Yuletide Letter
Oct. 23rd, 2015 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lirillithI always forget this part, so -- hello, writer! I hope you don't mind long letters! And I hope you're able to find something useful-to-you in this wall of text.
Each section has its own cut, so you can go back to the top page of my journal and navigate that way. I'm so sorry this letter got so out of hand.
A lot of my prompts may sound shippy, but I swear to you that just because I carry on at length about the dynamic between two people doesn't mean that I'm just being diplomatic when I say I'd also like gen about their friendship. (If I desperately require shippy fic and nothing but, I'll beg pathetically for it, and have in the past.) It's just that relationships, romantic or otherwise, give a jumping-off point, and I do tend to think of prompts in the form of "A and B in [time] and [place,] what do they do, or what do they have to say about [event]?" whether or not they're banging.
And that's the form a lot of my prompts will take, which will either work for you or drive you mad. All I can say is that while I do want my likes and dislikes taken into account, my prompts are just loose suggestions. If you have ideas that are inspiring you, go to town! Some of the best gift fics I've ever received went in directions I'd never have anticipated if I'd had to write something for my request. I hesitate to say "I'll like anything you write" because there are certainly things people could write that I wouldn't like, but historically, I've gotten awesome gifts every time, so the odds are good that I will.
The general stuff: I would like fic to end on a hopeful or positive note overall without glossing or candy-coating painful canonical events. I don't want an overall dark or hopeless tone, though bittersweet is okay, and I don't want the content to go darker than canon.
Likes:
- Fic that gets into greater depth with some canon events than canon itself did -- exploring the emotional fallout of that dramatic revelation in the middle of the final battle, H/C as characters recuperate during a timeskip, two characters getting a chance to talk when they never had much of a chance onscreen -- meaning I don't want the kind of AUs that just reset or leave behind canon. Canon-divergence, episode tags, and missing scenes are all good.
- The topic I refer to as "memory-fuckery," to cover full retrograde amnesia, memory-alteration, planting artificial memories, removing memories, all that stuff. This is something I tend to like in canons; I don't know how I'd feel about a fic that introduced it to a canon where it wasn't already present. But I'm *definitely* into fics where canonical memory issues are explored: amnesiacs regaining fragmentary memories, clones and constructs dealing with the revelation that all their memories are fake, dealing with memories you know are fake but which feel real, or with two sets of memories, etc.
- People finding companionship and love after an extended period of isolation, whatever that means for them (from mundane social isolation, bullying, or pushing people away, to a lifetime or centuries spent in solitary confinement or suspended animation or surrounded by the undead. My fandoms run the gamut.) Much of my love of the found-family trope is in that context.
- I enjoy dialog and strong character voices, regardless of POV (first-, second-, and third-person are all fine, and no preference on tense either) and relatedly, when I talk about shippy stuff, my default starting point is pre-relationship, flirting/banter/UST.
- Worldbuilding, magic meta, superpower meta, mundane details in fantastic settings, mundane applications of superpowers or magic.
- I said I wanted hopeful/happy endings, but I'm not at ALL averse to angst and pain on the way there.
- Food. Fantasy worldbuilding via food or drink, characters enjoying and seeking out different cuisines, characters enjoying the taste of their alcohol and not just how drunk it gets them (everyone knows about wine snobs, but have you spoken to people who are really into good beers, or spirits?) Food porn in general, not in the sense of "bring food into the porn" (that's actually a mild squick) but the kind of thing you get in Fumi Yoshinaga manga; it doesn't have to hinge on visuals.
- On the shippy side of things, very rarely do I find instantaneous powerful physical attraction interesting or compelling at all. (Though an instant "whoa, she's so cool" or clicking at their first meeting because they make each other laugh is a different matter.) I tend to favor pairings where they start out as close friends, or where they start out at odds and gradually start to respect and like each other as they're forced by circumstances to work together. If more of my canons were hospitable to arranged-marriage tropes (or I were more into AUs) I'd probably be all over those, but I tend to be picky about what canons they fit.
- I love awkward faily first times, awkward faily additional times (and awkward first anythings, not just sex -- I loved the hand-holding fails in Ore Monogatari, for instance), couples who can laugh and have fun in bed (and just in general), couples who fail utterly at being traditionally romantic, height/size differences in line with canon, pining before the couple gets together especially if it's followed by them getting together, long-distance relationships that work out though the downsides are treated realistically, people messing with each other's hair, hand-holding and hand appreciation, domesticity, and couples trading off who takes the lead depending on circumstances rather than one partner always dominating.
- On the explicitly sexual front: The aforementioned awkward sex, and if there's going to be dirty talk I prefer it be praise-based, awkward as hell, or both. Clothed or mostly clothed sex and frottage. Masturbation, especially coupled with pining. Hand and hair appreciation both go here too. Temperature play, and possibly relatedly, use of superpowers/magic powers during sex. Light xeno when a character has non-human features or forms. Couples taking things slow, and also couples falling into bed almost immediately once they get together (I often ship really rare pairs, I can't be picky.) Talking during sex in a non-dirty-talk way -- like, trying to carry on the pre-sex conversation until they get distracted into incoherence. I mentioned the laughter and humor during sex thing already, but more in the context of non-porn; I like them to be having fun with it whether the actual sex is explicit or faded-to-black.
Squicks, DNWs, etc.
The big one: For personal reasons, I'd prefer that stories avoid issues of infertility, miscarriage and stillbirth, unwanted or resented pregnancies (like "This was your idea! I never even wanted kids!" not "Man, I miss keeping my food down" -- the latter is fine) or pregnancies gone wrong in some way. Happy, healthy, wanted pregnancy is the only kind I want to see. You don't need to go anywhere near the topic of pregnancy! I'm only addressing this because a couple of canons that I request touch on the topic, which is a sensitive one for me.
Also DNW:
- Woobification or excusing of the actions of canonical villains. (I'm talking, like, Kefka, not sympathetic antagonists.)
- Non-con between any pairings I ship.
- Mundane AUs that remove magic or superpowers from a world where they exist, and most setting-change AUs in general.
- Okay, I don't know why I conflated the incest and sexual-abuse-of-children items, since the canon example I was thinking of involves consenting adults (and so does a lot of the incest that powers fandom), but I'm going to split them up. Apologies if you saw the pre-edit version of the letter. For incest, portrayal is a squick but references to canon relationships are fine; I don't mind if character A says to character B "you and your brother SURE ARE CLOSE," but I don't want to see them getting unusually close. And this only goes for canon situations; please no unusually-close-siblings where canon didn't provide them.
- And the second leg of that, underage and sexual abuse. Underage involving mid-teens or so is okay (I don't have a hard cutoff line, it varies by fandom) but I don't want a character's youthful appearance being emphasized and fetishized. Sexual abuse, or sexual content involving younger children, is an absolute no.
- Portrayal of the afterlife/what-happens-after-you-die in canons that don't touch on the subject: no for-real ghosts, no dead-characters-watching-from-the-afterlife, for most canons. If the subject is part of the canon cosmology, as with FF6 or Noragami, it's a different matter.
- On the sex front: Sex pollen, fuck-or-die and the like. Humiliation-based dirty talk. Intercrural. Excessive focus on bodily fluids and smells during sex, or sex featuring fluids that aren't traditionally part of sex, i.e. blood, vomit, etc. Foot fetishy stuff -- no mouths or even faces in contact with feet.
- Any reference at all to certain pairings I dislike, even in the past tense; I prefer they just be ignored, handwaved, or treated as simply a friendship. Yes, this goes for canon ships too at times.
- Also, cockroaches. (I wouldn't think this would come up in fanfic, but they keep popping up in canons -- THANKS, Benjamin January mysteries -- so I'm erring on the side of caution.)
Long Live the Queen || Elodie
I took great care to nominate all the Elodie-suitors who interested me the most (including Evrard, who didn't even have a canonical tag yet) and here I am requesting just Elodie. But the thing is, I'm quite happy with multiple options -- I'm interested in so many of Elodie's relationships, whatever form they take, and she's the sole unifying factor among the things I'd like to see. Like I said above about prompts, I tend to start from relationships, and they do really interest me here; but, for instance, I'd be just as interested in a fic about how Brin and Elodie navigate their respective marriages while maintaining their affair, as about how that affair itself gets underway. (Or both. Both is good.) Or I'd be interested in something getting in-depth with some element of Novan worldbuilding or Elodie's education. Some of my favorite moments in the game were descriptions of Elodie's specific lessons, delivering dinner menus like speeches and so on.
Also, reiterating from above: I don't want any exploration of the ending where Elodie's left infertile, even if that frees her to marry Brin or Briony, and if your story touches on pregnancy/childbirth/heir-begetting, I'd prefer it be a generally happy experience for all involved.
So with that in mind...
Elodie herself: I tend to play Elodie with a focus on academics as much as possible -- economics and accounting are usually how I get access to the Lumen crystal, for instance, and it kills me to have her pass up the hospital and the printing press out of ignorance. (SAY SOMETHING, Joslyn!) Obviously there are huge gaps in her knowledge, because I guess she slept through all her history classes at school, but I have her scrambling to catch up as much as possible. But my default playstyle doesn't work so well with every game path, so obviously you should write her the way it works best for you and the story you want to tell.
