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mongooseblues · 3 years

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Tag Game

@sniction-fiction Thanks for tagging me this was super fun and I got very long winded :D

The game is such:

List your top three whump tropes and tag people.

Whoever gets tagged gets to say how they feel about your top three tropes.

After finishing that, they then list their top three tropes, and the tagging cycle goes on!

Your tropes:

1. Inclement Weather: When I’m reading, as long as the character is sick they could have obtained illness via straight up magic as far as I’m concerned. Deus ex machina that rhinovirus. Do whatever you gotta do to get em there. When it comes to my own writing I’m very strict with myself about “cold science.” I won’t pinpoint inclement weather as being the cause of a cold. However! Using weather to add to the pre-existing misery of illness—needing to walk in the rain, be out in the cold, etc—is wonderful.

2. It Gets Worse: YES. In longer stuff especially I love to see the whole arc. And I go pretty hard: I like severity — the worse the better, and the heightening is a joy to behold. If you write this in tandem with a character arc as the character is dealing with it, then you have my whole entire heart.

3. Exhaustion: Absolutely adore it. Emotional, mental, physical, metaphysical — whatever modality it takes. Honestly just watching someone fall asleep is adorable. Drooping eyelids and belated, slurred responses and slumping posture is a very cute look. And the act of surrendering to it — finally giving up control, or having it sort of stolen from them and falling asleep without meaning to. Either way it happens it’s very good. I like a character who is practical about their need for bed rest equally as much as I like a character who is loathe to relinquish their continued consciousness — The former is very cute to me because I love when someone is capable of taking care of themself, the latter I can relate to (the feeling of waging a vain war against exhaustion) personally as I have an irrational dislike for sleep.

My tropes:

1. Forehead feel: I honestly don’t even know why I’m calling it a trope when this is a necessity as far as I’m concerned. I love the function it serves in determining some kind of objective measurement of exactly how sick someone is, but I love the form it takes even more. It is the world’s most intimate gesture, fullstop. I particularly enjoy it in platonic relationships wherein this kind of physical touch is an anomaly or, better yet, in an unrequited love or mutually flirtatious relationship where it’s an exciting step in physical closeness, a milestone even. Or better still, something that was perhaps a little too intimate, and oh oops maybe it shouldn’t have happened at all...

2. High stakes illness: aka setting a story during the worst possible time or situation for the character to fall ill, especially if that situation is that someone has a very heavy weight of responsibility and/or needs—absolutely, unavoidably needs—to give some sort of especially important presentation or to otherwise somehow be in front of an audience or a crowd. I do enjoy a casual slice-of-life cold, but high stakes illness just lends itself incredibly well to many other things that I love; mainly the attitude the characters take toward adversity. It requires self-awareness from the sick character and often help from other characters. Multiple people rallying around somebody, varying degrees of caretaking from many sources, needing to be honest about symptoms, to sometimes even discuss them at length so as to prepare for their possible repercussions. Cooperation, makeshift creative solutions. It is essentially the working-through-a-cold trope on steroids, in a way that lends itself better to disclosure than denial, and honesty and self-awareness are impossibly sexy to me.

3. Emotional crumpling: An expression of emotional vulnerability when someone’s wall is down. A confession because why not when they’re already so physically vulnerable, a fight caused by someone not fully being in their right mind, someone with a heightened temperature getting a little too effusive and maybe saying a little too much. It’s great when it leads to some kind of resolution in a relationship, and it’s also great when it complicates things. Emotional hurt/comfort is almost as meaningful to me as physical hurt/comfort, and in my opinion they’re meant to tie to each other. It’s intimacy doubled and it’s frankly fantastic and it’s why some vanillas are into sickfics and it’s such a naturally occurring duality that this community at large has very little trouble constantly generating new fics and so often involving a general emotional arc in those pieces of writing, because it’s… not obvious, but maybe… intuitive? The natural arc of a sickfic lends itself to something about emotional storytelling that everyone learns from consuming the stories around us all our lives, or maybe on some level just kinda knows, whether or not they’re actively trying to employ it.

If yall are around and feel like it I’m tagging @gay-for-the-snz, @thedevillionaire, @evilfloralfoolery, and @bless-you-babe (also anyone who happens to see this and wants to)

#sorry this was so long #also I spoke most of this into my phone via speech to text and how do I teach siri that sickfic is a word #bc she def does not know #and usually took it down as 'sick pics' which is cute but not what I'm talking about

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aplaceofstone · 6 years

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Yuletide letter

AO3: faceofstone

Dear Yuletide Writer,

thank you for offering one of the small surreal-ish fandoms of my heart and I hope you will have fun writing for it. Anything can happen! Symbols! Meaningful non sequiturs! Things! Stuff!

All prompts and ideas are just suggestions, if you are the kind of Yuletide writer who likes to follow them. If not, cool, they are certainly not the end-all of what I love about these fandoms and characters.

If you like visual prompts, this entire blog is 20% recipes and 80% aesthetics that mostly fit my requested fandoms…

I like found families, oddball friendships, sympathy toward outcasts, characters who fully embrace being outcasts, melancholy, a sense of place, bittersweet accomplishments, and a stubborn flicker of hope in an overall bleak world. Dreamlike atmospheres that aren’t necessarily scary, some sort of reassurance that can be found in the weird and the profoundly unnatural.

