FIAB 2025 Letter
Aug. 30th, 2025 12:37![[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 general likes, medium likes, and fandom-specific thoughts. Some things I said more about than others, but I would be thrilled to receive anything here!
- 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, 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!
- 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
- Characters who are afraid and have good reason to be. I'm not terribly into unjustified neurosis; I adore reasonable fear.
- 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 with either a dozen answers or none at all. (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 closed small groups.
- 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
- 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
- Characterizing body types! When a character looks like that because they would have a workout routine that prioritizes vanity muscles, or alternately because they definitely wouldn't.
- 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
- 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.
- Reinterpreted text, when a sentence has its meaning changed by the context you've put it in – maybe originally that was about the incentives of early modern potato farmers but it's about interpersonal avoidance now. My favorite thing about this medium is how putting things next to each other makes them mean something different and this is the peak of that.
- 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!
For the Mythos I like stories about humanity – what's it like to be a student at Miskatonic who knows that something weird is going on, but not what? What's it like to be a deep one hybrid slowly coming to terms with the truth of themself? What's it like to be in a cult of Nyarlathotep, and what's it like to interact with people who live that way? I like when great old ones are enormous and terrifying and so far beyond human scale they might as well be a sea-change; I love stories about the human-scale things that exist alongside them. Miskatonic might be a college that constantly brushes up against that which man was not meant to know, but it's still a college full of college students.
What's the deal with the cult, and what's the occult researcher's interest in poking around its leader? Is this a young deep one hybrid, maybe one raised human, confronting a family history he doesn't understand, or an older one who's known this was coming to her for a long time? How much does the Miskatonic student know about the occult undercurrents at their school – and if they did know just what they were getting into, would they still do it?
I love dramatic irony, and I love people who know less about what's going on than they think they do; I like narrators who have a lot of personality, whether that's 1st person POV or an omniscient narrator who interjects or just getting really into the POV character's head. As I note in my original fiction prompts, I love interwar Britain and America as settings, and Lovecraft is the reason why! I like stories about living in the shadow of something enormous and terrifying, whether that's the great old ones or the Great War or the war that's on the horizon; I like how these aren't really separate or separable. I like period-typical homophobia, I like period-typical sexism, and I like queer relationships and m/f relationships (and relationships that are both at once!) that flourish even so.
And for Randolph Carter and the Ulthar cats I admit I'm mostly thinking about art. For that one relationship, I opt into art. I would love art in which Randolph Carter is watching the stunningly colorful Dreamlands sunset and hanging out with cats.
General fandom likes:
- Complicated relationships with what you want, with what you're allowed to want, with what you're seen as wanting; correspondingly, complicated relationships with being queer
- Pedestalization of sexual purity, especially when it comes to Xie Lian but it's a theme I'm interested in broadly! Relatedly, virginity as a social phenomenon rather than a metaphysical one.
- Everyone being locked in the cycles and motifs factory, echoing one another; people locking each other in the cycles and motifs factory, making one person's situation echo another's
- Sunk cost fallacies; characters who are trying to prove a point to themselves; characters who feel like they have to keep going because if they stopped now they'd have to admit they were wrong
- A heavenly court that actually just sucks and is a horrible vicious den of information management and backstabbing, even among sympathetic characters
- Loyalty and who it's given to and how it's won
- Intense homoerotic best friendship
- Celebrity and fandom themes
- Characters making guesses about what's going on in each other's heads that are reasonable and also wrong
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, including FXMQ that is about Xie Lian's absence. Their vastly different relationships to loyalty; Feng Xin for whom loyalty means following you forever and Mu Qing for whom loyalty means being on your team. 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 eight hundred years later they still hate each other for having left, and for having stayed.
For these ships I like complicated relationships, crossing the streams, and grief-tinged pining. Pre-canon and book 2 era I like pedestalization, class differences, intense homoerotic teenage best friendship, and all three of them having to be so so careful with each other; during the 800-year timeskip I'm always down for Feng Xin and Mu Qing fucking about the fact that they're both in love with and grieving Xie Lian; post-third-ascension I like them following him under assumed names, knowing that something's changed, and being terrified for his sake; post-canon I like thorny rebuilding. If the sexual/romantic element is kind of an undertone that's cool, I like preslash and ambiguity, and especially pre-canon they do not have to get together – but I do want there to be that undertone.
