Trick Or Treat Exchange 2023 Letter
Sep. 14th, 2023 02:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skazkaHail and well met, Trick or Treat gang! It's the season for apple cider spices, falling leaves, and me tl;dr-ing about my canons.
Treat likes:
- domesticity scenes and material culture, even in less-than-domestic situations!
- mutual caretaking and h/c
- characters learning new skills or new things (about each other, their environment, their powers, etc.)
- monsters! werewolves, vampires, ghosts, revenants, mummies, etc.
- road trips
- trans characters in stories that aren’t centered on transphobia/outing/inner turmoil (even if they don’t “need” to be trans for the story to work, I love it, and maybe especially then)
- loyalty and tenderness
- character studies and introspection, role reversals
- queer identity and self-discovery, trauma recovery, disability, sex work AUs
- funny jubilant failsex, missing scenes, comedy
- PWPs, post-intimacy pillow talk, any kind of relationship vignette
- enemies-to-lovers or rivals-to-lovers, emotional repression, crusty characters warming up, cold-hearted baddies with one exception for the person they’re soft on
Trick likes:
- "came back wrong" -- undead revenants, hauntings, or just straight-up coming back from the dead or a near-miss with death leaving the person or people significantly altered
- cannibalism! grody vampires who take more than blood, subsistence cannibalism, weird gestures of affection, cannibalism as an act of reverence, cannibalism as an act of contempt
- serial killers, drifters, malcontents
- lonely road trips, cursed Americana
- ghosts, poltergeists, gothic horror, revenge from beyond the grave
- major character death
- wound fingering, injuries and bruises, scars
- dubcon and noncon, failsex, unpleasant/painful sex, power plays, power imbalances, hatefucking, more grim sex work AUs
- nightmares and dreams (with or without supernatural dream invasion)
- necromancy, misuse of magic, bad vibes
- enemy ships between enemies who stay enemies or at least mistrustful for the duration of their conjunction; pet sociopaths; characters doing terrible things for their love objects
- dysfunctional relationships, obsessive unbalanced love, emotional and sexual repression
Feel free to mix and match between these two categories and to take all prompts given as suggestions to get the gears turning. I’m also thrilled with crossovers between any of these fandoms.
Smut likes:
- size differences (both size/weight/physique-related and in the great big dick department)
- partially-clothed or mostly-clothed sex
- oral sex, handjobs, frottage, intercrural
- body worship, scar worship, breast worship, hair kink (including body hair)
- characters who kink on violence (gunplay, face-slapping, rough body play, beating the hell out of each other or getting beaten up, etc.)
- impotence/erectile dysfunction
- casual fuckbuddies, sex for comfort, friends with benefits
- funny goofy fail!sex, dramatic dysfunctional fail!sex; painful sex
- historical sexual practices and meeting places, cruising, queer subcultures
- fancy clothes and dressing/undressing
- angsty whumpy noncon/dubcon; conflicted manipulative dubcon; dysfunctional dynamics
- class issues in the bedroom
- younger characters as sexual initiators/sexual aggressors
- infidelity
- pining while fucking
I'm not confident in my ability to do art-specific prompts yet but if you're hankering to treat here's some stuff I dig!
Art likes:
- B&W and grayscale art, soft/muted colors.
- Visual pastiches of other art styles -- Edward Gorey, Aubrey Beardsley, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Goya, midcentury magazine illustrations, etc.
- Historical/setting AUs where the characters get to show off new clothes/settings/gear.
- Outfit changes and redesigns.
- Hairy chests, legs, and pits. Men's legs (especially thighs!) and butts. Long hair!
- Historical clothing and uniforms.
- Tarot motifs.
- Skulls! Skulls, skulls, skulls.
- Macabre/Halloweeny imagery. Your absolute bonkers-est symbolism.
- For ship art, clothed sex, size differences, and smaller characters taking a more dominant role (whether that's topping or in any other sense).
- Blood and injuries; characters beaten up or scarred.
- Portraits/bust-style art.
