Candy Hearts Exchange 2023

[lucymonster]

Skip to: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power | The Mandalorian | Star Wars (Marvel Comics)

Dear creator,

Thanks so much for creating for me! I love all the fandoms and ships I’ve requested and am so excited to see what I get. If you know me from past exchange letters, please note I've changed some things around - my tastes are still pretty stable, but I've added some new likes as well as retiring a few that I need a bit of a break from.

In general, I’m easy to please and hard to disappoint. As long as my gift features something I’ve mentioned wanting, I’m going to be delighted no matter where else inspiration takes you along the way – so please don't stress about whether your idea is too dark, too niche, not shippy enough, whatever. I'm fine with any past or background ships you want to include, and in cases where a canon ship 'conflicts' with a requested ship, handle it however you like - break them up, AU them out, have it be an open relationship, ignore the issue completely, whatever. If you're looking at my letter thinking 'hmm, she hasn't mentioned [thing], but it doesn't seem wildly out of line with her tastes' - your instincts are good, you should include the thing, I bet I'll love it. :D

If a prompt seems to suggest a longer story, I’d also be thrilled with a short scene or excerpt based on that concept. Ditto, if a prompt sounds fic-oriented, please feel free to adapt it to your preferred use. I’ve only been able to prompt for fic this round but I welcome treats in other media!

If anything is unclear in this letter, or you’d like more information about something, I’m always happy to answer questions.

Thanks so much, and happy creating!

lucymonster

General info

⛔ Do not want

• Underage: explicit <18 sex, any <16 sex, any <13 romance
• Unrequested incest
• Extreme gore, graphic organ damage, genital bleeding/cutting/tearing
• Any mention of child death, including pregnancy loss
• Child harm, except as angsty backstory for requested characters
• PWP (smut is lovely as a side dish, I just don’t currently want it as the main course)
• AUs other than canon divergence (incl trope AUs: please no a/b/o, soulmarks etc)
• Unrequested identity headcanons
• Poetry
• Deliberate infidelity (you don’t need to go out of your way to show an open relationship is consensual, just please no explicitly sneaking around behind a partner’s back)
• Unwarned major character death (tag or author’s note appreciated!)

⭐ Story likes

In general, my favourite stories are the ones where the characters feel like real, live, messy and imperfect people. I love fics that are thought-provoking or uncomfortable to read. I love to relax into well-earned (or not-so-well-earned) moments of happiness for my otherwise beleaguered faves. I love to laugh. Favourite themes include:

• anything with a strong character focus
• characters who are flawed and abrasive and challenging to love; difficult or dysfunctional relationships
• any level of shippiness or non-shippiness: pre-ship, relationships that don't work out or gennish plot-based fic with my requested ship as a secondary focus are all a-okay with me
• dark/gritty/moody aesthetics
• imperfect happiness, bittersweetness, unfulfilled yearning
• complicated, bittersweet twists on seemingly fluffy premises
• ensemble casts, background characters, outsider POV
• competence porn, especially of the ’walking human disaster is also breathtakingly competent’ variety
• mundane details, little moments of human vulnerability
• politics, bureaucracy, propaganda
• banter, snark, gallows humour, quippiness
• guilty pleasures: denying them, suppressing them, and finally giving into temptation
• tropes: hurt/comfort, enemies to lovers, forced proximity, huddling for warmth, fake relationships, bodyswap
• descriptions of food, characters eating or sharing food, food as comfort
• kidfic: the ups and downs of new parenthood; characters with fraught pasts determined to do better for their kids; tough guys going soft over little ones; dwelling in lavish, messy, sticky, smiley detail on how cute babies are (biokids, surprise acquisitions, OCs or canonical kids drawn however implausibly into my ship's care are all good)
• military kink: uniforms, weapons, ‘sir’
• harsh environments, brutal weather, survival/adventure stories
• redemption (or failed redemption)
• religion: worldbuilding around fictional faiths, or culturally appropriate real religious elements (Christian allegory in Tolkien, Buddist/Shinto/Confucian themes in Bleach, etc.)
• meta-fic stuff: subversions, tongue-in-cheek use of tropes, crack treated (semi-)seriously, genre-savvy characters, narratorial asides, really anything that engages playfully with the fictional world we're sharing
• non-standard formats: drabbles, non-linear, epistolary, social media, in-universe meta.