Brin: Brin really leaps into that "secret love" thing, doesn't she? Either she fell for Elodie like a ton of bricks at the ball, or she's making a calculated move to get in good with the naive young queen, or a semi-desperate effort at securing a partner of her own social class, since she seems pretty frustrated and bitter about her love life if you get the scene when Julianna's on the lam. All the options are interesting, you know? If you go with one of the more cynical motivations, I'd still prefer if she developed genuine feelings for Elodie over time, and I don't want her looking down on Elodie or gloating over how she's fooled this naive kid. (I realize I keep mentioning the naivete, even though Elodie has to be reasonably astute to have learned Brin's a romantic option for her; I guess it's something I'm assuming about how Brin would see Elodie. No need for you to project my hangups into your fic.)
And like I mentioned above, I'm very interested in how they make their marriages work (or not work); it sounds like Brin kind of relishes putting one over on Banion, given the way she talks about banging Julianna while he was courting her, but is Joslyn in the dark about the whole arrangement, too? I don't mean "take this f/f pairing and make it all about their het relationships-of-convenience," but it's a setup that interests me.
Evrard: You can tell how popular he is from the fact he didn't have a canonical tag before I nominated him. And I can sort of understand why. But for me, a lot of Elodie-ships are all about the ending. Elodie and Evrard's in-game interactions come off pretty generic, but the ending, where Evrard and his family provide Elodie with this oasis of normality and escape from palace life, pushed all the buttons that made me ship Youko/Rakushun back when I was watching Twelve Kingdoms. (Another great series about a teenage monarch with an improbable hair color learning how to rule! But not part of my request this year.) I just kind of want her to have a friend, you know? But I also love friends-to-lovers.
Another thing about Evrard, though -- maybe they really are just friends, but Elodie's incognito visits to the bakery keep coinciding with his sister Alice's evenings off, and Elodie and Alice gradually grow closer? I don't know, I'd just like to see some way for Elodie to romance Alice without going dark, and this might be a route to that?
Briony: Like with Evrard, it's all about the ending. I spent most of my Briony-romancing playthrough wanting to shake Briony very hard, and then the ending, where Briony's immaturity ends up giving Elodie a chance to be a silly teenage girl from time to time, redeemed the whole path for me. I think part of the reason Briony drove me bonkers, especially when I had to go into the forest with her to impress her with my heroism, is that by the time I was adept enough at the game to pull it off, I felt like a hardened veteran of the Novan political landscape, so Briony's youthful naivete and tactlessness really grated.
But Briony can also be delightful (check out her reaction if you trigger her parents' divorce then marry her dad) and Briony's also part of the key to marrying Kevan, which is an interesting ship in its own right. If you wanted to go in the direction of an Elodie/Kevan pairing instead, I wouldn't say no. Or maybe after Elodie and Briony get together they try to fix the tangled family web somehow? They don't have to succeed -- canon strongly implies Kevan is going to need someone else to imprint on to peel him off of Corisande -- but it seems like something Briony would try, and I'd like to see something help untangle that horrible traumatic family mess in a scenario where Elodie doesn't marry Kevan. (Also, while it's only IC for Kevan to think of his relationship with Jael as loving, I think it's clear from canon that this was fucked-up and abusive; I'd rather see at least some of the characters thinking as much.)
I also found Elodie's betrothal to Arisse's younger son Thaddeus pretty interesting -- how does that awkward wedding night of theirs, and its aftermath, play out in detail? By detail I don't necessarily mean sexually explicit, certainly not in a porny way, but I guess "unsexy and hideously awkward" can still qualify as explicit, depending on your approach. This canon definitely qualifies for the same caveat I've used before regarding underage: I don't mind underage content itself, but if you're dwelling on and really playing up a character's youth, especially in their physical features and development (inexperience is a different story) I'm probably going to get squicked.
One other thing: I'm ridiculously invested in Julianna/Selene considering how little screentime they have. I downloaded the beta build just to get a shot at letting them marry even if I didn't duel Togami. So if they show up, be kind to them, please?
Ore Monogatari || Suna, Takeo, Yamato
My prompts may sound Suna-centric, because at first he was my only requested character. Then I realized I'd be disappointed if Takeo and Yamato were totally absent, so I added them -- and if you want to write a fic that's centered on the two of them, with Suna continuing to be their resident sensible person in the background, go for it! It's hard to think exactly what to prompt, besides "fluff," but I think any of these ideas could be flipped around to be more about them and less about Suna's role. I would honestly like for the fic to be centered on/from-the-POV-of either Suna or Yamato, or some other character if you want to take an outsider-POV option (I didn't request Saijou or Ai but I love them both, and there they are in the tagset -- and I *adore* Takeo's parents, who aren't) since we get a lot of time in Takeo's head in canon.
Like so many people, I came out of Ore Monogatari totally adoring Suna. I love the way he's always functioning as the competent and reasonable person -- puncturing the Big Misunderstanding plots before they can start, calling the fire department to supplement Takeo's superheroics, retrieving Takeo's bag when he's thrown it skywards out of sheer joy over the idea of Valentine's chocolates -- and I love his friendship with Takeo. As a friendship! I don't think he's in love with Takeo, and I'd rather not see that interpretation in a fic. He loves the guy, but he's not in love with him, to me.
There are a couple of things I'd really love to see in fic. One is Suna/Saijou ship fic. Obviously this is optional, and I didn't even request Saijou, but I came out of her arc shipping them *hard,* and they have two more years of high school for things to develop, you know? Maybe they're in the same class in their third year, and Saijou's finally over Takeo, and Suna keeps taking an interest in her anyway. And Takeo and Yamato are delighted to get to play matchmaker again, and Yamato's delighted that she and Saijou can be friends after all. Maybe that works, maybe it doesn't, but Suna and Saijou could at least forge a strong enough friendship to keep them in contact into their college years... If you found this worked better for you from Saijou's perspective, that's great! I didn't request her because I didn't want to put too much emphasis on this prompt, not because the fic MUST be focused on one of the main trio.
The other idea I've been entertaining is just future-fic about the Takeo/Yamato/Suna trio dynamic. They're in their final year of college and Suna's assuring Yamato that Takeo's only avoiding her because he has a really good reason, there's no danger of him breaking up with you, btw I don't want to spoil any surprises but what's your ring size? He didn't actually know rings came in sizes and he kind of freaked out at me earlier. Suna as the best man at their wedding, Suna trying to keep Takeo from losing his mind when Rinko goes into labor, Suna assuring Takeo that no, he doesn't want to marry their daughter either. He could be happily involved in the background with someone (male or female) or happily single for life. Either option is fine! Despite having a ship for him, I understand where the asexual/aromantic headcanons for Suna come from; I don't want issuefic about aro-ace identity, but I don't have any objections to Suna staying unattached and uninterested without making a big production of it.
No Amami/Suna, please. At all.
I don't want to shortchange Takeo and Rinko -- they're SO cute, and I wouldn't have loved the show as much as I did if it weren't for all three main characters. I loved Rinko's surprising assertiveness and determination, and I enjoyed all the pastry porn that resulted from her talent for baking; if you wanted to focus on Rinko in culinary school with the guys as her supporting cast, that'd be awesome too. I absolutely don't want anything breaking up Takeo and Rinko. Did I say that already? Maybe it's just in my signup.
I'm sure there are lots of other possibilities, but maybe those will get you started? Please don't take my relatively short section (I mean, compared to some of my other requests; it's really long for letters in general, I know) here as a sign of favoritism. This anime filled me with pure giddy joy while it was airing, it was the highlight of its season, and I miss it terribly. Despite missing it I haven't yet transitioned over to the manga. I'm not worried about spoilers, since it doesn't seem like a shocking-plot-twist kind of series, but if you want to reference later-in-the-manga events, I may not catch the significance.
I Can't Understand What My Husband Is Saying || Kaoru and Hajime
If you got blocked on some other series and need a quick canon to consume, here's your anime! The episodes are each three minutes long (3:30 counting the credits.) That's not why I requested it, though. I requested it because it was one of the bright spots of last year for me, and I'd love more time with these guys: Kaoru's pregnancy, adjusting to parenthood, raising a mini-geek, just more slice-of-life stuff in general. Mayotama and Miki are welcome, as well as anyone else from their circle of friends, but Kaoru and Hajime and their relationship are what I'm here for.
This was the other canon calling for the pregnancy disclaimer, though. I mean, it's only IC for Kaoru to be craving cigarettes, wishing she could have a beer, or complaining about her heartburn, or for both of them to be scared-but-happy about the prospect of parenthood; I just don't want anything far afield from that, you know? Or you could do what the anime did for most of the second season and ignore the pregnancy storyline entirely, because I know this topic is a major DNW for some people.
And on the DNW front, I'd rather Mayotama's crush on Hajime be played down or avoided entirely.
