Dear AU Exchange Writer...
I'm requesting fic for everything.
General Likes: Hurt-comfort - all h/c tropes that don't infantilize anyone are delicious to me. Injured and stuck without medical care on another planet/behind enemy lines/etc, bedside vigils, tender caretaking, stoic characters pretending they are JUST FINE right up until they collapse - I love it all. The only thing I don't like is characters getting tons of care taking lavished on them for minor illnesses like colds - that hits my infantilization button. (But fevers with delirium are lovely, especially if they make characters babble secrets or true feelings that they'd never in a million years admit to if sober.) Emotional h/c is also excellent.
Loyalty, conflicting loyalties, being torn between a cause or job and the woman she loves - I adore all that. I love knight's vows, soldiers' camaraderie, and tight-knit groups - or being an outcast from a group.I love bonding through shared hardship or a shared hard job, through both being outcasts or both having a secret. I love characters who trust each other with their lives. I also love characters who don't trust each other for good reasons, but are forced to work together/depend on each other.
I like platonic and romantic relationships equally. I like characters entering new or dangerous emotional or sexual territory, like if they're control freaks or emotionally damaged and have never really relaxed and enjoyed themselves, or let themselves be vulnerable, or depended on another person, or lost control of their emotions or desires.
I like BDSM, especially if it's extremely informal (like, the characters might not have even heard the term, they just know they like being pinned down/tying up their girlfriend/etc). I like bruising (spontaneous or ornamental), and rough and/or frantic/desperate sex. I like "let's have sex because we might die tomorrow/we might not survive the war." I like fingering and frottage, especially when partly clothed, reaching into clothes, touching through clothes, etc. I like praise, bondage, honor bondage, and characters discovering kinks for the first time.
I like lavish descriptions of things, from food to clothing to scenery to the human body. I love sexy clothing, which could be slinky 40s dresses or battle-worn leathers. Scars and brands and tattoos are hot.
I like worldbuilding, whether it's of literal worlds or exploring the setting/culture of our real world. I love strange, beautiful/deadly, post-apocalyptic, and mysterious landscapes. I have a thing for ancient but still working, poorly understood machinery or magical items. I like any sort of survival narrative.
I like any kind of writing, from completely straightforward to 5 Things to any sort of odd format that serves the story. I even like second person if there's a reason for it.
General DNWs: Bodily waste other than blood, sweat, and tears. Incest. Anyone under 16 having sex. Non-canonical pregnancy and major focus on canonical pregnancy, human babies (kittens, lizard alien babies, etc, are fine.) Issuefic, terminal illness, dementia. A/B/O, PWP.
Dark Tower - Stephen King
Group: Roland Deschain & Susannah Dean & Eddie Dean & Jake Chambers & Oy
Group: Roland Deschain/Susan Delgado
Roland Deschain
Susan Delgado
Feel free to include any other canon characters with the exception of the ones in the DNWs.
DNW: Susannah's pregnancy/baby. Mia. Father Callahan. Stephen King as an actual character - I liked the metafictional aspects, that was just one step too far with them for me. Pimples.
ALL: Space Opera AU
A huge universe to explore, but a universe that's moved on and is rickety and not quite right; ships whose hyperspace drives may or may not still work so you don't know until it's too late whether they'll take you to the right destination or drive you insane (or if the AI is insane itself and is going to take its madness out on you) or if you'll ever come back. Are planetary mechanics changing, so seasons last for generations or one side of a planet is perpetual summer?
Do they need to find the planet that has the Tower, or is the Tower something else? Is Oy an alien creature? Do Eddie and Susannah and Jake need to learn to fly spaceships? Is the mark of the gunslinger that they're STILL using gunpowder and bullets even though no one else in the galaxy has for thousands of years, and how might that combine with only thin metal or plastic walls keeping out the vacuum?
Feel free to combine this one with any of the other freeforms, i.e., maybe Susan is leading the ka-tet with or instead of Roland, or the canon ka-tet finds an abandoned but working spaceship or goes through a door into a space opera world.
ALL: Canon Divergence AU
ALL: Character meets the parallel universe counterpart of their dead SO
ALL: Crossover - Shared Universe AU
ALL: Dimension hopping to find a timeline that isn't doomed
ALL: Going back in time to fix the future
ALL: Groundhog Day timeloop
Dark Tower - Stephen King: A different configuration of DT characters as a ka-tet
Dark Tower - Stephen King: Another turn of the wheel
Dark Tower - Stephen King: Other Stephen King characters as a ka-tet
Dark Tower - Stephen King: Susan Delgado as Gunslinger
I really like canon AUs in this fandom, and one of the fun things about it is how many AU premises are actually possible within canon: there are other worlds than these. A lot of these prompts are pretty self-explanatory - do whatever seems fun.
