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General Likes
Feb. 5th, 2025 12:08Thank you so much for coming to check out my letter! If you’re reading this, I managed to keep my prompts to the ao3 text box this time around; below are my general, NSFW, and medium likes. Thank you again, and I hope this is helpful to you!
- Subtext!!
- Character studies, relationship studies. Complicated, messy relationships, conflicts that can’t be resolved in one conversation.
- Bittersweet endings, hopeful endings, open endings, complicated endings, “and then the rest of canon happened and we know how that went” endings (whether that makes them more hopeful or less, I’ll like it either way).
- Missing scenes
- Snapshots in time, one scene in a larger-scale story; open ambiguous endings where things don’t get resolved.
- Dramatic irony, fluff with ominous foreshadowing
- Unreliable narrators; not just ones who lie to the audience on purpose but also ones who are wrong about what’s going on, who lie to themselves and the reader by extension, who are wrong about their own feelings, who are wrong about what’s going on with other people, who make guesses and assumptions and whose assumptions aren’t always right. Tight POVs that narrate the character’s experience rather than the full truth of what’s going on.
- Gender; characters with issues and complexes about gender performance.
- Feelings and opinions about queerness; complicated relationships with desire, wanting things you know aren’t what you’re supposed to want; these things being tangled up in one another.
- Hermaneutic injustice; characters who don’t have a conceptual vocabulary for their experiences.
- Characters who don’t know what they want, who don’t admit to what they want, who want contradictory things
- Relationships that cross the streams, that are four different kinds of thing at once; people who are neither precisely dating nor precisely not; when one person is your mentor and your comrade-in-arms and your lover and your friend; when ‘what are we’ is a question without an answer. (Not the same as depiction of QPRs – I don’t want it to be Representation(TM).)
- Intense homoerotic best friendships
- Relationships where all the communication is happening via subtext, whether because they won’t spit it out or because they can’t spit it out or because they don’t have to say things with their words to have them understood.
- The personal and the political being one and the same; people in situations where their personal relationships have much wider implications
- Image and how you’re viewed and having your personal life be public. Celebrity and fame (bad). Pedestalization and interaction therewith.
- Poly webs, open relationships. In general, nonmonogamous relationships that are not the thing where you have one relationship that works the way monogamous romances conventionally work but that happens to have three people in it.
- Choices that aren’t, like, GOOD per se, but there isn’t a clear better choice, it’s just bad options all around.
- Proxy relationships and triangulation; when two people have a relationship that’s about the conspicuous absence of a third person. Conspicuous absences of a person in general but triangulation and proxy relationships tend to be where that really shines.
- Everything is about sex, except for sex; sex is about misattributing quotes to Oscar Wilde. Is sex about power? About safety? About embodiment? About gender? About loyalty? About purity? About lack of purity? About getting to want things? About getting to ask for things? About the conspicuous absence of a third party? About something else entirely?
- Non-penetrative sex; sex that doesn’t follow the Standard Sex Action Flowchart
- Characterizing kinks
- Kink that is not responsibly-negotiated healthy BDSM scenes
- Characters who have sex the same way they'd have a conversation, or sex scenes that aren’t mostly hot. Maybe it’s cute and giggly, maybe it’s tragic, maybe it’s just really awkward.
- Using sex as a tool: as a bargaining chip, as a distraction from questions you don’t want to answer, as a means of communication, as a way to get things (eg: affection, reassurance) that you feel like you can't want or ask for directly.
- Complicated relationships with desire and bodily autonomy
- Gender themes – strong feelings about topping and bottoming, gendered power dynamics, everything I said above regarding feelings and opinions about queerness, that whole sphere
- Slightly unusual hotspots
- Experience gaps
- Masochism (specifically that; I’m not particularly into pain for its own sake but I do think it’s very hot for characters to be masochists); sadism; complicated feelings about pain
- Hair - pulling hair, playing with hair
- One character influencing another’s sexual preferences, whether that’s deliberate dubcon-y frogboiling or just “I had a teenage crush and imprinted on you and now my kinks show it”
- First times, whether it’s their first time with this person or their first time with this kink or their first time at all; mapping out unfamiliar territory with someone else
- Nipple play
- Touch starvation
- Drugged sex and altered states of consciousness; the hottest drug is MDMA, the second-hottest is alcohol, the third-hottest is whatever fantasy sex drug you feel like inventing
- Somno, especially unnegotiated somno; whether the asleep character wakes up at any point is up to you
- Orgasm delay; desperation to the point of pain
- Small-to-medium dicks and appreciation thereof (NOT humiliation)
- Overstimulation
- AUs that alt over specific events and dynamics; when character dynamics are recognizably kept, even in the new setting.
- For art, I love basically any AU where character design says something deep and true about your soul and themes as a person – magical girl AUs are especially great for this but there’s lots of options! More broadly, how would this character present themselves in a different context?
- Celebrity (fucked up) and fame (complicated to bad) – Hunger Games victor AUs, idol AUs, Olympian gymnastics/figure skating AUs that dig into abusive coaching, all hit this button.
