Worldbuilding Exchange 2019
Jan. 19th, 2019 03:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonsterDear Worldbuilder,
Thank you so much for creating for me! I'm excited to see what you make, and if none of my prompts are working for you, please feel free to skip right on over them and do your own thing.
For requested characters, I'm open to absolutely anything: gen, porn, opt-in kinks, unrequested ships, dark endings, close-POV introspection or a brief guest appearance in a larger worldbuilding fic - whatever works! I have no NOTPs.
For original characters or 'any or no character', I'm really here for the worldbuilding and would prefer any not-requested-by-name canon character appearances to be secondary to that. I love non-standard formats and pseudo-nonfiction. I also love outsider POVs, 'day in the life of a random nobody' style fic and plotty gen (background ships still totally welcome).
I've requested both fic and in-universe meta for everything. I'll be thrilled with a gift at any point along the spectrum, from tropey shipfic to line-by-line ship logs.
If you're looking for me elsewhere, I'm lucymonster on ao3 and occasionally tumblr.
Thanks again, and happy writing!
Thank you so much for creating for me! I'm excited to see what you make, and if none of my prompts are working for you, please feel free to skip right on over them and do your own thing.
For requested characters, I'm open to absolutely anything: gen, porn, opt-in kinks, unrequested ships, dark endings, close-POV introspection or a brief guest appearance in a larger worldbuilding fic - whatever works! I have no NOTPs.
For original characters or 'any or no character', I'm really here for the worldbuilding and would prefer any not-requested-by-name canon character appearances to be secondary to that. I love non-standard formats and pseudo-nonfiction. I also love outsider POVs, 'day in the life of a random nobody' style fic and plotty gen (background ships still totally welcome).
I've requested both fic and in-universe meta for everything. I'll be thrilled with a gift at any point along the spectrum, from tropey shipfic to line-by-line ship logs.
If you're looking for me elsewhere, I'm lucymonster on ao3 and occasionally tumblr.
Thanks again, and happy writing!
Do Not Want
- underage smut (<18 - ageing up, tactful handwaving or fade-to-black is fine)
- parent-child incest
- extreme gore, graphic internal/organ/genital damage
- pure fluff
- scat, emetophilia, vore, bestiality, lactation kink
- issuefic, character/ship bashing
Requested characters: Qi'ra, Rey, Any or no character, Original character
Some Qi'ra ships I like: Han, Dryden Vos, Maul, Kylo, Leia
Some Rey ships I like: Kylo, Phasma, Leia, Luke, Rose, Poe, Finn
Criminal Organizations
From her early days as a Corellian street thief to her career as a lieutenant in one of the galaxy's most powerful syndicates, organised crime has defined Qi'ra's life. I'd dearly love a glimpse of what her life is like once she steps into Vos's shoes as Crimson Dawn's public figurehead.
We know that the syndicate's influence wanes in the decades following the fall of the Empire. Was there something about conditions under Imperial rule that was helping them flourish? Or was there some other reason for the decline - mismanagement, competition with other syndicates, some kind of falling-out between Qi'ra and Maul? Or does the First Order's cold war with the New Republic, and associated underhanded dealings, change the landscape in a way that crowds the old players of the black market?
Droid Rights Movements, Legal Status of Droids and Consequences for Daily Life
I eat up all the classic android tropes with a spoon: what does it mean to be a person? What separates artificial from natural intelligence? When you wipe or decommission a droid, you're wiping out a dynamic conscious mind with ?feelings and ?desires of its own - is that the same as killing a person? What do droids owe their creators, and to what extent are they owed autonomy? To what extent are they capable of exercising free will?
Star Wars has such a huge range of droids, with intellects that range from 'Roomba stuck on a tricky patch of floor' to 'fully capable of abstract thought and moral reasoning', so it'd be interesting to look at exactly where the line gets drawn: this droid is a piece of glorified machinery, this droid is a beloved member of the family.
And how do those family roles play out, especially once children come into play? What (if any) difference it makes for kids to be looked after by a purpose-built humanoid robot compared to a 'real' human caretaker? Is there any in-universe controversy about leaving your kid with the household droid while you duck out for a few hours?