A lot of these canons deal in some way with gnarly subject matter and I'm fine with any level of darkness or non-darkness with those canon elements, as well as the presence or absence of Halloween themes. I like unhappy endings, fix-it fics, and anything in between. If you're interested in an even wordier take on the tropes/kinks I love, many of my previous exchange letters are here on DW. Feel free to incorporate ships into any of the prompts below if the given possibilities strike you.
DNWs: Self-harm via cutting or scratching; eating disorders; unrequested child sexual abuse; unrequested incest pairings; PIV sex with transmasculine characters bottoming; on-the-page sexual assault of trans characters; pregnancy as a plot point; omegaverse/BDSMverse/other role-based worldbuilding AUs; focus on formalized aspects of BDSM negotiations/safewords/etc. For this exchange, I don't want to receive explicit fic/art involving characters under 16, with fandom-specific exceptions noted.
The Black Phone
The Grabber
Treat/Trick
- Scenes from upstairs when Max comes into town — how does he act when he’s dealing with his brother? What’s their sibling dynamic like? On one level, the Grabber is the settled professional one and Max is the flaky younger sibling in need of protection, stuck couchsurfing with a bad drug habit, but he’s also the non-serial-killer of the family so he’s got that advantage. The two of them seem like they came from a fairly dysfunctional home growing up — what kind of trauma do they share and how far do they go to avoid talking about it? (If sibling incest is your bag, I also ship the two of them as adults.)
- Alternate universe (or canon divergence, way back) where plain old Al Shaw hasn’t murdered or abused any children whatsoever but he’s still getting prank calls on the black phone from the dimension where he did. Or anything really where this dude is just a weird failed magician who loves wearing rings and buying steaks but is just out there decompensating and losing control of his life in other less violent ways.
- How the fuck did this guy get into magic? When the fuck did this guy get into magic? The mask itself is creepy as hell and evokes a bygone era of dubiously-consensual scares — how did he find it, or did it find him? If you do fanart, I’d love any art centering the mask or centering this guy’s bonkers costume changes.
- The Grabber as a vampire… or wannabe vampire, as in Martin or The Transfiguration. I love all flavors of vampire media but I’d be especially into gross, predatory, self-loathing flavors here.
- Anything exploring his relationship to Finney, or the relationship he thinks he has with Finney — to me the Grabber’s demeanor behind the mask suggests a queasy tension between whatever self-deluding part of him genuinely wants the children’s attention and company, that wants them to like him and maybe even like what he does to them, and the overtly sadistic side that’s chasing the high of terrorizing and destroying someone vulnerable, and that’s hugely grimly interesting to me. Does some part of him want Finney to stick around? (If you want to write something genuinely pitch-black, does he ever consider making Finney into an accomplice, or bait for future victims?)
- Bonus extremely nonserious prompt: “aged-up Finney” this, “aged-up Robin” that, won’t somebody have the guts to de-age the Grabber? The new kid in town has arrived straight out of the 1940s via some freak event and somebody has to figure out how to keep him from growing right up into a serial killer again. Art-wise, consider this carte blanche for any kind of snapshots from the Grabber’s past.
Fandom-specific DNW notes: dealing with the canon child abuse themes here is OK and in the clear, including sexual abuse with the Grabber as perpetrator or past victim, but I’m not interested in straight-up smut for this fandom or in other explicit sex involving characters under 16.
Ship-wise, I love Finney/Robin and I’m down for pairing him or Gwen with any crossover characters or OMCs/OFCs. I’m also down for Grabber/Max between them as adults and anything exploring the Grabber’s relationship (such as it is) with his prisoners.
*
Bottoms (2023 Film)
Josie
Trick
- This is one fandom where I’m not interested too much in serious darkfic but black comedy is great -- I love the bonkers heightened reality of this film so much and I would love any fun with horror tropes in this milieu. Slumber party gone wrong, all of the film’s horny f/f fight club hijinks playing out against the backdrop of a summer camp bedeviled by a masked killer, Halloween party where everyone starts turning into their costumes, etc. I love that Josie’s an anime-watching gay black nerd with zero rizz and I’d love to see her getting to do Final Girl/Chosen One stuff.
