves Lola; I love how hard he works for the things he loves, how much effort he goes to, the sheer grinding day-in-day-out responsibility he takes for the place where he lives and what he sees in it, what he wants it to become. Even just the very first part of the first movie tells you everything you need to know about him: he tries to keep his building clean, he tries to keep his building safe, he tries to keep Taha's hooks out of the people around him, and everybody knows it. And he does it carefully—the guard at the elevator knows to lie about Leïto's apartment number (and is willing to do it, too, which speaks to a pretty astounding degree of loyalty). He's so smart and so fast and so strong—physically and mentally, in the way where he leaps off roofs and the way where he holds on to the things that matter to him even through his lowest low points.
So! I will enjoy anything you want to write about him. Pre-canon about him growing up in this banlieue, learning its ins and outs and how to love it, or what he was thinking and feeling the day the wall went up, or how he managed to establish himself as in charge of one of the buildings and gather together a community that would support him? Missing scenes from the first movie about his time in prison, or his POV on meeting Damien in the back of that prison van, or his POV on finding Lola with a match on that rooftop? Something set between movies about him learning how to support Lola while she deals with her addiction? Something in the second movie about him breaking Damien out of prison, or what he thinks about going to Tao for help? (What makes Tao so different from Taha for him? What does he know about her and her gang beforehand?) ANYTHING.
Damien
Damien! I love Damien's sheer bullheaded unrelenting commitment to doing The Right Thing, and I love that he never lets go of it. Even when he learns he was an inch from doing the totally wrong thing, that doesn't turn him into a self-hating amoral nihilist; he just takes a look around, figures out what The New Right Thing is, and starts doing that, even though it could easily cost him everything. ♥ He does what he does because he believes in it, not because he's been told to: absolutely everything he does in the first movie is driven by the idea that he's saving Banlieue 13, and when he finds out otherwise, he instantly reverses course, even though he understands by then what all of his superiors actually wanted from him. And even after all of that, he goes back to being a cop; even after the second movie and being betrayed again, he might very well go back to being a cop, because he wants to do good things and he wants to help people and that's the best way he knows how to do it. DAMIEN.
Things you could write about Damien that I would love: pre-canon about how he became a cop in the first place, or one of his other ridiculously amazing undercover assignments; mid-canon about his perspective on being sent into B13, or his perspective on whatever happened between movies that stopped the wall from coming down, or what it felt like to be sitting in prison after having been framed and have Leïto open that door; post-canon about him taking on some kind of liaison position to help Leïto and Lola and Tao rebuild B13. Or anything else you can think of! Did he ever have a partner on the police force? How did he have a working number for Leïto in the second movie, even after all that time? Who is his girlfriend in the second movie, and how did he meet her?
Lola
YAY LOLA. She was one of my favorite things in the first movie and I will always wish she had been in the second. I love her temper, hot enough to give a roomful of thugs the finger but cool enough to serve underwear-eating revenge cold; I love her bravery, grabbing K2's gun and turning it on him, tackling Damien away from the bomb on the strength of her trust in Leïto alone; I love the sheer rock-solid iron-willed badassery that had her willing to set herself on fire rather than permit Taha's plans to work out. Her storyline is so incredibly awful and painful, but it doesn't ever break her, doesn't make her lose who she is; even after everything she goes through with Taha, she's still so sharp and smugly flirtatious with Damien at the end of the first movie. Lola.
For Lola specifically: did Leïto ever teach her any parkour? Where does she live in B13—somewhere in Leïto's building, or somewhere else? How did she get and hold down that job at the grocery? When did she first handle a gun? What is she thinking when K2 yanks her into Taha's office and then she sees Leïto with a gun to Taha's head? How and when did she learn to drive? What is she thinking while Damien and Leïto are fighting, or during that moment of decision when she shoves Damien down to keep him from reaching the keypad? What was it like working through her involuntary addiction after the first movie? Where was she during the second?
Tao
Tao's awesome-per-frame is basically completely off the charts; she doesn't actually get that much screentime, but every single instant she has is basically solid 100% FANTASTIC. I'm not even the least bit objective when it comes to Tao and her Secret-Service-destroying Hairknives of Death—every time I see that scene, I watch it in spellbound silence with my mouth hanging open. It's ridiculous and completely over the top and not at all feasible, and I can't get enough of it. TAO. I love Tao's coolness and unflappability, how basically impossible it is to truly surprise her or throw her off her game, how easily and readily she volunteers to take down all those soldiers with nothing but hairknives and an MP3 player (and how everybody else leaves her to it, because they all know she can do it).
And the movie really doesn't tell us very much about her, so there's plenty of stuff to fill in. Has she always lived in Banlieue 13? How did she end up in the position she occupies? What's the thought process that leads to her throwing her lot in with Damien and Leïto—does she know about what happened in the first movie, and if she does is that a factor? What does she do after the second movie? Does her gang participate in the rebuilding process? How? What does she think of Damien, of Leïto, of the other gang leaders she brings together—or of Lola, if they meet after the second movie?