- Mu Qing who is gay and in a multilayered iron closet about it; Mu Qing who is gender nonconforming, who has his whole life been doing masculinity wrong, who's described as twisted like a concubine, who people say "men shouldn't think that way" about.
- Constant tracking of rumors and image and how he comes off both in the eyes of his worshipers and those of his peers, because he has to. Paranoia for good reason; expecting everyone to hate him and be trying to hurt him because they usually do and are. A heavenly court that's a horrible vicious den of backstabbing, generally.
- Meticulous attention to detail, and specifically keeping track of numbers – I think constantly about the scene from the revised edition where he hears a story about Xianle and immediately goes "that doesn't even make sense, that many horses wouldn't fit on this street and even if they could nothing could move a statue that size."
- Paying lots of attention to how he's portrayed – I love how deliberate Mu Qing is about his own image! This is kind of a subset of the constant tracking of rumors and the paranoia but it's also really fun on his own. Guy who has enormous sleeves because he is deliberately visually taking up space. Guy who is a huge bitch about how aesthetics, because that's how you enforce anything about how people see you.
- His attachment to his own image of himself as a hard-headed realist, how hard he clings to having been right back in Xianle; how even when he hates it he's still on some level smug about having been right.
- Practicality in general; I love how staunchly he refuses to put honor before reason.
- His relationship with his mother – MXTX has so many terrible parental relationships that it's really interesting to me how Mu Qing seems to just genuinely have a good one! It would make a lot of sense if she was the source of his skill with textiles; what else of him comes from her?
- How his love is shaped like prioritization – not "I'll follow you everywhere and accept your word as law," but "I'll help you, I'll keep track of the things you need to be tracking, I'll put other things aside for you, I'll see your goals carried out."
- Sabre cultivation as a metaphor for queerness, and how being told the sabre suits him is the one time in the book we see him actually happy.
- Allo gay Mu Qing whose celibacy is not and has never been effortless, demisexual Xie Lian who didn't struggle much with it, and both of them feeling a way and a half about that contrast
- Like imagine with me two gay men. One of them realized he was into men at 800 while making out with a ghost king who worshiped him. The other had it figured out by 15 because he could not stop thinking gay thoughts about his friend-also-boss, four of the other servants, two of the stablehands, his three least awful shixiongs, etc. This could be so feelings but also it could be so funny.
- Both of them being gender nonconforming – Mu Qing who always was, who's had people saying "men shouldn't think that way" his whole life; Xie Lian who only came into it as an adult - and both of them feeling a way and a half about that similarity
- Mu Qing being bitter and twisted up and loving Xie Lian anyway; guilt and grief and a kind of smug exhilaration and longing all mixed up
- How little they understand each other even when they try
- Like I said in the solo likes, Mu Qing having a complex about having been right when he said that Xie Lian would have to get used to it and stop acting like resource constraints don't apply to him, even as nobody's happy with how that actually shook out.
- Mu Qing being genuinely self-aware; knowing perfectly well what he wants even as he also believes he can't have it
- The overwhelming joy of not dying wondering
- The two of them being more similar than either of them thought at first
- And again, how practical Mu Qing's love is. 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; I am 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.
I've talked a lot, in my other prompts but also in past exchanges, about Mu Qing and Feng Xin and the hole Xie Lian left in their lives. How about Jun Wu taking advantage of that gap?
Likes:
- Frogboiling, slow escalation, and plausible deniability
- Sunk cost fallacies; characters who feel like they have to keep going because if they stop now they'll have to admit they were wrong
- Jun Wu presenting himself as a savior and benefactor to FXMQ; having presented himself that way to Xie Lian
- Abuse of authority; abuse of loyalty; Jun Wu being above suspicion
- Pedestalization of sexual purity
- The heavenly court in full generality being a backstabbing hellscape
- Jun Wu's obsession with Xie Lian; Jun Wu who has always favored Xie Lian, and who has always been known to favor 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.
- Gender and sexism and the sheer amount of bullshit Ling Wen has faced all her life, the ways she tries to escape it and the ways she doesn't – both subtler things, like how everyone complains about inefficiency but they couldn't ever do her job, and things like Jing Wen directly threatening her with prison rape.
