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Server exchange 2024 letter
Oct. 23rd, 2024 11:00Dear Creator:
Thank you so much for coming to check out my letter! Below you’ll find likes, fandom rambling, and my DNWs. While some things have more bullet points than others, I’d be delighted to receive a fic about any one of them. Thank you again, and I hope this is helpful to you!!
DNW
General: pregnancy or risk of pregnancy | babies or kidfic | religion, even fantasy religion (in TGCF and glass divine, canon-typical is fine) | psychiatry, therapy, institutionalization or hospitalization | pure fluff | crack | unrequested omegaverse | gore or medical horror | torture | noncanon family dynamics | unrequested incest | racism, including fantasy or hybrid racism | ageplay or age regression | wings that attach at the waist or hips and not the upper back | royalty AU where good kings exist | retail or food service AU | mafia AU | soulmate AU | historical AU without period-typical sexism and homophobia | covid, real-world politics, or current events | noncanonical major character permadeath
NSFW: onscreen sex that anyone involved straightforwardly does not want or is not enjoying (dubcon they feel complicated about or are conflictedly into is fine) | scat piss or other bodily fluids not typically associated with sex (blood is fine, crying is fine) | use of titles like sir or master (dianxia is fine) | rimming | humiliation | daddy or mommy kink | sexual assault or sexual slavery being the good ending or a misunderstanding with nobody involved actually at fault | sexual assault portrayed as being for the victim’s own good | serious bodily harm during sex | the stoplight system or safewords other than “stop” | safe, sane, negotiated, healthy BDSM scenes
Fandom specific (DSMP): Philza, Technoblade, or Tommyinnit (mentioned as part of requested character backstory is fine) | L’Manberg neg | aspec Quackity, Wilbur, or Jschlatt | trans Wilbur | possessive, “insane” or “psycho” anyone | genderbending such that Schlatt and Quackity are not the same gender (if they’re both women that’s fine) | abusive Wilbur | schlackity that is not at minimum really emotionally destructive for Q | hybrid headcanons (Schlatt having horns or Q having wings is fine in art) | watchers | duck-related pet names | populated server for DSMP canon setting | QSMP lore | sexual assault between requested characters
Fandom specific (TGCF): asexual Xie Lian (demi or otherwise ace-spec is actively encouraged) | asexual Mu Qing | Feng Xin and Mu Qing bickering that is not on some level about Xie Lian | Feng Xin and Mu Qing having always secretly liked each other | Feng Xin and Mu Qing’s dislike of each other being based on UST and not genuine grievances | Jun Wu/Mei Nianqing | trans headcanons other than trans woman Shi Qingxuan | Shi Qingxuan who is not a trans woman (other characters including POV characters not understanding her gender is fine) | setting depicted as non-homophobic or non-transphobic | sexual assault between requested characters
Fandom specific (THAW): Alexander_Wesker worldbuilding (sky gods, oaths of madness, it being impossible to leave Las Nevadas, etc) | torture apologia | characters or lore from non-DSMP servers | RPF (eg Q being cc!Quackity rather than modern AU c!Quackity)
Fandom specific (OW): sexual assault between requested characters | idol-industry-atypical queer acceptance | M/F | characters who use it/its pronouns stopping as a sign that they’ve gained self-esteem or self-determination (characters using it/its pronouns throughout the fic is fine!) | it/its pronouns for the cyborg designed for combat
DNW clarification: There’s a couple of things that I’m not totally sure how to DNW, because the thing I don’t want isn’t an element so much as a narrative stance. I am fine with having Phil or Techno exist in the backstories of requested characters, or with characters having complicated and not-wholly-positive relationships with L’Manberg, or with a c!Wilbur who sucks to be in a relationship with (that’s just canon!). What I don’t want is a fic that takes the stance that my favorite characters suck, unlike the syndicate, who are based. Which is hard to DNW properly because my favorite characters do suck, they’re dumbasses, they’re wrong, they’re self-serving, their logic is bad, they cause their own problems, they hurt the people around them, I don’t want to require that fic not engage with that! But I have requested Wilbur and Quackity because I like Wilbur and Quackity, and if I get a fic that is subtextually going “Wilbur and Quackity’s problem is that they are not anarchists, unlike Phil and Techno,” or “c!Wilbur is trash and Quackity is just thinking with his dick,” it will make me sad. If you cannot hold yourself back from that subtext please don’t write me DSMP fic.
