Summer of Horror Exchange 2026
May. 23rd, 2026 04:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonsterDear Summer of Horror Author
Thank you so much for offering my canons / claiming my pinch hit / arriving here however you arrived! I’ve only recently started immersing myself in the horror genre and am excited to explore the whole wide world of possibilities under this big umbrella. There are a small number of things I know for sure I don’t like and a much larger number I already adore, but if you feel inspired towards something that falls in neither category, please feel free to go ahead with it – who knows, you may be introducing me to my next favourite thing! I only have a few hard nopes to begin with, and when I’m reading or watching horror, I’m even more than usual in a mindset of wanting to test my limits. So if you’re in any doubt, I’d rather you err on the side of going too far than of holding back. :)
In general, unless otherwise specified, I prefer:
🖤 Horror likes 🖤
â›” Do Not Want â›”
Requested genres: Comedic Horror, Cosmic Horror, Folk Horror, Institutional Horror, Killer Horror, Monster Horror, Paranormal Horror, Psychological Horror, Religious Horror, Science Fiction Horror, Supernatural Horror, Survival Horror
💜 Characters: Alaric Ossinast & Talasyn
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.
And Talasyn! Poor girl has the weight of her whole entire nation on her shoulders, and is in way over her head trying to play complicated, backstabby political games when her whole life’s training has been in directness. I love how there’s always such tension between the exquisitely attired, court-mannered lachis’ka she’s required to be and the half-feral street child she really is. And most of all I love it when she takes out that tension on Alaric. :D
With that in mind, it would be great to see the two of them facing some new horror together. Post-apocalypse AU where they failed to stop the Moonless Dark? Gaheris takes over Nenavar and shatters what’s left of the Sardovian resistance, and is free to unleash the full horrors of his regime across the world? Or something smaller scale – Talasyn and Alaric run across some mysterious, mystical horror or terrible unknown Nenavarene beast while they’re out training in the jungle? Something goes wrong with a sever? One of them loses control of their powers? The ghosts of those who fell in the war rise up to torment them? I’m up for anything!
Requested genres: Comedic Horror, Cosmic Horror, Folk Horror, Institutional Horror, Killer Horror, Monster Horror, Paranormal Horror, Psychological Horror, Religious Horror, Science Fiction Horror, Supernatural Horror, Survival Horror
â›” Canon-specific DNW: Permanently breaking up Adam and Olive, or explicitly ruling out a future romantic connection between them.
🩷 Characters: Adam Carlsen & Olive Smith
My dream gift for this canon would be something that brings along the tropiness, genre-savvy and tongue-in-cheek humour of the novel with it into a horror setting. I am also absolutely down for more serious horror (I wouldn’t be signed up to this exchange if I weren’t!) but in any event I’d prefer a story that ends with Adam and Olive together, in love, and in a position to move on with their lives, or at least in a position where that outcome hasn’t been ruled out. Pre-relationship, established relationship, alternate get-together and plot-focused fic where relationship elements take a backseat are all welcome.
Prompts:
We know they’re both outdoorsy, so perhaps they stray off the path while hiking and stumble across some ravenous beast/isolated cult community/malevolent forest god/evil witch living alone in a murder hut? Or else they decide to try a more extreme activity – caving, diving, mountaineering – and end up trapped in a desperate survival situation? Would love to see mutual protectiveness, won’t-leave-without-you, desperately trying not to burden each other with their hurts, and each refusing to quit for the other’s sake.
Or how about a post-canon adventure in a whole new genre? Now happily coupled up, Adam and Olive find themselves embroiled in a surprising new adventure. Some ideas:
For any of these, I’d also love to see a canon-divergence AU sometime after their first meeting in the bathroom, where instead of The Kiss and the whole fake dating scheme, it’s the horror that breaks the pining barrier between them. Olive has NO idea why Stanford’s most dickish professor is suddenly risking his life to save hers, but hey, it’s not like she’s in a position to complain!
I don’t have the knowledge to write this myself, but I’d love to see horror that draws on Jewish folklore, and on Adam’s strained relationship with his parents and distance from their faith. Maybe dybbuks or golems turn out to be 1) real and 2) a danger to Olive, obliging Adam to dig up memories from his childhood and the stories he used to thumb his rationalist nose at?