- Josie’s freaky clown lamp keeps reappearing without explanation at exactly the wrong moment to totally cockblock her… some things just won’t stay hidden.
- Time loop fic! What’s the way to break the cycle — saving dipshit Jeff’s life at the big game? Telling Isabel the truth about juvie? Standing up to PJ? All of the above? What happens when the sex comedy genre stuff starts getting a little warped around the edges?
- Josie and the lesbian sex fight club girls tangling with the paranormal — hunting ghosts, slaying vampires, transforming into werewolves? Fusions with and parodies of other horror franchises (Scream, BTVS, The Craft?) are all extremely welcome here and feel free to get meta.
- Horny lesbian vampires. Maybe Josie and PJ are a two-girl coven of newly minted horny bloodsuckers trying their best to drum up some new recruits or maybe they’re trying to scam their way into getting fingerblasted by cheerleading vampires, maybe Josie’s discovering an unsettling hunger in with all of the nosebleeds and split lips coming out of their feminist fight club and she’s trying to keep it under wraps incredibly awkwardly…
Ship-wise I ship Josie with Isabel, PJ, Hazel, all the other fight club members, and any OFCs in any combination. Smut-wise I am all about grinding, hickeys, breast play (the makeout scene with Josie and Isabel has her in such a cute bra), clothed sex, and clitoral stimulation.
*
NBC Hannibal
Will Graham
Trick
- Hannibal survives the fall; Will doesn’t, but his ghost sticks around, and his relationship to Hannibal is as thorny as ever. I loved the ways Will’s mental version of Abigail served as an interlocutor to confront him with his own worst self-blaming thoughts, independent from who Abigail actually was as a person or how she might have felt about what happened, and I’d love to see what kind of not-very-nice things a version of Will who’s a similar invention of Hannibal’s imagination (or is he?) might throw at him. Alternately, Will haunting the shit out of everybody -- Jack Crawford? Bedelia?
- Time loop gone very, very bad, with Will stuck reliving a period of time he’d rather not — I’d especially love something where each successive loop imparts an ugly kind of clarity, or where Will stuck in the loop gets increasingly decompensated and fucked-up.
- Came Back Wrong fic where Will returns from the dead after any of the various points in the show where he nearly bites it — all the rampaging encephalitis, getting shot by Chris in “Oeuf” or by Jack, getting disemboweled, getting mauled by a cave bear otherkin, getting his skull sawn open, getting his face stolen, the final cliffside battle — but he’s not… quite… right. (Some of my favorite flavors of this trope are where the person’s intelligence and personality remain the same but their body is supernaturally deteriorating, or they’ve got some less than seemly appetites, but feel free to take the trope wherever you like.)
- Werewolf AU… but the solitary, isolating, maddening, life-ruining kind, not the comparatively-sociable kind with packs and alphas. Will has great lonesome-wolfman energy but he does have a documented propensity for helping out strays, maybe somebody else ends up in the back of his little Volvo that way while in animal form. Or if you want to take the life-ruining in a different direction, something where the animal transformation is purely a delusion and the characters are stuck dealing with that. Or just take some dog/wolf symbolism on a walk.
- Casefic or a scene from a case that leans into the series’ horror elements — where the killer (or victims?) are supernatural, where Will or his colleagues are in danger, or where shit hits the fan in some other exciting way.
Ship-wise I ship Will Graham with everybody -- Hannibal, Alana, Beverly, Jack, Bedelia, Abigail, and damn near any of the other killers he crosses paths with; ditto with Hannibal. All canon relationships (including nebulous auntfucking/weird siblingfucking Mischa vibes) and additional/background/past pairings are fair game too. I love this show's whole ensemble so feel free to have any characters appear.
Smut-wise: I am dying for some Will Graham sweatpants dick (and I am mildly unhinged about Hannibal's chest hair) but in general this fandom pairs great with the whole spectrum from gentle and intimate to rough and outright-violent sex, emotionally conflicted dubcon and noncon, pining for one another while actively fucking one another, unexpectedly tender comfort sex, intimate touching on the neck and face, hair pulling, breathplay, intercrural sex, and sex that takes advantage of the show's wild sets and domestic interiors.
