Yuletide 2025
Oct. 15th, 2025 02:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonsterSkip to: Deep End | The Hurricane Wars | The Love Hypothesis | Love Theoretically
⭐ 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:
💀 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:
🍑 Smut likes
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.
❤️ Adam Carlsen, Olive Smith, Scarlett Vandermeer
The only ship I’m passionate about is Adam/Olive, so please don’t explicitly break up their marriage – if you’re writing gen then I’d prefer their interactions to be ambiguous enough that I can assume what I like behind the scenes. I’m fine with Scarlett/Lukas in the background but not really interested in their relationship being a major focus. On the other hand, if you’re up for it, I would LOVE to see some Scarlett/Pen. Maybe instead of breaking up over kinks, Pen and Lukas break up because Pen is starting to have doubts about her sexual orientation, spurred along by her unbelievably gorgeous new synchro partner…
You’re very welcome to write just Scarlett & Olive or Scarlett & Adam instead of all three characters, if that works better for you! I’d also be totally fine with Olive and Adam receding into the background of a Scarlett/Pen fic, though you’d make my day if they still get cameos. I DNW any romantic Scarlett/Adam at all or any reciprocal Scarlett/Olive, but if you want to give Scarlett a bit of a one-sided puppy crush on Olive, I’d find that adorable.
Anyway, yeah, my absolute favourite parts of this novel were Scarlett’s interactions with her scary computational biology professor who turns out to hold her in high (if well hidden) regard, and her sunny new boss who loves all things pumpkin spice and turns out to be married to her scary, probably pumpkin-spice-allergic computational biology professor. I love the implication that the two of them were tug-of-warring over Scarlett as a potential recruit (and that Adam let Olive win so easily, because of course he did). I’d love to see more of Scarlett finding her feet in the lab and getting close to Olive as an older mentor figure, or taking her slightly terrified place in Adam’s lab in an AU where Olive let him win the tug-of-war instead. Or maybe she gets recruited for a joint Adam-and-Olive research project, since we know they sometimes work together now! Maybe the experience inspires Scarlett to pivot her rigidly planned career in a more research-focused direction.
I also love that Adam and Olive attended Scarlett’s competition and would love to see more in that vein. If you’re familiar with diving as a sport then by all means get right into the nitty-gritty of it – I love reading about athletes, and I also love reading about athletes’ friends and loved ones trying to get their heads around all the complex details of a sport they know only vicariously.
Another idea: Scarlett is roped into some faculty event or other – probably Olive’s doing – and gets to experience the awkwardness and disorientation of having to interact socially with her professors and learning that they’re people too.
I guess basically my desires for this fandom can be boiled down to “please mentor the hell out of Scarlett”, with an enthusiastic yes to more Adam/Olive on the side if you’re also familiar with their story from The Love Hypothesis.
(Note: The characters Adam and Olive make their primary appearance in The Love Hypothesis, and bear strong physical resemblances to Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley. Obviously I’m 100% happy if you’ve only read Deep End and gift me a fic based purely on this request, but if you’re not familiar with the Adam/Olive storyline in TLH, please don’t flesh Adam and Olive out on your own – I’d prefer a gift where they’re relegated to purely supporting roles over one that substantially contradicts the canon I already have in my head. If (but only if) more information is helpful, I’ve written a short primer that you can find here at the end of my letter.)
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🧡 Alaric Ossinast
The whole character of Alaric is basically pure, unadulterated id fodder for me. The tortured backstory, including literal systematic torture by his father! The loneliness! The touch starvation, kindness starvation, the dogged sense of duty and loyalty that persists no matter how he’s treated. I love his sweet tooth and his moments of boyishness. I love the intensity of his attraction to Talasyn, his empathy towards her own past traumas and his shame and self-loathing as he pines for her, believing that his soul-deep yearning is unrequited.
There are exactly two things my heart dearly wants:
1) Whump this poor beautiful man! Whump him so hard! I want more brutally abusive Gaheris. More Talasyn-will-never-love-me angst. More grief for his mother and fear for his nation’s future and exhaustion from the long, grinding war. I want to wallow in all the bad things canon has done to him and I want to see him suffer even worse things that will grind him down to his component atoms. He hurts so pretty.