On a related or entirely separate note: how about an paranormal/supernatural academic AU, where instead of biology, Adam and Olive are professor and grad student (respectively) of, like, demonology or parapsychology or Lovecraftian religious lore or something. Maybe one of Olive’s experiments went wrong and unleashed a vengeful ghost upon the department, and she’s forced to rely on Stanford’s least approachable faculty member for help before the malevolent entity eats her soul and/or gets her booted from the PhD program?
Requested genres: Comedic Horror, Cosmic Horror, Folk Horror, Institutional Horror, Killer Horror, Monster Horror, Paranormal Horror, Psychological Horror, Religious Horror, Science Fiction Horror, Supernatural Horror, Survival Horror
Canon note: Tava appears in issues #8 and #9 of Legacy of Vader. Voe appears in the four-issue miniseries The Rise of Kylo Ren. Both series are heavily entwined with the sequel trilogy and I doubt they’d make much sense if you haven’t seen the movies, but you definitely don’t need any broader knowledge of comics canon to write these requests.
â›” Canon-specific DNW: Poe & Finn & Rey teaming up against straightforward, unredeemed villain Kylo.
Prompts for all requested characters: IDK man, I feel like the GFFA is just an immensely fucking horrifying place, with canon-compatible ways to make just about any kind of horror happen. The Force as cosmic horror? Malevolent dark side forces that want to torment and destroy you for the sake of it? Holocrons containing ancient, terrifying secrets? Possession by the demonesque soul of a long dead Sith lord? Or some more “mundane” horrors: The insane dangers of space travel that these spacefaring societies have come to take for granted, but that suddenly become very very real when your spaceship malfunctions far from help. The extreme weirdness made possible by space travel: hostile alien environments, bizarre folklore or unknown monsters on backwater planets, space anomalies. Backwater planets with bloodcurdling folkloric practices or little-known species of vicious alien monster. Interstellar serial killers. The inherent horrors of galaxy-spanning fascist movements (First Order Wins AU, maybe?).
💙 Characters: Poe Dameron & Finn & Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
For this request, and per the DNW, my only non-negotiable is that I want there to be SOME kind of mutual attachment between Ben|Kylo and at least one other of the requested characters. Could be something postcanon where Ben Solo Lives (TM) and is helping the Resistance clean up what’s left of his defeated empire. Could be he’s Rey’s shitty Force-bond boyfriend whom the other two absolutely hate. Could be Kylo is still in Evil Overlord Mode but has screwed up and accidentally unleashed some terrible force that threatens them all, and has had to temporarily ally with the trio to defeat it – or maybe it’s Rey who stumbles across something deeply ill-advised while exploring the Force, and Finn, Poe and Kylo are forced to work together to save her. Basically, ensemble of good guys forced into some form of collaboration with their black sheep (?ex-)enemy is my dynamic of all time and I’m here for any variant of it you’d like to explore! :D
I ship all four requested characters in pretty much every possible configuration including pairs, triads, v-shaped poly, foursome poly, and confused mess of attractions that no one has quite managed to isolate or define.
💙 Characters: Tava Ren & Voe
I love Voe's quick temper and determination, her competitive streak and her bitter struggle to fit herself into the serene Jedi mould. She may not have a Skywalker scion's innate strength in the Force, but she aims high and works hard and never resigns herself to coming in second. Meanwhile, Tava is a glorious loose canon who is fundamentally looking out for number one but has learnt along the way that, hey, forming connections with others actually does improve her own prospects! They are such a lawful/chaotic ship and that’s the part of the dynamic that makes them so appealing to me. I’m flexible as to their placement on the good–-evil axis of the alignment chart. :D
I SHIP TAVA/VOE SO HARD. If you don’t ship them, I’m also into them being friends or antagonists who have 1) the Force and 2) Ben Fucking Solo in common. I’d love either an AU where Voe survives the minemoon, or one where for whatever reason she’s not there on Mimban in the first place (though I would like her Jedi training under Luke Skywalker to remain part of her backstory). As for Tava, I’d love either for her canon backstory to remain the same, or for her to have ended up as a student at Luke’s temple as well. They can meet sometime after having both been screwed over by Ben/Kylo, or they can have been there with each other all along, learning the mysteries of the Force together.