Jakku
The more tidbits canon gives us about Rey's life on Jakku, the more desperately I love her. She's self-made, self-sufficient, even completely self-educated. I want more about her grinding daily struggle for survival, more about the life she built for herself alone out there in the desert, more about the amazing skillset she built up salvaging junk from old warships.
There's really nothing out there - no infrastructure, no safety net, no oversight whatsoever for Unkar Plutt and his racket. Who are the other people who live at Niima outpost? What kind of community has grown up around the trash heaps, and what made Rey so determined to set herself apart from them?
Does Rey ever go back to Jakku once she's left? Maybe, with Kylo's words about her parents jangling under her skin, she turns her new Force-wielding resources to tracking down that pauper's grave? Or does she ever go looking for what's left of the Church of the Force? I wonder if the Resistance ever needs to look back at the Tuanul massacre - Rey, being from nearby, is an obvious choice for a mission like that.
Speaking of which: did Rey ever have anything to do with the Church of the Force, given that they'd set up a religious retreat not all that far away from her? She really doesn't seem to know all that much about the Force before it abruptly comes awake in her, but maybe she's heard rumours or had chance encounters with those kooky hermits who live across the dunes out there.
Star Wars - Movies Only
Requested characters: Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Any or no character, Original character
Some Kylo ships I like: Rey, Finn, Poe, Phasma, Hux, Snoke, Rose, Qi'ra
First Order politics
The movies don't tell us much about the First Order as an organisation. It's a military junta with an opaque leadership structure, ill-defined political goals, and an unexplained but seemingly bottomless well of technological and fiscal resources. Visually it's ?Nazi, ideologically it's ?totalitarian, and strategically its main priority seems to be to stick it to its relatively small and under-resourced enemies in the Resistance.
Like all extremist regimes, it's a mess of bad decisions and self-interest dressed up in a very thin cloak of revolutionary ideals. I'd love to know more about what makes the Order tick (like a time bomb?) and what stories its supporters tell themselves about why what they're doing is justified. Please feel to go as dark and morbid and political/historical as you like with this: how is it getting their resources? What does its R&D program look like? We've seen its armies in action, but what's going on behind the scenes with its training regime, its propaganda office, its diplomatic relationships?
On the other hand, I'd also love a lighter and more humorous take on the "evils" of large-scale bureaucracy and the blithe day-to-day incompetence of a military whose entire resource management philosophy seems to be "fuck it we can always buy/steal more".
And as for Kylo Ren - what, exactly, is his role in the Order? Like, what's his day job? How did the son of two Rebel heroes end up pledging his life to wind back all their hard-won freedoms?
The Unknown Regions
What has the First Order been doing out there all those years? It seems fair to guess that a lot of the First Order's resources are coming from the Unknown Regions, and they probably have all kinds of strongholds and held territory and places of interest off the edge of the map.
I'm very into the dangers of space travel, and would love any kind of story about Kylo Ren's adventures in a region so desolate and hazardous that no one's ever even bothered to map it. Has he come in contact with unknown civilisations in the course of his work with the Order? Has he encountered any strange species or unfamiliar Force phenomena? Weird alien planets, harsh environments and survival stories are forever my jam.
Star Wars - New EU
Characters: Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Any or no character, Original character
Some Kylo ships I like: Rey, Finn, Poe, Phasma, Hux, Snoke, Rose, Qi'ra
Different ways of knowing the Force, Force Bond, Force visions
Kylo Ren's relationship with the Force is complex: he's immensely powerful, haphazardly trained and catastrophically conflicted. He's infatuated with the Dark but naturally drawn to the Light, and his practice seems to draw indiscriminately from Jedi and Sith teachings with a generous helping of Miscellaneous to spice things up. We've had all kinds of snippets in the extended material about Snoke taking advantage of Kylo's conflict and using his Force-User-Not-Otherwise-Specified curriculum to deliberately aggravate that light-dark tension. I'd love to see what that approach actually looks like, as a day-to-day religious practice.
What's Kylo's training regime? What lore has he studied? What are the weaknesses in the more traditional Force-using schools, and what are he and Snoke aiming to achieve by overturning those traditions? How do the Force visions and mind-invasion techniques work?