2) Give this poor beautiful man a break! He has suffered so much and I want him to have all the nice things. More of him enjoying sugary treats and all the unfamiliar luxuries Nenavar has to offer. More of his relationship with Talasyn growing closer and more tender, more of him earning her respect, her trust, her love. More of her being his safe place. More of Sevraim making him smile against his will behind the mask.
Basically, if your work lands anywhere on the hurt/comfort spectrum – from all-hurt to all-comfort or anywhere in between – I’m going to be delighted.
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💛 Adam Carlsen
I absolutely adore Adam/Olive, do not want them broken up (unless temporarily, for angst) and would be over the moon to receive shipfic about them! But I’ve requested Adam by himself to also leave room for the kinds of gen I’d be just as thrilled to receive: grad school backstory, his friendships with other scientists and with Holden especially, general career stuff, or interactions with other academics or students.
Some prompts:
- Little snapshots of Olive’s life through Adam’s eyes, back before The Night when he was pining for her from afar. I’d like to see all the beautiful things he sees in her and all the emotionally stunted reasons he can’t possibly approach.
- Adam and Olive collaborate on a research project. I’d love to see them figuring out how to manage the power imbalance stemming from different levels of experience so they can work together as genuine academic equals.
- More of Adam’s traumatic grad school backstory – his supervisor’s abuse, Tom’s manipulation, the sleepless nights and ever-shifting goalposts and constant, overwhelming sense of powerlessness and inadequacy.
- Outsider perspective: let’s see Adam’s colleagues reacting to this weird new thing he has going with a random grad, or Olive’s friends being their most nosy selves at him (more Adam and Anh!!!), or his own students experiencing the moody, scary side of him that Olive never sees.
- I’d love to see more of Adam’s day-to-day life in academia. I genuinely love nitty-gritty details, okay? Give me all the dreary stuff: the faculty meetings, the unwanted social committee obligations, the undergrad wrangling, the hours and hours and hours in the lab. I’d love to see the parts of his work that make him feel alive, but I’d also love to see the parts that had him right on the brink of giving it all up for a while there. The long hours. The burnout. The frustration. The mind-numbing boredom. His dry, caustic, slightly antisocial humour through it all.
- What does Olive and Adam’s relationship look like once the honeymoon period wears off? I’d love to see them transition from the giddy world of get-together tropes to the much less glamorous work of maintaining a solid partnership through all the frictions of day-to-day life, and in the process getting to know each other in all the mundane, flawed, painfully intimate detail that inevitably follows once the idealisation phase wears off.
Some less PG prompts:
- Pre-canon, Adam experiments with Holden. He discovers for sure that he’s NOT bisexual, but it makes for a good story later once the unbearable awkwardness has worn off.
- Pre-canon, Adam jerks off fantasising vividly about Olive and wallows in his own patheticness.
- Directly after the ‘ik hou van jou’, Adam accompanies Olive to her place and goes absolutely wild on her as an outlet for all that emotion.
- Olive decides to mess with Adam’s composure by sucking him almost all the way off before a big presentation then forcing him to go out in public once he’s right on the edge of falling apart.
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💚 Adam Carlsen, Elsie Hannaway, Olive Smith, Jonathan “Jack” Smith-Turner
For this fandom, I’d also be happy with subsets of my requested characters as long as the subset includes Adam, Olive or both. The only ships I’m interested in as a focus are Adam/Olive and Elsie/Jack, though George and her wife are very welcome to make cameo appearances!
So, Elsie should totally spend more time hanging out with Jack’s friends! I love how easily she clicked with Adam and especially Olive, and how quick Olive was to take her into confidence and start giving her career advice, lol. I loved seeing them connect over being the only two relatively junior academics at a party full of tenured faculty. With or without their respective boyfriends, they should be besties! Maybe Olive ends up being one of the first people Elsie confides in after Dr L’s betrayal comes to light. Maybe they watch Twilight together. Maybe, postcanon, they take up fondly venting to each other about the difficult men they’ve chosen to fall in love with. (Maybe said men manage to have an emotionally honest conversation with each other at some point, at least for as long as it takes to expose what tail-wagging golden retriever boyfriends they are.) Maybe all four of them go on a hike sometime and Elsie, as the least athletic of the group, ends up needing a little extra support – in the form of a pep talk from Olive, or of Jack straight up carrying her. And then Adam gets competitive and insists on carrying Olive, and the whole thing turns into a very silly impromptu wife-carrying race.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this letter, I’m also genuinely super interested in the nitty-gritty of life in academia and would love to hear them all compare notes or commiserate about the ins and outs of their day jobs!
