Candy Hearts Exchange Letter
Jan. 5th, 2023 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisaintbcHi! Thank you for making me something for the exchange!
Yes please (in no particular order):
On the fence: All of these are things that I do occasionally read from time to time, but that are pretty hit-or-miss for me. These are listed roughly in order of how much I like them.
- I'm a huge fan of both fluff and angst; things that are really soft or really funny or really sad all tend to work well for me!
- family/found family dynamics (which can include kid!fic)
- baking/cooking
- domesticity
- outsider POV
- secret reveals (it can be any kind of secret! including relationship reveal!)
- mysteries
- historical AUs (anything pre ~1990)
- magical realism as well as fairytales and folklore
- crossovers - feel free to make a work that crosses over with a fandom that I may not be familiar with; it'll give me a cool new thing to check out!
- road trips
- plants/floriography
- character studies
- intense friendships
- courtship tropes
- I like happy endings but I also enjoy sad endings! Feel free to delve into the delicious angsty possibilities of canonical deaths or killing characters off if you want to, except where I've noted otherwise in my requests on AO3.
- I don't really know how to describe what I like in art in a way that might be helpful, but I would be just as excited to receive art as fic! I like line art with a sketchy, dynamic, feel, and dreamy impressionistic pastels, and minimalist comic panels and maximalist riots of flora and fauna. I like crosshatching and paint splatters and fun little surprises that pop out when your brain connects the right dots.
On the fence: All of these are things that I do occasionally read from time to time, but that are pretty hit-or-miss for me. These are listed roughly in order of how much I like them.
- I often really like things that play with gender and gender expression as well as gendered societal expectations, especially when they edge into nonbinary territory. This can be a bit hit-or-miss for me in terms of fandom, though; I've indicated in my requests which fandoms I'd be excited to receive something like this for.
- While I do like coffeeshop AUs, I'm generally not super interested in modern mundane AUs otherwise. That isn't to say I can't enjoy them, but the premise doesn't pique my interest on its own.
- I don't like things like soulmate AUs or Hanahaki disease very much in concept, but I do like the way they lend themselves to tropes like mutual pining (and for Hanahaki in particular, I really like plants and flowers cropping up in fic or fanart, so that can go a long ways toward making me more open to that trope).
- I like some college AUs but other than that I'm not overly fond of school AUs of any stripe, except potentially in the form of a crossover.
- Scifi AUs are largely not for me. I have no interest in robots or most aliens, and I especially don't care for humans having sex with/somehow related to robots (please do not give me a Pacific Rim AU). I do enjoy some scifi franchises, such as Stargate and Farscape, so I'm not completely opposed to putting characters IN SPACE - I just care a lot more about relationships than technology.
- As a general rule of thumb, I don't tend to love celebrity AUs, sex worker AUs (in particular, I dislike stories about a romantic relationship developing between a sex worker and their client; a sex worker AU in which that doesn't come up would probably be fine), or reincarnation stories.
- I don't love first person POV, except in the case of some stylistic conventions (epistolary fic, noir AUs that imitate classic noir monologue style, etc.)
No thanks: DNWs, listed from hardest no to softest
Requests
I have some prompts and thoughts about each of these fandoms, but please take them as very very loose suggestions for the most part. In general, I would be excited to receive anything for any of these fandoms/characters, so if something strikes a chord and inspires you, then great, but if you have a different idea then please feel free to take your work in whatever direction your heart desires!
1. Mr Queen
Links: If you want to thumb through some of the things I've loved in the past, here are my AO3 bookmarks and my fic recs tag on tumblr.
- detailed or lengthy medical horror/gore scenes (specifically medical; other kinds of horror are fine)
- incest
- cis-to-cis genderbending (exploring the possibilities of someone being trans or nonbinary is fine, please just no rewriting a cis man as a cis woman or vice versa)
- infidelity (things like open relationships or a couple who are separated but still legally married seeing other people are fine, just please no cheating-and-lying-about-it)
- RPF (except in the case of people who have already appeared in canon, eg Stephen Sondheim in Unsleeping City)
- non-con
- breaking up and making up - with the exception of something along the lines of a Persuasion AU, where the break up happened offscreen long before the action of the story starts
- I would largely prefer not to receive art that depicts full-body nudity - a naked person with hair/limbs/furniture arranged to mostly hide their genitalia is fine, nipples (of all gender presentations) are fine, I'd just prefer to leave their junk up to our imagination.
Requests
I have some prompts and thoughts about each of these fandoms, but please take them as very very loose suggestions for the most part. In general, I would be excited to receive anything for any of these fandoms/characters, so if something strikes a chord and inspires you, then great, but if you have a different idea then please feel free to take your work in whatever direction your heart desires!