💀 Dark likes

I love my dark themes both overt and covert - if you're not feeling the in-your-face disasterfest, by all means creep me out with subtle insinuations or dark twists to sweet-seeming premises. Some favourite themes:

• unreliable narrators
• characters doing terrible things for sympathetic reasons
• grey morality, antiheroes, villain-centred morality
• extremist politics, callous bureaucracies, the mundane horrors of life under the jackboot
• 'ugly' mental illness: violence, paranoia, self-destructiveness, warped thinking
• self-harm, suicide attempts or ideation
• psychological horror
• coercion, blackmail, abuse of power
• victim blaming
• self-harm, self-destructiveness, suicide attempts
• physical torture: flogging, beating, burrning, bone-breaking, electrocuting
• psychological/'enhanced interrogation' style torture: sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, stress positions, extreme noise and temperature, deliberate humiliation.

🍑 Smut likes

As mentioned in my DNWs, I’m not currently looking for PWP/fic where smut is the main focus. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love it as part of a broader-reaching fic, if you end up running long enough for this to come up (don’t worry, this is a contingency, not an expectation – I know the minimum word count <3). In general I love sex that says something about the people involved, that's awkward and imperfect and humanising. Specific sex acts are less important to me than characterisation: I'm ready and eager to be sold on pretty much any kink if it's being used as a lens to bring my faves’ desires, beliefs, motives, hangups and relationship skills (or lack thereof) into focus.

Request details

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

I love Tolkien but am not at all a purist, so feel free to draw as much or as little as you want from his canon, or make like the showrunners and throw everything out the window. I’m going to prompt entirely as if show canon is all there is; anything else is bonus content.

🧡 Galadriel | Artanis/Adar (Rings of Power)
🧡 Galadriel | Artanis & Adar (Rings of Power)

I see this two as on pretty even moral footing: Adar is out to liberate his family of downtrodden ex-slaves by brutally massacring the innocent Southlanders and stealing their homes, while Galadriel is a designated “good guy” who’s out and proud about her frothing racial hatred and brought Sauron back to Middle-earth because she was too caught up in what she wanted from him to listen when he all but straight-up told her who he was. They’re both horrible, loving, passionate, well-meaning, deeply flawed people and I’m here to wallow in the mess they’re sure to make of each other’s lives.

Optional prompts:

– Can we go a little deeper on that part where Galadriel threatened to genocide Adar’s whole race and make him watch? It’s compelling to me that the two of them seem to be travelling the same path in opposite directions. Adar is coming from a past of relentless violence; his anger has burnt itself out and he’s tired and wants peace, but is still more than willing to draw from the same old brutal playbook to win it. Galadriel is coming from a past of peace turned to initially by-the-book warfare now turning to something much, much darker; she’s right on the brink of crossing a line that would transform her into the same kind of threat as the enemy she chased there. Adar has already seen how much they have in common; I’d love Galadriel to see it, too.

– Same theme of common ground, but softer? I love that Adar still speaks Elvish and observes Elvish rituals, and I’d love them to have a chance to connect over their shared background. Maybe Adar doesn’t escape but gets taken back to Eregion as a prisoner, where his firsthand knowledge of Elvish custom and culture becomes impossible to ignore. Maybe Galadriel starts to question her beliefs about the Uruk race. (Or maybe she doesn’t, and instead starts to spiral downwards into a distrust of even herself and her own people if they’re capable of sharing traits with beings so corrupt and filthy.)

– Speaking of, what’s it like for Adar being back around Elves? Does he share any of Galadriel’s loathing for what he’s become, or has he truly made peace with his new Uruk nature?

– Enemy of my enemy! We’ve already seen Galadriel team up with Sauron against Adar; now let’s turn the tables and have her grudgingly ally with Adar and his forces against an enemy who wants to subjugate them all.

– Adar finds himself caring for an actual child: a tiny Uruk whose parents were lost in the war. Galadriel may hate orcs, but even her vitriol falters in the face of someone so clearly harmless and helpless.

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The Mandalorian

💛 Din Djarin/Bo-Katan Kryze

I adore the lopsided rivalry baked into this pairing: Din has something Bo-Katan desperately wants; he’d give it to her without a second thought; she can’t accept it. Presumably, lots of tension and not-quite-fair resentment ensue!

I love how they both care so deeply about being Mandalorian, and yet being Mandalorian means such wildly different things to them. Bo-Katan’s history is enmeshed in every part of her people’s recent history; Din grew up in an isolationist cult, cut off from all of it. Bo-Katan is practical and politically ruthless; Din’s ideals are as hard and unbending as beskar. (Well, except for Baby Yoda and the face thing – but that’s the beautiful exception that proves the heartbreaking rule!) Bo-Katan works seamlessly as part of a badass Mandalorian hit squad; Din’s used to fighting alone, and looks clumsy and awkward when he tries to integrate. The things they have in common only serve to draw attention to how far apart they really are, and it’s exactly that distance – those incompatibilities, those conflicting plans and clashing needs – that make me ship them together like burning.