This prompt only really works if you’ve also read The Love Hypothesis, but: fake dating! I so badly want the whole fake dating secret to come out between them all. Maybe Elsie opens up to Olive about her fake dating past, or vice versa; maybe family drama forces Jack to tell Adam in confidence about Elsie’s history with his brother. Maybe Elsie lets it slip in front of Adam and is surprised to learn that the man who’s very obviously never watched a romcom in his life is nonetheless familiar with the trope.
These are just a few ideas to start with – don’t feel beholden to follow a specific prompt! I’d really just love something sweet and funny about the whole ensemble or my requested subsets thereof.
(Note: The characters Adam and Olive make their primary appearance in The Love Hypothesis, and bear strong physical resemblances to Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley. Obviously I’m 100% happy if you’ve only read Love, Theoretically and gift me a fic based purely on this request, but if you’re not familiar with the Adam/Olive storyline in TLH, please don’t flesh Adam and Olive out on your own – I’d prefer a gift where they’re relegated to purely supporting roles over one that substantially contradicts the canon I already have in my head. If (but only if) more information is helpful, I’ve written a short primer that you can find here at the end of my letter.)
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The characters Adam and Olive make their primary appearance in The Love Hypothesis, and bear strong physical resemblances to Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley. Obviously I’m 100% happy if you’ve only read one of my requested Ali Hazelwood novels and gift me a fic based purely on that, but if you’re not familiar with their storyline in TLH, please don’t flesh Adam and Olive out on your own – I’d prefer a gift where they’re relegated to purely supporting roles over one that substantially contradicts the canon I already have in my head.
If (but only if) more details are helpful to you, I thought I’d write up a brief summary of Adam and Olive’s story. I promise this is NOT an attempt to try and force you to write multiple canons! The place I’m coming from is “here’s some info that I, personally, would find useful to have on hand if I were writing for one book but knew nothing about the others”. If this doesn’t work for your process then please feel free to completely ignore this section – again, I’ve requested each book as a canon in its own right, and I’ll be very happy with fic that’s solely about any single one of them.
So, associate Professor Dr. Adam Carlsen is a wildly successful computational biologist with a reputation for being bad-tempered, arrogant, hypercritical and unapproachable. Olive Smith is a grad student researching cancer biology in his department, though she doesn’t work directly with or under him. He has been secretly pining for her since he first encountered her crying in his lab’s bathroom right before her admissions interview, having been temporarily blinded by a pair of expired contacts; he has never approached her since then due to concerns about their power imbalance. Olive has no idea Adam is aware of her existence, and views him only as the scary professor who has made a bunch of her friends cry. For contrived romcom reasons, Olive needs to convince her best friend she’s dating someone and ends up kissing the first man she meets on campus one night, who turns out to be Adam. He surprises her by gamely taking up the fake dating charade, and over the course of the ensuing month of performative coffee dates, Olive falls head over heels for him: turns out he’s actually a super decent guy who just has bad social skills and prefers science to people. But he is still keeping his own feelings for her firmly under wraps, and she doesn’t dare hope hers are reciprocated – until a vicious sexual harassment incident involving Adam’s close friend and collaborator, Dr. Tom Benton, causes Adam to blurt out that Olive is “the woman he loves” while confronting Tom in her defence. After that they start dating for real. In Love, Theoretically Olive has finished her PhD and moved onto a postdoctoral fellowship, and they two are revealed to be engaged; by Deep End, they’re married and both working at Stanford.
Some miscellaneous character notes:
Adam is the son of two US diplomats, was born in the Hague, and grew up all over the world before settling in DC during high school. He is built like a brick shithouse, loves running and hiking, and wears mostly black. He’s a MacArthur fellow, cares deeply about scientific integrity, and while he’s unrepentantly hard on his students, he views it as a matter of holding them to their highest potential and not polluting the field by allowing them to publish unsound work, rather than wanting to harm or humiliate them. He is scared of needles, finds chocolate, tea and most sweet things disgusting, and has strong preferences for black coffee, plain bagels and simple foods in general (the people close to him joke a lot about him subsisting off raw broccoli, hard-boiled spinach, etc).
