rose_stonewall

Hi, writer! Thank you so much for writing for me! You can find me on AO3 as rosestone.

I've done my best to provide thoughts and prompts below. However, if you find your muse tugging you off in another direction, please feel free to go for it! I'm thrilled to see what the end result is.


Likes:

• Outsider perspective


• Identity porn


• Worldbuilding


• Character studies


• AUs including (but not limited to!) canon-divergence, fusions, non-mundane setting AUs - for example:
  
  • If the Avengers are in a coffeeshop AU - how do they maintain their secret identities while also being baristas? How did they all end up there - is the coffeeshop a cover for SHIELD, or did every one of them take a job/become a customer with no idea that anybody else at the coffeeshop wasn't an ordinary civilian, forcing them to desperately try to keep their secret identities from their "ordinary" co-workers?


• Time travel


• Pining, especially clueless mutual pining


• Hate to love


• Fake dating


• Gen, especially gen focused around people becoming friends/learning to trust other people/having to take a leap of faith on other people


• Non-standard formats such as epistolary, newspaper articles/articles from a history book/other in-universe meta


• Complicated, messy family relationships

DNWs:

• Noncon/dubcon


• Character bashing


• Major character death (excluding fake death)


• Incest


• Explicit underage sex (below 17 years of age; implied or offscreen sex is fine)


• Issuefic


• Harry being raised to believe Voldemort was right (AUs in which Harry is raised by someone affiliated with Voldemort, such as a Death Eater, but still grows up to oppose him are OK)


• Voldemort Was Right AUs

Medium Opt-Ins

I requested Any In-Universe Documents that Fit the Canon Setting for this exchange. I really like in-universe documents! They're great! My brain is not providing me with any more useful information than this! But, uh, stuff like notes or book excerpts or reports/research... newspapers and magazines! Or tabloids, for characters who're famous in-universe.


Harry Potter
Black Widow
Thor
WandaVision
Titans

Harry Potter

Harry Potter AUs I'm pretty much guaranteed to be interested in include:

• Sorting AUs (either as a character study or as a method of creating character divergence; and I absolutely enjoy alternate Sortings that seem illogical without context! The explanation's the fun bit.)


• Harry being raised by someone who treats him well (whether that's a kinder version of the Dursleys, a friend of his parents/teacher/other person older than him, or a time traveller... or anyone else you can think of!)


• Marriage law fics


• Weird magical inheritances


• Superhero AUs (whether that's 'Hogwarts is now a hero school' or 'Harry puts on a costume to pretend his magic is actually superpowers so he can save Muggles without breaking the Statute')


• Space AUs


• Voldemort Won AUs (where they're still fighting back, and there's some level of hope)


• Voldemort never rose to power AUs


• Someone else being the Boy Who Lived


• Dudley having magic


• ... probably more stuff honestly, but this is what I've got right now!

Hermione Granger/Harry Potter/Ron Weasley

So... how and when do they get together? These three don't strike me as people who'd actually be good at working out their feelings; they've been friends for so long it might be easy not to realise those friend emotions were actually more. (Look. I love Harry, but he would definitely spend a lot of time thinking about how great it would be to stay friends with Hermione and Ron forever and maybe live with them and never consider why.) Hermione's more likely to realise she's got feelings, I think, but possibly not that Ron and Harry have them... On the other hand, I could see Ron waking up one day, going "OH NO" and then pining for his definitely-straight BFF.

So, like. During the war, kissing in the heat of the moment after nearly dying and then having to work out what it all meant? Huddling for warmth after fleeing Death Eaters? Working out that there's feelings there, but not acting on them because what if they're wrong, and anyway they're in a war, it's the worst possible time... Or, post-war: rehabilitating Grimmauld Place together and coming to a slow realisation, or realising just how reluctant they are to move out/away from each other? Sitting down and working out what they want to do with their lives (teaching? Auror-ing? Politics? Research?) and eventually noticing they've built their futures around the assumption they'll always be together? Maybe everyone around them assumes they're together already (living in a small tent together for all that time seems like something that'd make them a lot less self-conscious about casual touch, and then other people might read into that), and it never occurs to the three of them that there's anything weird about the fact that they keep getting invited to parties etc. as a unit... until one day it does.