I know there's a manga, but the parts that I've read were already adapted (very closely) into the anime, so it's the same as Ore Monogatari above -- I'm not going to catch references to events or info that weren't in the anime, so it'd work better if you presented it as new information.
Okay, to prompt something more specific than "just more of the series, please" -- filling in the spaces the series didn't cover. Post-series, dealing with the pregnancy and new parenthood, of course, but there's also their past. As an anime viewer, I felt like we got the outline of how Kaoru and Hajime got together, but there's still a lot of room for elaboration. Heck, this is one of the canons where I feel like sexual content would actually fit in the kind of story I'm interested in. (They were apparently each other's firsts. Hajime mentioned wanting an undo button.)
And there was that Mayotama-centric episode where Kaoru was helping man his Comiket table; how'd he convince her to do that? She's obviously never going to be an otaku on their level, but she seems flexible about it (willing to go see anime movies if not Comiket) so I'd kind of like to see her getting into some show against her better judgment or something like that.
Final Fantasy VI || Terra
For many years, FF6 was my primary, year-round fandom. I don't want to intimidate you if you just added this on impulse because you spotted it in the tagset and remembered playing it years ago! I'm just trying to explain why I don't have as much fresh, shiny squee for it as for some of the new-to-me canons -- it's been twenty years. Terra's my forever girl, but that's been the case since I was younger than she is. I'm pretty sure it was imprinting on FF6 like a geeky little duckling when I was 15 that made me such a sucker for memory-fuckery tropes in other canons.
I asked for Terra not because "Terra, solo" is what I want, but because I want fic centered on her, regardless of who else is involved. Terra in Mobliz with the kids. Terra on the airship, accidentally mothering Gau or Relm out of habit. Terra/Locke, my OTP of twenty years. Terra interacting/communicating with magicite, Terra recovering memories, magic meta and worldbuilding with Terra.
Locke/Terra is obviously optional! I didn't ask for Locke for a couple of reasons. I really do want the Terra-centered gen, for one thing. For another, a couple of years ago I got several *amazing* Locke/Terra fics, and after that it almost seems greedy to ask for more. (By the way, what I said at the beginning about begging pathetically when ship fic is what I really want? The letter I wrote that year is a prime example.) But I'm plenty greedy, and of course I'd be thrilled to get ANY fic for my lifelong OTP.
Or don't even include Locke, since I didn't request him! All I ask is that you not indicate, even in a one-sentence mention, that Locke and Celes are involved.
That gen, though. Like I said, this was my primary fandom for well over a decade -- longer if you count the periods when I wasn't writing much. So I have opinions about things in the fandom, like "Cyan needs more love," and "I hate when people just write the Mobliz kids out rather than deal with them," and "I'd really like to see Terra and Relm interacting outside of Terra/Shadow fics," which influences my choice of prompts. I'd love to see Terra interacting with the party's motherless kids -- Gau seems like he'd accept it a little more readily than Relm would, but who knows? I'd kind of love to see the trio I think of as "the Veldt family," Cyan, Sabin, and Gau, making a home in Mobliz at least part of the time. I'd like to see Terra and Celes interacting, at any point during canon or after. I don't dislike them as a pairing, but they're not my favorite, either, so if you'd like to write them together, I'd like to see a lot of development; they have so little interaction in the game that it kind of feels like they have to start from square one, to me. Or I'd love to see them written just as a friendship.
Or if none of these are grabbing you, and the only other characters you offered aren't the ones I'm prompting for, Terra in Mobliz is a topic I happen to love, and so is Terra getting in-depth with magic, communing with Espers or magicite, Terra's lack of knowledge about the wider world as a gateway to worldbuilding... Terra recovering memories from her life in the Empire (would STRONGLY prefer this be in flashbacks rather than the primary setting of the fic) or finding she gets memory bleedthrough from the Espers?
Terra interacting with whatever other characters you did offer to write would be welcome, too! I mean, there has to be one other. I don't care for Edgar/Terra or Setzer/Terra as ships (Edgar/Terra is more than a bit of a squick, in fact, unless it's a totally pragmatic and unromantic arranged marriage) but I'd like to see them as friends. Terra/Cyan, on the other hand... (or Terra/Sabin, or Sabin/Cyan/Terra) Did I miss anyone? No Shadow/Terra or Leo/Terra, please.
Canon-divergence AUs are more than okay here, though I don't have any definite points of divergence that I absolutely have to see explored.
I've requested FF6 in MANY different exchanges over the past few years, so you're welcome to poke around and see if any of my older letters have ideas that suit you better if nothing here is working for you. I'm not so sure I'd suggest reading my fics for an idea of what I'd like to see, though -- I'd really like to see other people's interpretations and ideas, not just a reflection of mine.
Tiger & Bunny || Any
You know what? This is T&B's last year in Yuletide. I'm going for broke, to quote the show's own first episode title. There is nobody in this tag set I don't love; I'd be happy to get fic for any of them.
A lot of my prompts do involve Tiger & Bunny: The Rising, the sequel movie that came out early last year. It should be widely available by now, I hope, but things set during or before TV canon, or during one of the time skips, would be really welcome too! In the last-episode time skip, we passed over a year in which the heroes had to deal with the revelation that Hero TV was rigged, and that NEXTs could lose their powers (which had been a well-kept secret up till then.) And on top of that, Kotetsu, the heart of the team, and Barnaby, the catalyst who essentially made them a team, both retired at the same time. Were any of the heroes in touch with Barnaby during that year? Were they in touch with Kotetsu? Did any of them go to visit him?
There's also always the year before the series started -- Pao-lin, Karina, and Ivan are younger than the other heroes, but did they all start at the same time? How did they settle in?
And origin stories, for one or more characters, or all of them -- we know Keith was eighteen when his powers manifested, but how did they first appear, and how did he learn to control them? How did any of the characters learn to control their powers?
Character-specific prompts:
Kotetsu: You can go pre-series, into his relationship with Tomoe, Kaede's babyhood, all that. Despite all my disclaimers, pregnancy and babies are very much on my mind and I'd love fluff along those lines. Or family gen from even earlier, into his childhood and teen years, or later on; I have a huge soft spot for his brother Muramasa. I'd love Kotetsu/Barnaby, my first and biggest ship for this show. Maybe some kind of movie tag where they deal with the fallout of Rising, and Barnaby finally gives Kotetsu a piece of his mind for that "I will break up with you for your own good" stunt, and one of them finally admits he's in love with the other? There's so much out there for this pairing, I'm not sure what to prompt that hasn't been done. I have the opposite problem with my OT3, Barnaby/Kotetsu/Karina; there's almost nothing, so... anything at all? It always seemed to me like Kotetsu thought Karina might be into Barnaby, and it'd be just like him to pull off a failtacular attempt at matchmaking that somehow works out for the best in the end anyway.
Barnaby: Sometimes it's rough being a fan of this guy. It feels like the fandom's default is to treat him as the big meanie who picks on woobie Kotetsu, which drives me batty. They give each other shit on a pretty equal basis, it seems to me. I love this ridiculous man and his pretend-classical-conducting and his obvious adoration of his idiot partner. (I describe Kotetsu this way with love. Love and frustration. I'm sure Barnaby feels the same only more so.) I also ship him with Karina, or Ivan -- maybe he's had an interest in Ivan since their Hero Academy days? Maybe his occasional trolling of Karina is meant as teasing, not antagonism, and he's just a bit tone-deaf socially. (I don't really like seeing them totally hostile to each other; it doesn't feel like it fits the second half of the series and Rising.) For Barnaby solo, I liked the "traveling Bunny" Pixiv meme, where Barnaby spent the year-long episode 25 timeskip traveling the world and sending postcards home to Kotetsu; something along those lines would be wonderful, regardless of ship level.
Karina: I love this girl so much. And I ship her with so many people. Karina/Keith, Karina/Kotetsu, Karina/Barnaby, Karina/Pao-lin... I don't have many shippy prompts, but if you have an idea of your own, there you go. One thing I can say with certainty that I love is fic that takes her seriously as a superhero; it's not an accident that she's usually second or third in the hero rankings, coming in right behind the guy who can fly and the guy who can jump so well it's nearly flying. She's one of the cast's heaviest hitters.
One of the things I most want involving her is Girl Power Trio fic. She, Nathan, and Pao-lin were already shown to be friends, but Rising made it clear how protective they are of each other and how much they all mean to each other; I'd love some post-Rising hugs or platonic h/c. Karina and Nathan both took quite a beating trying to protect each other, after all. Or something set during one of the series timeskips, like I mentioned above -- friendships don't get that deep overnight, so the trio spending time together at any point would be good to see. And it seems like Kotetsu's retirement would hit Karina pretty hard, since she's still pining for him a year later. Or maybe she thinks she's over him and then he comes back?