Olive is a Canadian who came to the US on a full academic scholarship. Her mother died of pancreatic cancer when Olive was 15, motivating her to devote herself to developing better diagnostic tools. She feels desperately in over her head through most of grad school, not to mention being hopelessly broke and dependent on faculty events with free food for her subsistence needs. She’s very sporty in general and an enthusiastic runner in particular; she considers herself unattractively skinny, freckled and unfeminine, though everyone else clearly thinks she’s pretty. She LOVES sugary foods, especially pumpkin spice and fancy frappucinos; she has a bit of a weakness for kitsch, and goes absolutely wild over a cheap sushi train restaurant at one point in canon.
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Dear Author
Thanks so much for writing for me! 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, too shippy/not shippy enough, whatever. I'm also fine with any past or background relationships or other supporting characters 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. I'm very much open to treats, and would be thrilled to receive treats about ANY character/s in any of my canons regardless of who I've requested for my main gift.
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!
![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
lucymonster
Thanks so much for writing for me! 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, too shippy/not shippy enough, whatever. I'm also fine with any past or background relationships or other supporting characters 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. I'm very much open to treats, and would be thrilled to receive treats about ANY character/s in any of my canons regardless of who I've requested for my main gift.
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!
General info
⛔ Do not want- Underage: explicit <18 sex, any <16 sex, any <13 romance
- Incest involving different generations or large age gaps
- Any mention of child death, including pregnancy loss
- On-screen child harm (requested characters recalling their childhood trauma is fine
- AUs other than canon divergence (including trope AUs: please no omegaverse, soulmarks etc)
- Unrequested identity headcanons
- Poetry, first person POV (unless in an unconventional format such as epistolary)
- 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
- bureaucracy, fictional politics and 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 details
- harsh environments, brutal weather, survival/adventure stories
- redemption (or failed redemption)
- religion (fictional for SFF settings; canonical or culturally likely for real-world settings)
- 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: creative POVs, drabbles, non-linear narratives, 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
- (fictional!) 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
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.
Some dynamics I’m reliably weak for:
- I can’t believe I get to touch this exquisite goddess, I’m so overwhelmed
- Ugh this jerk drives me mad but I can’t seem to keep my hands off them
- I’m an actual human disaster and this sex is going to have to make up for the therapy I’m not getting
- This love is forbidden and could ruin my life but I just can’t resist.
And a few of my forever favourite kinks, if a more specific starting point is helpful:
- orgasm delay/denial, sexual frustration, begging
- coming too quickly, loss of control, getting overwhelmed
- rough sex, hate sex, power imbalances
- on the other hand: tender, adoring, needy sex with lavish attention to each other's pleasure
- frottage, dry humping, clothed sex
- sex pollen
- different erogenous zones, being sensitive in non-genital places
- anal sex (het, slash or femslash), double or multiple penetration
- loss of virginity, inexperience, clumsy sex
- praise kink
- scar worship
- under-negotiated kinks
- any level of complex, problematic or questionable consent.
Request details
Deep End - Ali Hazelwood
❤️ Adam Carlsen, Olive Smith, Scarlett Vandermeer
The only ship I’m passionate about is Adam/Olive, so please don’t explicitly break up their marriage – if you’re writing gen then I’d prefer their interactions to be ambiguous enough that I can assume what I like behind the scenes. I’m fine with Scarlett/Lukas in the background but not really interested in their relationship being a major focus. On the other hand, if you’re up for it, I would LOVE to see some Scarlett/Pen. Maybe instead of breaking up over kinks, Pen and Lukas break up because Pen is starting to have doubts about her sexual orientation, spurred along by her unbelievably gorgeous new synchro partner…
You’re very welcome to write just Scarlett & Olive or Scarlett & Adam instead of all three characters, if that works better for you! I’d also be totally fine with Olive and Adam receding into the background of a Scarlett/Pen fic, though you’d make my day if they still get cameos. I DNW any romantic Scarlett/Adam at all or any reciprocal Scarlett/Olive, but if you want to give Scarlett a bit of a one-sided puppy crush on Olive, I’d find that adorable.
