Trick Or Treat 2025 Exchange Letter

[skazka]

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
- trauma baggage (both sexual and non-sexual trauma) 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/gear to go with their new settings.
- 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.

DNW: Self-harm via cutting or scratching; eating disorders; focus on dysphoria or outing; unrequested child sexual abuse; unrequested incest pairings; transmasculine characters bottoming for PIV sex; on-the-page sexual assault of trans characters; pregnancy as a plot focus; belly kink/stuffing/vore; omegaverse/BDSMverse/other role-based worldbuilding AUs; race kink/raceplay. For this exchange, I don't want to receive explicit fic/art involving characters under 16.



FX Legion
- Amahl Farouk/David Haller

- David haunting Farouk, intimately, or vice-versa. My grimmest canon-divergence AU desire is something where instead of busting out of Federal Mutant Superjail at the end of s2, David impulsively and maybe-not-even-intentionally kills himself (listen… it’s dark) and then David’s consciousness (or... consciousnesses) get stuck hanging around for Farouk the way Lenny’s seemingly was for David back in s1. Or where David successfully mercs Farouk while he’s re-embodied in the desert only to end up with a little psychic shrapnel with an attitude problem.

- post-s3-finale fic set in the timeline version where David’s raised by Charles Xavier and he’s never had to deal with Farouk as a psychic parasite but he’s nevertheless plenty fucked up. Getting in over his head with that timeline’s version of Farouk, who’s been warned of the dangers of messing with this kid but can’t resist, or doing the pursuing and proving himself to be pretty monstrous in his own right.

- Really mindfucky noncon/dubcon — I love that it’s impossible to tell how sincere Farouk ever is about anything until the very end, and even if he’s grown attached to David that hasn’t stopped him from putting him through hell, so either and/or both of these guys doing monstrous things for love (or at least desire) is my favorite thing. I’d also be interested in seeing what kind of preamble would be necessary for David to reciprocate or at least tolerate Farouk’s attraction — what would need to change, or what kind of deception would need to take place?

- I love the horror/intimacy/horrifying intimacy/intimate horror of engaging with someone who’s known you while you haven’t had the same privilege — or conversely, Farouk catching actual feelings for someone (the guy he’s seen as a clueless pawn at best and a human prison the rest of the time!) and freaking the fuck out about it. Do with that what you will.

- Art or fic exploring the wide world of symbolism and imagery that characterizes these two’s interactions. We’ve got spiders, we’ve got homoerotic Greco-Roman wrestling, we’ve got David in shorts and tall socks, lots of Halloweeny and/or horny potential playing around in the flexible realities of the astral plane and the trippy aesthetics of canon.

Additional and background ships are entirely welcome here; I especially love Syd/David, Syd/Farouk, Farouk/Oliver, and whatever the fuck both David and Farouk have going on with respect to Lenny.

*

Marvel 616 (New Mutants)

- Stevie Hunter & the New Mutants
- Magneto & the New Mutants

- Characters’ dreams and nightmares start escaping their sleeping minds and spilling over into reality… I’m damn near sure this already occurs in canon at least once, and if not, it really should. I love the blurry lines of telepathy, possession, trauma, and teenagers just having messy overwhelming emotions to begin with — play around in that if you wanna.

- Ghosts, vampires, haunted artifacts! Mirrors, doubles, evil doppelgängers, alternate universe selves… both the canonical ones and whole new ones just because.

- Full-scale AU where mutants still exist but in a more horror focused milieu — thinking of stuff like Lois Duncan’s Down A Dark Hall (boarding school with dark secrets?) or a 1970s proto-slasher with Stevie as the final girl.

- Mansion's haunted! I would especially love this if what’s haunting it is related to Charles Xavier’s own traumatic gothic V.C. Andrews-ass childhood but there’s a whole lot of trauma and dead characters to go around. (As well as baggage specific to the X-Men/mutant identity/storylines not contained to the New Mutants runs.) Feel free to play fast and loose with existing retcons and character deaths.

- Not all the New Mutants hail from areas that observe Halloween (or that observe it in the way they might in Westchester, NY) but I’m a huge sucker for fanworks set against that kind of autumnal backdrop and nebulously spooky mood. This can be as mild (the kids hanging out watching regional TV specials and burning the popcorn) or as silly (costumes dress-up) or as intense (full-on, five-alarm comic book shit crashing the party on October 31) as you feel like.