Nathan: Like I said above, Girl Power Trio fic! Or something shippy - Nathan/Antonio or Nathan/Keith would both delight me. Or Nathan/Ivan? I think there was some artbook tidbit suggestion Nathan delivered on that promise to give Ivan a big kiss when he left to spy on Jake. Rising-related, I'd like to see something fleshing out Nathan's backstory based on the glimpses we saw. Something about the onset of his powers? He's notably missing the tattoo in the white-dress flashback in the movie, and all his angst seems to be about sexuality/gender/gender expression, not about NEXT status. I really like the idea that for him, paradoxically, finding out he was a NEXT was a happy and empowering discovery, which would fit with the way it didn't show up in flashbacks of his worst and most painful memories, but I'd really just love ANY exploration of the subject. Or his relationship with his family -- he probably took over Helios from his (obviously wealthy) parents, but was that the result of a full reconciliation or more grudging?
Regardless of your take on Nathan's gender identity, please don't use singular "they" as his pronoun in my fic -- I find it unworkable in prose fiction.
Pao-lin: In addition to the trio friendship fic, I do ship Pao-lin with Karina. And with Kaede. And with Ivan, whose age I estimate down so the age difference isn't so bad -- or there's always future fic. One of my favorite moments for the two of them isn't even onscreen anywhere; it's in their Circuit of Hero duet song, where he moons over how manly she is. They clearly get along, he admires her... I don't have too many ideas for them, but that's what I like about their dynamic -- she's tougher than he is. I find she doesn't get underestimated as a hero quite as often as Karina does, but like most fans of hers, I worry that her bosses will try to sex up and feminize her image as she gets older -- watching her dealing with that is always interesting. It's not exactly uncharted fic ground, but there's always room for multiple takes on it.
Ivan: I've prompted him a bit in tandem with other characters, but he also has a lot more known backstory than some. It was hard not to ship him with his imprisoned ex-boyfriend ROOMMATE (wait, were they actually roommates?) Edward. We know he went to the Hero Academy, where he didn't feel like he was very impressive even though he's a shapeshifter and there are people in the student body whose superpower is sweat. You could always write about him then -- were he and Edward an item, or was he secretly in love with Edward, or maybe it was the other way around? Or did he look up to Barnaby or have a crush on him? Or there's his first year as a hero, when never makes eye contact with anybody or even really talks to them except when Keith or Pao-lin seek him out. (Did he ever tell either of them about Edward? And if so, when or how?) Or the timeskip, when he apparently upgrades his powers from "can look and sound like someone" to "can make self indistinguishable from brick wall." How'd he practice and develop his abilities?
A lot of us assume he's an anime fan, but you know, I'm pretty sure he's adapted at least some of his in-character mannerisms from kabuki -- I think his interest in Japanese culture is a lot more in-depth than just "lol he likes Naruto." He's also one of the only heroes who (a) has a clearly-defined public persona totally distinct from his own, and (b) has a social media presence -- something getting into how he built that up and carved out a niche when veteran heroes like Kotetsu and Antonio struggle with it would be interesting.
Keith: Like I mentioned above -- all we know about his past is when he gained his powers. We know he's kind and honest and expresses himself clearly but very oddly, and he loves his dog SO MUCH. He seems kind of lonely sometimes, but not truly unhappy. I wish I had more ideas for him! I love him, I just find him difficult to write -- does he need a girlfriend? A boyfriend? Keith/Ivan used to be a very popular pairing when the fandom was more active, and I like Keith with Nathan, and Antonio, and even at some point in the future Karina, but I don't know exactly what it'd take to spark a romance with any of them. Come to think of it, it's also interesting that while Keith is impossibly earnest, he never raises a word of objection to Barnaby's "just in it for the points" attitude in the early part of the show; it's almost like he saw through it where Kotetsu didn't. Or, you know, he was just too airheaded for it to register, but sometimes I like the idea that he's a lot smarter and more perceptive than anyone realizes. It's a possibility, anyway.
Antonio: I love that this guy's hobby is sewing, and he's really proud of his skills. But what I find most interesting about him is his dynamic with other characters: how far back he and Kotetsu go, the mostly-offscreen friendship with Nathan, the crush on Agnes. Agnes and Nathan are friends (it's one of those Word of God things, it was posted on This Is Sternbild) and Antonio's got a thing for Agnes; maybe sometime they all drink just enough at one of the end-of-season parties and have a threesome. Maybe they decide to make it a tradition.
Did Antonio know Tomoe? There's a lot to explore there, where we know what was going on in Kotetsu's life at that point in time, but not Antonio's. I'm not at all averse to Kotetsu/Antonio, whether it's some angsty seeking-comfort-after-losing-Tomoe thing or a lighthearted friends-with-benefits arrangement (or maybe it starts light and then one of them falls in love.)
I really love the hints at a friendship between Nathan and Antonio, and the suggestion that Antonio doesn't so much mind being groped at all as being groped without warning and/or in public. I'd love some missing scenes set during/around/after the Rising movie, whether they're a secret couple and Antonio's worrying secretly about Nathan, or comes to realize how he feels when Nathan's endangered, or whatever else you can think of.
I feel like this fandom section (last one written -- not for lack of love but for waffling on what exactly to ask for) deteriorated as I went along. If you're reading this as of October 26th or 27th, I may come back and give it another pass for... coherence? Even-handedness?
This is another fandom where I'd be so very okay with smut.
Shingeki no Bahamut: Genesis/ Rage of Bahamut: Genesis || Favaro, Amira, Kaisar, Rita (caution: spoilers)
OH my god. I just finished watching this show and I'm so in love with it right now it's ridiculous. It was like a beautiful bouquet of all the tropes and character types and design elements I love, wrapped up in a beautiful bow with a zombie on top. (Consistent metaphors are not on that list of things I love.) So while I asked for the main quartet, but I'd be fine with fic about any subset of those characters, and most likely with the appearance of any number of characters I didn't request. And I haven't read any fic, I've barely even browsed Pixiv, so there is pretty much nothing I don't want to read. I'm just going to babble about the characters a bit and then try to make up some coherent prompts.
- Amira. The first character I fell in love with. Her childlike delight in mundane stuff like food and booze, her competence in combat whether she went demon or not, her lack of tolerance for Favaro-bullshit even if she also, at times, wasn't suspicious enough of him early on -- I kept watching for her even when I was out of patience with Favaro. I think it was around episode four or five that I decided, nope, I love everyone in this bar. I shipped her with Favaro early on, when he was showing his soft spot for her rather than plotting to kill her (and then he'd start thinking about killing her again and I'd yell at the screen.) The dance scene was like pure candy for me. And while there are some obvious end-of-series barriers to it happening, I was all *over* an Amira/Favaro/Kaisar OT3 for most of the series. I mean, Favaro/Amira is canon, Kaisar/Amira is at least canon on Kaisar's side, and Kaisar/Favaro sure is obvious, isn't it? I like every subset (I guess Kaisar/Amira is the part I'm least interested in) so if you just want to write Amira/Favaro, or Kaisar/Favaro, I'm fine with that, too.
- Kaisar. At first, I didn't really see how I'd ever ship Kaisar and Favaro. I mean, Favaro was flirting with him from episode 1, but Kaisar legitimately seemed to want him dead (I rarely take that as a proxy for just plain wanting him) and they were rarely in the same place for very long without some attempted murder... and then Kaisar says "We were childhood friends." BAM. And then they're working together. BAM. And then they're dueling with a fork and a butter knife and playfully calling each other names. BAM. Those are the sounds of the NAILS IN MY COFFIN. We're not even getting into what endgame did to me.
Wait, yes we are, a little, since I moved this section to the end of the post for spoiler reasons.
MOST people don't smile like that at a man who just SEVERED ONE OF THEIR LIMBS, Kaisar. I see how you're looking right back at him, too, Favaro.
As for Kaisar outside of a shippy context, what can I say? I was onboard for him from the start, because I'll pretty much always choose "honorable knight" over "amoral rogue" when those are the options, and when he then picked up Rita as a pomposity-busting sidekick, I was sold. It just delights me how little compunction he has about letting Rita zombify entire pirate crews as needed.
- Rita. Oh my god, how could I not love her? She *rips off her own arm and throws it at people.* She's constantly puncturing the drama and angst around her. She's a necromancer on the good guys' side! And she doesn't make a big tsundere stink about it; she got bored and lonely so she's following Kaisar now, no big deal. She cares about these dumbass kids.
- Favaro. I probably make it sound like I hate him, from the bits about the other characters, don't I? That's not it at all. Even when I was mad at him for not just embracing his main-character destiny and protecting the mysterious demon girl who put a curse on him, I still enjoyed the hell out of his ridiculous faces, and grudgingly acknowledged that he did have his reasons to want to rid himself of Amira and Kaisar.
Personally, I think (hope) that the second season is going to involve a reunion with Amira (and Rita, since we don't see her with Favaro and Kaisar at the end) and Pixiv artists seem to agree with me, but I wouldn't want to go there as a writer and get jossed all to hell. If you do, though, I'll love it. And "going there" could also mean handwaving how it actually happened and just putting the party back together for a peaceful moment post-series, to look into the fallout of all the character and relationship development up to that point while still having everyone alive and in one place. Or writing some shippy fic for Favaro and Kaisar on their own as they take up wandering again. Or some shippy fic where Favaro and Kaisar have already gotten together and then they find Amira again and they figure out a way to make things work with three of them. I don't consider Amira underage, ftr.