Likes
General Likes
- Subtext!!
- Character studies, relationship studies. Complicated, messy relationships, conflicts that can’t be resolved in one conversation, misunderstandings that don’t boil down to a single secret.
- Bittersweet endings, hopeful endings, complicated endings.
- Missing scenes
- Snapshots in time, one scene in a larger scale; open ambiguous endings where things don’t get resolved.
- Dramatic irony, fluff with ominous foreshadowing, “and then the rest of canon happened and we know how that went” endings.
- 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. (This is NOT the same thing as depiction of QPRs which I very seldom find satisfying— I don’t want it to be Representation(TM).)
- Intense homoerotic teenage 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.
- Poly webs that are not the thing where you have one standard 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 things with color! Spot color, limited palettes, what have you
- Implied stories
- Characterizing clothing choices
- AU designs. What WOULD that guy look like as a magical girl?
- I’m big on “all fic is meta” and perhaps the coolest thing in the world to me 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 I am very easy to please with art; I don’t draw and I am continually impressed by people who do. If you draw me a pre-top-surgery Quackity mirror selfie I will adore it.
- Thick thighs and soft bodies and love handles
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!
- Xianxia AU
- Idol AU, celebrity AU, streamer AU— I’m always down for celebrity (fucked up) and fame (complicated to bad)
NSFW Likes
- 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 the 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
- Experience gaps
- One character influencing another’s sexual preferences, whether that’s deliberate or just “I had a teenage crush and imprinted on you and now my kinks show it”
Prompts + fandom-specific likes
DSMP
Fandom likes
- The messiest men in the messiest relationships you have ever seen in your entire life.
- Incongruous tenderness, among and despite everything else.
- There’s no period of their relationship where Q isn’t cheating on someone; whether it’s escaping Schlatt or looking for connection while technically engaged, I’m interested in that
- To be a total self-parody: Wilbur and Quackity and suicide; loving someone who wants to die, and the particular way that it fucks you up to have made yourself responsible for your partner not dying, both while it’s happening and after it’s over. My first VOD in this fandom was Quackity fleeing an abusive relationship for Pogtopia and IMMEDIATELY reorienting his whole life around preventing Wilbur’s downward spiral; I will never be over Pogtopia and I will never be over Q in LN still not being over Pogtopia. Come be not over it with me!
- Bad decisions and the reasons both Wilbur and Quackity make them
- Relationships with masculinity (complicated to bad)
- Masochist Wilbur; non-masochist Quackity
- Severely mentally ill Wilbur; Wilbur who sucks to be in a relationship with because he’s in a terrifying amount of pain and has no idea how to handle it; Wilbur whose decisions are mostly a frantic attempt to prove a point to himself
- Dead serious fic of the vore stream
- Remember when we talked about wanting to do quackbur as an incest ship? I’m still :eyes: about that. They could be so codependent and weird about each other.
- Genderbends! Both of these guys have such fascinating derangements about gender and I love playing with that. Cis girl Wilbur who wants to be the secret princess of the moon kingdom the way that canon Wilbur wants to be president is maybe the best take I ever had.
- Setting change AUs— this is THE fandom for setting change AUs, for me.
- But if you’re writing something set on the canon SMP, I think it is literally always great to make it relevant that the fic takes place in a Minecraft roleplay. One of my favorite fics uses “Let’s break TOS” as a sexual proposition; another has plot-relevant Lore Voice, and makes it explicit that things Quackity says in his lore voice become true in a way that other things don’t. You can be serious about that— what is it like to live in a world where nobody can say the words abuse or suicide because they’ll get you dinged on Twitch?— but feel free to get silly with it too; if you’ve always wanted to canonize Quackity’s teenage misadventures raiding Club Penguin, now’s your chance!
