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skazkaHappy Chocolate Box, mystery author! Here is my customary seasonally appropriate tl;dr.
Some tropes I love:
- Characters hooking up before growing feelings for each other
- Anonymous/quasi-anonymous sex and cruising
- Torrid romances with a time limit on them (summer romances, "I'm shipping off to war soon"/"I'm headed back home soon", etc.) and one-night stands
- Pining and characters doing deeply strange things due to pining
- Complicated feelings -- characters who can't say or even think the truth about how they feel, tongue-tied lovers, pining, love/hate, enemies-to-lovers, enemies-to-friends-to-lovers, lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers-again, etc.
- Scary people being sweet on somebody who's less intimidating, even if not actually less dangerous. Alternately, scary people being sweet on equally scary people.
- Monsters! Ghosts, werewolves, vampires, etc.
- Film noir tropes and AUs (hardboiled narration, doom and double-crosses, femmes fatales, a gunsel or two…) and any other kind of genre fusion. Campy 80s slasher horror? Summer camp romp? 90s YA novel? Gothic horror?
- Fucked-up courtships -- mind games, fighting as foreplay, surveillance and obsessions from afar, villains in love with heroes and vice versa.
- Noncon and dubcon -- power plays, trying to bargain for advantages or escape worse consequences using sex, trying to defuse a dangerous situation using sex, fights and captivity scenarios that take a bad turn, villain-on-hero noncon.
- Dramatic irony, shady pasts, loyalty kink, parental hangups, secret meetings and trysts, road trips (ROAD TRIPS!!!), partners in crime, hurt-comfort and whump, always-a-girl genderswap (especially when leading to butch characters and f/f pairings), characters sharing their mysterious pasts with each other or wanting to learn more about each other, fuckups in love. I love fic with trans characters too, especially if characters retain their canonical genders as trans people (i.e. trans dude Roland Deschain, trans girl Sally Draper) rather than shifting how they identify in the course of the fic. This and genderswap can be a total freebie on top of any other AU too. (Noir AU with trans characters! Always-a-woman gothic horror AU!)
I'm down for crossovers/fusions, AUs of all kinds (especially high-concept/fanciful/historical AUs), and unusual formats, whatever that may mean to you. There's no specific art prompts in this letter because I've never figured out how to do that, but I'd love art treats if something sparks your imagination! (Any art style and any format, I'd love to see horror art or domestic snapshots if you're down for that, historical AUs/historical outfits will always delight me -- Regency! ancient Rome! 1940s! -- and any kind of genre pastiche mentioned above. I'm down with porn.) Lots of these prompts are a little bit sprawling for a 300-word minimum but I'm totally fine with tiny vignettes of a bigger scenario too.
Kinks: size differences, age differences, partially-clothed or mostly-clothed sex, oral sex, handjobs, frottage, intercrural, rough sex, characters who kink on violence (gunplay, face-slapping, beating the hell out of each other or getting beaten up, etc.), hatesex, casual fuckbuddies, sex for comfort and solace, funny goofy fail!sex, dramatic dysfunctional fail!sex, historical sexual practices and meeting places, fancy clothes and dressing/undressing, one-night stands and one-night stands that turn into something more, and for more antagonistic ships, noncon/dubcon.
I'm not too hot on: teacher/student pairings, high school setting AUs, characters overhearing one another masturbating, omegaverse, urban fantasy werewolf tropes, RL crises and current events, apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic fic for any fandom other than Dark Tower, and zombie apocalypses. (Individual undead revenants are great and, indeed, encouraged, especially in ships with canon character death for half the ship.)
I love sad stories, infidelity, and major character death, but I'd rather not read breakup stories for this exchange. On-again/off-again relationships and dramatic betrayal scenarios are fine, just not a couple reasonably agreeing to see other people.
DNWs: self-harm, eating disorders, child sexual abuse, unrequested incest. I'd rather not read explicit sex with characters under 16. General teen romance is fine.
In general, however, I'm totally comfortable receiving fic that includes or touches on heavy topics -- corruption, abuse, misogyny, homophobia, etc. You don't have to strive to include them out of obligation but you're not required to avoid them either.
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Crossover ships
- Rust Cohle (True Detective)/Jesse Pinkman (Breaking Bad)
The world of grim man drama is your oyster here -- the obvious candidate is the two of them recovering in Alaska together and I'd love that, but some kind of time-slip scenario (or straight-up just timeline rearrangement, I'm not a hardass about continuity) that leads to Jesse meeting Crash, or crossing paths with 1995!Rust, would make me extremely happy also. Does Rust try his whole faux-sympathetic-understanding mind whammy on this nervous young addict in the interrogation room and accidentally uncover more than he meant to? Do Jesse and junkie Rust spend some time holed up in the same hotel room together? The Iron Crusaders pick a fight with Todd's creepy Nazi gang and havoc ensues, or Rust and Jesse bond over their respective kid issues, or just two weird drifters crossing paths on their way up north, whatever you feel like.
Bonus porn prompts: high!sex, Jesse feeling guilty about Rust's hospitality and assuming he wants something in return or vice versa, grimy motel room fucking, anonymous or faux-anonymous sex, trying to get it on at Rust's place with practically no furnishings and murder photos everywhere, Alaskan comfort sex in a cabin by a lake or something, the crack AU where Jesse's a woodworking hermit up north and makes artisanal wooden dildos all day long to calm his troubled psyche...
- L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries (Rear Window)/Brandon Shaw (Rope)/Phillip Morgan (Rope)
I love Hitchcock's commitment to kinky subtext and to restricted-setting thrillers but this one doesn't have to be set during Jeff's period of recuperation by any means! Jeff witnessing a murder and his nice young neighbors coming over to visit him, flattered but also jittery to have a witness? Any kind of backstory fic (with or without "say, you look familiar!" as a point of entry) or fun with voyeurism. (Postcanon fic where Brandon and Phillip get away with their crimes and their social circles bring them into contact with Jeff via Lisa would also be up my alley.) Cat-and-mouse games, messed-up murder pacts, or totally benign non-murdery neighbor romance interaction with a suspenseful totally-gay subtext is all a-okay.
Bonus porn prompts: fucked-up dubcon that's pretending not to take advantage of Jeff's physical limitations circa canon, trawling for a third person for a thinly veiled mindfucky threesome, sex choking, voyeurism and exhibitionism (canon!)...
- Michael Corleone (The Godfather)/Ed Exley (L.A. Confidential)
This one is super cracky but if you're willing to give it a shot you have my love forever -- the most obvious point of convergence for me would be something set during WWII, but it's not especially clear whether movie!Ed has that backstory so it's your preference. Them as young men with a ton of paternal legacy to live up to? Them as older men, both more than a little shady in their own right? If you want to examine an alternate path for Michael, or run with Exley's political ambitions from the books or any other pre-canon/post-canon possibilities, that's fine with me -- you can explore how Exley's rigidity conflicts with Michael's descent into the family business, have straight-arrow Ed doing his damndest to prosecute Corleone family goings-n to the fullest extent of the law whilst being very very obviously hung up on Michael, or just have two hard-headed characters having an awkward thing together, I'll be into it. Exley is about as WASPy as a person can get, and Michael's family is obviously not -- any kind of culture clash thing, without even the option of going relatively aboveboard about their relationship like Michael and Kay can, would also tickle my weird, weird fancy.
Bonus porn prompts: wartime quickies and sex for solace, adversarial sex, mostly-clothed banging, each of them being under the mistaken impression that they're cruelly deflowering the other.
- Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver)/Sonny Wortzik (Dog Day Afternoon)
- Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver)/Steve Burns (Dog Day Afternoon)
These are my go-to sleazy 70s sad dark crossover ships so I'll consider them as a group here and I'd love anything that leverages that grainy atmosphere these canons share. Nocturnal meetings, random encounters, attempted acts of kindness, failed (or successful?) efforts to be morally upright… I'd love a ships-that-pass-in-the-night take on these relationships, or something where a human connection does genuinely make a change in any of their lives.
Sonny and Travis are both Vietnam vets, both more than a little unstable, and both forces to be reckoned with, but they have pretty damn different personalities and outlooks on life and intimacy -- any encounter between these two in all their squirreliness, Travis getting enlisted as unlucky wheelman, etc. Sonny's a family man capable of being charming and loving, but also a pretty flawed person who cracks badly under stress -- how does that chafe against Travis' romantic streak and weird rigidity?