💙 Characters: Tava Ren & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
He's fascinated! He knows damn well she's trying to play him, but he's so lonely and so desperate for a companion who understands the Force like he does, and he's on the rebound from Rey, and Tava's right, he really doesn't want the job he's got right now even if he can't admit it to himself. Falling for Tava is a terrible idea in every possible way and we all know how Kylo feels about bad ideas. I'm here for him caving in to temptation and reconciling with the Knights of Ren after all, because wreaking havoc with them and letting Tava play him like a fiddle is the literal only fun he ever has anymore. I’d love to see him and Tava get in over their heads together in their different but adjacent pursuits of power, with or without the other Knights along for the ride, with or without attempts to betray or one-up each other along the way.
Strong preference for at least some shippy vibes between Kylo and Tava, but completely fine with them coming to nothing/fizzling out/breaking up/ending horribly. (Ending horribly on the romance front, that is. My please-don’t-kill-them DNW still applies!)
Thank you so much for offering my canons / claiming my pinch hit / arriving here however you arrived! I’ve only recently started immersing myself in the horror genre and am excited to explore the whole wide world of possibilities under this big umbrella. There are a small number of things I know for sure I don’t like and a much larger number I already adore, but if you feel inspired towards something that falls in neither category, please feel free to go ahead with it – who knows, you may be introducing me to my next favourite thing! I only have a few hard nopes to begin with, and when I’m reading or watching horror, I’m even more than usual in a mindset of wanting to test my limits. So if you’re in any doubt, I’d rather you err on the side of going too far than of holding back. :)
In general, unless otherwise specified, I prefer:
- happy/safe or ambiguous endings over outright bad ones
- my requested characters facing an external horror together over one of them being the horror (being narrowly saved from becoming the horror is also good)
- shippy or ambiguous relationships between my requested characters over explicitly platonic ones
- mild to moderate gore over really extreme splatter stuff.
🖤 Horror likes 🖤
- Things lurking in shadows; the slow, inexorable approach of something terrible; a drawn-out sense of dread.
- Found footage, mockumentaries, in-universe meta, any and all framings of the horror being something real and documentable.
- Harsh natural environments, characters being trapped or lost in terrible places, heights, claustrophobia, thirst, starvation, being chased by monsters or fearsome animals.
- Paranormal/supernatural vibes, malevolent spirits, possession, curses, cults, demons, ancient entities awoken from centuries-long slumber.
- Characters forced to make terrible moral choices.
- Villains with sympathetic motives, tragic villains, villains who don’t mean to be villains or maybe don’t even know they’re the villains, the real villain was trauma all along.
- Psychological horror, psychosis, hallucinations, guilt, remorse, the monsters only exist inside my head, the monsters are real but I’m in deep denial about it.
- Rescuers, trusted mentors, friends, etc. turning out to have been the villain all along (strongly prefer when the surprise!villain character this applies to is someone outside my requested pairing/group).
- Black comedy, genre-savvy, moments of levity even in otherwise pitch dark scenarios.
â›” Do Not Want â›”
- Underage
- Incest
- Any mention of child death, including pregnancy loss
- On-screen child harm (requested characters recalling their childhood trauma is fine)
- Unrequested setting change AUs (including trope AUs: please no omegaverse, soulmarks etc)
- Unrequested identity headcanons
- Poetry, first person POV (unless in an unconventional format such as epistolary)
- Permanent death of requested characters.
Request Details
The Hurricane Wars
Requested genres: Comedic Horror, Cosmic Horror, Folk Horror, Institutional Horror, Killer Horror, Monster Horror, Paranormal Horror, Psychological Horror, Religious Horror, Science Fiction Horror, Supernatural Horror, Survival Horror
💜 Characters: Alaric Ossinast & Talasyn
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.
And Talasyn! Poor girl has the weight of her whole entire nation on her shoulders, and is in way over her head trying to play complicated, backstabby political games when her whole life’s training has been in directness. I love how there’s always such tension between the exquisitely attired, court-mannered lachis’ka she’s required to be and the half-feral street child she really is. And most of all I love it when she takes out that tension on Alaric. :D
With that in mind, it would be great to see the two of them facing some new horror together. Post-apocalypse AU where they failed to stop the Moonless Dark? Gaheris takes over Nenavar and shatters what’s left of the Sardovian resistance, and is free to unleash the full horrors of his regime across the world? Or something smaller scale – Talasyn and Alaric run across some mysterious, mystical horror or terrible unknown Nenavarene beast while they’re out training in the jungle? Something goes wrong with a sever? One of them loses control of their powers? The ghosts of those who fell in the war rise up to torment them? I’m up for anything!