- Politics and people who really aren’t qualified to do them, in settings with interesting and distinctive kinds of scarcity – Scholomance AUs, for instance, or a Bliss Stage post-apocalypse. High-stakes social maneuvering in general!
- If you put characters in the setting of a different canon, I generally prefer that they not follow that canon’s plot – a PMMM setting AU is great, but I don’t need or want the main characters to do what Homura and Madoka did there. (The one exception to this is We Know the Devil AUs, where I very much do want them to be three kids stuck in a cabin; even then, though, I’d rather they not be exact analogues of each of the Group South girls.)
- Specific AUs I like a lot: We Know the Devil fusion, Hunger Games victors, cultivation sect, Puella Magi Madoka Magica setting, palace intrigue, harem politics, niche historical settings (my specialty is 1920s London bohemianism but show me yours!!), cyberpunk
- Interesting and specific things with color – limited palettes, spot color, doing stuff with characters’ theme colors.
- Characterizing clothing choices; designs that communicate a lot about a character - AUs are particularly great for this! What would that character look like as a magical girl? In a modern setting would his attention to aesthetics mean he’s goth, or would he be wearing an impeccably-tailored suit? If she were a Hunger Games victor, what kind of image would her stylists try to evoke?
- I’m an ‘all fic is meta’ guy and possibly my favorite thing in the whole world is when art is meta - if you know PMMM, mihifu’s work is a stunningly good example of what I mean by that.
- Longer pieces of text getting split up and made into a throughline for the whole work
- Unusual juxtapositions – substack posts next to poetry next to legal briefs next to slogan buttons; fine art next to anime screenshots next to diagrams next to webcomic panels
- A Softer World edits
- Having an arc! All my collages have a beginning a middle and an end, you can read them top to bottom like a poem made of PNGs.
- Tinting text elements so it’s clear which things come from the same source; arranging text elements so it’s clear which things are part of the same thought; combining sources in the middle of a thought so elements respond to one another.
- Strong and specific color schemes – not necessarily bright colors, if the vibe is muted hazy purple I love a muted hazy purple, but I like a specific color scheme that contributes to the vibe.
- Vids that are commentary on the character/relationship; my absolute favorite thing in art is when juxtaposition of unlike things creates meaning.
- Ensemble vids that don’t focus on any one character or relationship so much as tracing a theme throughout the show
- Unusual song choices
- Making the subject of a song a metaphor for something in the show
- Songs with a strong beat
- If I’ve requested vids I’ve probably provided a playlist of songs I think would be fun for that fandom – feel free to take inspiration from that, or to go a different direction!
General Likes
- Subtext!!
- Character studies, relationship studies. Complicated, messy relationships, conflicts that can’t be resolved in one conversation.
- Bittersweet endings, hopeful endings, open endings, complicated endings, “and then the rest of canon happened and we know how that went” endings (whether that makes them more hopeful or less, I’ll like it either way).
- Missing scenes
- Snapshots in time, one scene in a larger-scale story; open ambiguous endings where things don’t get resolved.
- Dramatic irony, fluff with ominous foreshadowing
- Unreliable narrators; not just ones who lie to the audience on purpose but also ones who are wrong about what’s going on, who lie to themselves and the reader by extension, who are wrong about their own feelings, who are wrong about what’s going on with other people, who make guesses and assumptions and whose assumptions aren’t always right. Tight POVs that narrate the character’s experience rather than the full truth of what’s going on.
- Gender; characters with issues and complexes about gender performance.
- Feelings and opinions about queerness; complicated relationships with desire, wanting things you know aren’t what you’re supposed to want; these things being tangled up in one another.
- Hermaneutic injustice; characters who don’t have a conceptual vocabulary for their experiences.
- Characters who don’t know what they want, who don’t admit to what they want, who want contradictory things
- Relationships that cross the streams, that are four different kinds of thing at once; people who are neither precisely dating nor precisely not; when one person is your mentor and your comrade-in-arms and your lover and your friend; when ‘what are we’ is a question without an answer. (Not the same as depiction of QPRs – I don’t want it to be Representation(TM).)
- Intense homoerotic best friendships
- Relationships where all the communication is happening via subtext, whether because they won’t spit it out or because they can’t spit it out or because they don’t have to say things with their words to have them understood.
- The personal and the political being one and the same; people in situations where their personal relationships have much wider implications
- Image and how you’re viewed and having your personal life be public. Celebrity and fame (bad). Pedestalization and interaction therewith.
- Poly webs, open relationships. In general, nonmonogamous relationships that are not the thing where you have one relationship that works the way monogamous romances conventionally work but that happens to have three people in it.
- Choices that aren’t, like, GOOD per se, but there isn’t a clear better choice, it’s just bad options all around.
- Proxy relationships and triangulation; when two people have a relationship that’s about the conspicuous absence of a third person. Conspicuous absences of a person in general but triangulation and proxy relationships tend to be where that really shines.