Combinations
If you are looking to write dudeslash this Yuletide, I ship Leïto with Damien SO BAD, and would be 1000% okay with any sort of burning UST set during the first movie/desperate hurried makeouts set during the second movie/full-on slow-build first-time fic set after either movie; or any kind of joyously tropey AU (they meet while Damien is undercover in a gay bar! They meet when Damien gets shot while on patrol in B13 and Leïto finds him and takes care of him! Damien is one of the cops assigned to the B13 station in the beginning, and doesn't let the station chief get away with handing Lola over to Taha!) If you are looking to write ladyslash this Yuletide, I ship Lola and Tao in a gloriously hypothetical way where they never met in the movies but I can't help imagining how they'd react to each other—Lola is tiny and prickly and loud, talks back and drives like a maniac and doesn't back down; Tao is tall and calm and impenetrable and beats people up like she's dancing. Just a thousand words where they meet each other at all would be gold. AND if you are looking to write het this Yuletide, I ship pretty much either of these dudes with either of these ladies. I would love to read about Leïto and Tao being quiet and intense and taking care of their banlieue together; or Damien's pit-bull unstoppable force meeting Tao's impervious immovable object, his clearly-delineated idea of right and wrong coming up against all the shades of gray Tao must have had to learn to run a gang in B13; or Lola's spitfire sharpness with Damien's seriousness and solidity (can you imagine how thoroughly she would enjoy his sober recounting of the job he's working at the beginning of B13:U???); or an exploration of just how close Lola and Leïto are after spending years keeping each other alive through everything B13 threw at them. A threesome of any combination or a foursome would be a-okay—even a sedoretu AU! I LOVE EVERYONE IN THIS BAR. (And of course gen variations on any of these combinations of characters would also be entirely fantastic.)
Frank Herbert's Children of Dune (2003)
Ghanima, Leto II
This miniseries! I love this miniseries—I'm one of those awful Dune fans who only ever cared about the first book and then this miniseries met all my remaining needs. I love the cast, I love the costumes, I love the entire aesthetic, and the ways in which the plotting and characterization differ from the books are one of my favorite things about it. And Leto and Ghani are two of my other favorite things about it! :D I love the way Leto flickers between seriousness and laughter, delight, wonder; I love that he avoids Paul's trap, that he chooses his path because it's worth it to him instead of feeling like he's been shackled by destiny. I love Ghanima's cleverness, her sense of humor, her iron—I LOVE the conversation she has with Irulan in the garden room when she's decided to kill Farad'n, I love the way she talks to Farad'n after she's decided not to, I love that she has her own subplot even after she and Leto are separated. I absolutely cannot get enough of their relationship, how well they understand each other and how infinitely close they are to each other; I would be delighted by fic that heavily references that closeness, whether platonically or otherwise.
Basically I would read anything about these two: a boardgame session when they were younger, full of giggling and teasing and instant understanding; any kind of missing scene from the latter part of the miniseries, during the portions where they're together or separated, when Ghani thinks Leto is dead or when Leto has to continue on his path (alone, for pretty much the first time in his life); post-canon where Ghanima rules the Imperium or Leto runs the desert and thinks about fate; an AU where Ghani and Leto accept the skin that is not their own together. Anything!
This miniseries OWNS ME, no lie—as noted, I'm the worst Dune fan, because I like this as well or maybe even better than bookverse in a lot of ways. I love how it streamlines and alters the story from the later books, which for me became an increasingly bizarre and nonsensical philosophical tract; I love the simultaneous grandness and simplicity of its scope, the vast star-system-spanning empire in the background and this handful of people, their relationships and hurts and loves and decisions, in the foreground. There are a lot of things I like about Dune, but the way Paul handles his destiny quite frankly isn't one of them—I read miniseries!Leto as genuinely having a choice, and I love that he decides to embrace the Golden Path and all that it entails, even though he knows it will come with a price. I love that the miniseries doesn't forget about Ghanima, that she has a destiny of her own even if it isn't as mystical or all-consuming. I love that they're hurt and separated and alone, and they both find their own strengths and become incredibly individually powerful, and then they get each other back; the moment Ghani finds out Leto is still alive so often makes me tear up. I just adore their entire story a lot, pretty much.
Leto II
I absolutely adore Leto II; I love composed and vaguely smirky Leto in all his high-collared space fashion and I love awestruck shirtless Leto sinking his hand into a bed of baby sandworms. His composure and his confidence and his knowledge never stop him from appreciating the wondrousness of the things he comes to understand about Arrakis and the universe and the path he's set himself on, and I'm easy for that combination of ageless wisdom and fascinated delight. And the sacrifices he makes to take on that path—I don't think there's any doubt that he realizes doing what he's doing will mean he spends the majority of the rest of his life running alone in the desert, but he sees that and accepts it and chooses to do it anyway, and I couldn't love him any more for that if I tried.