Meanwhile, Burns and Bickle are both creatures of the night -- does Bickle know he's got an undercover cop in the back of his cab, or do their paths cross in a more sinister context? Travis and his aggressively-hetero coworkers are definitely in contact with queer New Yorkers, but it's not clear how much understanding they might have, and I'd love to see those streams cross given Travis' creepy ambivalence around intimacy and the way Burns eventually comes to associate sex and violence, consensual and otherwise.
Bonus porn prompts: weird quasi-anonymous intimacy, blowjobs, goings-on in alleys and backseats of cars, laying on of hands, anything taking advantage of Travis being immersed in the seediest side of sex but also weirdly virginal and untouchable, witnessing or participating in physical violence as a prelude to getting it on.
- Col. Walter Kurtz (Apocalypse Now)/Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver)
Okay, this one's the odd one out even out of my sleazy 70s thriller/horror/drama selections but that's never stopped me before. All these two really have in common is significant psychological disturbances and the Vietnam War but the potential for chronological overlap is there if you seriously turn your head and squint. I'd like to see anything with the two of them going off the rails and losing their shit -- warrior poet (in the classic sense!) meets white-knight vigilante wannabe with disastrous (and sexy) results. Something where Bickle's Special Forces background lands him in Kurtz's compound smack-dab in the middle of the war? (It already doesn't take much to set Bickle off on a creepy internal monologue, so in that respect at least he seems like a man after Kurtz's own heart.) Or something set before (or during) Kurtz's full-on break with the military and with Western society -- I can see that eliciting fascination or repulsion out of Bickle, or a little of both.
Travis as weird acolyte or wannabe assassin, usurping Willard's role in Now (or the photojournalist's?) or beating the boat crew to the compound, by accident or on purpose -- Kurtz can teach him a thing or two about cockeyed philosophy and existential horror and also about the art of love because nobody can get under your skin like scary-eyes Marlon Brando can. Scary monologues about the nature of warfare between the sheets, hero worship leveling up into pagan idolatry, or murderous obsession getting deflected into crazy-sublimated sexual desire, remaking your much younger and much more squirrelly captive/recruit/disciple/etc. in your own image… yeah. (Both these canons are pretty harsh, so if you want to leverage the ways Travis' psychological differences make him vulnerable in that context and not just open to persuasion, go for it. Or regular ol' Kurtz-level mindfucks/torture/cult of personality stuff.)
If you don't subscribe to the take that Travis is a vet, or you can't stand fudging the films' timelines this hard/would rather take this ship in a different direction logistics-wise, knock yourself out! I'd love to see anything you come up with here and you're a more inventive writer than I am.
Bonus porn prompts: SIZE DIFFERENCES SIZE DIFFERENCES SIZE DIFFERENCES. (Brando and De Niro are just about the same height, but Brando's Kurtz is famously hefty and it's hard to imagine Travis being less wiry as a younger man.) Semi-lucid sex. Travis being an extraordinarily tightly-wound virgin.
- Llewyn Davis (Inside Llewyn Davis)/Larry Gopnik (A Serious Man)
...there might be a Coen Bros theme to some of my ships this year, oops. Really I just want these two to cross paths with any level of romantic/sexual consummation, seeing as they're both sad sacks with very different reasons for their sad-sackness -- Llewyn's more assertive than Larry is, but he's also way more of a dick, and way less anchored by the idea of domestic obligations. Something where Llewyn is the sexy pot-smoking drifter crashing on Vivienne Samsky's couch who shakes up Larry's life, not necessarily for the better? Prequel fic set while Larry's still an earnest slightly-less-doomed bachelor, or something where Llewyn's drifting takes him all the way to the Minneapolis suburbs? Arguments about mathematics, seductions via folk song, and scriptural exegesis optional but appreciated. (I would love Jewish!Llewyn for this, especially anything with Llewyn Davis, Latino Jew -- ordinarily I'd be like "I have no idea how that'd be canon relevant in any way" but given A Serious Man's sweetass Job undertones, I mean, it could?)
Bonus porn prompts: anything really twisting the knife re. suburban domestic infidelity, high!sex, emotionally confusing flirtations and passes, unwelcome sex dreams for anybody involved, intimacy that's casual and commonplace for Llewyn not being so for Larry and vice versa
- Burt Gurney (Hail Caesar!)/Barton Fink (Barton Fink)
Hear me out! They're both idealistic leftists in the film industry, Barton Fink ends his canon effectively barred from pursuing his calling, all because he royally biffed his shot at Hollywood greatness by penning a fruity movie about suffering and social conscience; Burt Gurney throws it all away as a matter of principle and ends up in a position that might not be so great. (Cf. the Coens' comments about a stinger scene showing Burt standing in a really long line for toilet paper somewhere in the USSR.) But both of them are tied to Capitol Pictures by contract (albeit about a decade apart) and that's enough for me to build a dream on. Barton going Full Commie and showing his hunky tapdancing subletter the way of the future (with SWEET KISSES) or fresh faced idealist Burt Gurney recruiting Barton Fink, Alienated Has-Been to the cause by actually giving a shit about him and his mildly misguided vision -- maybe he saw Bare Ruined Choirs playing in New York. Jaded former idealist meets beefy true believer! Doomed dance hall hookups with the champion of the common man! Burt takes a walk on the wild side and ends up in a much more film noirish corner of the California dream, or Barton gets welcomed into the comparatively supportive and forward-looking arms of The Future -- anything with these guys would make me happy.
Bonus porn prompts: Channing Tatum's MAGNIFICENT LEGS, banging in thoroughly non-scenic locales with peeling wallpaper and worse, size differences, meeting your heroes and then banging them, uniform kink (costume and real -- not that Barton Fink has a TERRIFIC track record with sailors in uniform but stuff can get weird, ok.)
- Sally Draper (Mad Men)/Evie Boyd (The Girls)
Both of these girls got hit by the 60s like a train wreck, and they're both from shitty family situations, but one of them is a thinly veiled Manson girl and the other one's Sally Draper so LET'S MAKE THIS HAPPEN. I'd love something where Sally runs away and hits the road and meets Evie coming the opposite direction trying to get the fuck out of California. Maybe she goes and tries to rustle up her dad when he doesn't come back from his latest mind-expanding retreat and runs smack into the cult? Or a scenario where Sally ends up in the cult and she and Evie bond. Or some scenario with Evie and Sally in reform school together -- or a mental institution, or maybe worse, another prep school. Down A Dark Hall AU where Sally and Evie are both being groomed for greatness in a creepy boarding school for girls where the ghosts of dead geniuses possess them every night and they have to bust out? Or something set long after the 60s have passed away (no small thanks to the not!Manson family over there) where Evie and Sally are dysfunctional weirdos together with tons of cats and nebulously realized sexual identities.
(I don't have any smut prompts for these two as young teenagers, but paralyzingly awkward fumbling or institutional-setting fuckup hookups when they're older teens would both be fine by me. The two of them as intensely bitter 70s-80s-90s-00s women can get up to whatever kind of furiously bitter sex hijinks you want and I'll read every word.)
- Hannibal Lecter (Movies)/Holden Ford (Mindhunter
I know the other people who joked about this were probably thinking of Mads Mikkelsen's fabulous skull face, but I love movie!Hannibal and his ponytail. Maybe Hannibal and Wendy know each other and Holden cadges an invitation to one of Lecter's dinner parties? The two of them dishing about Holden's specialty, all while Holden's oblivious (or mostly oblivious) to Lecter's firsthand experiences with a certain kind of criminal psychology? Or something in an institutional setting where Holden tries to pick Hannibal's brain and Hannibal is mildly amused by this vaguely pathological weirdo trying to get up in his business. Mutual respect, mutual contempt, one-sided fascination, getting shanked and then threatened with a good old-fashioned heart-eating… Holden being Hannibal's hapless sugar baby, or getting fed pieces of his Fed coworkers, or both.
Bonus porn prompts: erotic violence, Freudian mindfucks, Holden being an eager beaver between the sheets.
