Dear Ladystuck Writer/Artist
Note: I am repurposing my stock Yuletide letter here, which is why some of the sections may seem slightly off-topic for a single fandom exchange.
Hi, and thank you in advance for creating a story or artwork for me! I'm pretty easy to please -- unless you write a context-free sex scene or draw explicit porn, I'll be thrilled just to get something in response to one of my prompts. Optional details are optional, after all! *grin* But I realize that's not terribly helpful, so here's the (very!) long version. (I am sorry for the tl;dr, but I like to talk about things I love and I figure more details are better than fewer.)
---------------
General Information:
1. I will read anything when it comes to pairings -- het, slash, femslash, threesomes, poly, whatever, so long as you put in a bit of character development so the relationships don't seem to come out of nowhere -- but I prefer gen, and I tend to skim sex scenes because the non-sex parts of the story are almost always more interesting to me.
2. I enjoy all kinds of genres and moods, from schmoopy fluff to angsty deathfic, but my favorite endings are bittersweet and a little complicated.
3. I fall in love with worlds and themes as much as I fall in love with characters, if not more, so any world-building you can sneak in around the edges of a story or in the background details of a picture will be received with great joy.
4. Stuff I really, really like: This can be boiled down to, 'Please treat characters as intelligent people who have understandable motives for their actions, please take the worlds seriously as settings, and please remember that there's more to life than sex. Also, ethics, metaphysics, and world-building are dead cool.'
The tl;dr version: I like character development; world-building; explanation of plot holes in canon; subtle humor; good spelling and grammar; a sense of wonder; writing that evokes an emotional reaction as well as telling a story; close relationships that don't necessarily involve sex (i.e., friendship, families, teachers and students, coworkers, traveling companions, soldiers in the same cause, etc.); the consequences of actions and choices; a sense of place and time; dialogue that conveys character as well as plot information; politics; ethics; people being intelligent even if they make bad choices; people trying to do the right thing even if they make bad choices; conflict because of opposing goals that both have points in their favor; a lack of simple solutions; female characters treated as people instead of plot devices; male characters treated as people instead of plot devices; ideas that make me stop and think; the nature of memory; the nature of truth; possession; soul-searching; non-gratuitous torture (...I have a kink, shut up); war and battles; hand-to-hand fighting; swordfights; peace and diplomacy; magic that's properly magical and strange or magic that's explained as a science (but not both at once); books and reading; people exploring a new country/world/city; linguistics and languages; early Industrial Revolution technology (or whatever technology is suitable to the milieu); people using logic to investigate a problem; and fires, floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.
5. Stuff I'm not so keen on: obvious authorial hatred for characters I like and/or find interesting (which is generally all of them); sex or romantic love with no in-story justification (unless the people in question are already a canon couple); gratuitous angst/torture/rape (i.e., bad stuff that comes out of nowhere and is not necessary to make the plot or character arc work); idiot plots (i.e., problems that could be solved in five minutes if the characters asked one or two obvious questions); and predestination, prophecies, and anything else that denies free will. (I admit that that last dislike is tricky since Homestuck is practically built on predestination paradoxes, but if you include any, please let the characters be annoyed at the constriction of their choices.)
6. If you want more information on what I think about Homestuck, here is a post on various ships I made in July (so it has nothing about the Dancestors), here is all my Homestuck fic, and here is my homestuck tag on this journal.
Okay. On to specific prompts.
---------------
A) Jade English in the alpha timeline. Growing up, working on her tech company, discovering things about Lord English and the game, meeting Dave and/or Rose (because she MUST have met them), finding Jake, building her home on Hellmurder Island, stealing Jack Noir's fourth wall, her last confrontation with the Batterwitch... anything, really! She never seems to get written about and that is a horrible, terrible crying shame that needs to be rectified ASAP.
I think this is fairly clear as it stands. But to elaborate a touch more, I'm not hugely interested in reading about Jade's relationship with John right now, except as a small part of a story focused on something else. I am also not hugely interested in angst or a story focused on Jade's feelings. I want to read about her DOING something -- going out into the world and making shit take place, whatever said shit may be.
