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damkiannaThank you for signing up for Yuletide, author! For starters, please rest assured that if you don't enjoy long letters, you can absolutely ignore this entire thing—work off my signup only, or pretend it was blank and write whatever you were already thinking about writing when you offered whichever fandom we matched on. Whatever works the best for you! I love these fandoms equally, and I have no DNWs you need to worry about. This letter's just here because I like to ramble, and because I hope there's a chance those ramblings might be helpful, if you want some thoughts and/or prompts to chew on. But if you get bored just thinking about reading this, then please x away immediately, and have a blast writing me 1k of whatever it is that inspires you the most about our shared fandom. :D
If you do enjoy long letters, this is probably still a bit much :'D but I hope you find something useful in it! Feel free to ignore anything that doesn't apply to you or isn't inspiring to you; I promise you won't miss anything important. I just get carried away when it comes to my tiny fandoms, and I enjoy talking about them so much I don't know when to stop. /o\ I've done my best to make this letter as easy to navigate as possible, even if I couldn't manage to shorten it, and by all means grab the first prompt that gives you even a quarter of an idea, pick whatever angle on it works the best for you, and leave the rest!
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Damkianna, and all my past exchange letters are posted to this journal, mostly under my Yuletide tag, Fandom5K tag, and FFFX tag. I basically never lose interest in anything, so if there's a prompt in any of my previous letters for a fandom I've requested here that works for you, but I didn't repeat that prompt in this letter, by all means write it anyway! (And don't feel bound by any of my old DNWs, either.)
In General | The Big Country (1958) | Dark Matter (TV)
The Huntsman (movies) | Jeremiah (TV) | Tidelands (TV)
If you don't want to completely ignore this letter, but you're also not exactly excited to read it, NO WORRIES. There's a bottom line! I adore all of these fandoms, I'm delighted to share one with you, and I'll be so happy to read whatever it is you want to write me. :D Whatever it is you consider opt-in, please consider this me opting into it—there's no topics, tropes, kinks, or headcanons you need to avoid, and whatever story you'd like to tell about these canons and characters, I'll be thrilled to receive it!
I love gen and shipfic, plot and PWP, the whumpiest angst and the softest most domestic fluff. I enjoy character studies and casefic, worst-timeline anti-fix-its and found families having a group hug. Pining? Friendship? Murder? Banter? Smut? Poetry? Terrible people doing terrible things to each other, good people doing terrible things for what they think are the right reasons, good people being kind to each other and eating a cake made out of rainbows together—anywhere on the scale, I'm there for it. I would love 1k of post-canon adventure just as much as 1k of worldbuilding via 100-word drabbles in the form of academic footnotes from a piece of in-universe documentation. Anything! By all means ignore my prompts and write the fic of your heart, because I would love to read it. :D Or go ahead and take a prompt, but turn it inside out. Give it a bad ending, rocks fall everyone dies? Subvert or invert the trope? Take the fix-it idea and blow a hole through the middle of it—or take the everything-goes-wrong AU and fix it? YES.
Basically, whatever it is that made you want to offer the fandom and characters we matched on, whatever it is that you'd most enjoy writing about them, give it to me! I want it! Sweet, weird, gory, kinky, scary, tragic, or none of the above, I am HERE FOR IT.
I adore and would be thrilled to receive:
• gen! By all means write about any of my requested characters individually, or give me the friendship/rivalry/platonic ensemble fic of your dreams, involving any one of them and any other character or characters from their canon. I love all the casts of all these canons, and am happy to have characters I didn't request appear in my gift!
:: Feel free to take any prompt I gave for a ship and turn it into gen, too—fake dating that really is a cover story, and no one's pining at all? Amnesia where the focus is on how it changes the character's platonic relationships with the rest of the ensemble, and on how it gets solved? Huddling for warmth, or hurt/comfort, or self-sacrifice + protectiveness, with absolutely zero UST? YES PLEASE.
:: And by all means tackle any part of canon, or before or after canon begins or ends, even if I didn't hit on your idea in a specific prompt. 1k of pre-canon backstory? Missing scenes? Post-canon going any which way you like? A quiet moment of connection between friends ... or enemies taunting each other? Introspection! A n y t h i n g.
• shipfic! I multiship in most of my fandoms, and I enjoy f/f, f/m, m/m, nonbinary or genderless characters being shipped, and poly in any configuration. In a lot of these fandoms, I've requested just one character—I've tried to prompt for as many ships as I can think of, but if I left your favorite off the list, feel free to write it anyway!
:: Which, for the record, if it's relevant: I'm definitely here for incest, age gaps, and messy or complicated relationships. I love enemies with UST who never make it to lovers, dubcon/noncon, and undernegotiated kink—and I also love earnest affection, quiet understated longing, h/c with kissing, and true love. ♥ So, yeah. Please feel free to include any ship you ship in my gift, and take that ship in any direction that suits you!
:: And don't worry at all about how shippy a gift you intended as shipfic turns out—I love UST and RST, pining that everyone's ignoring and hatesex where characters are fucking but not kissing ... So if you end up with something that's full of feelings but no touching, or touching but no kissing, or fucking but no feelings, rest assured that any or all of that is fantastic and I will be thrilled about it!
• free space! And by that I mean anything you'd enjoy writing that I manage to fail to explicitly prompt for.
:: A particular premise you can never get enough of (arranged marriage! Accidental telepathy! Kidfic! Undercover as a couple!)?
:: Any kind of AU or AU-adjacent trope (A/B/O! Everyone works in a coffee shop! Roleswap canon divergence! Fusion with another fandom!)?
:: Or something funky or unusual that you've always hoped someone would ask for (a decuple drabble that comes out to 1k exactly! Second person in future conditional! Interactive fiction! IN-UNIVERSE SONG LYRICS ADDING UP TO 1K)?
Whatever it is, please please please give me it. :D
I like fluff and angst, sad endings and happy endings, tension and relief. I would love something precisely placed and canon-compliant just as much as OCs or a brand-new setting to explore, pre-canon blanks getting filled in or post-canon adventures that go whole new directions. I'm here for rare pairings of all stripes, alternate character interpretations or AU variations, and outsider POVs on relationships or on individuals. 1k of any part of canon you like best (or want to rewrite or take somewhere other than where it went canonically, or think is weird or creepy or funny even though canon didn't seem to mean it that way) would be awesome. First person! Interactive fiction! The zombie apocalypse! ANYTHING. Write it for me, whatever it is, and have a great Yuletide. ♥
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:D I'm too greedy to stop asking for this movie, I love it so! much!—and also Jim and Steve, whether you'd like to write about either of them individually, both of them together, or either of them with any other character in the movie. Anything goes! Jim is a delight, I adore how chill and capable and self-assured he is, and at the same time how stubborn and determined he can be, bless his heart. So I am 100% here for any story you'd like to tell me about him, whether it's his pre-canon backstory at sea, or his relationship with Pat, or the process of falling for Julie during the movie. Or Steve! He is such a mess, bless, and I am absolutely interested in something that leans hard into what a jerk he can be—or something that's set later in his character arc and much more introspective, as his perspective starts to change, and his bravery, dedication, and ability to change his mind come into focus a little more. How did he end up working for the Terrills? How long has he had feelings for Pat, and are the two of them really a good match? (I'm just as happy for the answer to that question to be "yes" as for it to be "no"!) Does he recover from that gunshot wound—and if he does, what does he do next?
And if you happen to ship it, I'd be stoked to receive a Jim/Steve fic, by all means. :D Anything from barely-there UST that no one is willing to acknowledge to dubcon PWP, or anywhere in between—I'm here for it! Whether you want to set it early on, with Steve determined to ignore any ~urges "real men" aren't supposed to have toward each other, and/or displacing it all into wanting to knock Jim's teeth in? Hatesex in the barn? Steve trying a few unorthodox tactics during that midnight fight, trying to wring some anger or fear out of Jim any way he can, and Jim refusing to give him the satisfaction, letting him do it instead of pushing him away? Or go totally the opposite direction and give me some post-canon quasi-domesticity, the two of them taking over Big Muddy together, Steve quietly lending Jim a hand and staying overnight sometimes when it gets late or the weather's bad, and wait a minute, they're sort of living together? Or AU me: if Steve had gone after Jim alone, when Jim got "lost", and found him—might Things have Happened on the way back to the ranch together, but Steve won't acknowledge it afterward? ANYTHING.
I've gotten so many incredibly good gifts for this movie, but I'm too greedy to stop asking for it! :D I'm just so weak for Jim's particular brand of staunch self-possession, how thoughtful and patient he is, at the same time that he's so difficult in his own way, and won't veer from what he thinks is right or best even if it might make things a lot easier for him. And Steve's arc was so satisfying to me—I loved his irritation with Jim and how much he disliked Jim at first, how obvious it was that he just didn't know what to do with a man who relied so little on other people's good opinions or on "performing" manliness in the ways he was used to; that he wants to fight Jim SO BADLY, and still ends up starting to see where Jim's coming from in time, however reluctantly. ♥
HELP I LOVE JIM SO MUCH. :D He's just so calmly and quietly sure of himself, so thoughtful and perceptive—and possibly a bit self-righteous and irritating now and then, bless, but it's so hard to hold it against him. I love that he's decided so clearly what should carry weight and what shouldn't, and that he cares so much about people at the same time that he cares so little about their opinions, and doesn't mind being thought of as a coward or a fool (why should he, after all, when he knows he isn't, and anyone who pays enough attention will know the same?). ♥ JIM ♥
• So I'd love pretty much anything you'd like to tell me about Jim!
:: Where did he grow up? When did he first go to sea, and why, and who was it who taught him navigation?
:: What happened to give him the perspective that he has on self-respect and proving oneself? (Was he once a little more like Steve—maybe more than he wants to admit?)
:: Was there some specific incident—maybe aboard ship, or ashore on leave—where social pressure and trying to "be a man" ended badly, and taught him something?
:: When and how did he become a captain? What did he think the rest of his life was going to look like, before the events of the movie?
• And of course I'd be happy for you to write about his relationship with Pat, too!
:: How did it begin? How did they meet, and fall in love? What was it about each other that first caught their eye?
:: What was their separation like for Jim, when Pat first returned to her family but Jim was still back east? (Did they write to each other? What might those letters have said?)
:: Did he have a certain sense of foreboding about coming west and seeing her again—a niggling feeling that things might not work out?
:: Or was he looking forward to learning more about where Pat came from, meeting her family, and understanding her better?
• I'd be delighted with anything about Jim set during the movie:
:: His romance with Julie was so lovely, and that wordless confessional moment between them in Blanco Canyon, g o d, MY HEART. So anything from Jim's first impressions of Julie to deeper feelings taking root, realizing she's been taken to relief at finding she's still alive ... totally on the table!
:: And Jim's POV on any part of canon, whether it's the "big country" in general when he arrives, or the Hannasseys/Ramón/the Terrills as he learns more about the situation—or, of course, Steve :D—would be fantastic.
:: Or! Any kind of missing scene you'd like to tackle that's Jim-centric would be awesome, too: alone on his ride, realizing he really can orient himself well before he's found by Steve ...
:: ... or a conversation with Pat or Julie, or even Henry Terrill, that we didn't see ...
:: ... or his relief when the standoff in the canyon is over!
• And post-movie Jim/Julie or gen of any kind would also be more than welcome!
:: I'd honestly be as happy to read about Jim (by himself, or with Julie) riding off and moving on to a new home, either out west or back east, far away from feuds and water rights ...
:: ... as about Jim (by himself, or with Julie) returning to Big Muddy and fixing the place up so it's a real ranch again (with actual details about ranching 100% optional; I know nothing about it, I won't notice if you fudge it! :D).
:: Or even further in the future—does he ever go to sea again? Does he marry Julie after all?