But I'm always game for missing scenes, expanded perspectives on canon events, expanded backstories, and so on, especially given the type of canons I'm into (for many years a 16-bit RPG was my primary fandom.) Something exploring in greater detail the fallout of the robbery that killed both Favaro's and Kaisar's fathers? Some of Rita's backstory or her perspective on this new family of dumb kids she's found? Missing scenes of Amira discovering new delicious or fun things? I'd actually really love some Amira and Rita interaction, since we didn't get much of that other than Rita protecting Amira or moblizing the guys to look for her or rescue her at various points.
OKAY. I cannot possibly think of anything else to add, thank God. I'm the same name everywhere -![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
Lirillith or ![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
lirillith though the Tumblr is probably of limited utility. I think anon should be on here if you need to ask something.
Each section has its own cut, so you can go back to the top page of my journal and navigate that way. I'm so sorry this letter got so out of hand.
A lot of my prompts may sound shippy, but I swear to you that just because I carry on at length about the dynamic between two people doesn't mean that I'm just being diplomatic when I say I'd also like gen about their friendship. (If I desperately require shippy fic and nothing but, I'll beg pathetically for it, and have in the past.) It's just that relationships, romantic or otherwise, give a jumping-off point, and I do tend to think of prompts in the form of "A and B in [time] and [place,] what do they do, or what do they have to say about [event]?" whether or not they're banging.
And that's the form a lot of my prompts will take, which will either work for you or drive you mad. All I can say is that while I do want my likes and dislikes taken into account, my prompts are just loose suggestions. If you have ideas that are inspiring you, go to town! Some of the best gift fics I've ever received went in directions I'd never have anticipated if I'd had to write something for my request. I hesitate to say "I'll like anything you write" because there are certainly things people could write that I wouldn't like, but historically, I've gotten awesome gifts every time, so the odds are good that I will.
The general stuff: I would like fic to end on a hopeful or positive note overall without glossing or candy-coating painful canonical events. I don't want an overall dark or hopeless tone, though bittersweet is okay, and I don't want the content to go darker than canon.
Likes:
- Fic that gets into greater depth with some canon events than canon itself did -- exploring the emotional fallout of that dramatic revelation in the middle of the final battle, H/C as characters recuperate during a timeskip, two characters getting a chance to talk when they never had much of a chance onscreen -- meaning I don't want the kind of AUs that just reset or leave behind canon. Canon-divergence, episode tags, and missing scenes are all good.
- The topic I refer to as "memory-fuckery," to cover full retrograde amnesia, memory-alteration, planting artificial memories, removing memories, all that stuff. This is something I tend to like in canons; I don't know how I'd feel about a fic that introduced it to a canon where it wasn't already present. But I'm *definitely* into fics where canonical memory issues are explored: amnesiacs regaining fragmentary memories, clones and constructs dealing with the revelation that all their memories are fake, dealing with memories you know are fake but which feel real, or with two sets of memories, etc.
- People finding companionship and love after an extended period of isolation, whatever that means for them (from mundane social isolation, bullying, or pushing people away, to a lifetime or centuries spent in solitary confinement or suspended animation or surrounded by the undead. My fandoms run the gamut.) Much of my love of the found-family trope is in that context.
- I enjoy dialog and strong character voices, regardless of POV (first-, second-, and third-person are all fine, and no preference on tense either) and relatedly, when I talk about shippy stuff, my default starting point is pre-relationship, flirting/banter/UST.
- Worldbuilding, magic meta, superpower meta, mundane details in fantastic settings, mundane applications of superpowers or magic.
- I said I wanted hopeful/happy endings, but I'm not at ALL averse to angst and pain on the way there.
- Food. Fantasy worldbuilding via food or drink, characters enjoying and seeking out different cuisines, characters enjoying the taste of their alcohol and not just how drunk it gets them (everyone knows about wine snobs, but have you spoken to people who are really into good beers, or spirits?) Food porn in general, not in the sense of "bring food into the porn" (that's actually a mild squick) but the kind of thing you get in Fumi Yoshinaga manga; it doesn't have to hinge on visuals.
- On the shippy side of things, very rarely do I find instantaneous powerful physical attraction interesting or compelling at all. (Though an instant "whoa, she's so cool" or clicking at their first meeting because they make each other laugh is a different matter.) I tend to favor pairings where they start out as close friends, or where they start out at odds and gradually start to respect and like each other as they're forced by circumstances to work together. If more of my canons were hospitable to arranged-marriage tropes (or I were more into AUs) I'd probably be all over those, but I tend to be picky about what canons they fit.
- I love awkward faily first times, awkward faily additional times (and awkward first anythings, not just sex -- I loved the hand-holding fails in Ore Monogatari, for instance), couples who can laugh and have fun in bed (and just in general), couples who fail utterly at being traditionally romantic, height/size differences in line with canon, pining before the couple gets together especially if it's followed by them getting together, long-distance relationships that work out though the downsides are treated realistically, people messing with each other's hair, hand-holding and hand appreciation, domesticity, and couples trading off who takes the lead depending on circumstances rather than one partner always dominating.
- On the explicitly sexual front: The aforementioned awkward sex, and if there's going to be dirty talk I prefer it be praise-based, awkward as hell, or both. Clothed or mostly clothed sex and frottage. Masturbation, especially coupled with pining. Hand and hair appreciation both go here too. Temperature play, and possibly relatedly, use of superpowers/magic powers during sex. Light xeno when a character has non-human features or forms. Couples taking things slow, and also couples falling into bed almost immediately once they get together (I often ship really rare pairs, I can't be picky.) Talking during sex in a non-dirty-talk way -- like, trying to carry on the pre-sex conversation until they get distracted into incoherence. I mentioned the laughter and humor during sex thing already, but more in the context of non-porn; I like them to be having fun with it whether the actual sex is explicit or faded-to-black.
Squicks, DNWs, etc.
The big one: For personal reasons, I'd prefer that stories avoid issues of infertility, miscarriage and stillbirth, unwanted or resented pregnancies (like "This was your idea! I never even wanted kids!" not "Man, I miss keeping my food down" -- the latter is fine) or pregnancies gone wrong in some way. Happy, healthy, wanted pregnancy is the only kind I want to see. You don't need to go anywhere near the topic of pregnancy! I'm only addressing this because a couple of canons that I request touch on the topic, which is a sensitive one for me.
Also DNW:
- Woobification or excusing of the actions of canonical villains. (I'm talking, like, Kefka, not sympathetic antagonists.)
- Non-con between any pairings I ship.
- Mundane AUs that remove magic or superpowers from a world where they exist, and most setting-change AUs in general.
- Okay, I don't know why I conflated the incest and sexual-abuse-of-children items, since the canon example I was thinking of involves consenting adults (and so does a lot of the incest that powers fandom), but I'm going to split them up. Apologies if you saw the pre-edit version of the letter. For incest, portrayal is a squick but references to canon relationships are fine; I don't mind if character A says to character B "you and your brother SURE ARE CLOSE," but I don't want to see them getting unusually close. And this only goes for canon situations; please no unusually-close-siblings where canon didn't provide them.
- And the second leg of that, underage and sexual abuse. Underage involving mid-teens or so is okay (I don't have a hard cutoff line, it varies by fandom) but I don't want a character's youthful appearance being emphasized and fetishized. Sexual abuse, or sexual content involving younger children, is an absolute no.
- Portrayal of the afterlife/what-happens-after-you-die in canons that don't touch on the subject: no for-real ghosts, no dead-characters-watching-from-the-afterlife, for most canons. If the subject is part of the canon cosmology, as with FF6 or Noragami, it's a different matter.
- On the sex front: Sex pollen, fuck-or-die and the like. Humiliation-based dirty talk. Intercrural. Excessive focus on bodily fluids and smells during sex, or sex featuring fluids that aren't traditionally part of sex, i.e. blood, vomit, etc. Foot fetishy stuff -- no mouths or even faces in contact with feet.
- Any reference at all to certain pairings I dislike, even in the past tense; I prefer they just be ignored, handwaved, or treated as simply a friendship. Yes, this goes for canon ships too at times.
- Also, cockroaches. (I wouldn't think this would come up in fanfic, but they keep popping up in canons -- THANKS, Benjamin January mysteries -- so I'm erring on the side of caution.)
Long Live the Queen || Elodie
I took great care to nominate all the Elodie-suitors who interested me the most (including Evrard, who didn't even have a canonical tag yet) and here I am requesting just Elodie. But the thing is, I'm quite happy with multiple options -- I'm interested in so many of Elodie's relationships, whatever form they take, and she's the sole unifying factor among the things I'd like to see. Like I said above about prompts, I tend to start from relationships, and they do really interest me here; but, for instance, I'd be just as interested in a fic about how Brin and Elodie navigate their respective marriages while maintaining their affair, as about how that affair itself gets underway. (Or both. Both is good.) Or I'd be interested in something getting in-depth with some element of Novan worldbuilding or Elodie's education. Some of my favorite moments in the game were descriptions of Elodie's specific lessons, delivering dinner menus like speeches and so on.