This applies similarly to art: I'd prefer a picture of Jade doing something awesome over a more portrait-like picture. Which is not to say it would have to be an action scene! It could be something quiet like Jade in a lab, or at a computer, or on Prospit meeting with the White Queen, or whatever. Jade English in the Medium (piloting a battleship with her stolen loot!) would be especially awesome, as would Jade exploring Hellmurder Island. (Bonus if she has copies of The Complacency of the Learned or Dave's movies lying around in the background or in her backpack or whatever. *grin*)
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B) Terezi and Nepeta having fun in the woods -- my headcanon is that they lived in the same forest and met in person rather than over the internet. This can be before or after Terezi's blinding, and either gen or a bit of playful flirting would be fine.
This can be gen or light romance/flirting, whichever. Flirting could be red because they're adorable, or black because... well, because of anything other than rivalry over Karkat's affections, because fuck that, boys are a stupid thing to fight over. But they clearly get along and have a longstanding habit of roleplaying (even if Terezi is doing it to some degree as a joke), and I want them to have fun together. In this one case, to hell with bittersweet and complicated. Give me tooth-rotting sugary sweetness... and a bit of implicit bloody death underneath, of course, because Nepeta kills her own dinner with her bare hands and Terezi was Vriska's Flarp partner for a reason. *grin*
Same goes for art: I just want something adorable with a lot of trees and fun -- maybe some smiles and hugs, or silliness with leaves or water -- and a hint of potential violence to remind people that adorable doesn't equal harmless.
-----
C) Terezi and Vriska, the early days. How did they meet? When and why did they become Flarp partners? Which of them knew Aradia and/or Tavros first and introduced the other to them? If you are okay with writing violence and ethically dubious scenarios, I would love to see one of their normal, deadly Flarp campaigns, or Terezi looking back on their past victories after the Team Charge debacle and realizing she'd ignored evidence that their victims were not, in fact, as guilty as Vriska had told her they were. If not, anything with two somewhat awkward friends killing time, having fun, and trying to one-up each other would be great.
Okay, first up, I do not ship Terezi and Vriska. Not caliginous, not flushed, not pale, not ashen (...except maybe with Aradia, but that's not the point of this prompt, so um, ignore that unless you want to throw in subtext in that direction?), not even messy human-style. I want them to be FRIENDS, amen, the end. That is plenty of complicated emotional entanglement right there. That said, I do think their friendship is one of the most meaningful relationships in either of their lives, which is why I want to read about it. :-)
As for my thoughts on their time as the Scourge Sisters: I think that sometimes (maybe even the majority of the time) Vriska was honest about their agreement to use Flarp to hunt down "evil" people, but I also think that Terezi didn't bother to check their victims as closely as she should have done, because she got a kick out of the power and control. Maybe she scared and/or tortured people into false confessions; maybe Vriska mind-controlled them; maybe both. Neither of them is innocent there. The difference is that Terezi learned from the experience and tried to change, while Vriska just kept on being Vriska.
I think I said everything else within the prompt text itself.
Artists... I guess this is a trickier one to draw? But I'd love anything with the Scourge Sisters being intimidating, or maybe just Vriska and Terezi hanging out at one of their hives and doing stupid friend things. Actually that last would be awesome -- I don't think I've ever seen a picture of either of them in the other's territory, as it were.
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D) Roxy growing up among the carapacians. Pretty much anything on that theme would be awesome, but I guess I'm interested in things like being the only human in her neighborhood, or when and how she found her appearifier and decided to gather supplies for her neighbors, or ways in which she absorbed the cultural mindset of Prospit and Derse along with the human culture she gleaned from the internet and whatever files Rose was able to leave for her. If you can work in Rose and/or PM, that would be awesome, but please don't stress about that element.
AKA the request in which my world-building obsession got away from me a little bit. Anything you can do to invent and describe a coherent carapcian culture -- and the ways it's been altered by the Condesce's rule and centuries on a waterlogged Earth -- would be beyond awesome. But that should be backgrounded and seen only through Roxy's eyes, because this is a request about her, not about, say, PM's epic quest to survive exile in the alpha timeline.
Mostly I want the practical details of Roxy's childhood. Like, who took care of her as a baby? What did she (and the carapacians) eat before she found her appearifier and starting stealing pumpkins? When, how, and why did she discover the internet? (Side-question: do the carapacians have internet access?) What were her emotional reactions to growing up so visibly different from her neighbors, and then learning the fate of humanity? Roxy strikes me as a very, very lonely person, which is interesting since in a lot of ways she's the least socially isolated one of the alpha kids... except that all her friends and neighbors are aliens. So how did that situation WORK?