Do they go back in time to try to save Susan or Gabrielle, or keep the Horn of Eld, or have Jericho Hill turn out differently? Do they try to save the present-day ka-tet? How does that work with the canon paradox issues? Or is there more accidental changing the past, like happened with Roland and Jake, with unexpected consequences?
Does our ka-tet walk into the world of The Stand, or keep exploring the other universe that also had the Superflu? Did some or all of Roland's original ka-tet (and/or Susan) survive, with or without him? Do they join up with the present-day ka-tet? Do some DT characters who were never in it end up in it, like some of the Sisters of Oriza or an escapee from Lud? What if David is still with Roland?
Does Susan have a counterpart in our world, and in what time period? Or is Susan the one who meets an alternate Roland? What if some of the current ka-tet were drawn earlier or later than they were? (If you do that one, I'd like Susannah to still have some kind of mental/physical disability, even if it's not the same one or not acquired the same way - that feels really key to her character. Similarly, if Eddie was never an addict, I think he should still have some comparable issue (could just be emotional damage.)
For other King characters in a ka-tet, I'm especially fond of Carrie and Sue from Carrie, Charlie from Firestarter, Trisha from The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Dinah from "The Langoliers," Mrs. Todd from "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut," and literally everyone in The Stand and Duma Key. But feel free to grab anyone you like from any books or stories I've read based on my Stephen King tag, or you can ask if I've read or how I feel about something via the mod.
You can find me going on and on about Dark Tower and what I like about the characters in my Stephen King tag, if that's helpful.
Punisher (TV 2017)
Group: Frank Castle & David Lieberman & Sarah Lieberman (Punisher TV)
Group: Frank Castle/David Lieberman/Sarah Lieberman (Punisher TV)
Group: Frank Castle & Leo Lieberman (Punisher TV)
Group: Frank Castle/Billy Russo (Punisher TV)
Note: Feel free to include any of the canon characters in a story if it suits. Karen and Curtis are my favorites of the ones not in the tagset.
ALL: All Characters Genderswapped
I'm not usually into genderswaps but I think it would be really interesting in this canon. I'm thinking of this as "always a woman/man" gender swap, not something that happens during the story because of magic or transitioning. I'd like if it kept close to the gritty realism aspect of the series in terms of it not being a gender-equal society, but everything is the same except women got into Special Forces earlier than in canon/RL.
I could see some of female! Billy's fucked-upness coming from gender expectations placed on women, and her being much more constantly aware of what those are, while female!Frank might try to ignore and just bulldoze through them. Were they the first women to get into Special Forces, or were they in the second or third wave? If you had the veteran's group appear (like if you set it post-canon or had Frank in it earlier) it would probably be specifically for female vets. How would everyone's lives have been different, and how would they have been the same? I'm fine with including sexual trauma if you think it fits - it's a major issue in RL (actually, it is for male military personnel too.)
ALL: Apocalypse/Survival
This might be a good one for Frank & Leo. I am a sucker for tough guys and young (but also tough in their own way) girls making their way across a post-apocalyptic landscape. If you do that one, please either leave it open whether her family is still alive somewhere, or have them actively trying to get her back to them - please no dead Liebermans however implausible their survival might be. ;) Or else it's the post-apocalyptic Liebermans, inexplicably surviving though to outward appearances they shouldn't be able to, taking in loner Frank Castle who maybe hasn't had any contact with anyone not trying to kill him in literally years. Or Frank and Billy making their way or chasing each other across the post-apocalyptic landscape.
I'm think of this one as a far-future, apocalypse happened ages ago AU rather than the canon timeline blowing up. I like the sort of apocalypse where there are remnants of ancient technology that no one understands any more but are still working/valuable/dangerous.
ALL: Dimension hopping to find a timeline that isn't doomed
ALL: Going back in time to fix the future
For any Frank-and-Liebermans group, I'm thinking of these as a Terminator/X-Men style "the whole future world is fucked" or a more personal but still really disastrous "everyone dies" future (so they're traveling back to canon-present or alternate canon timelines to fix something that happens post-canon) rather than traveling to canon-past or alternate canon timelines to undo stuff that actually happened in canon, like Frank's family's death. However, if you're doing Frank/Billy, Frank trying to undo Billy becoming a villain would be cool.
Both these AUs remind me of a big theme in the show, which is how soldiers who come home from the war are returning to a world that should be better, but they don't fit in and it feels wrong and too soft, and yet it is better. Maybe Frank, or Frank and Billy (at cross purposes), come back from the fucked future/bad timeline and have to deal with living in a world they're trying to save but don't know if they can ever live in. Maybe the Liebermans are from the fucked future and team up with Frank because he can do things they can't and also seems out of time/place, though for a completely different reason.