The Love Hypothesis
Requested genres: Comedic Horror, Cosmic Horror, Folk Horror, Institutional Horror, Killer Horror, Monster Horror, Paranormal Horror, Psychological Horror, Religious Horror, Science Fiction Horror, Supernatural Horror, Survival Horror
â›” Canon-specific DNW: Permanently breaking up Adam and Olive, or explicitly ruling out a future romantic connection between them.
🩷 Characters: Adam Carlsen & Olive Smith
My dream gift for this canon would be something that brings along the tropiness, genre-savvy and tongue-in-cheek humour of the novel with it into a horror setting. I am also absolutely down for more serious horror (I wouldn’t be signed up to this exchange if I weren’t!) but in any event I’d prefer a story that ends with Adam and Olive together, in love, and in a position to move on with their lives, or at least in a position where that outcome hasn’t been ruled out. Pre-relationship, established relationship, alternate get-together and plot-focused fic where relationship elements take a backseat are all welcome.
Prompts:
We know they’re both outdoorsy, so perhaps they stray off the path while hiking and stumble across some ravenous beast/isolated cult community/malevolent forest god/evil witch living alone in a murder hut? Or else they decide to try a more extreme activity – caving, diving, mountaineering – and end up trapped in a desperate survival situation? Would love to see mutual protectiveness, won’t-leave-without-you, desperately trying not to burden each other with their hurts, and each refusing to quit for the other’s sake.
Or how about a post-canon adventure in a whole new genre? Now happily coupled up, Adam and Olive find themselves embroiled in a surprising new adventure. Some ideas:
- Turns out the supernatural is real, and they suddenly find themselves having to come to terms with the existence of vampires/ghosts/magic/whatever.
- Institutional horror: some shady academic shit is going on at Stanford, and Adam and Olive end up in the middle of some bizarre conspiracy or administrative power game.
- Mad science: some weird, distant colleague invents a super-serum and goes rogue with it, and now faculty meetings have to include a discussion of the impending supersoldier takeover; aliens exist, and are coming to destroy us all; a zombie virus has broken containment, and for handwavey Science(TM) reasons a cancer researcher and a computational biologist are of use in this scenario; one of Holden’s colleagues over in Pharmacology believes he has created a miracle drug that can reanimate the dead, but it actually raises abominations that are now running loose all over campus.
For any of these, I’d also love to see a canon-divergence AU sometime after their first meeting in the bathroom, where instead of The Kiss and the whole fake dating scheme, it’s the horror that breaks the pining barrier between them. Olive has NO idea why Stanford’s most dickish professor is suddenly risking his life to save hers, but hey, it’s not like she’s in a position to complain!
I don’t have the knowledge to write this myself, but I’d love to see horror that draws on Jewish folklore, and on Adam’s strained relationship with his parents and distance from their faith. Maybe dybbuks or golems turn out to be 1) real and 2) a danger to Olive, obliging Adam to dig up memories from his childhood and the stories he used to thumb his rationalist nose at?
On a related or entirely separate note: how about an paranormal/supernatural academic AU, where instead of biology, Adam and Olive are professor and grad student (respectively) of, like, demonology or parapsychology or Lovecraftian religious lore or something. Maybe one of Olive’s experiments went wrong and unleashed a vengeful ghost upon the department, and she’s forced to rely on Stanford’s least approachable faculty member for help before the malevolent entity eats her soul and/or gets her booted from the PhD program?
Star Wars
Requested genres: Comedic Horror, Cosmic Horror, Folk Horror, Institutional Horror, Killer Horror, Monster Horror, Paranormal Horror, Psychological Horror, Religious Horror, Science Fiction Horror, Supernatural Horror, Survival Horror
Canon note: Tava appears in issues #8 and #9 of Legacy of Vader. Voe appears in the four-issue miniseries The Rise of Kylo Ren. Both series are heavily entwined with the sequel trilogy and I doubt they’d make much sense if you haven’t seen the movies, but you definitely don’t need any broader knowledge of comics canon to write these requests.