Also, reiterating from above: I don't want any exploration of the ending where Elodie's left infertile, even if that frees her to marry Brin or Briony, and if your story touches on pregnancy/childbirth/heir-begetting, I'd prefer it be a generally happy experience for all involved.
So with that in mind...
Elodie herself: I tend to play Elodie with a focus on academics as much as possible -- economics and accounting are usually how I get access to the Lumen crystal, for instance, and it kills me to have her pass up the hospital and the printing press out of ignorance. (SAY SOMETHING, Joslyn!) Obviously there are huge gaps in her knowledge, because I guess she slept through all her history classes at school, but I have her scrambling to catch up as much as possible. But my default playstyle doesn't work so well with every game path, so obviously you should write her the way it works best for you and the story you want to tell.
Brin: Brin really leaps into that "secret love" thing, doesn't she? Either she fell for Elodie like a ton of bricks at the ball, or she's making a calculated move to get in good with the naive young queen, or a semi-desperate effort at securing a partner of her own social class, since she seems pretty frustrated and bitter about her love life if you get the scene when Julianna's on the lam. All the options are interesting, you know? If you go with one of the more cynical motivations, I'd still prefer if she developed genuine feelings for Elodie over time, and I don't want her looking down on Elodie or gloating over how she's fooled this naive kid. (I realize I keep mentioning the naivete, even though Elodie has to be reasonably astute to have learned Brin's a romantic option for her; I guess it's something I'm assuming about how Brin would see Elodie. No need for you to project my hangups into your fic.)
And like I mentioned above, I'm very interested in how they make their marriages work (or not work); it sounds like Brin kind of relishes putting one over on Banion, given the way she talks about banging Julianna while he was courting her, but is Joslyn in the dark about the whole arrangement, too? I don't mean "take this f/f pairing and make it all about their het relationships-of-convenience," but it's a setup that interests me.
Evrard: You can tell how popular he is from the fact he didn't have a canonical tag before I nominated him. And I can sort of understand why. But for me, a lot of Elodie-ships are all about the ending. Elodie and Evrard's in-game interactions come off pretty generic, but the ending, where Evrard and his family provide Elodie with this oasis of normality and escape from palace life, pushed all the buttons that made me ship Youko/Rakushun back when I was watching Twelve Kingdoms. (Another great series about a teenage monarch with an improbable hair color learning how to rule! But not part of my request this year.) I just kind of want her to have a friend, you know? But I also love friends-to-lovers.
Another thing about Evrard, though -- maybe they really are just friends, but Elodie's incognito visits to the bakery keep coinciding with his sister Alice's evenings off, and Elodie and Alice gradually grow closer? I don't know, I'd just like to see some way for Elodie to romance Alice without going dark, and this might be a route to that?
Briony: Like with Evrard, it's all about the ending. I spent most of my Briony-romancing playthrough wanting to shake Briony very hard, and then the ending, where Briony's immaturity ends up giving Elodie a chance to be a silly teenage girl from time to time, redeemed the whole path for me. I think part of the reason Briony drove me bonkers, especially when I had to go into the forest with her to impress her with my heroism, is that by the time I was adept enough at the game to pull it off, I felt like a hardened veteran of the Novan political landscape, so Briony's youthful naivete and tactlessness really grated.
But Briony can also be delightful (check out her reaction if you trigger her parents' divorce then marry her dad) and Briony's also part of the key to marrying Kevan, which is an interesting ship in its own right. If you wanted to go in the direction of an Elodie/Kevan pairing instead, I wouldn't say no. Or maybe after Elodie and Briony get together they try to fix the tangled family web somehow? They don't have to succeed -- canon strongly implies Kevan is going to need someone else to imprint on to peel him off of Corisande -- but it seems like something Briony would try, and I'd like to see something help untangle that horrible traumatic family mess in a scenario where Elodie doesn't marry Kevan. (Also, while it's only IC for Kevan to think of his relationship with Jael as loving, I think it's clear from canon that this was fucked-up and abusive; I'd rather see at least some of the characters thinking as much.)
I also found Elodie's betrothal to Arisse's younger son Thaddeus pretty interesting -- how does that awkward wedding night of theirs, and its aftermath, play out in detail? By detail I don't necessarily mean sexually explicit, certainly not in a porny way, but I guess "unsexy and hideously awkward" can still qualify as explicit, depending on your approach. This canon definitely qualifies for the same caveat I've used before regarding underage: I don't mind underage content itself, but if you're dwelling on and really playing up a character's youth, especially in their physical features and development (inexperience is a different story) I'm probably going to get squicked.
One other thing: I'm ridiculously invested in Julianna/Selene considering how little screentime they have. I downloaded the beta build just to get a shot at letting them marry even if I didn't duel Togami. So if they show up, be kind to them, please?
Ore Monogatari || Suna, Takeo, Yamato
My prompts may sound Suna-centric, because at first he was my only requested character. Then I realized I'd be disappointed if Takeo and Yamato were totally absent, so I added them -- and if you want to write a fic that's centered on the two of them, with Suna continuing to be their resident sensible person in the background, go for it! It's hard to think exactly what to prompt, besides "fluff," but I think any of these ideas could be flipped around to be more about them and less about Suna's role. I would honestly like for the fic to be centered on/from-the-POV-of either Suna or Yamato, or some other character if you want to take an outsider-POV option (I didn't request Saijou or Ai but I love them both, and there they are in the tagset -- and I *adore* Takeo's parents, who aren't) since we get a lot of time in Takeo's head in canon.
Like so many people, I came out of Ore Monogatari totally adoring Suna. I love the way he's always functioning as the competent and reasonable person -- puncturing the Big Misunderstanding plots before they can start, calling the fire department to supplement Takeo's superheroics, retrieving Takeo's bag when he's thrown it skywards out of sheer joy over the idea of Valentine's chocolates -- and I love his friendship with Takeo. As a friendship! I don't think he's in love with Takeo, and I'd rather not see that interpretation in a fic. He loves the guy, but he's not in love with him, to me.
There are a couple of things I'd really love to see in fic. One is Suna/Saijou ship fic. Obviously this is optional, and I didn't even request Saijou, but I came out of her arc shipping them *hard,* and they have two more years of high school for things to develop, you know? Maybe they're in the same class in their third year, and Saijou's finally over Takeo, and Suna keeps taking an interest in her anyway. And Takeo and Yamato are delighted to get to play matchmaker again, and Yamato's delighted that she and Saijou can be friends after all. Maybe that works, maybe it doesn't, but Suna and Saijou could at least forge a strong enough friendship to keep them in contact into their college years... If you found this worked better for you from Saijou's perspective, that's great! I didn't request her because I didn't want to put too much emphasis on this prompt, not because the fic MUST be focused on one of the main trio.
The other idea I've been entertaining is just future-fic about the Takeo/Yamato/Suna trio dynamic. They're in their final year of college and Suna's assuring Yamato that Takeo's only avoiding her because he has a really good reason, there's no danger of him breaking up with you, btw I don't want to spoil any surprises but what's your ring size? He didn't actually know rings came in sizes and he kind of freaked out at me earlier. Suna as the best man at their wedding, Suna trying to keep Takeo from losing his mind when Rinko goes into labor, Suna assuring Takeo that no, he doesn't want to marry their daughter either. He could be happily involved in the background with someone (male or female) or happily single for life. Either option is fine! Despite having a ship for him, I understand where the asexual/aromantic headcanons for Suna come from; I don't want issuefic about aro-ace identity, but I don't have any objections to Suna staying unattached and uninterested without making a big production of it.
No Amami/Suna, please. At all.
I don't want to shortchange Takeo and Rinko -- they're SO cute, and I wouldn't have loved the show as much as I did if it weren't for all three main characters. I loved Rinko's surprising assertiveness and determination, and I enjoyed all the pastry porn that resulted from her talent for baking; if you wanted to focus on Rinko in culinary school with the guys as her supporting cast, that'd be awesome too. I absolutely don't want anything breaking up Takeo and Rinko. Did I say that already? Maybe it's just in my signup.
I'm sure there are lots of other possibilities, but maybe those will get you started? Please don't take my relatively short section (I mean, compared to some of my other requests; it's really long for letters in general, I know) here as a sign of favoritism. This anime filled me with pure giddy joy while it was airing, it was the highlight of its season, and I miss it terribly. Despite missing it I haven't yet transitioned over to the manga. I'm not worried about spoilers, since it doesn't seem like a shocking-plot-twist kind of series, but if you want to reference later-in-the-manga events, I may not catch the significance.
I Can't Understand What My Husband Is Saying || Kaoru and Hajime
This was the other canon calling for the pregnancy disclaimer, though. I mean, it's only IC for Kaoru to be craving cigarettes, wishing she could have a beer, or complaining about her heartburn, or for both of them to be scared-but-happy about the prospect of parenthood; I just don't want anything far afield from that, you know? Or you could do what the anime did for most of the second season and ignore the pregnancy storyline entirely, because I know this topic is a major DNW for some people.
And on the DNW front, I'd rather Mayotama's crush on Hajime be played down or avoided entirely.