ALL: High Fantasy AU
Frank Castle as a damaged, outcast knight! Is David a wizard? Is Leo Frank's squire who helps repair his armor and weapons? Are they all on a quest together, or is Frank going back and forth between the apparently abandoned keep where he and David are hiding, and Sarah's fortress/home in the village? Are Frank and Billy knights or dragonriders together, maybe chasing each other across some amazing magical landscape? There's some very romantic aspects to the series that I think would meld well with this AU - all the loyalty and love and broken idealism.
ALL: Hyperspace test pilot
I was thinking of this one for Frank/Billy though if you have an idea for the other groups, go ahead. Maybe you never know on each flight whether you'll come back, or come back sane; maybe it's so wonderful that you don't like coming back; maybe it's neither wonderful nor terrible, but so much its own thing you no longer fit in anywhere but onboard (shades of returning from war); maybe the ships are going off to fight so far across the galaxy that there's time dilation and the world has literally changed when you return.
You don't have to actually read the book to write this concept, as I'll tell you everything you need to know, but you could do a Gateway AU - it's a book by Frederik Pohl in which people find alien ships that they don't quite understand, so you can fly them, but you have no idea until it's too late where they're going or how long the trip will be or if you'll arrive somewhere you can't survive or somewhere that will make you rich or save the world. Some ships never return at all; some return with the pilots dead.
Are the ships sentient? Is one of the characters the ship, or the ship's AI? Do the ghosts of dead pilots, or pilots who uploaded their souls into the computer, haunt the ships?
Punisher Groups
I love Frank Castle so much, it's ridiculous. If you can capture some of his immense capacity for both heartbreaking tenderness and horrific violence, how he's trying to make himself into an emotionless killing machine because feelings hurt so damn much yet keeps getting into emotionally intense relationships that both terrify him and bring out the best in him, I will be a very happy camper.
I love hurt/comfort and could read infinite reams of him getting taken care of after being beaten half to death, or of him caring for someone else, whether physically or emotionally. For a man with such amazingly dysfunctional ways of dealing with his own emotions, he's surprisingly good at handling difficult emotional situations involving other people's feelings.
II'm a multishipper and am primarily interested in the relationship rather than exactly what sort of relationship it is. If you take the sexy option for the ones that have one, I'm more interested in sex that illuminates character than in sex that's primarily about being hot. (If you can do both, awesome!)
Frank Castle & David "Micro" Lieberman & Sarah Lieberman
Frank Castle/David "Micro" Lieberman/Sarah Lieberman
So, obviously I really like Frank and the Liebermans. I would be equally happy with their odd-but-it-works canon relationship where Sarah and David are married and Frank is their friend, or one where they're in a threesome. If the latter, I'd prefer all three to be involved rather than a V configuration. If you write one of these pairings, I'd be happy to also have kids be in the story, or not and have them be on vacation with their grandparents or whatever.
I love them all SO MUCH. The domestic squabbling! The awkward conversations! Frank pouting over not getting a sandwich! Frank making David soup! "My friend is dying!" Sarah and Frank's accidental courtship! Sarah and David's awkward but super-hot bathroom sex! What I mostly missed in the show was all three of them interacting at the same time, which is why I requested it.
Frank Castle & Leo Lieberman
I loved their interactions and could read an infinite amount of Frank being a surrogate dad. Leo felt like such a real character, and I loved that we got to see her in so many different situations, including being quite heroic in a plausible manner. I loved how Frank supported her and cared for her, and how she was so open-hearted toward him. Does he ever teach her some of what he knows that might interest her, like fixing cars or other stuff? Rescue her again? I like role reversal - what if for some reason he needed her help?
We didn't see him show his dark side so much with her, as he did with Zach in the scene with the knife, so that would also be interesting to explore - what if he pulled something along those lines with her, where he means well but is being weird/terrifying/wildly inappropriate? (NOT IN A SEXUAL WAY.) I could see that happening if he started teaching her how to shoot or disassemble/assemble a gun, and ended up telling her or teaching stuff she really doesn't need to know. How would that go down, and how would he pull it back or make it right?
Frank Castle/Billy Russo
Please be inspired by "Goddamn, Frankie. I love to watch you work." That was the moment that completely sold me on the pairing. Billy's unabashed lust as he drapes himself over the bars! Frank's shellshocked, blood-spattered upward glance! I couldn't believe I was seeing something that hot and dark and weird and perverse on TV.
