Dear Writer - Darkest Night 2019
Jul. 28th, 2019 05:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
simplecoffeeHey there! Thank you so much for sharing my fandoms and for writing for me! I am simplecoffee on ao3 and academicgangster on tumblr.
So, the thing I love most in fanfic is taking canon character dynamics and just...making them More. Taking both the darkness of canon and the light, taking what's left unsaid of both, and exploring what makes them so.
With that reasoning, for each of my requests, each tag in the cloud can be taken as a prompt on its own, or you can read the tags for that request as a whole and get a pretty solid idea of the general vibe for that canon that I love. While my likes and DNWs are similar overall, there are enough slight differences between them for different canons that I'll separate them rather than put them in a single section; broadly speaking, I love hurt/comfort and strongly prefer the darkness to be tempered with light - I'm never averse to fluff and softness to mitigate the awfulness of what the characters go through. (Collateral, being the darkest, most jagged canon of the ones I'm requesting, is the exception to this; I am okay with a dark ending for this fandom, while I'd rather a happy, hopeful or at least bittersweet ending for the others.)
I'm going to ramble a bit in this letter about the dark aspects of each canon that I like, and about some individual tags that catch my fancy - but I do love all my requested tags very much, so I'm pretty much guaranteed to love whichever one(s) you choose, regardless of whether or not I mention it separately here. <3 Please feel free to mix and match whichever freeform tags you like, and where I've requested a / pairing, to go with getting together or established relationship as you prefer! I am also more than okay with or without smut, as you like.
Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Ethan Hunt
Ethan/Hunley
Ethan & Hunley
Ethan/Sidorov
Ethan & Sidorov
(I also love Luther, and would be very okay with Ethan & Luther or Ethan/Luther)
Likes and DNWs:
Thoughts:
MI, being an action/espionage canon, is full of dark themes, implications and tangents that are never really explored. That's partly because Ethan's a cinnamon roll who always, always looks on the bright side, and partly because he's a stoic dumbass who never complains no matter what he suffers through. Which, as you might imagine, leaves a lot of potential for other characters to discover what he suffers through.
So, there are some 'altered states' tags, and some general sickness tags that could cause altered states or just cause Ethan's walls to fall, such as "altered mental states", "fever", "hallucinations", and "character forgets they are undercover". Some tags are about Ethan's desperate protectiveness and tendency to be a self-sacrificing idiot, such as "enduring pain to protect another", "aftermath of torture", "torture victim comforts distressed person who was forced to watch", and "faking recovery so others will stop worrying about you". The rest are general hurt/comfort/vulnerability tags with a dark bent, such as "characters bond in traumatic circumstances", "gunshot wounds", "scars", "too sick to sleep", and "post-traumatic stress disorder".
So, what happens when Ethan's sick or hurt or even triggered badly enough for his grip on reality to fade - enough for his emotional walls to crumble without his consent, perhaps even without his knowledge? Does he flash back to an earlier trauma, or start seeing lost loved ones, or remembering missions that failed? Does he apologize for things that aren't/weren't his fault? Is Hunley his handler, and does he get to witness or hear Ethan try to hold himself together when he barely knows what he's saying? Does he talk him through it, or send someone or go himself to fetch him home? Or is it Sidorov who sees the American so unexpectedly vulnerable and tries to help? Is it Luther, Ethan's oldest, truest friend, who knows best what he's suffered through the years and wishes he could help, but can only hold him through it? Is it the entire team, so used to Ethan being their fearless, compassionate leader, that has to take care of him for a change? Is Ethan undercover or trapped with someone (Hunley, Sidorov, Luther) who has to watch him go through hell, and help as best they can? Is he in a relationship with this person, or are they hoping for one? How does living through that experience affect them?
Or if Ethan's not in quite bad enough a state to lose the plot, how does he let other people comfort him - if at all? Does he try to comfort whoever else is there instead? How do they come out of that experience?
If you're going the romantic route, I love submissive Ethan, with doms who treat him gently and prove worthy of his trust.