Greenverse
Fandom Likes
I think a lot about Quackity, one year out from winning the games. He’s living with Schlatt and loves him still, but their relationship’s turned sour and it’s never going to recover. He’s avoidant and terrified of what Schlatt’s going to say at any given moment, and he’s not wrong to be; Schlatt is growing increasingly angry and unpredictable as his health fails and as Q makes other friends. He’s starting to flirt publicly with Wilbur, and also starting to have a private friendship with Wilbur, who (although he will only communicate this in cryptic subtext) has all sorts of feelings and opinions about your mentor selling you to the Capitol. And he’s beginning a thing with Sapnap, who is his first boyfriend but not his first lover, and knows almost none of this.
All these guys are blorbos from my brain, and have been for about two years now. Literally every relationship and combination of relationships in the fic makes me so fucking sad. Only schlackity made it into the tagset but I am hereby opting into quackbur and quacknap also. Go forth and conquer.
Likes:
- People being importantly wrong about their own internal lives and those of the people around them
- The public eye; having to constantly worry about what the cameras are or aren’t picking up on
- Communicating in subtext because you can’t put what you have to say into text, or don’t know how. Knowing each other well enough to pick up on that subtext, or not, and that being characterizing as well as plot-driving.
- 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 coworker and your friend; when ‘what are we’ is a question without an answer.
- Poly webs that are not the thing where you have one standard relationship that works the way monogamous romances conventionally work but that happens to have three people in it
- Epistolary discourse
- Choices that aren’t GOOD but there isn’t a clear better option
- People who haven’t discussed or processed their damage but whose relationship with sexuality is informed by it
- 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
- Long-distance relationships
- Complicated relationships with bodily autonomy
- Bad coping mechanisms
Q/El twincest AU
Fandom likes
- Codependency and trauma bonding and obsession
- El’s deliberate frogboiling and wearing away of Quackity’s boundaries; the excuses he makes to himself about it
- The twins both understanding each other better than anyone, and also not noticing the ways in which they’re wrong about each other
- Q’s wildly fucked-up standards for relationships and ideas of what it is and isn’t acceptable to do to him
- El’s terrified alley cat nature; the way he hates people as an extension of being scared and uncomfortable around them
- Bad ending where Q tries and fails to leave El
- ““Good”” ending where they end up in a triad
- The one where El almost-but-not-quite admits his feelings at the beginning and Q sets about finding someone for El to lose his virginity to
- But also, the fact that no matter how it ends, this isn’t their good ending. This is the horrors. They are deeply deeply codependent and cannot imagine living without each other and even the best possible outcome is horrors.
- This is the one fandom where I’m opting into omegaverse, because these boys could have SUCH a bad time of being in heat.
THAW
Fandom likes
Note: I’m counting coming to get us and the myth of fingerprints as part of the THAW extended universe. If you wanted to write something based on so glad you came to visit I also opt into that and most of the rest of this should work for it. Anyway!
- The immense potential for character meta inherent to all selfcest
- The sheer history and baggage all of these people have about each other— Quackity with Q, Quackity with Wilbur, Q with a Wilbur who isn’t his Wilbur
- Quackity’s feelings about his own younger self, externalized— is he trying to do better for himself? Is he trying to do worse for himself? Is he somehow trying to do both? Does he know which he’s doing or why?
- Quackity’s absolute point-blank refusal to confront his own trauma or the idea that the things that happened to him might not have been good for him in the end
- Alarming tenderness between Q and this other, older, more violent Wilbur
- Wilbur being a masochist; Q and Quackity not
- Q and Quackity having feelings about their bodies being the same except for the evidence of their histories; Q and Quackity having oddly similar hotspots; feelings around how Q and Quackity’s circumstances shaped their respective kinks.
- Issues around topping, bottoming, and gender; issues around gender in general; if you write Q and Quackity as trans they should absolutely not be normal about it
- Sharing clothes
- A threesome between Q and DSMP burger arc quackbur. Let this boy get sandwiched between two older, sexually menacing men, who happen to be alts of himself and his alarmingly handsome [however you interpret Q’s relationship with his own Wilbur], who are transparently using him as a pawn in their own power plays with each other but also very much have feelings about him, and feelings about him as a symbol for past-Quackity, and feelings about their own history that he doesn’t necessarily have context for. What a perfect storm of projection! What an absolute fucking nightmare of a sexual encounter. Isn’t it delightful?
