DEAR FANDOM 5K WRITER
Hi there,
I'm really sorry for not having this letter up and ready to go when assignments went out; over the last three weeks at home I've completely lost track of time. I absolutely love this exchange though, so thanks for matching with me on a fandom/pairing I really care about and am super excited at the thought of a 5K story for. As always, this letter is a crazy quilt of bits and pieces I've scavenged from older exchange letters -- if I've received it before and am asking for it again it means I still love it and will always want more; if I haven't, clearly I still live in hope! -- along with updates and additions and a whole new fandom.
Please don't feel too constrained by the genre tags I chose for any given request - I was aiming to give an indication of some of my favourite kinds of stories, while also trying to leave some room for you to work. Let your own muse be your guide, and please feel free to work with the spirit rather than the letter of any prompts, or to use anything I suggest to set the mood rather than dictate a plot. I don't want to cramp your style too much, so please just take this as a wish list that you can mix and match from as suits you. Hopefully I've given you somewhere to start. (Also, if it seems like I might contradict myself between general and specific likes/dislikes, then please go with the specific, there are always exceptions.)
I dislike mundane and/or modern AUs, so please keep the characters in their own settings or time periods and retain their own backstories and abilities/powers. Also, please, no non-con, no infidelity, no unasked for kinks. I do enjoy reading explicit sex scenes in fic, though as a general rule as part of character development rather than pure PWP, so if you enjoy writing them please go ahead. If you prefer lower ratings then super intense feelings and emotions tickle my id just as well.
I have a basic preference for third person narration, and also for a fairly tight POV, rather than an omniscient narrator. That’s not a hard and fast rule though, so don’t feel bound by it if it doesn’t suit the story you want to tell.
General Likes:
• found family/families of choice
• friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, enemies to friends to lovers, friends to enemies to lovers
• characters knowing each other really well
• size/strength difference even when it's only a bit or especially if it's surprising
• first times
• reconciliations after rifts
• breakups followed by makeups
• loyalty
• you and me against the world
• identity porn
• fork in the road AUs
General Dislikes:
• infidelity
• non-con
• unasked for kinks
• mundane/modern AUs
• bdsm
• obliviousness/drawn out pining/misunderstandings
• parental incest or any related kink
*****
Rome
Group: Mark Antony/Atia & Octavian
Group: Mark Antony & Lucius Vorenus
Group: Mark Antony & Julius Caesar
Mark Antony
Interpersonal Drama, Character Development, AU - Canon Divergence
Full Disclosure: I'm a classicist by trade, but my specialty is Greek history not Roman. In any case, one of the writers on the show put it best when he said they were going for authenticity, not accuracy. That's more than good enough for me.
I finally got around to watching S2 a couple of months ago, went back and rewatched S1 for the first time in years, and... God. I adore James Purefoy's Mark Antony, so if you do too, just about anything that revisits and explores him would be great. Pick whichever of the relationships I've requested, or mix and match them, I think they're all fascinating.
Antony himself is crass and corrupt but oh so charming when he wants to be, and an utter opportunist but also oddly loyal, and greedy, and generous, and cruel and kind, and amazingly competent but also an impetuous disaster, and I guess I'm saying what I love about him is he's a land of contrasts? Also he has great relationships with great (also terrible) people. Julius Caesar maybe puts it best when he says, "He has a vulgar streak. I don't mind it."
The first time I watched Rome I found Atia quite repulsive, but this time round I grew to love her. Partly for her terribleness, partly a genuine sympathy with how the tables turn with Octavian and how trapped she is by the end. And partly for her relationship with Antony which veers from friends with benefits to a political alliance to I'm pretty sure a genuine love affair to... where do we end? A woman scorned and a man who's convinced himself he loves someone else? I feel like the compressed timeline of S2 does no favours to the Antony/Cleopatra relationship, and I personally am utterly unconvinced by it... but Antony's refusal to either kill or more importantly humiliate Atia in front of her rival still struck a chord. And of course the whole triangle (not love triangle!) with Octavian. The way the adults underestimate child Octavian while they're still in a position to order him around, and how he seizes the upper hand so decisively when he's (just a little) older. The way Atia, as Octavia so rightly points out, *wanted* to make Octavian first man in Rome, but likes the results a little less than she expected.