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The Dark Tower - Stephen King
- Roland Deschain/Man in Black
These two are my die-hard Dark Tower OTP from "you are my climax" onward and I'm really open to any variation on their relationship, from the mutually obsessive to the totally-non-reciprocated. (The very fact that Roland has bigger fish to fry and could get along just fine in the later stages of his quest seldom thinking of the man in black, while the man in black is really defined primarily by Roland much more than he is by his nominal obedience to the Crimson King, must really chap Flagg's ass.) I'm down for anything set during any stage of their long and complicated history -- murder attempts and creepy peeping in Gilead, erotic fortune-telling circa the palaver at the end of The Gunslinger, a more satisfying showdown that doesn't involve Mordred eating people's eyeballs, sexy dreams, ka-tet polyamory sabotage, whatever. I'm open to always-a-girl genderswap for absolutely any of these ships involving dudes, but I'd especially love it for this ship, either as another mildly weirder resumption of Roland's quest or as a completely separate AU where Flagg is a creepy lady drifter witch and Roland is a woman gunslinger. Or something set in one of the Captain Trips timelines -- the Topeka they visit in canon, or some other instance of a plague interrupting the course of Roland's quest. (I'd also love a straight-up crossover with The Stand!)
Bonus porn prompts: gunplay, wound fingering, erotic misuse of magic, sexy intrusive dreams, angry handjobs, any kind of sexual bargaining, weird specters of mom-banging and Freudian baggage, Flagg needling Roland about the other members of his ka-tet during sex.
Get Out
- Rod Williams/Chris Washington
Love is… busting your best friend out of a ball-jiggling white supremacist gothic hellscape! I'd love fic with Chris and Rod spending a nice weekend together either pre-canon or post-canon. Being dog dads, getting breakfast, fucking around, drinking a couple beers, going to meet Rod's parents and nothing bad happening -- at least not something Armitage family level bad, awkwardness is just fine. Or Chris and Rod falling in love over a cross-country road trip to rescue other victims of the Coagula procedure. Or angsty fic where Chris needs to unpack all the shit that happened to him and Rod is there for him. Or an AU where Chris and Rod are true crime podcast hosts (in love) and no one tries to kidnap them and steal their bodies. Leverage Rod's obsession with Jeffrey Dahmer for the purposes of good! Or an AU where the events of canon take place and they're still true crime podcast hosts in love, using the medium to get their message out and disseminate the truth about the Armitage family. Basically my only requirement with this fandom is that both of them survive and do alright; this is the one fandom where I'd rather not get downer endings or deathfic.
Bonus porn prompts: sleepy sex, desperate sex for comfort, domestic boning with no stinger of "btw my parents are going to try to mindwipe you" in the offing, post-traumatic learning-to-trust-again intimacy.
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The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
- Blondie/Tuco Ramirez
I love these guys and their tempestuous push and pull-- sometimes friends, sometimes enemies, sometimes partners in crime. I'd love to read about a time when they pulled off a con without a hitch (either the shooting-the-rope trick or something else) and got to celebrate for once, or about the screwed-up vendetta between them playing out in a more intimate way, whether before/during/after canon. A snippet of their history together, or an alternate take on where their partnership could go. Their volleying murder attempts are one of my favorite ship dynamics but you're by no means restricted to that; they're two archetypal scoundrels who maybe know each other too well to get along and I'd be down for the banditry equivalent of casefic or any little scene from earlier in their acquaintance. (Or later, for that matter, post-canon-drama. Can they mend things after that much drama? What the hell would either of them really do with that money?) Blondie is clearly aware of Tuco's shortcomings and sadder moments (cf. them sharing a cigar after Tuco bullshitting about how much his brother loves him, and Blondie plainly letting him have the lie for his dignity's sake) and is willing to let some of them slide -- when has that happened before? Has Tuco ever played that role for him? Them in a more peaceful moment, maybe. (Or a more combative one! I'm easy.)
Bonus porn prompts: BREATHPLAY BREATHPLAY BREATHPLAY. Bed-sharing leads to sex, bath-sharing leads to sex, sleeping space-sharing in the middle of an inhospitable desert leads to sex. (Canon takes them mostly to warm-weather locations but I'd love to see them in a snowbound, Hateful Eight-esque context, however unlikely that might be. Which isn't a sex thing as such, but lends itself to its own flavor of grudging huddling for warmth.) Spite sex that says spiteful all the way through or takes a turn for cautious camaraderie partway through. Weird inventive vengeance noncon. Dubcon gunplay! Or just a grudging-affectionate helping hand in the night.
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Mad Men
- Sal Romano/Michael Ginsberg
"They don't even meet!", you say. "They appear in completely non-overlapping seasons!", you say. "Ginsberg has massive hangups around the very concept of homosexuality that feed into his debilitating mental illness!", you say. Well… you're right, but fuck it. (FWIW, I'd prefer fic set after Ginsberg's psychotic break to give him a little bit of recovery and security, even if it's recovery by the standards of early-70s psychiatry.) Something with Michael getting accidentally/accidentally-on-purpose cruised by Sal, or where they meet in a pickup situation and only later find out a) they actually like each other and/or have feelings for each other b) holy shit, they could have been coworkers in another life. (Something where Sal comes back to SC&P in Don's absence and it sends Ginsberg's gay paranoia into overdrive?) Or on a happier note, Sal meeting Michael's father, or Michael self-actualizing his sexuality a little with Sal's help and vice versa -- Sal sort of gets the shaft in a narrative sense and he's in the closet out of necessity but he definitely seems to know himself and to like himself, in a way that might blow Ginsberg's mind. Or something in an AU where Michael, Sal, and Kitty become an inadvertent poly V
Bonus porn prompts: anonymous sex, Sal giving blowjobs, anything that kinks on Sal being a beefy handsome brick shithouse and Ginsberg looking like a haunted late-60s waif, Ginsberg being a big honking virgin.
- Don Draper/Roger Sterling
Love is… feeding someone a shitload of oysters and then making them run up a bunch of flights of stairs. I'd love fic about these two and their drunk misadventures of any kind, from lolzy to melancholy. Maybe some time where they're mistaken for a couple like Don and Lane were? Don helping Roger get things straightened out after some disastrous mishap that even Joan can't or won't field? I'd love to read fic about an encounter or a fling between these two early in Don's career as an ad man -- maybe something where Roger assumes Don is angling for sugar-baby status and Don is totally game? Or later on, furtive taxicab handjobs, fucked-up wartime reminisces when swapping blowies, office quickies, discovering to their horror that they have serious and genuine feelings for each other? Or the two of them ending up in a threesome (or foursome?) together where they get way into each other and the women they're with are either totally feelin' it, or totally weirded out.
Bonus porn prompts: mutual masturbation, anything incorporating massive amounts of self-loathing and internalized homophobia, denial, Don's kinks coming out to play (face-slapping! so much face-slapping!), Roger's kinks coming out to play.
-Peggy Olsen/Dawn Chambers
These two are often framed in terms of their differences and the gulf between them but I'd really like to see them get to bond… in a gay way. Peggy calling Dawn up for workplace gossip and maybe more once she's left the agency, or Dawn calling Peggy up to bitch about how godawful a workplace it is for anybody who couldn't be mistaken at a distance for Pete Campbell. Or something where the events of "Mystery Date" take a different turn and they end up hooking up? Any kind of depressing comfort sex (this is Mad Men after all) whether springboarded off all the bad shit that's in the air in "Mystery Date", or just in general the turmoil of working at SC&P. (If it's set after the snafu with Shirley's flowers, please have Peggy have apologized for that or something, her actions in that episode are so agonizing.) Or an AU of the end of s7 where Dawn also get courted for Joan's startup and things get simultaneously more weird/less weird between her and Peggy?
Bonus porn prompts: dressing and undressing, office late-night quickies, tipsy sex, extricating each other from mountains of 60s undergaments, workshopping advertising pitches turning into an excuse for boning down.
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Miller's Crossing
- Mink Larouie/Eddie Dane
Okay, so Mink being Eddie Dane's boy seems to be fairly well-known, at least among insiders, but it's definitely a tread-lightly thing among people in the know. How did they end up involved with each other? Is this the first time Mink has strayed? What do they see in each other? I'd love to read about any past noir misadventures for these two or a regular night around town, or a take on canon where Mink doesn't get shot in the face out in the woods and the fallout from that. I'm comfortable with a fucked-up or a relatively functional take on this ship, or anything in between, just anything that fills in the gaps in their acquaintance. What if the Dane gets to Mink before Bernie does -- hustling him out of harm's way, maybe, but putting him back in the Dane's way for sure and confronting some unfortunate stuff about their relationship? (With or without reconciliation.)
