![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
2023 Yuletide
Oct. 16th, 2023 07:55 pmThank you so much for writing for me this year!
Generally speaking, there are a lot of tropes I love in my fic-- they're popular for a reason! Competence kink in all its iterations always gets me, I'm a sucker for a found family, fake relationships, bed sharing (and hilarious twists upon it), enemies to lovers, and mutual pining will usually put a grin on my face. Playing with themes of trust, especially among people who shouldn't be trusted, will often delight me to my core-- I love a good spy show, because enemy spies forced to trust each other so explicitly explores that dynamic. Canon divergence is also a lot of fun, but AUs are kind of hit or miss for me-- I'm not usually reading coffeeshop or florist AUs, but I will take a chance on the very niche things, for example a Once Upon a Time gothic horror AU or a Star Wars Soviet-Afghan War AU. I'm often very down with a Prohibition AU, because who doesn't need their blorbos rumrunning, and I do have a particular fondness for espionage AUs.
( Read more... )
I'm currently in month four of a Beauty and the Beast hyperfixation, reading a variety of novelizations, and movies, I'm writing a huge Once Upon a Time fic, I'm having personal revelations about ways I relate to Belle in the Disney version, it's a whole thing. I care deeply about the ways power dynamics work in the story, in the ways they find themselves bound to each other or offering freedom to each other, and how these two people experience their differences with the people around them and bring that to their slow journey to love. If you also have these kind of feelings and want to explore them in what you write your fic about, go wild, my friend. If you feel like that's too much pressure, that is also fine. I am guessing you might be closer to the former, though, if you got matched with my particular collection of requests.
DNWs include noncon (but given that some of my requests could go into ambiguous consent areas, or situations where consent isn't discussed, I'd like to say those are fine and I would really rather you didn't shoehorn in an awkward consent conversation just to cover your bases.) I'd prefer not to have pregnancy or baby fic, a/b/o, or animal death. Some of the La Belle et la Bête themes I mention get into the D/s exploration zone, but if you get into that, I'd prefer it more in the context of navigating underlying power dynamics, not outright kink put into practice, and I'd definitely rather stay away from the humiliation side of things, since that's kinda squicky for me personally. Lastly, character death within canon is alright, but I don't want to get deeply into themes of grief.
On to the requests!
La Belle et la Bête
Uprooted
On to the requests!
La Belle et la Bête
- This movie is so visually lovely and so beautifully disturbing when you pause to really look at it.
- I'm not really asking for a body horror story, but like, can we appreciate how there are arms in the wall and faces in the fireplace and hands in the table and they're whispering beauty, I am your door, I am your mirror? It's so much worse than dancing teapots in the Disney version. All these people melted down together into the walls, trying to signal their presence, and maybe it being in black and white saves us from seeing how viscerally goopy that could get. Absolutely horrible to think about, 10/10 Jean Cocteau.
- I'm fascinated by the ways they hold power over each other. She's a prisoner, and that underlies every bit of gentleness and courtesy he offers her, and she has to beg for him to allow her to leave. But at the same time, he tells her at their first dinner that she is the mistress of the castle, and before that he tells her not to look into his eyes, because it burns him; on the night she leaves, he comes to her bedroom after a hunt and she orders him out with disgust as he stumbles back and says "your look is like fire!" But he releases his power over her to let her go, and she stops withholding her love from him to release him from the curse. It's the kind of dance that practically becomes D/s and kink just by virtue of thinking about it enough. How do the two of them feel when it comes to balancing wanting and not wanting to be held at the mercy of the other?
