#and not that writing fictional characters having sex is a totally new skillset. but the scaffolding might help / be interesting

[erstwhilesparrow]

[voice of someone considering a deeply inadvisable project] i mean, i could actually be more directed about learning how to write smut, i have works i consider good examples, i've successfully achieved verisimilitude about kink stuff in the past just by doing a lot of googling, i could take notes about it,

[reconditarmonia]

Dear Every Woman Writer

Hello, lovely writer!

I’m reconditarmonia here and on AO3 (and have been since LJ days, but my LJ is locked down and I only have a DW to see locked things).

General likes:

– Relationships that aren’t built on romance or attraction. They can be romantic or sexual as well, but my favorite ships are all ones where it would still be interesting or compelling if the romantic component never materialized.

– Loyalty kink, whether commander-subordinate or comrades-in-arms, and the trust associated with it. Sometimes-but-not-always relatedly, idealism. I guess the two combined might be, in general, the idea of nobility of character and what that means.

– Heists, or other stories where there’s a lot of planning and then we see how the plan goes.

– Femslash, complicated or intense relationships between women, and female-centric gen. Women doing “male” stuff.

– Stories whose emotional climax or resolution isn’t the sex scene, if there is one.

– Uniforms/costumes/clothing.

– Stories, history, and performance. What gets told and how, what doesn’t get told or written down, behavior in a society where everyone’s consuming media and aware of its tropes, how people create their personas and script their own lines.

– Eucatastrophe.

General DNW: rape/dubcon, torture, other creative gore; unrequested AUs, including “same setting, different rules” AUs such as soulmates/soulbonds; PWP; food sex.

—

Fandom: Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

Characters/Groups: Bathsheba Everdene

One thing that always sticks in my mind about this novel is the way Hardy calls Bathsheba “the young farmer” just as he refers to the men as farmers - which, just saying, is more than most people writing about this story can do - and so, that being the case, what I’m most interested in is something about Bathsheba as farmer. One day in the life or four seasons in the life or five plantings/harvests in the life, or pseudo-academic fic about a case study of a woman farmer in the Victorian era, or a conflict between the farm and nature that Bathsheba has to decide how to solve.

Feel free to bring in other characters if it suits what you’re trying to do, but what I’m really looking for is a focus on Bathsheba’s work, determination, and process of learning. I’d also love to read something like a merchant ship AU (as the first alternate setting that came to mind where it would be not exactly the done thing for her to captain her inherited ship and make commercial decisions herself - although I do have to point out that contrary to popular belief, there were a lot of women on shipboard in the age of sail, may this be useful - but also where nature and luck/fate are as influential as they are in the original setting), or something in which the land, superstition, and ritual were more overtly magical.

—

Fandom: Monstrous Regiment - Terry Pratchett

Characters/Groups: Polly "Ozzer" Perks & Jack Jackrum, Polly Perks & Maladict, Magda "Tonker" Halter & Tilda "Lofty" Tewt, Polly "Ozzer" Perks, Alice "Wazzer" Goom, Jack Jackrum, Mildred Froc

Give me all the loyalty kink for this fandom. Characters rescuing each other from peril, risking their reputation or position or ethics to defend each other, accomplishing the impossible or sacrificing things without even thinking twice because one trusts the other’s orders or judgment. Or A not going off the leash or into danger to defend B because B said not to, to protect A’s conscience or life or reputation. Can be romantic or platonic - I ship Polly/Mal and Tonker/Lofty, but I would also be delighted with Polly&Jackrum, Wazzer&Polly, or other non-romantic twosomes or moresomes in situations of loyalty and trust. Maybe Polly sends Mal on a dangerous mission, or Tonker is captured after she and Lofty burn down another place where women and girls are being abused, or Polly protects Jackrum’s secret/s from someone who could reveal them, or Wazzer ends up in the field again with the general’s retinue and Polly and Mal rescue her from danger (or vice versa!!). What strengths or sacrifices do they have at their disposal for each other?