I also liked how it was preceded, with Frank's betrayal and Billy's manipulation but also remnants of genuine, though battered and twisted, feeling. Who knows, but I did get the impression that Billy really had planned to give Frank the quick, clean death he promised, and on some level did feel sort of bad for him, though not enough to do anything about it. Their friendship felt as if it had been very real, and in some way still was: you don't get that angry with someone unless you still care about the relationship on some level. Shattered love, rage and hate, scraps of inappropriate, resentful caring: this is the ultimate love/hate pairing.
So, be as dark and twisted as you like, just please avoid any super-gross or really graphically violent descriptions. That is, having sex while covered in blood is fine, but please don't do the written equivalent of the broken mirror scene. Other than that, go to town with hatesex, beating the hell out of each other somehow leads to sex, or just inappropriate sexual tension.
Dubcon is fine if it's the semi-mutual sort where they're manipulating or deceiving each other, sex pollened (even if it's Billy who released the sex pollen, I'd still count that as dub rather than non), etc. I'd like them on equal or constantly shifting ground or tables turned, not one outright forcing the other. Would also be down with "villain made them do it."
One hard DNW for this pairing: if you do anything along the lines of "covered in someone else's blood/just finished murdering someone/etc," the murdered person or persons must be a bad guy who deserved it. Otherwise it's a huge squick.
The Stand - Stephen King
Group: Jenny Engstrom & Lloyd Henreid & Whitney Horgan & Randall Flagg
Dayna Jurgens
Larry Underwood
Nadine Cross
Nick Andros
Feel free to mix-and-match, or include any canon characters, including ones not in the tagset. I like everyone. I'm a multishipper generally so you can sell me on anything, but I especially like FF with Dayna and Nadine and Jenny, with each other in any combination or with any woman of your choice.
DNW: I'm not crazy about pregnancy and babies; if you want to keep any canon pregnant characters pregnant (it's hard for me to imagine Fran NOT pregnant), that's fine but I'd prefer that their pregnancy not be the main thing going on in the story. I'm OK with bittersweet endings along the lines of canon - if someone dies, I like the canon sort of "died heroically/not in vain/fulfilling their goals even if their goals were terrible/bonkers (i.e., Trashcan Man)" deaths. Please no endings where someone is left alive but mentally broken, or dies pointlessly.
ALL: Canon Divergence AU
The Stand: Different characters end up in Las Vegas and Boulder
ALL: female characters are the major players
What if Flagg was killed or driven away from Vegas, but the other Vegas characters survived and had to pick up the pieces without him? (If you pick the group for this, feel free to leave Flagg out of it, or include him in the form of unsettling dreams that might be traumatic nightmares or might be more than that.) What if Whitney Horgan had actually managed to incite an uprising? What if his group had successfully escaped, with or without Lloyd - would Flagg have pursued them?
What if Flagg and Abagail had their communities in different places, and so some meetings and confrontations played out differently because of who was already there? What if Nick went to Vegas instead of Tom? What if Nadine chose differently? What if she ended up in Vegas but still in her right mind? What if Flagg picked someone else to play demon lover with? It wouldn't have to be a woman. If he wanted a consort/boy toy rather than an incubator, he could have picked, say, Larry.
I really liked how the communities weren't a clear split between good and evil, with apparently basically decent people like Angie Hirschfeld ending up in Vegas and some real jerks in Boulder. What made people choose as they did? What if choice or chance led them another way?
What if the story emphasis was different in that the women got the most focus and drove most of the action? What minor characters would have become major or leads? Would the story have come out differently, or would it be a case of "the more things change, the more they stay the same," or only differently in some apparently small but actually very significant ways? How would Nadine's story have changed (would it have changed?) if women had been the movers and shakers?
ALL: Crossover - Shared Universe AU
What if some of the Stand characters went through a door into Mid-World, or the ka-tet found the Stand universe instead of the one that was one dimension removed? What if the Shop had been more successful with their Firestarter experiments, and having powers was what made you immune to Captain Trips?
You can check my Stephen King tag for my other favorite books of his. If you're not sure if I read or liked a book, please ask via mod.
ALL: Dimension hopping to find a timeline that isn't doomed
ALL: Going back in time to fix the future
ALL: Groundhog Day timeloop
Are they trying to fix the nuclear explosion, or the bomb in the Free Zone, or Nadine and Harold's bad choices, or the Superflu itself? Is there one group or person trying to fix things, and someone else trying to make sure they stay the same? (Feel free to handwave or not explain why this is possible, I'm much more interested in what they do than in why it's happening.) Or something smaller, like Rita overdosing? Or something much more personal? It could also involve something that didn't actually happen in canon. There's such an emphasis on individual decisions causing huge changes, like the chain of events that led to the Superflu getting out, that I'd love to see some of the myriad possibilities.
You can find me going on and on about The Stand and what I like about these characters in my Stephen King tag, if that's helpful.
