48 Hour Exchange 2025
Aug. 27th, 2025 10:40![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
consumptive_sphinxThank you so much for coming to check out my letter! Below you'll find likes, prompts, and DNWs. While some things have more bullet points than others, I would be delighted to receive a work about any of them. Thank you again, and I hope this is helpful to you!!
General: pregnancy, risk thereof, babies or children, parenting of children | religious faith | therapy or psychiatry | age play or regression | gore | noncanon familial relationships | soulmates | genderbends | omegaverse/cakeverse/variants | chatfic | pure fluff | incest | unrequested crossovers including cameos | setting change AU | real world politics/current events (exception: pre-1930 politics in Original Work or Cthulhu Mythos) | characters talking about gender, sexuality, abuse, or mental health like they have a tumblr | requested character permadeath
TGCF: aspec Mu Qing | entirely asexual Xie Lian (demi is fine + encouraged) | Feng Xin and Mu Qing's animosity being pigtail pulling or a misunderstanding without real grievances; their distrust of Hua Cheng being silly or unreasonable | fengqing | junmei | Ling Wen/Yushi Huang, Ling Wen/Xuan Ji | cheating | cis Shi Qingxuan (other characters, inc POV characters, thinking of her as a man is fine) | trans headcanons other than transfem SQX (Ling Wen having a complicated relationship with gender is fine) | setting depicted as non-sexist, non-transphobic, or non-homophobic
Original/Cthulhu: superhero settings | retail or food service | psychic girl being trans | real world politics after 1930 | Delta Green | Nazi characters | 20th century China | camp Cthulhu (ie "Cthulhu 2020: Why Vote For The Lesser Evil" type stuff; human characters and situations being funny is fine but please keep Great Old Ones scary) | focus on tentacles
MDZS: depictions of the jianghu as non-bigoted (homophobic, transphobic, sexist, classist, whorephobic, etc) | any character other than Wangxian and Mo Xuanyu being openly queer (closeted characters are actively encouraged) | trans headcanons other than transfem WWX or MXY | badass chessmaster Nie Huaisang | using CQL/Untamed canon over MDZS where they diverge (second flautist, Xue Chonghai, Xue Yang working for the Wens, Lan Wangji as chief cultivator, etc) | Mo Xuanyu actually harassing Jin Guangyao | fix-its | fluff without ominous foreshadowing
- 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 (that last applies whether it makes a sad ending hopeful or a happy ending bleak – I'll be delighted either way).
- Missing scenes and canon compliance
- Snapshots in time, one scene in a larger-scale story; open ambiguous endings where things don't get resolved. Characters who aren't meeting for the first time and already have a relationship (especially in small-wordcount exchanges!)
- Unreliable narrators; not just ones who lie to the audience on purpose but also ones who are wrong about what's going on outside their vision or in other people's heads
- Gender; characters with issues and complexes about gender performance. Setting-typical attitudes towards gender, sexuality, and queerness. Closeted characters – not necessarily self-closeted (and if they are self-closeted I'd like it to feel like they have good reason to be and aren't just stupid).
- For a freeform exchange recently I nominated the tag "Complicated is maybe too nice a word for this guy's relationship with their own desires" and that is basically always applicable
- Hermaneutic injustice; characters who don't have a conceptual vocabulary for their experiences and are forced to improvise
- 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).)
- 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.
- 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.
- But also, characters casually existing! Putting their hair in a ponytail with a hairtie in their mouth, taking mirror selfies, sitting on counters. I like symbolic nonsense but I also like people hanging out.
- Thick thighs and soft bodies and love handles
- 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
- Reinterpreting text – if you can take a paragraph about archery and making it about interpersonal paranoia I will adore that. My favorite thing about web weaves is how context changes meaning!
- A Softer World edits
- A Softer World vibes, that sort of funny but also grief-tinged mood
- 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.
Mu Qing's incredibly complicated feelings about Xie Lian and his memory of Xie Lian and his own desires wrt a relationship with Xie Lian, bitterness and longing all in one. Queer Mu Qing who has his whole life been doing masculinity wrong and is in an iron closet about it. I'm forever soft about Fu Yao warning Xie Lian that there aren't many people in the heavens worth knowing, and so obviously speaking from experience, and forever wailing about Mu Qing sincerely believing Xie Lian despises him and would never believe him and would never help him, and going to die for him anyway.