Fandom-specific DNWs: AUs where Will’s a serial killer of his own volition; conflict-free domestic Hannigram in any universe where either party murders people for fun. (In general, in any universe where Hannibal or any other character kills people on purpose I need there to be interpersonal friction about it rather than Will acquiescing.)
*
Stranger Things
Billy Hargrove
Trick
- Something where Billy escapes the Mind Flayer’s control but now he’s unlike his old self in a completely different way… in the Came Back Wrong kind of way.
- Billy’s ghost haunting Max, Eleven, Will, or anybody else! Regular classic ghost, some kind of residual impression, some shred of his consciousness that’s still hooked into the Mind Flayer-Vecna industrial complex… I’d especially love anything where he’s not happy about hanging around or where Vecna etc have effectively yanked him back from someplace he’d rather be.
- Non-supernatural darkfic dealing with Billy’s obsessive control over Max and the long shadow he has over her even once he’s dead — I’m down for the stepsibling incest/sexual obsession angle here as well but I’d prefer it not to have started when Max was younger than at the time of her first appearance in canon.
- Billy’s noncon Mind Flayer takeover reminded me at times of Michael’s transformation in The Lost Boys (a fine 1980s horror parallel!) and now I want grody vampire nightmare Billy. Or werewolf Billy, tbh.
- dirtybadwrong Billy/anyone — especially adult/older teen characters (Steve, Jonathan, Nancy, Robin, his housewife admiration society at the pool, Joyce, Murray…), supernatural characters (the Mind Flayer, Vecna, his Mind Flayer doppelganger) or getting nonconned by various Soviets.
I ship Billy with all teens/adults, both being tender and being terrible. I also love anything pairing him with Will, especially where internalized homophobia/closetedness comes into play or their mutual connections to the Upside-Down.
Eddie Munson
Trick
- I’m going to be honest, I loved this guy and I want to see him suffer. Emotionally, physically, sexually, psychically. Hurt-comfort scenarios (platonic ones with the whole gang, one-on-one comfort, romantic ones, some kind of giant comfort gangbang, etc.) are terrific too but I just love seeing this poor guy undergo agonies.
- Vampire Eddie! I’d love this in a dark, angsty, disconnected, came-back-wrong flavor or with a more comedic angle as he tries to navigate the “earthquake” aftermath and reconnect with his old friends.
- Eddie dealing with the clearly traumatic experience of seeing Chrissy’s death — something where supernatural forces exploit his guilt to fuck with his mind? Something where his memories of seeing it go down recur as nightmares or intrusive thoughts even as he spends time with his new allies? Feel free to go for h/c here too.
- Vecna tries to manipulate Eddie using the same kind of hyper-pessimistic, morbid rhetoric he expounds on to Eleven — either in a similar “we could rule together, haha psych, you’re my human meat puppet” kind of way or trying to use Eddie as his puppet for evildoing via suggestion and coercion. Eddie’s stuck doubting his own reality and terrified confessing “btw an extradimensional being is ordering me to kill kill kill, but trust me, it’s not Satan or psychosis or bad acid” will fuck up his life even more.
- Sad forlorn hustler Eddie, that is all. (Sad-but-mostly-pissed-off hustler Billy is also very welcome, or both of them as rivals haunting the same slim-pickings Indiana cruising spots.)
I ship Eddie with damn near everybody teenaged and up, in any combination including trios and moresomes — in addition to Chrissy, Jonathan, Steve, Nancy, and Billy, Eddie/Hopper is a rarepair of my heart — and I’m very multishippy with this whole fandom so go for it. Background pairings and outside POVs are just fine.
Smut-wise, for both of these characters (and any of their sexual partners) I love some grimy Midwestern boning -- handjobs, frottage, sex in out-of-the-way places, high sex, drunk sex, all different flavors of heavy petting.
Fandom-specific DNWs: Eddie-as-Kas-the-Betrayer; racist violence happening to any of the Sinclairs. For any ships involving the show's younger cohort of characters, I'd prefer nothing where they're explicitly younger than they are in s3.
