Chocolate Box 2017
Jan. 1st, 2017 12:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skazkaHi there! I'm Skazka on ao3 (and most other places). I'm really excited for Chocolate Box this year and I'm sure I'll be happy to read whatever you write me. All my prompts this year are pretty geared toward fic, so that's what I've requested, but I'd be very happy to receive artwork as well if any of this sparks your creativity! (If for some reason these prompts aren't tl;dr enough for you, you can check out my Yuletide/Darkest Night/Rare Pair Fest letters, and God bless you.)
Some tropes I love:
- Undercover as dating -- especially for mutually pining characters or characters who are romantically involved, just not on the level of seriousness that necessitates planning a huge crazy wedding, getting caught for blackmail, going on a romantic cruise to solve a crime onboard, etc.
- Hiding out together in a remote cabin/lonely hotel room/etc.
- Torrid summer romances, or romances that are otherwise time/place-delimited (two characters working on the same Alaskan fishing boat for a season, shacking up while hiding out in the same small town, etc.) -- relationships springing up out of convenience and turning into more are great.
- 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.
- Monsters! Ghosts, werewolves, vampires, etc.
- Darkfic of any kind -- psychological fuckery, body horror, lives of crime, break-it fics... with or without a happy ending, though bittersweet fics with a note of hope are just fine.
- Fucked-up courtships -- mind games, fighting as foreplay, surveillance and obsessions from afar, villains in love with heroes and vice versa.
- Dramatic irony, shady pasts, loyalty kink, parental hangups, anonymous or ostensibly anonymous meetings and trysts, road trips (ROAD TRIPS!!!), partners in crime, hurt-comfort and whump, always-a-girl genderswap (especially when leading to f/f), characters sharing their mysterious pasts with each other or wanting to learn more about each other, fuckups in love, historical domesticity whether they're sharing a farmhouse or a tent or a rat-trap apartment or a shed. I'm a sucker for any kind of little moment between these characters, random snippets of uncommon/high-concepty AUs, and guarded displays of affection.
[ETA: An anon in the comments asked about my thoughts on crossovers -- I'm totally down for any crossovers/fusions, especially with other fandoms I've previously requested/written for.]
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, 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 antagonistic ships, noncon/dubcon.
I'm not too hot on: teacher/student pairings (whether AU or canon), high school setting AUs, characters overhearing one another masturbating, omegaverse, urban fantasy werewolf tropes, 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 straight-up breakup stories for this exchange.
DNWs: I would prefer not to read fic with self-harm, eating disorders, child sexual abuse, or unrequested incest. (Unless it's the Corleone siblings, you've got a blank check there. I'm also alright with offscreen sexual abuse and its resulting hangups in BvS fandom for Lex.) In general I'd rather not read explicit sex with characters under 16.
In general, however, I'm totally comfortable receiving fic that includes or touches on heavy topics -- infidelity, partner abuse, political corruption, torture, trauma, racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc. You don't have to strive to include them out of obligation but you're not required to avoid them either. I'm also fine with any rating -- from the chastest G-rated fic ever to your filthiest filth.
And now, prompts!
Batman v Superman - Dawn Of Justice
- Lex Luthor Jr./Bruce Wayne
(I appear to be the person this iteration of Lex was tailor-made for -- sketchily defined motivations, daddy issues, mile-a-minute lunatic dialogue, and ZERO INTERPERSONAL BOUNDARIES.) I'd love to read something set earlier in Lex's career of blatant evil, where maybe Bruce isn't as hardened in his cynicism and thinks, hey, maybe this weird upstart kid displaying blatant supervillain warning signs at all these benefits and shit might just need a positive influence in his life -- with mixed results. Anything where Bruce's understandable protective impulses interact badly with the way Lex is a walking psychological wound -- Bruce putting it together that Lex Sr. was a bad egg, at the same time as Lex Jr. is putting it together that Bruce is Batman, for instance. Or later: volleying villainous courtship, mindgames, ongoing "you know that I'm no good" action, five times Lex Jr. ascribed sinister motivations to Bruce Wayne's gestures of goodwill… anything.