â›” Canon-specific DNW: Poe & Finn & Rey teaming up against straightforward, unredeemed villain Kylo.
Prompts for all requested characters: IDK man, I feel like the GFFA is just an immensely fucking horrifying place, with canon-compatible ways to make just about any kind of horror happen. The Force as cosmic horror? Malevolent dark side forces that want to torment and destroy you for the sake of it? Holocrons containing ancient, terrifying secrets? Possession by the demonesque soul of a long dead Sith lord? Or some more “mundane” horrors: The insane dangers of space travel that these spacefaring societies have come to take for granted, but that suddenly become very very real when your spaceship malfunctions far from help. The extreme weirdness made possible by space travel: hostile alien environments, bizarre folklore or unknown monsters on backwater planets, space anomalies. Backwater planets with bloodcurdling folkloric practices or little-known species of vicious alien monster. Interstellar serial killers. The inherent horrors of galaxy-spanning fascist movements (First Order Wins AU, maybe?).
💙 Characters: Poe Dameron & Finn & Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
For this request, and per the DNW, my only non-negotiable is that I want there to be SOME kind of mutual attachment between Ben|Kylo and at least one other of the requested characters. Could be something postcanon where Ben Solo Lives (TM) and is helping the Resistance clean up what’s left of his defeated empire. Could be he’s Rey’s shitty Force-bond boyfriend whom the other two absolutely hate. Could be Kylo is still in Evil Overlord Mode but has screwed up and accidentally unleashed some terrible force that threatens them all, and has had to temporarily ally with the trio to defeat it – or maybe it’s Rey who stumbles across something deeply ill-advised while exploring the Force, and Finn, Poe and Kylo are forced to work together to save her. Basically, ensemble of good guys forced into some form of collaboration with their black sheep (?ex-)enemy is my dynamic of all time and I’m here for any variant of it you’d like to explore! :D
I ship all four requested characters in pretty much every possible configuration including pairs, triads, v-shaped poly, foursome poly, and confused mess of attractions that no one has quite managed to isolate or define.
💙 Characters: Tava Ren & Voe
I love Voe's quick temper and determination, her competitive streak and her bitter struggle to fit herself into the serene Jedi mould. She may not have a Skywalker scion's innate strength in the Force, but she aims high and works hard and never resigns herself to coming in second. Meanwhile, Tava is a glorious loose canon who is fundamentally looking out for number one but has learnt along the way that, hey, forming connections with others actually does improve her own prospects! They are such a lawful/chaotic ship and that’s the part of the dynamic that makes them so appealing to me. I’m flexible as to their placement on the good–-evil axis of the alignment chart. :D
I SHIP TAVA/VOE SO HARD. If you don’t ship them, I’m also into them being friends or antagonists who have 1) the Force and 2) Ben Fucking Solo in common. I’d love either an AU where Voe survives the minemoon, or one where for whatever reason she’s not there on Mimban in the first place (though I would like her Jedi training under Luke Skywalker to remain part of her backstory). As for Tava, I’d love either for her canon backstory to remain the same, or for her to have ended up as a student at Luke’s temple as well. They can meet sometime after having both been screwed over by Ben/Kylo, or they can have been there with each other all along, learning the mysteries of the Force together.
💙 Characters: Tava Ren & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
He's fascinated! He knows damn well she's trying to play him, but he's so lonely and so desperate for a companion who understands the Force like he does, and he's on the rebound from Rey, and Tava's right, he really doesn't want the job he's got right now even if he can't admit it to himself. Falling for Tava is a terrible idea in every possible way and we all know how Kylo feels about bad ideas. I'm here for him caving in to temptation and reconciling with the Knights of Ren after all, because wreaking havoc with them and letting Tava play him like a fiddle is the literal only fun he ever has anymore. I’d love to see him and Tava get in over their heads together in their different but adjacent pursuits of power, with or without the other Knights along for the ride, with or without attempts to betray or one-up each other along the way.
Strong preference for at least some shippy vibes between Kylo and Tava, but completely fine with them coming to nothing/fizzling out/breaking up/ending horribly. (Ending horribly on the romance front, that is. My please-don’t-kill-them DNW still applies!)