:: Or maybe 1k of Jim on his deathbed, thinking over the things he regrets (if only a little) and the things he doesn't. ♥
AND STEVE. :D I loved Steve's character arc so much—it's so easy to understand why he is the way he is, the rules he must be used to and the way he clearly perceives the world as working. And at the same time that it's understandable, it's so frustrating, because he's so rude and angry and difficult, and it's so unnecessary; he just doesn't know how else to act, and he's never had a reason to try to be different. But then Jim gives him one, even if he doesn't want it, and everything starts to change. :D His speech to the Major at the end! And then getting shot for him anyway! ;-; STEVE.
• So, point is: definitely here for 1k of any headcanon you might have about Steve's backstory!
:: Where's he from? How did he start working for the Terrills, and how did he end up foreman?
:: Was he sweet on Pat even before she went east? (Or might that have been more about Jim than it was about Pat, in some ways? :D)
:: Does he have any personal reasons to dislike the Hannasseys? (In typical feud fashion, was it "just because the Terrills do" at first, but then altercations resulted in personal grievances, and now it's A Thing?) Or is it all about the Terrills and his own stubborn loyalty?
• Or start a bit closer to the movie itself:
:: What might his reaction have been when Pat came back? Was she changed at all by her experiences back east, and if she was, did that bother him?
:: What does she or doesn't she tell him about Jim, before Jim arrives, and what does he think about it?
:: Pat and Julie have been friends for a long time, so Steve must know Julie—might they have talked to each other, about Pat or about this Jim of hers, before Jim arrived?
• And of course I'd be thrilled with 1k from Steve's perspective that's set during the movie, too!
:: Anything about his relationship with Pat would be great! He's clearly into her, or at least trying to make a point out of the possibility—what kind of future is he imagining for them? Did he have a real chance before Steve showed up, and now everything's gone wrong?
:: But I'm also definitely here for pre-slash of any kind at all—from only-if-you-squint to serious UST, from Steve in total denial to Steve grudgingly aware that he's got more than one reason to want to get up close and personal with Jim—would be awesome. :D
:: Something set during the early parts of the movie, where he's still resentful and dismissive of Jim? Or his POV during the search for Jim, and the resulting argument?
:: Or 1k of whatever he's thinking when he realizes it's Jim who's come into his room and woken him up, and the midnight fight? The moment Steve's understanding of Jim's philosophy began to change? The Blanco Canyon showdown, and getting shot?
• I'd love to read about whatever you think might happen to Steve after the movie:
:: If you'd like to write me the story where he dies of his bullet wound, regretful and too late to change what he did with his life, I will write you the best comment I can through my tears!
:: BUT feel free to let him live and tell me something else about him, too. :D What does he do—keep working for the Terrills?
:: Or maybe he marries Pat after all, both of them a little older and wiser now?
:: Or does he move on to another ranch, or even start up his own somewhere else, using the lessons he's learned to run it differently than the Terrills?
:: Would he choose to take on Big Muddy himself, if Jim and Julie didn't? Fixing it up, at the same time that he's now conscious of a need to better himself, too?
:: Or maybe Jim and Julie stay? Julie has a line about how you'd need a good foreman to run a place like that—would they ask Steve to take on that role? (And would he accept, or refuse?)
And the pairing's getting its own batch of prompts, because I had a few too many to fit up there. :D By the way, please rest assured that while I'd appreciate Julie and/or Pat being treated kindly or at least understandingly, if they do appear in your story—you don't need to spend the beginning of a Jim/Steve fic explaining to me how Jim and Julie broke up, if you don't want to! I'm happy to take it as read, if you like, and roll with Jim/Steve at any point during or after the movie without blinking. (You definitely can if you want to; just don't feel obligated, is all. :D)
• As I've mentioned elsewhere, you should feel free to give me anything that's pre-slash or ship-if-you-squint, and don't worry one bit that it's not shippy "enough"!
:: Something where Steve's been hearing all about Jim from Pat, irritated and resentful about having to listen to her talk about this other man ... and then Jim shows up, and OH NO, HE'SHOT EVEN WORSE THAN STEVE IMAGINED?
:: Or maybe Jim's the one who's heard a bit about Steve from Pat, and wasn't quite sure what to expect?
:: Their first meeting from either of their POVs—what they think before, whether they want to make a good impression or not, and what they think after?
:: Or either of their POVs on Jim's little field trip—Steve's frustration over having to try to track Jim down, whether Jim feels any real resentment that Steve won't believe he wasn't lost, or a conversation between them afterward that we didn't get to see, filled with simmering irritation and thinly-veiled UST?
• Or something a little later in the movie's events, that progresses a little further!
:: By all means, feel free to let that visit Jim makes to Steve's room end differently—whether that's a single furious impulsive kiss that takes them both a bit by surprise, or higher-rated territory!
:: And for the record, dubcon would be more than okay here, whether you think Steve might want to ~teach Jim a lesson, and then that impulse goes sideways on him ...
:: ... or maybe Jim sees something in Steve, rolls with a hunch and tries something other than punching, and Steve obviously can't let a dirty trick like that shake him—even if he also can't admit he's dying for it. :D
:: And I should mention as a side note that it makes a lot of sense to me for Steve—who's clearly pretty hung up on how men "ought" to behave/what makes a man a "real" man—to have some internalized homophobia/biphobia, and/or be very uncomfortable with his own response to Jim. If that's something you're interested in exploring, I would be there for it! If not, no worries; you definitely don't have to include period-appropriate homophobia on either of their parts if you don't want to. Whatever works for you!
• And of course post-canon would be great, too. :D I love h/c so much, and I would read a thousand different takes on Jim involved in Steve's recovery from his gunshot wound! TEN THOUSAND.
:: Does Jim find him immediately afterward, injured, and bandage him up long enough to get him out of Blanco to a bed?
:: Or does Steve make it up and away with someone else's help, and hole up somewhere ... but Jim tracks him down and won't stop checking in on him?
:: Or something set a little further off: what if they met again after a few years? Steve helping Pat run the Terrill place, maybe, and Jim passing through?
:: Or Steve having had to go east for ~reasons (on business for Pat?) and running into Jim there?
:: Or what if Jim does stick around and takes on Big Muddy alone? I'm also weak for accidental domesticity, and I'd adore something where Steve starts showing up more and more often, with tools Jim needs or a little gruffly offered advice, or just as an extra pair of hands ... and then oh, no, a sudden storm, Steve had better stay the night ... and then maybe another night, and then all winter, and then ... :D
• Or basically anything else you're interested in writing me!
:: By all means, trap them together in bad weather, make them huddle for warmth; invent a sex pollen plant that grows only in the soil of Big Muddy, and Steve realizes (too late) that nobody warned Jim about it!
:: Give me 1k of the AU where there was some kind of outrageous mixup, and the bride Steve mail-ordered from back east ... is a quiet-spoken man who doesn't seem half as angry about the mistake as he should be. :D
:: Or maybe 1k of the AU where Jim never came west at all—started second-guessing his relationship with Pat and putting off the trip, until she sends Steve east to find out why he hasn't come yet ... but Steve was just supposed to go get him, not fall in love with him himself? :D
:: Or stick a little closer to canon: what if Steve had, without Jim noticing, come back early enough to catch Jim on Old Thunder? Would he started paying more attention to Jim a little sooner?
:: What if this were IN SPACE and the Terrills and Hannasseys owned competing mining outfits working the same asteroid belt? OR EVERYONE'S WEREWOLVES. STEVE GETS STUCK IN AN INEXPLICABLE TIME LOOP UNTIL HE LEARNS TO STOP BEING AN ASSHOLEand kisses Jim. *waves hands* Anything!
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I still love and miss this show so much! ♥ I narrowed my request down to Misaki this time around, but I adore the crew of the Raza and the universe of Dark Matter in general, so please feel free to involve whichever other characters you like, and set this at pretty much any point in the show, with as much or as little of the rest of the ensemble included as you want. Pre-canon fic on Zairon, with the canonical imperial family and Teku, when Akita was still captain of the guard? Yes! Or Misaki navigating the court and the imperial guard, with stacks of OCs? Also yes! Something set during the show, when she's still trying to track Four down, and presumably also trying not to give Ishida Katsumi any reasons to kill her? Yes! Or her POV on Ryo's return to Zairon? Killing Nyx? Planning the coup? Two killing her? BY ALL MEANS. Or post-canon, however you want to navigate it—whether you'd like to AU it, or write about a Misaki from another dimension ending up in the canon universe, or have a historian of the Galactic Empire of Zairon a few hundred years in the future find Misaki's personal logs ... anything!
Obviously you should also feel free to go AU somewhere during canon, too—and you don't have to "fix it", by any means! Diverge anywhere you want—tell me the story where Misaki took the fall for the emperor's death and got exiled instead of Ryo, and ended up on the Raza with her memory wiped? Or where she did marry Ryo, and it was everything she hoped it would be? (Or wasn't? Or she's over whatever feelings she once had for Ryo, but it's a lot easier to murder somebody who's within arm's reach?) I would also adore shipfic about Misaki and basically anyone, whether you can make it happen in a missing scene or you have to shuffle the pieces around a little, with or without a thread of Misaki/Ryo running through the background. And by all means feel free to write about Nyx's death and/or Misaki's own—or keep them both alive and stuck dealing with each other, in a world where Nyx married Ryo after all. Or save just Misaki, and give me her, post-canon, on the run from Zairon and the aliens at the same time. Whatever you like!
I will never be over this show getting canceled the way it did, and I'm always so excited to revisit the universe and the characters whenever I get the chance. ♥ There are so many things I love about Dark Matter, I can guarantee you I will like anything you want to throw at me—character study? Court intrigue? Psychological horror involving the blob aliens? The power of friendship and loyalty (even if it's from Misaki's disdainful and uncomprehending POV)? YES PLEASE. Whatever tone or genre you want to aim for, heist shenanigans or galactic politics, found family feels or desperation in the face of unstoppable alien invasion, this is 100% the canon for it, and I'm looking forward to it! (And I should mention—if you'd like to make use of supplementary canon like Joe Mallozzi's summaries of how the first few eps of S4 would have gone down, feel free! If you'd rather go a different direction post-canon and ignore all of that, I would love that also. Whatever works for you!)
OH MISAKI. I was interested in Misaki basically the very first time she appeared on screen, without even knowing who she was, and that didn't change at all as I got to know her better. :D Which, she is definitely violent and manipulative and unkind, and you don't need to pretend she isn't! I love the contrast between the face she sometimes presents (cool, pragmatic, reasonable, loyal) and the things she does when she has the chance (hold endless resentful grudges, pine but like in an angry murderous way, kill people, plan a coup). And! I'd adore anything you'd like to write me about her. The things she wants and what she'll do to get them, how unapologetic she is about it, the lines she crosses without looking back ... YES PLEASE.
• Backstory! Totally here for your headcanons about Zairon, or anything about a younger Misaki growing up in the imperial court. :D
:: 1k about her childhood? Any direction you'd like to take it, from court intrigue involving her family that a young Misaki is only just starting to understand ...
:: ... to other weirdly adorable pranks Ryo might have played on her when they were companions as children!
:: Her early training, and how she ended up joining or being recruited to the imperial guard in the first place?
:: Or once she's in the guard—how did she manage to rise to the point where she could take the captain's place after Four killed Akita?
:: Her perspective on Dowager Empress Katsumi, or on Ishida Tetsuya's death and Ryo's exile, or how her rivalry with Teku began?
• Or, of course, anything about Misaki set during canon would be fantastic. :D
:: What was it like in the imperial court when Hiro was emperor, and she was captain of his guard? How did she feel about him? Did she ever think about trying to orchestrate a coup to take his place?
:: What was she thinking or feeling when Ryo was captured, and to what degree was she expecting what happened in the throne room?