Bonus porn prompts: dubcon/noncon with younger Lex as the aggressor, banging in stately old houses (or what's left of them) with a ton of personal baggage in every room, verbal sparring during sex, or Lex unexpectedly turning to jelly in the face of Bruce's hardcore Crossfit Bat-muscles.
Band of Brothers
- Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters
I love these two and everything about them -- together and apart, their messier moments and the contrast in their backgrounds and personalities. My tastes for shipfic are all over the map, dysfunctional or domestic, pining or emphatically requited, but setting-wise I'm mostly interested in fics set in the approximate territory of canon, or where the events of canon have taken place. (Fic where the two of them meet only after the war, or where the events of historical canon go differently, are just fine; fic where they're jewel thieves or high school students in a modern context isn't as much my speed with this fandom.) But anything within those vague boundaries would thrill me -- established relationship fic with weird guilt and furtive assignations, unconsummated longing, five times they looked out for one another and one time they were safe and at peace, pining both mutual and one-sided, fucked-up confusing emotions bubbling to the surface at inconvenient times, any tiny scene of post-war domesticity, desperate sex for solace they're both pretending is totally normal procedure…
Bonus porn prompts: furtively getting off under less than optimal circumstances, trysts and assignations during moments of peace that feel downright opulent, inventive moments of intimacy when they're both exhausted/wounded/filthy/cold, anything perving on Dick's great legs.
Breaking Bad
- Gus Fring/Jesse Pinkman
You can go full AU (so what if Jesse throws in his lot with Gus in s4 and they figure out some way to get Walt out of the picture? what if Gus got to Jesse first during the time he was in recovery?) or write a random slashy interlude with these guys during their time together or anything else that catches your fancy up to and including a complete timeline or universe-rearranging AU. (My one caveat is that I'd rather not read outright noncon between these guys.) What's Gus' idea of a restrained courtship like? What's Jesse's idea of an appropriate display of affection toward your very, very scary boss? Anything from fluffy to fucked-up is fine with me,
Bonus porn prompts: glad-to-be-alive sex, Jesse being divided between wanting physical comfort and being completely fucking terrified, Gus' preternatural calm not melting away in the bedroom, sad banging while thinking of other people, mostly- or entirely-clothed sex -- think of all Jesse's ridiculous layers!
- Gus Fring/Max Arciniega
The greatest love story never told! What the hell was up with them? From what little we see of Max he's a lot less restrained than Gus will later be -- was he the Jesse to Fring's Walt, or was it the other way around? (I've read a little fan speculation that he was using meth as well as producing it, which might be interesting to explore in contrast with Gus' straight-lacedness even back in '86.) Did Gus and Max leave Chile together or did one of them follow the other? Did they live together? Domesticity, fucked-up business scheming, long conversations about meth, political baggage, living a double life together: I'm interested in fic about any and all of it.
Bonus porn prompts: anything to do with the practical concerns of keeping your sex life pretty clandestine, anything where Max makes the first move, first-time sex, biting, casual companionable domestic banging.
E Street Band RPF
Note: given the tenor of 2016 and just my own sad feelings, I'd like to request no deathfic with this fandom, please -- I'm fine with fic about getting older, or dealing with Bruce's depression, but not fic dealing with death or grappling with anybody's mortality.
- Clarence Clemons/Bruce Springsteen
ANYTHING. ANYTHING AT ALL. SERIOUSLY. AAAH.
Right now I especially would love anything set during the 1978 Darkness On The Edge Of Town tour -- I've seen the Dec 8 1978 concert recording in Houston and they're both great in it, with a killer on-stage rapport
But anything set over the course of their friendship would make me happy -- Clarence put a lot on the line for his career in music, and in a lot of ways he could have had a more solid settled life than Bruce maybe could with his whole wayward-American-poet thing going on, but he was also capable of some excellent memorable hellraising in his own right. Band adventures and road trips, onstage and offstage shenanigans, Bruce being an extremely affectionate drunk, dramatic AUs of any kind (space pirates! wandering bards! film noir!), AUs where they met under different circumstances, fake interviews and snapshots from a timeline where they're romantically involved and how that affects the course of musical history, etc.
Bonus porny prompts: drunk sex, getting together after a show, using sex to combat loneliness, adrenaline highs, size differences, spoooooning.