I know there's a manga, but the parts that I've read were already adapted (very closely) into the anime, so it's the same as Ore Monogatari above -- I'm not going to catch references to events or info that weren't in the anime, so it'd work better if you presented it as new information.
Okay, to prompt something more specific than "just more of the series, please" -- filling in the spaces the series didn't cover. Post-series, dealing with the pregnancy and new parenthood, of course, but there's also their past. As an anime viewer, I felt like we got the outline of how Kaoru and Hajime got together, but there's still a lot of room for elaboration. Heck, this is one of the canons where I feel like sexual content would actually fit in the kind of story I'm interested in. (They were apparently each other's firsts. Hajime mentioned wanting an undo button.)
And there was that Mayotama-centric episode where Kaoru was helping man his Comiket table; how'd he convince her to do that? She's obviously never going to be an otaku on their level, but she seems flexible about it (willing to go see anime movies if not Comiket) so I'd kind of like to see her getting into some show against her better judgment or something like that.
Final Fantasy VI || Terra
For many years, FF6 was my primary, year-round fandom. I don't want to intimidate you if you just added this on impulse because you spotted it in the tagset and remembered playing it years ago! I'm just trying to explain why I don't have as much fresh, shiny squee for it as for some of the new-to-me canons -- it's been twenty years. Terra's my forever girl, but that's been the case since I was younger than she is. I'm pretty sure it was imprinting on FF6 like a geeky little duckling when I was 15 that made me such a sucker for memory-fuckery tropes in other canons.
I asked for Terra not because "Terra, solo" is what I want, but because I want fic centered on her, regardless of who else is involved. Terra in Mobliz with the kids. Terra on the airship, accidentally mothering Gau or Relm out of habit. Terra/Locke, my OTP of twenty years. Terra interacting/communicating with magicite, Terra recovering memories, magic meta and worldbuilding with Terra.
Locke/Terra is obviously optional! I didn't ask for Locke for a couple of reasons. I really do want the Terra-centered gen, for one thing. For another, a couple of years ago I got several *amazing* Locke/Terra fics, and after that it almost seems greedy to ask for more. (By the way, what I said at the beginning about begging pathetically when ship fic is what I really want? The letter I wrote that year is a prime example.) But I'm plenty greedy, and of course I'd be thrilled to get ANY fic for my lifelong OTP.
Or don't even include Locke, since I didn't request him! All I ask is that you not indicate, even in a one-sentence mention, that Locke and Celes are involved.
That gen, though. Like I said, this was my primary fandom for well over a decade -- longer if you count the periods when I wasn't writing much. So I have opinions about things in the fandom, like "Cyan needs more love," and "I hate when people just write the Mobliz kids out rather than deal with them," and "I'd really like to see Terra and Relm interacting outside of Terra/Shadow fics," which influences my choice of prompts. I'd love to see Terra interacting with the party's motherless kids -- Gau seems like he'd accept it a little more readily than Relm would, but who knows? I'd kind of love to see the trio I think of as "the Veldt family," Cyan, Sabin, and Gau, making a home in Mobliz at least part of the time. I'd like to see Terra and Celes interacting, at any point during canon or after. I don't dislike them as a pairing, but they're not my favorite, either, so if you'd like to write them together, I'd like to see a lot of development; they have so little interaction in the game that it kind of feels like they have to start from square one, to me. Or I'd love to see them written just as a friendship.
Or if none of these are grabbing you, and the only other characters you offered aren't the ones I'm prompting for, Terra in Mobliz is a topic I happen to love, and so is Terra getting in-depth with magic, communing with Espers or magicite, Terra's lack of knowledge about the wider world as a gateway to worldbuilding... Terra recovering memories from her life in the Empire (would STRONGLY prefer this be in flashbacks rather than the primary setting of the fic) or finding she gets memory bleedthrough from the Espers?
Terra interacting with whatever other characters you did offer to write would be welcome, too! I mean, there has to be one other. I don't care for Edgar/Terra or Setzer/Terra as ships (Edgar/Terra is more than a bit of a squick, in fact, unless it's a totally pragmatic and unromantic arranged marriage) but I'd like to see them as friends. Terra/Cyan, on the other hand... (or Terra/Sabin, or Sabin/Cyan/Terra) Did I miss anyone? No Shadow/Terra or Leo/Terra, please.
Canon-divergence AUs are more than okay here, though I don't have any definite points of divergence that I absolutely have to see explored.
I've requested FF6 in MANY different exchanges over the past few years, so you're welcome to poke around and see if any of my older letters have ideas that suit you better if nothing here is working for you. I'm not so sure I'd suggest reading my fics for an idea of what I'd like to see, though -- I'd really like to see other people's interpretations and ideas, not just a reflection of mine.
Tiger & Bunny || Any
You know what? This is T&B's last year in Yuletide. I'm going for broke, to quote the show's own first episode title. There is nobody in this tag set I don't love; I'd be happy to get fic for any of them.
A lot of my prompts do involve Tiger & Bunny: The Rising, the sequel movie that came out early last year. It should be widely available by now, I hope, but things set during or before TV canon, or during one of the time skips, would be really welcome too! In the last-episode time skip, we passed over a year in which the heroes had to deal with the revelation that Hero TV was rigged, and that NEXTs could lose their powers (which had been a well-kept secret up till then.) And on top of that, Kotetsu, the heart of the team, and Barnaby, the catalyst who essentially made them a team, both retired at the same time. Were any of the heroes in touch with Barnaby during that year? Were they in touch with Kotetsu? Did any of them go to visit him?
There's also always the year before the series started -- Pao-lin, Karina, and Ivan are younger than the other heroes, but did they all start at the same time? How did they settle in?
And origin stories, for one or more characters, or all of them -- we know Keith was eighteen when his powers manifested, but how did they first appear, and how did he learn to control them? How did any of the characters learn to control their powers?
Character-specific prompts:
Kotetsu: You can go pre-series, into his relationship with Tomoe, Kaede's babyhood, all that. Despite all my disclaimers, pregnancy and babies are very much on my mind and I'd love fluff along those lines. Or family gen from even earlier, into his childhood and teen years, or later on; I have a huge soft spot for his brother Muramasa. I'd love Kotetsu/Barnaby, my first and biggest ship for this show. Maybe some kind of movie tag where they deal with the fallout of Rising, and Barnaby finally gives Kotetsu a piece of his mind for that "I will break up with you for your own good" stunt, and one of them finally admits he's in love with the other? There's so much out there for this pairing, I'm not sure what to prompt that hasn't been done. I have the opposite problem with my OT3, Barnaby/Kotetsu/Karina; there's almost nothing, so... anything at all? It always seemed to me like Kotetsu thought Karina might be into Barnaby, and it'd be just like him to pull off a failtacular attempt at matchmaking that somehow works out for the best in the end anyway.
Barnaby: Sometimes it's rough being a fan of this guy. It feels like the fandom's default is to treat him as the big meanie who picks on woobie Kotetsu, which drives me batty. They give each other shit on a pretty equal basis, it seems to me. I love this ridiculous man and his pretend-classical-conducting and his obvious adoration of his idiot partner. (I describe Kotetsu this way with love. Love and frustration. I'm sure Barnaby feels the same only more so.) I also ship him with Karina, or Ivan -- maybe he's had an interest in Ivan since their Hero Academy days? Maybe his occasional trolling of Karina is meant as teasing, not antagonism, and he's just a bit tone-deaf socially. (I don't really like seeing them totally hostile to each other; it doesn't feel like it fits the second half of the series and Rising.) For Barnaby solo, I liked the "traveling Bunny" Pixiv meme, where Barnaby spent the year-long episode 25 timeskip traveling the world and sending postcards home to Kotetsu; something along those lines would be wonderful, regardless of ship level.
Karina: I love this girl so much. And I ship her with so many people. Karina/Keith, Karina/Kotetsu, Karina/Barnaby, Karina/Pao-lin... I don't have many shippy prompts, but if you have an idea of your own, there you go. One thing I can say with certainty that I love is fic that takes her seriously as a superhero; it's not an accident that she's usually second or third in the hero rankings, coming in right behind the guy who can fly and the guy who can jump so well it's nearly flying. She's one of the cast's heaviest hitters.
One of the things I most want involving her is Girl Power Trio fic. She, Nathan, and Pao-lin were already shown to be friends, but Rising made it clear how protective they are of each other and how much they all mean to each other; I'd love some post-Rising hugs or platonic h/c. Karina and Nathan both took quite a beating trying to protect each other, after all. Or something set during one of the series timeskips, like I mentioned above -- friendships don't get that deep overnight, so the trio spending time together at any point would be good to see. And it seems like Kotetsu's retirement would hit Karina pretty hard, since she's still pining for him a year later. Or maybe she thinks she's over him and then he comes back?