:: Did she interact with the Seers at all while they were serving Hiro? (Did she hate them and want them dead, or was she surprised by that part?)
:: Or! Please feel free to give me the most excruciating thousand words you can generate about what it was like for her to overhear that conversation between Nyx and Ryo, and her developing her plans to eliminate Nyx. ;-;
:: Or anything about the moment when Ryo discovered that she'd succeeded? The planning and execution of the coup, that fight with Two—the moment Misaki realized she wasn't going to win it?
• Obviously futurefic about Misaki requires a little footwork; I'm totally here for AUs where she didn't die, or there's a Misaki from another part of the canonical multiverse, or *waves hands* the crew finds a synthetic with (most of) Misaki's memories loaded into her!
:: I'd love "fix-it" from her perspective where Ryo can in fact be convinced to make her empress!
:: Or where her coup succeeds, and she takes command of Zairon's forces in the war against Pyr, and starts fighting it her way. (Was she right to think she could do better than Ryo? Or was she wrong?)
:: BUT I'd also love fix-it from everyone else's perspective—where the android shows up on the bridge a little earlier, maybe, and she and Nyx together are able to beat Misaki and take her prisoner? As a bargaining chip to use against Ryo, even?
:: Or diverge from canon anywhere else you like! If Ryo had succeeded in keeping and duplicating the blink drive, and Zairon's fleets utterly wrecked Pyr and rolled unstoppably through the galaxy—would Misaki ever have a reason to regret her decisions?
:: Or if she'd taken the fall for Ishida Tetsuya's death and been exiled instead of Ryo—could she have ended up on the Raza with her memory wiped, calling herself Four? :D
• And shipfic (or the beginnings of it) with Misaki involved would be more than welcome. :D Anything from UST to hatesex would be great, and I'd be delighted to receive Misaki/anyone that ignores Misaki/Ryo entirely ... or that acknowledges it one way or another, whether you like it as one-sided, reciprocated, or "actually Misaki's long since over it, but she brought it up to fuck with Ryo's head/uses it to justify stuff to herself".
:: If Nyx had managed to win her fight with Misaki—might Misaki have (however unwillingly) admired her for it? If Misaki were imprisoned on the Raza afterward, what else could that admiration have turned into? :D
:: Or, in a universe where Ryo had convinced Nyx to accept—might Misaki succeed in killing him, and then decide to keep his Seer Empress for herself? :D
:: Would Three be up for a round of hatesex? (Does he share his alternate counterpart's enjoyment of being hit and/or choked during sex? Because I can definitely see Misaki accidentally getting him going, and then choosing to see how far she can take it just to humiliate him ...)
:: In a universe where she didn't kill Nyx, or hadn't yet—could Two have ended up grudgingly reaching out to her (trying anything/everything to get the blink drive back from Ryo, maybe)?
:: Would Six try to redeem her (oh, Six :D)? Would she pretend it was working, and that she was ~in love to boot—but it had actually started working, just a little bit?
:: Or, venturing a bit sideways—might she ever have tried to seduce Hiro to make him easier to manipulate, while Ryo was gone?
:: I don't know how it would happen or whether you could get it to / in the end, but for the record, 1k of the android observing Misaki and trying to work out her reasoning for the things she does, in her blandly patient android way, would be A++. :D
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I enjoyed these movies a truly ridiculous amount, they were so incredibly up my alley I can't even handle it! From the setting and the magic to all the women trying to kill each other in various ways, the touches of gorgeous fantasy and eldritch horror, obsessive cruelty and true love ... YES GOOD. Which, I should say—I've seen both, and obviously the tag is for both, but you definitely don't need to have watched Winter's War to write me a story about Ravenna! I'm equally here for something set during SWatH that ignores everything from WW, or post-SWatH that goes a completely different direction than SWatH did, or a story that uses a few bits of WW canon but ignores the rest, or something that's 100% WW-compliant. Whatever works for you! I adore these movies separately and together, and no matter how much or how little of the canon you want to stick to, you've got my attention. :D
And I liked pretty much every single character in both of these movies, but, inevitably, I'm asking for Ravenna, because I'm weak for Charlize Theron in general and even weaker for Ravenna in particular. :'D She is just so marvelously compelling in her sheer charismatic terribleness, her relentless ambition and her deliberate cruelty, the pain and fury that underlies it all. ♥ So! I'd be delighted with basically anything you want to write about Ravenna, whether it's deathfic, an AU where she gets a happy ending despite herself, or anything in between! Her childhood with her siblings? Other kingdoms she's toppled, on her way through the world? Losing Finn, or disguising herself as Will and kissing Snow White? What it's like in the space within the mirror? And shipfic is more than welcome, too—Ravenna/Snow White, Ravenna/Freya or Ravenna/Finn or magical incest OT3, Ravenna/Sara ... whatever you like!
There are so many things about these movies that I adore—the aesthetics! The fairytale framework! The weird and sometimes inexplicable magic that you have to keep an eye out for if you want to not die!—but despite all that competition, one of the big things that keeps me rewatching them is DEFINITELY Ravenna. Everything about her, her anger and her magnetism and her whole gleaming murderous raven-feathered aesthetic, the slow smug way she smiles to herself while people die around her, is fantastic and awful and I love it. :D
SO YEAH. By all means, write me anything you like about Ravenna! And while I would be delighted by an AU where she manages to find herself a genuine happy ending (presumably despite herself, and no doubt it would take her time to recognize it for what it is), please don't feel any need to soften her or smooth down her sharp edges. There's a lot about Ravenna that's vicious and petty and unkind, however much she may legitimately have been wronged in her turn, and I'm 100% on board with her making bad decisions, doing bad things, and believing herself to be justified and even the aggrieved party when that's not what's happening at all. :D
• Backstory! There's all kinds of places you could go pre-canon, whether you want to use Winter's War or not, and I'd love a fic about any part of it:
:: Ravenna's youth with Finn and/or Freya—how they related to each other and connected to each other, as kids?
:: The circumstances of Ravenna's first use of magic or first killing (or both, if they were the same moment) ...
:: And if you like to worldbuild, by all means feel free to fill in some blanks! Where is the Duchy of Blackwood? What other kings and queens has Ravenna destroyed?
:: Where did she get that mirror, and when?
:: Is she ruling in absentia anywhere, other countries or empires—what stories follow her, what do other nations' people say about her?
• Or! Something set during either movie, or between them. :D
:: Her perspective on basically any part of SWatH, or a missing scene, would be wonderful! How does King Magnus's kingdom compare—does she miss others she once ruled?
:: People, places, art and music and books that once existed, dances no one else remembers the steps to (except maybe Finn)?
:: Does she truly hate Snow White, or is she almost relieved to be run through, to have the long exhausting march of "too many lives" end?
:: Between movies—what is it like inside the mirror, looking out at Snow White from it? What does she do, or say, to drive Snow White so close to the edge?
:: What is it like in Winter's War, to step out of the mirror again and be almost alive, to be reunited Freya at last (and then watch her die ;-;)?
• Or AU me any way you like!
:: What if Snow White hadn't managed to escape? If Ravenna had gone to talk to her enough times—might she have been moved eventually to spare her? Or deliberately given Snow White the chance to kill her?
:: Or, of course, what if Ravenna had killed Snow White, and eaten her heart? Would it have worked out the way she expected it to? Or would she have been changed somehow by it? (Might she end up with Snow White's connection to the land, and thereby forced to attempt to actually care for it? Or visited by the white hart?)
:: Ignore Winter's War completely; what might have happened if Snow White had spared Ravenna instead, at the end of the first movie?
:: Or use the mirror thing but no more—if Snow White had realized Ravenna was in there, and found a way to get her out? If Ravenna had succeeded in tricking her, driving her slowly mad?
:: Or! What if Freya had come down from the north herself to get the mirror? Or sent a still-enchanted Sara for it? What if Snow White had insisted on escorting it north herself?
• And of course I'm all over Ravenna shipfic. :D
:: I loved the codependence and mental connection between Ravenna and Finn, so anything leaning on that for anything from an incestuous vibe to porn would be wonderful!
:: And Ravenna/huntsman or Ravenna/William would be great, whether we're talking 1k of Ravenna being SUPER CREEPY or 1k of the beginning of what could become sincere slow burn—where she's captured either of them, perhaps, and tries to make them love her? Fails ... or succeeds? Or Snow-Queens them to force them to stop feeling anything for Snow White, and noncons them, and they don't even care anymore? D: but also yes please
:: I am very much here for incest and would love Ravenna/Freya—the whole spectrum from Ravenna insisting they can only trust each other and manipulating Freya to sincere affection (or both at once) is absolutely open to you! :D
:: Could Ravenna have tired of disposable kings a little earlier, and chosen to install Freya as her eternal silver sister-queen instead?
:: Or Ravenna/Snow White, because I will never get enough! In absolutely any flavor: canonical obsessiveness tinged with UST? Ravenna dubconning or nonconning captive Snow White? Any sort of AU or your favorite f/f trope—accidental soulbonding, or hatesex that doesn't stay hatesex, or amnesia. Or might Queen Snow White, faced with a magical problem, have no option but to retrieve Ravenna from the lands of the dead, and ask for her help?
:: And of course if you'd like to AU things so that Ravenna and Sara meet—in a universe where it was Eric/the canonical huntsman who was taken by Freya, and Sara who roamed the world thinking he was dead and getting hired to hunt down princesses ... :D
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I loved this show so much, back in the day, and I can never resist a chance to revisit it—some things about it have definitely aged better than others, bless, but at its heart it's so earnest and well-meaning, and so interested in all the ways people can be complicated, can become better or worse or both at once in different ways. ♥ And one of my favorite characters has always been Theo! She caught my attention right away in the pilot, and I was so bummed when it looked like the show had moved on to new settings and characters, and so delighted when she started showing up again in more episodes later on. She's so interesting, with her particular brand of ruthless, practical, unapologetic resourcefulness, and I'd be delighted to read any story you'd like to tell about her, from backstory before the show to missing scenes between her canonical appearances, post-canon speculation or AUs taking her any direction you can think of.
I also ship her with just about everybody, so if there's some Theo shipfic that lives in your heart that you've been waiting for an excuse to write (Theo/Erin? Theo/Markus? Theo/Jeremiah? Theo/Kurdy? Theo/Elizabeth? Theo/Libby?), by all means give it to me. :D And while there was no worldbuilding tag nominated, I'm incredibly weak for post-apocalyptic settings, so for the record, absolutely anything about the world of Jeremiah that you'd like to explore through a story about Theo would be amazing, from how she ended up in charge of Clairfield in the first place to attempting to forge an alliance with the other local leaders, or recovering post-canon after Daniel's army is defeated. Anything!
This show is probably where my abiding love for apocalypses and their aftermath comes from—it was so earnest (sometimes to the point of cringe, I admit) and I totally adore people doing their best to come together and build something new out of the ashes, even if they struggle with it, even when there are setbacks, which means it gave me just about everything I could have asked for. :D Which, I definitely do love both the effort and commitment and the struggles and setbacks, the times when the characters defaulted to cruelty or distrust and the times when they extended unexpected kindness, so darkfic and happy endings are both on the table!
THEO. :D Theo's arc has always been one of my favorite things about the show—starting off as much more of an antagonist than not, and gaining more and more nuance every time she reappeared. I love how smart and tough and difficult she is, that she's always looking out for herself but at the same time aware that there's more going on in the world, and that every now and then the latter tips her in new and unexpected directions. So, yeah. Any story you'd like to tell me about Theo, I'm here for it!
• Anything about Theo set before the show starts would be fantastic. :D
:: How did she end up in charge of Clairfield? (By all means run with everything she said about it in the pilot being basically true ... or decide she exaggerated or smoothed over a few things. :D)
:: What kinds of challenges had she faced before Jeremiah and Kurdy showed up, and how did she handle them?