NSFW Likes (literary)
- Everything is about sex, except for sex; sex is about misattributing quotes to Oscar Wilde. Is sex about power? About safety? About embodiment? About gender? About loyalty? About purity? About lack of purity? About getting to want things? About getting to ask for things? About the conspicuous absence of a third party? About something else entirely?
- Non-penetrative sex; sex that doesn’t follow the Standard Sex Action Flowchart
- Characterizing kinks
- Kink that is not responsibly-negotiated healthy BDSM scenes
- Characters who have sex the same way they'd have a conversation, or sex scenes that aren’t mostly hot. Maybe it’s cute and giggly, maybe it’s tragic, maybe it’s just really awkward.
- Using sex as a tool: as a bargaining chip, as a distraction from questions you don’t want to answer, as a means of communication, as a way to get things (eg: affection, reassurance) that you feel like you can't want or ask for directly.
- Complicated relationships with desire and bodily autonomy
- Gender themes – strong feelings about topping and bottoming, gendered power dynamics, everything I said above regarding feelings and opinions about queerness, that whole sphere
NSFW Likes (kinks)
- Slightly unusual hotspots
- Experience gaps
- Masochism (specifically that; I’m not particularly into pain for its own sake but I do think it’s very hot for characters to be masochists); sadism; complicated feelings about pain
- Hair - pulling hair, playing with hair
- One character influencing another’s sexual preferences, whether that’s deliberate dubcon-y frogboiling or just “I had a teenage crush and imprinted on you and now my kinks show it”
- First times, whether it’s their first time with this person or their first time with this kink or their first time at all; mapping out unfamiliar territory with someone else
- Nipple play
- Touch starvation
- Drugged sex and altered states of consciousness; the hottest drug is MDMA, the second-hottest is alcohol, the third-hottest is whatever fantasy sex drug you feel like inventing
- Somno, especially unnegotiated somno; whether the asleep character wakes up at any point is up to you
- Orgasm delay; desperation to the point of pain
- Small-to-medium dicks and appreciation thereof (NOT humiliation)
- Overstimulation
AU Likes
- AUs that alt over specific events and dynamics; when character dynamics are recognizably kept, even in the new setting.
- For art, I love basically any AU where character design says something deep and true about your soul and themes as a person – magical girl AUs are especially great for this but there’s lots of options! More broadly, how would this character present themselves in a different context?
- Celebrity (fucked up) and fame (complicated to bad) – Hunger Games victor AUs, idol AUs, Olympian gymnastics/figure skating AUs that dig into abusive coaching, all hit this button.
- Politics and people who really aren’t qualified to do them, in settings with interesting and distinctive kinds of scarcity – Scholomance AUs, for instance, or a Bliss Stage post-apocalypse. High-stakes social maneuvering in general!
- If you put characters in the setting of a different canon, I generally prefer that they not follow that canon’s plot – a PMMM setting AU is great, but I don’t need or want the main characters to do what Homura and Madoka did there. (The one exception to this is We Know the Devil AUs, where I very much do want them to be three kids stuck in a cabin; even then, though, I’d rather they not be exact analogues of each of the Group South girls.)
- Specific AUs I like a lot: We Know the Devil fusion, Hunger Games victors, cultivation sect, Puella Magi Madoka Magica setting, palace intrigue, harem politics, niche historical settings (my specialty is 1920s London bohemianism but show me yours!!), cyberpunk
Art Likes
- Interesting and specific things with color – limited palettes, spot color, doing stuff with characters’ theme colors.
- Characterizing clothing choices; designs that communicate a lot about a character - AUs are particularly great for this! What would that character look like as a magical girl? In a modern setting would his attention to aesthetics mean he’s goth, or would he be wearing an impeccably-tailored suit? If she were a Hunger Games victor, what kind of image would her stylists try to evoke?
- I’m an ‘all fic is meta’ guy and possibly my favorite thing in the whole world is when art is meta - if you know PMMM, mihifu’s work is a stunningly good example of what I mean by that.
Collage/Web Weave Likes
- Longer pieces of text getting split up and made into a throughline for the whole work
- Unusual juxtapositions – substack posts next to poetry next to legal briefs next to slogan buttons; fine art next to anime screenshots next to diagrams next to webcomic panels
- A Softer World edits
- Having an arc! All my collages have a beginning a middle and an end, you can read them top to bottom like a poem made of PNGs.
- Tinting text elements so it’s clear which things come from the same source; arranging text elements so it’s clear which things are part of the same thought; combining sources in the middle of a thought so elements respond to one another.
- Strong and specific color schemes – not necessarily bright colors, if the vibe is muted hazy purple I love a muted hazy purple, but I like a specific color scheme that contributes to the vibe.
Vid likes
- Vids that are commentary on the character/relationship; my absolute favorite thing in art is when juxtaposition of unlike things creates meaning.
- Ensemble vids that don’t focus on any one character or relationship so much as tracing a theme throughout the show
- Unusual song choices
- Making the subject of a song a metaphor for something in the show
- Songs with a strong beat
- If I’ve requested vids I’ve probably provided a playlist of songs I think would be fun for that fandom – feel free to take inspiration from that, or to go a different direction!
