RMSE 2025 exchange letter

[skazka]

Likes:

- historical details, material culture, pop culture for the era the fic is set in, historical politics (feel free to pick and choose, embroider, and ignore historical reality as desired)
- allegiances and loyalty (especially loyalty kink!)
- dreams and nightmares (dream sex and dream symbolism are both a+)
- trauma and PTSD, memory and personal baggage, literal and metaphorical haunting
- reincarnating soul mates in the sense of "fated(/cursed) to meet in every lifetime"
- friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers-while-remaining-enemies
- pining both reciprocated and unreciprocated
- religion and religious identity
- hurt/comfort: post-whump h/c, battle aftermath, h/c where a powerful/prickly/difficult person is the recipient of the comfort whether they like it or not, h/c where a villain is doing the comforting (for mindfucky sinister reasons or otherwise), h/c where the 'hurt' is embarrassing or a chronic condition with no easy fix
- sex happening before feelings and then feelings show up to the party and make everything weird: characters in denial about their developing feelings, or reluctantly finding themselves feeling something real for one another
- bulletproof loyalty, whether or not it's deserved, and all kinds of loyalty kink
- pet sociopaths -- morally fucky characters doing heinous ruthless things for the one they love, with or without their permission
- infidelity -- guilt, rationalizations, the thrill of the forbidden
- open relationships/background relationships/characters having previous romantic and sexual connections
- all different kinds of historical/genre AUs. Film noir AUs, theater company AUs, 70s horror movie AUs, AUs setting canon in the 1980s corporate world or the English Regency -- any high-concept AU you want to write, I want to read.

Side pairings, background pairings, and unrequested characters (up to and including ensemble casts) are all welcome. The prompts I list below are definitely not comprehensive or hard-and-fast -- if nothing here inspires you or if you're inspired to mix and match or write a role-reversal of something I've laid out feel free. I’ve got plenty of smut prompts but I will hugely enjoy anything you write me on any level of explicitness, and I also love pairings that go completely unconsummated.

Smut Likes:

- size differences
- age differences
- sexually aggressive inexperienced characters
- body worship -- scars, hands, body hair, muscles
- blowjobs, handjobs, frottage, intercrural and non-penetrative sex
- clothed/semi-clothed sex, or where only one party is naked
- fancy clothes, uniforms, layers, dressing and undressing
- hatesex and fighting-turned-fucking, arguments, verbal abuse, insults, physical roughhousing and wrestling
- erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation
- breathplay, choking
- cuddlefucking, lazy sex, affectionate post-sex hangouts, pillow talk
- inhibitions and interpersonal baggage in the bedroom
- anonymous or pseudo-anonymous hookups
- sex that's both clumsy/painful and tender
- wound fingering, wound fucking, kinking on the pain and power involved in historical medicine
- rope bondage
- caning and flogging
- characters with physical imperfections (scars, bad joints, body parts that won't necessarily cooperate) or hang-ups about their bodies
- characters seeking sex for comfort (whether or not they find it)
- sadomasochism, pain, rough body play -- grabbing/shoving/yanking/hitting/punching/etc.
- smoking, sharing cigarettes, cigarette burns
- drug and alcohol use (positive/destructive/neutral — relaxation and altered states of consciousness during sex as well as substance abuse and dependency)
- time-period-specific sexual practices and meeting places
- head-shaving or hair-cutting, especially nonconsensual/dubiously consensual or degrading, clinical hair-cutting -- I don't know how to work this into any of my fandoms but if you'd like to write it I'd love to read it.
- noncon and dubcon -- especially fucked-up sexual bargaining, villains menacing protagonists, dark!protagonists menacing villains, antagonistic characters mutually attempting to dubcon one another, and anything where the focus is on emotional conflict and distress. I love noncon/dubcon as an expression of erotic obsession, as a character trying to manage complicated emotions by taking them out on somebody else, as a raw and violent assertion of power, or any/all of the above.

I'm not specifically requesting art this year, but if you feel a visual treat coming on in any style/format I would love to receive it.