The miniseries pretty much blipped over his childhood, but I would love it if you chose to spend time on what it was like: growing up in a household with Alia and Irulan fencing their way around each other, being a child but also pre-born and knowing and understanding so much more than most of the adults trying to care for him. (I am 100% okay with Alia and Irulan having cameos, I'm fascinated by them both—please feel free to include as much or as little of either or both of them as you'd like.) There's plenty of missing scenes in the latter parts of the miniseries that could be filled in, too; and if you feel like poignant futurefic about the vast aching loneliness of running the desert in a skin that is not his own, please go ahead! I think this is one fandom where setting details are too intrinsic for it to be easy to transplant these characters, but I wouldn't mind a fork-in-the-road AU in the least—a roleswap, Ghani leaves him behind to rule while she becomes the desert incarnate; or they never run away in the first place; or even a quieter domestic AU where Chani never dies and she takes the twins back to the sietch to be raised as Fremen after Paul wanders off. ♥
Ghanima
GHANI. I don't even know where to start—I LOVE that Paul never saw her, that she evaded the reach of his visions; in my heart of hearts I sometimes wish this had meant that she was the one who would save the universe by becoming a half-sandworm goddess-queen. (Canonically speaking, I choose to read the miniseries as implying Ghanima took the throne as empress regnant, which is an equally awesome and universe-changing fate, so really I have no complaints.) I love the combination of compassion and mercilessness in her, that she can see Irulan's worries at a glance and reach out to comfort her, and then vow without remorse to kill Farad'n on their wedding night just because he might have had something to do with Leto's apparent death. (And yet she still doesn't descend into simply hating him mindlessly; when he turns on his mother, she's equally able to let it go.) She alternates gravity and wisdom with affection and joy as readily as Leto does, and I adore that about both of them.
Again, as with Leto, the miniseries blips over her childhood, but there's so much about living as a pre-born girl in the palace in Arrakeen to be mined—please feel free to poke around in that space (and don't feel like you need to draw on book canon or worry about contradicting it; go ahead and make things up if you enjoy worldbuilding). Anything from the latter part of the miniseries is also completely fair game: how does grown-up Ghani feel about Irulan, when she has Chani's genetic memory? What process does Ghani go through between waking up believing Leto's been killed and deciding to kill Farad'n? What's her perspective on Alia's long slow Baron-driven self-destruction? As noted, I read the miniseries's ending as supportive of the idea that Ghanima ruled as empress while Leto was busy sprinting around in the desert being a sandworm-god—absolutely anything about what that might have been like would be TOTALLY AWESOME.
Both of them
As noted, I ship this but also just fundamentally love them being ridiculously close and having tremendous broccoli together and caring a lot about each other—if you want to write incest, this is absolutely an excellent fandom to do it in, and if you want to write twins who are each other's best friends and just plain enjoy each other's company, this is absolutely an excellent fandom to do it in. If you're a miniseries-only fan who also ships this, I'm very pleased to be able to tell you that it's book canon that Leto and Ghanima get ~symbolically~ married; I would be over the moon about a miniseries-verse story that is every tropey ridiculous marriage-of-convenience cliché ever, where both of them secretly love being married to each other but are trying to pretend it's just politics because they don't want to freak each other out, and then idk there's kissing. /o\ JUST ONE IDEA. On the platonic side of things, there's so much left out about their childhood: did they run shrieking through the palace hallways together playing games? Did they like to freak out guests at Alia's imperial banquets with their weirdly personal knowledge of galactic history and ability to talk like extremely well-educated adults—and then cackle together over it later? Did they ever talk together about the things they both genetically remember—about Chani, about Liet-Kynes, about the long, long line of Fremen whose memories are packed in there alongside their Atreides ancestors? What is it like for them to meet Jessica as adults when they both remember half her life as well as she does (but only half)? Tell me about one of the times an exhausted and lonely Leto comes back to rest a while with empress!Ghanima. ANYTHING.
Hercules (2014)
Atalanta, Ergenia
The second I saw a trailer for this movie, I knew it was right in my wheelhouse: The Rock + swords-and-sandals-and-sorcery + more than one woman with speaking lines = YESSSSSS. And then I watched it, and, indeed: YESSSSSS. :D I would absolutely love basically any story about either or both of these women, because for me they encapsulate two completely different but equally fantastic kinds of awesome. I love Atalanta's stone-faced strength and speed and INCREDIBLE AIM, her confidence and loyalty and commitment; and I love Ergenia's determination, her willingness to step up and do what needs doing—whether that's teaching herself how to tend to horrifying battle wounds, or finding Hercules and asking for his help even though she has heard and at that point seems to believe the most common rumors regarding what happened to his family, or giving a publicly despised prisoner a drink of water.
So! Pre-canon about Atalanta and her Amazon sisters, or some more of the truths behind Hercules's labors from her POV, or the early days of Ergenia's marriage, or the moment Ergenia first realized Lord Cotys was bad news; missing scenes from somewhere during the movie, Ergenia asking Atalanta more questions about her background or Atalanta teaching Ergenia the basics of archery, Ergenia trying to come up with a new plan to keep her son safe when it looks like the mercenaries are going to leave or Atalanta mentally preparing for that GLORIOUS chariot ride of merciless sharpshooting death; or post-movie fic about Ergenia ruling as regent until her son comes of age with Atalanta as her personal bodyguard are all equally welcome! If your tastes run toward ladyslash, I'd love some for these two, but am equally delighted by the prospect of gen. (That post-movie prompt ends with ladyslash in my head; Ergenia tending any minor wounds of Atalanta's could also go there, and so could the archery lessons. :D)
Line by line, the writing for this movie didn't strike me as particularly good, but I don't even care because I loved the rest of it SO MUCH. It was sort of halfheartedly trying to be all grim! with realism! everyone is dirty! Hercules is just some orphan who grew up to be The Rock! the labors were three-quarters bullshit! all Greeks are liars! and then the end was all NEVER MIND EVERYTHING IS HEROES :DDDDDDDDD ♥ A ragtag band of misfits who would die for each other + people insisting they don't believe in heroism and then turning around and being heroes when it matters the most is basically what my id is made out of. I loved this movie. /o\ Even all the stuff about training Cotys's troops so they were less terrible at everything and then having half of them switch sides at the end—YES. THAT WAS EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED TO HAVE HAPPEN. (I mean, I'm firmly convinced it should have happened earlier and that scene was not well put together; but the outline of that part was everything I could have asked for.)