:: How did she first learn about Thunder Mountain/"the end of the world"?
• And of course I'd love missing scenes and/or episode tags that fill in some of the gaps between Theo's various appearances on the show!
:: What happened to her between the pilot and 1.11? There's got to be more to it than she'd have admitted to anybody from Thunder Mountain ...
:: How did she handle the aftermath of the pilot, and what did or didn't change about the way she ran Clairfield?
:: Or between 1.11 and 1.18? Her position seems to have stabilized somewhat by 1.18—how did she pull that off?
:: Or between 1.18 and 2.04-2.05! How and when did she discover she was pregnant? Had she told anybody else, or was she trying to hide it and also maybe pretend it wasn't happening at all?
:: Or, of course, after 2.05! What's her response to the whole Daniel situation? What does she have her people do to prepare?
• Or! Post-canon adventures of any kind—or, well, leading into post-canon, because she's offscreen for the end of S2:
:: Where is she when Daniel's army shows up? Is she coordinating with Thunder Mountain in ways we just didn't see, or holding back, waiting to see who comes out on top?
:: How does she survive it—or does she go down fighting, scratching tooth and nail? ;-; OH THEO
:: What happens next? Does she come back and help start rebuilding in the aftermath—playing it like it's for her own benefit, but inwardly relieved there's still something left?
:: And I would 100% be there for a pregnancy fic that tackles what it's like trying to give birth safely—is she willing to go to Thunder Mountain for help? Does she try to handle it all herself?
• I'd be thrilled with an AU branching off from just about anywhere, too, or fixing anything you'd like to fix!
:: What if Theo had in fact discovered Thunder Mountain first, or had followed Jeremiah and Kurdy there? (Waited for them to leave, pretended to need help, and managed to get herself inside?)
:: Would she have taken it over/sabotaged it, or ended up won over by their mission and Markus's earnestness despite herself?
:: Or a role reversal, however you feel like you can swing it: how could she have ended up as a runner for Thunder Mountain, in another world?
:: What would Thunder Mountain look like if she'd been in Markus's place? (Better, worse, and somewhere in between are all 100% fair answers!)
:: "Fix it" from Theo's perspective: what would have happened if she'd succeeded in holding Jeremiah, Kurdy, and Simon until she could get some answers, and her people hadn't turned on her?
:: Or fix anything else about the show, with Theo involved—let her save Elizabeth? Let the leaders succeed in forging an alliance that can fend off Daniel's forces entirely? Whatever you like!
• And I'd be t h r i l l e d with Theo shipfic, too!
:: I can admit that I probably ship Theo the most intensely with Erin, on the strength of That One Conversation in 2.04—I would be delighted by the tropiest ever accidental domesticity fic where Erin does end up helping Theo through her pregnancy, and they share quarters in Thunder Mountain but it's Just Practical (it's not just practical), and feelings happen. :D
:: Or anything else you're interested in for them! Theo's pregnancy makes her horny = fuckbuddies? AU where they meet earlier (both captured in Milhaven, maybe)? WINGFIC. Anything!
:: BUT I'm also definitely here for Theo shipped with anybody else—say, Markus, perhaps intending to manipulate him at first, but oops real feelings happen?
:: Or give me Theo/Jeremiah—I adore how prickly their back-and-forth with each other can get, and how well they can keep up with each other when they try!
:: Or Theo/Elizabeth, with all the messiness of Simon's death hanging between them, Elizabeth's gentleness-but-strength vs Theo's sharp-edges-but-feelings?
:: Or Theo/Kurdy—maybe Theo hitting on him and him always refusing, doubly so after Elizabeth's death, becomes A Thing ... until one day he finally says yes instead? :D
:: Or anybody else you're interested in shipping her with! Theo/Jeremiah/Kurdy, Theo/Kurdy/Elizabeth, Theo/Erin/Markus ... Mr. Smith! Libby! HATESEX WITH LEE CHEN. Anything!
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I'm so enamored of so many different things about this weird little show, but ultimately, Cal is my favorite, and I'd be so thrilled to get a gift about her! :D No matter where you want to start, and no matter where you'd like to take it—backstory set during her childhood, while her dad was still alive? When she first went to prison, and how she adjusted? Missing scenes or episode tags? Whatever you think might have been about to happen next, after that cliffhanger? Or AU me from any point you like: what if Cal's dad had told her what she was earlier? What if she'd ended up at Orphelin Beach a lot earlier? (What if Augie had refused to let her go alone, and he was the one who'd had to grow up feeling like an outcast, instead of her?) What if Cal had been able to save Corey, or had found Genoveva earlier and learned exactly what she needed to know to stop Adrielle ... or to take her place as queen?
And I also ship basically all the things here, so if you'd like to write some canon-compliant Cal/Dylan or Cal/Corey, definitely do that—more sex with accidental siren powers involved? All the feelings conversations they didn't get to have during the show? BUT I would also love some messy power-tripping manipulative Cal/Adrielle, or Cal/Augie not-technically-incest-but-it-still-feels-like-it-is, or Cal/Leandra or Cal/Violca seduction or hatesex. And if you want to delve into more siren lore, or tell me all your headcanons about summonings and water magic and what sirens actually think of their abandoned half-human children, feel free!
I have a thing for mermaids in general, but also specifically for mermaids as wildly dangerous and/or kind of terrifying, and this show fascinated me—there's some pretty soapy twists and turns, and also some hilariously unnecessary sex. But at the same time it did such an intriguing job with the Tidelanders and their community, its structure and its (sometimes terrifying) rules, the sirens and the Tidelanders' longing for them. The whole show is so appropriately moody and beautiful and kind of wild, and I ended up really loving it, even if that finale absolutely murdered me with bewilderment!
And one of my favorite things about it was definitely Cal. :D Her angsty backstory is so amazing and messed up in all my favorite ways, and her homecoming is so believably awkward and difficult and painful. ♥ Her journey toward starting to learn some of the secrets that have been kept from her, and starting to understand herself—being able to use her powers, and even wanting to, and the push-pull between enjoying it and being terrified of it ... I LOVED ALL OF THAT, and Cal is great, the end.
• So! Anything you'd like to explore about Cal and her life at any point—I'm here for it!
:: Her childhood while her dad was still alive, not knowing where she'd come from; were there hints that piled up, despite her dad keeping her away from water?
:: Or the fire, and going to prison, adjusting to it—and then having to try to figure out how to live life outside of it again?
:: Or, of course, Cal's perspective on the Tidelanders! Does she feel drawn to Dylan, to Adrielle, to L'Attente? Is it reassuring or scary—or both—to finally understand why she's never quite felt like she belonged?
:: Or the runup to the ending! Anything about what it's like to make that guy drown himself, realizing that she liked it, admitting it to Augie—stabbing Adrielle, trying to save Augie, the sirens ...
• And I would love to know what you think about what might happen next, too!
:: Obviously the cliffhanger gives you a jumping-off point, if you want it—what do the sirens do? Who lives, and who dies?
:: Are the sirens willing/intrigued to have been summoned ... or not so much?
:: How do the Tidelanders react? Has Adrielle strengthened her position as queen—or does it become clear the sirens came for Cal, not her?
:: But feel free to go further and tackle new problems, and let me piece together what must have happened on that beach retroactively!
:: More struggles in dealing with Augie's ... business? Trying to survive whatever Adrielle's got in mind next, now that she has in fact succeeded in her original goal?
• Or go in another direction entirely:
:: What if Cal had never gone to prison—if, say, Augie had taken the fall with a false confession?
:: Or if she'd fled from the police (and ended up stumbling all the way to the Tidelanders, maybe)? How else might she have learned what she was?
:: What if Dylan had decided to full-on side with Cal over Adrielle earlier?
:: Or if Violca had recruited her in an effort to line up some allies and defy Adrielle sooner?
:: Or if she'd been able to save poor Colton—or met Gilles and Bijou earlier, and Bijou's drawings had helped her guess a few more things that were coming?
:: What if she actually had killed Adrielle—how would the rest of the Tidelanders have reacted to her as queen? (I'm equally interested in principled queen Cal who's not going to make people gouge each other's eyes out anymore ... or a darker Cal who starts to indulge the part of her nature that enjoyed making a man helplessly drown himself. :D)
:: Or, of course, fix it: let her succeed in forcing Corey's blood back inside him and keeping his heart beating, in the morgue! Let Dylan leave Adrielle to die and stick with Cal! Let her save Bijou and Augie! (With the sirens' help?)
• And I'd love it if you were interested in shipping Cal with ... just about anybody, really!
:: I absolutely ship Cal with both Corey and Dylan, so I'm here for either pairing, or both continuing to occur at once in a V, or an actual straight-up poly formation where Corey and Dylan also bang!
:: I'm also weak for incest and pseudo-incest, and Augie and Cal have such a compellingly strong relationship with each other—they trust each other SO MUCH, and that entire rescue + holding each other + Cal confessing to him that she'd made that guy drown and liked it, ffff, MY HEART.
:: AND THEN ALSO I would be delighted to read about fucked-up manipulative Cal/Adrielle (such a UST vibe! Adrielle like half trying to win Cal over and half trying to achieve some kind of control over the potential threat she poses! *_____*)
:: Or! Cal/Violca where Violca's trying to get someone else to take Adrielle on first so she can step forward in the aftermath? (Does it work? Or does Cal do better than expected, and suddenly Violca's got to keep her favor instead?)
:: Cal/Leandra? Maybe Leandra finds Cal first in the morgue, not Corey, and Cal uses her abilities to force Leandra to submit to her? How does that change the endgame?
:: For any of the pairings above, if you want to play up the whole "queen" thing/potential additional Tidelander powers in a femdom way, feel free. :D (Including Cal and Adrielle each trying to whammy the other with it, until at last one of them has to submit ...)
:: Or go any other tropey direction you like: do Tidelanders grow secret sex pollen plants? Soulbond to each other, or to humans? Have soulmates? :D
• And I'm adding an extra set of prompts, because despite the lack of a worldbuilding tag in the tagset, there is so. much. worldbuilding here that I'd love to see explored! So if you feel like digging into any of these elements some more, in combination with another prompt or standalone, that would be AWESOME:
:: I would LOVE anything you want to tell me about the sirens' history—more about the translation of the text on the artifact, the legends about the horn and armies of women from the sea ... 1k of fictional documentation about a couple pieces of the horn, or an excerpt from an analysis of several variations on the sirens' appearances in mythohistory? :D
:: Anything with Cal involved that delves a little deeper into the nature of sirens and where they come from (if there are no siren dudes, and when they bang human dudes they dump the babies ... can select Tidelanders be made into full sirens, if the sirens choose to do so? Or is it more mythological—sirens carve new sirens out of stone, or something?)
:: Or just dive in and tell me all about the original mythohistorical conflict, what happened and how; the original breaking of that horn and who did it, the scattering of the pieces ...
:: Or anything focused on the Tidelanders and their community: how separate they are, how separate they feel, the juxtaposition of the desperation to reach out for their mothers and the awareness that their mothers abandoned them.
:: The massacre! Their social structure! Their rules are so interesting, and obviously also kind of creepy/brutal: the eye-gouging, Adrielle's determination to make them all believe they can't have kids with humans, succession among queens ...
:: Or their magic! The water-lock on Adrielle's little basement of surprises was super cool—please tell me all about how it feels to control water, including the water in blood, and to breathe it. Or to entrance people, for that matter!
:: And then there's Bijou and Genoveva, with their apparent precognition; how does that work? Are there other "extra" talents that some Tidelanders have and others don't?
:: Or maybe full-blooded sirens can see the future even more clearly? (Is that why they came to the shore for Cal and not for Adrielle—because they saw that it would be her, and that mattered somehow?)