Treat likes:
- domesticity scenes and material culture, even in less-than-domestic situations!
- mutual caretaking and h/c
- characters learning new skills or new things (about each other, their environment, their powers, etc.)
- monsters! werewolves, vampires, ghosts, revenants, mummies, etc.
- road trips
- trans characters in stories that aren’t centered on transphobia/outing/inner turmoil (even if they don’t “need” to be trans for the story to work, I love it, and maybe especially then)
- loyalty and tenderness
- character studies and introspection, role reversals
- queer identity and self-discovery, trauma recovery, disability, sex work AUs
- funny jubilant failsex, missing scenes, comedy
- PWPs, post-intimacy pillow talk, any kind of relationship vignette
- enemies-to-lovers or rivals-to-lovers, emotional repression, crusty characters warming up, cold-hearted baddies with one exception for the person they’re soft on
Trick likes:
- "came back wrong" -- undead revenants, hauntings, or just straight-up coming back from the dead or a near-miss with death leaving the person or people significantly altered
- cannibalism! grody vampires who take more than blood, subsistence cannibalism, weird gestures of affection, cannibalism as an act of reverence, cannibalism as an act of contempt
- serial killers, drifters, malcontents
- lonely road trips, cursed Americana
- ghosts, poltergeists, gothic horror, revenge from beyond the grave
- major character death
- wound fingering, injuries and bruises, scars
- dubcon and noncon, failsex, unpleasant/painful sex, power plays, power imbalances, hatefucking, more grim sex work AUs
- nightmares and dreams (with or without supernatural dream invasion)
- necromancy, misuse of magic, bad vibes
- enemy ships between enemies who stay enemies or at least mistrustful for the duration of their conjunction; pet sociopaths; characters doing terrible things for their love objects
- dysfunctional relationships, obsessive unbalanced love, emotional and sexual repression
Feel free to mix and match between these two categories and to take all prompts given as suggestions to get the gears turning. I’m also thrilled with crossovers between any of these fandoms.
Smut likes:
- size differences (both size/weight/physique-related and in the great big dick department)
- partially-clothed or mostly-clothed sex
- oral sex, handjobs, frottage, intercrural
- body worship, scar worship, breast worship, hair kink (including body hair)
- characters who kink on violence (gunplay, face-slapping, rough body play, beating the hell out of each other or getting beaten up, etc.)
- impotence/erectile dysfunction
- casual fuckbuddies, sex for comfort, friends with benefits
- funny goofy fail!sex, dramatic dysfunctional fail!sex; painful sex
- historical sexual practices and meeting places, cruising, queer subcultures
- fancy clothes and dressing/undressing
- angsty whumpy noncon/dubcon; conflicted manipulative dubcon; dysfunctional dynamics
- class issues in the bedroom
- younger characters as sexual initiators/sexual aggressors
- infidelity
- pining while fucking
I'm not confident in my ability to do art-specific prompts yet but if you're hankering to treat here's some stuff I dig!
Art likes:
- B&W and grayscale art, soft/muted colors.
- Visual pastiches of other art styles -- Edward Gorey, Aubrey Beardsley, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Goya, midcentury magazine illustrations, etc.
- Historical/setting AUs where the characters get to show off new clothes/settings/gear.
- Outfit changes and redesigns.
- Hairy chests, legs, and pits. Men's legs (especially thighs!) and butts. Long hair!
- Historical clothing and uniforms.
- Tarot motifs.
- Skulls! Skulls, skulls, skulls.
- Macabre/Halloweeny imagery. Your absolute bonkers-est symbolism.
- For ship art, clothed sex, size differences, and smaller characters taking a more dominant role (whether that's topping or in any other sense).
- Blood and injuries; characters beaten up or scarred.
- Portraits/bust-style art.