- Bruce Springsteen/Patti Scialfa
I love these two and I love the look at their relationship that comes up in Bruce's memoir -- shippy moments on the road, a "what if they got together earlier?" historical-divergence AU, something exploring their early brush while Bruce was still trying to assemble a band…
From Bruce's memoir: We held auditions for singers for the Bruce Springsteen Band, my new calling card, at the factory. Brave young women answered our ad in the Asbury Park Press, driving up into the dark industrial wilderness toward what must have looked like a rapist’s paradise just to test their talents. We had Vegas-style songbirds; opera singers; horrible, hilarious pre-karaoke wannabes who tested our good manners and self-control. I even spoke on the phone to a high school–age Patti Scialfa, dispensing the fatherly advice that this was a traveling gig and it’d be best for a young lady to stay in school. It doesn't have to be anything romantic at that exact point in time, given the whole "high school-age" part of the above, but if you wanted to write a canon-divergence AU where Patti shows up anyway as a musical force to be reckoned with, I would love it.
Other things: Patti wearing Bruce's clothes! Bruce wearing Patti's clothes? Canon cunnilingus! AU where it's Patti running the show and Bruce who comes along later wanting to join her super sweet band? Film noir/Terrence Malick/criminals-on-the-run AU? Or just nice domestic anything, the joys and stresses of parenting, anything incorporating Bruce's love of film noir and big desolate rambling narratives.
Bonus porn prompts: married!sex, flings while on the road, anything homaging Springsteen's hilariously thinly-veiled affection for cunnilingus.
HBO's Oz
- Miguel Alvarez/Ray Mukada
These guys are in a tough spot even by the standards of my usual ships -- I'd love anything with them, from mostly-gen interactions flavored by the tension between them or missing scenes (during the riot? visits in solitary?) to full-fledged romantic drama with all the conflicts of interest and desperate affection that entails. (Canon provides a pretty good framework for how and where relationships between inmates can play out -- how can these guys figure it out, and what are the consequences?) If you I'd be very open to a look at what their relationship might look like outside of penitentiary walls, or in a canon-divergent AU where their paths cross under other circumstances. (The part of me that's always stoked to see Kirk Acevedo in Band of Brothers says: military chaplain AU?)
(I don't have a ton of distinct smutty desires for these guys but I'd be happy to read it, and in general I am always always open to FUCKED-UP PINING, courtly love in a less than courtly environment, and fucked-up doomed bad idea sex.)
- Tobias Beecher/Kareem Said
These guys are my other religiously fraught Oz OTP and I was so happy to see them in the tagset -- that's a starting place I'd love to read about if you're comfortable taking it on, the place Beecher has in Said's long line of complicated relationships with lawyers and white people or the way Beecher's genuine desire for religious fulfillment and spiritual solace gets tangled up in his relationship with and attraction to men. Or if you'd rather not, I'm down for any kind of missing-scenes fic drawing from their canon fraught interactions. Said has some good reasons to be wary of Beecher, but he also has his own ample amount of hangups drawn from his own lifetime -- I'd love to read the kind of encounter neither of them is ready to talk about later, or see a little of them trying to make it work semi-functionally behind bars.
Bonus porn prompts: ditto re. fucked-up pining and bad idea sex, Beecher's fucked-up bad boundaries, mutually guarded displays of affection, trying to find some way to get it on that doesn't evoke tons and tons of Schillinger and Keller baggage.
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.
Crossover ships
- Rust Cohle/Jesse Pinkman
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/Brandon/Phillip
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/Ed Exley
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/Sonny Wortzik
- Travis Bickle/Steve Burns
- Steve Burns/Father Damien Karras
All three of 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… Both Burns and Karras are feeling more than a little alienated from their ostensible callings, while Bickle appears to be alienated from absolutely everything -- I'd love a ships-that-pass-in-the-night take on any of 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.
Karras is nominally a pillar of the daylit world, as a priest, and more than a little uncomfortable with the harsher elements that his vocation puts him in contact with -- Steve Burns is theoretically in service of the city as a police officer but he's increasingly absorbed in his undercover identity and disillusioned with law enforcement's treatment of marginalized people. (Also… maaaybe a serial killer? Maybe?) Anything with shadowy streets, and guilt out the wazoo, and mingled attraction/dread/repulsion, and intimacy with near-strangers.
