argentum_ls (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
argentum_ls) wrote2021-10-14 04:40 pm
argentum_ls) wrote2021-10-14 04:40 pm
Fest: Yuletide
Dear Yuletide Writer:
Thank you so much for signing up!
What follows is a run-down of my likes/dislikes, favorite tropes, and some specific fandom discussion with optional sentence prompts. Use what you need to, but know that I know that ODAO. You're also welcome to stalk me online. I'm![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
LadySilver, argentum_ls, and ![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
argentum-ls. I participate in a lot of exchanges and fests, which means I've thrown a lot of prompts out into the void. Should you see a prompt from a different exchange/fest/general rambling/conversation on Discord that you'd like to use, go for it! (Even if it's already been filled).
If you're happy with what I put in the sign-up, you prefer to write unprompted, or you have no time for a long letter, then please don't feel obligated to read this. Nothing in here is a demand. As long as you avoid my DNWs, I'll enjoy your story.
This year I'm requesting three TV shows and a book.
Henry Danger
My Babysitter's a Vampire
The Sidekicks Initiative: A Superhero Comedy
The Tomorrow People (2013)
Overall, what I like in a story is plot; that is, I want something to happen. Beyond that, the reins are pretty loose. I like h/c and whump, angst, drama, humor, casefic, action/adventure, and romance. I'm open to gen, het, slash, poly—though I do have some fandom-specific preferences, which are listed below. I love pairings and I also love strong friendship, sibling, and (pseudo)parent-child relationships. Ratings from G to hard-R are great. Crossovers are fantastic, though not anything I ever expect. I prefer canon based stories or canon-divergent AUs, and I prefer third-person storytelling, though I don't care if it's in past or present tense.
Should you happen to be the crossover type, any live-action fandom I've ever written is fair game. And if you know me and know there's a fandom I haven't written in that I'd like, that's fair game too.
Wants
My favorite trope of all is Secret Identity Revealed/Discovered. The common thread of my fandoms is that at least one of the characters has superpowers or equivalent that s/he/they have to keep secret from the world at large. I love secrets. I love seeing them kept (and the cost that keeping secrets invariably has), threatened, discovered, or revealed. And I love to watch the fallout when it happens.
My second favorite is Trapped!, perhaps because it offers so many potential interpretations that all boil down to the same thing. This can be the characters getting stuck in an avalanche, cave-in, snow storm, hurricane, or any other disaster inspired reason that they have limited resources to deal with and no ability to simply walk away from. Likewise, characters being captured or held hostage, regardless of whether it's physical or psychological bondage that's keeping them there, can be a great way to show how characters act under pressure and/or to bring out sides of their personalities that we don't normally see. Other interpretations are for the characters to get stuck in the wrong time, to get stuck out-of-sync with everyone else (such as in an alternate universe or on a ghostly plane), or to simply get stuck in circumstances they'd never, ever choose to be in (such as the awkward meet-the-other-family dinner or forced-to-work-together with a person they don't like).
Other things I like:
Unexpected Allies
Outsider POV
Characters talking about their superpowers/superstate in a way that provides insight into what it means for them.
Characters who don't trust each other learning to
When two characters believe they're talking about the same thing, but aren't.
Real world situations complicated by the supernatural
Clever or unusual uses of a character's abilities.
Trope inversions
Coming of Age
Canon-based, post-canon, or canon-divergent stories
Gen, het, slash, poly stories, except where specifically indicated
Time travel gone wrong, including time loops, trapped out of time, or characters inadvertently messing up their timelines
Do Not Wants:
Crack
Non-canon AUs (including omegaverse, mpreg, and genderbends)
Non con
Permanent requested character maiming or death
PWPs (Romance, sexual activity, UST, or sexual tension are all fine as part of a larger story)
E or NC-17 rated sexual material
Stories based on jealousy
Character assassination/bashing
Torture!porn (e.g. the Saw movies)
Incest
Identity headcanons (e.g. trans*, autistic, asexual)
Zombies
1st or 2nd person POV
Henry Hart
It's no secret that superheroes are one of my favorite types of character, and especially when the story is about the double life the superhero has to lead. I absolutely love the conflicts that our character has to deal with because of needing to keep his story straight; needing to lie to people he doesn't want to lie to; needing to pretend to be weak or incapable in situations where, in costume, he'd totally be crushing the problem; and needing to constantly re-calibrate his understanding of normal vs. what everyone else thinks is normal. As indicated in my likes, I'm also a huge h/c and whump fan, but especially when it's the kind of superhero whump where being thrown into a wall only causes some bruises and temporary limping and being caught in a explosion doesn't do much worse than ruining your clothes. Henry Danger fed all of my likes here, though it sometimes went a little too far with things used as jokes that I personally find horrifying, like the mind-wiper or the time our heroes framed Bichelle Bilsky for a crime and never fixed or retracted it.