A lot of these canons deal in some way with gnarly subject matter and I'm fine with any level of darkness or non-darkness with those canon elements, as well as the presence or absence of Halloween themes. I like unhappy endings, fix-it fics, and anything in between. If you're interested in an even wordier take on the tropes/kinks I love, many of my previous exchange letters are here on DW. Feel free to incorporate ships into any of the prompts below if the given possibilities strike you.
DNWs: Self-harm via cutting or scratching; eating disorders; unrequested child sexual abuse; unrequested incest pairings; PIV sex with transmasculine characters bottoming; on-the-page sexual assault of trans characters; pregnancy as a plot point; omegaverse/BDSMverse/other role-based worldbuilding AUs; focus on formalized aspects of BDSM negotiations/safewords/etc. For this exchange, I don't want to receive explicit fic/art involving characters under 16, with fandom-specific exceptions noted.
The Black Phone
The Grabber
Treat/Trick
- Scenes from upstairs when Max comes into town — how does he act when he’s dealing with his brother? What’s their sibling dynamic like? On one level, the Grabber is the settled professional one and Max is the flaky younger sibling in need of protection, stuck couchsurfing with a bad drug habit, but he’s also the non-serial-killer of the family so he’s got that advantage. The two of them seem like they came from a fairly dysfunctional home growing up — what kind of trauma do they share and how far do they go to avoid talking about it? (If sibling incest is your bag, I also ship the two of them as adults.)
- Alternate universe (or canon divergence, way back) where plain old Al Shaw hasn’t murdered or abused any children whatsoever but he’s still getting prank calls on the black phone from the dimension where he did. Or anything really where this dude is just a weird failed magician who loves wearing rings and buying steaks but is just out there decompensating and losing control of his life in other less violent ways.
- How the fuck did this guy get into magic? When the fuck did this guy get into magic? The mask itself is creepy as hell and evokes a bygone era of dubiously-consensual scares — how did he find it, or did it find him? If you do fanart, I’d love any art centering the mask or centering this guy’s bonkers costume changes.
- The Grabber as a vampire… or wannabe vampire, as in Martin or The Transfiguration. I love all flavors of vampire media but I’d be especially into gross, predatory, self-loathing flavors here.
- Anything exploring his relationship to Finney, or the relationship he thinks he has with Finney — to me the Grabber’s demeanor behind the mask suggests a queasy tension between whatever self-deluding part of him genuinely wants the children’s attention and company, that wants them to like him and maybe even like what he does to them, and the overtly sadistic side that’s chasing the high of terrorizing and destroying someone vulnerable, and that’s hugely grimly interesting to me. Does some part of him want Finney to stick around? (If you want to write something genuinely pitch-black, does he ever consider making Finney into an accomplice, or bait for future victims?)
- Bonus extremely nonserious prompt: “aged-up Finney” this, “aged-up Robin” that, won’t somebody have the guts to de-age the Grabber? The new kid in town has arrived straight out of the 1940s via some freak event and somebody has to figure out how to keep him from growing right up into a serial killer again. Art-wise, consider this carte blanche for any kind of snapshots from the Grabber’s past.
Fandom-specific DNW notes: dealing with the canon child abuse themes here is OK and in the clear, including sexual abuse with the Grabber as perpetrator or past victim, but I’m not interested in straight-up smut for this fandom or in other explicit sex involving characters under 16.
Ship-wise, I love Finney/Robin and I’m down for pairing him or Gwen with any crossover characters or OMCs/OFCs. I’m also down for Grabber/Max between them as adults and anything exploring the Grabber’s relationship (such as it is) with his prisoners.
*
Bottoms (2023 Film)
Josie
Trick
- This is one fandom where I’m not interested too much in serious darkfic but black comedy is great -- I love the bonkers heightened reality of this film so much and I would love any fun with horror tropes in this milieu. Slumber party gone wrong, all of the film’s horny f/f fight club hijinks playing out against the backdrop of a summer camp bedeviled by a masked killer, Halloween party where everyone starts turning into their costumes, etc. I love that Josie’s an anime-watching gay black nerd with zero rizz and I’d love to see her getting to do Final Girl/Chosen One stuff.
- Josie’s freaky clown lamp keeps reappearing without explanation at exactly the wrong moment to totally cockblock her… some things just won’t stay hidden.