Bonus porn prompts: fucked-up possessive sex, disarmingly tender sex in unlikely locations, anything capitalizing on size kink, Mink being an absolute terror in bed, losing one's cool between the sheets (or anywhere else), the mysterious yet undeniable sexual charisma of Steve Buscemi.
- Mink Larouie/Bernie Bernbaum
What happened there? Bernie seems to have a pretty good read on Mink's weaknesses but also the ways in which he's useful -- how'd they meet and get involved? How did things transpire between them? (And to what degree did they transpire in the first place -- one-time thing or ongoing connection or a series of trysts?) Bernie has his moments of charm but he's also big-time bad news; to what degree did both of them realize they were stirring up more trouble? What's a typical racket like for these guys? How do their respective vices interact? Mink's avarice getting the better of him, or sex-for-drugs gone south, or who knows, Mink actually thinking Bernie's an alright guy who's going places in life and has the right idea about how to turn a profit in this town?
Bonus porn prompts: Cigarette burns, trading sex for drugs, clandestine deliberately-paranoia-inducing sex, the thrill of infidelity, guilty intimacy, surprise bedroom visitations in the middle of the night.
- Tom Reagan/Bernie Bernbaum
My rarest of rare pairs! However this has to go, with reluctant collaboration or showing up in each other's homes unannounced or more taunting telephone calls, Bernie is my fave unlikely femme fatale ("dude fatale", French for "Fatal Dude") and I love him and Tom's interplay of double-meaning and talk with flat-out violence. Tom's a pretty sensible person, but even a sensible person can lose their way now and then -- what happens if he gets entangled in all this workplace love and murder drama even deeper? Or just a quick-and-dirty disastrous tryst in the course of their volleying mindfucks, showing up in each other's apartments at all hours and trying to needle one another.
Bonus porn prompts: contemptuous sex, Tom's miserable alcoholic flop streak versus Bernie's taste for mind games, wary intimacy after one or both of them has had the shit kicked out of them, sexual extortion that goes both ways.
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Mindhunter
- Debbie Mitford/Wendy Carr
These two women deserve to get laid and also get a goddamn break from Holden's hijinks! The solution to this is plainly that they should date, even if this means long-distance phone convos, road trips, or all different kinds of fucking around. Wendy seems to have just gotten out of a long-term relationship, or being on the brink of ending that relationship at least -- does getting with Debbie feel like infidelity, or is it a chance to let her freakiest ambitions come out to play now that her relationship isn't so bound by the confines of responsibility in her social circle? I'd love something where the difference in their ages and professional standings is highlighted, whether in a way they both enjoy or in a way that causes friction or a little of both. Debbie being Wendy's manic pixie dream girl? Wendy being Debbie's intimidating and aloof fuckbuddy? I'd love to see some academia kink -- from the mild (Wendy reading over Debbie's thesis/Debbie spitballing ideas for Wendy's next publication with her) to the wild (sexy thesis advisor roleplay!) Or anything with these two putting their heads together with their respective specialties -- I'd love some simmering UST as they bullshit about their disciplines together, or where they bond over their experiences as women who love weird shit. The two of them have ample opportunities to gripe about Holden, so I'd be totally open to a fic where that facilitates bad-idea rebound sex (or as Wendy might say, a what-the-fuck fuck) or the two of them having an affair while Debbie's relationship with Holden is cooling rapidly. (I'd prefer nothing where Holden's crush on Wendy turns into him actually trying to forge a relationship with her, though!)
Bonus porn prompts: bondage, Debbie sending Wendy dirty polaroids, drunk/high sex, sex in the bathroom of a fancy restaurant.
- Holden Ford/Edmund Kemper
This is such a fucked up pairing in so many ways but it's pretty hard to shake (thanks, Jonathan Groff!) and it dovetails with so many of the show's themes about power and control. Any variation or elaboration on the Vacaville hospital scene or any of their interviews is fine by me! There's lots of opportunities for what-might-have-been stuff or for vignettes elaborating on their already screwy dynamic there. Or post-s1, something where the two of them correspond after the hospital visit in Vacaville, or where Holden is at a loss to explain what exactly happened there. If you're open to not including Kemper directly, a fic where Holden's processing what happened with his coworkers/professional contacts would totally work for me too! (Or, I suppose, the Kemper version of that same aftermath -- are there consequences for him too?) Or an AU where Holden is Kemper's cellmate, not his FBI interviewer, or where they meet in a therapeutic setting in some other way -- any kind of power play between the two of them, or mutual/not-so-mutual brain-picking.
(I'd prefer no fics set during the time where Kemper is actually active as a serial killer, or where his real-life victims appear as characters.)
Bonus porn prompts: BREATHPLAY BREATHPLAY BREATHPLAY, facefucking, any kind of noncon/dubcon touching, Holden being weirdly sexually inquisitive but also terrible, erotic dreams, size differences, injured sex.
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Philip Marlowe - Raymond Chandler
- Philip Marlowe/Terry Lennox
These two have it all -- wartime trauma, healthy skepticism, secrets piled on secrets, symbolic booze. They're both men with their own cautious principles, but when they first meet Lennox is such a mess that Marlowe looks positively sober and respectable in comparison and as they both learn more about each other's qualities and little mysteries it just firms up that bond of uneasy tenderness -- even when Marlowe has abundant reason to think Lennox has already shuffled off this mortal coil. Casefic with a romantic angle that creeps in despite Marlowe's best efforts, a romantic interlude that has fuck-all to do with any case or any mystery at all, an alternate take where Terry Lennox really is murderously bad news despite being a very polite war hero and Marlowe loves him anyway, Lennox continuing to haunt Marlowe a little after the timeframe of canon or a fic where their last meeting goes differently -- something where they're reunited or correspond with each other after parting ways, or even just something to do with the experience of falling for someone as you try to put together exactly who the hell they are and what their racket is. (Hell, I would also take absolutely any hardboiled/noirish tropes you want to party up with this pairing, up to and including wholesale AUs.) If you've ever longed to go to town on a Marlowe pastiche, I would love and welcome that for these two, but I also totally understand why you might not want to go there.
Bonus porn prompts: drunk propositions leading to contrite, hung-over banging; eventual consummation after a lot of circuitous pussyfooting around; expectations of situational homosexuality held over from the war blossom into something more™.
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The Thing
- R.J. MacReady/Childs
GRUDGING TEAMWORK BECOMES SOMETHING MORE. (How many times can I use "becomes something more" in my letter? Science does not know.) Or anything set in the weird stir-crazy altered state of wintering over on the base. I'd love to read something where their totally justified mutual suspicion in light of the whole Thing thing gives way to slowly building appreciation for each other's finer qualities, or established-relationship fic where their low-key established relationship is damn near scuttled by the "who's infected" identity scare, or fic where their shared crazy competence and ridiculous physical attractiveness mean they already have a ~history~ before the film's events, whether you want to explore that or write canon-era/postcanon fic where it's the elephant in the room. The difficulties of a secret relationship on a tiny research base? Teeth-gritted romantic gestures in the middle of nowhere? Or fic set during a regular old stretch at the research base where no terrifying assimilation-minded alien randos crash the party. You can handwave the futility of their efforts to survive at the film's end/patch it up with a canon-divergent AU where the generator isn't destroyed etc, or write fic where they end up tragically assimilated, or write fic where they both know it's a lost cause but are going to try and hack it as long as possible anyway -- the one thing I'd prefer not to read is fic where they opt for onscreen suicide or decide onscreen to lie down and die. A blaze of glory or foregone-conclusion death is fine, though. (I'd also prefer no blatant rape metaphors in the body-horror aspect of what the alien does to other species, if that comes up, though human-on-human noncon/dubcon is fine. Or human-on-alien, hell.)
eta BONUS ROUND: 16th/17th century Jesuit AU. Early Modern plague-busting! Early Modern investigative science vs. body horror! Keith David in priest garb! You know you wanna.
Bonus porn prompts: grudging bedsharing leading to grudging boning, pragmatic banging all over the base,anything exploiting 1982 Kurt Russell's lavish head of hair for sexy yanking purposes.