Xianle trio's breakup 800 years ago and none of them being over it. Feng Xin and Mu Qing as comets in Xie Lian's orbit; FX&MQ that is about Xie Lian's absence. That Mu Qing always left to bring back help, that Feng Xin always stayed by Xie Lian's side; that Mu Qing left and Feng Xin stayed; that they still hate each other for having left, and for having stayed.
And Jun Wu taking advantage of that wound: frogboiling, slow escalation, and plausible deniability; Jun Wu presenting himself as a savior and benefactor. Abuse of authority; abuse of loyalty; Jun Wu being above suspicion. Pedestalization of purity. The heavenly court in general being a backstabbing hellscape. Jun Wu's obsession with Xie Lian; The ways both of them are vulnerable - Feng Xin a loyal man who's just lost the person he always thought he'd protect; Mu Qing who doesn't have friends in the heavens, who has very little experience with being wanted, who knows nobody will believe him or come for him whatever he says.
And I'm just generally fascinated by Ling Wen: how she creates a heavens that would be chaos without her on purpose; her position as one of the guys; how viciously she defends it. How, during the lantern festival, they say she sucks up to martial gods and has no time for other civil gods; how Pei Ming is the one person in the heavens who isn't wildly sexist to her and was instantly on her side against Jing Wen, while in a civil god's palace she was lucky to get to grind ink. She and Pei Ming helped Shi Wudu with the fate switch, soon enough after SWD's ascension that they couldn't have known him well at that point; was that what the three of them bonded over? And Bai Jing, her secret and her vulnerability; how Bai Jing loved Ling Wen and wanted to protect her, and so he became a piece of clothing that couldn't be taken off her and hated all men who he thought had touched her. Ling Wen even now having a fondness for naive young martial gods - for people who remind her of Bai Jing.
Feel free to combine prompts! Consider:
- the protective butch having some opinions about the competent but so achingly fragile teammate she's in love with also seeing a dangerous sorcerer or a leader of a cutthroat cult
- or maybe the sorcerer, morally ambiguous though he may be, is fond of this brilliant girl who keeps visiting his office, and doesn't want her getting mixed up in whatever's going on with the exhausted secret society leader
- or maybe the sorcerer is the exhausted secret society leader, and who knows if she can trust this girl, who seems nice (and clever, and so small, christ, the sorcerer doesn't know if she was ever that small) but is after all working for her rival, and you can't really trust anyone or let your guard down even if she wants to.
What are the psychic and her teammate working on, and why is their job so dangerous that she's protective about it? What's up with the cult, and what interest does the occult researcher have in poking around its leader? Why are these members of rival branches of a cutthroat group in a relationship in the first place, and do they know the other is also in the secret society? Why has the fox spirit been hiding his identity for so long - and has he cottoned on to how he feels about his shizun?
Any of them could work great in a Mythos setting (except the cultivator and the fox spirit, that one I admit I'd struggle to make lovecraftian - but hey, maybe you've got an idea) or they could be somewhere else, or don't combine them if you'd rather not! Could go any number of places with any of these.
Likes: Characters who already have relationships with each other when the fic begins! Period settings (especially the interwar period especially for Lovecraft); settings with masquerades; characters who know less about what's going on than they think they do. Complicated relationships with gender and with expected gender performance. Preslash, ambiguous relationships, relationships that cross the streams, when "what are we" is a question with either a dozen answers or none. In period settings, period-typical sexism and homophobia; queer relationships and m/f relationships (and relationships that are both at once!) that flourish even so.
Jinlintai black ops necromancy bootcamp who cheered!
Likes:
- Jin Guangyao being so open that Xue Yang is disposable to him, and Jin Guangyao being much less open that Mo Xuanyu is if anything more so.
- Mo Xuanyu having zero (0) queer role models and putting people in that slot who really REALLY shouldn't be - especially with them and Xue Yang both idolizing Wei Wuxian!
- The spectre of Wei Wuxian hanging over the narrative - transfem Wei Wuxian who Mo Xuanyu sees as a mirror; gay Wei Wuxian who Jin Guangyao sees as a warning; vengeful genius maverick Wei Wuxian who Xue Yang sees as an aspiration; and of course Wei Wuxian who invented the cultivation method they're trying to use - and all of them being kind of wrong about who Wei Wuxian actually was.