Crossposted to https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2205894.html. Comment here or there.
General Likes: Hurt-comfort - all h/c tropes that don't infantilize anyone are delicious to me. Injured and stuck without medical care on another planet/behind enemy lines/etc, bedside vigils, tender caretaking, stoic characters pretending they are JUST FINE right up until they collapse - I love it all. The only thing I don't like is characters getting tons of care taking lavished on them for minor illnesses like colds - that hits my infantilization button. (But fevers with delirium are lovely, especially if they make characters babble secrets or true feelings that they'd never in a million years admit to if sober.) Emotional h/c is also excellent.
Loyalty, conflicting loyalties, being torn between a cause or job and the woman she loves - I adore all that. I love knight's vows, soldiers' camaraderie, and tight-knit groups - or being an outcast from a group.I love bonding through shared hardship or a shared hard job, through both being outcasts or both having a secret. I love characters who trust each other with their lives. I also love characters who don't trust each other for good reasons, but are forced to work together/depend on each other.
I like platonic and romantic relationships equally. I like characters entering new or dangerous emotional or sexual territory, like if they're control freaks or emotionally damaged and have never really relaxed and enjoyed themselves, or let themselves be vulnerable, or depended on another person, or lost control of their emotions or desires.
I like BDSM, especially if it's extremely informal (like, the characters might not have even heard the term, they just know they like being pinned down/tying up their girlfriend/etc). I like bruising (spontaneous or ornamental), and rough and/or frantic/desperate sex. I like "let's have sex because we might die tomorrow/we might not survive the war." I like fingering and frottage, especially when partly clothed, reaching into clothes, touching through clothes, etc. I like praise, bondage, honor bondage, and characters discovering kinks for the first time.
I like lavish descriptions of things, from food to clothing to scenery to the human body. I love sexy clothing, which could be slinky 40s dresses or battle-worn leathers. Scars and brands and tattoos are hot.
I like worldbuilding, whether it's of literal worlds or exploring the setting/culture of our real world. I love strange, beautiful/deadly, post-apocalyptic, and mysterious landscapes. I have a thing for ancient but still working, poorly understood machinery or magical items. I like any sort of survival narrative.
I like any kind of writing, from completely straightforward to 5 Things to any sort of odd format that serves the story. I even like second person if there's a reason for it.
General DNWs: Bodily waste other than blood, sweat, and tears. Incest. Anyone under 16 having sex. Non-canonical pregnancy and major focus on canonical pregnancy, human babies (kittens, lizard alien babies, etc, are fine.) Issuefic, terminal illness, dementia. A/B/O, PWP.
Dark Tower - Stephen King
Group: Roland Deschain & Susannah Dean & Eddie Dean & Jake Chambers & Oy
Group: Roland Deschain/Susan Delgado
Roland Deschain
Susan Delgado
Feel free to include any other canon characters with the exception of the ones in the DNWs.
DNW: Susannah's pregnancy/baby. Mia. Father Callahan. Stephen King as an actual character - I liked the metafictional aspects, that was just one step too far with them for me. Pimples.
ALL: Space Opera AU
A huge universe to explore, but a universe that's moved on and is rickety and not quite right; ships whose hyperspace drives may or may not still work so you don't know until it's too late whether they'll take you to the right destination or drive you insane (or if the AI is insane itself and is going to take its madness out on you) or if you'll ever come back. Are planetary mechanics changing, so seasons last for generations or one side of a planet is perpetual summer?
Do they need to find the planet that has the Tower, or is the Tower something else? Is Oy an alien creature? Do Eddie and Susannah and Jake need to learn to fly spaceships? Is the mark of the gunslinger that they're STILL using gunpowder and bullets even though no one else in the galaxy has for thousands of years, and how might that combine with only thin metal or plastic walls keeping out the vacuum?
Feel free to combine this one with any of the other freeforms, i.e., maybe Susan is leading the ka-tet with or instead of Roland, or the canon ka-tet finds an abandoned but working spaceship or goes through a door into a space opera world.
ALL: Canon Divergence AU
ALL: Character meets the parallel universe counterpart of their dead SO
ALL: Crossover - Shared Universe AU
ALL: Dimension hopping to find a timeline that isn't doomed
ALL: Going back in time to fix the future
ALL: Groundhog Day timeloop
Dark Tower - Stephen King: A different configuration of DT characters as a ka-tet
Dark Tower - Stephen King: Another turn of the wheel
Dark Tower - Stephen King: Other Stephen King characters as a ka-tet
Dark Tower - Stephen King: Susan Delgado as Gunslinger
I really like canon AUs in this fandom, and one of the fun things about it is how many AU premises are actually possible within canon: there are other worlds than these. A lot of these prompts are pretty self-explanatory - do whatever seems fun.