Some tropes I love:
- Characters hooking up before growing feelings for each other
- Anonymous/quasi-anonymous sex and cruising
- Torrid romances with a time limit on them (summer romances, "I'm shipping off to war soon"/"I'm headed back home soon", etc.) and one-night stands
- Pining and characters doing deeply strange things due to pining
- Complicated feelings -- characters who can't say or even think the truth about how they feel, tongue-tied lovers, pining, love/hate, enemies-to-lovers, enemies-to-friends-to-lovers, lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers-again, etc.
- Scary people being sweet on somebody who's less intimidating, even if not actually less dangerous. Alternately, scary people being sweet on equally scary people.
- Monsters! Ghosts, werewolves, vampires, etc.
- Film noir tropes and AUs (hardboiled narration, doom and double-crosses, femmes fatales, a gunsel or two…) and any other kind of genre fusion. Campy 80s slasher horror? Summer camp romp? 90s YA novel? Gothic horror?
- Fucked-up courtships -- mind games, fighting as foreplay, surveillance and obsessions from afar, villains in love with heroes and vice versa.
- Noncon and dubcon -- power plays, trying to bargain for advantages or escape worse consequences using sex, trying to defuse a dangerous situation using sex, fights and captivity scenarios that take a bad turn, villain-on-hero noncon.
- Dramatic irony, shady pasts, loyalty kink, parental hangups, secret meetings and trysts, road trips (ROAD TRIPS!!!), partners in crime, hurt-comfort and whump, always-a-girl genderswap (especially when leading to butch characters and f/f pairings), characters sharing their mysterious pasts with each other or wanting to learn more about each other, fuckups in love. I love fic with trans characters too, especially if characters retain their canonical genders as trans people (i.e. trans dude Roland Deschain, trans girl Sally Draper) rather than shifting how they identify in the course of the fic. This and genderswap can be a total freebie on top of any other AU too. (Noir AU with trans characters! Always-a-woman gothic horror AU!)
I'm down for crossovers/fusions, AUs of all kinds (especially high-concept/fanciful/historical AUs), and unusual formats, whatever that may mean to you. There's no specific art prompts in this letter because I've never figured out how to do that, but I'd love art treats if something sparks your imagination! (Any art style and any format, I'd love to see horror art or domestic snapshots if you're down for that, historical AUs/historical outfits will always delight me -- Regency! ancient Rome! 1940s! -- and any kind of genre pastiche mentioned above. I'm down with porn.) Lots of these prompts are a little bit sprawling for a 300-word minimum but I'm totally fine with tiny vignettes of a bigger scenario too.
Kinks: size differences, age differences, partially-clothed or mostly-clothed sex, oral sex, handjobs, frottage, intercrural, rough sex, characters who kink on violence (gunplay, face-slapping, beating the hell out of each other or getting beaten up, etc.), hatesex, casual fuckbuddies, sex for comfort and solace, funny goofy fail!sex, dramatic dysfunctional fail!sex, historical sexual practices and meeting places, fancy clothes and dressing/undressing, one-night stands and one-night stands that turn into something more, and for more antagonistic ships, noncon/dubcon.
I'm not too hot on: teacher/student pairings, high school setting AUs, characters overhearing one another masturbating, omegaverse, urban fantasy werewolf tropes, RL crises and current events, apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic fic for any fandom other than Dark Tower, and zombie apocalypses. (Individual undead revenants are great and, indeed, encouraged, especially in ships with canon character death for half the ship.)
I love sad stories, infidelity, and major character death, but I'd rather not read breakup stories for this exchange. On-again/off-again relationships and dramatic betrayal scenarios are fine, just not a couple reasonably agreeing to see other people.
DNWs: self-harm, eating disorders, child sexual abuse, unrequested incest. I'd rather not read explicit sex with characters under 16. General teen romance is fine.
In general, however, I'm totally comfortable receiving fic that includes or touches on heavy topics -- corruption, abuse, misogyny, homophobia, etc. You don't have to strive to include them out of obligation but you're not required to avoid them either.
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Crossover ships
- Rust Cohle (True Detective)/Jesse Pinkman (Breaking Bad)
The world of grim man drama is your oyster here -- the obvious candidate is the two of them recovering in Alaska together and I'd love that, but some kind of time-slip scenario (or straight-up just timeline rearrangement, I'm not a hardass about continuity) that leads to Jesse meeting Crash, or crossing paths with 1995!Rust, would make me extremely happy also. Does Rust try his whole faux-sympathetic-understanding mind whammy on this nervous young addict in the interrogation room and accidentally uncover more than he meant to? Do Jesse and junkie Rust spend some time holed up in the same hotel room together? The Iron Crusaders pick a fight with Todd's creepy Nazi gang and havoc ensues, or Rust and Jesse bond over their respective kid issues, or just two weird drifters crossing paths on their way up north, whatever you feel like.
Bonus porn prompts: high!sex, Jesse feeling guilty about Rust's hospitality and assuming he wants something in return or vice versa, grimy motel room fucking, anonymous or faux-anonymous sex, trying to get it on at Rust's place with practically no furnishings and murder photos everywhere, Alaskan comfort sex in a cabin by a lake or something, the crack AU where Jesse's a woodworking hermit up north and makes artisanal wooden dildos all day long to calm his troubled psyche...
- L.B. "Jeff" Jeffries (Rear Window)/Brandon Shaw (Rope)/Phillip Morgan (Rope)
I love Hitchcock's commitment to kinky subtext and to restricted-setting thrillers but this one doesn't have to be set during Jeff's period of recuperation by any means! Jeff witnessing a murder and his nice young neighbors coming over to visit him, flattered but also jittery to have a witness? Any kind of backstory fic (with or without "say, you look familiar!" as a point of entry) or fun with voyeurism. (Postcanon fic where Brandon and Phillip get away with their crimes and their social circles bring them into contact with Jeff via Lisa would also be up my alley.) Cat-and-mouse games, messed-up murder pacts, or totally benign non-murdery neighbor romance interaction with a suspenseful totally-gay subtext is all a-okay.
Bonus porn prompts: fucked-up dubcon that's pretending not to take advantage of Jeff's physical limitations circa canon, trawling for a third person for a thinly veiled mindfucky threesome, sex choking, voyeurism and exhibitionism (canon!)...
- Michael Corleone (The Godfather)/Ed Exley (L.A. Confidential)
This one is super cracky but if you're willing to give it a shot you have my love forever -- the most obvious point of convergence for me would be something set during WWII, but it's not especially clear whether movie!Ed has that backstory so it's your preference. Them as young men with a ton of paternal legacy to live up to? Them as older men, both more than a little shady in their own right? If you want to examine an alternate path for Michael, or run with Exley's political ambitions from the books or any other pre-canon/post-canon possibilities, that's fine with me -- you can explore how Exley's rigidity conflicts with Michael's descent into the family business, have straight-arrow Ed doing his damndest to prosecute Corleone family goings-n to the fullest extent of the law whilst being very very obviously hung up on Michael, or just have two hard-headed characters having an awkward thing together, I'll be into it. Exley is about as WASPy as a person can get, and Michael's family is obviously not -- any kind of culture clash thing, without even the option of going relatively aboveboard about their relationship like Michael and Kay can, would also tickle my weird, weird fancy.
Bonus porn prompts: wartime quickies and sex for solace, adversarial sex, mostly-clothed banging, each of them being under the mistaken impression that they're cruelly deflowering the other.
- Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver)/Sonny Wortzik (Dog Day Afternoon)
- Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver)/Steve Burns (Dog Day Afternoon)
These are my go-to sleazy 70s sad dark crossover ships so I'll consider them as a group here and I'd love anything that leverages that grainy atmosphere these canons share. Nocturnal meetings, random encounters, attempted acts of kindness, failed (or successful?) efforts to be morally upright… I'd love a ships-that-pass-in-the-night take on these relationships, or something where a human connection does genuinely make a change in any of their lives.
Sonny and Travis are both Vietnam vets, both more than a little unstable, and both forces to be reckoned with, but they have pretty damn different personalities and outlooks on life and intimacy -- any encounter between these two in all their squirreliness, Travis getting enlisted as unlucky wheelman, etc. Sonny's a family man capable of being charming and loving, but also a pretty flawed person who cracks badly under stress -- how does that chafe against Travis' romantic streak and weird rigidity?