Glass Divine
Fandom likes
- Secular humanism and love for the works of human hands rather than a perceived higher power being something that can actually be SO romantic
- Wilbur’s alienation from his own body and his own desires; reclamation of one’s own body and one’s own desires
- Quackity’s sureness in his life philosophy, contrasted against Wilbur’s crisis of faith
- First times; discovering for the first time what you like and how your body reacts to it. Mapping that territory out with someone else.
- All the things implied by I’ve seen empty before, and you’re not it
- Pedestalization of sexual purity
- Blindfolds, fucked-up neuroses around; blindfolds, reclamation of
- Names and pet names. If you don’t have a name, if Pythia doesn’t count because it’s just a title, why couldn’t you have another one? If you can’t be the Pythia and you can’t be Wilbur how about ‘sweetheart’?
- Porn with philosophical subtext. Or just making out with philosophical subtext!
- Obviously the literal events of The Three-Body Problem don’t work here because this is not a WKTD fic, but that’s the kind of vibe I’m imagining
- The utter and unspeakable triumph of literally just being some guy who isn’t that special— what’s a Pythia to a nonbeliever?
OW
Exhausted Idol
- I’m always a slut for celebrity and fame (complicated to bad) in basically full generality and idols give you a chance to play with that SO hard.
- The idols-can’t-date dynamic— selling your image as a virgin so fans can imagine themselves dating you has incredible potential. I love sexual purity and pedestalization thereof as themes and I’m very into that here.
- On a similar note, being queer and closeted with that level of fame; I’m imagining these ships as M/M but F/F would also be very fun for this. What’s that like?
- For Idol/Bodyguard, I’m interested in the dynamic where— it’s your job to protect this person, and you can see how tired they are and their job is wrecking them, and equally clearly you can see how much they love it and how hard they work to have it and keep it, and it is your job to keep them safe and you take that seriously, and also.
- For Idol/PR manager I’m interested in selling and maintaining someone’s image, while intimately aware— because you love them— of how that image is exhausting
- And of course if you combine those tags, I think it’s very fun how a bodyguard and PR manager are both a kind of protection from the worst parts of having a fanbase, just in very different ways.
Cyborg Designed For Combat/Cyborg Designed For Pleasure
- For this I’m imagining F/NB but you could take it almost any direction! How do they engage with gender? Are they claiming gender, reclaiming gender, claiming or reclaiming a lack thereof?
- Bodily autonomy themes! What’s it like to have had your body designed for a purpose— especially since these are cyborgs, not androids, and weren’t custom-built from the start for that purpose.
- Looking seriously at what it’s like to be a cyborg not just in the realm of scifi but in the real world. I’m disabled; I’m also a sincere transhumanist! How does being a cyborg suck? How is being a cyborg really cool?
- What sort of person becomes a cyborg built to be a sex toy, what’s the draw of that? How do they respectively relate to the purposes for which they were built?
- Complicated and fraught relationships with humanity and being a person
- Complicated and fraught but not wholly negative relationships with being a nonperson
TGCF
Fandom likes
- Xie Lian being simultaneously a total sweetheart and an incredible bitch. I love him I love how he fucks with people I love how he knows full well people think he’s too innocent to live and I love how he plays that up on purpose.
- Complicated relationships with what you want, with what you’re allowed to want, with what you’re seen as wanting, with what you have a concept of wanting
- Pedestalization of sexual purity, especially when it comes to Xie Lian but it’s a theme I’m fascinated with broadly
- Metaphors for queerness that are SO makes you cry
- Loyalty and who it’s given to and how it’s won
- Celebrity and fandom themes! The streamer AU especially lives in my head rent-free forever; if you wanted to do an idol AU I’d be there with bells on.
- Dramatic irony. I love dramatic irony everywhere but this fandom has such potential for it.
