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. (Note: Please feel free to disregard this if you want to write Nepeta/Terezi porn. I am very okay with sex for that particular prompt! Just... only written porn, please; if art, let's keep it, oh, PG-13ish. Like, naked cuddles and kisses are good; full-frontal writhing bulges, not so much.)
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 2012 (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) I would like a story about Jade exploring Hellmurder Island, discovering the portals into the Medium, and having adventures in the strange new universe of Sburb. How much of the game exists before the players enter? Did she have any contact with the Black Queen, or had the Condesce already conquered Derse? Did she have any contact with the White Queen? How and why did she steal Jack Noir's fourth wall? If the Denizens existed (instead of being retroactively created upon the players' entries), were they awake and open to conversations? How much did she tell Rose and Dave about her adventures? (Did she take pictures of Roxy and Dirk so they would have some tangible record of their timelost wards?) Did she try to spark a resistance among the Dersites the way she founded a resistance movement on Earth? I have so many questions and would love some answers!
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 relationships with Jake, John, Rose, or Dave, 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 meteor lab, or at a computer trying to reverse-engineer Sburb, or on Prospit meeting with the White Queen, or whatever. Jade piloting a battleship with her stolen loot, or strifing with the skeleton zombies, or exploring the Sburb-related parts of Hellmurder Island would be extra awesome. (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, regardless of the main action. *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, whichever is easier for you. Anything from gen friendship to playful flirting to awkward first time adolescent attempts at sex would be equally welcome. I just want to see them being dangerous, adorable dorks together. (Roleplaying is always a plus. Yes, even during sex -- see above in re: awkward and adorkable.)
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 and/or blood to remind people that adorable doesn't equal harmless.
Also, if you want to write or draw sex, I prefer trolls to be at least a little xeno, and for there to be no difference in reproductive anatomy between male and female trolls, regardless of what form that reproductive anatomy takes.
-----
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'm especially 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.
---------------
So yeah, this is basically what I asked for last year, minus the Alternian world-building via Mindfang. I tweaked the Jade request so it's more specifically focused on exciting adventures!!! but beyond that, hey, the heart wants what it wants. Besides, everything else I thought about requesting turned out, on deeper reflection, to be a story I wanted to write, not just a story I wanted to read (or art I wanted to see), so... yeah. This is what I want and I will love you forever for filling one of these prompts.
You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
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. (Note: Please feel free to disregard this if you want to write Nepeta/Terezi porn. I am very okay with sex for that particular prompt! Just... only written porn, please; if art, let's keep it, oh, PG-13ish. Like, naked cuddles and kisses are good; full-frontal writhing bulges, not so much.)
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 2012 (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) I would like a story about Jade exploring Hellmurder Island, discovering the portals into the Medium, and having adventures in the strange new universe of Sburb. How much of the game exists before the players enter? Did she have any contact with the Black Queen, or had the Condesce already conquered Derse? Did she have any contact with the White Queen? How and why did she steal Jack Noir's fourth wall? If the Denizens existed (instead of being retroactively created upon the players' entries), were they awake and open to conversations? How much did she tell Rose and Dave about her adventures? (Did she take pictures of Roxy and Dirk so they would have some tangible record of their timelost wards?) Did she try to spark a resistance among the Dersites the way she founded a resistance movement on Earth? I have so many questions and would love some answers!
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 relationships with Jake, John, Rose, or Dave, 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 meteor lab, or at a computer trying to reverse-engineer Sburb, or on Prospit meeting with the White Queen, or whatever. Jade piloting a battleship with her stolen loot, or strifing with the skeleton zombies, or exploring the Sburb-related parts of Hellmurder Island would be extra awesome. (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, regardless of the main action. *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, whichever is easier for you. Anything from gen friendship to playful flirting to awkward first time adolescent attempts at sex would be equally welcome. I just want to see them being dangerous, adorable dorks together. (Roleplaying is always a plus. Yes, even during sex -- see above in re: awkward and adorkable.)
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 and/or blood to remind people that adorable doesn't equal harmless.
Also, if you want to write or draw sex, I prefer trolls to be at least a little xeno, and for there to be no difference in reproductive anatomy between male and female trolls, regardless of what form that reproductive anatomy takes.
-----
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'm especially 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.
---------------
So yeah, this is basically what I asked for last year, minus the Alternian world-building via Mindfang. I tweaked the Jade request so it's more specifically focused on exciting adventures!!! but beyond that, hey, the heart wants what it wants. Besides, everything else I thought about requesting turned out, on deeper reflection, to be a story I wanted to write, not just a story I wanted to read (or art I wanted to see), so... yeah. This is what I want and I will love you forever for filling one of these prompts.
You can also read this entry on Dreamwidth, where there are currently (
comments)