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If you got here by reading absolutely all of that, then I apologize /o\ :D and bless you for being willing to look at all of that. I can only hope at least some of it will turn out to be useful to you, but above all, please know that what I want most for Yuletide is for you to write me something you really enjoy writing! ♥ So, yeah, thank you so much in advance, and have a fantastic Yuletide!
If you do enjoy long letters, this is probably still a bit much :'D but I hope you find something useful in it! Feel free to ignore anything that doesn't apply to you or isn't inspiring to you; I promise you won't miss anything important. I just get carried away when it comes to my tiny fandoms, and I enjoy talking about them so much I don't know when to stop. /o\ I've done my best to make this letter as easy to navigate as possible, even if I couldn't manage to shorten it, and by all means grab the first prompt that gives you even a quarter of an idea, pick whatever angle on it works the best for you, and leave the rest!
I'm on the AO3 as
In General
If you don't want to completely ignore this letter, but you're also not exactly excited to read it, NO WORRIES. There's a bottom line! I adore all of these fandoms, I'm delighted to share one with you, and I'll be so happy to read whatever it is you want to write me. :D Whatever it is you consider opt-in, please consider this me opting into it—there's no topics, tropes, kinks, or headcanons you need to avoid, and whatever story you'd like to tell about these canons and characters, I'll be thrilled to receive it!
I love gen and shipfic, plot and PWP, the whumpiest angst and the softest most domestic fluff. I enjoy character studies and casefic, worst-timeline anti-fix-its and found families having a group hug. Pining? Friendship? Murder? Banter? Smut? Poetry? Terrible people doing terrible things to each other, good people doing terrible things for what they think are the right reasons, good people being kind to each other and eating a cake made out of rainbows together—anywhere on the scale, I'm there for it. I would love 1k of post-canon adventure just as much as 1k of worldbuilding via 100-word drabbles in the form of academic footnotes from a piece of in-universe documentation. Anything! By all means ignore my prompts and write the fic of your heart, because I would love to read it. :D Or go ahead and take a prompt, but turn it inside out. Give it a bad ending, rocks fall everyone dies? Subvert or invert the trope? Take the fix-it idea and blow a hole through the middle of it—or take the everything-goes-wrong AU and fix it? YES.
Basically, whatever it is that made you want to offer the fandom and characters we matched on, whatever it is that you'd most enjoy writing about them, give it to me! I want it! Sweet, weird, gory, kinky, scary, tragic, or none of the above, I am HERE FOR IT.
I adore and would be thrilled to receive:
• gen! By all means write about any of my requested characters individually, or give me the friendship/rivalry/platonic ensemble fic of your dreams, involving any one of them and any other character or characters from their canon. I love all the casts of all these canons, and am happy to have characters I didn't request appear in my gift!
:: Feel free to take any prompt I gave for a ship and turn it into gen, too—fake dating that really is a cover story, and no one's pining at all? Amnesia where the focus is on how it changes the character's platonic relationships with the rest of the ensemble, and on how it gets solved? Huddling for warmth, or hurt/comfort, or self-sacrifice + protectiveness, with absolutely zero UST? YES PLEASE.
:: And by all means tackle any part of canon, or before or after canon begins or ends, even if I didn't hit on your idea in a specific prompt. 1k of pre-canon backstory? Missing scenes? Post-canon going any which way you like? A quiet moment of connection between friends ... or enemies taunting each other? Introspection! A n y t h i n g.
• shipfic! I multiship in most of my fandoms, and I enjoy f/f, f/m, m/m, nonbinary or genderless characters being shipped, and poly in any configuration. In a lot of these fandoms, I've requested just one character—I've tried to prompt for as many ships as I can think of, but if I left your favorite off the list, feel free to write it anyway!
:: Which, for the record, if it's relevant: I'm definitely here for incest, age gaps, and messy or complicated relationships. I love enemies with UST who never make it to lovers, dubcon/noncon, and undernegotiated kink—and I also love earnest affection, quiet understated longing, h/c with kissing, and true love. ♥ So, yeah. Please feel free to include any ship you ship in my gift, and take that ship in any direction that suits you!
:: And don't worry at all about how shippy a gift you intended as shipfic turns out—I love UST and RST, pining that everyone's ignoring and hatesex where characters are fucking but not kissing ... So if you end up with something that's full of feelings but no touching, or touching but no kissing, or fucking but no feelings, rest assured that any or all of that is fantastic and I will be thrilled about it!
• free space! And by that I mean anything you'd enjoy writing that I manage to fail to explicitly prompt for.
:: A particular premise you can never get enough of (arranged marriage! Accidental telepathy! Kidfic! Undercover as a couple!)?
:: Any kind of AU or AU-adjacent trope (A/B/O! Everyone works in a coffee shop! Roleswap canon divergence! Fusion with another fandom!)?
:: Or something funky or unusual that you've always hoped someone would ask for (a decuple drabble that comes out to 1k exactly! Second person in future conditional! Interactive fiction! IN-UNIVERSE SONG LYRICS ADDING UP TO 1K)?
Whatever it is, please please please give me it. :D
I like fluff and angst, sad endings and happy endings, tension and relief. I would love something precisely placed and canon-compliant just as much as OCs or a brand-new setting to explore, pre-canon blanks getting filled in or post-canon adventures that go whole new directions. I'm here for rare pairings of all stripes, alternate character interpretations or AU variations, and outsider POVs on relationships or on individuals. 1k of any part of canon you like best (or want to rewrite or take somewhere other than where it went canonically, or think is weird or creepy or funny even though canon didn't seem to mean it that way) would be awesome. First person! Interactive fiction! The zombie apocalypse! ANYTHING. Write it for me, whatever it is, and have a great Yuletide. ♥
The Big Country (1958)
Any (James McKay, Steve Leech)
:D I'm too greedy to stop asking for this movie, I love it so! much!—and also Jim and Steve, whether you'd like to write about either of them individually, both of them together, or either of them with any other character in the movie. Anything goes! Jim is a delight, I adore how chill and capable and self-assured he is, and at the same time how stubborn and determined he can be, bless his heart. So I am 100% here for any story you'd like to tell me about him, whether it's his pre-canon backstory at sea, or his relationship with Pat, or the process of falling for Julie during the movie. Or Steve! He is such a mess, bless, and I am absolutely interested in something that leans hard into what a jerk he can be—or something that's set later in his character arc and much more introspective, as his perspective starts to change, and his bravery, dedication, and ability to change his mind come into focus a little more. How did he end up working for the Terrills? How long has he had feelings for Pat, and are the two of them really a good match? (I'm just as happy for the answer to that question to be "yes" as for it to be "no"!) Does he recover from that gunshot wound—and if he does, what does he do next?
And if you happen to ship it, I'd be stoked to receive a Jim/Steve fic, by all means. :D Anything from barely-there UST that no one is willing to acknowledge to dubcon PWP, or anywhere in between—I'm here for it! Whether you want to set it early on, with Steve determined to ignore any ~urges "real men" aren't supposed to have toward each other, and/or displacing it all into wanting to knock Jim's teeth in? Hatesex in the barn? Steve trying a few unorthodox tactics during that midnight fight, trying to wring some anger or fear out of Jim any way he can, and Jim refusing to give him the satisfaction, letting him do it instead of pushing him away? Or go totally the opposite direction and give me some post-canon quasi-domesticity, the two of them taking over Big Muddy together, Steve quietly lending Jim a hand and staying overnight sometimes when it gets late or the weather's bad, and wait a minute, they're sort of living together? Or AU me: if Steve had gone after Jim alone, when Jim got "lost", and found him—might Things have Happened on the way back to the ranch together, but Steve won't acknowledge it afterward? ANYTHING.
I've gotten so many incredibly good gifts for this movie, but I'm too greedy to stop asking for it! :D I'm just so weak for Jim's particular brand of staunch self-possession, how thoughtful and patient he is, at the same time that he's so difficult in his own way, and won't veer from what he thinks is right or best even if it might make things a lot easier for him. And Steve's arc was so satisfying to me—I loved his irritation with Jim and how much he disliked Jim at first, how obvious it was that he just didn't know what to do with a man who relied so little on other people's good opinions or on "performing" manliness in the ways he was used to; that he wants to fight Jim SO BADLY, and still ends up starting to see where Jim's coming from in time, however reluctantly. ♥
James McKay
HELP I LOVE JIM SO MUCH. :D He's just so calmly and quietly sure of himself, so thoughtful and perceptive—and possibly a bit self-righteous and irritating now and then, bless, but it's so hard to hold it against him. I love that he's decided so clearly what should carry weight and what shouldn't, and that he cares so much about people at the same time that he cares so little about their opinions, and doesn't mind being thought of as a coward or a fool (why should he, after all, when he knows he isn't, and anyone who pays enough attention will know the same?). ♥ JIM ♥
• So I'd love pretty much anything you'd like to tell me about Jim!
:: Where did he grow up? When did he first go to sea, and why, and who was it who taught him navigation?
:: What happened to give him the perspective that he has on self-respect and proving oneself? (Was he once a little more like Steve—maybe more than he wants to admit?)
:: Was there some specific incident—maybe aboard ship, or ashore on leave—where social pressure and trying to "be a man" ended badly, and taught him something?
:: When and how did he become a captain? What did he think the rest of his life was going to look like, before the events of the movie?
• And of course I'd be happy for you to write about his relationship with Pat, too!
:: How did it begin? How did they meet, and fall in love? What was it about each other that first caught their eye?
:: What was their separation like for Jim, when Pat first returned to her family but Jim was still back east? (Did they write to each other? What might those letters have said?)
:: Did he have a certain sense of foreboding about coming west and seeing her again—a niggling feeling that things might not work out?
:: Or was he looking forward to learning more about where Pat came from, meeting her family, and understanding her better?
• I'd be delighted with anything about Jim set during the movie:
:: His romance with Julie was so lovely, and that wordless confessional moment between them in Blanco Canyon, g o d, MY HEART. So anything from Jim's first impressions of Julie to deeper feelings taking root, realizing she's been taken to relief at finding she's still alive ... totally on the table!
:: And Jim's POV on any part of canon, whether it's the "big country" in general when he arrives, or the Hannasseys/Ramón/the Terrills as he learns more about the situation—or, of course, Steve :D—would be fantastic.
:: Or! Any kind of missing scene you'd like to tackle that's Jim-centric would be awesome, too: alone on his ride, realizing he really can orient himself well before he's found by Steve ...
:: ... or a conversation with Pat or Julie, or even Henry Terrill, that we didn't see ...
:: ... or his relief when the standoff in the canyon is over!
• And post-movie Jim/Julie or gen of any kind would also be more than welcome!
:: I'd honestly be as happy to read about Jim (by himself, or with Julie) riding off and moving on to a new home, either out west or back east, far away from feuds and water rights ...
:: ... as about Jim (by himself, or with Julie) returning to Big Muddy and fixing the place up so it's a real ranch again (with actual details about ranching 100% optional; I know nothing about it, I won't notice if you fudge it! :D).
:: Or even further in the future—does he ever go to sea again? Does he marry Julie after all?
:: Or maybe 1k of Jim on his deathbed, thinking over the things he regrets (if only a little) and the things he doesn't. ♥
Steve Leech
AND STEVE. :D I loved Steve's character arc so much—it's so easy to understand why he is the way he is, the rules he must be used to and the way he clearly perceives the world as working. And at the same time that it's understandable, it's so frustrating, because he's so rude and angry and difficult, and it's so unnecessary; he just doesn't know how else to act, and he's never had a reason to try to be different. But then Jim gives him one, even if he doesn't want it, and everything starts to change. :D His speech to the Major at the end! And then getting shot for him anyway! ;-; STEVE.