Anyway, yeah, my absolute favourite parts of this novel were Scarlett’s interactions with her scary computational biology professor who turns out to hold her in high (if well hidden) regard, and her sunny new boss who loves all things pumpkin spice and turns out to be married to her scary, probably pumpkin-spice-allergic computational biology professor. I love the implication that the two of them were tug-of-warring over Scarlett as a potential recruit (and that Adam let Olive win so easily, because of course he did). I’d love to see more of Scarlett finding her feet in the lab and getting close to Olive as an older mentor figure, or taking her slightly terrified place in Adam’s lab in an AU where Olive let him win the tug-of-war instead. Or maybe she gets recruited for a joint Adam-and-Olive research project, since we know they sometimes work together now! Maybe the experience inspires Scarlett to pivot her rigidly planned career in a more research-focused direction.
I also love that Adam and Olive attended Scarlett’s competition and would love to see more in that vein. If you’re familiar with diving as a sport then by all means get right into the nitty-gritty of it – I love reading about athletes, and I also love reading about athletes’ friends and loved ones trying to get their heads around all the complex details of a sport they know only vicariously.
Another idea: Scarlett is roped into some faculty event or other – probably Olive’s doing – and gets to experience the awkwardness and disorientation of having to interact socially with her professors and learning that they’re people too.
I guess basically my desires for this fandom can be boiled down to “please mentor the hell out of Scarlett”, with an enthusiastic yes to more Adam/Olive on the side if you’re also familiar with their story from The Love Hypothesis.
(Note: The characters Adam and Olive make their primary appearance in The Love Hypothesis, and bear strong physical resemblances to Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley. Obviously I’m 100% happy if you’ve only read Deep End and gift me a fic based purely on this request, but if you’re not familiar with the Adam/Olive storyline in TLH, please don’t flesh Adam and Olive out on your own – I’d prefer a gift where they’re relegated to purely supporting roles over one that substantially contradicts the canon I already have in my head. If (but only if) more information is helpful, I’ve written a short primer that you can find here at the end of my letter.)
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The Hurricane Wars - Thea Guanzon
🧡 Alaric Ossinast
The whole character of Alaric is basically pure, unadulterated id fodder for me. The tortured backstory, including literal systematic torture by his father! The loneliness! The touch starvation, kindness starvation, the dogged sense of duty and loyalty that persists no matter how he’s treated. I love his sweet tooth and his moments of boyishness. I love the intensity of his attraction to Talasyn, his empathy towards her own past traumas and his shame and self-loathing as he pines for her, believing that his soul-deep yearning is unrequited.
There are exactly two things my heart dearly wants:
1) Whump this poor beautiful man! Whump him so hard! I want more brutally abusive Gaheris. More Talasyn-will-never-love-me angst. More grief for his mother and fear for his nation’s future and exhaustion from the long, grinding war. I want to wallow in all the bad things canon has done to him and I want to see him suffer even worse things that will grind him down to his component atoms. He hurts so pretty.
2) Give this poor beautiful man a break! He has suffered so much and I want him to have all the nice things. More of him enjoying sugary treats and all the unfamiliar luxuries Nenavar has to offer. More of his relationship with Talasyn growing closer and more tender, more of him earning her respect, her trust, her love. More of her being his safe place. More of Sevraim making him smile against his will behind the mask.
Basically, if your work lands anywhere on the hurt/comfort spectrum – from all-hurt to all-comfort or anywhere in between – I’m going to be delighted.
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The Love Hypothesis - Ali Hazelwood
💛 Adam Carlsen
I absolutely adore Adam/Olive, do not want them broken up (unless temporarily, for angst) and would be over the moon to receive shipfic about them! But I’ve requested Adam by himself to also leave room for the kinds of gen I’d be just as thrilled to receive: grad school backstory, his friendships with other scientists and with Holden especially, general career stuff, or interactions with other academics or students.
Some prompts:
- Little snapshots of Olive’s life through Adam’s eyes, back before The Night when he was pining for her from afar. I’d like to see all the beautiful things he sees in her and all the emotionally stunted reasons he can’t possibly approach.