Do they go back in time to try to save Susan or Gabrielle, or keep the Horn of Eld, or have Jericho Hill turn out differently? Do they try to save the present-day ka-tet? How does that work with the canon paradox issues? Or is there more accidental changing the past, like happened with Roland and Jake, with unexpected consequences?
Does our ka-tet walk into the world of The Stand, or keep exploring the other universe that also had the Superflu? Did some or all of Roland's original ka-tet (and/or Susan) survive, with or without him? Do they join up with the present-day ka-tet? Do some DT characters who were never in it end up in it, like some of the Sisters of Oriza or an escapee from Lud? What if David is still with Roland?
Does Susan have a counterpart in our world, and in what time period? Or is Susan the one who meets an alternate Roland? What if some of the current ka-tet were drawn earlier or later than they were? (If you do that one, I'd like Susannah to still have some kind of mental/physical disability, even if it's not the same one or not acquired the same way - that feels really key to her character. Similarly, if Eddie was never an addict, I think he should still have some comparable issue (could just be emotional damage.)
For other King characters in a ka-tet, I'm especially fond of Carrie and Sue from Carrie, Charlie from Firestarter, Trisha from The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Dinah from "The Langoliers," Mrs. Todd from "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut," and literally everyone in The Stand and Duma Key. But feel free to grab anyone you like from any books or stories I've read based on my Stephen King tag, or you can ask if I've read or how I feel about something via the mod.
You can find me going on and on about Dark Tower and what I like about the characters in my Stephen King tag, if that's helpful.
Punisher (TV 2017)
Group: Frank Castle & David Lieberman & Sarah Lieberman (Punisher TV)
Group: Frank Castle/David Lieberman/Sarah Lieberman (Punisher TV)
Group: Frank Castle & Leo Lieberman (Punisher TV)
Group: Frank Castle/Billy Russo (Punisher TV)
Note: Feel free to include any of the canon characters in a story if it suits. Karen and Curtis are my favorites of the ones not in the tagset.
ALL: All Characters Genderswapped
I'm not usually into genderswaps but I think it would be really interesting in this canon. I'm thinking of this as "always a woman/man" gender swap, not something that happens during the story because of magic or transitioning. I'd like if it kept close to the gritty realism aspect of the series in terms of it not being a gender-equal society, but everything is the same except women got into Special Forces earlier than in canon/RL.
I could see some of female! Billy's fucked-upness coming from gender expectations placed on women, and her being much more constantly aware of what those are, while female!Frank might try to ignore and just bulldoze through them. Were they the first women to get into Special Forces, or were they in the second or third wave? If you had the veteran's group appear (like if you set it post-canon or had Frank in it earlier) it would probably be specifically for female vets. How would everyone's lives have been different, and how would they have been the same? I'm fine with including sexual trauma if you think it fits - it's a major issue in RL (actually, it is for male military personnel too.)
ALL: Apocalypse/Survival
This might be a good one for Frank & Leo. I am a sucker for tough guys and young (but also tough in their own way) girls making their way across a post-apocalyptic landscape. If you do that one, please either leave it open whether her family is still alive somewhere, or have them actively trying to get her back to them - please no dead Liebermans however implausible their survival might be. ;) Or else it's the post-apocalyptic Liebermans, inexplicably surviving though to outward appearances they shouldn't be able to, taking in loner Frank Castle who maybe hasn't had any contact with anyone not trying to kill him in literally years. Or Frank and Billy making their way or chasing each other across the post-apocalyptic landscape.
I'm think of this one as a far-future, apocalypse happened ages ago AU rather than the canon timeline blowing up. I like the sort of apocalypse where there are remnants of ancient technology that no one understands any more but are still working/valuable/dangerous.
ALL: Dimension hopping to find a timeline that isn't doomed
ALL: Going back in time to fix the future
For any Frank-and-Liebermans group, I'm thinking of these as a Terminator/X-Men style "the whole future world is fucked" or a more personal but still really disastrous "everyone dies" future (so they're traveling back to canon-present or alternate canon timelines to fix something that happens post-canon) rather than traveling to canon-past or alternate canon timelines to undo stuff that actually happened in canon, like Frank's family's death. However, if you're doing Frank/Billy, Frank trying to undo Billy becoming a villain would be cool.
Both these AUs remind me of a big theme in the show, which is how soldiers who come home from the war are returning to a world that should be better, but they don't fit in and it feels wrong and too soft, and yet it is better. Maybe Frank, or Frank and Billy (at cross purposes), come back from the fucked future/bad timeline and have to deal with living in a world they're trying to save but don't know if they can ever live in. Maybe the Liebermans are from the fucked future and team up with Frank because he can do things they can't and also seems out of time/place, though for a completely different reason.
