Dear Writer - Trick or Treat 2021

[m_madeleine]

Dear Trick-or-treater, welcome to my letter! Can't wait to read whatever you come up with! Below, you'll find general preferences and DNWs as well as fandom-specific details, feel free to chose whatever strikes your fancy. You can also find me on AO3 under m_madeleine.

Navigation
General Likes & Smut Likes
General DNWs
Smut DNWs

Rebel Without a Cause (1955) (Jim/Buzz)
1st Century BCE Roman Politics RPF (Pompey, Julia, Caesar, Pompey/Caesar, Pompey/Julia)
Rómeó és Júlia - Színház (Any character: Julia, Romeo, Tybalt, Mercutio, Lady Capulet, Lady Montague)

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General Likes

• H/C, physical and emotional. Characters worrying for each other when injured, rescuing each other, trying their best to comfort even if they or their partner aren't good with feelings, etc
• UST, Characters noticing appealing things about each other, maybe at inopportune times, keeping themselves from acting on their attraction, or feeling mutual attraction that scares them
• enemies to friends to lovers, friends to lovers, lovers to friends, enemies to lovers (to friends)
• getting together, falling in love/lust, polyamory, developing relationships, established relationships. I love to see people fall in love(/lust), especially painfully, but I also love to see couples being loving and comfortable with each other, or still puzzling each other out
• Any rating and length! I like long meaty case/plotfic and getting together fic and drawn out porn, but I also love shorter stories, snapshots that explore just one moment in time, like a first kiss or a painful realization, introspection, quiet moments, etc.
• I also like missing scenes, canon divergence AUs, world building, character exploration, cracky premises taken seriously
• angst and pining, repression, bittersweetness, sadness, jealousy, anger -- but I also love my faves being happy!
• canon-specific imagery, historical tidbits, setting details and (especially autumnal) nature descriptions
• magical realism
• actual magic and witches
• daemon AUs
• period-specific holiday traditions

Smut likes

• anywhere from consensual to dub con
• hatesex, desperation, heightened emotional states
• characters feeling overwhelmed/overstimulated
• rough or slow and gentle (depending on characters/situations): throwing each other around, good old fashioned wall-slamming, bruising, marking, choking, physical altercations getting sexy, holding each other down, hair pulling -- and/or making out, lazy frottage, taking the time to explore various body parts, etc
• vaginal and anal penetration (all positions are good, but from behind is a particular fave), anal play, object insertion, fingering
• oral of any kind (including rimming), facefucking
• multiple orgams (only for characters with vaginas)
• barebacking, comeplay, facials
• informal D/S overtones and elements

General DNWs

• graphic violence, gore, body horror
• graphic decomposition/bodily decay, zombie tropes, i.e. contagiousness, cannibalism and loss of personality. To elaborate, I have some “undead people” requests, and I avoided “zombie” on purpose, since that comes with a lot of elements I’m not interested in. Some uncanniness and weirdness is welcome, but no gross-out horror please.
• setting change AUs (including A/B/O), soulmate AUs, unrequested supernatural creatures (especially vampires)
• no-homophobia AUs (homophobia doesn’t have to be the focus of the story, but please no gay marriage in periods it didn’t exist, for example)
• pregnancy, characters having non-canon children, exception: 1st Century BCE RPF, but no graphic childbirth please (mentions of background characters being pregnant are ok for all canons!)
• sickfic or mention of illness (if it’s canon, please keep it brief)
• non-canon pet names/nicknames, epithets (like "the brunette")
• For ResJ: Romeo and Julia breaking up or only one of them dying, requited Tybalt/Julia outside of Romeo/Tybalt/Julia

Smut DNWs

• non-con
• parent-child incest
• sex involving characters younger than 16 (PG romance is fine!)
• sex-related injuries
• painful penetration
• kink and safeword negotiations, dirty talk, daddy/mommy kink
• scat, vomit, watersports
• sounding
• orgasm denial

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Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
Jim/Buzz, Jim, Buzz

Where to get it/how I know it: Available to watch in any way one usually watches movies, I assume :D

I love teenage narratives and this movie was very interesting as one of the earlier modern examples. The existentialism felt pretty gut-punching at times, Jim watching the planetarium movie was especially poignant.

I very much zeroed in on Jim and Buzz and their knife fight, so full of delicious tension. Their quiet moment before the race was also great, because after the previous aggression, despite the fact that they’re about to play a game with even higher stakes, it felt like Buzz was recognizing Jim as his equal, and the race was more a thing of principle, rather than personal. So yeah, I’d love all the various ways this could go - the knife fight turns into sexy times rather than racing, or Buzz survives the race, Jim gets accepted into the gang, whether they're actually trying to lowkey date, or are more like occassional fuckbuddies.