- Ling Wen who looked at the structural misogyny that tried to destroy her twice over and went fine then, you know what I love, I love the smell of single points of failure in the morning. Ling Wen taking on way more work than she has to in the service of creating a heavens that would be chaos without her.
- How, during the lantern festival, they say she sucks up to martial gods and has no time for other civil gods; how in a civil god's palace they said she was lucky to get to grind ink.
- Her position as one of the guys, and how viciously she defends it – I think constantly about Shi Wudu telling Shi Qingxuan to boymode or someone like Pei Ming might assault her, and it's a joke, it's not even really a joke aimed at Shi Qingxuan he's mostly mocking Pei Ming, but what a fucking thing to say to your sister, and they just showed a play where Ling Wen was one of Pei Ming's conquests and when Shi Wudu makes that joke Ling Wen laughs.
- How genuinely ride or die the Three Tumors are for each other! Ling Wen 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?
- Ling Wen and sexuality, generally – given how ready people are to believe that she slept her way to power, including the powerful man who threatens her, it has to be enormously fraught for her! Does she sleep with people in her true form, or is that too vulnerable? Does she sleep with people at all, or is that too vulnerable? (If you wanted to go for three tumors, chilling in a hot tub, doing hand stuff AND IT'S NOT GAY, with Ling Wen in male form so it's all bros no hoes here, that could be really fun!)
- Parallels between Ling Wen and Shi Qingxuan – how they're both ~women in a deeply sexist heavenly court, but Shi Qingxuan holds onto womanhood with both hands while for Ling Wen it's mostly something used to hurt her; how they were both pulled there by more powerful benefactors, but Jing Wen never wanted Ling Wen to be anything but below him while Shi Wudu does (for better or for worse!) want Shi Qingxuan to be a success; how Ling Wen knows about the worst thing in Shi Qingxuan's life, and Shi Qingxuan doesn't.
- And Bai Jing, her secret and her vulnerability; how she has loved him for centuries and how she will never, ever admit it
- 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; hold that up against Jing Wen's threats and you get a really specific picture!
- Ling Wen even now having a fondness for naive young martial gods – for people who remind her of Bai Jing.
The book doesn't have a lot to say about An Le. Still, I think there's something here – An Le was Lang Qianqiu's same age, and so was only seventeen at the gilded banquet. He was a teenager when he was pulling off this conspiracy to become best friends with the crown prince in order to kill his family! What was he like, what sort of person does that? What was that relationship like, and how did he feel about it?
Ship likes:
- An Le thinking this is going to be a great way to make the betrayal sting even more and not really realizing that he'd gotten attached
- An Le generally being a teenager who thinks he's better at this whole 'pretend to be a guy’s friend while not actually caring about him at all' thing than he is
- Lang Qianqiu being bad at subtlety and oblivious to the idea that anyone might be lying to him
- Xianle culture idolizing beauty and sexual purity; An Le and Xianle and the legacy of a country he's an undercover terrorist for, but has never actually known because it fell hundreds of years before he was born.
- Homoerotic teenage best friendship
- Heavy-handed metaphors
- MXTX-typical futility of revenge
- Everything from the fandom likes about sunk cost fallacies and characters trying to prove a point to themselves
- Dramatic irony; "and then the rest of canon happened and we know how that went" endings.
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, a leader of a cutthroat cult, or someone who's
- 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
- or maybe the psychic and her teammate are infiltrating this secret society, and she meets a boy who seems bizarrely kind and it's a wonder he hasn't been ripped to metaphorical shreds, and both of them are warily circling each other wondering if they can trust this person – who, as far as they know, is okay in this cutthroat environment where you can't trust anyone – and her teammate would really like it if instead she stopped and did something safer.
What are the psychic and her teammate working on, that's so dangerous that the teammate is this protective about it; has she ever contributed to that danger? What does this girl see in a dangerous sorcerer who could hurt her, and who she surely knows could hurt her – and what keeps her coming back? How did the exhausted secret society leader get to where she is, this woman at the top of the world who no longer wants to be there, and does she see a way down? And for all of these: How do you decide when someone's proven to you that they're not going to hurt you?