I love all the characters on this show, though I'm especially fond of Henry and Piper's later relationship, after she knows he's Kid Danger, and the friendship among Henry, Jasper, and Charlotte. Feel free to include anyone. For villains, Drex is probably my favorite (and he's in the tag set!) because of the conflict with him being the failed sidekick. I'm also a fan of Jeff, Gwen, and Kyle.
Should you think it's relevant, I have seen every episode of Henry Danger, most of Danger Force, and enough of the The Adventures of Kid Danger to not care about spoilers.
Optional Prompts
Kid Danger starts to date someone who only knows him as Kid Danger. Now guess who Henry Hart's new lab partner is? Just guess. How does he handle this?
Henry gets the chance to re-try all the powers he's ever had, one at a time, and decide which one, if any, he wants to keep. What does he choose, and why?
While out and about and in a position where he can’t get a refill, Henry runs out of gumballs.
So, I kinda fell hard into this show when it dropped on Netflix and had a lot of thoughts. If you want more prompts, there are 35 of them here: Danger Prompts. (I won't blame you at all if you don't want to go into this rabbit hole.)
Additional Canon Note: Henry Danger has a lot of crack-y elements, and Crack is both a somewhat ambiguous term and in my DNWs. If the show went there, so can you-- though I would prefer if things like the alternate universe where everyone is Henry are kept as throwaway jokes rather than being the setting of the story. I love most of what the show does, and I absolutely eat up all the lampshading ("The rules of time travel change every time we do it, dude!"), but I prefer when the weird-for-the-sake-of-being-weird jokes are not the focus.
Ships:
Henry/Charlotte/Jasper
Kid Danger/Kyle
Henry/OFC
NoTP: Henry/Ray
Ethan Morgan & Bennie Weir
Teenagers with superpowers is always an automatic draw for me. This show hits a lot of what I like with characters who are trying to do their best when forced into situations they're completely unprepared to handle—even if they're not always successful—and characters trying to balance multiple, conflicting sets of lives and lies. While I'm not usually a horror fan, I also loved the slightly darker themes the show was able to explore by more-or-less being “Buffy lite.” With this show, I'm also really fond of Ethan and Benny's friendship, though I sometimes got the impression that Ethan is the only reason Benny hasn't started down the path to becoming a bad guy.
All canon characters are welcome in your story, as are OCs. Please stick with canon relationships or invent OCs for the boys.
Optional Prompts
If you have it in you to provide some resolution to the series cliffhanger, naturally I'd love to know how everyone survived (because, they had to have.)
Bodyswap, either physical or mental. Ethan with Benny's powers and Benny with Ethan's? What differences are there to how they use them or what they understand because of them? Who messes up the worst first? (Rory. Somehow it's going to be Rory.)
Bennie tries to help Ethan figure out how to use his powers on demand. It has ... mixed results.
Randy | Butterfly King
This book hit that sweet middle spot for me of being genre aware and able to poke fun at various superhero and comic book/comic book movie tropes/cliches, while still playing the story straight and telling a solid story where the world is real to the characters. I loved Sam's journey and seeing him grow from a downtrodden guy who didn't have much going for him to being a hero. However, the character I'm requesting is Randy. I listened to this book and the narrator really went in on giving Randy that Batman-esque growl that may or may not have come through on the printed page. I was also fascinated by that brief moment of weakness we had where Randy admitted that he wore his Batman persona because “what else do I have?” And, while all the main characters had their tragic backgrounds, Randy's hit me the hardest because his mentor neglected the human side of his upbringing. Of course, if you want to include Sam, Anna, or any other character—canon or original—in this story, they're more than welcome.