In the case of art, I'd love a scene with Roxy and the carapacians working together at some task to maintain their floating habitat -- fishing, making salt from seawater, repairing rain cisterns, riding out a hurricane, or just sitting around a driftwood fire and cooking mutant seagulls for dinner. Stuff like that.
-----
E) Alternia had an interstellar empire as far back as the Sufferer's day, so what personal and/or cultural factors made Mindfang choose to stay on her home planet instead of becoming a space pirate? Or just tell me about the Alternia of her youth and how she grew up and found her calling -- the mix of high tech and staunch traditionalism is particularly interesting. I mean, this is a planet with FTL starships, yet Redglare comes hunting Mindfang with a dragon rather than a bomber or jet fighter, and Mindfang's fleet seems almost stuck in the Age of Sail. How and why are those technology levels integrated, and does that also explain why Mindfang kept a paper journal instead of an electronic one?
AKA the request in which my world-building obsession really got away from me. Sorry about that! (*is not actually sorry at all*)
Screw romance, plot, and epic drama. Instead, talk to me about Marquise Spinneret Mindfang (née Aranea Serket) in the context of her society. Tell me about growing up on Alternia in that mish-mash of technology levels. Tell me about how trolls chose their adult callings in the days before automatic conscription into the space fleet and banishment from their homeworld. How did the economy work when adults were still present? What was done via automated machines, what was done by genetically modified drones, and what was done by hand -- and WHY? What did kids do to support themselves if they lived in or near "civilization," and what were the rules for mingling (or not mingling) with adults? (Sub-question: did Mindfang grow up in the middle of nowhere or on the edges of a city? Either way, how did that affect her?) Did Mindfang resent parts of her culture or did she accept it wholeheartedly, and in either case how did that lead to her career as a pirate? (Sub-question: what happens to lusii once their trolls are grown? Could spidermom not stand the gravitational force of breaking orbit, so Mindfang took her to sea instead?) There are all kinds of things to think about!
For art, I guess the best thing would be a picture of Mindfang moving through a busy street or waterfront scene, young Aranea Serket daydreaming in that time period's equivalent of school, spidermom up in the rigging of a ship while Mindfang writes in her journal on the deck and a starship flashes by in the background, or something else that illustrates both Mindfang's world and her place in it.
---------------
*rereads torrent of words*
...If I were in Homestuck, I'd be a Light player, wouldn't I?
*headdesk*
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comments)
Hi, and thank you in advance for creating a story or artwork for me! I'm pretty easy to please -- unless you write a context-free sex scene or draw explicit porn, I'll be thrilled just to get something in response to one of my prompts. Optional details are optional, after all! *grin* But I realize that's not terribly helpful, so here's the (very!) long version. (I am sorry for the tl;dr, but I like to talk about things I love and I figure more details are better than fewer.)
---------------
General Information:
1. I will read anything when it comes to pairings -- het, slash, femslash, threesomes, poly, whatever, so long as you put in a bit of character development so the relationships don't seem to come out of nowhere -- but I prefer gen, and I tend to skim sex scenes because the non-sex parts of the story are almost always more interesting to me.
2. I enjoy all kinds of genres and moods, from schmoopy fluff to angsty deathfic, but my favorite endings are bittersweet and a little complicated.
3. I fall in love with worlds and themes as much as I fall in love with characters, if not more, so any world-building you can sneak in around the edges of a story or in the background details of a picture will be received with great joy.
4. Stuff I really, really like: This can be boiled down to, 'Please treat characters as intelligent people who have understandable motives for their actions, please take the worlds seriously as settings, and please remember that there's more to life than sex. Also, ethics, metaphysics, and world-building are dead cool.'
The tl;dr version: I like character development; world-building; explanation of plot holes in canon; subtle humor; good spelling and grammar; a sense of wonder; writing that evokes an emotional reaction as well as telling a story; close relationships that don't necessarily involve sex (i.e., friendship, families, teachers and students, coworkers, traveling companions, soldiers in the same cause, etc.); the consequences of actions and choices; a sense of place and time; dialogue that conveys character as well as plot information; politics; ethics; people being intelligent even if they make bad choices; people trying to do the right thing even if they make bad choices; conflict because of opposing goals that both have points in their favor; a lack of simple solutions; female characters treated as people instead of plot devices; male characters treated as people instead of plot devices; ideas that make me stop and think; the nature of memory; the nature of truth; possession; soul-searching; non-gratuitous torture (...I have a kink, shut up); war and battles; hand-to-hand fighting; swordfights; peace and diplomacy; magic that's properly magical and strange or magic that's explained as a science (but not both at once); books and reading; people exploring a new country/world/city; linguistics and languages; early Industrial Revolution technology (or whatever technology is suitable to the milieu); people using logic to investigate a problem; and fires, floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.