I also really enjoyed what The Last Jedi did with Kylo and Rey's bond, so a closer look at how that connection works would be amazing. Was it really Snoke who created the bond? Or did he take advantage of an existing connection, some natural affinity between them or a side-effect of their psychic interrogation battle in The Force Awakens? I love Reylo as a pairing, but I'd be equally delighted with a shippy or non-shippy reading of this prompt - and if you want to go dark, I'm also really into the skin-crawling implications of having that kind of soul-deep, Force-ordained intimacy thrust upon you with someone who's your sworn enemy and who you'd really, truly prefer to stay away from.
The building and running of Rebellion intelligence networks
As much as I love a good heart-pounding hero adventure story, I've always had a weakness for the quieter behind-the-scenes work that goes into maintaining a successful intelligence network. There are the administrators, the organisers, the comms people who scour every network for relevant transmissions and the codebreakers who painstakingly decipher their findings. Sometimes your intel comes from your life and death Rogue One-style operations. Other times it comes from whistleblowers, sympathetic bystanders, deep cover agents grinding away at their unglamorous day job inside the enemy quarters in exchange for whatever unglamorous but practical tidbits they can pick up every now and then.
The Star Wars universe has so many fun avenues for intelligence-gathering: droid networks, advanced technology, a staggering array of different worlds and cultures all crammed in under the auspice of the Empire. I'm keen to see what kind of twist those things could put on your classic spy saga.
I also adore stories about moral compromise and difficult choices. Does spywork mean collaborating with the Empire to maintain cover? Does it mean sacrificing smaller chances to save lives and do good, in order to protect your sources and hold out for something bigger? Does an 'enemy of my enemy' approach force loyal Rebel ideologues to make nice with allies they find morally repugnant?
- unwarned major character death (if it's not a canon death, please flag it in tags or author's notes so I'm ready).
GENERAL LIKES
Story likes
- anything with a strong character focus
- characters who are flawed and abrasive and challenging to love
- difficult or dysfunctional relationships
- incidental details, everyday lives
- incidental details, everyday lives
- dark/gritty/moody aesthetics
- romantic tension, unrequited feelings, love triangles
- ensemble casts, background characters
- outsider or observer POVs
- banter, snark, gallows humour
- descriptions of food, characters eating or sharing food, food as comfort
- military kink: uniforms, weapons, 'sir' (including and especially to address women)
- enemies to lovers
- stranded together, huddling for warmth
- harsh environments, survival/adventure stories
- casefic, missionfic
- casefic, missionfic
- redemption arcs (or failed redemption arcs)
- subversions, pastiches, crack treated seriously
- first times (sexual or non-sexual).
Smut likes
- character-driven smut
- orgasm delay/denial, sexual frustration
- coming too quickly, loss of control, getting overwhelmed
- crying after sex
- sex pollen, aphrodisiacs, drugged sex, fuck-or-die
- rough sex, hate sex, power imbalances
- humiliation, verbal insults, gendered slurs
- frottage, dry humping, clothed sex
- different erogenous zones, being sensitive in non-genital places
- anal sex (het or slash), double or multiple penetration
- sounding, watersports, forced wetting
- public use, gangbangs
- loss of virginity, inexperience, clumsy sex
- scar worship
- uncomfortable, consensual-but-unpleasant type sex
- under-negotiated kinks.
Darker likes
- creepy, uncomfortable, 'something's off here' vibes
- self-sacrifice, suicide for a good cause
- 'ugly' mental illness: violence, paranoia, warped thinking
- noncon/dubcon
- grey morality, antiheroes
- villain-centred morality
- coercion, blackmail, abuse of power
- victim-blaming
- mind rape, violation, psychological torture
- imprisonment
- physical or sexual torture.
In-universe meta likes
- historical records: journals, annals, letters etc
- anything and everything related to politics
- propaganda
- bureaucracy, procedures, paperwork
- academia, essays
- humanities, comparative cultures, in-universe social movements
- journalism, especially tabloids/magazines/sensationalised accounts
- religious texts and philosophy
- droid programming and AI functions
- the advertising industry
- travel writing.