For some more seasonal/spooky ideas, I kind of really want Buzz to come back from the dead and mess with the movie's ending, since his death is pretty much what singlehandedly kickstarted it. So basically, another fix-it request, but with Buzz freaking everyone out by being, well, dead. I also kinda want some crack played straight where everyone just has to make do with being friends and going to school with an undead guy now. (Does he get roped into doing anti-racing PSAs for the cops? :D)

I’d also be into seeing some 50s American teen Halloween traditions! Apparently Halloween was only just starting to become a more cutesy family holiday and had basically just been an excuse for kids to wreak anarchic havoc before, and that sounds a lot like the gang!

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1st Century BCE Roman Politics RPF
Pompey, Julia, Pompey/Julia, Pompey/Julius Caesar

Where to get it/how I know it: Honestly, my own knowledge about the guy(/the period, generally) is very cobbled together. I took Latin for several years, and always enjoyed traipsing through the wiki pages of all the dramatis personae, but also the largest influence on my Pompey squee was a really bad movie where he’s played by the guy who’s also Mr Big in Sex and the City, so…..yeah. Feel free to go super historical and hit me with some Plutarch, but I’d also be very happy if you used basic information about their lives to tell whatever story you’re inspired to :)


So, Pompey. I’ve always been fascinated with this guy. I like how he’s kind of an upstart jock, with a very different path to power than most of his political colleagues. I’m generally very into the Late Republic atmosphere, there were some wild intrigues going on! So feel free to write about Pompey on his own, his personality, interactions with Sulla or his father, his career in general (though I'm sort of ambivalent about the latter and would especially prefer if you didn't focus on the Eastern Campaigns).

As far as interactions with other characters go, I’m very very interested in any kind of dynamic between Pompey and Caesar, whether shippy or not. I love their ever changing frenemy-ness, which you can honestly interpret in any way you like, and even for times they are -- as far as I know -- not confirmed to have interacted, there’s still a lot of potential, for example when they were briefly on opposite sides of the Sulla conflict. Pompey’s death is so tragic and Caesar’s reaction to it, just, argh! Tragedy! Feels! Gimme!

Pompey’s marriage to Julia also strikes me as all kinds of interesting. I’m up for something a bit weird happening between Pompey, Julia and Caesar (though no actual parent-child incest please), like maybe Julia being aware that it’s really her husband and father who have the deep -- and maybe shippy -- connection and she’s just kind of caught in the middle. Angst would be neat, but really maybe they’re all fine with that arrangement. Historically, I think, Pompey/Julia are described as having been pretty happy together and I’d love to see that too! I’ve always really liked Plutarch’s kind of out there story about her shock of seeing Pompey’s bloody toga -- again, feels, drama! (By the way, very much opting into pregnancy stuff in general and pregnancy sex in particular here, though please sidestep graphic childbirth or complications).

I find Julia very fascinating in her own right as well, feel free to focus on her! While not as much is known about her, she is a pretty important player here, both in the personal and political sense here and I'd love to know what you think she was like, how she wrote and thought and lived.

Overall, I'd be interested in anything from crack (taken seriously), to something poignant, introspective and hazy, or heavy on setting (I’m no Roman history buff exactly, but I do enjoy details), or shippy and/or chock-full of feels. Tragedy very welcome, happy endings not required at all (but also appreciated). If you wanna get into some alternative history, for example what if Julia and their kid survived, Pompey & Caesar reconciled, Pompey didn’t get murdered, etc, that’d be interesting too! My knowledge/interest in the era is kind of restricted to the people politically active at the same time as Pompey and pretty much ends with Julius’ Caesar’s death though, so I’d appreciate if you kept that in mind.

For this fandom I’m very partial to unconventional formats such as epistolary (especially as Pompey’s (and Julia’s) voice didn’t reach our times), poem pastiche, faux historical writing (maybe some more Plutarchian anecdotes? Cicero going off, as he's so good at? :D), fictional academia, etc -- but am just as happy with a more conventional format. I’ve also done a little bit of research on Roman religion for college and ended up totally fascinated by augury, so feel free to go ham on the omens. Straight up magic AUs welcome as well, and daemon AU is an all-time favorite of mine.

