Dear ToT writer

[raspberryhunter]

Dear ToT writer,

Thank you for writing for me! I am very excited to get anything from any of these fandoms :D Feel free to use your own ideas or prompts — I love seeing how other people think about my favorite fandoms, and I love seeing interpretations that are different from mine (some of my favorite fics are the ones that made me look at things in a new way). Also, please don't read anything into the amount of stuff I have written for each fandom; I would be extremely pleased to receive anything for any of these, otherwise I would not have requested them.

Also, I would be totally happy to see any of these people interact with zombie pumpkins! (Or any sort of horror/supernatural-ish kind of thing, but zombie pumpkins seem both horror-occult-ish and kinda cute, which is a combination I am super here for. Pet bats? Friendly ghosts?) Olivier and her team defend Briggs from an invasion of alchemy-animated zombie pumpkins! Cave Johnson has the Aperture scientists make ill-advised robot zombie pumpkins that just want to be your friend! Rodrigo takes up his sword (...but not the executioner's axe! :D ) and defends Filippo and Carlo from zombie pumpkins! and then Philip and Carlos get into a fight as to which of them Rodrigo likes more The strength of Don Alvaro's grief for the di Vargases scares off the zombie pumpkin invasion! Tatyana's cute zombie pumpkin pal helps her get over Onegin and fall properly in love with Gremin! Or something :)


General: I am open to most things! I am more a fan of gen than anything else, but I'm totally open to het/slash/femslash. I will enthusiastically read whatever rating you would like to write. I love fork-in-the-road type AUs for any fandom; I am on board for setting-changed AU for Don Carlo but not for the other fandoms (though see my note on tropey AUs for Onegin). I am also totally open to alternative ways of telling stories -- IF, epistolary fic, what-have-you, I'm up for it!

Things I love: (I don't expect all of these by any means, this is just a sampling of Things That Make Me Happy): I love worldbuilding fic and plotty fic because I can't write it myself, but by the same token I know it is hard to write and I certainly don't expect it. I love character-driven fic that thinks hard about the ramifications of characters' choices. I love most of all for there to be some sort of character arc, or characters (and/or the reader) coming to a greater understanding of something or someone during a fic. I love and adore friendship/partnerships, especially platonic ones, of all gender-variety. I love loyalty and duty bonds (and I have a special place in my heart for physical expressions of fealty bonds, like kneeling or ritualized oath-swearing or salutes). I love it when all the characters are understandable rather than straight-out villainous or malicious, or where expectations of malice are subverted. I love when something or some implication is clear to the reader that is not clear to the characters, or some subset of the characters, because we have knowledge (about the actual canon, for example) that they don't have.

DNW: PWP; graphic gratuitous violence/gore; infidelity involving characters whose fidelity is an important part of their character (that is to say Elisabeth and Tatyana) or involving characters who plausibly have functional relationships (e.g., I don't want Miles in FMA cheating on his wife). (I have no problems with infidelity for characters like Philip, who is doing it canonically, or like Cave Johnson, who is going to be in a dysfunctional relationship no matter what.) Darkfic/character death is great and even encouraged (but please tag!) for all these fandoms/characters except for Tatyana; please don't kill her off or make her life any darker than it already is.


Canons:

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga (Olivier Mira Armstrong, trick or treat) - I love Olivier so much, she is so great! I love how totally hardcore she is, I love how absolutely sure of herself she is, I love how she's so utterly pragmatic, I love how she can intrigue and plot as well as anyone in FMA, I love how she inspires loyalty and how her team is utterly loyal to her, and she to them. I also love all the Armstrongs and how delightfully over-the-top they all are (my favorite bit may be where Olivier picked a fight as to who would rule the family as cover for sending her family away) -- I would absolutely adore to see her in the context of her family (because ALWAYS here for SPARKLY ARMSTRONG SHENANIGANS). I'd also love to see her and her team working together! Or Olivier and Roy (and/or their respective teams?) driving each other crazy, or her and Riza being awesome together and bantering and Riza totally calling Olivier out if/when she was being idiotic? (Would they drive each other crazy or drive Roy crazy?) I don't ship her with anyone really, but Olivier/Riza could be very interesting and I'd love to read about it!

Евгений Онегин | Eugene Onegin - Aleksandr Pushkin, Tchaikovsky/Pushkin - (Tatyana, treat) I asked for both Pushkin and Tchaikovsky; they're very very similar, and I will treat them both in this section; I don't care which one you write for (or both) as long as it's tagged properly :) I love about the opera its increased characterization of Tatyana's husband/Gremin and the way everyone's portrayed just a touch less cynically, especially Olga and Lensky; and I love about the book its last scene, with Tatyana declaring herself and not really even letting Onegin get a word in, who has made up her mind that she's going to be true to her husband and that's it. But I love them both!