Pratchett-esque voices would be great. He’s really, really good at sucker-punching the reader with sincerity in an overall satiric mode, and I think that style lends itself well to this sort of thing.

I’m not going to lie, Polly is my fave. I like that this could have been a generic coming-of-age or women-in-war story, where the protagonist learns that she’s brave or worthwhile and then the crisis is past, but instead Polly learns that she’s a cunning bastard and a hell of a sergeant, and being a one-off hero in a country that’s at peace and making slow social progress isn’t good enough for her. That said, just because I’m better able to articulate what I like about Polly doesn’t mean I’d be less excited for fic about anyone else! And I know that we might have matched on single characters, rather than groups, and that’s just fine. I think that’s something I’d want to explore for any of the characters who enlist in the course of the story - what are these women good at? What lets them fulfill their potential? What do they want when their hand isn’t being forced? I guess that for most of the regiment this would be post-canon and for Jackrum or Froc it’d be backstory. How’d Jackrum go from enlisting for Reasons to being the career sergeant of canon? What’s Froc’s relationship to the Duchess been like over the years, as someone who met her in person?

If you’re going the Polly/Mal route, I also love ludicrous levels of sexual tension in a military context (I think it’s the unavoidable proximity + the presence of others making it hard to act on it).

Fandom-specific DNW: vampire romance tropes (such as turning and/or immortality) as focus; non-female pronouns/headcanons.

–

Fandom: Original Work

Characters: Commissioned Officer & Non-Commissioned Officer, Female Re-Enactor Playing Male Soldier & Female Re-Enactor Playing Woman, Chaotic good Berserker & Officer she's absolutely loyal to, Crossdressing Fugitive Princess

Um, so, I’ve never requested original work before, but these are...certainly some options that play well with my general likes. Something that I also notice across these requests, other than the fact that most of them are military-related or otherwise have to do with clothing and/or women doing “man” stuff, is that there are a lot of options for exploring how characters with different skillsets and/or values play together. When there’s a problem to solve, especially in a high-risk and high-emotion situation, what happens when they don’t agree on what to do?

As far as setting goes, I think I’d been envisioning the CO & NCO and Berserker & Officer as taking place in a setting that’s removed from us in some way - whether that’s a fictionalized version of a historic military where women can be soldiers, actual historic settings where both are cross-dressing as men, total fantasy settings or future space settings. Likewise I imagine the Fugitive Princess might work better in a fictional or historical setting. The re-enactor pairing could be in our real present day in a way that might not work for the others, but it could equally well be future people or fantasy people!

Romance between any of these pairs, or between the Crossdressing Fugitive Princess and a female character - whether a rival or tyrant she’s a fugitive from, an old ally, someone new she meets while in disguise - is lovely :D (I neglected to officially DNW this so I suppose I could be screwed, but I don’t want het for these. I’m also less interested in, like, orc or goblin characters if you write a fantasy setting, but I didn’t think to DNW that either. :|)

–

Fandom: Simoun (Anime)

Characters: Neviril, Aaeru & Neviril, Paraietta, Rodoreamon, Mamiina

Simoun somehow ended up being a really weirdly meaningful show to me. I loved how all these women got to be flawed and fucked-up, noble and loyal. How, in the mold of all my favorite epic shoujo anime, it starts off beautiful and fine and then Shit Gets Very Real and that’s actually one of the themes of the show - we had a little debate on FFA as to whether or not Simoun was a military canon, and the fact that circumstances have remade a team of priestesses in fancy quarters and magic flying machines who are there to pray to God, put off their choice of sex, use their talents, maintain or claw their way into a social position, into a military force involved in a war - that’s an idea that the characters themselves struggle with in the show. (Neviril’s scene in the hearing is one of my favorites.) How everyone gets character development, in the sense of learning and changing, and even what seem like annoying mandatory straight subplots actually end up serving that thematic or character development, to say nothing of the more focal relationships between the leads (not just Neviril and Aeru, but also Mamiina and Rodoreamon, Neviril and Paraietta…)