DNWs:
Self-harm via cutting; disordered eating due to emotional distress; unrequested incest or child sexual abuse (references to past CSA are fine); high school or teacher/student AUs; pregnancy between requested characters; omegaverse/BDSMverse AUs; focus on coming-out or gender transition; noncon with trans victims; urban fantasy werewolf tropes like packs and alphas; scat; OTK spanking. I'd rather not read explicit sex with characters younger than 16.




3:10 to Yuma (2007)
Ben Wade/Charlie Prince

- How did Charlie end up in Ben’s gang to begin with? How long’s he been trailing after Wade with the most unsubtle stars in his eyes? What were their respective first impressions of one another? Ben seems like the consummate cool customer as far as leaders go, but Charlie always seems to be just this side of flying off the handle even when his boss isn’t in peril — how did he earn his place as Wade’s de facto lieutenant, and why does Ben tolerate him?

- Any kind of dealing with injury/illness/inclement conditions together, either as part of the bigger gang or caught out alone/separated and trying to reunite. Does Charlie go and get himself injured in the course of trying to do something valiant on Wade’s behalf? What about when it’s the boss who’s injured? I could see Ben Wade trying to stoically tough his way through an injury while Charlie freaks out and can’t keep a cool head, or conversely Wade struggling to keep his composure while Charlie suddenly uncovers a reservoir of competence he didn’t know he had because this time it’s his boss who needs rescuing.

- I’m really interested in the various ways age and experience are played with in this movie — adolescent William both starstruck with outlawry and queasily fascinated by the taking of human life, Ben Wade’s account of starting his gang off in Leadville as a motherless boy not much older — and I’d love any kind of AU where these two’s relative ages are adjusted, whether it’s teenage budding outlaw Wade falling in with an equally teenaged and tempestuous Prince or either one of them as grown men dealing with a teenaged version of the other. (Though a teenaged Charlie Prince with all the admiration for outlaw life and none of the experience sounds like a real powder keg.)

- Charlie seems to be almost as protective of Ben Wade’s glamorous criminal reputation as he is of the man himself, especially in the screenplay where he clearly expects others to respect what Wade’s name signifies (and the near-fetishization of his famous gun) — what does Wade himself make of that when they’re alone together? How aware is he of Charlie’s feelings about him?

- On the flipside, Charlie Prince is at rock bottom an arrogant, vicious, trigger-happy dickhead and I love it so much — feel free to whump him, rough him up, make him suffer, or have Wade firmly but painfully rein him in from his more reckless tendencies. Even the boss must get tired of him sometimes and as much as I love the loyalty kink/villain-henchman dynamic they’ve got going on I would love anything where a noncon/dubcon element muddies the waters even more. Wade steamrolling Charlie's emotions without meaning to, or Charlie forcing the matter?

Fandom-specific smut: Huddling for warmth/bedroll-sharing; loyalty kink; eye contact during sex; intercrural sex; service kink; gun kink, both in the usual sense of gunplay (sex at gunpoint, penetration with a gun, etc.) and in the sense of guns-as-objects-of-desire. (The Hand of God does look awfully pretty, and it’s not like Westerns don’t have a rich track record of homoerotic “btw the gun is my penis” imagery.)

*

Sweet Smell Of Success (1957)
J.J. Hunsecker/Sidney Falco

- What favor did Sidney do for J.J. that was too far, even for him? (I'd rather it weren't just Falco having sex with Hunsecker in exchange for tips; that can be part of it, but I'd rather the line being crossed be something more than that.) Some ethical violation on par with the kind of degrading things Sidney does and convinces others to do in canon would be especially interesting to me, but I’m really interested in the moral and ethical calculus of the show business world all of them live in.

- Something where J.J. takes Sidney under his wing, maybe in an AU where the gambit to separate Susie and Dallas succeeds uncommonly well or at some earlier point of divergence in their relationship; Sidney feels like a kept boy and hates it, even as he benefits from it. In general I love the contrast between their respective economic strata and ways of living, and the thought of Sidney getting what he nominally wants (success! Money! Material comforts!) and hating it is absolutely delicious to me.

- Does Hunsecker have a background in show business, if he's nominally writing about the arts? Does Falco ever needle him about it? (Side note: Hunsecker’s RL inspiration, Walter Winchell, came up as a teenager through vaudeville and lived long enough to encounter fellow ex-vaudevillian and fuckup Bob Fosse. Fosse, who was closer to J.J.’s chronological cohort, apparently hated the guy and at the time of his own death was working on a biopic of him. Make of that what you will.)