5. Stuff I'm not so keen on: obvious authorial hatred for characters I like and/or find interesting (which is generally all of them); sex or romantic love with no in-story justification (unless the people in question are already a canon couple); gratuitous angst/torture/rape (i.e., bad stuff that comes out of nowhere and is not necessary to make the plot or character arc work); idiot plots (i.e., problems that could be solved in five minutes if the characters asked one or two obvious questions); and predestination, prophecies, and anything else that denies free will. (I admit that that last dislike is tricky since Homestuck is practically built on predestination paradoxes, but if you include any, please let the characters be annoyed at the constriction of their choices.)
6. If you want more information on what I think about Homestuck, here is a post on various ships I made in July (so it has nothing about the Dancestors), here is all my Homestuck fic, and here is my homestuck tag on this journal.
Okay. On to specific prompts.
---------------
A) Jade English in the alpha timeline. Growing up, working on her tech company, discovering things about Lord English and the game, meeting Dave and/or Rose (because she MUST have met them), finding Jake, building her home on Hellmurder Island, stealing Jack Noir's fourth wall, her last confrontation with the Batterwitch... anything, really! She never seems to get written about and that is a horrible, terrible crying shame that needs to be rectified ASAP.
I think this is fairly clear as it stands. But to elaborate a touch more, I'm not hugely interested in reading about Jade's relationship with John right now, except as a small part of a story focused on something else. I am also not hugely interested in angst or a story focused on Jade's feelings. I want to read about her DOING something -- going out into the world and making shit take place, whatever said shit may be.
This applies similarly to art: I'd prefer a picture of Jade doing something awesome over a more portrait-like picture. Which is not to say it would have to be an action scene! It could be something quiet like Jade in a lab, or at a computer, or on Prospit meeting with the White Queen, or whatever. Jade English in the Medium (piloting a battleship with her stolen loot!) would be especially awesome, as would Jade exploring Hellmurder Island. (Bonus if she has copies of The Complacency of the Learned or Dave's movies lying around in the background or in her backpack or whatever. *grin*)
-----
B) Terezi and Nepeta having fun in the woods -- my headcanon is that they lived in the same forest and met in person rather than over the internet. This can be before or after Terezi's blinding, and either gen or a bit of playful flirting would be fine.
This can be gen or light romance/flirting, whichever. Flirting could be red because they're adorable, or black because... well, because of anything other than rivalry over Karkat's affections, because fuck that, boys are a stupid thing to fight over. But they clearly get along and have a longstanding habit of roleplaying (even if Terezi is doing it to some degree as a joke), and I want them to have fun together. In this one case, to hell with bittersweet and complicated. Give me tooth-rotting sugary sweetness... and a bit of implicit bloody death underneath, of course, because Nepeta kills her own dinner with her bare hands and Terezi was Vriska's Flarp partner for a reason. *grin*
Same goes for art: I just want something adorable with a lot of trees and fun -- maybe some smiles and hugs, or silliness with leaves or water -- and a hint of potential violence to remind people that adorable doesn't equal harmless.
-----
C) Terezi and Vriska, the early days. How did they meet? When and why did they become Flarp partners? Which of them knew Aradia and/or Tavros first and introduced the other to them? If you are okay with writing violence and ethically dubious scenarios, I would love to see one of their normal, deadly Flarp campaigns, or Terezi looking back on their past victories after the Team Charge debacle and realizing she'd ignored evidence that their victims were not, in fact, as guilty as Vriska had told her they were. If not, anything with two somewhat awkward friends killing time, having fun, and trying to one-up each other would be great.
Okay, first up, I do not ship Terezi and Vriska. Not caliginous, not flushed, not pale, not ashen (...except maybe with Aradia, but that's not the point of this prompt, so um, ignore that unless you want to throw in subtext in that direction?), not even messy human-style. I want them to be FRIENDS, amen, the end. That is plenty of complicated emotional entanglement right there. That said, I do think their friendship is one of the most meaningful relationships in either of their lives, which is why I want to read about it. :-)
As for my thoughts on their time as the Scourge Sisters: I think that sometimes (maybe even the majority of the time) Vriska was honest about their agreement to use Flarp to hunt down "evil" people, but I also think that Terezi didn't bother to check their victims as closely as she should have done, because she got a kick out of the power and control. Maybe she scared and/or tortured people into false confessions; maybe Vriska mind-controlled them; maybe both. Neither of them is innocent there. The difference is that Terezi learned from the experience and tried to change, while Vriska just kept on being Vriska.