Xianle trio & subsets
- Conspicuous absences; the Xie-Lian-shaped hole left in Feng Xin and Mu Qing’s lives; the way that they orbit him whether he’s here or not. Could be platonic or could be proxyfucking, up to you.
- Especially in book 1, Feng Xin and Mu Qing being incredibly afraid for Xie Lian and of what Hua Cheng might want with him, and with very good reason!
- Vastly different relationships to loyalty; worldview clashes in general. Feng Xin for whom loyalty means following you forever, hating Mu Qing for leaving; Mu Qing for whom loyalty means being on your team, hating Feng Xin for not helping.
- Weirdly intense and homoerotic teenage best friendship
- Xie Lian the world’s most oblivious sadomasochist
- Extremely demi Xie Lian who never had a problem with his cultivation vows and only realized he was gay at 800 while actively making out with the love of his life who last week asked if he wanted to get married, contrasted with extremely allo Mu Qing who realized he was gay at 15 because he could not stop thinking gay thoughts about Xie Lian, four of the other servants, two of the stablehands, his least awful shixiong,
- Sabre cultivation as a metaphor for queerness
- Feng Xin being so specifically Xie Lian’s bodyguard, whose job it is to keep him safe no matter what; Feng Xin reckoning with his failure at this role
- Everything about Fu Yao and Nan Feng— protecting Xie Lian while pretending not to, working under a false name because you don’t think he’d allow your real one anywhere near him. Identity porn is always a bonus!
Hualian
- Subtop Hua Cheng
- Complicated relationships with pain and having a body
- Xie Lian the world’s most oblivious sadomasochist
- E’ming as a queerness metaphor— as HC’s metaphorical dick that he forged himself, as his deviant masculinity that people call cursed and evil, as the part of him that people have always always always hated and shunned him for; as his kindness, as a sacrifice he made to protect people out of love for Xie Lian. As something people warn Xie Lian away from and tell him to absolutely never touch or allow to touch him. As something that Xie Lian sees and immediately, despite every warning, recognizes and loves.
- Xie Lian knowing people see him as innocent, and Hua Cheng knowing that people see him as predatory, and both of them playing that up on purpose, and both of them knowing that the other is playing that up on purpose
- The insane bits and amount that they will both immediately no-questions-asked play yes-and with one another
- Trans man Hua Cheng
- Hua Cheng recognizably doing fandom about Xie Lian— the cave of ten thousand boundary-breaking fanart posts!
- The way that they are in love having a grand romance of the ages but they also just like each other and enjoy each other’s company. They have their dramatic lines but they also have Only after having met you did I rediscover, it’s such a simple thing to be happy.
Shi Qingxuan & Three Tumors
- Shi Qingxuan and Xie Lian parallels! Community and solidarity among people with principles.
- Xie Lian being the only person in Shi Qingxuan’s life to tell her anything
- The genuinely insane lengths Shi Wudu will go to in order to protect Shi Qingxuan
- Shi Wudu’s hubris and resourcefulness and sharp edges!!!
- The Three Tumors being friends. They rag on each other they counter-countersignal they like each other and it’s great.
- The Three Tumors being immediately ride-or-die for each other’s crimes— Ling Wen and Pei Ming helped Shi Wudu with the fate swap when he was new to the heavens, that’s how they met, and to all appearances a genuinely strong friendship was formed that way!
- Ling Wen being one of the guys, defending her position as one of the guys. I requested the & version of the ship but if you wanted to do 3 Tumors as dudes chilling in a hot tub I would be in favor of this.
- Pei Ming being simultaneously an incredible womanizer and one of like three people in heaven who is not incredibly sexist to Ling Wen
- Pei Ming and Ling Wen being protective of Shi Qingxuan for Shi Wudu’s sake— especially in Pei Ming’s case, she doesn’t even like him, and there he is anyway, because that’s his best friend’s beloved little brother
- Shi Qingxuan being afraid of her brother and never, ever admitting it, even to herself. Shi Wudu, to the very bitter end, keeping Shi Qingxuan safe by removing her agency.