1. Mr Queen
- I would love anything for this fandom, but if you're looking for some inspiration, I was especially intrigued by the implications that they had swapped bodies previously (and were maybe now actually back in their original bodies?!). I really love the way this show plays with gender, and would be really excited to see more of that! I also just generally enjoy the relationship between the two leads and how it builds over the course of the show, so if gender shenanigans aren't for you then definitely don't feel obligated to go that route.
- I really like this manga (and most mangas by this mangaka) and I was so excited to see it on the list of fandoms! I'm also really enjoying the currently airing tv show, so if you find some show canon creeping into your fic that's fine by me; I had to pick either the manga or the show for the fandom and I do like the manga slightly better, so I went with that, but they're both great. Something that leans into the workplace/casefic aspect or the domesticity of this ship could be really fun, and I think there's also a lot of potential for crossover works here.
- The OT3 of my heart!!!!! They're all so cute and I love their dynamic as a trio. I'd love a small episode tag vignette, or something post-canon (the other two pining for Qiao Chusheng? a reunion? epistolary fic about the letters they send during their separation? Qiao Chusheng having followed them to Paris and working as a French Resistance spy in WW2? the possibilities are endless). No matter what you do with this, though, please keep it firmly in OT3 territory; I'm not interested in either Qiao Chusheng/Lu Yao or Lu Yao/Bai Youning without the third point of their little triangle.
- Tan and Bun are so sweet and so intense, there's really no way to go wrong here! If you've seen Triage, feel free to incorporate that into your work if you want - I'd be really intrigued to get a view on the events of Triage from the POV of Tan and Bun, and/or what their relationship might have looked like in other loops, and/or what Tan and Bun look like to some of the Triage characters. If you haven't seen Triage, I'd still love basically any sort of post-canon and/or outsider POV take on these two!
- I have loved The Librarian franchise since I first saw The Librarian movie when I was a kid, and so naturally the tv show also holds a special place in my heart. I really adore the little found family they build for themselves, and would be really excited to get anything that showcases that! I also like anything that plays with the magic of their world, their role as mediators for the supernatural world, or the actual library aspects of the Library.
- This is another fandom where I am very intrigued by its thoughts about gender, and would be really excited to see something delve into that more. I also think outsider POV on their relationship could be really fun, or some kind of 5+1 of people finding out about their relationship, or some nice old fashioned (heh) soft sweet domesticity.
- I love Arthuriana. I really like OG Welsh!Kay as seen in things like Culwhch and Olwen, and would be so excited to see something play with that version of the character, or to play with the tension between his disagreeableness in later versions and his prominence within Arthur's inner circle. I also really like all of the G-name brothers (Gawain, Gareth, & co.), and their dynamics as a family, and I'm intrigued by the possibilities of Guinevere/Morgana. While I would of course really enjoy receiving something sunny and happy here, I do think that an after-the-end reflection on events and/or a relationship that really dives into the tragedy of Arthurian myth has a lot of really cool potential. If you like making sad, angsty things, feel no need to hold back for me in general but especially feel free to just go wild for this one. Please no modern AUs here, although feel free to play with time period if you want to; WW1 or 1970s Arthuriana is fine, just please keep them roughly pre-smart phone.
- This fandom has some exceptions to my normal DNWs, which are noted on AO3: to sum them up, I'm okay with infidelity here provided it's happening in the background or played purely for tragedy; RPF is fine here provided that they're historical figures and not modern celebrities; given the mutable nature of Arthurian myth, I'm okay with cisswap for this fandom specifically.
- I'm not going to lie to you; I don't have any particular ideas here, I was just so excited to see this beloved series from my childhood in the tagset that I had to request it. Go wild!
- I have watched and loved almost every Dimension 20 season (I haven't seen Shriek Week). There are so many relationships I'd be excited to receive something for for D20 that it's hard to think of a request that would sort of apply to all of them, but a lot of what makes D20 so appealing to me is its found family aspects, the way that these wildly different characters come together and support each other.
- I have RPF listed in my DNWs, and that holds true for D20 (I'm interested in Sylvester Cross, not Grant). That said, for art if some of your inspiration for the characters' appearances comes from their players, that's totally fine--I have no objections to a Sofie Bikes who's essentially Emily with Fran Drescher hair.
- While I'm generally fine with character death, please don't kill Esther or Gilear. (Planetar!Gilear, implied to have died offscreen at some point previous, is fine.)
- Crossovers have been one of my favorite tropes in fandom since my fanfiction.net days, and that still holds true now. I love crossover relationships, be they romantic, platonic, familial, whatever, because I love watching characters from different fandoms bounce off of each other and interact with people and/or scenarios that they would never encounter in canon.
Links: If you want to thumb through some of the things I've loved in the past, here are my AO3 bookmarks and my fic recs tag on tumblr.