Optional Prompts
We have a lot of information about the kind of "every day" life Sam leads. What's Randy's? Does he have one? Or is he the "Butterfly King" all the time? If so, how does that work?
Randy's mentor never taught him to read. Has he ever tried to learn on his own? What understanding of his own comic books/story does he have because he can't read them? Has there ever been a point where his illiteracy turned out to be helpful?
What other basic skills did his mentor neglect to teach him? If only literacy, why? That seems like a major oversight.
Randy finally gets to make the perfect quip.
Worldbuilding
The Tomorrow People, in all its variations, is my comfort food show. I've been a fan since the 1973 version and will be a fan of whatever version comes next, no matter what its flaws may be.
The very idea of children and teenagers with something more to offer the world, yet who have to hide what they are from the world for their own safety, speaks powerfully to me. I love that the characters are thrust into situations that they don't have the experience to deal with, yet have the responsibility to take on because their powers make them the only ones who can solve the problems. I love how they are forced to rely on each other, and how although their powers separate them from their family and friends, the Tomorrow People still consider themselves part of the world at large. I also love how they continually have to grapple with the question of whether they are superior to or better than the people they're descended from, and how often the answer is “only in some ways.”
The 2013 show brought us a new generation of characters with the problems of the modern world. Further, while the other versions of the show limited the TP experience to a small and fixed group of people—which is easy to teach and monitor—this one throws the doors open to myriad people, many of whom aren't good people. This would completely change the overall TP experience. I'm really interested in seeing the characters live and function in the 21st century where new breakouts are happening all the time, and CCTV, iPhones, satellites, and social media surround and affect us all whether we want it to or not.
Optional Prompt
A "I used to be a TP" world building story, especially after the fall of ULTRA. Do any of these people come out of the woodwork to discuss their brief experience with superpowers? Is there a support group? Does an underground business to restore people's powers start? Are there snake oil salesmen who go around promising to "fix" the de-powered? What happens when the de-powered accept the offer? Is there a class action lawsuit? How does one go about proving that they used to have superpowers? Are there any long-term health consequences to having one's powers removed? Do people who used to be TP regain their ability to kill after their powers are removed?
All canon characters or OCs who fit the world are welcome in your story. The ones in the tag set are Stephen, Luca, and Kurt Rundle (who was in two episodes and who had his powers taken by the TP themselves), but I'd be happy to see stories with anyone.
Ships
Canon ships are all good. Really, with this show I can pretty much ship anyone with anyone as long as they're over the age of 16, within ~5 years of each other in age, and not incestuous.
NoTP: John/Jedikiah
If you're reading this letter with an eye toward treats and wish I'd requested any of the other Tomorrow People versions instead, no worries! I will never turn down stories about those shows.
I very much look forward to what you're going to write. Thank you for signing up!
Thank you so much for signing up!
What follows is a run-down of my likes/dislikes, favorite tropes, and some specific fandom discussion with optional sentence prompts. Use what you need to, but know that I know that ODAO. You're also welcome to stalk me online. I'm
argentum_ls, and If you're happy with what I put in the sign-up, you prefer to write unprompted, or you have no time for a long letter, then please don't feel obligated to read this. Nothing in here is a demand. As long as you avoid my DNWs, I'll enjoy your story.
This year I'm requesting three TV shows and a book.
About Me
Overall, what I like in a story is plot; that is, I want something to happen. Beyond that, the reins are pretty loose. I like h/c and whump, angst, drama, humor, casefic, action/adventure, and romance. I'm open to gen, het, slash, poly—though I do have some fandom-specific preferences, which are listed below. I love pairings and I also love strong friendship, sibling, and (pseudo)parent-child relationships. Ratings from G to hard-R are great. Crossovers are fantastic, though not anything I ever expect. I prefer canon based stories or canon-divergent AUs, and I prefer third-person storytelling, though I don't care if it's in past or present tense.
Should you happen to be the crossover type, any live-action fandom I've ever written is fair game. And if you know me and know there's a fandom I haven't written in that I'd like, that's fair game too.