I’d really like to read a fic where an individual character’s development or two characters’ relationship is similarly tied in to plot developments; it doesn’t have to be a plotty fic as such, but I was very interested in the way the developments of the war and the pilots/priestesses’ actions in it precipitated changes in their relationships. So how might Neviril and Aeru’s relationship develop in the other world (what are they doing?), or Mamiina and Rodoreamon’s on the Messis when they’re not the narrative focus before Mamiina’s last mission and the braid thing? (Or if this is more your speed, dig into that and see how a character grows or the relationship between characters develops when that’s not being moved along by outside events in the same way, especially if they’re aware of that being an issue. When Neviril and Aeru are outside the normal flow of time, or Paraietta ends up a civilian, for example.) I’m also interested in all the permutations of loyalty we see in the show - like loyalty to a position over loyalty to a side (as with the Plumbish priestesses’ siding with our Sibyllae), loyalty that develops before liking or friendship, the devoted loyalty to Neviril. I like the show’s military themes despite its magical-girl visuals. I think this is also a canon where it would make sense for sexual first times to be part of a fic - what does that mean for the characters you choose?

I should also say that due to all the magic and timespace warping in the show, I am more than okay with post-canon fic that gets characters back together who were separated by canon, if that’s what you want. You can resurrect Mamiina, or have Neviril and Aeru visit the main reality/timeline again. Or play with timespace even more - time loop fic?

[tren-fraszka]

Yuletide Letter 2020

Dear creator,

Thank you for taking your time to check my requests. I know my requests can sound a bit tricky, but please don’t be discouraged. I wish you will have good time writing first and foremost!

My AO3 is Tren, if you wish to check it out.

Likes: comedy, casefics, canon compliants, AUs, time loops, bodyswaps, roleswaps, fantasy AU, urban fantasy AU, “being hoisted by your own petard” plotlines, snark, pettiness, rivals, enemies to friends to lovers, complicated relationship, violence, friendships, character bonding. 

DNW: explicit sex (makeouts and fade to black is okay), A/B/O, mpreg, rape depicted as positive (so no “it’s okay, because the other person enjoyed it/it was what they truly wanted”), trans headcanons, soulmate AUs, stories ending with surrender to fate/destiny, fourth wall breaking in canons where that doesn’t occur, character has cancer or other real-life terminal disease AU, word “queerplatonic”.

Also, I included what ships I’m okay with in each fandom. Please do not include any ships that aren’t canon and I have not allowed in those sections (if you feel really strongly about a ship I haven’t mentioned, you can always ask through mods just in case).

Additionally, while I almost never request fanart as possible medium, because I prefer my main gift to be fic, I would be very okay with receiving fanart treats. On another note, feel free to use my old letters if you get your hands on them. I never stop being interested in fandoms, and if I requested something once I will still want it in the future.

                                            REQUESTS

GREAT PRETENDER (ANIME)

Edamura Makoto Laurent Thierry Abigail Jones (Great Pretender) Cynthia Moore (Great Pretender)

You don’t have to include all the requested characters. I love all of the main four characters and will gladly take story focusing on any of them.

I love the idea of swindlers who go after terrible people and would just like more of the same. Maybe it’s just a small con one of the characters does to kill the time. Or maybe it’s another large scale operation against a wealthy prick. Or maybe Edamura made bet with someone that he can take down an exploitative cult so he joins and tries to become one of its heads just so he can make it implode from inside. Or maybe Abby joins some martial arts tournament for real to prove her prowes. Or Cynthia is off to do some more mischief for the benefit of people important to her. Or Laurent is just Laurent, going through life by flirting and teasing.