- Adam and Olive collaborate on a research project. I’d love to see them figuring out how to manage the power imbalance stemming from different levels of experience so they can work together as genuine academic equals.
- More of Adam’s traumatic grad school backstory – his supervisor’s abuse, Tom’s manipulation, the sleepless nights and ever-shifting goalposts and constant, overwhelming sense of powerlessness and inadequacy.
- Outsider perspective: let’s see Adam’s colleagues reacting to this weird new thing he has going with a random grad, or Olive’s friends being their most nosy selves at him (more Adam and Anh!!!), or his own students experiencing the moody, scary side of him that Olive never sees.
- I’d love to see more of Adam’s day-to-day life in academia. I genuinely love nitty-gritty details, okay? Give me all the dreary stuff: the faculty meetings, the unwanted social committee obligations, the undergrad wrangling, the hours and hours and hours in the lab. I’d love to see the parts of his work that make him feel alive, but I’d also love to see the parts that had him right on the brink of giving it all up for a while there. The long hours. The burnout. The frustration. The mind-numbing boredom. His dry, caustic, slightly antisocial humour through it all.
- What does Olive and Adam’s relationship look like once the honeymoon period wears off? I’d love to see them transition from the giddy world of get-together tropes to the much less glamorous work of maintaining a solid partnership through all the frictions of day-to-day life, and in the process getting to know each other in all the mundane, flawed, painfully intimate detail that inevitably follows once the idealisation phase wears off.
Some less PG prompts:
- Pre-canon, Adam experiments with Holden. He discovers for sure that he’s NOT bisexual, but it makes for a good story later once the unbearable awkwardness has worn off.
- Pre-canon, Adam jerks off fantasising vividly about Olive and wallows in his own patheticness.
- Directly after the ‘ik hou van jou’, Adam accompanies Olive to her place and goes absolutely wild on her as an outlet for all that emotion.
- Olive decides to mess with Adam’s composure by sucking him almost all the way off before a big presentation then forcing him to go out in public once he’s right on the edge of falling apart.
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Love Theoretically - Ali Hazelwood
💚 Adam Carlsen, Elsie Hannaway, Olive Smith, Jonathan “Jack” Smith-Turner
For this fandom, I’d also be happy with subsets of my requested characters as long as the subset includes Adam, Olive or both. The only ships I’m interested in as a focus are Adam/Olive and Elsie/Jack, though George and her wife are very welcome to make cameo appearances!
So, Elsie should totally spend more time hanging out with Jack’s friends! I love how easily she clicked with Adam and especially Olive, and how quick Olive was to take her into confidence and start giving her career advice, lol. I loved seeing them connect over being the only two relatively junior academics at a party full of tenured faculty. With or without their respective boyfriends, they should be besties! Maybe Olive ends up being one of the first people Elsie confides in after Dr L’s betrayal comes to light. Maybe they watch Twilight together. Maybe, postcanon, they take up fondly venting to each other about the difficult men they’ve chosen to fall in love with. (Maybe said men manage to have an emotionally honest conversation with each other at some point, at least for as long as it takes to expose what tail-wagging golden retriever boyfriends they are.) Maybe all four of them go on a hike sometime and Elsie, as the least athletic of the group, ends up needing a little extra support – in the form of a pep talk from Olive, or of Jack straight up carrying her. And then Adam gets competitive and insists on carrying Olive, and the whole thing turns into a very silly impromptu wife-carrying race.
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this letter, I’m also genuinely super interested in the nitty-gritty of life in academia and would love to hear them all compare notes or commiserate about the ins and outs of their day jobs!
This prompt only really works if you’ve also read The Love Hypothesis, but: fake dating! I so badly want the whole fake dating secret to come out between them all. Maybe Elsie opens up to Olive about her fake dating past, or vice versa; maybe family drama forces Jack to tell Adam in confidence about Elsie’s history with his brother. Maybe Elsie lets it slip in front of Adam and is surprised to learn that the man who’s very obviously never watched a romcom in his life is nonetheless familiar with the trope.
These are just a few ideas to start with – don’t feel beholden to follow a specific prompt! I’d really just love something sweet and funny about the whole ensemble or my requested subsets thereof.