Likes: Characters who start out already knowing each other and hit the ground running! Period settings, especially the interwar period; settings with masquerades; dramatic irony and characters who know less about what's going on than they think they do. Narrators with a lot of personality, whether that's 1st person POV or an omniscient narrator who interjects or just getting really into the POV character's head. Complicated relationships with gender and with expected gender performance. 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.
Again, for both: How do you decide when someone's proven to you that they're not going to hurt you?
I like mercyfic and I love when characters have a history already when the story opens, so as you can imagine the Cauldron/Former Shidi tag made my pupils dilate like a cat – what was their relationship like? How much have they changed since then? Was the former shidi looking for his shixiong deliberately, or is this unexpected for them both? And where do they go from here?
Why has the fox spirit been hiding his identity for so long? Does the cultivator know? If so, does the fox spirit know he knows? And either way, has he cottoned on to how he feels about his shizun?
Likes: Canon-typical sexuality played for horror; the concept of in-universe borderline-pinup advertising has me going crazy. Canon-typical gender played for horror. A tone that's both wry and sad. Dramatic irony, characters who know less than they think they do, characters who are fooling themselves. Sunk cost fallacies, and characters who keep going well past the point where they should because if they stop they're admitting to something they don't want to admit to.
For characters and relationships I've picked a handful that I don't see a lot of focus on in fanwork and would be happy to see more fic with! For mediums other than fic:
Art: Like I said above the concept of in-universe advertising that's like, those fashion/jewelry/perfume ads that are right on the border of softcore - especially with Juri, who's canonically a model – would be so fun and fucked up! Wouldn't that be so fucked up?
ASW: I love the wry-but-sad tone of asofterworld comics and I think they go great with RGU as a show; I am down for any character or dynamic you want to highlight here!
Dress-up game: Obviously any solo character I selected would work for this but I'd also really love a picrew sort of deal that lets you assemble a character out of elements from the whole cast (or whatever subset of it makes sense to you).
Vids: I love vids focused on the whole ensemble or a theme or plot rather than any specific relationship or character. I don't have any photosensitivity triggers and canon-typical flashing is fine. I do have a playlist of songs I think would work well for this fandom; feel free to take inspiration from it or feel free to do something else!
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, 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!
- 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
- Characters who are afraid and have good reason to be. I'm not terribly into unjustified neurosis; I adore reasonable fear.
- 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 with either a dozen answers or none at all. (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 closed small groups.
- 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
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
Medium Likes
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
- Characterizing body types! When a character looks like that because they would have a workout routine that prioritizes vanity muscles, or alternately because they definitely wouldn't.
- 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
- 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.
- Reinterpreted text, when a sentence has its meaning changed by the context you've put it in – maybe originally that was about the incentives of early modern potato farmers but it's about interpersonal avoidance now. My favorite thing about this medium is how putting things next to each other makes them mean something different and this is the peak of that.
- 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!
Fandom Specific
Cthulhu Mythos
For the Mythos I like stories about humanity – what's it like to be a student at Miskatonic who knows that something weird is going on, but not what? What's it like to be a deep one hybrid slowly coming to terms with the truth of themself? What's it like to be in a cult of Nyarlathotep, and what's it like to interact with people who live that way? I like when great old ones are enormous and terrifying and so far beyond human scale they might as well be a sea-change; I love stories about the human-scale things that exist alongside them. Miskatonic might be a college that constantly brushes up against that which man was not meant to know, but it's still a college full of college students.
What's the deal with the cult, and what's the occult researcher's interest in poking around its leader? Is this a young deep one hybrid, maybe one raised human, confronting a family history he doesn't understand, or an older one who's known this was coming to her for a long time? How much does the Miskatonic student know about the occult undercurrents at their school – and if they did know just what they were getting into, would they still do it?
I love dramatic irony, and I love people who know less about what's going on than they think they do; I like narrators who have a lot of personality, whether that's 1st person POV or an omniscient narrator who interjects or just getting really into the POV character's head. As I note in my original fiction prompts, I love interwar Britain and America as settings, and Lovecraft is the reason why! I like stories about living in the shadow of something enormous and terrifying, whether that's the great old ones or the Great War or the war that's on the horizon; I like how these aren't really separate or separable. I like period-typical homophobia, I like period-typical sexism, and I like queer relationships and m/f relationships (and relationships that are both at once!) that flourish even so.