Tropes
Wants
My favorite trope of all is Secret Identity Revealed/Discovered. The common thread of my fandoms is that at least one of the characters has superpowers or equivalent that s/he/they have to keep secret from the world at large. I love secrets. I love seeing them kept (and the cost that keeping secrets invariably has), threatened, discovered, or revealed. And I love to watch the fallout when it happens.
My second favorite is Trapped!, perhaps because it offers so many potential interpretations that all boil down to the same thing. This can be the characters getting stuck in an avalanche, cave-in, snow storm, hurricane, or any other disaster inspired reason that they have limited resources to deal with and no ability to simply walk away from. Likewise, characters being captured or held hostage, regardless of whether it's physical or psychological bondage that's keeping them there, can be a great way to show how characters act under pressure and/or to bring out sides of their personalities that we don't normally see. Other interpretations are for the characters to get stuck in the wrong time, to get stuck out-of-sync with everyone else (such as in an alternate universe or on a ghostly plane), or to simply get stuck in circumstances they'd never, ever choose to be in (such as the awkward meet-the-other-family dinner or forced-to-work-together with a person they don't like).
Other things I like:
Unexpected Allies
Outsider POV
Characters talking about their superpowers/superstate in a way that provides insight into what it means for them.
Characters who don't trust each other learning to
When two characters believe they're talking about the same thing, but aren't.
Real world situations complicated by the supernatural
Clever or unusual uses of a character's abilities.
Trope inversions
Coming of Age
Canon-based, post-canon, or canon-divergent stories
Gen, het, slash, poly stories, except where specifically indicated
Time travel gone wrong, including time loops, trapped out of time, or characters inadvertently messing up their timelines
Do Not Wants:
Crack
Non-canon AUs (including omegaverse, mpreg, and genderbends)
Non con
Permanent requested character maiming or death
PWPs (Romance, sexual activity, UST, or sexual tension are all fine as part of a larger story)
E or NC-17 rated sexual material
Stories based on jealousy
Character assassination/bashing
Torture!porn (e.g. the Saw movies)
Incest
Identity headcanons (e.g. trans*, autistic, asexual)
Zombies
1st or 2nd person POV
Requested Fandoms
Henry Danger
Henry Hart
It's no secret that superheroes are one of my favorite types of character, and especially when the story is about the double life the superhero has to lead. I absolutely love the conflicts that our character has to deal with because of needing to keep his story straight; needing to lie to people he doesn't want to lie to; needing to pretend to be weak or incapable in situations where, in costume, he'd totally be crushing the problem; and needing to constantly re-calibrate his understanding of normal vs. what everyone else thinks is normal. As indicated in my likes, I'm also a huge h/c and whump fan, but especially when it's the kind of superhero whump where being thrown into a wall only causes some bruises and temporary limping and being caught in a explosion doesn't do much worse than ruining your clothes. Henry Danger fed all of my likes here, though it sometimes went a little too far with things used as jokes that I personally find horrifying, like the mind-wiper or the time our heroes framed Bichelle Bilsky for a crime and never fixed or retracted it.
I love all the characters on this show, though I'm especially fond of Henry and Piper's later relationship, after she knows he's Kid Danger, and the friendship among Henry, Jasper, and Charlotte. Feel free to include anyone. For villains, Drex is probably my favorite (and he's in the tag set!) because of the conflict with him being the failed sidekick. I'm also a fan of Jeff, Gwen, and Kyle.
Should you think it's relevant, I have seen every episode of Henry Danger, most of Danger Force, and enough of the The Adventures of Kid Danger to not care about spoilers.
Optional Prompts
So, I kinda fell hard into this show when it dropped on Netflix and had a lot of thoughts. If you want more prompts, there are 35 of them here: Danger Prompts. (I won't blame you at all if you don't want to go into this rabbit hole.)
Additional Canon Note: Henry Danger has a lot of crack-y elements, and Crack is both a somewhat ambiguous term and in my DNWs. If the show went there, so can you-- though I would prefer if things like the alternate universe where everyone is Henry are kept as throwaway jokes rather than being the setting of the story. I love most of what the show does, and I absolutely eat up all the lampshading ("The rules of time travel change every time we do it, dude!"), but I prefer when the weird-for-the-sake-of-being-weird jokes are not the focus.