Oblivion (2013)
Jack Harper
Jack/Vika
Jack/Julia
Jack/Jack
Likes and DNWs:
Thoughts:
I am here for all the hurt/comfort, and all the exploration of how Vika and Julia were both pretty terrible partners to Jack 49 - Vika outright, at least emotionally, abusive, and Julia at best assuming he was - or wanting him to be - someone he's not. (And how he accepted their love because he wants love so badly and doesn't know he deserves any better.)
So, the dubcon/noncon/abuse tags are all regarding Jack/Vika and Jack/Julia; if Jack/Jack strikes your fancy to explore, I'd rather that relationship be a light at the end of the tunnel for 49 (or any other Jack, of course), while or after he recovers from what Vika and/or Julia put him through.
Oblivion has a whole bunch of delightfully messed up character dynamics. Jack - any/every Jack - is a lovely, lovely man, whimsical and gentle, and he's in a relationship with Vika, who (though it's clearly because she has issues of her own) is subtly super controlling toward him. He can't tell her anything or talk to her about anything he does or finds or thinks about, because he knows she'll find something about it he 'shouldn't' be thinking or doing; he hides his book and his little forest getaway from her, no matter how badly he clearly wants her to share in them. When he tries, just a little, to get her to see his point of view, she panics and throws his flower away, and he looks so very miserable. In short, I don't think Vika really knows Jack at all - nor does she really know herself at all - and so their relationship ends up more or less inadvertently hurting him. I don't think Vika means to be cruel, but I think she kind of ends up being cruel sometimes anyway, and that's the dynamic I'd love to see explored between these two. Maybe Jack's sick or hurt, and Vika refuses to believe him when he tells her so. Maybe they're having sex and she ignores him when he asks to stop. Maybe she believes that for them to be an 'effective team', she needs to discipline him whenever he does something outside of routine. (Maybe he even liked that to begin with, as a roleplay of sorts, and later realized she didn't quite mean it as roleplay.) Maybe she gaslights him into believing he consented when he didn't. Maybe she's dismissive of his illness or pain or nightmares, but he lives for the few words of comfort she'll bother to give him because he knows it's the best he'll ever get.
With Jack and Julia, things are different and possibly even murkier. There's genuine feeling between them, genuine memories, but those memories aren't Jack's own, and so Jack 49 has to come to terms not only with the fact that he's never been loved but that, to Julia, he's a replacement goldfish. There's a reluctance to him when she drags him to bed, a possible feeling that he's being used, and yet he goes along with it for the sake of feeling loved for that one night - and then he gives everything up so everyone but him can live. What's going through Jack 49's head when he's letting Julia love him? Is he desperately drinking in her touch, knowing it was never meant for him? Is he in denial? Half overwhelmed and wanting to stop, but also wanting to go on because he needs to comfort her and keep her safe and happy? What about Jack 52, after the film - does he go through similar things?
Regardless of what canon says, please don't let Jack 49 die! I'd love him to live and have at least some hope of recovering from the events of the film, and of processing the trauma and recognizing that the love he thought he had was really not great. I'd also love him to have the chance of finding real love with another Jack.
Top Gun (1986)
Maverick/Charlie
Maverick/Iceman
Likes and DNWs:
Thoughts:
Angsty sub!Maverick is my weakness in this fandom. Mav's a serious mess, both in 1986 and in the new trailer for Top Gun 2, and there's a lot to explore in what makes this sad, sad character tick.
First off, I don't think he and Charlie, while cute, were really as perfect as they seemed to be. Charlie has her good points - she's strong and knowledgeable and romantic - but when she asked Mav out, even that first time, it was to pump him for information; and when she decided to give him a pep talk, she went about it by cutting him down and calling him a coward, which clearly hurt him deeply. And Mav, while self-centred and a bit of a showoff, does not have a mean bone in his body: he never retaliates, and he never even tries to defend himself. That's not a great relationship, and it doesn't say much for Mav's self-worth either - and it's why I think that Ice, who pulls no punches but always speaks the truth, would be better for Mav both as a partner and a friend.