Optional prompts:

– Din needs to get to the ruined mines of Mandalore to bathe in the living waters and redeem himself from the removal of his helmet. Bo-Katan needs to return to Mandalorian soil if she ever hopes to reclaim it from the Empire. Once again, their objectives align! Time for another extremely tense teamup? :D

– Din learns more about Death Watch and the history of his religion. I doubt he and Bo-Katan are ever going to see fully eye to eye about the virtues or vices of fundamentalism, but I’d love to see them coming to grips with each other’s perspectives.

– Bo-Katan persuades Din to help her rally the Mandalorians behind the Darksaber.

– Din persuades Bo-Katan to help him and Baby Yoda on another of their reckless adventures.

– Can you fit two adults inside a single-seater N-1 starfighter? Should you fit two adults inside a single-seater N-1 starfighter? For reasons, Din and Bo-Katan find out. (Maybe they’re alone together and the closeness leads to unbearable sexual tension. Or maybe they’re there with Baby Yoda munching snacks and watching from his little droid seat, and nothing has ever been less conducive to sexytimes in their lives.)

– The mask comes off during an intimate moment.

– The mask emphatically does not come off during an intimate moment.

– To secure the political succession of Mandalore, Din and Bo-Katan have a child together (or adopt a tiny human foundling). Bo-Katan, who's never been the maternal type, has to come to terms with the sudden and overwhelming depth of her feelings for this new little person; Din, who's been there before, has to manage a jealous green toddler who's none too sure about sharing his dad.

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Star Wars (Marvel Comics)

💚 Ben Solo | Kylo Ren/Voe (SW Comics)
💚 Ben Solo | Kylo Ren & Voe (SW Comics)

Voe to me was the most compelling new character in the Rise of Kylo Ren comics and I only wish we’d gotten more of her. For so many reasons she’s a terrible Jedi – angry, impulsive, competitive, insecure – but the moment things get serious, she’s able to cast all those struggles aside and focus on helping innocent people. She’s a good foil to young Jedi Ben, who looks better at the lofty spiritual stuff but inside is ready to detonate at first pressure. He’s so confident in his judgment of her, and so right in all the ways that don’t matter, and so wrong in the one way that really, really does.

But she totally survived Mimban, right? She’s out there somewhere, ready for a reckoning with the man who tried to throw her life away like rubbish as his first act of true, senseless, nihilistic evil. I want it so bad.

Optional prompts:

– After Somehow (TM) surviving, Voe eventually does what she maybe should have done in the first place and makes that call to Leia. It’s far too late to save Ben, but by joining the Resistance she can help stop his breakdown from breaking anyone else.

– After Somehow (TM) surviving, Voe falls to the dark side – not seeking renown or power, but simple personal revenge. By the time she manages to catch up to Ben, he’s already returned to the light, making their confrontation a near-perfect reversal of the last time they fought.

– Voe will never be a Jedi – there’s no one left to teach her – but instead of running her through, Ben finds a more productive use for her potential. She joins the Knights of Ren along with him, and secretly plots to one day destroy the man who for now she’s forced to kneel to like the rest of the Knights.

– Voe survives but it costs her all her strength in the Force. With her powers gone, she’s freed from the burden of proving herself, and finds a new vocation in passing on Master Skywalker’s teachings to a new generation of students whose power she no longer shares. It’s not what she envisioned for herself, but she’s enjoying it … until one day Ben shows back up in her life, having lost his powers in much the same way on Exegol.

– Ben returns to the light while the war against the First Order is still ongoing; Voe, who’s working for the Resistance, struggles to cope with the sudden return of and apparent lack of consequences for the man who ran her through and left her for dead.

– Ben doesn’t kill Voe at all; instead of sending him off the deep end, Tai’s death snaps him to his senses and he teams up with Voe on a revenge quest against the Knights of Ren and Snoke. Voe still blames Ben for the deaths of Hennix and Tai, and Ben still blames Luke for trying to kill him in his sleep, and the whole thing’s a fraught mess just barely held together by their grim shared purpose.

– Young, pre-Mimban Ben and Voe get sent off together on an assignment for the school. Away from the steadying influence of characters like Tai and Master Skywalker, their frenmity is free to grow to its full, acrimonious potential. Frenemies with benefits or regular platonic frenemies, I’m easy – I just want Voe to have lots of messy, conflicting feelings about Ben and for Ben to be an emotionally immature jerk about it.

– Bodyswap! When a training exercise goes wrong, Voe gets what Ben so dismissively suggested to Ren was her wish: she gets to be him. Only trouble is, he gets to be her as well.

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