Fic in a Box Exchange 2023

[a_whale_bone]

Thanks so much for creating for me, and for taking a look at my letter! DNWs, likes and prompts are all below. All prompts are just suggestions and should be taken as such - let your imagination run wild!

I have more ideas/prompts for some canons/characters than others, but I would be genuinely thrilled to get anything in this letter, regardless of whether I've written a long or short section on it.

I am just called whalebone on AO3 :)


Do Not Wants

General Likes

Smut Likes

Art Likes

Request One: His Dark Materials
Lyra Belacqua & Pantalaimon
Mary Malone & Will Parry
Balthamos/Baruch
Solo: Lyra Belacqua
Solo: Mary Malone
WB: Any
WB: Lyra's World

Request Two: The Lord of the Rings
Legolas/Gimli
Solo: Éowyn

Request Three: Rogue One
Cassian Andor & Jyn Erso & Chirrut Imwe & K-2SO & Baze Malbus & Bodhi Rook
Cassian Andor/K-2SO
Cassian Andor & K-2SO
Jyn Erso & K-2SO
Bodhi Rook/K-2SO
Chirrut Imwe/Baze Malbus
WB: Guardians of the Whills history and theology and abilities

Request Four: Original Work
Human Pining for Robot Best Friend/Robot Pining Too (F/F and M/M)
Mage Healer/Broken Android Healing Doesn’t Work On
Android/His Human Soulmate (M/M)
Android/Her Human Soulmate (F/F)
Devout Knight/Fallen Angel He Accidentally Rescues (M/M)
Female Horse Archer/City Girl (F/F)

Request Five: Lost
Sayid Jarrah/Desmond Hume
Michael Dawson/Sun-Hwa Kwon/Jin-Soo Kwon
Michael Dawson/Sun-Hwa Kwon
Daniel Faraday/Miles Straume
Kate Austen/Sun-Hwa Kwon
Kate Austen/Sayid Jarrah
WB: Any

Request Six: Nimona
Ballister Boldheart & Nimona
Ballister Boldheart/Ambrosius Goldenloin
Ballister Boldheart/Ambrosius Goldenloin & Nimona
Solo: Nimona
WB: Any


DNWs

• Non-con
• Mpreg
• BDSM
• Incest
• Watersports & scat
• Underage
• Teenager (under-18)/adult romance and sex
• Omegaverse
• Sex pollen
• Unrequested non-canon ships
• Medical kink (meaning: explicitly kinking on medical treatment, doctor/patient relationship, use of medical equipment. Feelings and attraction developing during hurt/comfort, wound care, etc., are fine.)
• Readerfic
• Character bashing (characters can be critical of others, particularly if canon-compliant, but I don't like characters being made to be villains when they aren't meant to be.)
• For Rogue One: Focus on the Jedi (happy for Jedi characters to appear and for discussions of the Force and the Jedi to happen, but I like the non-Jedi-centric aspect of Rogue One).

General likes

• Mutual pining
• Protectiveness, hurt/comfort
• Competence kink
• Strong sense of place
• Complicated relationships with family, home, faith.
• Friends-to-lovers
• Complications of inhuman/human relationships
• Slow-burn
• Navigating inhuman/human sex
• Trauma recovery
• Tenderness and gentle touching (hair stroking, hand holding, face touches, all that stuff.)
• Banter and snark
• Non-mundane AUs (setting change or canon divergence)
• Time travel
• 5 times fic / 5+1 fic
• Complex, interesting F/F with lots of push-pull and tension.
• Women in leadership positions, working with/against other women.

Smut likes

• Character-driven smut
• Tenderness
• Hand/finger kink
• Wireplay (for robot and android ships)
• Interesting ways for non-humans to experience sex
• Handjobs
• Oral
• Anal (for m/m)
• Rimming
• Erogenous zones
• Very gentle dom/sub: holding someone down, hair pulling, pinned against a wall. (Nothing formal, though: no titles, collars; nothing very painful or rough; caretaking dom dynamic preferred.)
• Praise kink

Art Likes

• Bold colours and strong lighting
• Post-impressionistic styles
• Pattern-heavy styles, like mosaic or stained glass
• Cute and more cartoon-y styles
• Art deco
• Tarot/playing card imagery
• Characters hanging out and enjoying one another's company
• Characters fighting together (where canon appropriate)
• Intimacy between characters. Not necessarily sex, but physical closeness - hair and face touching, holding hands, hugging, kissing. Non-explicit sex also welcome!

Request 1: His Dark Materials

Fandom likes:

• Alternate worlds
• Canon-typical weirdness (mulefa? Super weird. Love them. Mary's time in their world is one of my favourite parts of the books)
• Focus on personal growth and learning and kindness
• Ruminations on faith and death
• Family of choice
• Daemons, of course - the bond between daemon and person, daemon settling, the huge intimacy of daemon-touching. I love that Will and Mary will be able to get to know their daemons.
• Armoured bears, their society, and their skyiron souls
• Rebuilding in the aftermath (Lyra and Will moving on; building 'the Republic of Heaven'; Mary and Will navigating the real world)
• Please feel free to include canon from The Book of Dust, and equally feel free to ignore it.
• The alternate history and geography of Lyra's world
• Dust! Anything about Dust and what it is, what it can do, how it can affect the world
• The history of angels and the angel rebellion, and what they do after the books
• Fix-it fic (for Lyra/Will, for Baruch/Balthamos, etc.)
• Relearning how to use the alethiometer
• Lyra going on adventures and learning more about her world, and how she works to better it

Request Two: The Lord of the Rings

Fandom likes:

• Strong sense of place and history. Beautiful landscapes.
• A sense of a fading world, but beauty remains and more can be discovered and built
• The healing power of nature and rebuilding (Gimli's speech about the Glittering Caves is one of my top moments in the whole book. I also love Legolas and Gimli talking about how to improve Minas Tirith, and that after the war Legolas takes elves to Ithilien to turn it into beautiful gardens, that Sam is able to heal the Shire through the power of gardening, that Aglarond becomes a Dwarf paradise, etc.)
• Legolas and Gimli learning to love and appreciate their differences (while still teasing one another)
• Legolas's funny, mischievous streak, and that he both seems very young for an elf and yet at other times so ancient.
• Gimli's eloquence combined with his sturdy strength, and that he's brave and loyal but has moments of deep weakness (such as the Paths of the Dead)
• Éowyn's combination of strength and melancholy, high-hearted and loyal to her people, but longing for independence
• Éowyn learning that she can be a shieldmaiden without self-destruction
• Horses. I love the Rohirrim for their love of their horses.

Request Three: Rogue One

Fandom likes:

• Themes of hope in the darkness
• Normal people doing extraordinary things 
• Building strong relationships between the core six 
• Everybody lives AUs (especially if they're all a bit broken afterwards)
• Chirrut/Baze as an old married couple
• Bodhi having long-term repercussions from his encounter with Bor Gullet
• Mission fic
• Mutual protectiveness
• Ensemble casts (I love all six mains a lot)
• AUs totally welcome, provided K-2 is still some kind of AI (exception for fic/art of my fic, for AUs where I've written him as human!)
• The differences between organics and droids, and the weird status of droids in the galaxy (are they considered people or not?) Droid rights!
• For K-2 ships: size difference, robot sex
• The Guardians of the Whills having a different relationship with the Force than the Jedi
• Old vs new Jedha - the Jedha that Baze and Chirrut grew up in, compared to the one Bodhi grew up in
• What it means to be a Guardian, and how you become one
• Baze and Chirrut's different approaches to their faith - and how Baze loses (and maybe regains) his own

Request Four: Original Work

Some things I really like in OW:

• For ships involving non-human characters, I love stories that focus on the difference of their experiences - of attraction, of sex, of the world in general. I love robots that process things like machines, and angels that seem otherworldly and strange. Bonus points if they don't want to be like humans.
• Settings I particularly like: in space!, near-future sci-fi, steampunk, solarpunk, urban fantasy, alternate history, fantasy with spec-fic elements
• Anything with a strong sense of place - I love descriptions of nature, or of cities, or anything like that.
• I love first times and get-togethers, especially when pining is involved
• Characters exploring, appreciating and admiring one another's differences, and discovering unexpected things in common
• Roadtrips
• Touch-starved characters being touched for the first time in a while
• Someone had a bad relationship previously and is learning to trust the new one
• Looking after an environment or rebuilding something (refurbishing an old house, fixing a broken spaceship, building a garden)
• Friends-to-lovers, especially long-standing friendships with complicated histories (bonus for pining, whether mutual or not).

Request Five: Lost

Fandom likes:

• Canon-typical weirdness, especially time travel
• Characters being competent and smart
• Mission fic
• Ensemble casts - feel free to include other Losties!
• Characters learning to like (and love) someone they never would have expected
• A real sense of place for the Island, almost as though it's an entity in its own right
• Characters having to learn and grow and change through their experiences on the Island, and grapple with their pasts
• Meditations on faith and loss and trauma through weird Island mystery stuff. I love that the story usually works in service of the characters and their journeys, rather than vice-versa.
• Weird history of the Island, especially Dharma Initiative stuff. Season five might be my favourite season. Anything that goes into either the Losties time with Dharma or Dharma themselves and what the hell they were doing and how things ran would be amazing
• He's not nominated but any worldbuilding around Richard Alpert's many, many years on the island and navigating its shifting internal politics
• Flash sideways weirdness, especially for characters who are still in the sideways at the end of the show, or how the sideways could have gone differently if things had changed in the real world

Canon Relationship Notes:

• I love Penny and Penny/Desmond, so please don't write out Desmond's love for her. I'm fine with other options! He doesn't think there's any chance that he could ever find her again? He doesn't think she cares for him anymore? He is able to love two people, particularly when time travel weirdness happens? All fine.

• As for Nadia... I love her too, she's brave and kind and wonderful, but I fundamentally believe that a huge part of Sayid's arc is learning to move on from Nadia. She's so tied up with his past and his guilt and all the horrors there, and I want Sayid to develop past that and make some peace with himself. He loved Nadia, of course, but he needs to move on. I also have no issues with Sayid/Shannon (except for the fact that she died) - I'm happy for fics to pretend it never happened though, so long as there's no Shannon-bashing.

• Happy for Daniel to have had feelings for Charlotte and then move on, or just pretend that he didn't have those feelings and they were just good friends. Both good.

• Sun and Jin have a complicated relationship, alright? I'm happy for them to have an open relationship, for Sun to explore other options when she and Jin aren't speaking, for things to happen when they're separated by time and space... I'm happy to go with it.

• Please just pretend that the Kate love triangle with Jack and Sawyer isn't a thing.

Request Six: Nimona

Fandom likes:

• Ballister's robot arm
• Ballister's Big Sad Eyes
• Ballister and Nimona's whole relationship, especially him learning to let loose a little and both of them learning to care for one another
• Those quiet moments between Ballister and Ambrosius, with the touching <3
• Learning to embrace difference and change
• Ballister and Ambrosius learning how to be together and trust one another again after everything
• Loyalty and competence kink
• Opening up the world at the end
• Worldbuilding for the city and its technology
• Future fic
• What is day-to-day life like for the knights-in-training before the movie starts? What is it like for the knights afterwards?