For some more prompts. It would be fun to get some insight into Edamura’s days in prison. He probably had more free time than he knew what to do with back then and he’s not one to just sit without doing nothing. Was he trying to improve his english only to angrily chuck the book after he remembered he’s not going to work with Lauren’t crew anymore? Did he get along with other prisoners? I would also love to get insight into what made Cynthia give up on trying to become an actress and become a confidence woman instead. How did her ex-boyfriend factor into her change of heart? I would love to see that explored. For Abby I would love to see something connected more to her future. She’s a character that’s trapped by their past probably the most, so I would love to see her finding some happiness in the life she’s leading right now. Laurent always feels so elusive, I would love to see a fic that gives more insight into his actions.

AUs and ships

Setting changes are okay, but I want the characters to still be conmans at the end of the day and swindle those who abuse their power/money. Any other AUs are also fine. Maybe a roleswap where Edamura is the head of a conman group and Laurent is a newbie in over his head. Or ones where characters have different skillsets (they are still conmen, just with different specializations).

I’m fine with Laurent/Edamura, but I’m not big on romantic relationships in this anime. Mentions of any past relationships are fine.

Great Pretender is available on Netflix.

天晴爛漫! | APPARE-RANMAN! (ANIME)

Sorano Appare 

I find it amusing that Appare is set up as this genius who doesn’t human emotion and it feels like this series will teach him kindness and empathy, but then it turns out he already has all of that and the lesson he needs to learn is about admitting those feelings to himself. Appare despite his standoffishness deeply treasures people and I love that he always puts them first, even if he uses excuses for that reason.

I would love any introspective piece about the journey he takes during the race or something set in the future. Maybe he needs money for his flying machine project, so he ends up goining another race. Or maybe he pairs with Xialian as the driver and him as a mechanic so they can split the prize money. I know everyone went their separate ways, but I would love to see him reuniting with some of the cast in the future.

AUs and ships

I don’t want any setting AUs for this, because the anachronistic wild west setting of this series is just too cool. Any other AUs are fine, though. Maybe Kosame really died after being shot and Appare needs to find strength to go on without him? Or an AU where Appare for all his talent with machinery can’t drive to save his life, so Xialian joins their team as a driver.

I ship Appare and Xialian, but I will be very happy with them as friends too.

Appare-Ranman! is available on Funimation.

I’M THE GRIM REAPER (WEBCOMIC)

I’m caught up with the newest chapters. You are free to incorporate any new developments into the story.

Chase Carter Scarlet | Grim Reaper

I love the relationship between Chase and Scarlet. Chase is discount Light Yagami who instead of god complex got an ugly cat and a nerd status. Scarlet is a grim reaper with amnesia, who is trying to figure out what kind of sins she committed to land her in the lowest circle of hell. Together they kill sinners, while also being stupidly sweet to each other.

I would love to see more of their misadventures, whether serious or more on the lighter side. I would love some MMO shenanigans. Maybe someone in Red Spades introduces Brook to Fatecraft and Scarlet together with Chase coach him through the early stages of it without realizing who he is. Or Scarlet learns that Chase’s birthday is coming soon, so she tries to secretly organize something for him. Or Chase and Scarlet are investigating a sinner, but something goes wrong and Chase is in danger. 

AUs and ships

I’m okay with AUs and canon divergences. MMO-focused fic would be absolutely great for this fandom. Maybe the main characters are a part of the same guild that’s currently in feud with Red Spades guild. Satan is the chaotic guild leader who annoys everyone whenever he does log in. Or a role swap where Chase is the amnesiac grim reaper and Scarlet is the detective with far too strong sense of justice.

It’s probably obvious from the intro, but I ship Chase and Scarlet.

I’m a Grim Reaper is available on webtoon.

THE VILLAINESS REVERSES THE HOURGLASS (MANHWA)

I’m caught up with the newest english translated chapters of the manhwa, you are free to incorporate any new developments. However, DON’T include anything that hadn’t happened in webcomic yet. I’m not interested in the original light novel and I don’t want to get spoiled about future happenings.