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, vows of celibacy having their limits, witnessing or participating in physical violence as a prelude to getting it on.
- Llewyn Davis/Larry Gopnik
...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
Some tropes I love:
- Undercover as dating -- especially for mutually pining characters or characters who are romantically involved, just not on the level of seriousness that necessitates planning a huge crazy wedding, getting caught for blackmail, going on a romantic cruise to solve a crime onboard, etc.
- Hiding out together in a remote cabin/lonely hotel room/etc.
- Torrid summer romances, or romances that are otherwise time/place-delimited (two characters working on the same Alaskan fishing boat for a season, shacking up while hiding out in the same small town, etc.) -- relationships springing up out of convenience and turning into more are great.
- 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.
- Monsters! Ghosts, werewolves, vampires, etc.
- Darkfic of any kind -- psychological fuckery, body horror, lives of crime, break-it fics... with or without a happy ending, though bittersweet fics with a note of hope are just fine.
- Fucked-up courtships -- mind games, fighting as foreplay, surveillance and obsessions from afar, villains in love with heroes and vice versa.
- Dramatic irony, shady pasts, loyalty kink, parental hangups, anonymous or ostensibly anonymous meetings and trysts, road trips (ROAD TRIPS!!!), partners in crime, hurt-comfort and whump, always-a-girl genderswap (especially when leading to f/f), characters sharing their mysterious pasts with each other or wanting to learn more about each other, fuckups in love, historical domesticity whether they're sharing a farmhouse or a tent or a rat-trap apartment or a shed. I'm a sucker for any kind of little moment between these characters, random snippets of uncommon/high-concepty AUs, and guarded displays of affection.
[ETA: An anon in the comments asked about my thoughts on crossovers -- I'm totally down for any crossovers/fusions, especially with other fandoms I've previously requested/written for.]
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, 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 antagonistic ships, noncon/dubcon.
I'm not too hot on: teacher/student pairings (whether AU or canon), high school setting AUs, characters overhearing one another masturbating, omegaverse, urban fantasy werewolf tropes, 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 straight-up breakup stories for this exchange.
DNWs: I would prefer not to read fic with self-harm, eating disorders, child sexual abuse, or unrequested incest. (Unless it's the Corleone siblings, you've got a blank check there. I'm also alright with offscreen sexual abuse and its resulting hangups in BvS fandom for Lex.) In general I'd rather not read explicit sex with characters under 16.
In general, however, I'm totally comfortable receiving fic that includes or touches on heavy topics -- infidelity, partner abuse, political corruption, torture, trauma, racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc. You don't have to strive to include them out of obligation but you're not required to avoid them either. I'm also fine with any rating -- from the chastest G-rated fic ever to your filthiest filth.
And now, prompts!
Batman v Superman - Dawn Of Justice
- Lex Luthor Jr./Bruce Wayne
(I appear to be the person this iteration of Lex was tailor-made for -- sketchily defined motivations, daddy issues, mile-a-minute lunatic dialogue, and ZERO INTERPERSONAL BOUNDARIES.) I'd love to read something set earlier in Lex's career of blatant evil, where maybe Bruce isn't as hardened in his cynicism and thinks, hey, maybe this weird upstart kid displaying blatant supervillain warning signs at all these benefits and shit might just need a positive influence in his life -- with mixed results. Anything where Bruce's understandable protective impulses interact badly with the way Lex is a walking psychological wound -- Bruce putting it together that Lex Sr. was a bad egg, at the same time as Lex Jr. is putting it together that Bruce is Batman, for instance. Or later: volleying villainous courtship, mindgames, ongoing "you know that I'm no good" action, five times Lex Jr. ascribed sinister motivations to Bruce Wayne's gestures of goodwill… anything.
Bonus porn prompts: dubcon/noncon with younger Lex as the aggressor, banging in stately old houses (or what's left of them) with a ton of personal baggage in every room, verbal sparring during sex, or Lex unexpectedly turning to jelly in the face of Bruce's hardcore Crossfit Bat-muscles.