So I'm here for Mav being a messed-up sub to Charlie, or to Ice, or to Charlie and then, after they break up, to Ice. A number of tags in this request lend themselves to angsty sub situations - I'd love to see the differences between Charlie's cutting, inconsiderate style of domination, and Ice's rougher but more compassionate one. Maybe Charlie refused Mav aftercare, or ignored one or more of his boundaries, or maybe he wanted to be hurt or humiliated but let her go on even when it stopped being fun, because he thought he deserved the pain. Maybe he tries to do the same with Ice, refusing or genuinely forgetting to safeword even when he wants to, but Ice notices when he shows signs of distress and breaks the scene, and Mav's like, does not compute. Maybe Mav doesn't even know his own boundaries and accidentally triggers himself and ends up crying. Maybe Ice tries to make him talk about it, and maybe he even succeeds.
There are also some non-sexual dark tags that lend themselves to Mav's headspace as of 1986: there's "Character whose parents are abusive/dead wishes another character were their parent", since Mav's canonically an orphan and tries very hard to find parental love with Goose and Viper, "Survivor Guilt" because he has to deal with losing Goose, "Hazing" and "Revenge Backfire" because cadets can be cruel and Mav is small and angry and not the most popular - hell, perhaps Ice is the one who tries to prank Mav, hoping for him to make a dramatic scene, and is chastened when he just gets sad and resigned instead. Or maybe Ice seduces him with the intention of learning what makes him tick, or of bringing him down a couple of notches or having something to brag about, but ends up learning how surprisingly sincere and sad he is, and then falls in love with him despite his best worst intentions.
And finally, there are tags that speak to my thoughts about the TG2 trailer - which I was not expecting to give me five thousand feelings about depression, but...well, it somehow did. Mav looks so exhausted and resigned and 'refuses to die' and just, feelings. So, "depression". "Forced to admit to past abuse". "Loss of Faith". "Character doesn't care about their own wellbeing". Possibly, "past suicide attempt revealed". Tell me more about how Mav refuses to die, despite not really knowing why. Tell me about how lonely he's been and how tired he is, and how he copes with it. (And maybe tell me about how Ice walks back into his life, and how while it doesn't fix him, maybe love helps him feel a little less alone.)
Collateral (2004)
Vincent
Vincent/Max
Likes and DNWs:
Thoughts:
God these characters are so fucked up. Vincent is a terrible person, and yet you kind of feel for him; Max is a sad bean who never asked to be caught up in any of this, and yet somehow finds it in himself to kick ass. Please tell me more about these messed up people, and/or about them getting it on in the most messed up ways. I'm a-okay with it either being during the film, or after the film in a universe where Vincent doesn't die.
Maybe one or both of them are drugged or drunk or high, maybe Vincent's sick or injured so badly he's hallucinating and isn't sure Max is real. Maybe they use banging each other as an excuse to talk out or fuck out their various issues, like Max's with his limo company and Vincent's with his father. Vincent is definitely a masochist; maybe he's surprisingly eager to please, and Max uses that to get revenge for everything Vincent put him through in the film. Maybe he does that by hurting him, or maybe he does it by getting him to confess to (or just talk about) all the times he's been vulnerable in the past. Maybe Vincent's time in the military comes up, in a kinky context or an angsty, bitter context, or both. Maybe they walk away weirdly healed...or maybe just bleeding and ripped apart.
I'd like whatever they do to be more or less consensual, if not necessarily safe or sane - the few dubcon tags are for situations where they may be drunk, drugged or (as mentioned above) Vincent may be hallucinating and not entirely conscious - not for noncon or coerced situations. I don't want either of them to hold disproportionate power over the other - as Max established in the second half of the film, the leash very much goes both ways. (Also Vincent is weirdly fucking principled for a hitman and I could see him as being laughably obsessed with consent, so make of that what you will.)