ALL: High Fantasy AU
Frank Castle as a damaged, outcast knight! Is David a wizard? Is Leo Frank's squire who helps repair his armor and weapons? Are they all on a quest together, or is Frank going back and forth between the apparently abandoned keep where he and David are hiding, and Sarah's fortress/home in the village? Are Frank and Billy knights or dragonriders together, maybe chasing each other across some amazing magical landscape? There's some very romantic aspects to the series that I think would meld well with this AU - all the loyalty and love and broken idealism.
ALL: Hyperspace test pilot
I was thinking of this one for Frank/Billy though if you have an idea for the other groups, go ahead. Maybe you never know on each flight whether you'll come back, or come back sane; maybe it's so wonderful that you don't like coming back; maybe it's neither wonderful nor terrible, but so much its own thing you no longer fit in anywhere but onboard (shades of returning from war); maybe the ships are going off to fight so far across the galaxy that there's time dilation and the world has literally changed when you return.
You don't have to actually read the book to write this concept, as I'll tell you everything you need to know, but you could do a Gateway AU - it's a book by Frederik Pohl in which people find alien ships that they don't quite understand, so you can fly them, but you have no idea until it's too late where they're going or how long the trip will be or if you'll arrive somewhere you can't survive or somewhere that will make you rich or save the world. Some ships never return at all; some return with the pilots dead.
Are the ships sentient? Is one of the characters the ship, or the ship's AI? Do the ghosts of dead pilots, or pilots who uploaded their souls into the computer, haunt the ships?
Punisher Groups
I love Frank Castle so much, it's ridiculous. If you can capture some of his immense capacity for both heartbreaking tenderness and horrific violence, how he's trying to make himself into an emotionless killing machine because feelings hurt so damn much yet keeps getting into emotionally intense relationships that both terrify him and bring out the best in him, I will be a very happy camper.
I love hurt/comfort and could read infinite reams of him getting taken care of after being beaten half to death, or of him caring for someone else, whether physically or emotionally. For a man with such amazingly dysfunctional ways of dealing with his own emotions, he's surprisingly good at handling difficult emotional situations involving other people's feelings.
II'm a multishipper and am primarily interested in the relationship rather than exactly what sort of relationship it is. If you take the sexy option for the ones that have one, I'm more interested in sex that illuminates character than in sex that's primarily about being hot. (If you can do both, awesome!)
Frank Castle & David "Micro" Lieberman & Sarah Lieberman
Frank Castle/David "Micro" Lieberman/Sarah Lieberman
So, obviously I really like Frank and the Liebermans. I would be equally happy with their odd-but-it-works canon relationship where Sarah and David are married and Frank is their friend, or one where they're in a threesome. If the latter, I'd prefer all three to be involved rather than a V configuration. If you write one of these pairings, I'd be happy to also have kids be in the story, or not and have them be on vacation with their grandparents or whatever.
I love them all SO MUCH. The domestic squabbling! The awkward conversations! Frank pouting over not getting a sandwich! Frank making David soup! "My friend is dying!" Sarah and Frank's accidental courtship! Sarah and David's awkward but super-hot bathroom sex! What I mostly missed in the show was all three of them interacting at the same time, which is why I requested it.
Frank Castle & Leo Lieberman
I loved their interactions and could read an infinite amount of Frank being a surrogate dad. Leo felt like such a real character, and I loved that we got to see her in so many different situations, including being quite heroic in a plausible manner. I loved how Frank supported her and cared for her, and how she was so open-hearted toward him. Does he ever teach her some of what he knows that might interest her, like fixing cars or other stuff? Rescue her again? I like role reversal - what if for some reason he needed her help?
We didn't see him show his dark side so much with her, as he did with Zach in the scene with the knife, so that would also be interesting to explore - what if he pulled something along those lines with her, where he means well but is being weird/terrifying/wildly inappropriate? (NOT IN A SEXUAL WAY.) I could see that happening if he started teaching her how to shoot or disassemble/assemble a gun, and ended up telling her or teaching stuff she really doesn't need to know. How would that go down, and how would he pull it back or make it right?
Frank Castle/Billy Russo
Please be inspired by "Goddamn, Frankie. I love to watch you work." That was the moment that completely sold me on the pairing. Billy's unabashed lust as he drapes himself over the bars! Frank's shellshocked, blood-spattered upward glance! I couldn't believe I was seeing something that hot and dark and weird and perverse on TV.