Meanwhile, Burns and Bickle are both creatures of the night -- does Bickle know he's got an undercover cop in the back of his cab, or do their paths cross in a more sinister context? Travis and his aggressively-hetero coworkers are definitely in contact with queer New Yorkers, but it's not clear how much understanding they might have, and I'd love to see those streams cross given Travis' creepy ambivalence around intimacy and the way Burns eventually comes to associate sex and violence, consensual and otherwise.
Bonus porn prompts: weird quasi-anonymous intimacy, blowjobs, goings-on in alleys and backseats of cars, laying on of hands, anything taking advantage of Travis being immersed in the seediest side of sex but also weirdly virginal and untouchable, witnessing or participating in physical violence as a prelude to getting it on.
- Col. Walter Kurtz (Apocalypse Now)/Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver)
Okay, this one's the odd one out even out of my sleazy 70s thriller/horror/drama selections but that's never stopped me before. All these two really have in common is significant psychological disturbances and the Vietnam War but the potential for chronological overlap is there if you seriously turn your head and squint. I'd like to see anything with the two of them going off the rails and losing their shit -- warrior poet (in the classic sense!) meets white-knight vigilante wannabe with disastrous (and sexy) results. Something where Bickle's Special Forces background lands him in Kurtz's compound smack-dab in the middle of the war? (It already doesn't take much to set Bickle off on a creepy internal monologue, so in that respect at least he seems like a man after Kurtz's own heart.) Or something set before (or during) Kurtz's full-on break with the military and with Western society -- I can see that eliciting fascination or repulsion out of Bickle, or a little of both.
Travis as weird acolyte or wannabe assassin, usurping Willard's role in Now (or the photojournalist's?) or beating the boat crew to the compound, by accident or on purpose -- Kurtz can teach him a thing or two about cockeyed philosophy and existential horror and also about the art of love because nobody can get under your skin like scary-eyes Marlon Brando can. Scary monologues about the nature of warfare between the sheets, hero worship leveling up into pagan idolatry, or murderous obsession getting deflected into crazy-sublimated sexual desire, remaking your much younger and much more squirrelly captive/recruit/disciple/etc. in your own image… yeah. (Both these canons are pretty harsh, so if you want to leverage the ways Travis' psychological differences make him vulnerable in that context and not just open to persuasion, go for it. Or regular ol' Kurtz-level mindfucks/torture/cult of personality stuff.)
If you don't subscribe to the take that Travis is a vet, or you can't stand fudging the films' timelines this hard/would rather take this ship in a different direction logistics-wise, knock yourself out! I'd love to see anything you come up with here and you're a more inventive writer than I am.
Bonus porn prompts: SIZE DIFFERENCES SIZE DIFFERENCES SIZE DIFFERENCES. (Brando and De Niro are just about the same height, but Brando's Kurtz is famously hefty and it's hard to imagine Travis being less wiry as a younger man.) Semi-lucid sex. Travis being an extraordinarily tightly-wound virgin.
- Llewyn Davis (Inside Llewyn Davis)/Larry Gopnik (A Serious Man)
...there might be a Coen Bros theme to some of my ships this year, oops. Really I just want these two to cross paths with any level of romantic/sexual consummation, seeing as they're both sad sacks with very different reasons for their sad-sackness -- Llewyn's more assertive than Larry is, but he's also way more of a dick, and way less anchored by the idea of domestic obligations. Something where Llewyn is the sexy pot-smoking drifter crashing on Vivienne Samsky's couch who shakes up Larry's life, not necessarily for the better? Prequel fic set while Larry's still an earnest slightly-less-doomed bachelor, or something where Llewyn's drifting takes him all the way to the Minneapolis suburbs? Arguments about mathematics, seductions via folk song, and scriptural exegesis optional but appreciated. (I would love Jewish!Llewyn for this, especially anything with Llewyn Davis, Latino Jew -- ordinarily I'd be like "I have no idea how that'd be canon relevant in any way" but given A Serious Man's sweetass Job undertones, I mean, it could?)
Bonus porn prompts: anything really twisting the knife re. suburban domestic infidelity, high!sex, emotionally confusing flirtations and passes, unwelcome sex dreams for anybody involved, intimacy that's casual and commonplace for Llewyn not being so for Larry and vice versa
- Burt Gurney (Hail Caesar!)/Barton Fink (Barton Fink)
Hear me out! They're both idealistic leftists in the film industry, Barton Fink ends his canon effectively barred from pursuing his calling, all because he royally biffed his shot at Hollywood greatness by penning a fruity movie about suffering and social conscience; Burt Gurney throws it all away as a matter of principle and ends up in a position that might not be so great. (Cf. the Coens' comments about a stinger scene showing Burt standing in a really long line for toilet paper somewhere in the USSR.) But both of them are tied to Capitol Pictures by contract (albeit about a decade apart) and that's enough for me to build a dream on. Barton going Full Commie and showing his hunky tapdancing subletter the way of the future (with SWEET KISSES) or fresh faced idealist Burt Gurney recruiting Barton Fink, Alienated Has-Been to the cause by actually giving a shit about him and his mildly misguided vision -- maybe he saw Bare Ruined Choirs playing in New York. Jaded former idealist meets beefy true believer! Doomed dance hall hookups with the champion of the common man! Burt takes a walk on the wild side and ends up in a much more film noirish corner of the California dream, or Barton gets welcomed into the comparatively supportive and forward-looking arms of The Future -- anything with these guys would make me happy.
Bonus porn prompts: Channing Tatum's MAGNIFICENT LEGS, banging in thoroughly non-scenic locales with peeling wallpaper and worse, size differences, meeting your heroes and then banging them, uniform kink (costume and real -- not that Barton Fink has a TERRIFIC track record with sailors in uniform but stuff can get weird, ok.)
- Sally Draper (Mad Men)/Evie Boyd (The Girls)
Both of these girls got hit by the 60s like a train wreck, and they're both from shitty family situations, but one of them is a thinly veiled Manson girl and the other one's Sally Draper so LET'S MAKE THIS HAPPEN. I'd love something where Sally runs away and hits the road and meets Evie coming the opposite direction trying to get the fuck out of California. Maybe she goes and tries to rustle up her dad when he doesn't come back from his latest mind-expanding retreat and runs smack into the cult? Or a scenario where Sally ends up in the cult and she and Evie bond. Or some scenario with Evie and Sally in reform school together -- or a mental institution, or maybe worse, another prep school. Down A Dark Hall AU where Sally and Evie are both being groomed for greatness in a creepy boarding school for girls where the ghosts of dead geniuses possess them every night and they have to bust out? Or something set long after the 60s have passed away (no small thanks to the not!Manson family over there) where Evie and Sally are dysfunctional weirdos together with tons of cats and nebulously realized sexual identities.
(I don't have any smut prompts for these two as young teenagers, but paralyzingly awkward fumbling or institutional-setting fuckup hookups when they're older teens would both be fine by me. The two of them as intensely bitter 70s-80s-90s-00s women can get up to whatever kind of furiously bitter sex hijinks you want and I'll read every word.)
- Hannibal Lecter (Movies)/Holden Ford (Mindhunter
I know the other people who joked about this were probably thinking of Mads Mikkelsen's fabulous skull face, but I love movie!Hannibal and his ponytail. Maybe Hannibal and Wendy know each other and Holden cadges an invitation to one of Lecter's dinner parties? The two of them dishing about Holden's specialty, all while Holden's oblivious (or mostly oblivious) to Lecter's firsthand experiences with a certain kind of criminal psychology? Or something in an institutional setting where Holden tries to pick Hannibal's brain and Hannibal is mildly amused by this vaguely pathological weirdo trying to get up in his business. Mutual respect, mutual contempt, one-sided fascination, getting shanked and then threatened with a good old-fashioned heart-eating… Holden being Hannibal's hapless sugar baby, or getting fed pieces of his Fed coworkers, or both.
Bonus porn prompts: erotic violence, Freudian mindfucks, Holden being an eager beaver between the sheets.
