ShipSwap Exchange Letter

Jan 25, 2015 00:22

I have no squicks or triggers and the range of fic and art I enjoy is really broad. (Much broader than the range I create.) If you have a specific story that you've been itching to write or picture you've been itching to draw, then you can safely gift it to me. Nothing is off limits, so it's okay to ignore everything that follows and just start working on your assignment.

Also, as long as there's a strong focus on the relationship between my requested characters, I'm okay with stuff like pre-ship and breakup fic and my-best-enemy trope and other stuff that you probably wouldn't write for a shipping exchange without specific permission. This is that permission.

ABOUT MY FAVOURITE SHIPPING DYNAMICS

There are a few specific ship dynamics that I especially gravitate to. All of the pairings I've requested fall into at least one of these. Some manage to be all three at once!

Antagonistic Dynamic
This is where the people in question are fundamentally at odds. They're enemies, competitors or rivals. They disagree on fundamentally important things. The very idea of them becoming a couple is laughable and yet... the chemistry. SO MUCH CHEMISTRY. So they end up falling into a relationship despite their best judgment, which is either a sexy, sexy trainwreck or becomes the next type of ship.

Complementary Dynamic
This is where the people in a ship are different to each other in ways that make them stronger together than they would be individually. I love reading about the process of negotiation as they learn to accommodate each other's strengths and weaknesses. I love watching them become stronger together and seeing the relationship turn into something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Kindred Spirits Dynamic
This is where the people in a ship are kindred spirits on some level. They have something in common which sets them apart from other people. A passion, an ability, a goal, a past experience: anything which is shared between the two of them and that few other people understand. I'm equally happy seeing this played for unhealthy co-dependency or as a source of strength for the characters who gain confidence knowing that there's somebody who truly "gets" them.

ABOUT THE FANDOMS

X-Men
I've been reading X-Men comics for about fifteen years now, but my collection is kind of a mess. Instead of picking up the new issue every Wednesday, I tend to collect random trade paperbacks that sound interesting or buy boxes of second hand comics at yard sales or collect omnibus editions of Silver Age stuff. The arcs I'm most familiar with are Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men and Joss Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men, but I've got at least a passing familiarity with all of the 616 continuity. If you want to include details from Ultimates or write a fusion with the movies, that's okay.

If you're looking for visual references for art I like Cassaday's and Van Sciver's Hank art the best; I'm not fond of the way Steve Sanders draws Hank with the giant wolf-snout. If you want a live action visual reference from the movies, I'd sooner you used Kelsey Grammar than Nicholas Hoult, because Beast in the prequel movies looks so much scrawnier than I picture him in my head.

Magician RPF
This is all Jim Steinmeyer's fault. I read his book 'Hiding The Elephant' and found myself desperately wanting fanfic about historical magicians.

I'm really into the industrial espionage and celebrity culture angles, as well as craving fic about specific individuals all of whom were larger than life characters.

I requested this for Yuletide and got a ficlet in the Yuletide Madness collection, but I want more!

Previous letters for this fandom: Yuletide letter

Narnia
I wrote my first Narnia fanfic when I was 6 years old and I haven't stopped since.

I saw the movies in theatres and enjoyed them, but I don't own them and I don't have the encyclopaedic knowledge of them that I do of the books. So movie fusions are okay and you can use Anna Popplewell as a visual reference for art if you want.

Previous letters for this fandom: Narnia Exchange letter

ABOUT THE SHIPS

Hank/Emma
Am I the only person on the planet who ships this? Quite possibly, but I ship it so hard, like, above and beyond my tendency to Ship Hank With All The Things!

I've written a ship manifesto here where I lay out why I think they work so well together.

Fic Prompts
Bodyswap! If you're able to write this, please do, because it would pretty much make my life!

A friends-to-lovers fic that focuses on their common interests, like "Five cups of coffee Hank and Emma drank together (and one they left to go cold)" or "Five books Hank lent Emma (and what she thought to them)" would be amazing.

If you're familiar with Wicked the musical, I'd really like a fic about Hank and Emma taking some of the students on a trip to see it and Hank freaking out at the scene where the teacher starts devolving and losing his voice, because it's such a perfect mirror for his fears about himself. Then Emma helps him through it.

There's some sort of psychic attack and Emma loses her ability to shield her thoughts (and shield herself from the thoughts of others) when she's not in diamond form. So she and Hank go somewhere isolated to rebuild them. Ostensibly she takes Hank because of doctor-patient confidentiality, but really it's because Emma's not comfortable letting Scott fully into her head. And then once they start mind melding an understanding forms between her and Hank.