Once again, thank you for writing for me! I hope you have fun doing so - that's what it's all about, after all. 💛
So, the thing I love most in fanfic is taking canon character dynamics and just...making them More. Taking both the darkness of canon and the light, taking what's left unsaid of both, and exploring what makes them so.
With that reasoning, for each of my requests, each tag in the cloud can be taken as a prompt on its own, or you can read the tags for that request as a whole and get a pretty solid idea of the general vibe for that canon that I love. While my likes and DNWs are similar overall, there are enough slight differences between them for different canons that I'll separate them rather than put them in a single section; broadly speaking, I love hurt/comfort and strongly prefer the darkness to be tempered with light - I'm never averse to fluff and softness to mitigate the awfulness of what the characters go through. (Collateral, being the darkest, most jagged canon of the ones I'm requesting, is the exception to this; I am okay with a dark ending for this fandom, while I'd rather a happy, hopeful or at least bittersweet ending for the others.)
I'm going to ramble a bit in this letter about the dark aspects of each canon that I like, and about some individual tags that catch my fancy - but I do love all my requested tags very much, so I'm pretty much guaranteed to love whichever one(s) you choose, regardless of whether or not I mention it separately here. <3 Please feel free to mix and match whichever freeform tags you like, and where I've requested a / pairing, to go with getting together or established relationship as you prefer! I am also more than okay with or without smut, as you like.
Mission: Impossible (Movies)
Ethan Hunt
Ethan/Hunley
Ethan & Hunley
Ethan/Sidorov
Ethan & Sidorov
(I also love Luther, and would be very okay with Ethan & Luther or Ethan/Luther)
Likes and DNWs:
Thoughts:
MI, being an action/espionage canon, is full of dark themes, implications and tangents that are never really explored. That's partly because Ethan's a cinnamon roll who always, always looks on the bright side, and partly because he's a stoic dumbass who never complains no matter what he suffers through. Which, as you might imagine, leaves a lot of potential for other characters to discover what he suffers through.
So, there are some 'altered states' tags, and some general sickness tags that could cause altered states or just cause Ethan's walls to fall, such as "altered mental states", "fever", "hallucinations", and "character forgets they are undercover". Some tags are about Ethan's desperate protectiveness and tendency to be a self-sacrificing idiot, such as "enduring pain to protect another", "aftermath of torture", "torture victim comforts distressed person who was forced to watch", and "faking recovery so others will stop worrying about you". The rest are general hurt/comfort/vulnerability tags with a dark bent, such as "characters bond in traumatic circumstances", "gunshot wounds", "scars", "too sick to sleep", and "post-traumatic stress disorder".
So, what happens when Ethan's sick or hurt or even triggered badly enough for his grip on reality to fade - enough for his emotional walls to crumble without his consent, perhaps even without his knowledge? Does he flash back to an earlier trauma, or start seeing lost loved ones, or remembering missions that failed? Does he apologize for things that aren't/weren't his fault? Is Hunley his handler, and does he get to witness or hear Ethan try to hold himself together when he barely knows what he's saying? Does he talk him through it, or send someone or go himself to fetch him home? Or is it Sidorov who sees the American so unexpectedly vulnerable and tries to help? Is it Luther, Ethan's oldest, truest friend, who knows best what he's suffered through the years and wishes he could help, but can only hold him through it? Is it the entire team, so used to Ethan being their fearless, compassionate leader, that has to take care of him for a change? Is Ethan undercover or trapped with someone (Hunley, Sidorov, Luther) who has to watch him go through hell, and help as best they can? Is he in a relationship with this person, or are they hoping for one? How does living through that experience affect them?
Or if Ethan's not in quite bad enough a state to lose the plot, how does he let other people comfort him - if at all? Does he try to comfort whoever else is there instead? How do they come out of that experience?
If you're going the romantic route, I love submissive Ethan, with doms who treat him gently and prove worthy of his trust.