I enjoy historical details a lot, but I do not in any way feel like you should have to do research to write fic about this movie—knock yourself out if you want to, but I will love a story that captures the handwaviest parts of the mood of this movie just as much as a fic that carefully uses Ancient Greek terms for every article of clothing these people were wearing. I feel like a lot of things about these characters and situations do rely on preserving certain elements of the setting, but I would be 100% okay with transposing this into other genres (ancient Greek steampunk: Rhesus's army is rumored to be terrorizing the countryside with war machines called "iron centaurs" and automaton thralls! sci-fi: Atalanta shoots laser arrows, Eurystheus's wolves are cybernetically enhanced and sentient, and Amphiaraus's predictions are the result of the computational matrices implanted in his brain! superpowers au: this is a story about a ragtag band of superheroes for hire!) And of course I only asked for Ergenia and Atalanta, but you may very well find yourself including the rest of Team Hercules or other side characters—that's totally fine.
Atalanta
YAY ATALANTA. I am so incredibly easy for warrior women, and was so pleased that they included A Chick (I wouldn't have minded if they had gone as far as two women in the ragtag band of misfits, even, but I know that's a lot to ask of any action movie). And I love Atalanta's strong silent sniper thing—it made me roll my eyes that they included That Heavyhanded Scene where The Chick's capability gets questioned and she shuts it down with her awesome, but seriously that trick shot was SO GRATE. RIDICULOUSLY IMPLAUSIBLE ARCHERY STUNTS FOREVER. I also love that her stone-faced confidence and strength and badassery goes hand-in-hand with such simple and total loyalty: she's a cool, composed, extremely experienced warrior who SHOULD be all practical and detached, but instead is all in with this band of failboats and won't turn her back on Hercules even for an entire chariotful of money, despite the part where she's supposedly a mercenary. ♥ YES PLEASE.
Obviously there is a tremendous amount of pre-canon space to explore with Atalanta, if backstory is your thing: what was her life like back when she lived among her fellow Amazons? Who taught her to shoot? What exactly was that first meeting with Hercules like? What was the reality behind some of the other labors of Hercules, from Atalanta's POV? Was she in the city for what happened to Hercules's family—did she see or hear anything, or was the first she knew about it Amphiaraus shaking her awake to tell her they needed to get out of there? What was it like for their little band afterward? And then anything during the movie from her POV would be great—her work with the archery recruits, her perspective on the realization that Cotys has tricked them into securing his rule, that whole ridiculous final battle scene and what she's thinking and feeling during it. Or, of course, post-canon: what is the cleanup like immediately after the movie ends? Do they stick around for a little while to help Ergenia straighten things out? Do they head out again to right more wrongs? Does Atalanta ever find any other surviving Amazons?
Ergenia
HI ELIZABETH WOODVILLE HI. Ahem. Ergenia! I love the complexity that's gradually introduced after Ergenia's "help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi" introduction—first she's some princess who needs a task accomplished, but then, oh, she's also the mother of a son she loves fiercely; oh, and she's learned a bunch of medical skills because she realized there was a need for it; oh, and she actually knows a bunch more about Hercules than it seemed and simultaneously realizes she doesn't know the whole story; oh, and she's actually been trapped in the middle of Cotys's despotic schemes, immediately following the death of a husband who she at the very least seemed to like, and has somehow managed to keep herself and her son alive, maintain a front sufficient to make Cotys believe she's reasonably willing to go along with him, AND is still an excellent enough human being that even knowing Cotys won't like it, she still stands up and tries to take water to Rhesus. \o/ YES. There were things I didn't like about watching her nearly get her head cut off, but I loved how hard she yelled and screamed and pleaded and cursed, how red her face got—that was not a pale and lovely tragic statue, that was an angry, desperate, loud woman who really wanted to live. ♥
There's even fewer details about Ergenia's past than Atalanta's, actually—what was her relationship with her husband really like? How did she end up marrying him? Where is she from? What's her family like? What was it like for her in those early days after his death? How did she first realize Cotys was a despotic asswagon? Who did she learn the healing arts from, and when? What did she think about being sent to ask for assistance from Hercules—was she afraid, given what she'd heard about him? Was she secretly hoping he might figure it out and stop Cotys even that early on, even though she knew the odds weren't very good? And during the movie, she's offscreen a lot—what was it like waiting in Thrace while Hercules &c faced Rhesus? What did she think when they brought Rhesus back? Did she ever get to a point where even though she liked them she was still half hoping Rhesus would slaughter them all if it would only stop Cotys? And then post-movie—what happens? Does she take over Thrace? Does a relative, and if so, does she help them? How does she feel about Thrace and its people afterward? THERE'S SO MUCH.