Art Prompts
Anything playing up their common interests, please! Emma and Hank drinking fancy coffee, Emma and Hank in a box at the opera. Emma and Hank in the library at the X-Mansion. (There was one issue of New X-Men that showed Emma and Hank alone in the library together and Emma was wearing reading glasses and I literally don't think she's ever done that again in the entire history of the comics, but it is intensely relevant to my interests, both because of how it looks on her and because of what it says about how comfortable she is being her real self around Hank.

Hank/Abigail
There's a pretty good ship manifesto for them here. So I won't reinvent the wheel, except to say that it fails to emphasise the utterly ridiculous pet names that they use for each other, which I love a lot.

Fic Prompts
Five times Hank and Abigail disagreed and one time they idn't? I love how their different personalities and codes of ethics often put them at loggerheads, but they still support each other. Fast paced bickering, with an undercurrent of affection would be perfect here.

That they refer in the text to playing "alien science pervert" just absolutely kills me and I'd love a fic where they do roleplay. And I love that sleeping with an alien helps Hank to reframe his sexuality in terms of xeno rather than bestiality and to put aside some of his longstanding worries about whether he can be seen in terms other than animal ones. He's not an animal, he's a physically unusual person and I love that Abigail makes playful/sexy comments that emphasise that. It's very good for his self-esteem.

And on similar lines, first time fic. We see how Abigail broaches the relationship, but not how they get from Hank being all fucked up about his species identity in a relationship context to being comfortable with it. I'd love to see that process beginning.

Art Prompts
Domesticity or filth, I am totally up for either. For domesticity, I'd love a picture of Abigail having breakfast at the X-Mansion after spending the night with Hank and they're totally wrapped up in each other and ignoring the stink-eye she's getting from Wolverine or Cyclops or whoever. For filth, I am very into the idea of them doing the bioscience roleplay they keep making comments about, so give me stethoscopes and labcoats in the bedroom, pls!

Maskelyne/Devant
I ship these two as the head and heart of the magic world and have metaed elsewhere about how Egyptian Hall was kind of like The Avengers, if you squint.

Fic Prompts
I'd love a fic about Devant persuading Maskelyne to include motion pictures in the shows, which Maskelyne was originally dead set against. Show me how Devant changed his mind.

I'd also like something with a H/C vibe about Devant being there for Maskelyne when his long term BFF George Cooke died.

If you want to go a bit more offbeat, please have them fight crime! I would lovelovelove a fic where the Magicians of Egyptian Hall had either been recruited as a secret force by the British government or had decided to expand their canonical activity taking down cheats and frauds into a more impressive vigilante style operation

Art Prompts
Maskelyne started out as a clockmaker and built Victorian robots, so art with a steampunk aesthetic would be pretty on the nose. I'd love something that showed him and Davenport developing an act - like, arguing over a set of blueprints or something - and it's obviously a serious difference of opinion, but when you look closer they're, like, holding hands under the table or something.

Kellar/Medley
He was a thirty three year old mega-celebrity famous on five different continents. She was a 19 year old who waited at stage door after the show to try and get an autograph. Who even marries some random teenage fangirl? That shit is crazy.

Fic prompts
Can I have a tinhat parody? Like Kellar married Medley, but part of his fandom just cannot accept it and there's some Magician fanzine full of letters from bitter fangirls reporting sightings of them being all cute together in public and trying to come up with batshit interpretations for why it means that they secretly hate each other?

Alternately something about how they settled into their relationship and dealt with the weird power differential from him being so much older and from them their relationship's weird beginnings. Maybe a five times fic where the first is her waiting for an autograph and the last is him asking her to forge his signature on a cheque because he's got his hands full with something?

Art Prompts
Eva at stage door with her autograph book, pls! Or continuing with the tinhat theme, a picture of the two of them looking all lovey dovey that was printed in a newspaper, adorned with vicious scribbles about how their body language is all wrong, dammit! Or maybe something playing up the fact that Kellar inspired The Wizard of Oz, like a visual gag where he is literally the man behind the curtain and Eva is Dorothy sneaking backstage to try and get a peek.

Thurston/Leotha
I have a big thing for found families and Thurston's adoption of Jane pushes those buttons. I just want cute domesticity between this crazy - and crazy talented - showbiz family.