Band of Brothers
- Lewis Nixon/Richard Winters
I love these two and everything about them -- together and apart, their messier moments and the contrast in their backgrounds and personalities. My tastes for shipfic are all over the map, dysfunctional or domestic, pining or emphatically requited, but setting-wise I'm mostly interested in fics set in the approximate territory of canon, or where the events of canon have taken place. (Fic where the two of them meet only after the war, or where the events of historical canon go differently, are just fine; fic where they're jewel thieves or high school students in a modern context isn't as much my speed with this fandom.) But anything within those vague boundaries would thrill me -- established relationship fic with weird guilt and furtive assignations, unconsummated longing, five times they looked out for one another and one time they were safe and at peace, pining both mutual and one-sided, fucked-up confusing emotions bubbling to the surface at inconvenient times, any tiny scene of post-war domesticity, desperate sex for solace they're both pretending is totally normal procedure…
Bonus porn prompts: furtively getting off under less than optimal circumstances, trysts and assignations during moments of peace that feel downright opulent, inventive moments of intimacy when they're both exhausted/wounded/filthy/cold, anything perving on Dick's great legs.
Breaking Bad
- Gus Fring/Jesse Pinkman
You can go full AU (so what if Jesse throws in his lot with Gus in s4 and they figure out some way to get Walt out of the picture? what if Gus got to Jesse first during the time he was in recovery?) or write a random slashy interlude with these guys during their time together or anything else that catches your fancy up to and including a complete timeline or universe-rearranging AU. (My one caveat is that I'd rather not read outright noncon between these guys.) What's Gus' idea of a restrained courtship like? What's Jesse's idea of an appropriate display of affection toward your very, very scary boss? Anything from fluffy to fucked-up is fine with me,
Bonus porn prompts: glad-to-be-alive sex, Jesse being divided between wanting physical comfort and being completely fucking terrified, Gus' preternatural calm not melting away in the bedroom, sad banging while thinking of other people, mostly- or entirely-clothed sex -- think of all Jesse's ridiculous layers!
- Gus Fring/Max Arciniega
The greatest love story never told! What the hell was up with them? From what little we see of Max he's a lot less restrained than Gus will later be -- was he the Jesse to Fring's Walt, or was it the other way around? (I've read a little fan speculation that he was using meth as well as producing it, which might be interesting to explore in contrast with Gus' straight-lacedness even back in '86.) Did Gus and Max leave Chile together or did one of them follow the other? Did they live together? Domesticity, fucked-up business scheming, long conversations about meth, political baggage, living a double life together: I'm interested in fic about any and all of it.
Bonus porn prompts: anything to do with the practical concerns of keeping your sex life pretty clandestine, anything where Max makes the first move, first-time sex, biting, casual companionable domestic banging.
E Street Band RPF
Note: given the tenor of 2016 and just my own sad feelings, I'd like to request no deathfic with this fandom, please -- I'm fine with fic about getting older, or dealing with Bruce's depression, but not fic dealing with death or grappling with anybody's mortality.
- Clarence Clemons/Bruce Springsteen
ANYTHING. ANYTHING AT ALL. SERIOUSLY. AAAH.
Right now I especially would love anything set during the 1978 Darkness On The Edge Of Town tour -- I've seen the Dec 8 1978 concert recording in Houston and they're both great in it, with a killer on-stage rapport
But anything set over the course of their friendship would make me happy -- Clarence put a lot on the line for his career in music, and in a lot of ways he could have had a more solid settled life than Bruce maybe could with his whole wayward-American-poet thing going on, but he was also capable of some excellent memorable hellraising in his own right. Band adventures and road trips, onstage and offstage shenanigans, Bruce being an extremely affectionate drunk, dramatic AUs of any kind (space pirates! wandering bards! film noir!), AUs where they met under different circumstances, fake interviews and snapshots from a timeline where they're romantically involved and how that affects the course of musical history, etc.
Bonus porny prompts: drunk sex, getting together after a show, using sex to combat loneliness, adrenaline highs, size differences, spoooooning.