Oblivion (2013)
Jack Harper
Jack/Vika
Jack/Julia
Jack/Jack
Likes and DNWs:
Thoughts:
I am here for all the hurt/comfort, and all the exploration of how Vika and Julia were both pretty terrible partners to Jack 49 - Vika outright, at least emotionally, abusive, and Julia at best assuming he was - or wanting him to be - someone he's not. (And how he accepted their love because he wants love so badly and doesn't know he deserves any better.)
So, the dubcon/noncon/abuse tags are all regarding Jack/Vika and Jack/Julia; if Jack/Jack strikes your fancy to explore, I'd rather that relationship be a light at the end of the tunnel for 49 (or any other Jack, of course), while or after he recovers from what Vika and/or Julia put him through.
Oblivion has a whole bunch of delightfully messed up character dynamics. Jack - any/every Jack - is a lovely, lovely man, whimsical and gentle, and he's in a relationship with Vika, who (though it's clearly because she has issues of her own) is subtly super controlling toward him. He can't tell her anything or talk to her about anything he does or finds or thinks about, because he knows she'll find something about it he 'shouldn't' be thinking or doing; he hides his book and his little forest getaway from her, no matter how badly he clearly wants her to share in them. When he tries, just a little, to get her to see his point of view, she panics and throws his flower away, and he looks so very miserable. In short, I don't think Vika really knows Jack at all - nor does she really know herself at all - and so their relationship ends up more or less inadvertently hurting him. I don't think Vika means to be cruel, but I think she kind of ends up being cruel sometimes anyway, and that's the dynamic I'd love to see explored between these two. Maybe Jack's sick or hurt, and Vika refuses to believe him when he tells her so. Maybe they're having sex and she ignores him when he asks to stop. Maybe she believes that for them to be an 'effective team', she needs to discipline him whenever he does something outside of routine. (Maybe he even liked that to begin with, as a roleplay of sorts, and later realized she didn't quite mean it as roleplay.) Maybe she gaslights him into believing he consented when he didn't. Maybe she's dismissive of his illness or pain or nightmares, but he lives for the few words of comfort she'll bother to give him because he knows it's the best he'll ever get.
With Jack and Julia, things are different and possibly even murkier. There's genuine feeling between them, genuine memories, but those memories aren't Jack's own, and so Jack 49 has to come to terms not only with the fact that he's never been loved but that, to Julia, he's a replacement goldfish. There's a reluctance to him when she drags him to bed, a possible feeling that he's being used, and yet he goes along with it for the sake of feeling loved for that one night - and then he gives everything up so everyone but him can live. What's going through Jack 49's head when he's letting Julia love him? Is he desperately drinking in her touch, knowing it was never meant for him? Is he in denial? Half overwhelmed and wanting to stop, but also wanting to go on because he needs to comfort her and keep her safe and happy? What about Jack 52, after the film - does he go through similar things?
Regardless of what canon says, please don't let Jack 49 die! I'd love him to live and have at least some hope of recovering from the events of the film, and of processing the trauma and recognizing that the love he thought he had was really not great. I'd also love him to have the chance of finding real love with another Jack.
Top Gun (1986)
Maverick/Charlie
Maverick/Iceman
Likes and DNWs:
Thoughts:
Angsty sub!Maverick is my weakness in this fandom. Mav's a serious mess, both in 1986 and in the new trailer for Top Gun 2, and there's a lot to explore in what makes this sad, sad character tick.
First off, I don't think he and Charlie, while cute, were really as perfect as they seemed to be. Charlie has her good points - she's strong and knowledgeable and romantic - but when she asked Mav out, even that first time, it was to pump him for information; and when she decided to give him a pep talk, she went about it by cutting him down and calling him a coward, which clearly hurt him deeply. And Mav, while self-centred and a bit of a showoff, does not have a mean bone in his body: he never retaliates, and he never even tries to defend himself. That's not a great relationship, and it doesn't say much for Mav's self-worth either - and it's why I think that Ice, who pulls no punches but always speaks the truth, would be better for Mav both as a partner and a friend.