- Hovering in the ambiguous zone between fluff with knives and angst with jokes - I'm interested in the horrors here but the horrors don't have to come down onscreen or anything. They can hang out while the horrors lurk.
DNW
General: pregnancy, risk thereof, babies or children, parenting of children | religious faith | therapy or psychiatry | age play or regression | gore | noncanon familial relationships | soulmates | genderbends | omegaverse/cakeverse/variants | chatfic | pure fluff | incest | unrequested crossovers including cameos | setting change AU | real world politics/current events (exception: pre-1930 politics in Original Work or Cthulhu Mythos) | characters talking about gender, sexuality, abuse, or mental health like they have a tumblr | requested character permadeath
TGCF: aspec Mu Qing | entirely asexual Xie Lian (demi is fine + encouraged) | Feng Xin and Mu Qing's animosity being pigtail pulling or a misunderstanding without real grievances; their distrust of Hua Cheng being silly or unreasonable | fengqing | junmei | Ling Wen/Yushi Huang, Ling Wen/Xuan Ji | cheating | cis Shi Qingxuan (other characters, inc POV characters, thinking of her as a man is fine) | trans headcanons other than transfem SQX (Ling Wen having a complicated relationship with gender is fine) | setting depicted as non-sexist, non-transphobic, or non-homophobic
Original/Cthulhu: superhero settings | retail or food service | psychic girl being trans | real world politics after 1930 | Delta Green | Nazi characters | 20th century China | camp Cthulhu (ie "Cthulhu 2020: Why Vote For The Lesser Evil" type stuff; human characters and situations being funny is fine but please keep Great Old Ones scary) | focus on tentacles
MDZS: depictions of the jianghu as non-bigoted (homophobic, transphobic, sexist, classist, whorephobic, etc) | any character other than Wangxian and Mo Xuanyu being openly queer (closeted characters are actively encouraged) | trans headcanons other than transfem WWX or MXY | badass chessmaster Nie Huaisang | using CQL/Untamed canon over MDZS where they diverge (second flautist, Xue Chonghai, Xue Yang working for the Wens, Lan Wangji as chief cultivator, etc) | Mo Xuanyu actually harassing Jin Guangyao | fix-its | fluff without ominous foreshadowing
Likes
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 (that last applies whether it makes a sad ending hopeful or a happy ending bleak – I'll be delighted either way).
- Missing scenes and canon compliance
- Snapshots in time, one scene in a larger-scale story; open ambiguous endings where things don't get resolved. Characters who aren't meeting for the first time and already have a relationship (especially in small-wordcount exchanges!)
- Unreliable narrators; not just ones who lie to the audience on purpose but also ones who are wrong about what's going on outside their vision or in other people's heads
- Gender; characters with issues and complexes about gender performance. Setting-typical attitudes towards gender, sexuality, and queerness. Closeted characters – not necessarily self-closeted (and if they are self-closeted I'd like it to feel like they have good reason to be and aren't just stupid).
- For a freeform exchange recently I nominated the tag "Complicated is maybe too nice a word for this guy's relationship with their own desires" and that is basically always applicable
- Hermaneutic injustice; characters who don't have a conceptual vocabulary for their experiences and are forced to improvise
- 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).)
- 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.
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.
- But also, characters casually existing! Putting their hair in a ponytail with a hairtie in their mouth, taking mirror selfies, sitting on counters. I like symbolic nonsense but I also like people hanging out.
- Thick thighs and soft bodies and love handles
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
- Reinterpreting text – if you can take a paragraph about archery and making it about interpersonal paranoia I will adore that. My favorite thing about web weaves is how context changes meaning!
- A Softer World edits
- A Softer World vibes, that sort of funny but also grief-tinged mood
- 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.
Fandom-Specific
TGCF
Mu Qing's incredibly complicated feelings about Xie Lian and his memory of Xie Lian and his own desires wrt a relationship with Xie Lian, bitterness and longing all in one. Queer Mu Qing who has his whole life been doing masculinity wrong and is in an iron closet about it. I'm forever soft about Fu Yao warning Xie Lian that there aren't many people in the heavens worth knowing, and so obviously speaking from experience, and forever wailing about Mu Qing sincerely believing Xie Lian despises him and would never believe him and would never help him, and going to die for him anyway.