Vorenus, of course, is Vorenus, so rigid he'll break rather than bend, but I love the way he ultimately stands by Antony to the very bitter end. That suicide scene, and the way he washed and dressed Antony's body after, oh my God. But also the way Pullo knows it's Antony who'll know how to pull him out of his post-Niobe crisis. All the ways they insist they don't like each other but admit they need each other.
And Caesar... I loved Ciaran Hinds' Caesar. I also love how genuinely, sincerely loyal to him Antony seemed to be. Embezzling funds, sure. An eye on his own opportunities, sure. But when Atia tells him he won't risk his own life to save Caesar and he says so coldly, but also with a sense of wonder in his voice, "Will I not?" it just kills me.
So anyway. Sorry there's no concrete prompts there, but that's what I love, and hopefully you can do something with it. You've got a free rein. Origin story for Antony and Caesar's friendship. Vorenus' stunned moment of realisation that he kind of loves Antony after all, it isn't just financial or spiritual desperation. Missing scenes from Antony and Atia and Octavian's life together. ("He's family, darling." "Actually, he isn't.")
Also, one of the few AUs I really, really love is canon divergence, so if Caesar lives and everything (or nothing) is different, or Antony and Octavian manage to remain friends of a sort (or at least allies), or Antony wins Actium, or Antony and Atia do get married, or any other hinge point you want to pivot on... That'd be amazing.
Marvel Cinematic Universe
Group: Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Morgan Stark
Action/Adventure, AU - Canon Divergence, Character Development, Fix-it Fic
My most fevered hope, heading towards the end of the OG MCU, the original Avengers team, was that Tony could hang up the suit and settle down with Pepper. Throwing an adorable kid into the mix just made me feel it even more. I wound up hugely invested in their little family, in a way I never saw coming. I'll come right out and say it: the end of Endgame broke me. I still found myself crying randomly months afterwards. So my one and only, most important, desperate request here, is to fix it. Do something different. I don't really mind what, just have Tony and Pepper and Morgan live happily ever after. In the immortal words of Steve Rogers and the team, whatever it takes.
I can't pretend I wasn't a huge Steve/Tony shipper back in the day, but I always loved Pepper, and I really did grow to love her relationship with Tony as it developed in the MCU. I was surprised by how sad I was when Tony said they broke up in Civil War, I cheered out loud in the theatre when they were back together in Homecoming, and I bawled my eyes out when she told him he could finally rest in Endgame. I want to see them live together. I want them to grow old together. It's so amazing when Pepper shows up in the final battle in the suit he made her. Let them walk off the battlefield together. Or you can jump into the future a bit and show me what they're doing later. Maybe he's a house husband and she's back at Stark Industries. Maybe he's retired and she's taken over the superheroing. I don't care as long as they're happy and together.
I'm not usually one for kidfic, but my God I fell in love with Morgan at first sight. Give me dad and daughter tinkering in the lab. Give me a growing girl wrestling with life as a legacy. Give me grown up Morgan as a hero/inventor/businesswoman. With parents like Tony and Pepper we know Morgan's going to be a genius, plus I bet there's even more interesting tech just hiding in that garage she's not supposed to go into, so why not one more miracle. Teen or adult Morgan goes back with a better solution for Tony, whether that's yanking him forward to her present, or fudging "the rules" a bit to save him back then so he didn't miss seeing her grow up, and accepting whatever other changes that might bring.
Black Sails
Group: Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton
Getting Together, Interpersonal Drama, Character Development, AU - Canon Divergence
I could have very happily watched a whole season of these two making cow eyes at each other and arguing about politics, even before they actually got together. But once they did! I would dearly love to have a story set in London, pre the fall. I just adore them, in all their starchy, buttoned down glory. There's a million fics set after the series, and who can blame anyone writing after that happy ending, but I'd rather have something set before, even if that means it ends sadly. (We all know it'll fix itself later.) This is also a case where I'd love various kinds of canon divergence AUs.
I love their friendship, and their love affair of the mind that starts long before the physical one, whereby Thomas, who presumably has learned the hard way from his father that trust can be misplaced, can say to the man who is sleeping with his wife "I have come to trust you very much", and James, who has likewise fought his way to a position not his by right and somewhat precarious, can throw caution to the winds and order a peer of the realm out of his own house.
I'm not a huge fan of pining or misunderstandings, so don't particularly want a drawn out exploration of either of them thinking their feelings are one sided, but I do enjoy internalised homophobia and period-appropriate issues with acknowledging one's very real feelings. Likewise, qualms about class and status difference etc.