Nathan: Like I said above, Girl Power Trio fic! Or something shippy - Nathan/Antonio or Nathan/Keith would both delight me. Or Nathan/Ivan? I think there was some artbook tidbit suggestion Nathan delivered on that promise to give Ivan a big kiss when he left to spy on Jake. Rising-related, I'd like to see something fleshing out Nathan's backstory based on the glimpses we saw. Something about the onset of his powers? He's notably missing the tattoo in the white-dress flashback in the movie, and all his angst seems to be about sexuality/gender/gender expression, not about NEXT status. I really like the idea that for him, paradoxically, finding out he was a NEXT was a happy and empowering discovery, which would fit with the way it didn't show up in flashbacks of his worst and most painful memories, but I'd really just love ANY exploration of the subject. Or his relationship with his family -- he probably took over Helios from his (obviously wealthy) parents, but was that the result of a full reconciliation or more grudging?
Regardless of your take on Nathan's gender identity, please don't use singular "they" as his pronoun in my fic -- I find it unworkable in prose fiction.
Pao-lin: In addition to the trio friendship fic, I do ship Pao-lin with Karina. And with Kaede. And with Ivan, whose age I estimate down so the age difference isn't so bad -- or there's always future fic. One of my favorite moments for the two of them isn't even onscreen anywhere; it's in their Circuit of Hero duet song, where he moons over how manly she is. They clearly get along, he admires her... I don't have too many ideas for them, but that's what I like about their dynamic -- she's tougher than he is. I find she doesn't get underestimated as a hero quite as often as Karina does, but like most fans of hers, I worry that her bosses will try to sex up and feminize her image as she gets older -- watching her dealing with that is always interesting. It's not exactly uncharted fic ground, but there's always room for multiple takes on it.
Ivan: I've prompted him a bit in tandem with other characters, but he also has a lot more known backstory than some. It was hard not to ship him with his imprisoned ex-
A lot of us assume he's an anime fan, but you know, I'm pretty sure he's adapted at least some of his in-character mannerisms from kabuki -- I think his interest in Japanese culture is a lot more in-depth than just "lol he likes Naruto." He's also one of the only heroes who (a) has a clearly-defined public persona totally distinct from his own, and (b) has a social media presence -- something getting into how he built that up and carved out a niche when veteran heroes like Kotetsu and Antonio struggle with it would be interesting.
Keith: Like I mentioned above -- all we know about his past is when he gained his powers. We know he's kind and honest and expresses himself clearly but very oddly, and he loves his dog SO MUCH. He seems kind of lonely sometimes, but not truly unhappy. I wish I had more ideas for him! I love him, I just find him difficult to write -- does he need a girlfriend? A boyfriend? Keith/Ivan used to be a very popular pairing when the fandom was more active, and I like Keith with Nathan, and Antonio, and even at some point in the future Karina, but I don't know exactly what it'd take to spark a romance with any of them. Come to think of it, it's also interesting that while Keith is impossibly earnest, he never raises a word of objection to Barnaby's "just in it for the points" attitude in the early part of the show; it's almost like he saw through it where Kotetsu didn't. Or, you know, he was just too airheaded for it to register, but sometimes I like the idea that he's a lot smarter and more perceptive than anyone realizes. It's a possibility, anyway.
Antonio: I love that this guy's hobby is sewing, and he's really proud of his skills. But what I find most interesting about him is his dynamic with other characters: how far back he and Kotetsu go, the mostly-offscreen friendship with Nathan, the crush on Agnes. Agnes and Nathan are friends (it's one of those Word of God things, it was posted on This Is Sternbild) and Antonio's got a thing for Agnes; maybe sometime they all drink just enough at one of the end-of-season parties and have a threesome. Maybe they decide to make it a tradition.
Did Antonio know Tomoe? There's a lot to explore there, where we know what was going on in Kotetsu's life at that point in time, but not Antonio's. I'm not at all averse to Kotetsu/Antonio, whether it's some angsty seeking-comfort-after-losing-Tomoe thing or a lighthearted friends-with-benefits arrangement (or maybe it starts light and then one of them falls in love.)
I really love the hints at a friendship between Nathan and Antonio, and the suggestion that Antonio doesn't so much mind being groped at all as being groped without warning and/or in public. I'd love some missing scenes set during/around/after the Rising movie, whether they're a secret couple and Antonio's worrying secretly about Nathan, or comes to realize how he feels when Nathan's endangered, or whatever else you can think of.
I feel like this fandom section (last one written -- not for lack of love but for waffling on what exactly to ask for) deteriorated as I went along. If you're reading this as of October 26th or 27th, I may come back and give it another pass for... coherence? Even-handedness?
This is another fandom where I'd be so very okay with smut.
Shingeki no Bahamut: Genesis/ Rage of Bahamut: Genesis || Favaro, Amira, Kaisar, Rita (caution: spoilers)
OH my god. I just finished watching this show and I'm so in love with it right now it's ridiculous. It was like a beautiful bouquet of all the tropes and character types and design elements I love, wrapped up in a beautiful bow with a zombie on top. (Consistent metaphors are not on that list of things I love.) So while I asked for the main quartet, but I'd be fine with fic about any subset of those characters, and most likely with the appearance of any number of characters I didn't request. And I haven't read any fic, I've barely even browsed Pixiv, so there is pretty much nothing I don't want to read. I'm just going to babble about the characters a bit and then try to make up some coherent prompts.
- Amira. The first character I fell in love with. Her childlike delight in mundane stuff like food and booze, her competence in combat whether she went demon or not, her lack of tolerance for Favaro-bullshit even if she also, at times, wasn't suspicious enough of him early on -- I kept watching for her even when I was out of patience with Favaro. I think it was around episode four or five that I decided, nope, I love everyone in this bar. I shipped her with Favaro early on, when he was showing his soft spot for her rather than plotting to kill her (and then he'd start thinking about killing her again and I'd yell at the screen.) The dance scene was like pure candy for me. And while there are some obvious end-of-series barriers to it happening, I was all *over* an Amira/Favaro/Kaisar OT3 for most of the series. I mean, Favaro/Amira is canon, Kaisar/Amira is at least canon on Kaisar's side, and Kaisar/Favaro sure is obvious, isn't it? I like every subset (I guess Kaisar/Amira is the part I'm least interested in) so if you just want to write Amira/Favaro, or Kaisar/Favaro, I'm fine with that, too.
- Kaisar. At first, I didn't really see how I'd ever ship Kaisar and Favaro. I mean, Favaro was flirting with him from episode 1, but Kaisar legitimately seemed to want him dead (I rarely take that as a proxy for just plain wanting him) and they were rarely in the same place for very long without some attempted murder... and then Kaisar says "We were childhood friends." BAM. And then they're working together. BAM. And then they're dueling with a fork and a butter knife and playfully calling each other names. BAM. Those are the sounds of the NAILS IN MY COFFIN. We're not even getting into what endgame did to me.
Wait, yes we are, a little, since I moved this section to the end of the post for spoiler reasons.
MOST people don't smile like that at a man who just SEVERED ONE OF THEIR LIMBS, Kaisar. I see how you're looking right back at him, too, Favaro.
As for Kaisar outside of a shippy context, what can I say? I was onboard for him from the start, because I'll pretty much always choose "honorable knight" over "amoral rogue" when those are the options, and when he then picked up Rita as a pomposity-busting sidekick, I was sold. It just delights me how little compunction he has about letting Rita zombify entire pirate crews as needed.
- Rita. Oh my god, how could I not love her? She *rips off her own arm and throws it at people.* She's constantly puncturing the drama and angst around her. She's a necromancer on the good guys' side! And she doesn't make a big tsundere stink about it; she got bored and lonely so she's following Kaisar now, no big deal. She cares about these dumbass kids.
- Favaro. I probably make it sound like I hate him, from the bits about the other characters, don't I? That's not it at all. Even when I was mad at him for not just embracing his main-character destiny and protecting the mysterious demon girl who put a curse on him, I still enjoyed the hell out of his ridiculous faces, and grudgingly acknowledged that he did have his reasons to want to rid himself of Amira and Kaisar.
Personally, I think (hope) that the second season is going to involve a reunion with Amira (and Rita, since we don't see her with Favaro and Kaisar at the end) and Pixiv artists seem to agree with me, but I wouldn't want to go there as a writer and get jossed all to hell. If you do, though, I'll love it. And "going there" could also mean handwaving how it actually happened and just putting the party back together for a peaceful moment post-series, to look into the fallout of all the character and relationship development up to that point while still having everyone alive and in one place. Or writing some shippy fic for Favaro and Kaisar on their own as they take up wandering again. Or some shippy fic where Favaro and Kaisar have already gotten together and then they find Amira again and they figure out a way to make things work with three of them. I don't consider Amira underage, ftr.
But I'm always game for missing scenes, expanded perspectives on canon events, expanded backstories, and so on, especially given the type of canons I'm into (for many years a 16-bit RPG was my primary fandom.) Something exploring in greater detail the fallout of the robbery that killed both Favaro's and Kaisar's fathers? Some of Rita's backstory or her perspective on this new family of dumb kids she's found? Missing scenes of Amira discovering new delicious or fun things? I'd actually really love some Amira and Rita interaction, since we didn't get much of that other than Rita protecting Amira or moblizing the guys to look for her or rescue her at various points.
OKAY. I cannot possibly think of anything else to add, thank God. I'm the same name everywhere -