(Note: The characters Adam and Olive make their primary appearance in The Love Hypothesis, and bear strong physical resemblances to Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley. Obviously I’m 100% happy if you’ve only read Love, Theoretically and gift me a fic based purely on this request, but if you’re not familiar with the Adam/Olive storyline in TLH, please don’t flesh Adam and Olive out on your own – I’d prefer a gift where they’re relegated to purely supporting roles over one that substantially contradicts the canon I already have in my head. If (but only if) more information is helpful, I’ve written a short primer that you can find here at the end of my letter.)
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Aliverse Primer
The characters Adam and Olive make their primary appearance in The Love Hypothesis, and bear strong physical resemblances to Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley. Obviously I’m 100% happy if you’ve only read one of my requested Ali Hazelwood novels and gift me a fic based purely on that, but if you’re not familiar with their storyline in TLH, please don’t flesh Adam and Olive out on your own – I’d prefer a gift where they’re relegated to purely supporting roles over one that substantially contradicts the canon I already have in my head.
If (but only if) more details are helpful to you, I thought I’d write up a brief summary of Adam and Olive’s story. I promise this is NOT an attempt to try and force you to write multiple canons! The place I’m coming from is “here’s some info that I, personally, would find useful to have on hand if I were writing for one book but knew nothing about the others”. If this doesn’t work for your process then please feel free to completely ignore this section – again, I’ve requested each book as a canon in its own right, and I’ll be very happy with fic that’s solely about any single one of them.
So, associate Professor Dr. Adam Carlsen is a wildly successful computational biologist with a reputation for being bad-tempered, arrogant, hypercritical and unapproachable. Olive Smith is a grad student researching cancer biology in his department, though she doesn’t work directly with or under him. He has been secretly pining for her since he first encountered her crying in his lab’s bathroom right before her admissions interview, having been temporarily blinded by a pair of expired contacts; he has never approached her since then due to concerns about their power imbalance. Olive has no idea Adam is aware of her existence, and views him only as the scary professor who has made a bunch of her friends cry. For contrived romcom reasons, Olive needs to convince her best friend she’s dating someone and ends up kissing the first man she meets on campus one night, who turns out to be Adam. He surprises her by gamely taking up the fake dating charade, and over the course of the ensuing month of performative coffee dates, Olive falls head over heels for him: turns out he’s actually a super decent guy who just has bad social skills and prefers science to people. But he is still keeping his own feelings for her firmly under wraps, and she doesn’t dare hope hers are reciprocated – until a vicious sexual harassment incident involving Adam’s close friend and collaborator, Dr. Tom Benton, causes Adam to blurt out that Olive is “the woman he loves” while confronting Tom in her defence. After that they start dating for real. In Love, Theoretically Olive has finished her PhD and moved onto a postdoctoral fellowship, and they two are revealed to be engaged; by Deep End, they’re married and both working at Stanford.
Some miscellaneous character notes:
Adam is the son of two US diplomats, was born in the Hague, and grew up all over the world before settling in DC during high school. He is built like a brick shithouse, loves running and hiking, and wears mostly black. He’s a MacArthur fellow, cares deeply about scientific integrity, and while he’s unrepentantly hard on his students, he views it as a matter of holding them to their highest potential and not polluting the field by allowing them to publish unsound work, rather than wanting to harm or humiliate them. He is scared of needles, finds chocolate, tea and most sweet things disgusting, and has strong preferences for black coffee, plain bagels and simple foods in general (the people close to him joke a lot about him subsisting off raw broccoli, hard-boiled spinach, etc).
Olive is a Canadian who came to the US on a full academic scholarship. Her mother died of pancreatic cancer when Olive was 15, motivating her to devote herself to developing better diagnostic tools. She feels desperately in over her head through most of grad school, not to mention being hopelessly broke and dependent on faculty events with free food for her subsistence needs. She’s very sporty in general and an enthusiastic runner in particular; she considers herself unattractively skinny, freckled and unfeminine, though everyone else clearly thinks she’s pretty. She LOVES sugary foods, especially pumpkin spice and fancy frappucinos; she has a bit of a weakness for kitsch, and goes absolutely wild over a cheap sushi train restaurant at one point in canon.
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Date: 2025-10-20 04:51 pm (UTC)HAHA @ your dynamics I’m reliably weak for :D
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Date: 2025-10-21 11:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-22 11:42 am (UTC)