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The Dark Tower - Stephen King
- Roland Deschain/Man in Black
These two are my die-hard Dark Tower OTP from "you are my climax" onward and I'm really open to any variation on their relationship, from the mutually obsessive to the totally-non-reciprocated. (The very fact that Roland has bigger fish to fry and could get along just fine in the later stages of his quest seldom thinking of the man in black, while the man in black is really defined primarily by Roland much more than he is by his nominal obedience to the Crimson King, must really chap Flagg's ass.) I'm down for anything set during any stage of their long and complicated history -- murder attempts and creepy peeping in Gilead, erotic fortune-telling circa the palaver at the end of The Gunslinger, a more satisfying showdown that doesn't involve Mordred eating people's eyeballs, sexy dreams, ka-tet polyamory sabotage, whatever. I'm open to always-a-girl genderswap for absolutely any of these ships involving dudes, but I'd especially love it for this ship, either as another mildly weirder resumption of Roland's quest or as a completely separate AU where Flagg is a creepy lady drifter witch and Roland is a woman gunslinger. Or something set in one of the Captain Trips timelines -- the Topeka they visit in canon, or some other instance of a plague interrupting the course of Roland's quest. (I'd also love a straight-up crossover with The Stand!)
Bonus porn prompts: gunplay, wound fingering, erotic misuse of magic, sexy intrusive dreams, angry handjobs, any kind of sexual bargaining, weird specters of mom-banging and Freudian baggage, Flagg needling Roland about the other members of his ka-tet during sex.
Get Out
- Rod Williams/Chris Washington
Love is… busting your best friend out of a ball-jiggling white supremacist gothic hellscape! I'd love fic with Chris and Rod spending a nice weekend together either pre-canon or post-canon. Being dog dads, getting breakfast, fucking around, drinking a couple beers, going to meet Rod's parents and nothing bad happening -- at least not something Armitage family level bad, awkwardness is just fine. Or Chris and Rod falling in love over a cross-country road trip to rescue other victims of the Coagula procedure. Or angsty fic where Chris needs to unpack all the shit that happened to him and Rod is there for him. Or an AU where Chris and Rod are true crime podcast hosts (in love) and no one tries to kidnap them and steal their bodies. Leverage Rod's obsession with Jeffrey Dahmer for the purposes of good! Or an AU where the events of canon take place and they're still true crime podcast hosts in love, using the medium to get their message out and disseminate the truth about the Armitage family. Basically my only requirement with this fandom is that both of them survive and do alright; this is the one fandom where I'd rather not get downer endings or deathfic.
Bonus porn prompts: sleepy sex, desperate sex for comfort, domestic boning with no stinger of "btw my parents are going to try to mindwipe you" in the offing, post-traumatic learning-to-trust-again intimacy.
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The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
- Blondie/Tuco Ramirez
I love these guys and their tempestuous push and pull-- sometimes friends, sometimes enemies, sometimes partners in crime. I'd love to read about a time when they pulled off a con without a hitch (either the shooting-the-rope trick or something else) and got to celebrate for once, or about the screwed-up vendetta between them playing out in a more intimate way, whether before/during/after canon. A snippet of their history together, or an alternate take on where their partnership could go. Their volleying murder attempts are one of my favorite ship dynamics but you're by no means restricted to that; they're two archetypal scoundrels who maybe know each other too well to get along and I'd be down for the banditry equivalent of casefic or any little scene from earlier in their acquaintance. (Or later, for that matter, post-canon-drama. Can they mend things after that much drama? What the hell would either of them really do with that money?) Blondie is clearly aware of Tuco's shortcomings and sadder moments (cf. them sharing a cigar after Tuco bullshitting about how much his brother loves him, and Blondie plainly letting him have the lie for his dignity's sake) and is willing to let some of them slide -- when has that happened before? Has Tuco ever played that role for him? Them in a more peaceful moment, maybe. (Or a more combative one! I'm easy.)
Bonus porn prompts: BREATHPLAY BREATHPLAY BREATHPLAY. Bed-sharing leads to sex, bath-sharing leads to sex, sleeping space-sharing in the middle of an inhospitable desert leads to sex. (Canon takes them mostly to warm-weather locations but I'd love to see them in a snowbound, Hateful Eight-esque context, however unlikely that might be. Which isn't a sex thing as such, but lends itself to its own flavor of grudging huddling for warmth.) Spite sex that says spiteful all the way through or takes a turn for cautious camaraderie partway through. Weird inventive vengeance noncon. Dubcon gunplay! Or just a grudging-affectionate helping hand in the night.
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Mad Men
- Sal Romano/Michael Ginsberg
"They don't even meet!", you say. "They appear in completely non-overlapping seasons!", you say. "Ginsberg has massive hangups around the very concept of homosexuality that feed into his debilitating mental illness!", you say. Well… you're right, but fuck it. (FWIW, I'd prefer fic set after Ginsberg's psychotic break to give him a little bit of recovery and security, even if it's recovery by the standards of early-70s psychiatry.) Something with Michael getting accidentally/accidentally-on-purpose cruised by Sal, or where they meet in a pickup situation and only later find out a) they actually like each other and/or have feelings for each other b) holy shit, they could have been coworkers in another life. (Something where Sal comes back to SC&P in Don's absence and it sends Ginsberg's gay paranoia into overdrive?) Or on a happier note, Sal meeting Michael's father, or Michael self-actualizing his sexuality a little with Sal's help and vice versa -- Sal sort of gets the shaft in a narrative sense and he's in the closet out of necessity but he definitely seems to know himself and to like himself, in a way that might blow Ginsberg's mind. Or something in an AU where Michael, Sal, and Kitty become an inadvertent poly V
Bonus porn prompts: anonymous sex, Sal giving blowjobs, anything that kinks on Sal being a beefy handsome brick shithouse and Ginsberg looking like a haunted late-60s waif, Ginsberg being a big honking virgin.
- Don Draper/Roger Sterling
Love is… feeding someone a shitload of oysters and then making them run up a bunch of flights of stairs. I'd love fic about these two and their drunk misadventures of any kind, from lolzy to melancholy. Maybe some time where they're mistaken for a couple like Don and Lane were? Don helping Roger get things straightened out after some disastrous mishap that even Joan can't or won't field? I'd love to read fic about an encounter or a fling between these two early in Don's career as an ad man -- maybe something where Roger assumes Don is angling for sugar-baby status and Don is totally game? Or later on, furtive taxicab handjobs, fucked-up wartime reminisces when swapping blowies, office quickies, discovering to their horror that they have serious and genuine feelings for each other? Or the two of them ending up in a threesome (or foursome?) together where they get way into each other and the women they're with are either totally feelin' it, or totally weirded out.
Bonus porn prompts: mutual masturbation, anything incorporating massive amounts of self-loathing and internalized homophobia, denial, Don's kinks coming out to play (face-slapping! so much face-slapping!), Roger's kinks coming out to play.
-Peggy Olsen/Dawn Chambers
These two are often framed in terms of their differences and the gulf between them but I'd really like to see them get to bond… in a gay way. Peggy calling Dawn up for workplace gossip and maybe more once she's left the agency, or Dawn calling Peggy up to bitch about how godawful a workplace it is for anybody who couldn't be mistaken at a distance for Pete Campbell. Or something where the events of "Mystery Date" take a different turn and they end up hooking up? Any kind of depressing comfort sex (this is Mad Men after all) whether springboarded off all the bad shit that's in the air in "Mystery Date", or just in general the turmoil of working at SC&P. (If it's set after the snafu with Shirley's flowers, please have Peggy have apologized for that or something, her actions in that episode are so agonizing.) Or an AU of the end of s7 where Dawn also get courted for Joan's startup and things get simultaneously more weird/less weird between her and Peggy?
Bonus porn prompts: dressing and undressing, office late-night quickies, tipsy sex, extricating each other from mountains of 60s undergaments, workshopping advertising pitches turning into an excuse for boning down.
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Miller's Crossing
- Mink Larouie/Eddie Dane
Okay, so Mink being Eddie Dane's boy seems to be fairly well-known, at least among insiders, but it's definitely a tread-lightly thing among people in the know. How did they end up involved with each other? Is this the first time Mink has strayed? What do they see in each other? I'd love to read about any past noir misadventures for these two or a regular night around town, or a take on canon where Mink doesn't get shot in the face out in the woods and the fallout from that. I'm comfortable with a fucked-up or a relatively functional take on this ship, or anything in between, just anything that fills in the gaps in their acquaintance. What if the Dane gets to Mink before Bernie does -- hustling him out of harm's way, maybe, but putting him back in the Dane's way for sure and confronting some unfortunate stuff about their relationship? (With or without reconciliation.)