Xianle trio's breakup 800 years ago and none of them being over it. Feng Xin and Mu Qing as comets in Xie Lian's orbit; FX&MQ that is about Xie Lian's absence. That Mu Qing always left to bring back help, that Feng Xin always stayed by Xie Lian's side; that Mu Qing left and Feng Xin stayed; that they still hate each other for having left, and for having stayed.
And Jun Wu taking advantage of that wound: frogboiling, slow escalation, and plausible deniability; Jun Wu presenting himself as a savior and benefactor. Abuse of authority; abuse of loyalty; Jun Wu being above suspicion. Pedestalization of purity. The heavenly court in general being a backstabbing hellscape. Jun Wu's obsession with Xie Lian; The ways both of them are vulnerable - Feng Xin a loyal man who's just lost the person he always thought he'd protect; Mu Qing who doesn't have friends in the heavens, who has very little experience with being wanted, who knows nobody will believe him or come for him whatever he says.
And I'm just generally fascinated by Ling Wen: how she creates a heavens that would be chaos without her on purpose; her position as one of the guys; how viciously she defends it. How, during the lantern festival, they say she sucks up to martial gods and has no time for other civil gods; how Pei Ming is the one person in the heavens who isn't wildly sexist to her and was instantly on her side against Jing Wen, while in a civil god's palace she was lucky to get to grind ink. She and Pei Ming helped Shi Wudu with the fate switch, soon enough after SWD's ascension that they couldn't have known him well at that point; was that what the three of them bonded over? And Bai Jing, her secret and her vulnerability; how Bai Jing loved Ling Wen and wanted to protect her, and so he became a piece of clothing that couldn't be taken off her and hated all men who he thought had touched her. Ling Wen even now having a fondness for naive young martial gods - for people who remind her of Bai Jing.
Original/Cthulhu
Feel free to combine prompts! Consider:
- the protective butch having some opinions about the competent but so achingly fragile teammate she's in love with also seeing a dangerous sorcerer or a leader of a cutthroat cult
- or maybe the sorcerer, morally ambiguous though he may be, is fond of this brilliant girl who keeps visiting his office, and doesn't want her getting mixed up in whatever's going on with the exhausted secret society leader
- or maybe the sorcerer is the exhausted secret society leader, and who knows if she can trust this girl, who seems nice (and clever, and so small, christ, the sorcerer doesn't know if she was ever that small) but is after all working for her rival, and you can't really trust anyone or let your guard down even if she wants to.
What are the psychic and her teammate working on, and why is their job so dangerous that she's protective about it? What's up with the cult, and what interest does the occult researcher have in poking around its leader? Why are these members of rival branches of a cutthroat group in a relationship in the first place, and do they know the other is also in the secret society? Why has the fox spirit been hiding his identity for so long - and has he cottoned on to how he feels about his shizun?
Any of them could work great in a Mythos setting (except the cultivator and the fox spirit, that one I admit I'd struggle to make lovecraftian - but hey, maybe you've got an idea) or they could be somewhere else, or don't combine them if you'd rather not! Could go any number of places with any of these.
Likes: Characters who already have relationships with each other when the fic begins! Period settings (especially the interwar period especially for Lovecraft); settings with masquerades; characters who know less about what's going on than they think they do. Complicated relationships with gender and with expected gender performance. Preslash, ambiguous relationships, relationships that cross the streams, when "what are we" is a question with either a dozen answers or none. In period settings, period-typical sexism and homophobia; queer relationships and m/f relationships (and relationships that are both at once!) that flourish even so.
MDZS
Jinlintai black ops necromancy bootcamp who cheered!
Likes:
- Jin Guangyao being so open that Xue Yang is disposable to him, and Jin Guangyao being much less open that Mo Xuanyu is if anything more so.
- Mo Xuanyu having zero (0) queer role models and putting people in that slot who really REALLY shouldn't be - especially with them and Xue Yang both idolizing Wei Wuxian!
- The spectre of Wei Wuxian hanging over the narrative - transfem Wei Wuxian who Mo Xuanyu sees as a mirror; gay Wei Wuxian who Jin Guangyao sees as a warning; vengeful genius maverick Wei Wuxian who Xue Yang sees as an aspiration; and of course Wei Wuxian who invented the cultivation method they're trying to use - and all of them being kind of wrong about who Wei Wuxian actually was.
- Hovering in the ambiguous zone between fluff with knives and angst with jokes - I'm interested in the horrors here but the horrors don't have to come down onscreen or anything. They can hang out while the horrors lurk.