If you don’t have any specific faves you want to write about, I especially enjoy Xuân Cao Mạnh, Dani, Roberto, Illyana, and Warlock. If you want to throw any recurring baddies in the mix I love Selene, the Shadow King, Mojo, and Emma Frost anywhere she might fall on the villainous-to-antiheroic spectrum. Any ships or no ships are fine here but if you’re looking for a specific starting place I love femslash pairings with Dani and sad fucked-up Illyana/Magneto. Background ships, canonical entanglements, and shippy readings of canon dynamics like Charles Xavier/Magneto) are welcome.

Fandom-specific DNW: live-action movie canon

Wrt my <16 underage DNW, given the shaky nature of comic book time I’m fine with age-ups, time travel, or just not explicitly stating somebody's definitely under sixteen during a certain fic. General teenage sexuality (hooking up, jerking off, etc.) and references to canonical sexual assaults of younger characters are totally fine.

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The Black Phone

(note: all these prompts were written before TBP 2 premiered; if there’s anything in here or in your fanwork that the second film contradicts, you have zero obligation to make it mesh with sequel canon. I’ll definitely be seeing the film before ToT fics drop, though, so if there’s anything you want to incorporate, no worries about spoilers.)

- Al Shaw (a.k.a. the Grabber)

- 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.

Ship-wise, I love background Finney/Robin and I’m down for pairing him or Gwen with any crossover characters or OMCs/OFCs in a postcanon context. I’m also down for Grabber/Max between them as adults and anything exploring the Grabber’s relationship (such as it is) with his child prisoners.

Fandom-specific DNW notes: dealing with the canon child abuse themes here is OK and welcome, including sexual abuse with the Grabber as perpetrator/past victim, but I’m not interested in straight-up smutfic centering on those encounters or in any other explicit sex involving the canon's kids.

*

The Stand - Stephen King


Treats
- I read the epilogue in the Complete & Uncut Edition as, in Dark Tower terms, another turn of the wheel — Flagg being picked up and dumped in another iteration of his same essential journey but in a fundamentally different place and time. Where else might he get to?
- Missing scenes from Flagg’s nebulous backstory/backstories — do any of the assorted misfits, murderers, and radicals he influences catch on to the nature of his interference? What is it like to be in an organization Flagg is in the process of taking over, whether that’s a political cell taking a turn for the worse or something more informal?
- Literally any art of Flagg would thrill me but I’d especially love different 20th century iterations of Flagg slightly tweaked for differences of era. What might Flagg look like in a postwar middle-American scenario, or drifting through 1960s Haight-Ashbury?
- Flagg wandering through another Stephen King property of your choice — feel free to incorporate Dark Tower characterizations or any other iteration of the character King has interpolated. My favorite King properties include Salem’s Lot, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Carrie, The Shining, Christine, It (and its various adaptations), and the 11/22/63 TV series, but feel free to drop him down anywhere.
- Art or fic with a female version of Flagg! I’d love it if fem!Flagg’s attire and general sense of style is still just about the same as the busted-cowboy-boots, faded-denim, pockets-full-of-hate-literature presence regular dude Flagg has in canon. The 1970s vibes of the novel's initial release or the 1990s re-release could be fun to play with here.

Tricks
- Flagg sexually menacing the King hero/heroine of your choice. I love the juxtaposition between his supernatural, demon-lover qualities and the crass nastiness of him, cruel sense of humor and all.
- Fic/art set in Vegas with Flagg obtaining Larry as an amusement for Nadine while maintaining her technical virginity for himself. Can be as fraught, sexual, trauma-bonding-filled, mutually recriminatory, or gothic as desired.
- Art illustrating Flagg’s gradual ascension over Nadine, either symbolizing his insidious influence in her life as he seemingly calls her to him or representing their ultimate meeting. I love everything about Nadine and especially her pre-Captain Trips backstory, so feel free to have the focus be on her as much as Flagg.
- What would a Flagg-wins scenario for the novel look like? Besides, obviously… very very bad for everyone else.
- Art/fic incorporating the Complete & Uncut Edition with Flagg finally meeting the Kid either in Las Vegas or in some other circumstance while the two of them are drifters pre-canon — how far could the Kid have gotten in his mutiny plans? What kind of inventive cruelty could they wreak on one another?