• So, point is: definitely here for 1k of any headcanon you might have about Steve's backstory!
:: Where's he from? How did he start working for the Terrills, and how did he end up foreman?
:: Was he sweet on Pat even before she went east? (Or might that have been more about Jim than it was about Pat, in some ways? :D)
:: Does he have any personal reasons to dislike the Hannasseys? (In typical feud fashion, was it "just because the Terrills do" at first, but then altercations resulted in personal grievances, and now it's A Thing?) Or is it all about the Terrills and his own stubborn loyalty?
• Or start a bit closer to the movie itself:
:: What might his reaction have been when Pat came back? Was she changed at all by her experiences back east, and if she was, did that bother him?
:: What does she or doesn't she tell him about Jim, before Jim arrives, and what does he think about it?
:: Pat and Julie have been friends for a long time, so Steve must know Julie—might they have talked to each other, about Pat or about this Jim of hers, before Jim arrived?
• And of course I'd be thrilled with 1k from Steve's perspective that's set during the movie, too!
:: Anything about his relationship with Pat would be great! He's clearly into her, or at least trying to make a point out of the possibility—what kind of future is he imagining for them? Did he have a real chance before Steve showed up, and now everything's gone wrong?
:: But I'm also definitely here for pre-slash of any kind at all—from only-if-you-squint to serious UST, from Steve in total denial to Steve grudgingly aware that he's got more than one reason to want to get up close and personal with Jim—would be awesome. :D
:: Something set during the early parts of the movie, where he's still resentful and dismissive of Jim? Or his POV during the search for Jim, and the resulting argument?
:: Or 1k of whatever he's thinking when he realizes it's Jim who's come into his room and woken him up, and the midnight fight? The moment Steve's understanding of Jim's philosophy began to change? The Blanco Canyon showdown, and getting shot?
• I'd love to read about whatever you think might happen to Steve after the movie:
:: If you'd like to write me the story where he dies of his bullet wound, regretful and too late to change what he did with his life, I will write you the best comment I can through my tears!
:: BUT feel free to let him live and tell me something else about him, too. :D What does he do—keep working for the Terrills?
:: Or maybe he marries Pat after all, both of them a little older and wiser now?
:: Or does he move on to another ranch, or even start up his own somewhere else, using the lessons he's learned to run it differently than the Terrills?
:: Would he choose to take on Big Muddy himself, if Jim and Julie didn't? Fixing it up, at the same time that he's now conscious of a need to better himself, too?
:: Or maybe Jim and Julie stay? Julie has a line about how you'd need a good foreman to run a place like that—would they ask Steve to take on that role? (And would he accept, or refuse?)
Jim/Steve
And the pairing's getting its own batch of prompts, because I had a few too many to fit up there. :D By the way, please rest assured that while I'd appreciate Julie and/or Pat being treated kindly or at least understandingly, if they do appear in your story—you don't need to spend the beginning of a Jim/Steve fic explaining to me how Jim and Julie broke up, if you don't want to! I'm happy to take it as read, if you like, and roll with Jim/Steve at any point during or after the movie without blinking. (You definitely can if you want to; just don't feel obligated, is all. :D)
• As I've mentioned elsewhere, you should feel free to give me anything that's pre-slash or ship-if-you-squint, and don't worry one bit that it's not shippy "enough"!
:: Something where Steve's been hearing all about Jim from Pat, irritated and resentful about having to listen to her talk about this other man ... and then Jim shows up, and OH NO, HE'S
:: Or maybe Jim's the one who's heard a bit about Steve from Pat, and wasn't quite sure what to expect?
:: Their first meeting from either of their POVs—what they think before, whether they want to make a good impression or not, and what they think after?
:: Or either of their POVs on Jim's little field trip—Steve's frustration over having to try to track Jim down, whether Jim feels any real resentment that Steve won't believe he wasn't lost, or a conversation between them afterward that we didn't get to see, filled with simmering irritation and thinly-veiled UST?
• Or something a little later in the movie's events, that progresses a little further!
:: By all means, feel free to let that visit Jim makes to Steve's room end differently—whether that's a single furious impulsive kiss that takes them both a bit by surprise, or higher-rated territory!
:: And for the record, dubcon would be more than okay here, whether you think Steve might want to ~teach Jim a lesson, and then that impulse goes sideways on him ...
:: ... or maybe Jim sees something in Steve, rolls with a hunch and tries something other than punching, and Steve obviously can't let a dirty trick like that shake him—even if he also can't admit he's dying for it. :D
:: And I should mention as a side note that it makes a lot of sense to me for Steve—who's clearly pretty hung up on how men "ought" to behave/what makes a man a "real" man—to have some internalized homophobia/biphobia, and/or be very uncomfortable with his own response to Jim. If that's something you're interested in exploring, I would be there for it! If not, no worries; you definitely don't have to include period-appropriate homophobia on either of their parts if you don't want to. Whatever works for you!
• And of course post-canon would be great, too. :D I love h/c so much, and I would read a thousand different takes on Jim involved in Steve's recovery from his gunshot wound! TEN THOUSAND.
:: Does Jim find him immediately afterward, injured, and bandage him up long enough to get him out of Blanco to a bed?
:: Or does Steve make it up and away with someone else's help, and hole up somewhere ... but Jim tracks him down and won't stop checking in on him?
:: Or something set a little further off: what if they met again after a few years? Steve helping Pat run the Terrill place, maybe, and Jim passing through?
:: Or Steve having had to go east for ~reasons (on business for Pat?) and running into Jim there?
:: Or what if Jim does stick around and takes on Big Muddy alone? I'm also weak for accidental domesticity, and I'd adore something where Steve starts showing up more and more often, with tools Jim needs or a little gruffly offered advice, or just as an extra pair of hands ... and then oh, no, a sudden storm, Steve had better stay the night ... and then maybe another night, and then all winter, and then ... :D
• Or basically anything else you're interested in writing me!
:: By all means, trap them together in bad weather, make them huddle for warmth; invent a sex pollen plant that grows only in the soil of Big Muddy, and Steve realizes (too late) that nobody warned Jim about it!
:: Give me 1k of the AU where there was some kind of outrageous mixup, and the bride Steve mail-ordered from back east ... is a quiet-spoken man who doesn't seem half as angry about the mistake as he should be. :D
:: Or maybe 1k of the AU where Jim never came west at all—started second-guessing his relationship with Pat and putting off the trip, until she sends Steve east to find out why he hasn't come yet ... but Steve was just supposed to go get him, not fall in love with him himself? :D
:: Or stick a little closer to canon: what if Steve had, without Jim noticing, come back early enough to catch Jim on Old Thunder? Would he started paying more attention to Jim a little sooner?
:: What if this were IN SPACE and the Terrills and Hannasseys owned competing mining outfits working the same asteroid belt? OR EVERYONE'S WEREWOLVES. STEVE GETS STUCK IN AN INEXPLICABLE TIME LOOP UNTIL HE LEARNS TO STOP BEING AN ASSHOLE
Dark Matter (TV)
Misaki Han-Shireikan
I still love and miss this show so much! ♥ I narrowed my request down to Misaki this time around, but I adore the crew of the Raza and the universe of Dark Matter in general, so please feel free to involve whichever other characters you like, and set this at pretty much any point in the show, with as much or as little of the rest of the ensemble included as you want. Pre-canon fic on Zairon, with the canonical imperial family and Teku, when Akita was still captain of the guard? Yes! Or Misaki navigating the court and the imperial guard, with stacks of OCs? Also yes! Something set during the show, when she's still trying to track Four down, and presumably also trying not to give Ishida Katsumi any reasons to kill her? Yes! Or her POV on Ryo's return to Zairon? Killing Nyx? Planning the coup? Two killing her? BY ALL MEANS. Or post-canon, however you want to navigate it—whether you'd like to AU it, or write about a Misaki from another dimension ending up in the canon universe, or have a historian of the Galactic Empire of Zairon a few hundred years in the future find Misaki's personal logs ... anything!
Obviously you should also feel free to go AU somewhere during canon, too—and you don't have to "fix it", by any means! Diverge anywhere you want—tell me the story where Misaki took the fall for the emperor's death and got exiled instead of Ryo, and ended up on the Raza with her memory wiped? Or where she did marry Ryo, and it was everything she hoped it would be? (Or wasn't? Or she's over whatever feelings she once had for Ryo, but it's a lot easier to murder somebody who's within arm's reach?) I would also adore shipfic about Misaki and basically anyone, whether you can make it happen in a missing scene or you have to shuffle the pieces around a little, with or without a thread of Misaki/Ryo running through the background. And by all means feel free to write about Nyx's death and/or Misaki's own—or keep them both alive and stuck dealing with each other, in a world where Nyx married Ryo after all. Or save just Misaki, and give me her, post-canon, on the run from Zairon and the aliens at the same time. Whatever you like!
I will never be over this show getting canceled the way it did, and I'm always so excited to revisit the universe and the characters whenever I get the chance. ♥ There are so many things I love about Dark Matter, I can guarantee you I will like anything you want to throw at me—character study? Court intrigue? Psychological horror involving the blob aliens? The power of friendship and loyalty (even if it's from Misaki's disdainful and uncomprehending POV)? YES PLEASE. Whatever tone or genre you want to aim for, heist shenanigans or galactic politics, found family feels or desperation in the face of unstoppable alien invasion, this is 100% the canon for it, and I'm looking forward to it! (And I should mention—if you'd like to make use of supplementary canon like Joe Mallozzi's summaries of how the first few eps of S4 would have gone down, feel free! If you'd rather go a different direction post-canon and ignore all of that, I would love that also. Whatever works for you!)
Misaki Han-Shireikan
OH MISAKI. I was interested in Misaki basically the very first time she appeared on screen, without even knowing who she was, and that didn't change at all as I got to know her better. :D Which, she is definitely violent and manipulative and unkind, and you don't need to pretend she isn't! I love the contrast between the face she sometimes presents (cool, pragmatic, reasonable, loyal) and the things she does when she has the chance (hold endless resentful grudges, pine but like in an angry murderous way, kill people, plan a coup). And! I'd adore anything you'd like to write me about her. The things she wants and what she'll do to get them, how unapologetic she is about it, the lines she crosses without looking back ... YES PLEASE.
• Backstory! Totally here for your headcanons about Zairon, or anything about a younger Misaki growing up in the imperial court. :D
:: 1k about her childhood? Any direction you'd like to take it, from court intrigue involving her family that a young Misaki is only just starting to understand ...
:: ... to other weirdly adorable pranks Ryo might have played on her when they were companions as children!
:: Her early training, and how she ended up joining or being recruited to the imperial guard in the first place?
:: Or once she's in the guard—how did she manage to rise to the point where she could take the captain's place after Four killed Akita?
:: Her perspective on Dowager Empress Katsumi, or on Ishida Tetsuya's death and Ryo's exile, or how her rivalry with Teku began?
• Or, of course, anything about Misaki set during canon would be fantastic. :D
:: What was it like in the imperial court when Hiro was emperor, and she was captain of his guard? How did she feel about him? Did she ever think about trying to orchestrate a coup to take his place?
:: What was she thinking or feeling when Ryo was captured, and to what degree was she expecting what happened in the throne room?
:: Did she interact with the Seers at all while they were serving Hiro? (Did she hate them and want them dead, or was she surprised by that part?)
:: Or! Please feel free to give me the most excruciating thousand words you can generate about what it was like for her to overhear that conversation between Nyx and Ryo, and her developing her plans to eliminate Nyx. ;-;
:: Or anything about the moment when Ryo discovered that she'd succeeded? The planning and execution of the coup, that fight with Two—the moment Misaki realized she wasn't going to win it?
