May the Fourth Be With You Exchange 2023

[lucymonster]

Dear Yoda

Thanks so much for creating for me! I love all the characters and ships I’ve requested and am so excited to see what I get.

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 also fine with any past or background ships you want to include. 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.

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

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.


🎨 Art likes
Any of my fic likes that can translate visually are just as relevant to my taste in art. For any of my ficcier prompts or favourite tropes, I'd be over the moon to receive an illustration from the hypothetical fic that fills them. I love dark, shadowy colour palettes and goth/metal/industrial styles and an overall moody gloom. I love symbolism and meaningful visual motifs, and I'm open to oblique, metaphorical depictions of ships just as much as pictures of people kissing. (But I am also, to be clear, still very keen on pictures of people kissing.)

On a different note, fluffy art is also amazing. I love chibis, cuddle piles and all manner of sugary cuteness. Polka dots or rainbows in the background just because? You son of a bitch, I'm in. My ship holds hands in the background while their new pet hamster frolics across most of the canvas? Just make sure that little guy's cheeks are as chubby as they come! Throw my grumpy black-clad faves into a scene of lollipops and sparkles? I'll squeal so much that even my ship's new pet hamster will think I'm shrill. I also adore that trend of tiny chibi characters with food items larger than they are.

Request details

❤️ THE MANDALORIAN ❤️

Din Djarin/Bo-Katan Kryze

Din Djarin/Bo-Katan Kryze & Grogu

Please note that I’m keeping up with Mando s3 as it releases, and will be a-okay with any of the following: gifts that include major spoilers for the season, gifts that hinge on plot points that haven’t yet happened as of me writing this letter, gifts that are already jossed by the time reveals happen, and gifts that completely ignore the new episodes in favour of your own ideas. Basically I’m loving everything about the show but my expectations are WIDE OPEN and I have no cherished headcanons to protect, so unless something happens in canon that hits one of my stated DNWs – in which case please pretend it didn’t happen – you can safely use as much or as little of the new material as you like.

Anyway: this ship pretty much epitomises my thing for ultra-competent badasses who are also hopeless failboats in their intimate lives. How can romance blossom when Din can’t remove his helmet? What deeper convictions lie behind Bo-Katan’s cynical act? How can the two of them reconcile their differing ideas of what it means to be Mandalorian? And not least importantly, what does Grogu think about it? Some things I’d love to see more of: leadership politics, space adventures, bounty missions, parenting hijinks, training together, cultural/religious worldbuilding.

❤️ STAR WARS SEQUEL TRILOGY ❤️

Finn/Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren

Poe Dameron/Finn & Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren

Poe Dameron/Finn/Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren

I never, ever get tired of redeemed Ben Solo finding an awkward, baggage-laden place for himself among Rey and her Resistance friends. I will devour as many ‘Hey Finn, hey Poe, look who came back with me from Exegol’ scenarios as you can throw at me. I will swallow any defection AU, captured-by-Resistance AU or otherwise-came-back-to-the-light-but-is-still-a-maladjusted-jerk AU you can dream up. The key ingredients for me are redemption as a complex process, forgiveness as hard but rewarding work, and lots of snarky banter between people who would strongly prefer not to have feelings for each other. Everything else is sweet, sweet icing on my very favourite cake.

❤️ STAR WARS: THE RISE OF KYLO REN ❤️

Ben Solo | Kylo Ren/Voe

Ben Solo | Kylo Ren & Voe

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.

Comments

[rhoda_rants]

I *might* have an idea I can contribute for this! Do you have a word count preference? (The one I'm thinking of is a one-shot.)

[lucymonster]

Ooh, that sounds exciting! 😁All wordcounts are great - the “official” minimum length for this event is 500 words, but that only applies to formal assignments. Extra works can be any length at all.

[rhoda_rants]

Oooh, there's an official thing. Do you care if I ignore the "rules" and just go by what you've requested here? It will be longer than 500 words.

[lucymonster]

Oh, absolutely, I’d be over the moon if you want to take a prompt and do whatever you want with it outside the event! 🥰