So I'm here for Mav being a messed-up sub to Charlie, or to Ice, or to Charlie and then, after they break up, to Ice. A number of tags in this request lend themselves to angsty sub situations - I'd love to see the differences between Charlie's cutting, inconsiderate style of domination, and Ice's rougher but more compassionate one. Maybe Charlie refused Mav aftercare, or ignored one or more of his boundaries, or maybe he wanted to be hurt or humiliated but let her go on even when it stopped being fun, because he thought he deserved the pain. Maybe he tries to do the same with Ice, refusing or genuinely forgetting to safeword even when he wants to, but Ice notices when he shows signs of distress and breaks the scene, and Mav's like, does not compute. Maybe Mav doesn't even know his own boundaries and accidentally triggers himself and ends up crying. Maybe Ice tries to make him talk about it, and maybe he even succeeds.
There are also some non-sexual dark tags that lend themselves to Mav's headspace as of 1986: there's "Character whose parents are abusive/dead wishes another character were their parent", since Mav's canonically an orphan and tries very hard to find parental love with Goose and Viper, "Survivor Guilt" because he has to deal with losing Goose, "Hazing" and "Revenge Backfire" because cadets can be cruel and Mav is small and angry and not the most popular - hell, perhaps Ice is the one who tries to prank Mav, hoping for him to make a dramatic scene, and is chastened when he just gets sad and resigned instead. Or maybe Ice seduces him with the intention of learning what makes him tick, or of bringing him down a couple of notches or having something to brag about, but ends up learning how surprisingly sincere and sad he is, and then falls in love with him despite his best worst intentions.
And finally, there are tags that speak to my thoughts about the TG2 trailer - which I was not expecting to give me five thousand feelings about depression, but...well, it somehow did. Mav looks so exhausted and resigned and 'refuses to die' and just, feelings. So, "depression". "Forced to admit to past abuse". "Loss of Faith". "Character doesn't care about their own wellbeing". Possibly, "past suicide attempt revealed". Tell me more about how Mav refuses to die, despite not really knowing why. Tell me about how lonely he's been and how tired he is, and how he copes with it. (And maybe tell me about how Ice walks back into his life, and how while it doesn't fix him, maybe love helps him feel a little less alone.)
Collateral (2004)
Vincent
Vincent/Max
Likes and DNWs:
Thoughts:
God these characters are so fucked up. Vincent is a terrible person, and yet you kind of feel for him; Max is a sad bean who never asked to be caught up in any of this, and yet somehow finds it in himself to kick ass. Please tell me more about these messed up people, and/or about them getting it on in the most messed up ways. I'm a-okay with it either being during the film, or after the film in a universe where Vincent doesn't die.
Maybe one or both of them are drugged or drunk or high, maybe Vincent's sick or injured so badly he's hallucinating and isn't sure Max is real. Maybe they use banging each other as an excuse to talk out or fuck out their various issues, like Max's with his limo company and Vincent's with his father. Vincent is definitely a masochist; maybe he's surprisingly eager to please, and Max uses that to get revenge for everything Vincent put him through in the film. Maybe he does that by hurting him, or maybe he does it by getting him to confess to (or just talk about) all the times he's been vulnerable in the past. Maybe Vincent's time in the military comes up, in a kinky context or an angsty, bitter context, or both. Maybe they walk away weirdly healed...or maybe just bleeding and ripped apart.
I'd like whatever they do to be more or less consensual, if not necessarily safe or sane - the few dubcon tags are for situations where they may be drunk, drugged or (as mentioned above) Vincent may be hallucinating and not entirely conscious - not for noncon or coerced situations. I don't want either of them to hold disproportionate power over the other - as Max established in the second half of the film, the leash very much goes both ways. (Also Vincent is weirdly fucking principled for a hitman and I could see him as being laughably obsessed with consent, so make of that what you will.)
Once again, thank you for writing for me! I hope you have fun doing so - that's what it's all about, after all. 💛