- Other potential avenues to explore in a fic that I more generally enjoy involve looking the moments in which people slowly fall in love, when a movie skims over the amount of time taken to do so. I also wouldn't mind an exploration of Beauty's loneliness; she's practically a Cinderella to her sisters, and her brother and Avenant are always sitting around wasting their lives, and then she comes to the castle and there's no one but the Beast; how does that turn into sympathy with how alone the Beast has been, as well? Also thinking about the contrast of the first scene where Beauty sees the Beast, and is so overwhelmed that she faints, and then the scene where he comes to her door smoking and she almost seems to frighten him as she tells him to clean himself up and go to bed, and flings her shawl at him-- there's something in there about how she comes to fear her death from him less, while he comes to fear his from her more.
- This is not a request for a fic, just wanting someone to be as baffled as I am: what the FUCK is Avenant doing there all the time. He never leaves. Does he not have a home? Does he not have laundry of his own to do? How is Beauty turning him down on the basis of not leaving her father when AVENANT NEVER EVER LEAVES. Okay, I mean, if you write a post-movie fic, getting into some of Beauty's feelings about him wouldn't go awry, because it is a totally weird situation she's in-- she says she did love Avenant, even if he never knew it, but now the person she does love has his face. What does that do to a girl? Especially one who has said "no I won't marry you" a million times to both that face and that person, and now is going to?
- What an unexpected delight this series was! While Adventure Time has always been deeper than it appears on the surface, and the spinoff episodes deeper still, this felt like very mature in the way it approached what it means to exist, and making choices independently and viewed through the eyes of others. And the Lemongrabs having all new ways to be horrible. The journey that Simon took, particularly, was a difficult one; what a tragedy it is that after everything, after he's fought his way back to himself and to being able to love other people in a functional way, he sees that the only thing of value that Simon Petrikov can provide is becoming the Ice King again.
- I've loved Simon/Betty as a ship since I saw it, and even more when I read a Beauty and the Beast version of Simon/Betty. I love that Betty has a perspective that no one else has of Simon, not even him, even though they live the same span of time. She believes in him but she challenges him, too. She's into his research and willing to listen to what he's passionate about, but she doesn't let that overrun her own passions. I think both of them are unaccustomed to having someone into their intensity and ready to return it in equal measure. The versions of this story that Fionna and Cake offer, though, are fascinating-- what if they made different choices, did different things.
- I'd be curious to see something about if Betty WAS able to come back-- what ways would they live differently? Would Simon be able to make better choices, or is he still so set in his ways that it's not possible? Fionna and Cake's world was promoted to real world status outside of Simon's brain; what if his memory version of Betty was able to become real as well, and how would she cope with not being the original Betty, or would she face down the entity Betty became? Here's one I wonder especially: what if the original plan had happened, and Simon became Ice King again, is there a version of Betty who could pull him free? Would Fionna and Cake somehow find a way to work with her as their world, still inside Ice King's head, perhaps started freezing or going dark as Simon forgot things?
- I don't know that any of these are particularly specific requests, but they're just the things I'm thinking about!
Uprooted
- I enjoy Agnieszka's love for others; she's kind of a prickly cannonball sometimes, but fiercely devoted to the people she cares about. I think the contrast between the love she has for the Dragon and Kasia is so interesting, and so different. Sarkan is always strange and challenging, and Kasia is her home, no matter what the forest does. The three of them will be aging so much slower than the world around them, and I do think that them as a triad would work very well-- Agnieszka and Kasia as wives living together, Agnieszka and the Dragon as occasional lovers, the Dragon and Kasia as firm friends. The way they each care for each other is so unique that I don't think it would cause a problem. So if you wanted to write about them over time, I'd be into that.
- I also love the worldbuilding in his book, and how it so clearly has a past and a future. What is it like in the future, when the three of them and whatever other wizards are all that's left of a bygone age? How does Agnieszka become even more of a folktale since she's Baba Yaga-ing around? In all of this magic and horror and healing, what does a normal life filled with the magical look like? How does Sarkan's relationship with the Wood change as it heals, and he engages with the world? And what does healing for the Wood look like, in all the triumphs and failures and loss and growth?
Again, I appreciate you writing me fic so much, and I hope this letter helps you to find the inspiration for it!