Fic Prompts
Letters! You can read some of his letters to Leotha online and I would love, love, love an epistolary story between them.

I'd also like kidfic! Something about him adopting Leotha's daughter and learning how to be a dad and how that tested or strengthened their relationship? Or something set in their later years, when Jane took up with some rich douchebag who turned out to be abusive and Thurston attacked him with a pen that fired tear gas. (This was an actual thing that happened. You can look it up in the society pages of the Baltimore newspapers from the time.) Did Leotha approve of that? Was it her idea? How did they handle the subsequent lawsuit. (Abusive douchebag sued.) What other ridiculous weapons was Thurston carrying on his person? I must know!

Art Prompts
Something with a playing card motif, please? Or just some some happily, messy domestic scene with them surrounded by the detritus of their crazy careers? I'm very invested in Thurston, Leotha and Jane as a happy found-family of talented, passionate, creative people with completely ridiculous lives.

Houdini/Crandon
Did you know that Mina Crandon got famous by holding seances in the nude and extruding ectoplasm from her vagina? Did you know that Houdini swore to unmask Crandon's fraud by intimately examining her act? Did your mind just go to a filthy place? Good, mine too!

Fic Prompts
NGL, I'm still really psyched by the idea of somebody writing me that Houdini handcuff porn I requested for Yuletide. I realise that not everybody's comfortable with writing porn, but if PWP is your thing, then adversarial/competitive dub-con handcuff escape artist porn is my jam, yo!

If you cannot porn, then I would still totally dig something G rated in which Houdini and Crandon are in this constant game of cat-and-mouse, where they both think the other one is an asshole and yet they feel this mad chemistry.

Art Prompts
Again, I would really love porn here if that's in your skillset, but I'm also really excited by the idea of fanart that does clever stuff with darkness and silhouettes, because it would be a great way to try and recreate the atmosphere in one of Crandon's sexy seances, with Houdini watching intently for reasons that are 100% to do with busting spiritualist frauds and have nothing to do with Crandon being hot and naked. Honest!

Susan/Magneto
This is the ridiculous crossover ship of my heart and has been for, like, half a decade now.

They have so much in common, although you wouldn't think so at first glance. They're both practical, intelligent, charismatic and inflexible. They were prepared to cut all ties with their nearest and dearest when asked to pursue a dream which they considered dangerously at odds with observable reality. They both had their entire families wiped out in horrible circumstances. They're so in control and so utterly damaged.

Also they're about the same age and have both done quite a bit of travelling, so you have a window of about sixty years and multiple continents where they could potentially meet each other!

Fic Prompts
What if Erik's mutant powers had first manifested in Narnia instead of Auschwitz? I'd love to see an AU where Erik escaped from Germany as part of the Kindertransport and was evacuated to Professor Kirke's house along with the Pevensies.

What's the line between magic and mutation? In my own Narnia fic, I usually prefer to solve The Problem Of Susan by writing her as trying to put Narnia behind her rather than having forgotten it. Aslan told her at the end of Prince Caspian to live fully in her own world, so that's what she's trying to do, not just physically, but mentally. She's gone back to her own world and tried to build a life for herself there, just like Aslan asked her to, instead of just mooning after Narnia like her siblings. Except instead of some new adventure like she was expecting, all she's had is first boredom then tragedy. The adventure never came and she's starting to feel like all the best parts of her life happened when she was just a pre-teen and she has nothing to look forward to and then suddenly this guy turns up in her own world - the place Aslan told her to look - and he can apparently do magic... I'd love something that framed Erik's superpowers in terms of Susan's crisis of faith.

Wouldn't a straight up action adventure fic with these two be awesome? Either with them teaming up to track down Nazis using ratlines or with a post The Last Battle Susan working for the government and having been tasked with bringing Magneto in. (If you want to crossover with Agent Carter or Torchwood at this point by having her work for those organisations, I am completely on board.)

Art Prompts
Firstly, I would really, really like an icon of the two of them, so if you could provide art that shrinks down neatly to 100x100, I would be extremely grateful.

Fake cover art for a non-existent crossover comic maybe?

Action shots of them working together where Susan has her bow. Or shots of them separately where they're doing different tasks, but have the exact same posture. Something that plays up the similarities, y'know?

Or could you do something cool with maps, maybe? I always loved looking at the maps at the front of the Narnia books and with both Susan and Erik being so well travelled it might be cool to do a map showing their respective journeys and marking where those journeys cross. I am all about beautiful maps.
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