- Bruce Springsteen/Patti Scialfa
I love these two and I love the look at their relationship that comes up in Bruce's memoir -- shippy moments on the road, a "what if they got together earlier?" historical-divergence AU, something exploring their early brush while Bruce was still trying to assemble a band…
From Bruce's memoir: We held auditions for singers for the Bruce Springsteen Band, my new calling card, at the factory. Brave young women answered our ad in the Asbury Park Press, driving up into the dark industrial wilderness toward what must have looked like a rapist’s paradise just to test their talents. We had Vegas-style songbirds; opera singers; horrible, hilarious pre-karaoke wannabes who tested our good manners and self-control. I even spoke on the phone to a high school–age Patti Scialfa, dispensing the fatherly advice that this was a traveling gig and it’d be best for a young lady to stay in school. It doesn't have to be anything romantic at that exact point in time, given the whole "high school-age" part of the above, but if you wanted to write a canon-divergence AU where Patti shows up anyway as a musical force to be reckoned with, I would love it.
Other things: Patti wearing Bruce's clothes! Bruce wearing Patti's clothes? Canon cunnilingus! AU where it's Patti running the show and Bruce who comes along later wanting to join her super sweet band? Film noir/Terrence Malick/criminals-on-the-run AU? Or just nice domestic anything, the joys and stresses of parenting, anything incorporating Bruce's love of film noir and big desolate rambling narratives.
Bonus porn prompts: married!sex, flings while on the road, anything homaging Springsteen's hilariously thinly-veiled affection for cunnilingus.
HBO's Oz
- Miguel Alvarez/Ray Mukada
These guys are in a tough spot even by the standards of my usual ships -- I'd love anything with them, from mostly-gen interactions flavored by the tension between them or missing scenes (during the riot? visits in solitary?) to full-fledged romantic drama with all the conflicts of interest and desperate affection that entails. (Canon provides a pretty good framework for how and where relationships between inmates can play out -- how can these guys figure it out, and what are the consequences?) If you I'd be very open to a look at what their relationship might look like outside of penitentiary walls, or in a canon-divergent AU where their paths cross under other circumstances. (The part of me that's always stoked to see Kirk Acevedo in Band of Brothers says: military chaplain AU?)
(I don't have a ton of distinct smutty desires for these guys but I'd be happy to read it, and in general I am always always open to FUCKED-UP PINING, courtly love in a less than courtly environment, and fucked-up doomed bad idea sex.)
- Tobias Beecher/Kareem Said
These guys are my other religiously fraught Oz OTP and I was so happy to see them in the tagset -- that's a starting place I'd love to read about if you're comfortable taking it on, the place Beecher has in Said's long line of complicated relationships with lawyers and white people or the way Beecher's genuine desire for religious fulfillment and spiritual solace gets tangled up in his relationship with and attraction to men. Or if you'd rather not, I'm down for any kind of missing-scenes fic drawing from their canon fraught interactions. Said has some good reasons to be wary of Beecher, but he also has his own ample amount of hangups drawn from his own lifetime -- I'd love to read the kind of encounter neither of them is ready to talk about later, or see a little of them trying to make it work semi-functionally behind bars.
Bonus porn prompts: ditto re. fucked-up pining and bad idea sex, Beecher's fucked-up bad boundaries, mutually guarded displays of affection, trying to find some way to get it on that doesn't evoke tons and tons of Schillinger and Keller baggage.
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.
Crossover ships
- Rust Cohle/Jesse Pinkman
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/Brandon/Phillip
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/Ed Exley
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/Sonny Wortzik
- Travis Bickle/Steve Burns
- Steve Burns/Father Damien Karras
All three of 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… Both Burns and Karras are feeling more than a little alienated from their ostensible callings, while Bickle appears to be alienated from absolutely everything -- I'd love a ships-that-pass-in-the-night take on any of 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.
Karras is nominally a pillar of the daylit world, as a priest, and more than a little uncomfortable with the harsher elements that his vocation puts him in contact with -- Steve Burns is theoretically in service of the city as a police officer but he's increasingly absorbed in his undercover identity and disillusioned with law enforcement's treatment of marginalized people. (Also… maaaybe a serial killer? Maybe?) Anything with shadowy streets, and guilt out the wazoo, and mingled attraction/dread/repulsion, and intimacy with near-strangers.
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, vows of celibacy having their limits, witnessing or participating in physical violence as a prelude to getting it on.
- Llewyn Davis/Larry Gopnik
...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
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Date: 2017-01-09 09:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-01-09 09:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-01-09 09:37 pm (UTC)