Both of them
As noted, ladyslash is 100% welcome, and you should feel free to take any prompt I give for these two together and add a bunch of making out. The movie doesn't really show Ergenia and Atalanta interacting in any significant capacity, but there's plenty of opportunities! What does Ergenia think when she first meets Atalanta, or vice versa? Has Ergenia heard of the Amazons—and if she has, is what she's heard accurate or inaccurate? (Does Atalanta correct her, or, with deadpan gravitas, agree and even elaborate with increasingly ridiculous fictions until Ergenia realizes Atalanta's fucking with her? :D) Does Atalanta receive any injuries—during battle or even by accident during training—that Ergenia helps take care of? Does Atalanta ever teach Ergenia any archery? (Does Ergenia ask her to, or does she offer because she thinks it might be a good idea for Ergenia to know?) And post-movie! Immediately after, I can imagine that they maybe end up sitting next to each other after the storm, talking about what's going to happen to Thrace; longer-term, as mentioned, I'd love something where Ergenia rules Thrace as her son's regent and Team Hercules as a whole or Atalanta in particular stick around to help her out. And a genre-swap or fork-in-the-road AU of any kind would be awesome: what would have happened if Ergenia had brought her son, escaped her escort on the road, and asked Hercules to help her dethrone Cotys from the start? What would have happened if Ergenia had fled Thrace with her son right after her husband's death, and run into an Atalanta who never joined up with Hercules after her tribe was slaughtered? (If you somehow watched this movie and went away thinking, "Gosh, I really want to write ladyslash kidfic for that!"—THIS IS YOUR CHANCE.)
Maleficent (2014)
Aurora, Leila, Maleficent
THIS MOVIE. I totally adored this movie, it was like a really big-budget high-quality vid of an AU Sleeping Beauty fic and it was GLORIOUS. I loved Aurora's sweetness and brightness, the way she smiled, that she got angry but then also forgave, how blissfully unintimidated she was even with all Maleficent's ~dark and terrible~ trappings; I loved Maleficent's anger, the ways it strengthened her and weakened her at the same time, the way she never quite lost herself (still that sly pranky fairy sense of humor!) but didn't quite find herself until the end, how she learned to be happy again; and I loved the wee glimpses we got of who Leila was and could have been: reaching out and encouraging fairies to meet her baby daughter, even though she was the child of a man who wanted to crush the Moors and the wife of a man who never wanted to see another fairy again.
Any of these women individually or together would be a marvelous gift! Leila with a baby Aurora, looking out a window and imagining what the Moors are like; or meeting Maleficent in the woods instead of Stefan doing it; or how and from whom she learned what she knows about fairies (how was she so sure they were there to give Aurora gifts? Is that fairy lore she learned at some point, or did she invite the fairies behind Stefan's back?). Maleficent in her youth, exploring some of the wonders of the Moors; or meeting Leila in an AU where Leila became queen regnant of the human kingdom after the old king's death; or struggling with her fondness for Aurora, the first time she lets Aurora come to the Moors awake (she spells Aurora asleep that first time, and then delivers her back to her bed—did Aurora think that time was a dream? Or once upon a dream, even. :D When was the first time Maleficent trusted Aurora enough to let her visit and leave while awake the whole time?). I ship Maleficent/Aurora something fierce, though I'd like Aurora to be at least eighteen before either one of them acts on anything; and I would love a snippet of Maleficent/Leila AU SO MUCH.
I was expecting to like this movie, because it was fairytale-based and it had Angelina Jolie in it; but I went to see it and LOVED IT. ♥ Honestly that post has most of what I thought about it anyway, so instead of repeating myself I'll move on!
Aurora
AURORA. I enjoy a lot of modern fairytale revamps, but to be honest I am still and will always be into the classic "just flat-out a really good person" Disney princess, and Aurora is one of my favorites. She's so generous and adventurous and kind, so ready to be delighted, so willing to reach out to absolutely everybody—UGH MY HEART. I just find that so hopelessly awesome. And it's not like she's some kind of porcelain doll; she gets angry, she gets afraid, she gets disappointed. She just doesn't let herself become embittered by it—she forgives Maleficent, when she's ready to, and she doesn't let anything that's happened to her stop her from embracing the Moors as a whole. ♥ OH AURORA. That scene where Maleficent makes awful faces at baby Aurora through the window and Aurora just defaults to smiling back at her is everything I love about Aurora: I'm not sure I can quite call it bravery when she isn't even really afraid, but that openhearted acceptance, that willingness to treat absolutely everyone as though they are probably wonderful—♥♥♥.