In-universe meta likes
- historical records: journals, annals, letters etc
- anything and everything related to politics
- propaganda
- bureaucracy, procedures, paperwork
- academia, essays
- humanities, comparative cultures, in-universe social movements
- journalism, especially tabloids/magazines/sensationalised accounts
- religious texts and philosophy
- droid programming and AI functions
- the advertising industry
- travel writing.
Star Wars - All Media Types
Requested characters: Qi'ra, Rey, Any or no character, Original character
Some Qi'ra ships I like: Han, Dryden Vos, Maul, Kylo, Leia
Some Rey ships I like: Kylo, Phasma, Leia, Luke, Rose, Poe, Finn
Criminal Organizations
From her early days as a Corellian street thief to her career as a lieutenant in one of the galaxy's most powerful syndicates, organised crime has defined Qi'ra's life. I'd dearly love a glimpse of what her life is like once she steps into Vos's shoes as Crimson Dawn's public figurehead.
We know that the syndicate's influence wanes in the decades following the fall of the Empire. Was there something about conditions under Imperial rule that was helping them flourish? Or was there some other reason for the decline - mismanagement, competition with other syndicates, some kind of falling-out between Qi'ra and Maul? Or does the First Order's cold war with the New Republic, and associated underhanded dealings, change the landscape in a way that crowds the old players of the black market?
Droid Rights Movements, Legal Status of Droids and Consequences for Daily Life
I eat up all the classic android tropes with a spoon: what does it mean to be a person? What separates artificial from natural intelligence? When you wipe or decommission a droid, you're wiping out a dynamic conscious mind with ?feelings and ?desires of its own - is that the same as killing a person? What do droids owe their creators, and to what extent are they owed autonomy? To what extent are they capable of exercising free will?
Star Wars has such a huge range of droids, with intellects that range from 'Roomba stuck on a tricky patch of floor' to 'fully capable of abstract thought and moral reasoning', so it'd be interesting to look at exactly where the line gets drawn: this droid is a piece of glorified machinery, this droid is a beloved member of the family.
And how do those family roles play out, especially once children come into play? What (if any) difference it makes for kids to be looked after by a purpose-built humanoid robot compared to a 'real' human caretaker? Is there any in-universe controversy about leaving your kid with the household droid while you duck out for a few hours?
Jakku
The more tidbits canon gives us about Rey's life on Jakku, the more desperately I love her. She's self-made, self-sufficient, even completely self-educated. I want more about her grinding daily struggle for survival, more about the life she built for herself alone out there in the desert, more about the amazing skillset she built up salvaging junk from old warships.
There's really nothing out there - no infrastructure, no safety net, no oversight whatsoever for Unkar Plutt and his racket. Who are the other people who live at Niima outpost? What kind of community has grown up around the trash heaps, and what made Rey so determined to set herself apart from them?
Does Rey ever go back to Jakku once she's left? Maybe, with Kylo's words about her parents jangling under her skin, she turns her new Force-wielding resources to tracking down that pauper's grave? Or does she ever go looking for what's left of the Church of the Force? I wonder if the Resistance ever needs to look back at the Tuanul massacre - Rey, being from nearby, is an obvious choice for a mission like that.
Speaking of which: did Rey ever have anything to do with the Church of the Force, given that they'd set up a religious retreat not all that far away from her? She really doesn't seem to know all that much about the Force before it abruptly comes awake in her, but maybe she's heard rumours or had chance encounters with those kooky hermits who live across the dunes out there.
Star Wars - Movies Only
Requested characters: Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Any or no character, Original character
Some Kylo ships I like: Rey, Finn, Poe, Phasma, Hux, Snoke, Rose, Qi'ra
First Order politics
The movies don't tell us much about the First Order as an organisation. It's a military junta with an opaque leadership structure, ill-defined political goals, and an unexplained but seemingly bottomless well of technological and fiscal resources. Visually it's ?Nazi, ideologically it's ?totalitarian, and strategically its main priority seems to be to stick it to its relatively small and under-resourced enemies in the Resistance.