• Obviously futurefic about Misaki requires a little footwork; I'm totally here for AUs where she didn't die, or there's a Misaki from another part of the canonical multiverse, or *waves hands* the crew finds a synthetic with (most of) Misaki's memories loaded into her!
:: I'd love "fix-it" from her perspective where Ryo can in fact be convinced to make her empress!
:: Or where her coup succeeds, and she takes command of Zairon's forces in the war against Pyr, and starts fighting it her way. (Was she right to think she could do better than Ryo? Or was she wrong?)
:: BUT I'd also love fix-it from everyone else's perspective—where the android shows up on the bridge a little earlier, maybe, and she and Nyx together are able to beat Misaki and take her prisoner? As a bargaining chip to use against Ryo, even?
:: Or diverge from canon anywhere else you like! If Ryo had succeeded in keeping and duplicating the blink drive, and Zairon's fleets utterly wrecked Pyr and rolled unstoppably through the galaxy—would Misaki ever have a reason to regret her decisions?
:: Or if she'd taken the fall for Ishida Tetsuya's death and been exiled instead of Ryo—could she have ended up on the Raza with her memory wiped, calling herself Four? :D
• And shipfic (or the beginnings of it) with Misaki involved would be more than welcome. :D Anything from UST to hatesex would be great, and I'd be delighted to receive Misaki/anyone that ignores Misaki/Ryo entirely ... or that acknowledges it one way or another, whether you like it as one-sided, reciprocated, or "actually Misaki's long since over it, but she brought it up to fuck with Ryo's head/uses it to justify stuff to herself".
:: If Nyx had managed to win her fight with Misaki—might Misaki have (however unwillingly) admired her for it? If Misaki were imprisoned on the Raza afterward, what else could that admiration have turned into? :D
:: Or, in a universe where Ryo had convinced Nyx to accept—might Misaki succeed in killing him, and then decide to keep his Seer Empress for herself? :D
:: Would Three be up for a round of hatesex? (Does he share his alternate counterpart's enjoyment of being hit and/or choked during sex? Because I can definitely see Misaki accidentally getting him going, and then choosing to see how far she can take it just to humiliate him ...)
:: In a universe where she didn't kill Nyx, or hadn't yet—could Two have ended up grudgingly reaching out to her (trying anything/everything to get the blink drive back from Ryo, maybe)?
:: Would Six try to redeem her (oh, Six :D)? Would she pretend it was working, and that she was ~in love to boot—but it had actually started working, just a little bit?
:: Or, venturing a bit sideways—might she ever have tried to seduce Hiro to make him easier to manipulate, while Ryo was gone?
:: I don't know how it would happen or whether you could get it to / in the end, but for the record, 1k of the android observing Misaki and trying to work out her reasoning for the things she does, in her blandly patient android way, would be A++. :D
The Huntsman (movies)
Ravenna
I enjoyed these movies a truly ridiculous amount, they were so incredibly up my alley I can't even handle it! From the setting and the magic to all the women trying to kill each other in various ways, the touches of gorgeous fantasy and eldritch horror, obsessive cruelty and true love ... YES GOOD. Which, I should say—I've seen both, and obviously the tag is for both, but you definitely don't need to have watched Winter's War to write me a story about Ravenna! I'm equally here for something set during SWatH that ignores everything from WW, or post-SWatH that goes a completely different direction than SWatH did, or a story that uses a few bits of WW canon but ignores the rest, or something that's 100% WW-compliant. Whatever works for you! I adore these movies separately and together, and no matter how much or how little of the canon you want to stick to, you've got my attention. :D
And I liked pretty much every single character in both of these movies, but, inevitably, I'm asking for Ravenna, because I'm weak for Charlize Theron in general and even weaker for Ravenna in particular. :'D She is just so marvelously compelling in her sheer charismatic terribleness, her relentless ambition and her deliberate cruelty, the pain and fury that underlies it all. ♥ So! I'd be delighted with basically anything you want to write about Ravenna, whether it's deathfic, an AU where she gets a happy ending despite herself, or anything in between! Her childhood with her siblings? Other kingdoms she's toppled, on her way through the world? Losing Finn, or disguising herself as Will and kissing Snow White? What it's like in the space within the mirror? And shipfic is more than welcome, too—Ravenna/Snow White, Ravenna/Freya or Ravenna/Finn or magical incest OT3, Ravenna/Sara ... whatever you like!
There are so many things about these movies that I adore—the aesthetics! The fairytale framework! The weird and sometimes inexplicable magic that you have to keep an eye out for if you want to not die!—but despite all that competition, one of the big things that keeps me rewatching them is DEFINITELY Ravenna. Everything about her, her anger and her magnetism and her whole gleaming murderous raven-feathered aesthetic, the slow smug way she smiles to herself while people die around her, is fantastic and awful and I love it. :D
Ravenna
SO YEAH. By all means, write me anything you like about Ravenna! And while I would be delighted by an AU where she manages to find herself a genuine happy ending (presumably despite herself, and no doubt it would take her time to recognize it for what it is), please don't feel any need to soften her or smooth down her sharp edges. There's a lot about Ravenna that's vicious and petty and unkind, however much she may legitimately have been wronged in her turn, and I'm 100% on board with her making bad decisions, doing bad things, and believing herself to be justified and even the aggrieved party when that's not what's happening at all. :D
• Backstory! There's all kinds of places you could go pre-canon, whether you want to use Winter's War or not, and I'd love a fic about any part of it:
:: Ravenna's youth with Finn and/or Freya—how they related to each other and connected to each other, as kids?
:: The circumstances of Ravenna's first use of magic or first killing (or both, if they were the same moment) ...
:: And if you like to worldbuild, by all means feel free to fill in some blanks! Where is the Duchy of Blackwood? What other kings and queens has Ravenna destroyed?
:: Where did she get that mirror, and when?
:: Is she ruling in absentia anywhere, other countries or empires—what stories follow her, what do other nations' people say about her?
• Or! Something set during either movie, or between them. :D
:: Her perspective on basically any part of SWatH, or a missing scene, would be wonderful! How does King Magnus's kingdom compare—does she miss others she once ruled?
:: People, places, art and music and books that once existed, dances no one else remembers the steps to (except maybe Finn)?
:: Does she truly hate Snow White, or is she almost relieved to be run through, to have the long exhausting march of "too many lives" end?
:: Between movies—what is it like inside the mirror, looking out at Snow White from it? What does she do, or say, to drive Snow White so close to the edge?
:: What is it like in Winter's War, to step out of the mirror again and be almost alive, to be reunited Freya at last (and then watch her die ;-;)?
• Or AU me any way you like!
:: What if Snow White hadn't managed to escape? If Ravenna had gone to talk to her enough times—might she have been moved eventually to spare her? Or deliberately given Snow White the chance to kill her?
:: Or, of course, what if Ravenna had killed Snow White, and eaten her heart? Would it have worked out the way she expected it to? Or would she have been changed somehow by it? (Might she end up with Snow White's connection to the land, and thereby forced to attempt to actually care for it? Or visited by the white hart?)
:: Ignore Winter's War completely; what might have happened if Snow White had spared Ravenna instead, at the end of the first movie?
:: Or use the mirror thing but no more—if Snow White had realized Ravenna was in there, and found a way to get her out? If Ravenna had succeeded in tricking her, driving her slowly mad?
:: Or! What if Freya had come down from the north herself to get the mirror? Or sent a still-enchanted Sara for it? What if Snow White had insisted on escorting it north herself?
• And of course I'm all over Ravenna shipfic. :D
:: I loved the codependence and mental connection between Ravenna and Finn, so anything leaning on that for anything from an incestuous vibe to porn would be wonderful!
:: And Ravenna/huntsman or Ravenna/William would be great, whether we're talking 1k of Ravenna being SUPER CREEPY or 1k of the beginning of what could become sincere slow burn—where she's captured either of them, perhaps, and tries to make them love her? Fails ... or succeeds? Or Snow-Queens them to force them to stop feeling anything for Snow White, and noncons them, and they don't even care anymore? D: but also yes please
:: I am very much here for incest and would love Ravenna/Freya—the whole spectrum from Ravenna insisting they can only trust each other and manipulating Freya to sincere affection (or both at once) is absolutely open to you! :D
:: Could Ravenna have tired of disposable kings a little earlier, and chosen to install Freya as her eternal silver sister-queen instead?
:: Or Ravenna/Snow White, because I will never get enough! In absolutely any flavor: canonical obsessiveness tinged with UST? Ravenna dubconning or nonconning captive Snow White? Any sort of AU or your favorite f/f trope—accidental soulbonding, or hatesex that doesn't stay hatesex, or amnesia. Or might Queen Snow White, faced with a magical problem, have no option but to retrieve Ravenna from the lands of the dead, and ask for her help?
:: And of course if you'd like to AU things so that Ravenna and Sara meet—in a universe where it was Eric/the canonical huntsman who was taken by Freya, and Sara who roamed the world thinking he was dead and getting hired to hunt down princesses ... :D
Jeremiah (TV)
Theo Coleridge
I loved this show so much, back in the day, and I can never resist a chance to revisit it—some things about it have definitely aged better than others, bless, but at its heart it's so earnest and well-meaning, and so interested in all the ways people can be complicated, can become better or worse or both at once in different ways. ♥ And one of my favorite characters has always been Theo! She caught my attention right away in the pilot, and I was so bummed when it looked like the show had moved on to new settings and characters, and so delighted when she started showing up again in more episodes later on. She's so interesting, with her particular brand of ruthless, practical, unapologetic resourcefulness, and I'd be delighted to read any story you'd like to tell about her, from backstory before the show to missing scenes between her canonical appearances, post-canon speculation or AUs taking her any direction you can think of.
I also ship her with just about everybody, so if there's some Theo shipfic that lives in your heart that you've been waiting for an excuse to write (Theo/Erin? Theo/Markus? Theo/Jeremiah? Theo/Kurdy? Theo/Elizabeth? Theo/Libby?), by all means give it to me. :D And while there was no worldbuilding tag nominated, I'm incredibly weak for post-apocalyptic settings, so for the record, absolutely anything about the world of Jeremiah that you'd like to explore through a story about Theo would be amazing, from how she ended up in charge of Clairfield in the first place to attempting to forge an alliance with the other local leaders, or recovering post-canon after Daniel's army is defeated. Anything!
This show is probably where my abiding love for apocalypses and their aftermath comes from—it was so earnest (sometimes to the point of cringe, I admit) and I totally adore people doing their best to come together and build something new out of the ashes, even if they struggle with it, even when there are setbacks, which means it gave me just about everything I could have asked for. :D Which, I definitely do love both the effort and commitment and the struggles and setbacks, the times when the characters defaulted to cruelty or distrust and the times when they extended unexpected kindness, so darkfic and happy endings are both on the table!
Theo Coleridge
THEO. :D Theo's arc has always been one of my favorite things about the show—starting off as much more of an antagonist than not, and gaining more and more nuance every time she reappeared. I love how smart and tough and difficult she is, that she's always looking out for herself but at the same time aware that there's more going on in the world, and that every now and then the latter tips her in new and unexpected directions. So, yeah. Any story you'd like to tell me about Theo, I'm here for it!
• Anything about Theo set before the show starts would be fantastic. :D
:: How did she end up in charge of Clairfield? (By all means run with everything she said about it in the pilot being basically true ... or decide she exaggerated or smoothed over a few things. :D)
:: What kinds of challenges had she faced before Jeremiah and Kurdy showed up, and how did she handle them?
:: How did she first learn about Thunder Mountain/"the end of the world"?
• And of course I'd love missing scenes and/or episode tags that fill in some of the gaps between Theo's various appearances on the show!
:: What happened to her between the pilot and 1.11? There's got to be more to it than she'd have admitted to anybody from Thunder Mountain ...