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Rómeó és Júlia - Színház
Julia/Tybalt/Romeo, Julia, Romeo, Tybalt, Benvolio, Lady Capulet, Lady Montague

Where to get it/how I know it: There’s a subtitled pro-shot up on youtube! I really like pretty much everyone in it, but I’m open to alternative takes on Benvolio, if you’ve seen another version/have a different favorite actor.

I love this dark, goth-y, apocalyptic take on Shakespeare! So many cool costumes, so much psychology, wow. Love as resistance to a toxic society and young people being pushed into roles they struggle to fill <3

This is probably my fandom with the highest tolerance for darkness and angst. I find the canon character deaths quite cathartic and would very much enjoy non-fix-it exploration of the fall-out. What’s Verona like when so much of a generation has been wiped out, not just emotionally and personally, but politically, socially? What does Benvolio do now, how are the parents coping? How can the city continue on? (I could see a lot of adoptions happening for some reason...what’s it like for those kids, knowing who and what they’re following after?)

However, I also love any and all kinds of what-if fix-it scenarios! Does the Friar’s plan maybe, somehow, work and leave Romeo and Julia on the run, with Tybalt in pursuit? Are Tybalt and Mercutio left peacocking alone around Verona? Do Romeo/Julia reveal their marriage in time, so they get to stay in Verona, but have to contend with animosities and difficult social dynamics? Or does the feud get nipped in the bud, maybe? Does everybody have to unite against a different enemy? I’d probably enjoy anything you can come up with to make my faves less miserable <3

Some spooky prompts I'm perpetually craving:

• Juliet’s monologue about the crypt is one of my favorite parts about the play (it’s cut a little short in the musical but it’s still there). What if she really does have a supernatural experience? Maybe she gets to talk to Tybalt’s ghost -- Színház Julia doesn’t really get a lot of time and opportunity to mourn Tybalt and generally we don’t particularly get her part of their relationship -- or any other Capulet ancestors. This could be poignant and bittersweet, an exploration of their family history and the feud, but I’d also appreciate something a bit more tongue in cheek where Romeo and Julia have to fight a ghost or skeleton army on their way out :D
• While I believe Halloween specifically is very based in pre-Christian Celtic traditions (although there is also the Italian tradition of setting out a meal for the ghosts of your family on All Hallow’s Eve), All Soul’s Day two days later also specifically commemorates the dead, which seems like a holiday Verona might have a special relationship to. I’d be interested in something history-based, but feel free to mix and match -- maybe this Verona also believes that souls walk the earth on Halloween, are there particular traditions around that? (lots of dead, after all)
• Or ghosts do actually exist in Verona, how does that affect the story? Ghost Mercutio and ghost Tybalt suddenly show up and (try to) fix everything? Or are ghosts so established that they are regularly called to testify about their own death and the second half of the story just devolves into a very complicated trial? :D
• Tybalt and Mercutio rise from the dead (they’re fine! just...also dead), which makes things very difficult for the Prince but probably easier for everyone else
• undead legal drama still relevant to my interests :D

Gen takes on any of the prompts are welcome, but I also multiship like crazy. Feel free to make it messy and complicated -- or (at the same time?) healing. I'm requesting Romeo/Julia/Tybalt this time, so I'll just break down the dynamics: Romeo/Julia is definitely the feelsiest ship in the whole canon for me. Romeo’s so kind, thoughtful and yet fun, and Julia’s just bursting with curiosity and gumption and I love that he and Julia are so earnestly, whole-heartedly in love, despite everything <3 I enjoy the poignancy of their canon fate but I would also absolutely love to see them actually manage to escape together. I also love how ready Romeo is to reconcile with Tybalt and make peace, and I can totally see Tybalt’s issues about him being Julia’s partner turn into a strange reluctant attraction, whether during or post canon. I feel like Tybalt/Julia could actually have potential to be more healing and less fucked up than in canon with Romeo as a buffer. I’d love to see Tybalt learn to appreciate Julia as a person and find peace with the both of them.
However, if we match on one of the characters, feel free to write gen (or Romeo/Julia or Romeo/Tybalt, I've already squeed above) or one of the other ships below:

Benvolio/Tybalt: Benvolio is so good-natured, and while he’s Montague-adjacent, he’s also not actually family, so I see some potential for him trying to bridge the gap, and Tybalt being intrigued despite himself. Maybe what he needs is someone to just cut through the angst!

Lady C/Lady M: So much hate and passion :D On the other hand, they weren’t always part of this feud, so I’d be interested in different takes on their history as well. And post-canon, whether fix-it or not, they have more occasion to finally see eye to eye

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Very much looking forward to your fic, have fun writing! And if anything needs clarification, feel free to ask through the mods!