And for Randolph Carter and the Ulthar cats I admit I'm mostly thinking about art. For that one relationship, I opt into art. I would love art in which Randolph Carter is watching the stunningly colorful Dreamlands sunset and hanging out with cats.
TGCF
General fandom likes:
- Complicated relationships with what you want, with what you're allowed to want, with what you're seen as wanting; correspondingly, complicated relationships with being queer
- Pedestalization of sexual purity, especially when it comes to Xie Lian but it's a theme I'm interested in broadly! Relatedly, virginity as a social phenomenon rather than a metaphysical one.
- Everyone being locked in the cycles and motifs factory, echoing one another; people locking each other in the cycles and motifs factory, making one person's situation echo another's
- Sunk cost fallacies; characters who are trying to prove a point to themselves; characters who feel like they have to keep going because if they stopped now they'd have to admit they were wrong
- A heavenly court that actually just sucks and is a horrible vicious den of information management and backstabbing, even among sympathetic characters
- Loyalty and who it's given to and how it's won
- Intense homoerotic best friendship
- Celebrity and fandom themes
- Characters making guesses about what's going on in each other's heads that are reasonable and also wrong
Xianle Trio
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, including FXMQ that is about Xie Lian's absence. Their vastly different relationships to loyalty; Feng Xin for whom loyalty means following you forever and Mu Qing for whom loyalty means being on your team. 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 eight hundred years later they still hate each other for having left, and for having stayed.
For these ships I like complicated relationships, crossing the streams, and grief-tinged pining. Pre-canon and book 2 era I like pedestalization, class differences, intense homoerotic teenage best friendship, and all three of them having to be so so careful with each other; during the 800-year timeskip I'm always down for Feng Xin and Mu Qing fucking about the fact that they're both in love with and grieving Xie Lian; post-third-ascension I like them following him under assumed names, knowing that something's changed, and being terrified for his sake; post-canon I like thorny rebuilding. If the sexual/romantic element is kind of an undertone that's cool, I like preslash and ambiguity, and especially pre-canon they do not have to get together – but I do want there to be that undertone.
Mu Qing solo
- Mu Qing who is gay and in a multilayered iron closet about it; Mu Qing who is gender nonconforming, who has his whole life been doing masculinity wrong, who's described as twisted like a concubine, who people say "men shouldn't think that way" about.
- Constant tracking of rumors and image and how he comes off both in the eyes of his worshipers and those of his peers, because he has to. Paranoia for good reason; expecting everyone to hate him and be trying to hurt him because they usually do and are. A heavenly court that's a horrible vicious den of backstabbing, generally.
- Meticulous attention to detail, and specifically keeping track of numbers – I think constantly about the scene from the revised edition where he hears a story about Xianle and immediately goes "that doesn't even make sense, that many horses wouldn't fit on this street and even if they could nothing could move a statue that size."
- Paying lots of attention to how he's portrayed – I love how deliberate Mu Qing is about his own image! This is kind of a subset of the constant tracking of rumors and the paranoia but it's also really fun on his own. Guy who has enormous sleeves because he is deliberately visually taking up space. Guy who is a huge bitch about how aesthetics, because that's how you enforce anything about how people see you.
- His attachment to his own image of himself as a hard-headed realist, how hard he clings to having been right back in Xianle; how even when he hates it he's still on some level smug about having been right.
- Practicality in general; I love how staunchly he refuses to put honor before reason.
- His relationship with his mother – MXTX has so many terrible parental relationships that it's really interesting to me how Mu Qing seems to just genuinely have a good one! It would make a lot of sense if she was the source of his skill with textiles; what else of him comes from her?
- How his love is shaped like prioritization – not "I'll follow you everywhere and accept your word as law," but "I'll help you, I'll keep track of the things you need to be tracking, I'll put other things aside for you, I'll see your goals carried out."
- Sabre cultivation as a metaphor for queerness, and how being told the sabre suits him is the one time in the book we see him actually happy.
Mulian
- Allo gay Mu Qing whose celibacy is not and has never been effortless, demisexual Xie Lian who didn't struggle much with it, and both of them feeling a way and a half about that contrast
- Like imagine with me two gay men. One of them realized he was into men at 800 while making out with a ghost king who worshiped him. The other had it figured out by 15 because he could not stop thinking gay thoughts about his friend-also-boss, four of the other servants, two of the stablehands, his three least awful shixiongs, etc. This could be so feelings but also it could be so funny.