Aria Roscent

I love fictional stories about terrible people getting a second chance at life and not afraid of dirtying their hands to achieve their goals and I love stories that incorporate economies. Needlessly to say I love this story. Aria is absolutely terrible person, but there’s a reason for her terribleness and at the same time she is enough of an underdog that you can root for her. She needs to fight for her future happiness and she will do it and make life of

I love the petty wars between Aria and Mielle and would love to see more of them using the ettiquete to make jabs at each other. Also Aria using her economical and business knowledge is always so great. I would love to see more of her learning and understanding economy than we were shown in the story (where she just read a few books). Outsider POV of prince’s allies watching Aria attend the secret meetings would also be interesting.

AUs and ships

I would prefer no setting changes for this story. Other AUs are fine, though. Maybe there are some other side-effects to using hourglass than simply growing up quicker. What if Aria’s stepfather didn’t try to steal the credit for the ideas and actually worked with her to strengthen their family’s business?

I ship Aria and prince like burning and would love any moment of them totally not flirting while discussing economical and political situation of the country.

ANIME CRIMES DIVISION (WEB SERIES)

Detective Diesel (Anime Crimes Division) Joe Furuya (Anime Crimes Division)

I loved this affectionate parody of anime culture. A hardboiled cop show about detectives solving anime crimes was just incredible and I would love to see more of that ridiculousness. I also loved how well Detective Diesel and Joe Furuya worked together as cops complimenting each other strengths.

I would love for them to explore some more unique places in Neo Otaku City. Maybe there is a kabedon valley where everyone feels compulsion to kabedon someone. Or fanfic district where everything is fanfic tropes and eyes become orbs in the descriptions once characters enter that part of the city. There are just so many interesting things you can do with that setting. 

For some suggestions of potential cases, maybe there is a new “isekai drug” in the city that makes you believe that you’ve been transported into a fantasy world with cool powers and it’s up to Diesel and Furuya to find out who is manufacturing it. Or the two of them get a tip that one of the gatcha games is hypnotizing its users which leads them down a path of gatcha hell to try to figure out which one is actually using hypnotism rather than good old gatcha games manipulation techniques. I would love any and all cases, those are just some suggestions.

AUs and ships

No setting chages for this canon, please. I’m fine with divergent AUs or just a general madness that comes from a city where anime tropes work. 

I would prefer no romance between Diesel and Furuya (unless it’s a situation similar to that time in S2 where they went to the city where everything played by the rules of western TV shows and they had to have romantic tension). I want them as buddies more than anything.

Anime Crimes Division is available on youtube: Season 1, Season 2

TALES OF CRESTORIA

Vicious (Tales of Crestoria)

This gatcha game had no right to have such a good main story, but here I am loving the hell out of it. I would love to see more misadventures of Vicious whether it be before he meet Kanata and the rest of the team or after.

I would love to see more of Vicious absolute lack of morality contrast with other characters. Vicious works best when he has someone to bounce off. I absolutely love the weird dynamic between Vicious, Kanata and Misella. For some prompts, maybe Vicious attempt to obtain booze results in some trouble for the team. Or he ends up separated from the team after they are attacked and now has to work with someone to rejoin them. 

Feel free to throw any characters from other Tales games. I played Symphonia, Graces f, Vesperia, both Xillias, Zestiria and Berseria (and Links and Rays before english versions got closed), but I’m fine with characters from games I haven’t  played as long as you give me an idea of their personality and who they are. Don’t be afraid to throw in your favourites!

AUs and ships

No setting chages for this canon, please. Feel free to use any other AUs. This story is pretty much an AU for all other Tales characters that get transplanted into this story, and I love how they get integrated into the setting of Crestoria.

I’m not really big on any ships for the main Crestoria team, please just preserve their usual dynamics.

Tales of Crestoria is a mobile game available for free on IOS and Android.