Obviously there isn't exactly a pre-canon option for Aurora! But I'd love a story from any part of her life: another one of her very early encounters with Maleficent (the first one she can remember later? Or make a Five Things out of it!), or her playing as a child with Diaval (the first time she realizes he isn't like most other birds?); her perspective on the three fairies as she gets older, or on the woods where she lives, or on the kingdom (she knows where the castle is, even though she presumably hasn't been to it that she can remember—does she like to look at it? Does she daydream about it? Is the story of the cursed little princess who's now missing public enough for her to have heard it from anyone?), or on the Moors (why did she wander up to the border in the first place? Has she been told stories about the Moors, or does she not really know why there's a wall of thorns there? Has she been told it's an awful place but finds herself not believing it?); or something post-canon, political fic where she has to learn how to deal with the nobles Stefan left behind or road-trip fic where she decides she needs to really get to know both her kingdoms. (I am totally okay with Phillip/Aurora, if you'd like to write that—they're both so adorably brimming with bright-eyed goodwill. ♥)
Leila
Oh, Leila—obviously we don't know a lot about her, but I'll try to stick to things that are plausible considering what little we did see of her. I think the most important thing we know about her is that she's totally okay with having the fairies at the christening and talks Stefan down when it looks like he might turn them away. Considering how her father felt about the Moors, I find this FASCINATING—in a Doylist sense, it may very well have been done just to code her as a decent person, but in a Watsonian sense, I would love some exploration of where her attitude comes from. She seems pretty certain the fairies are there to give Aurora gifts—did she talk to them about it beforehand? Is this a thing fairies used to do all the time, back in the day, and Leila somehow found out about it (has read the few books still extant in the castle library about fairies? Was told about it when she was a child by a tutor or nurse?)? I think any answer you decide to run with will automatically say something about who Leila is, and there must be an answer, even if the movie didn't tell us which it was! I also really loved her effort to redirect Maleficent—it didn't work, of course, but the kind of person who can look up at the towering storm of cold rage and disdain that was Maleficent in that scene, be as afraid as that image deserves, and still try to head her off with a compliment is the kind of person there should be more fic about.
There's plenty of room to worldbuild around her backstory. Did she grow up in the castle, or did her father depose the last king somehow and install himself? Who was her mother, and what was she like? Leila seems to have been something of a diplomat at heart, the way she tries to smooth things over between Stefan and the fairies even before Maleficent shows up—it's hard for me to imagine that she agreed with her father's decision to attack the Moors. Did she try to talk him out of it? Was she almost sort of relieved when he came back injured, because it meant he wouldn't try again? Did she ever visit the Moors, or want to? Did she have some kind of experience with fairies or sprites as a child that led to her seemingly positive attitude toward the Moors? Did she like Stefan at any point, or was she horrified from the start that he seemed to have murdered what could have been the very queen of the Moors just to earn her father's throne? Did she want to be queen regnant but couldn't win enough support, or did she spend most of Stefan's rule wishing she could live in a cottage in the countryside and not have to deal with all these ambitious noblemen? Did she ever visit or talk to Maleficent's wings? (What would have happened if she'd snuck into the room where they were kept and let them out before the christening ever happened?)
Maleficent
I'm easy for any character played by Angelina Jolie in general, but Maleficent hits my buttons in LIKE 5783249 DIFFERENT WAYS. The entire arc of someone being hurt, lashing out in what turns out to be the wrong direction, healing through affection despite themselves, realizing they made a huge mistake, and expecting everyone to be as reluctant to forgive them as they are reluctant to forgive themselves—every single part of that is DELICIOUS to me. And then the particulars—the glorious flight sequences, Maleficent as trusted guardian/shieldmaiden of the Moors and how that becomes twisted into her Dark Queen thing, her almost involuntary affection for Aurora, how much she simultaneously craves and tries to reject acceptance from Aurora, her resigned unhappiness when Aurora learns the truth, how hard she works to avert the curse even though she already thinks she's lost Aurora entirely—it SLAYS ME, ALL OF IT. Her working her way through the iron thorns, the way she hissed when they burned her and then kept going, her eyes as she watched Phillip through that screen, MY HEART. MALEFICENT.
Ahem. Pre-canon and/or early-movie fic about Maleficent as a young fairy in the Moors would be totally awesome—if you enjoy fantastical worldbuilding, knock yourself out! If you have a headcanon as to why Maleficent is so much more powerful than the other fairies we saw, go ahead and use it. Were there other humans who crossed the border besides Stefan? Did Maleficent ever return the favor and go exploring along the edge of the human kingdom? How much of the Moors has Maleficent seen? Mid-canon, what did Maleficent first think when she heard Stefan's wife was going to have a child? What other tricks did Maleficent play on the pixies while they were trying to care for Aurora? What other attempts were made to break through the border of the Moors, and how did Maleficent foil them? (Or a "five people Maleficent found at the border of the Moors" story!) Maleficent POV on any scene you particularly loved would be wonderful, honestly, or any kind of futurefic—does she go off and wander the Moors for a while? Become Aurora's chief court fairy representing the Moors' interests when Aurora has to negotiate with other human kingdoms? How do Aurora's people feel about Maleficent, and about their newly reopened border with a land that's very strange to them? The concluding voiceover doesn't suggest there were huge problems, but there must have been an adjustment period.