Ships:
Henry/Charlotte/Jasper
Kid Danger/Kyle
Henry/OFC
NoTP: Henry/Ray
My Babysitter's a Vampire
Ethan Morgan & Bennie Weir
Teenagers with superpowers is always an automatic draw for me. This show hits a lot of what I like with characters who are trying to do their best when forced into situations they're completely unprepared to handle—even if they're not always successful—and characters trying to balance multiple, conflicting sets of lives and lies. While I'm not usually a horror fan, I also loved the slightly darker themes the show was able to explore by more-or-less being “Buffy lite.” With this show, I'm also really fond of Ethan and Benny's friendship, though I sometimes got the impression that Ethan is the only reason Benny hasn't started down the path to becoming a bad guy.
All canon characters are welcome in your story, as are OCs. Please stick with canon relationships or invent OCs for the boys.
Optional Prompts
The Sidekicks Initiative
Randy | Butterfly King
This book hit that sweet middle spot for me of being genre aware and able to poke fun at various superhero and comic book/comic book movie tropes/cliches, while still playing the story straight and telling a solid story where the world is real to the characters. I loved Sam's journey and seeing him grow from a downtrodden guy who didn't have much going for him to being a hero. However, the character I'm requesting is Randy. I listened to this book and the narrator really went in on giving Randy that Batman-esque growl that may or may not have come through on the printed page. I was also fascinated by that brief moment of weakness we had where Randy admitted that he wore his Batman persona because “what else do I have?” And, while all the main characters had their tragic backgrounds, Randy's hit me the hardest because his mentor neglected the human side of his upbringing. Of course, if you want to include Sam, Anna, or any other character—canon or original—in this story, they're more than welcome.
Optional Prompts
The Tomorrow People (2013)
Worldbuilding
The Tomorrow People, in all its variations, is my comfort food show. I've been a fan since the 1973 version and will be a fan of whatever version comes next, no matter what its flaws may be.
The very idea of children and teenagers with something more to offer the world, yet who have to hide what they are from the world for their own safety, speaks powerfully to me. I love that the characters are thrust into situations that they don't have the experience to deal with, yet have the responsibility to take on because their powers make them the only ones who can solve the problems. I love how they are forced to rely on each other, and how although their powers separate them from their family and friends, the Tomorrow People still consider themselves part of the world at large. I also love how they continually have to grapple with the question of whether they are superior to or better than the people they're descended from, and how often the answer is “only in some ways.”
The 2013 show brought us a new generation of characters with the problems of the modern world. Further, while the other versions of the show limited the TP experience to a small and fixed group of people—which is easy to teach and monitor—this one throws the doors open to myriad people, many of whom aren't good people. This would completely change the overall TP experience. I'm really interested in seeing the characters live and function in the 21st century where new breakouts are happening all the time, and CCTV, iPhones, satellites, and social media surround and affect us all whether we want it to or not.
Optional Prompt
A "I used to be a TP" world building story, especially after the fall of ULTRA. Do any of these people come out of the woodwork to discuss their brief experience with superpowers? Is there a support group? Does an underground business to restore people's powers start? Are there snake oil salesmen who go around promising to "fix" the de-powered? What happens when the de-powered accept the offer? Is there a class action lawsuit? How does one go about proving that they used to have superpowers? Are there any long-term health consequences to having one's powers removed? Do people who used to be TP regain their ability to kill after their powers are removed?
All canon characters or OCs who fit the world are welcome in your story. The ones in the tag set are Stephen, Luca, and Kurt Rundle (who was in two episodes and who had his powers taken by the TP themselves), but I'd be happy to see stories with anyone.
Ships
Canon ships are all good. Really, with this show I can pretty much ship anyone with anyone as long as they're over the age of 16, within ~5 years of each other in age, and not incestuous.
NoTP: John/Jedikiah
If you're reading this letter with an eye toward treats and wish I'd requested any of the other Tomorrow People versions instead, no worries! I will never turn down stories about those shows.
I very much look forward to what you're going to write. Thank you for signing up!