Like all extremist regimes, it's a mess of bad decisions and self-interest dressed up in a very thin cloak of revolutionary ideals. I'd love to know more about what makes the Order tick (like a time bomb?) and what stories its supporters tell themselves about why what they're doing is justified. Please feel to go as dark and morbid and political/historical as you like with this: how is it getting their resources? What does its R&D program look like? We've seen its armies in action, but what's going on behind the scenes with its training regime, its propaganda office, its diplomatic relationships?
On the other hand, I'd also love a lighter and more humorous take on the "evils" of large-scale bureaucracy and the blithe day-to-day incompetence of a military whose entire resource management philosophy seems to be "fuck it we can always buy/steal more".
And as for Kylo Ren - what, exactly, is his role in the Order? Like, what's his day job? How did the son of two Rebel heroes end up pledging his life to wind back all their hard-won freedoms?
The Unknown Regions
What has the First Order been doing out there all those years? It seems fair to guess that a lot of the First Order's resources are coming from the Unknown Regions, and they probably have all kinds of strongholds and held territory and places of interest off the edge of the map.
I'm very into the dangers of space travel, and would love any kind of story about Kylo Ren's adventures in a region so desolate and hazardous that no one's ever even bothered to map it. Has he come in contact with unknown civilisations in the course of his work with the Order? Has he encountered any strange species or unfamiliar Force phenomena? Weird alien planets, harsh environments and survival stories are forever my jam.
Star Wars - New EU
Characters: Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Any or no character, Original character
Some Kylo ships I like: Rey, Finn, Poe, Phasma, Hux, Snoke, Rose, Qi'ra
Different ways of knowing the Force, Force Bond, Force visions
Kylo Ren's relationship with the Force is complex: he's immensely powerful, haphazardly trained and catastrophically conflicted. He's infatuated with the Dark but naturally drawn to the Light, and his practice seems to draw indiscriminately from Jedi and Sith teachings with a generous helping of Miscellaneous to spice things up. We've had all kinds of snippets in the extended material about Snoke taking advantage of Kylo's conflict and using his Force-User-Not-Otherwise-Specified curriculum to deliberately aggravate that light-dark tension. I'd love to see what that approach actually looks like, as a day-to-day religious practice.
What's Kylo's training regime? What lore has he studied? What are the weaknesses in the more traditional Force-using schools, and what are he and Snoke aiming to achieve by overturning those traditions? How do the Force visions and mind-invasion techniques work?
I also really enjoyed what The Last Jedi did with Kylo and Rey's bond, so a closer look at how that connection works would be amazing. Was it really Snoke who created the bond? Or did he take advantage of an existing connection, some natural affinity between them or a side-effect of their psychic interrogation battle in The Force Awakens? I love Reylo as a pairing, but I'd be equally delighted with a shippy or non-shippy reading of this prompt - and if you want to go dark, I'm also really into the skin-crawling implications of having that kind of soul-deep, Force-ordained intimacy thrust upon you with someone who's your sworn enemy and who you'd really, truly prefer to stay away from.
The building and running of Rebellion intelligence networks
As much as I love a good heart-pounding hero adventure story, I've always had a weakness for the quieter behind-the-scenes work that goes into maintaining a successful intelligence network. There are the administrators, the organisers, the comms people who scour every network for relevant transmissions and the codebreakers who painstakingly decipher their findings. Sometimes your intel comes from your life and death Rogue One-style operations. Other times it comes from whistleblowers, sympathetic bystanders, deep cover agents grinding away at their unglamorous day job inside the enemy quarters in exchange for whatever unglamorous but practical tidbits they can pick up every now and then.
The Star Wars universe has so many fun avenues for intelligence-gathering: droid networks, advanced technology, a staggering array of different worlds and cultures all crammed in under the auspice of the Empire. I'm keen to see what kind of twist those things could put on your classic spy saga.
I also adore stories about moral compromise and difficult choices. Does spywork mean collaborating with the Empire to maintain cover? Does it mean sacrificing smaller chances to save lives and do good, in order to protect your sources and hold out for something bigger? Does an 'enemy of my enemy' approach force loyal Rebel ideologues to make nice with allies they find morally repugnant?