Combinations
Maleficent/Leila and Maleficent/Aurora are both completely okay with me (though I would rather not have both in a single fic, I think). I would absolutely love to see Leila with baby Aurora in the very early days of Aurora's life (I imagine this would be bittersweet in tone), or in an AU where Leila doesn't die; I'd also love a story where Aurora learns more about Leila, by talking to fairies or humans who knew her or by asking Maleficent for everything Maleficent can remember about her. For Maleficent and Leila, I'd pretty much love anything where they actually interact for more than two seconds—an AU where Leila was Maleficent's human love instead of Stefan, or where Leila became queen after her father's death and approached Maleficent to apologize for her father's actions/negotiate a truce; or a much smaller AU/missing scene where Leila goes to find Maleficent after the christening to plead for Aurora, and they actually talk for a minute. For Maleficent and Aurora, I would love any platonic fic about one of Aurora's trips to the Moors, or an AU where Aurora actually does move to the Moors with Maleficent before her birthday, or an AU where Aurora is raised in the castle but still ends up meeting Maleficent (maybe this, again, would have the wings being released well in advance of the scene in the movie?). For Maleficent/Aurora, I'd much prefer post-movie or an AU that extends to a point where Aurora's a bit older. Does Aurora find out exactly what happened while she was cursed? Does she know it was Maleficent who kissed her awake—or does she begin to suspect it over time? Does Maleficent intend to retire quietly to the Moors but end up helping Aurora defend their joined kingdoms from other human kings, or find that Aurora just keeps visiting her even though Maleficent was silently expecting the visits to taper off and stop? (Anything that wallows gloriously in how much Maleficent adores Aurora and how little she expects or thinks she ought to receive in return—and how sincerely Aurora believes otherwise—will really hit me where I live. :D YAY PINING.)
Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
Ravenna, Snow White
Yay, I'm so glad this got nominated again! Write me anything about either or both of these women and I'll absolutely love it. For me, Snow White and Ravenna capture two different but equally awesome variants on the theme of women who are incredibly strong and determined and really want to rule things—Snow White is awkward and kind, brave and compassionate, and learns to really want to rule things, while Ravenna is bitter and ambitious, clever and cynical and knife-edged, and already knows she really wants to rule things. In some ways they're each other through a glass darkly (accidental mirror joke /o\), and that FASCINATES me, I never ever get tired of examining it. I adore Snow White wholeheartedly, and I find Ravenna simultaneously sympathetic and magnetically terrible (I love her and I think she's fantastic and interesting but also she kills people and snacks on bird hearts! help).
Feel like exploring Ravenna's earlier years—where she's from, how long exactly she's lived, how many kings and kingdoms she's already seen rise and fall? Or Snow White's childhood—more about what her mother was like, or more about her tutors and nurses and experiences as a child-princess? Or a missing scene from anywhere in the movie, from either of their POVs? Or post-canon—Queen Snow White taking over her kingdom, learning about it, reaching out to the magical creatures within it in ways her predecessors never did, or an AU where Snow White lets Ravenna live and they manage to slowly forge some kind of enemy-mine understanding? YES TO ALL THOSE THINGS. If you want to write ladyslash, I would absolutely love that—if you want to go creepy, I'd prefer it stay abstracted and DNW to read about assault, but love eerieness and obsessiveness; and if you want to write straight-up love-heals-at-least-some-wounds, I would be 100% into Snow White slowly and even almost unintentionally teaching Ravenna that she maybe doesn't have to destroy everything all the time, or an AU where Ravenna tries the box trick on Snow White's kingdom twenty years later than she did in canon and ends up with an armored Snow White willing to marry her.
I enjoyed pretty much everything about this movie a totally ridiculous amount, which is why I'm asking for it again even though I received a marvelous treat for it last year (Mirrored by
This is a fandom where I am absolutely actively interested in creepy fic, although I would, as noted, prefer not to receive a story with sexual violence, and I'm more interested in psychological horror/slow creeping dread than I am in torture porn or extreme nonsexual violence. If you'd like to dwell on Ravenna's relationship with the mirror, for example (is she hallucinating? Does she hallucinate other things? Or was Finn the one hallucinating, unable to see the truth of the mirror's nature?), or on what happens to it afterward (creepy post-canon AU where Snow White keeps it and is increasingly affected by it?), or are interested in an AU where Ravenna actually does get what she wants, please go ahead! If you'd like to do some worldbuilding, Ravenna backstory fic would be a great way to do that—the movie doesn't tell us jack about any other kingdoms or countries in this world, but Ravenna seems to have been through some or maybe even all of them, and depending on how long she's been extending her life, a few hundred or even thousand years of this world's history may have happened while she's been around. (Also: I obviously would prefer that the focus be on Snow White or Ravenna, but you don't have to pretend that Finn, the huntsman, and William don't exist! I like them, too, and I realize they might very well come up in responses to some of these prompts.) And this is one fandom where deathfic is something I would be okay with, if you have an idea that revolves around Ravenna's canonical death, or an AU where Ravenna manages to kill Snow White (though I'd rather not lovingly dwell on how ~beautiful and broken~ a dead woman's body is, if possible).
Ravenna
I love Ravenna but also realize that she is deeply messed up, so please don't feel like you need to find a way to make her "nice" in order to make me happy! There is so much to her: her all-shall-love-me-and-despair dark queen thing, her bitterness and loneliness and anger and sadness, the delight or at least satisfaction she seems to take in other people's pain when at the same time she can't escape her own. I realize this is really cliché and overdone, but I LOVE examinations of how weird and amazing and awful it is to be immortal or quasi-immortal in a world full of people who aren't—no, I am not necessarily asking for a Highlander AU (although that would be a hell of a thing), but I'm fascinated and creeped out at the same time by the terrible trap of knowing you've "lived too many lives," having seen so many awful things that no one means anything to you anymore and losing all sense of meaning and purpose, but being so thoroughly horrified by aging and death ... I would love to either wallow in the awfulness of that or read a story that lets Snow White—ameliorate it, at least, even if she can't fix it. (I mean, canonically she sort of does, even, by letting Ravenna rest at last—does Snow White see it that way in the moment she kills Ravenna, or begin to the more she thinks about it?)