Any of the following canon divergences (or others you come up with in similar vein) would be cool: Hamilton and Hennessey never find out about the affair and James and Thomas head out to Nassau together to put the pirate-plan in motion; Ex-Royal Navy officer turned pirate captain James meets Governor of the Bahamas Thomas; Thomas goes *with* James on his exploratory mission to Nassau...
Whitechapel
Group: Joseph Chandler & Ray Miles
Character Development, Horror, Worldbuilding
DNW: Chandler/Kent, or pining Kent or asexual Chandler. Please just keep this one gen and plot/case focused.
Joe and Ray's relationship is everything I like in mismatched colleagues turned loyal friends, from the initial terrible start, to sharing confidences and trusting each other with weaknesses, to firmly having each other's backs by the end. Miles trying to reassure Chandler in the sewer that his coat was salvageable tugged on my heartstrings in the final episode. How far they've come! Tell me more about how these two very different people find common ground and fight the good fight together.
I love the sudden swerve the show took in the final season, and would enjoy seeing it more fully explored, but equally, I've always been a fan of historical crime, and would be happy with a continued focus on more earthly policing. I like the whole team, and would be happy to see more of any/all of them. I would also be interested, in either case, in the whereabouts of Commander Anderson, and the ongoing impact on Chandler's once promising career. Are the team ever going to bring their villain in alive?
Is the police station built on a Hellmouth? Did Original Flavour Jack the Ripper leave some kind of psychic taint on the vicinity, like calling to like? Is the mythology of the place just a self fulfilling prophecy that affects the easily suggestible? Or is it all the inevitable result of poverty and neglect? The final few episodes making explicit what had been creeping in round the edges opened up a whole new world to explore. Is it "real" though, in the sense of demonic activity on earth, or are we witnessing some sort of folie a deux/mass hysteria/psychic assault etc?
Lastly, I remain a sucker for faves in peril, so if something ghastly (but recoverable!) happens to Chandler and Miles has to rescue him that'd be grand. Otherwise, facing danger together or with the team, all great in my book.
*****
Thanks very much, dear writer. Hopefully *something* here was helpful. Have fun writing, I can't wait to see what you come up with.
I'm really sorry for not having this letter up and ready to go when assignments went out; over the last three weeks at home I've completely lost track of time. I absolutely love this exchange though, so thanks for matching with me on a fandom/pairing I really care about and am super excited at the thought of a 5K story for. As always, this letter is a crazy quilt of bits and pieces I've scavenged from older exchange letters -- if I've received it before and am asking for it again it means I still love it and will always want more; if I haven't, clearly I still live in hope! -- along with updates and additions and a whole new fandom.
Please don't feel too constrained by the genre tags I chose for any given request - I was aiming to give an indication of some of my favourite kinds of stories, while also trying to leave some room for you to work. Let your own muse be your guide, and please feel free to work with the spirit rather than the letter of any prompts, or to use anything I suggest to set the mood rather than dictate a plot. I don't want to cramp your style too much, so please just take this as a wish list that you can mix and match from as suits you. Hopefully I've given you somewhere to start. (Also, if it seems like I might contradict myself between general and specific likes/dislikes, then please go with the specific, there are always exceptions.)
I dislike mundane and/or modern AUs, so please keep the characters in their own settings or time periods and retain their own backstories and abilities/powers. Also, please, no non-con, no infidelity, no unasked for kinks. I do enjoy reading explicit sex scenes in fic, though as a general rule as part of character development rather than pure PWP, so if you enjoy writing them please go ahead. If you prefer lower ratings then super intense feelings and emotions tickle my id just as well.
I have a basic preference for third person narration, and also for a fairly tight POV, rather than an omniscient narrator. That’s not a hard and fast rule though, so don’t feel bound by it if it doesn’t suit the story you want to tell.
General Likes:
• found family/families of choice
• friends to lovers, enemies to lovers, enemies to friends to lovers, friends to enemies to lovers
• characters knowing each other really well
• size/strength difference even when it's only a bit or especially if it's surprising
• first times
• reconciliations after rifts
• breakups followed by makeups
• loyalty
• you and me against the world
• identity porn
• fork in the road AUs
General Dislikes:
• infidelity
• non-con
• unasked for kinks
• mundane/modern AUs
• bdsm
• obliviousness/drawn out pining/misunderstandings
• parental incest or any related kink
*****
Rome
Group: Mark Antony/Atia & Octavian
Group: Mark Antony & Lucius Vorenus
Group: Mark Antony & Julius Caesar
Mark Antony
Interpersonal Drama, Character Development, AU - Canon Divergence
Full Disclosure: I'm a classicist by trade, but my specialty is Greek history not Roman. In any case, one of the writers on the show put it best when he said they were going for authenticity, not accuracy. That's more than good enough for me.