Bonus porn prompts: fucked-up possessive sex, disarmingly tender sex in unlikely locations, anything capitalizing on size kink, Mink being an absolute terror in bed, losing one's cool between the sheets (or anywhere else), the mysterious yet undeniable sexual charisma of Steve Buscemi.
- Mink Larouie/Bernie Bernbaum
What happened there? Bernie seems to have a pretty good read on Mink's weaknesses but also the ways in which he's useful -- how'd they meet and get involved? How did things transpire between them? (And to what degree did they transpire in the first place -- one-time thing or ongoing connection or a series of trysts?) Bernie has his moments of charm but he's also big-time bad news; to what degree did both of them realize they were stirring up more trouble? What's a typical racket like for these guys? How do their respective vices interact? Mink's avarice getting the better of him, or sex-for-drugs gone south, or who knows, Mink actually thinking Bernie's an alright guy who's going places in life and has the right idea about how to turn a profit in this town?
Bonus porn prompts: Cigarette burns, trading sex for drugs, clandestine deliberately-paranoia-inducing sex, the thrill of infidelity, guilty intimacy, surprise bedroom visitations in the middle of the night.
- Tom Reagan/Bernie Bernbaum
My rarest of rare pairs! However this has to go, with reluctant collaboration or showing up in each other's homes unannounced or more taunting telephone calls, Bernie is my fave unlikely femme fatale ("dude fatale", French for "Fatal Dude") and I love him and Tom's interplay of double-meaning and talk with flat-out violence. Tom's a pretty sensible person, but even a sensible person can lose their way now and then -- what happens if he gets entangled in all this workplace love and murder drama even deeper? Or just a quick-and-dirty disastrous tryst in the course of their volleying mindfucks, showing up in each other's apartments at all hours and trying to needle one another.
Bonus porn prompts: contemptuous sex, Tom's miserable alcoholic flop streak versus Bernie's taste for mind games, wary intimacy after one or both of them has had the shit kicked out of them, sexual extortion that goes both ways.
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Mindhunter
- Debbie Mitford/Wendy Carr
These two women deserve to get laid and also get a goddamn break from Holden's hijinks! The solution to this is plainly that they should date, even if this means long-distance phone convos, road trips, or all different kinds of fucking around. Wendy seems to have just gotten out of a long-term relationship, or being on the brink of ending that relationship at least -- does getting with Debbie feel like infidelity, or is it a chance to let her freakiest ambitions come out to play now that her relationship isn't so bound by the confines of responsibility in her social circle? I'd love something where the difference in their ages and professional standings is highlighted, whether in a way they both enjoy or in a way that causes friction or a little of both. Debbie being Wendy's manic pixie dream girl? Wendy being Debbie's intimidating and aloof fuckbuddy? I'd love to see some academia kink -- from the mild (Wendy reading over Debbie's thesis/Debbie spitballing ideas for Wendy's next publication with her) to the wild (sexy thesis advisor roleplay!) Or anything with these two putting their heads together with their respective specialties -- I'd love some simmering UST as they bullshit about their disciplines together, or where they bond over their experiences as women who love weird shit. The two of them have ample opportunities to gripe about Holden, so I'd be totally open to a fic where that facilitates bad-idea rebound sex (or as Wendy might say, a what-the-fuck fuck) or the two of them having an affair while Debbie's relationship with Holden is cooling rapidly. (I'd prefer nothing where Holden's crush on Wendy turns into him actually trying to forge a relationship with her, though!)
Bonus porn prompts: bondage, Debbie sending Wendy dirty polaroids, drunk/high sex, sex in the bathroom of a fancy restaurant.
- Holden Ford/Edmund Kemper
This is such a fucked up pairing in so many ways but it's pretty hard to shake (thanks, Jonathan Groff!) and it dovetails with so many of the show's themes about power and control. Any variation or elaboration on the Vacaville hospital scene or any of their interviews is fine by me! There's lots of opportunities for what-might-have-been stuff or for vignettes elaborating on their already screwy dynamic there. Or post-s1, something where the two of them correspond after the hospital visit in Vacaville, or where Holden is at a loss to explain what exactly happened there. If you're open to not including Kemper directly, a fic where Holden's processing what happened with his coworkers/professional contacts would totally work for me too! (Or, I suppose, the Kemper version of that same aftermath -- are there consequences for him too?) Or an AU where Holden is Kemper's cellmate, not his FBI interviewer, or where they meet in a therapeutic setting in some other way -- any kind of power play between the two of them, or mutual/not-so-mutual brain-picking.
(I'd prefer no fics set during the time where Kemper is actually active as a serial killer, or where his real-life victims appear as characters.)
Bonus porn prompts: BREATHPLAY BREATHPLAY BREATHPLAY, facefucking, any kind of noncon/dubcon touching, Holden being weirdly sexually inquisitive but also terrible, erotic dreams, size differences, injured sex.
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Philip Marlowe - Raymond Chandler
- Philip Marlowe/Terry Lennox
These two have it all -- wartime trauma, healthy skepticism, secrets piled on secrets, symbolic booze. They're both men with their own cautious principles, but when they first meet Lennox is such a mess that Marlowe looks positively sober and respectable in comparison and as they both learn more about each other's qualities and little mysteries it just firms up that bond of uneasy tenderness -- even when Marlowe has abundant reason to think Lennox has already shuffled off this mortal coil. Casefic with a romantic angle that creeps in despite Marlowe's best efforts, a romantic interlude that has fuck-all to do with any case or any mystery at all, an alternate take where Terry Lennox really is murderously bad news despite being a very polite war hero and Marlowe loves him anyway, Lennox continuing to haunt Marlowe a little after the timeframe of canon or a fic where their last meeting goes differently -- something where they're reunited or correspond with each other after parting ways, or even just something to do with the experience of falling for someone as you try to put together exactly who the hell they are and what their racket is. (Hell, I would also take absolutely any hardboiled/noirish tropes you want to party up with this pairing, up to and including wholesale AUs.) If you've ever longed to go to town on a Marlowe pastiche, I would love and welcome that for these two, but I also totally understand why you might not want to go there.
Bonus porn prompts: drunk propositions leading to contrite, hung-over banging; eventual consummation after a lot of circuitous pussyfooting around; expectations of situational homosexuality held over from the war blossom into something more™.
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The Thing
- R.J. MacReady/Childs
GRUDGING TEAMWORK BECOMES SOMETHING MORE. (How many times can I use "becomes something more" in my letter? Science does not know.) Or anything set in the weird stir-crazy altered state of wintering over on the base. I'd love to read something where their totally justified mutual suspicion in light of the whole Thing thing gives way to slowly building appreciation for each other's finer qualities, or established-relationship fic where their low-key established relationship is damn near scuttled by the "who's infected" identity scare, or fic where their shared crazy competence and ridiculous physical attractiveness mean they already have a ~history~ before the film's events, whether you want to explore that or write canon-era/postcanon fic where it's the elephant in the room. The difficulties of a secret relationship on a tiny research base? Teeth-gritted romantic gestures in the middle of nowhere? Or fic set during a regular old stretch at the research base where no terrifying assimilation-minded alien randos crash the party. You can handwave the futility of their efforts to survive at the film's end/patch it up with a canon-divergent AU where the generator isn't destroyed etc, or write fic where they end up tragically assimilated, or write fic where they both know it's a lost cause but are going to try and hack it as long as possible anyway -- the one thing I'd prefer not to read is fic where they opt for onscreen suicide or decide onscreen to lie down and die. A blaze of glory or foregone-conclusion death is fine, though. (I'd also prefer no blatant rape metaphors in the body-horror aspect of what the alien does to other species, if that comes up, though human-on-human noncon/dubcon is fine. Or human-on-alien, hell.)
eta BONUS ROUND: 16th/17th century Jesuit AU. Early Modern plague-busting! Early Modern investigative science vs. body horror! Keith David in priest garb! You know you wanna.
Bonus porn prompts: grudging bedsharing leading to grudging boning, pragmatic banging all over the base,anything exploiting 1982 Kurt Russell's lavish head of hair for sexy yanking purposes.