I think I said everything else within the prompt text itself.
Artists... I guess this is a trickier one to draw? But I'd love anything with the Scourge Sisters being intimidating, or maybe just Vriska and Terezi hanging out at one of their hives and doing stupid friend things. Actually that last would be awesome -- I don't think I've ever seen a picture of either of them in the other's territory, as it were.
-----
D) Roxy growing up among the carapacians. Pretty much anything on that theme would be awesome, but I guess I'm interested in things like being the only human in her neighborhood, or when and how she found her appearifier and decided to gather supplies for her neighbors, or ways in which she absorbed the cultural mindset of Prospit and Derse along with the human culture she gleaned from the internet and whatever files Rose was able to leave for her. If you can work in Rose and/or PM, that would be awesome, but please don't stress about that element.
AKA the request in which my world-building obsession got away from me a little bit. Anything you can do to invent and describe a coherent carapcian culture -- and the ways it's been altered by the Condesce's rule and centuries on a waterlogged Earth -- would be beyond awesome. But that should be backgrounded and seen only through Roxy's eyes, because this is a request about her, not about, say, PM's epic quest to survive exile in the alpha timeline.
Mostly I want the practical details of Roxy's childhood. Like, who took care of her as a baby? What did she (and the carapacians) eat before she found her appearifier and starting stealing pumpkins? When, how, and why did she discover the internet? (Side-question: do the carapacians have internet access?) What were her emotional reactions to growing up so visibly different from her neighbors, and then learning the fate of humanity? Roxy strikes me as a very, very lonely person, which is interesting since in a lot of ways she's the least socially isolated one of the alpha kids... except that all her friends and neighbors are aliens. So how did that situation WORK?
In the case of art, I'd love a scene with Roxy and the carapacians working together at some task to maintain their floating habitat -- fishing, making salt from seawater, repairing rain cisterns, riding out a hurricane, or just sitting around a driftwood fire and cooking mutant seagulls for dinner. Stuff like that.
-----
E) Alternia had an interstellar empire as far back as the Sufferer's day, so what personal and/or cultural factors made Mindfang choose to stay on her home planet instead of becoming a space pirate? Or just tell me about the Alternia of her youth and how she grew up and found her calling -- the mix of high tech and staunch traditionalism is particularly interesting. I mean, this is a planet with FTL starships, yet Redglare comes hunting Mindfang with a dragon rather than a bomber or jet fighter, and Mindfang's fleet seems almost stuck in the Age of Sail. How and why are those technology levels integrated, and does that also explain why Mindfang kept a paper journal instead of an electronic one?
AKA the request in which my world-building obsession really got away from me. Sorry about that! (*is not actually sorry at all*)
Screw romance, plot, and epic drama. Instead, talk to me about Marquise Spinneret Mindfang (née Aranea Serket) in the context of her society. Tell me about growing up on Alternia in that mish-mash of technology levels. Tell me about how trolls chose their adult callings in the days before automatic conscription into the space fleet and banishment from their homeworld. How did the economy work when adults were still present? What was done via automated machines, what was done by genetically modified drones, and what was done by hand -- and WHY? What did kids do to support themselves if they lived in or near "civilization," and what were the rules for mingling (or not mingling) with adults? (Sub-question: did Mindfang grow up in the middle of nowhere or on the edges of a city? Either way, how did that affect her?) Did Mindfang resent parts of her culture or did she accept it wholeheartedly, and in either case how did that lead to her career as a pirate? (Sub-question: what happens to lusii once their trolls are grown? Could spidermom not stand the gravitational force of breaking orbit, so Mindfang took her to sea instead?) There are all kinds of things to think about!
For art, I guess the best thing would be a picture of Mindfang moving through a busy street or waterfront scene, young Aranea Serket daydreaming in that time period's equivalent of school, spidermom up in the rigging of a ship while Mindfang writes in her journal on the deck and a starship flashes by in the background, or something else that illustrates both Mindfang's world and her place in it.
---------------
*rereads torrent of words*
...If I were in Homestuck, I'd be a Light player, wouldn't I?
*headdesk*
You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)