There are so many things we never learn about Ravenna: has she done what she does to Snow White's father in other kingdoms? Has she used her quasi-immortality to crown herself god-empress somewhere—or had she at any point before this, a hundred or a thousand years ago? Or is this the first time? Where did she get the mirror? Or did she make it? Did she learn her black-glass-and-crows magic from someone, or did she invent it? What is her perspective on the child Snow White—does she see herself there, or can she no longer really muster any sympathy for other people, who are to her at that point petty fireflies? Does she honestly while away all the time she isn't onscreen carefully slaughtering songbirds by hand, or does she do other things—read (since ideas are perhaps the only other thing able to last as long as she and Finn), or sit alone and remember (depending on how long she's lived, she knows and has experienced things no one else alive can possibly know or experience), or ride/dance/fly (is she a stupendously excellent equestrian after all this time, or do horses refuse to come near her? Can she forget who she is for a little while when she's a flock of crows?)? Her perspective on anything that happens would be wonderful, whether it's getting to pretend to be fond and happy while she's William or what she's thinking while she's standing in the tower watching Snow White's army charge. And of course if you'd like to AU her into surviving for a post-canon story, that would be fantastic.
Snow White
Oh my god, I love Snow White so much! I love all the different ways she connects with everything she meets, whether it's by roaring right back at that bridge-troll or awkwardly but gamely dancing with a dwarf who comes up to her elbow or sitting quietly and making dolls with that girl in Fenland. ♥ And I lovelovelove that being sincerely, thoroughly good is such a highly-valued part of her, that it doesn't take away from and isn't in opposition to her strength. I also love that strength was specifically part of her mother's wish in this version of the story. I really enjoy the arc she travels during the movie—I feel like in the end she's really learned to want to be queen, to be ambitious, and I love that having ambition isn't automatically bad. (This is one of the changes to the story I love the most; passivity is not in any way part of what makes this Snow White virtuous.) I'm intrigued by the hints the movie throws out about how Snow White might be connected to the actual land/health of the kingdom itself (is that a Snow White thing or a Rightful Queen thing? Is it because the white hart is on her side? If Ravenna had captured or killed the hart, what would have happened?). I love how earnest and awkward she is and how much she cares about people and about her kingdom; I love the sense of awe and wonder she has with the dwarves and the fairies and the hart; I love how brave she is, and how hard she works to do the right thing (i.e., retake her kingdom to rule it better). MAN SHE IS SO GREAT.
I would adore anything early-movie about Snow White and Queen Eleanor, or anything about how Snow White coped with being imprisoned for as long as she was—what a revelation it was to be outside again, even wet and dirty and exhausted, or how terrifyingly weird the creepy swamp/dark forest must have seemed (did she almost wish for the cell back, or was terrifyingly weird still better than that?). Any missing scene or Snow White POV on her travels with the huntsman and the dwarves, what she thinks about the fairies (did she know fairies were a thing? Had she heard stories but always thought they were fables? Or did she have no idea fairies existed?) or about the white hart (is the hart a local legend Snow White actually is familiar with, or is Muir's quasi-explanation a piece of dwarven lore that humans wouldn't know?), would be entirely welcome! I personally am kind of fond of the idea that her speech to Hammond's forces was all inarticulate and weird because she'd just been dead for a while, and/or was trying to explain an insight she'd had as she woke that was fundamentally hard to put into words—was she disoriented when she came back to life, or was everything suddenly really clear? What was going through her mind during that long, long charge down the shore, or in the hall with all the black glass, or during that last altercation with Ravenna? And absolutely any post-canon about Snow White's glorious reign as queen would be BLISS. (As "life itself", is there a chance she'll turn out to be functionally immortal? Will she still be ruling in a hundred years—five hundred—ten thousand?)
Both of them
As noted, I'm interested in these women interacting, whether it's platonic or otherwise. I would love any canon-compliant scene that has both of them in it—Ravenna talking a little more extensively to a child Snow White, or visiting Snow White while Snow White is still imprisoned in the castle, or turning out to have been that Fenland girl Snow White was making dolls with. Obviously anything you choose to write about the final battle will probably at least mention them both; and, as I mentioned, any post-movie AU where Ravenna doesn't die but Snow White doesn't either would be right up my alley. I've already talked a bit about my preferences when it comes to ladyslash for this fandom—anything that takes Ravenna's obsessiveness about Snow White's beauty a step further would be lovely. If a snippet of slow redemption fic is more to your taste, I would adore that (I realize it isn't exactly likely with Ravenna, but I pretty much always want my favorite women to find a way to be happy somehow). And any sort of AU that permits your favorite ladyslash trope or cliché is 100% okay—soulbonding fic that means Ravenna can't kill Snow White and ends up experiencing every time Snow White is kind or happy or forgiving? Fic where Ravenna ends up marrying Snow White instead of King Magnus and then never quite manages to kill her, even though she tells herself she will every night? THUMBS UP.
That got ridiculously long, but if you chose to read it or the relevant portions of it, I hope it was helpful! If you write a story you love, I will undoubtedly love it also, and I can't wait to have the chance to read it. ♥