:: How did she handle the aftermath of the pilot, and what did or didn't change about the way she ran Clairfield?
:: Or between 1.11 and 1.18? Her position seems to have stabilized somewhat by 1.18—how did she pull that off?
:: Or between 1.18 and 2.04-2.05! How and when did she discover she was pregnant? Had she told anybody else, or was she trying to hide it and also maybe pretend it wasn't happening at all?
:: Or, of course, after 2.05! What's her response to the whole Daniel situation? What does she have her people do to prepare?
• Or! Post-canon adventures of any kind—or, well, leading into post-canon, because she's offscreen for the end of S2:
:: Where is she when Daniel's army shows up? Is she coordinating with Thunder Mountain in ways we just didn't see, or holding back, waiting to see who comes out on top?
:: How does she survive it—or does she go down fighting, scratching tooth and nail? ;-; OH THEO
:: What happens next? Does she come back and help start rebuilding in the aftermath—playing it like it's for her own benefit, but inwardly relieved there's still something left?
:: And I would 100% be there for a pregnancy fic that tackles what it's like trying to give birth safely—is she willing to go to Thunder Mountain for help? Does she try to handle it all herself?
• I'd be thrilled with an AU branching off from just about anywhere, too, or fixing anything you'd like to fix!
:: What if Theo had in fact discovered Thunder Mountain first, or had followed Jeremiah and Kurdy there? (Waited for them to leave, pretended to need help, and managed to get herself inside?)
:: Would she have taken it over/sabotaged it, or ended up won over by their mission and Markus's earnestness despite herself?
:: Or a role reversal, however you feel like you can swing it: how could she have ended up as a runner for Thunder Mountain, in another world?
:: What would Thunder Mountain look like if she'd been in Markus's place? (Better, worse, and somewhere in between are all 100% fair answers!)
:: "Fix it" from Theo's perspective: what would have happened if she'd succeeded in holding Jeremiah, Kurdy, and Simon until she could get some answers, and her people hadn't turned on her?
:: Or fix anything else about the show, with Theo involved—let her save Elizabeth? Let the leaders succeed in forging an alliance that can fend off Daniel's forces entirely? Whatever you like!
• And I'd be t h r i l l e d with Theo shipfic, too!
:: I can admit that I probably ship Theo the most intensely with Erin, on the strength of That One Conversation in 2.04—I would be delighted by the tropiest ever accidental domesticity fic where Erin does end up helping Theo through her pregnancy, and they share quarters in Thunder Mountain but it's Just Practical (it's not just practical), and feelings happen. :D
:: Or anything else you're interested in for them! Theo's pregnancy makes her horny = fuckbuddies? AU where they meet earlier (both captured in Milhaven, maybe)? WINGFIC. Anything!
:: BUT I'm also definitely here for Theo shipped with anybody else—say, Markus, perhaps intending to manipulate him at first, but oops real feelings happen?
:: Or give me Theo/Jeremiah—I adore how prickly their back-and-forth with each other can get, and how well they can keep up with each other when they try!
:: Or Theo/Elizabeth, with all the messiness of Simon's death hanging between them, Elizabeth's gentleness-but-strength vs Theo's sharp-edges-but-feelings?
:: Or Theo/Kurdy—maybe Theo hitting on him and him always refusing, doubly so after Elizabeth's death, becomes A Thing ... until one day he finally says yes instead? :D
:: Or anybody else you're interested in shipping her with! Theo/Jeremiah/Kurdy, Theo/Kurdy/Elizabeth, Theo/Erin/Markus ... Mr. Smith! Libby! HATESEX WITH LEE CHEN. Anything!
Tidelands (TV)
Calliope "Cal" McTeer
I'm so enamored of so many different things about this weird little show, but ultimately, Cal is my favorite, and I'd be so thrilled to get a gift about her! :D No matter where you want to start, and no matter where you'd like to take it—backstory set during her childhood, while her dad was still alive? When she first went to prison, and how she adjusted? Missing scenes or episode tags? Whatever you think might have been about to happen next, after that cliffhanger? Or AU me from any point you like: what if Cal's dad had told her what she was earlier? What if she'd ended up at Orphelin Beach a lot earlier? (What if Augie had refused to let her go alone, and he was the one who'd had to grow up feeling like an outcast, instead of her?) What if Cal had been able to save Corey, or had found Genoveva earlier and learned exactly what she needed to know to stop Adrielle ... or to take her place as queen?
And I also ship basically all the things here, so if you'd like to write some canon-compliant Cal/Dylan or Cal/Corey, definitely do that—more sex with accidental siren powers involved? All the feelings conversations they didn't get to have during the show? BUT I would also love some messy power-tripping manipulative Cal/Adrielle, or Cal/Augie not-technically-incest-but-it-still-feels-like-it-is, or Cal/Leandra or Cal/Violca seduction or hatesex. And if you want to delve into more siren lore, or tell me all your headcanons about summonings and water magic and what sirens actually think of their abandoned half-human children, feel free!
I have a thing for mermaids in general, but also specifically for mermaids as wildly dangerous and/or kind of terrifying, and this show fascinated me—there's some pretty soapy twists and turns, and also some hilariously unnecessary sex. But at the same time it did such an intriguing job with the Tidelanders and their community, its structure and its (sometimes terrifying) rules, the sirens and the Tidelanders' longing for them. The whole show is so appropriately moody and beautiful and kind of wild, and I ended up really loving it, even if that finale absolutely murdered me with bewilderment!
Cal McTeer
And one of my favorite things about it was definitely Cal. :D Her angsty backstory is so amazing and messed up in all my favorite ways, and her homecoming is so believably awkward and difficult and painful. ♥ Her journey toward starting to learn some of the secrets that have been kept from her, and starting to understand herself—being able to use her powers, and even wanting to, and the push-pull between enjoying it and being terrified of it ... I LOVED ALL OF THAT, and Cal is great, the end.
• So! Anything you'd like to explore about Cal and her life at any point—I'm here for it!
:: Her childhood while her dad was still alive, not knowing where she'd come from; were there hints that piled up, despite her dad keeping her away from water?
:: Or the fire, and going to prison, adjusting to it—and then having to try to figure out how to live life outside of it again?
:: Or, of course, Cal's perspective on the Tidelanders! Does she feel drawn to Dylan, to Adrielle, to L'Attente? Is it reassuring or scary—or both—to finally understand why she's never quite felt like she belonged?
:: Or the runup to the ending! Anything about what it's like to make that guy drown himself, realizing that she liked it, admitting it to Augie—stabbing Adrielle, trying to save Augie, the sirens ...
• And I would love to know what you think about what might happen next, too!
:: Obviously the cliffhanger gives you a jumping-off point, if you want it—what do the sirens do? Who lives, and who dies?
:: Are the sirens willing/intrigued to have been summoned ... or not so much?
:: How do the Tidelanders react? Has Adrielle strengthened her position as queen—or does it become clear the sirens came for Cal, not her?
:: But feel free to go further and tackle new problems, and let me piece together what must have happened on that beach retroactively!
:: More struggles in dealing with Augie's ... business? Trying to survive whatever Adrielle's got in mind next, now that she has in fact succeeded in her original goal?
• Or go in another direction entirely:
:: What if Cal had never gone to prison—if, say, Augie had taken the fall with a false confession?
:: Or if she'd fled from the police (and ended up stumbling all the way to the Tidelanders, maybe)? How else might she have learned what she was?
:: What if Dylan had decided to full-on side with Cal over Adrielle earlier?
:: Or if Violca had recruited her in an effort to line up some allies and defy Adrielle sooner?
:: Or if she'd been able to save poor Colton—or met Gilles and Bijou earlier, and Bijou's drawings had helped her guess a few more things that were coming?
:: What if she actually had killed Adrielle—how would the rest of the Tidelanders have reacted to her as queen? (I'm equally interested in principled queen Cal who's not going to make people gouge each other's eyes out anymore ... or a darker Cal who starts to indulge the part of her nature that enjoyed making a man helplessly drown himself. :D)
:: Or, of course, fix it: let her succeed in forcing Corey's blood back inside him and keeping his heart beating, in the morgue! Let Dylan leave Adrielle to die and stick with Cal! Let her save Bijou and Augie! (With the sirens' help?)
• And I'd love it if you were interested in shipping Cal with ... just about anybody, really!
:: I absolutely ship Cal with both Corey and Dylan, so I'm here for either pairing, or both continuing to occur at once in a V, or an actual straight-up poly formation where Corey and Dylan also bang!
:: I'm also weak for incest and pseudo-incest, and Augie and Cal have such a compellingly strong relationship with each other—they trust each other SO MUCH, and that entire rescue + holding each other + Cal confessing to him that she'd made that guy drown and liked it, ffff, MY HEART.
:: AND THEN ALSO I would be delighted to read about fucked-up manipulative Cal/Adrielle (such a UST vibe! Adrielle like half trying to win Cal over and half trying to achieve some kind of control over the potential threat she poses! *_____*)
:: Or! Cal/Violca where Violca's trying to get someone else to take Adrielle on first so she can step forward in the aftermath? (Does it work? Or does Cal do better than expected, and suddenly Violca's got to keep her favor instead?)
:: Cal/Leandra? Maybe Leandra finds Cal first in the morgue, not Corey, and Cal uses her abilities to force Leandra to submit to her? How does that change the endgame?
:: For any of the pairings above, if you want to play up the whole "queen" thing/potential additional Tidelander powers in a femdom way, feel free. :D (Including Cal and Adrielle each trying to whammy the other with it, until at last one of them has to submit ...)
:: Or go any other tropey direction you like: do Tidelanders grow secret sex pollen plants? Soulbond to each other, or to humans? Have soulmates? :D
• And I'm adding an extra set of prompts, because despite the lack of a worldbuilding tag in the tagset, there is so. much. worldbuilding here that I'd love to see explored! So if you feel like digging into any of these elements some more, in combination with another prompt or standalone, that would be AWESOME:
:: I would LOVE anything you want to tell me about the sirens' history—more about the translation of the text on the artifact, the legends about the horn and armies of women from the sea ... 1k of fictional documentation about a couple pieces of the horn, or an excerpt from an analysis of several variations on the sirens' appearances in mythohistory? :D
:: Anything with Cal involved that delves a little deeper into the nature of sirens and where they come from (if there are no siren dudes, and when they bang human dudes they dump the babies ... can select Tidelanders be made into full sirens, if the sirens choose to do so? Or is it more mythological—sirens carve new sirens out of stone, or something?)
:: Or just dive in and tell me all about the original mythohistorical conflict, what happened and how; the original breaking of that horn and who did it, the scattering of the pieces ...
:: Or anything focused on the Tidelanders and their community: how separate they are, how separate they feel, the juxtaposition of the desperation to reach out for their mothers and the awareness that their mothers abandoned them.
:: The massacre! Their social structure! Their rules are so interesting, and obviously also kind of creepy/brutal: the eye-gouging, Adrielle's determination to make them all believe they can't have kids with humans, succession among queens ...
:: Or their magic! The water-lock on Adrielle's little basement of surprises was super cool—please tell me all about how it feels to control water, including the water in blood, and to breathe it. Or to entrance people, for that matter!
:: And then there's Bijou and Genoveva, with their apparent precognition; how does that work? Are there other "extra" talents that some Tidelanders have and others don't?
:: Or maybe full-blooded sirens can see the future even more clearly? (Is that why they came to the shore for Cal and not for Adrielle—because they saw that it would be her, and that mattered somehow?)
If you got here by reading absolutely all of that, then I apologize /o\ :D and bless you for being willing to look at all of that. I can only hope at least some of it will turn out to be useful to you, but above all, please know that what I want most for Yuletide is for you to write me something you really enjoy writing! ♥ So, yeah, thank you so much in advance, and have a fantastic Yuletide!