- Time loop fic! What’s the way to break the cycle — saving dipshit Jeff’s life at the big game? Telling Isabel the truth about juvie? Standing up to PJ? All of the above? What happens when the sex comedy genre stuff starts getting a little warped around the edges?
- Josie and the lesbian sex fight club girls tangling with the paranormal — hunting ghosts, slaying vampires, transforming into werewolves? Fusions with and parodies of other horror franchises (Scream, BTVS, The Craft?) are all extremely welcome here and feel free to get meta.
- Horny lesbian vampires. Maybe Josie and PJ are a two-girl coven of newly minted horny bloodsuckers trying their best to drum up some new recruits or maybe they’re trying to scam their way into getting fingerblasted by cheerleading vampires, maybe Josie’s discovering an unsettling hunger in with all of the nosebleeds and split lips coming out of their feminist fight club and she’s trying to keep it under wraps incredibly awkwardly…
Ship-wise I ship Josie with Isabel, PJ, Hazel, all the other fight club members, and any OFCs in any combination. Smut-wise I am all about grinding, hickeys, breast play (the makeout scene with Josie and Isabel has her in such a cute bra), clothed sex, and clitoral stimulation.
*
NBC Hannibal
Will Graham
Trick
- Hannibal survives the fall; Will doesn’t, but his ghost sticks around, and his relationship to Hannibal is as thorny as ever. I loved the ways Will’s mental version of Abigail served as an interlocutor to confront him with his own worst self-blaming thoughts, independent from who Abigail actually was as a person or how she might have felt about what happened, and I’d love to see what kind of not-very-nice things a version of Will who’s a similar invention of Hannibal’s imagination (or is he?) might throw at him. Alternately, Will haunting the shit out of everybody -- Jack Crawford? Bedelia?
- Time loop gone very, very bad, with Will stuck reliving a period of time he’d rather not — I’d especially love something where each successive loop imparts an ugly kind of clarity, or where Will stuck in the loop gets increasingly decompensated and fucked-up.
- Came Back Wrong fic where Will returns from the dead after any of the various points in the show where he nearly bites it — all the rampaging encephalitis, getting shot by Chris in “Oeuf” or by Jack, getting disemboweled, getting mauled by a cave bear otherkin, getting his skull sawn open, getting his face stolen, the final cliffside battle — but he’s not… quite… right. (Some of my favorite flavors of this trope are where the person’s intelligence and personality remain the same but their body is supernaturally deteriorating, or they’ve got some less than seemly appetites, but feel free to take the trope wherever you like.)
- Werewolf AU… but the solitary, isolating, maddening, life-ruining kind, not the comparatively-sociable kind with packs and alphas. Will has great lonesome-wolfman energy but he does have a documented propensity for helping out strays, maybe somebody else ends up in the back of his little Volvo that way while in animal form. Or if you want to take the life-ruining in a different direction, something where the animal transformation is purely a delusion and the characters are stuck dealing with that. Or just take some dog/wolf symbolism on a walk.
- Casefic or a scene from a case that leans into the series’ horror elements — where the killer (or victims?) are supernatural, where Will or his colleagues are in danger, or where shit hits the fan in some other exciting way.
Ship-wise I ship Will Graham with everybody -- Hannibal, Alana, Beverly, Jack, Bedelia, Abigail, and damn near any of the other killers he crosses paths with; ditto with Hannibal. All canon relationships (including nebulous auntfucking/weird siblingfucking Mischa vibes) and additional/background/past pairings are fair game too. I love this show's whole ensemble so feel free to have any characters appear.
Smut-wise: I am dying for some Will Graham sweatpants dick (and I am mildly unhinged about Hannibal's chest hair) but in general this fandom pairs great with the whole spectrum from gentle and intimate to rough and outright-violent sex, emotionally conflicted dubcon and noncon, pining for one another while actively fucking one another, unexpectedly tender comfort sex, intimate touching on the neck and face, hair pulling, breathplay, intercrural sex, and sex that takes advantage of the show's wild sets and domestic interiors.