I finally got around to watching S2 a couple of months ago, went back and rewatched S1 for the first time in years, and... God. I adore James Purefoy's Mark Antony, so if you do too, just about anything that revisits and explores him would be great. Pick whichever of the relationships I've requested, or mix and match them, I think they're all fascinating.
Antony himself is crass and corrupt but oh so charming when he wants to be, and an utter opportunist but also oddly loyal, and greedy, and generous, and cruel and kind, and amazingly competent but also an impetuous disaster, and I guess I'm saying what I love about him is he's a land of contrasts? Also he has great relationships with great (also terrible) people. Julius Caesar maybe puts it best when he says, "He has a vulgar streak. I don't mind it."
The first time I watched Rome I found Atia quite repulsive, but this time round I grew to love her. Partly for her terribleness, partly a genuine sympathy with how the tables turn with Octavian and how trapped she is by the end. And partly for her relationship with Antony which veers from friends with benefits to a political alliance to I'm pretty sure a genuine love affair to... where do we end? A woman scorned and a man who's convinced himself he loves someone else? I feel like the compressed timeline of S2 does no favours to the Antony/Cleopatra relationship, and I personally am utterly unconvinced by it... but Antony's refusal to either kill or more importantly humiliate Atia in front of her rival still struck a chord. And of course the whole triangle (not love triangle!) with Octavian. The way the adults underestimate child Octavian while they're still in a position to order him around, and how he seizes the upper hand so decisively when he's (just a little) older. The way Atia, as Octavia so rightly points out, *wanted* to make Octavian first man in Rome, but likes the results a little less than she expected.
Vorenus, of course, is Vorenus, so rigid he'll break rather than bend, but I love the way he ultimately stands by Antony to the very bitter end. That suicide scene, and the way he washed and dressed Antony's body after, oh my God. But also the way Pullo knows it's Antony who'll know how to pull him out of his post-Niobe crisis. All the ways they insist they don't like each other but admit they need each other.
And Caesar... I loved Ciaran Hinds' Caesar. I also love how genuinely, sincerely loyal to him Antony seemed to be. Embezzling funds, sure. An eye on his own opportunities, sure. But when Atia tells him he won't risk his own life to save Caesar and he says so coldly, but also with a sense of wonder in his voice, "Will I not?" it just kills me.
So anyway. Sorry there's no concrete prompts there, but that's what I love, and hopefully you can do something with it. You've got a free rein. Origin story for Antony and Caesar's friendship. Vorenus' stunned moment of realisation that he kind of loves Antony after all, it isn't just financial or spiritual desperation. Missing scenes from Antony and Atia and Octavian's life together. ("He's family, darling." "Actually, he isn't.")
Also, one of the few AUs I really, really love is canon divergence, so if Caesar lives and everything (or nothing) is different, or Antony and Octavian manage to remain friends of a sort (or at least allies), or Antony wins Actium, or Antony and Atia do get married, or any other hinge point you want to pivot on... That'd be amazing.
Marvel Cinematic Universe
Group: Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Morgan Stark
Action/Adventure, AU - Canon Divergence, Character Development, Fix-it Fic
My most fevered hope, heading towards the end of the OG MCU, the original Avengers team, was that Tony could hang up the suit and settle down with Pepper. Throwing an adorable kid into the mix just made me feel it even more. I wound up hugely invested in their little family, in a way I never saw coming. I'll come right out and say it: the end of Endgame broke me. I still found myself crying randomly months afterwards. So my one and only, most important, desperate request here, is to fix it. Do something different. I don't really mind what, just have Tony and Pepper and Morgan live happily ever after. In the immortal words of Steve Rogers and the team, whatever it takes.