I have a burning OTP for this canon, and it's Tatyana/happiness. Please write me a Tatyana who finds her way to happiness somehow! In canon, she has such depth of character in rejecting Onegin though she loves him still -- and in Pushkin I love how it's almost an aside: sure, she loves him, but that's tangential to the real points... I would love a Tatyana who got to be happy. What if she used some of that strength and awesomeness she used to send Onegin away to talk to her husband about how she would like to spend more time in the country and away from the court which she hates, and all the things she's sad about in that last scene? It's interesting that in the opera, Tchaikovsky put a lot of this sentiment in Gremin's mouth in his lovely aria... but there's nothing in either book or opera that even hints that the two of them have talked about this at all. I don't think they could probably spend all their time away from the court, but would it be possible for her to really fall in love with her husband if they were able to connect in their love for the country? (Which is specifically something Onegin basically fails at in the book.) Or a tropey AU? Maybe Tatyana and Onegin have to have an Fake Engagement for Reasons, and Onegin is bored by this at first, and then Tatyana wins him over because she's awesome like that. Or -- maybe Tatyana and Gremin have a Fake Engagement that blossoms into love while Onegin reaps the consequences of being such a huge jerk? Or what if the ghost of Lensky comes to Tatyana and... what? Or what if Olga and Tatyana have a heart-to-heart that makes everything better somehow? Or canon-divergence is great -- I already wrote one version where the duel is averted and Tatyana but there are of course lots of ways that could happen; I would be up for another one! I do ask that if you go Tatyana/Onegin, make him work for it, because he is a super-huge jerk and Tatyana wouldn't be happy with him unless he fundamentally changed (and ideally didn't kill Lensky).

Don Carlos | Don Carlo - Verdi/du Locle/Méry (Rodrigo, trick or treat) - I love this opera so much for lots of reasons; a big one is that it caters so much to my loyalty kink, and I'm just fascinated with the interplay with and tension between different loyalty and love bonds in the opera. Rodrigo is the principal example: Rodrigo's primary loyalty and love to Carlos, and then I feel that in the opera there's also a strong secondary bond to his king, to whom he's sworn allegiance and who represents Spain, which he also loves (and dies for, as well as for Carlos and Flanders). And Elisabeth also has a similar setup going on: she has made vows to Philip, and he has her primary loyalty (if under some duress), but she also loves Carlos and is loyal to the best in him. And then there's a (mostly implied, but still there) friendship/loyalty bond between Elisabeth and Eboli that gets betrayed; in some sense it's the dark mirror of Carlos and Rodrigo... To me it's the very strength of these bonds that turns everything to tragedy when they collide, and I love it.

So anyway, I would love to see Rodrigo interacting with any other character (Eboli? Count Lerma? Seriously, anyone) or as part of an ensemble; he doesn't actually need to be a main character in the fic as long as he's present in some capacity, even for example in someone's memories or as a ghost (if the fic takes place after his death). I would absolutely adore Rodrigo gen loyalty, but I pretty much am willing to ship him with anyone (with varying degrees of dysfunctionality) except for Elisabeth, even unrequited, because she's got way too much going on with Philip and Carlos. (Except in cases where one can sidestep it: for example, a) the extremely messed-up dubcon scenario where Philip commands her to, b) canon-divergence where both Philip and Carlos somehow die (do they kill each other in the swordfight?) and she is left picking up the pieces (and maybe figuring out how to rule??) and mourning with that best of courtiers (which now that I think of it would also make a fantastic gen/romantic-feelings-sublimated-into-political-counseling fic), or c) an AU where everyone's character and/or the cultural milieu is changed enough that this becomes possible. Like, if it's Space AU and Space Queen Elisabetta deposes Philip... You get the idea.) What if Rodrigo were the ghost that shows up at the end, rather than Charles V? How would everyone react? How would the Grand Inquisitor react?

La Forza del Destino - Verdi/Piave - (Don Alvaro, treat (but could be a tricky treat)) Don Alvaro is so great (SO great, especially for a tenor), and the opera just grinds him down into the ground; every time it seems like he's found some sort of peace it's flung away from him. Please fix things for him! This could mean all sorts of things, of course, and I'm happy with this going super dark as long as it ends up a little less dark than the opera, which shouldn't be hard, haha. Maybe it means he lives happily ever after with Leonora (which would be the happiest but also seems to me to be least interesting -- if you can make it interesting, though -- and honestly even if they'd escaped together at the beginning it wouldn't necessarily have been an easy life for them (and maybe Carlo still comes after them), so maybe it is more interesting than I think it is). Maybe it means he dies. (He'd certainly be a lot happier if he'd died in that battle, or if Carlo managed to kill him at the end instead of vice versa.) Maybe it means Carlo never looks through his freaking bag and they stay best friends. Maybe it means Carlo never finds him at the end (or dies while searching for him, I am cool with that) and he stays a monk (he seems like he's found peace as a monk) and maybe sees Leonora at the very end when they're both dying. Maybe it means all the events of the opera happen but post-opera there's some reason for it, because he went through all of that, those experiences, going through that horrific pain -- it allows him to -- I don't know -- save the monks, save Spain, save the world from aliens, save the kid who's on track to become the next Carlo di Vargas from himself, just as long as there's a reason why he specifically had to go through all that crap. And I'm here for Alvaro/Leonora or Alvaro/Carlo (assuming Alvaro thinks Leonora is dead) or neither (though not for OT3 unless Carlo works through a LOT of stuff first).

Portal (Video Game) - (Caroline (Portal), Cave Johnson, trick) - I absolutely love the little snippets of backstory that we get for these two, and I am here for allllll the dark twisted backstory with Caroline and/or Cave Johnson. He had her put into a computer. I mean, how did that go down? What did Caroline think of all this? Did she know it was coming or was it a complete surprise? Did she know Chell?? Was there some part of her that wanted to save her? What did she think about the moon dust? If you just signed up for Cave, oh man, he is a piece of work and I want more. Tell me all about his (Aperture's) competition with Black Mesa, the more darkly hilarious the better. (I know nothing about Half-Life, but my spouse plays it, so feel free to put in Half-Life jokes if you want and if you inform me I'll get him to explain them to me :D ) I ship Caroline/Cave in its dark twisted dysfunctional dubconny glory, but I'd also be interested in an interpretation that took the "She's married... to SCIENCE!" line more seriously. (Also, okay, I love that line.)