Fandom-specific DNWs: AUs where Will’s a serial killer of his own volition; conflict-free domestic Hannigram in any universe where either party murders people for fun. (In general, in any universe where Hannibal or any other character kills people on purpose I need there to be interpersonal friction about it rather than Will acquiescing.)
*
Stranger Things
Billy Hargrove
Trick
- Something where Billy escapes the Mind Flayer’s control but now he’s unlike his old self in a completely different way… in the Came Back Wrong kind of way.
- Billy’s ghost haunting Max, Eleven, Will, or anybody else! Regular classic ghost, some kind of residual impression, some shred of his consciousness that’s still hooked into the Mind Flayer-Vecna industrial complex… I’d especially love anything where he’s not happy about hanging around or where Vecna etc have effectively yanked him back from someplace he’d rather be.
- Non-supernatural darkfic dealing with Billy’s obsessive control over Max and the long shadow he has over her even once he’s dead — I’m down for the stepsibling incest/sexual obsession angle here as well but I’d prefer it not to have started when Max was younger than at the time of her first appearance in canon.
- Billy’s noncon Mind Flayer takeover reminded me at times of Michael’s transformation in The Lost Boys (a fine 1980s horror parallel!) and now I want grody vampire nightmare Billy. Or werewolf Billy, tbh.
- dirtybadwrong Billy/anyone — especially adult/older teen characters (Steve, Jonathan, Nancy, Robin, his housewife admiration society at the pool, Joyce, Murray…), supernatural characters (the Mind Flayer, Vecna, his Mind Flayer doppelganger) or getting nonconned by various Soviets.
I ship Billy with all teens/adults, both being tender and being terrible. I also love anything pairing him with Will, especially where internalized homophobia/closetedness comes into play or their mutual connections to the Upside-Down.
Eddie Munson
Trick
- I’m going to be honest, I loved this guy and I want to see him suffer. Emotionally, physically, sexually, psychically. Hurt-comfort scenarios (platonic ones with the whole gang, one-on-one comfort, romantic ones, some kind of giant comfort gangbang, etc.) are terrific too but I just love seeing this poor guy undergo agonies.
- Vampire Eddie! I’d love this in a dark, angsty, disconnected, came-back-wrong flavor or with a more comedic angle as he tries to navigate the “earthquake” aftermath and reconnect with his old friends.
- Eddie dealing with the clearly traumatic experience of seeing Chrissy’s death — something where supernatural forces exploit his guilt to fuck with his mind? Something where his memories of seeing it go down recur as nightmares or intrusive thoughts even as he spends time with his new allies? Feel free to go for h/c here too.
- Vecna tries to manipulate Eddie using the same kind of hyper-pessimistic, morbid rhetoric he expounds on to Eleven — either in a similar “we could rule together, haha psych, you’re my human meat puppet” kind of way or trying to use Eddie as his puppet for evildoing via suggestion and coercion. Eddie’s stuck doubting his own reality and terrified confessing “btw an extradimensional being is ordering me to kill kill kill, but trust me, it’s not Satan or psychosis or bad acid” will fuck up his life even more.
- Sad forlorn hustler Eddie, that is all. (Sad-but-mostly-pissed-off hustler Billy is also very welcome, or both of them as rivals haunting the same slim-pickings Indiana cruising spots.)
I ship Eddie with damn near everybody teenaged and up, in any combination including trios and moresomes — in addition to Chrissy, Jonathan, Steve, Nancy, and Billy, Eddie/Hopper is a rarepair of my heart — and I’m very multishippy with this whole fandom so go for it. Background pairings and outside POVs are just fine.
Smut-wise, for both of these characters (and any of their sexual partners) I love some grimy Midwestern boning -- handjobs, frottage, sex in out-of-the-way places, high sex, drunk sex, all different flavors of heavy petting.
Fandom-specific DNWs: Eddie-as-Kas-the-Betrayer; racist violence happening to any of the Sinclairs. For any ships involving the show's younger cohort of characters, I'd prefer nothing where they're explicitly younger than they are in s3.