I also liked how it was preceded, with Frank's betrayal and Billy's manipulation but also remnants of genuine, though battered and twisted, feeling. Who knows, but I did get the impression that Billy really had planned to give Frank the quick, clean death he promised, and on some level did feel sort of bad for him, though not enough to do anything about it. Their friendship felt as if it had been very real, and in some way still was: you don't get that angry with someone unless you still care about the relationship on some level. Shattered love, rage and hate, scraps of inappropriate, resentful caring: this is the ultimate love/hate pairing.
So, be as dark and twisted as you like, just please avoid any super-gross or really graphically violent descriptions. That is, having sex while covered in blood is fine, but please don't do the written equivalent of the broken mirror scene. Other than that, go to town with hatesex, beating the hell out of each other somehow leads to sex, or just inappropriate sexual tension.
Dubcon is fine if it's the semi-mutual sort where they're manipulating or deceiving each other, sex pollened (even if it's Billy who released the sex pollen, I'd still count that as dub rather than non), etc. I'd like them on equal or constantly shifting ground or tables turned, not one outright forcing the other. Would also be down with "villain made them do it."
One hard DNW for this pairing: if you do anything along the lines of "covered in someone else's blood/just finished murdering someone/etc," the murdered person or persons must be a bad guy who deserved it. Otherwise it's a huge squick.
The Stand - Stephen King
Group: Jenny Engstrom & Lloyd Henreid & Whitney Horgan & Randall Flagg
Dayna Jurgens
Larry Underwood
Nadine Cross
Nick Andros
Feel free to mix-and-match, or include any canon characters, including ones not in the tagset. I like everyone. I'm a multishipper generally so you can sell me on anything, but I especially like FF with Dayna and Nadine and Jenny, with each other in any combination or with any woman of your choice.
DNW: I'm not crazy about pregnancy and babies; if you want to keep any canon pregnant characters pregnant (it's hard for me to imagine Fran NOT pregnant), that's fine but I'd prefer that their pregnancy not be the main thing going on in the story. I'm OK with bittersweet endings along the lines of canon - if someone dies, I like the canon sort of "died heroically/not in vain/fulfilling their goals even if their goals were terrible/bonkers (i.e., Trashcan Man)" deaths. Please no endings where someone is left alive but mentally broken, or dies pointlessly.
ALL: Canon Divergence AU
The Stand: Different characters end up in Las Vegas and Boulder
ALL: female characters are the major players
What if Flagg was killed or driven away from Vegas, but the other Vegas characters survived and had to pick up the pieces without him? (If you pick the group for this, feel free to leave Flagg out of it, or include him in the form of unsettling dreams that might be traumatic nightmares or might be more than that.) What if Whitney Horgan had actually managed to incite an uprising? What if his group had successfully escaped, with or without Lloyd - would Flagg have pursued them?
What if Flagg and Abagail had their communities in different places, and so some meetings and confrontations played out differently because of who was already there? What if Nick went to Vegas instead of Tom? What if Nadine chose differently? What if she ended up in Vegas but still in her right mind? What if Flagg picked someone else to play demon lover with? It wouldn't have to be a woman. If he wanted a consort/boy toy rather than an incubator, he could have picked, say, Larry.
I really liked how the communities weren't a clear split between good and evil, with apparently basically decent people like Angie Hirschfeld ending up in Vegas and some real jerks in Boulder. What made people choose as they did? What if choice or chance led them another way?
What if the story emphasis was different in that the women got the most focus and drove most of the action? What minor characters would have become major or leads? Would the story have come out differently, or would it be a case of "the more things change, the more they stay the same," or only differently in some apparently small but actually very significant ways? How would Nadine's story have changed (would it have changed?) if women had been the movers and shakers?
ALL: Crossover - Shared Universe AU
What if some of the Stand characters went through a door into Mid-World, or the ka-tet found the Stand universe instead of the one that was one dimension removed? What if the Shop had been more successful with their Firestarter experiments, and having powers was what made you immune to Captain Trips?
You can check my Stephen King tag for my other favorite books of his. If you're not sure if I read or liked a book, please ask via mod.
ALL: Dimension hopping to find a timeline that isn't doomed
ALL: Going back in time to fix the future
ALL: Groundhog Day timeloop
Are they trying to fix the nuclear explosion, or the bomb in the Free Zone, or Nadine and Harold's bad choices, or the Superflu itself? Is there one group or person trying to fix things, and someone else trying to make sure they stay the same? (Feel free to handwave or not explain why this is possible, I'm much more interested in what they do than in why it's happening.) Or something smaller, like Rita overdosing? Or something much more personal? It could also involve something that didn't actually happen in canon. There's such an emphasis on individual decisions causing huge changes, like the chain of events that led to the Superflu getting out, that I'd love to see some of the myriad possibilities.
You can find me going on and on about The Stand and what I like about these characters in my Stephen King tag, if that's helpful.
Crossposted to https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2205894.html. Comment here or there.