I can't pretend I wasn't a huge Steve/Tony shipper back in the day, but I always loved Pepper, and I really did grow to love her relationship with Tony as it developed in the MCU. I was surprised by how sad I was when Tony said they broke up in Civil War, I cheered out loud in the theatre when they were back together in Homecoming, and I bawled my eyes out when she told him he could finally rest in Endgame. I want to see them live together. I want them to grow old together. It's so amazing when Pepper shows up in the final battle in the suit he made her. Let them walk off the battlefield together. Or you can jump into the future a bit and show me what they're doing later. Maybe he's a house husband and she's back at Stark Industries. Maybe he's retired and she's taken over the superheroing. I don't care as long as they're happy and together.
I'm not usually one for kidfic, but my God I fell in love with Morgan at first sight. Give me dad and daughter tinkering in the lab. Give me a growing girl wrestling with life as a legacy. Give me grown up Morgan as a hero/inventor/businesswoman. With parents like Tony and Pepper we know Morgan's going to be a genius, plus I bet there's even more interesting tech just hiding in that garage she's not supposed to go into, so why not one more miracle. Teen or adult Morgan goes back with a better solution for Tony, whether that's yanking him forward to her present, or fudging "the rules" a bit to save him back then so he didn't miss seeing her grow up, and accepting whatever other changes that might bring.
Black Sails
Group: Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton
Getting Together, Interpersonal Drama, Character Development, AU - Canon Divergence
I could have very happily watched a whole season of these two making cow eyes at each other and arguing about politics, even before they actually got together. But once they did! I would dearly love to have a story set in London, pre the fall. I just adore them, in all their starchy, buttoned down glory. There's a million fics set after the series, and who can blame anyone writing after that happy ending, but I'd rather have something set before, even if that means it ends sadly. (We all know it'll fix itself later.) This is also a case where I'd love various kinds of canon divergence AUs.
I love their friendship, and their love affair of the mind that starts long before the physical one, whereby Thomas, who presumably has learned the hard way from his father that trust can be misplaced, can say to the man who is sleeping with his wife "I have come to trust you very much", and James, who has likewise fought his way to a position not his by right and somewhat precarious, can throw caution to the winds and order a peer of the realm out of his own house.
I'm not a huge fan of pining or misunderstandings, so don't particularly want a drawn out exploration of either of them thinking their feelings are one sided, but I do enjoy internalised homophobia and period-appropriate issues with acknowledging one's very real feelings. Likewise, qualms about class and status difference etc.
Any of the following canon divergences (or others you come up with in similar vein) would be cool: Hamilton and Hennessey never find out about the affair and James and Thomas head out to Nassau together to put the pirate-plan in motion; Ex-Royal Navy officer turned pirate captain James meets Governor of the Bahamas Thomas; Thomas goes *with* James on his exploratory mission to Nassau...
Whitechapel
Group: Joseph Chandler & Ray Miles
Character Development, Horror, Worldbuilding
DNW: Chandler/Kent, or pining Kent or asexual Chandler. Please just keep this one gen and plot/case focused.
Joe and Ray's relationship is everything I like in mismatched colleagues turned loyal friends, from the initial terrible start, to sharing confidences and trusting each other with weaknesses, to firmly having each other's backs by the end. Miles trying to reassure Chandler in the sewer that his coat was salvageable tugged on my heartstrings in the final episode. How far they've come! Tell me more about how these two very different people find common ground and fight the good fight together.
I love the sudden swerve the show took in the final season, and would enjoy seeing it more fully explored, but equally, I've always been a fan of historical crime, and would be happy with a continued focus on more earthly policing. I like the whole team, and would be happy to see more of any/all of them. I would also be interested, in either case, in the whereabouts of Commander Anderson, and the ongoing impact on Chandler's once promising career. Are the team ever going to bring their villain in alive?
Is the police station built on a Hellmouth? Did Original Flavour Jack the Ripper leave some kind of psychic taint on the vicinity, like calling to like? Is the mythology of the place just a self fulfilling prophecy that affects the easily suggestible? Or is it all the inevitable result of poverty and neglect? The final few episodes making explicit what had been creeping in round the edges opened up a whole new world to explore. Is it "real" though, in the sense of demonic activity on earth, or are we witnessing some sort of folie a deux/mass hysteria/psychic assault etc?
Lastly, I remain a sucker for faves in peril, so if something ghastly (but recoverable!) happens to Chandler and Miles has to rescue him that'd be grand. Otherwise, facing danger together or with the team, all great in my book.
*****
Thanks very much, dear writer. Hopefully *something* here was helpful. Have fun writing, I can't wait to see what you come up with.