- Both of them being gender nonconforming – Mu Qing who always was, who's had people saying "men shouldn't think that way" his whole life; Xie Lian who only came into it as an adult - and both of them feeling a way and a half about that similarity
- Mu Qing being bitter and twisted up and loving Xie Lian anyway; guilt and grief and a kind of smug exhilaration and longing all mixed up
- How little they understand each other even when they try
- Like I said in the solo likes, Mu Qing having a complex about having been right when he said that Xie Lian would have to get used to it and stop acting like resource constraints don't apply to him, even as nobody's happy with how that actually shook out.
- Mu Qing being genuinely self-aware; knowing perfectly well what he wants even as he also believes he can't have it
- The overwhelming joy of not dying wondering
- The two of them being more similar than either of them thought at first
- And again, how practical Mu Qing's love is. 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; I am 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.
Junqing, Junfeng
I've talked a lot, in my other prompts but also in past exchanges, about Mu Qing and Feng Xin and the hole Xie Lian left in their lives. How about Jun Wu taking advantage of that gap?
Likes:
- Frogboiling, slow escalation, and plausible deniability
- Sunk cost fallacies; characters who feel like they have to keep going because if they stop now they'll have to admit they were wrong
- Jun Wu presenting himself as a savior and benefactor to FXMQ; having presented himself that way to Xie Lian
- Abuse of authority; abuse of loyalty; Jun Wu being above suspicion
- Pedestalization of sexual purity
- The heavenly court in full generality being a backstabbing hellscape
- Jun Wu's obsession with Xie Lian; Jun Wu who has always favored Xie Lian, and who has always been known to favor 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.
Ling Wen
- Gender and sexism and the sheer amount of bullshit Ling Wen has faced all her life, the ways she tries to escape it and the ways she doesn't – both subtler things, like how everyone complains about inefficiency but they couldn't ever do her job, and things like Jing Wen directly threatening her with prison rape.
- Ling Wen who looked at the structural misogyny that tried to destroy her twice over and went fine then, you know what I love, I love the smell of single points of failure in the morning. Ling Wen taking on way more work than she has to in the service of creating a heavens that would be chaos without her.
- How, during the lantern festival, they say she sucks up to martial gods and has no time for other civil gods; how in a civil god's palace they said she was lucky to get to grind ink.
- Her position as one of the guys, and how viciously she defends it – I think constantly about Shi Wudu telling Shi Qingxuan to boymode or someone like Pei Ming might assault her, and it's a joke, it's not even really a joke aimed at Shi Qingxuan he's mostly mocking Pei Ming, but what a fucking thing to say to your sister, and they just showed a play where Ling Wen was one of Pei Ming's conquests and when Shi Wudu makes that joke Ling Wen laughs.
- How genuinely ride or die the Three Tumors are for each other! Ling Wen 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?
- Ling Wen and sexuality, generally – given how ready people are to believe that she slept her way to power, including the powerful man who threatens her, it has to be enormously fraught for her! Does she sleep with people in her true form, or is that too vulnerable? Does she sleep with people at all, or is that too vulnerable? (If you wanted to go for three tumors, chilling in a hot tub, doing hand stuff AND IT'S NOT GAY, with Ling Wen in male form so it's all bros no hoes here, that could be really fun!)
- Parallels between Ling Wen and Shi Qingxuan – how they're both ~women in a deeply sexist heavenly court, but Shi Qingxuan holds onto womanhood with both hands while for Ling Wen it's mostly something used to hurt her; how they were both pulled there by more powerful benefactors, but Jing Wen never wanted Ling Wen to be anything but below him while Shi Wudu does (for better or for worse!) want Shi Qingxuan to be a success; how Ling Wen knows about the worst thing in Shi Qingxuan's life, and Shi Qingxuan doesn't.
- And Bai Jing, her secret and her vulnerability; how she has loved him for centuries and how she will never, ever admit it
- 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; hold that up against Jing Wen's threats and you get a really specific picture!
- Ling Wen even now having a fondness for naive young martial gods – for people who remind her of Bai Jing.