- Falco survives the film's ending and the two of them end up in a deeply bitter relationship full of dependence and jealousy. I would love any kind of post-canon waning-days-of-Hollywood-gossip retrospective (if you want to go truly wild, some kind of epistolary treatment of their relationship in the style of You Must Remember This or Scandals Of Classic Hollywood or hell, Hollywood Babylon) or just a scene from the aftermath of that finale.

- What does Falco make of Hunsecker's attachment to his sister? Is he ever bold enough to float the word "incest"? (Consider J.J./Susie's weird vibes firmly requested in this case.)

Bonus smut prompts: J.J. making Falco crawl to him, metaphorically or literally; anonymous and faux-anonymous meetings; closetedness; tearooms and cottaging; face-slapping; rough body play; verbal humiliation; sexual humiliation.

*

FX’s Legion
Amahl Farouk/David Haller

- Post-s3-finale, the new freshly-minted parasite-free version of David really does show back up as an adult looking to connect with Farouk. Farouk still harbors whatever memories of the parasite era his alternate!self transmitted and is… conflicted about this encounter, horny-style. Or any other flavor of AU where they get a do-over of sorts and things between them are fucked-up in a different kind of way.

- Time loops, time travel, alternate universes… I loved the whole episode dedicated to other lives David might have led and other fates he might have encountered, and I’m a slut for “character from X alternate universe meets the version of their beloved from Y alternate universe” scenarios (say, the version of Farouk who’s used to working with evil corporate visionary David having to deal with vindictive cult leader David) and characters dealing with the emotional baggage of hopping universes.

- These two really lend themselves to gnarly consent issues and I want to read about all of that. Rape by deception in a fake alternate reality, bad-guy-wins scenarios where one or the other of them has the villainous upper hand and keeps the other around for unwholesome reasons. For anything with David as the aggressor I’m especially interested with the intersection of his own capability for physical violence, especially as an expression of frustration. How aware is or isn’t he of Farouk’s attraction to him? Is that a source of humiliation and anger, violation, a guilty kind of pleasure, all of the above? On the flipside, I love Farouk’s penchant for throwing into doubt how complicit someone really was and whether they enjoyed what he made them do, and I feel like that has hot and/or grim potential here.

- These two go way back, but David hasn’t had much time to spend with Farouk once all the masks and dead-person impersonation come off. Any kind of circumstances where David gets to know his parasite better (his shock at just how old Clark suggests Farouk might be is so interesting to me!) and how either of them feels about that? Something where Farouk is the one who has David orb-captive for that intervening year and decides to spend that quality time breaking down his resistance? Conversely, something where Farouk’s the captive while David has the upper hand and either hasn’t killed him for handwavey Reasons or maybe physically can’t kill him? Mutual scheming, mutual manipulation!

- I think it’s very interesting that despite Farouk’s seeming desire for companionship and his intimate knowledge of David’s psyche from riding along inside it for ~30-odd years, Farouk seems reluctant to be known in return, certainly not in any way that would necessitate treating the other person like an equal. What happens if David breaks through those defenses, whether by charm or force? What’s inside that glamorous but nasty carapace?

Fandom-specific DNW note: I’d rather not receive fic where Farouk’s physical attraction to David explicitly predates his mid-teens. Re. the incest DNW I’m happy to receive fic where Farouk’s ostensible paternal/nurturing feelings toward David are real and coexist alongside romantic/sexual/sadistic ones and I love various flavors of twisted daddy kink with these two, but I’d prefer no AUs where Farouk is David’s literal family member in the mundane sense.

Fandom-specific smut likes: Exploiting the flexibility of the astral plane for filthy sex reasons; dream sex; inventing imaginary locations purely to fuck in or despoiling remembered ones like the facilities at Clockworks or Philly’s apartment; emotional sadism and emotional edgeplay where intense volatile feelings are part of sex; forced arousal and orgasm; psychic/mental contact that either or both parties experiences as sexual; baggage around penetration and being penetrated; hostile dirty talk, humiliating praise, arguing while fucking.