All fic formats, tenses, povs are fine.

± canon-compliant levels of assorted grimdark are fine, so eg I have no problems with characters dealing with canon rape in Twin Peaks but would rather avoid it elsewhere, whereas murderous infradimensional overgrown ants are better suited to specific Myst fic.

Myst: Atrus, Catherine

I wouldn’t like anything sexual for this request – more of a bittersweet emotional thing, leaning on each other as history passes you by, that sort of low-rating business.

How did they readjust to being free and together after the terrible months that culminated in the events of Myst 1 and Riven? Where would they have a little adventure together? I’m sure something fun must have happened in the desert at some point, or in an Age Catherine wrote. Could he find an echo of hers after her death, somehow, somewhere?

If you don’t care for them as a couple but like them as individuals, separate adventures that parallel each other are also something I’d be very interested in reading.

Alternatively, when I reread The Book of D’ni it struck me as odd that David Wingrove never really considered how profoundly asocial the man is. In Terahnee, he’s invited to all these feasts and banquets and he takes it all like a champ. It would be fun to expand or fully reimagine those parties with Atrus behaving like the introverted nerd he is, friendly, but stressed out by all this socialization and generally unaccustomed to people, with Catherine also being way out of her comfort zone. Or a similar situation in a new context, with no obscure canon review required!

Obduction: Any (Farley, CW, Josef, worldbuilding)

What’s your favorite spot on Hunrath, dear author? What’s your favorite odd item (is it RIUM+’s Myst book or the Unwritten manual)? Tell me a story about it. Or tell me about how it’s like to live in that new world, humans, villein, arai and so very few mofang, and Farley’s plan was what got them there for better and for worse. Or a night at that cute little pub they added with the patch. Tell me about the differences between Farley’s worldview, since Hunrath is all she knows, and CW who misses his life on Earth so much. What’s Josef’s story in this regard? Or focus on any aspect of Earth culture that got lost on Hunrath, or one that got preserved, or how the 19th century habits of some obductees clash with their neighbors who come from a few centuries later, and how it all eventually becomes Hunrath’s unique culture. Or what are your favorite character’s feelings on the Sorian sky hanging on their head?

I don’t ship any combination of main characters but I am interested in all platonic interactions between the main trio (as well as actually seeing them forced to act like a trio. What would it take?). I am also interested in seeing any of the characters who are only mentioned in the various journals getting fleshed out a little: if your story needs an additional character or two, you could see if anyone there suits your needs! (and if nobody there does, actual OCs are welcome)

Twin Peaks: Albert Rosenfield, Dale Cooper

Three words: post canon reunion. Standard “I ship them; intense friendship is also great, just please don’t ship them with anyone else” applies.

If you’re looking for a specific approach, I think that Albert would be very justified in being very hurt by Cooper’s behavior in the finale and in finally getting over him (either as the friend he’d tried to find again for the past 25 years, the ex boyfriend or the forever crush, anything goes). But once Cooper comes back, and offffff courrrrrrrrse he does at some point, what happens? I would hope he would want to reconnect with Albert, his oldest remaining friend / ex boyfriend / ‘omg he’s been right beside me all along and I never really appreciated him’. And he’d have to work for it. I’m not asking to downplay Cooper’s own trauma and all the crap he must’ve been through, I’m interested in all that, but after s3, I wouldn’t want to see him as just the poor woobie who never did anything wrong and is the sole focus of the fic’s emotional comfort. I wouldn’t like him (nor anyone else) to be “saved” by other characters, either - I really appreciate canon’s moxie on that topic. Shovel yourself out of the shit, Coop! Show Albert you care, and allow him to care again! At what point does Coop’s “I could never say no to that face” schtick (you know, those dorky smiles) start working again on Albert? Show me any point of the journey they must undergo to really find each other again, or fastforward to the fluff but please without ignoring that it is hard-earned fluff.

If that doesn’t work for you, I would like to read about them meeting in other places, during any point of canon. The red room or beyond, in dreams or otherwise. Reaching out for each other.

Prompts of a different sort: cozy coffee dates, the marvels of the modern world, things lost and (considerably less) things found, lost in a crowd, night time, astrology, “this too shall pass”. Addendum: Mr C swears = some part of Coop swears = what if Coop swears in front of (renowned foul-mouth) Albert?

De Chirico: Piazze d’Italia

My boy Giorgio is back in the tagset? Oh joy! My tastes haven’t changed from a few years ago, so, with my sincerest thanks to this year’s nominator, here goes again: I would love to see what kind of story can be inspired by these paintings and their peculiar mood. The stillness of the landscape, a tower looming in the background, trains or sails carrying distant travellers, a heavy sky. An opaque reality. What meetings take place under those statues, what lies just beyond the borders of the canvas? Full-on classic surrealism is very much welcome, complete with a healthy, heavy sense of mystery. Of course I’m not requesting all, or even any, of these details to appear in the story: I would love to read something inspired by a specific painting just as much the result of a mix of the elements you feel like you relate to the most. Other De Chirico mainstays such as mannequins, artichokes or whatever are also welcome if your story calls for them! His titles could also be a source of inspiration, they’re very pretty titles!

#yuletide letter

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