An Le/Lang Qianqiu
The book doesn't have a lot to say about An Le. Still, I think there's something here – An Le was Lang Qianqiu's same age, and so was only seventeen at the gilded banquet. He was a teenager when he was pulling off this conspiracy to become best friends with the crown prince in order to kill his family! What was he like, what sort of person does that? What was that relationship like, and how did he feel about it?
Ship likes:
- An Le thinking this is going to be a great way to make the betrayal sting even more and not really realizing that he'd gotten attached
- An Le generally being a teenager who thinks he's better at this whole 'pretend to be a guy’s friend while not actually caring about him at all' thing than he is
- Lang Qianqiu being bad at subtlety and oblivious to the idea that anyone might be lying to him
- Xianle culture idolizing beauty and sexual purity; An Le and Xianle and the legacy of a country he's an undercover terrorist for, but has never actually known because it fell hundreds of years before he was born.
- Homoerotic teenage best friendship
- Heavy-handed metaphors
- MXTX-typical futility of revenge
- Everything from the fandom likes about sunk cost fallacies and characters trying to prove a point to themselves
- Dramatic irony; "and then the rest of canon happened and we know how that went" endings.
Original Work
Psychic powers and secret societies
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, a leader of a cutthroat cult, or someone who's
- 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
- or maybe the psychic and her teammate are infiltrating this secret society, and she meets a boy who seems bizarrely kind and it's a wonder he hasn't been ripped to metaphorical shreds, and both of them are warily circling each other wondering if they can trust this person – who, as far as they know, is okay in this cutthroat environment where you can't trust anyone – and her teammate would really like it if instead she stopped and did something safer.
What are the psychic and her teammate working on, that's so dangerous that the teammate is this protective about it; has she ever contributed to that danger? What does this girl see in a dangerous sorcerer who could hurt her, and who she surely knows could hurt her – and what keeps her coming back? How did the exhausted secret society leader get to where she is, this woman at the top of the world who no longer wants to be there, and does she see a way down? And for all of these: How do you decide when someone's proven to you that they're not going to hurt you?
Likes: Characters who start out already knowing each other and hit the ground running! Period settings, especially the interwar period; settings with masquerades; dramatic irony and characters who know less about what's going on than they think they do. Narrators with a lot of personality, whether that's 1st person POV or an omniscient narrator who interjects or just getting really into the POV character's head. Complicated relationships with gender and with expected gender performance. 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.
Cultivation Fiction
Again, for both: How do you decide when someone's proven to you that they're not going to hurt you?
I like mercyfic and I love when characters have a history already when the story opens, so as you can imagine the Cauldron/Former Shidi tag made my pupils dilate like a cat – what was their relationship like? How much have they changed since then? Was the former shidi looking for his shixiong deliberately, or is this unexpected for them both? And where do they go from here?
Why has the fox spirit been hiding his identity for so long? Does the cultivator know? If so, does the fox spirit know he knows? And either way, has he cottoned on to how he feels about his shizun?
Utena
Likes: Canon-typical sexuality played for horror; the concept of in-universe borderline-pinup advertising has me going crazy. Canon-typical gender played for horror. A tone that's both wry and sad. Dramatic irony, characters who know less than they think they do, characters who are fooling themselves. Sunk cost fallacies, and characters who keep going well past the point where they should because if they stop they're admitting to something they don't want to admit to.
For characters and relationships I've picked a handful that I don't see a lot of focus on in fanwork and would be happy to see more fic with! For mediums other than fic:
Art: Like I said above the concept of in-universe advertising that's like, those fashion/jewelry/perfume ads that are right on the border of softcore - especially with Juri, who's canonically a model – would be so fun and fucked up! Wouldn't that be so fucked up?
ASW: I love the wry-but-sad tone of asofterworld comics and I think they go great with RGU as a show; I am down for any character or dynamic you want to highlight here!
Dress-up game: Obviously any solo character I selected would work for this but I'd also really love a picrew sort of deal that lets you assemble a character out of elements from the whole cast (or whatever subset of it makes sense to you).
Vids: I love vids focused on the whole ensemble or a theme or plot rather than any specific relationship or character. I don't have any photosensitivity triggers and canon-typical flashing is fine. I do have a playlist of songs I think would work well for this fandom; feel free to take inspiration from it or feel free to do something else!