Lily Evans Potter

I have to admit with this one I'm leaning towards much fluffier, happier ideas. Like – what would Lily's life have looked like if she'd survived for whatever reason (Voldemort's war never happened, or she and James weren't targeted, or Peter didn't betray them/wasn't the Secret Keeper to start with, etc.)? Who would she have grown up to be, and what would her life have looked like? We know she was clever – would she have ended up going into research, and changing the world another way? (If you end up writing a fic set around the time of her canonical death, I really like the idea that Harry's survival was actually down to some kind of weird experimental magic Lily developed while stuck in their house for all those months.) Or maybe Lily (and James?) didn't actually die in their house, actually got flung into… limbo, through time, whatever else, and end up spat out some time in the future – what would happen? How would she and Harry cope? In a no-war AU, Lily presumably would have continued being friends with Severus… if she still ended up with James, or with another Marauder, how disastrously would that have gone?

Shipwise, I'm pretty open – I'd be equally happy to read Lily with James, another Marauder, Severus… I have less ideas for femslash, but I have to admit I'm fond of Narcissa/Lily, though I don't have any specific prompt ideas there. I'd also be happy to read Lily & Harry, Lily & Petunia or other gen. (As far as Petunia goes – I'm rather fond of her because she could have so easily been a better person. But she got jealous, and stewed, and nobody ever shook her out of it. What if she'd had magic too, or Lily had almost died and Petunia had realised what she'd almost lost? Etc.)


Dudley Dursley

All of my Dudley feelings basically fall into the same category: But What If Dudley Was Good, Actually. So like... AU where Dudley and Harry were united against his parents? AU where Dudley has magic, and the Dursleys have to deal with that, and his and Harry's relationship is upended because it turns out Harry's name carries a hell of a lot more weight than Dudley's does in the magical world? AU where Dudley has magic and Harry doesn't, and the Dursleys end up completely changing how they treat the two of them? Or, for a magical Dudley AU - what does Dudley's time at Hogwarts look like? Does anyone know he's Harry's cousin, and does he end up making himself a pariah parroting his parents' views about Harry? Is he involved in Harry's frequent adventures, or is he firmly (and happily) on the sidelines?

Or... future fic? Maybe Dudley and Harry reconcile post-war, once Dudley's had some time to really think about his parents and how he was raised and realise he'd like to get to know his cousin properly. Or when Dudley's kid turns out magical. Or Harry never comes back, and Dudley resigns himself to never being able to apologise properly, only WHOOPS turns out he's dating a witch/wizard and his plan to let Harry continue to have a Dursley-free life is failing spectacularly.


Petunia Evans Dursley/Severus Snape

I'm really interested in how these two might have gotten together despite themselves (Petunia wants nothing to do with magic, Severus nothing to do with Muggles...). There are some AUs that would be obvious routes - if Petunia had magic, or if Severus never got caught up with the Death Eaters, things would be a lot easier for them. For other options... if Petunia were more sympathetic to magic, or had more sensible ideas about how to deal with caring for a magical child, she might have sought out Severus for help (sure, she doesn't like him, but he's a hell of a lot easier to find than 'my sister's husband's best friend with the weird name'), or gone with Harry to Diagon Alley and realised he could use someone in his corner who wouldn't expect him to be a hero. Or maybe her marriage to Vernon broke down (due to Harry, or maybe because Dudley had magic?), and they ran into each other, and it turned out without the thorny issue of who Lily liked the most between them they actually got on somewhat better.


Hermione Granger/Pansy Parkinson
Pansy Parkinson/Harry Potter
Pansy Parkinson/Ginny Weasley
Pansy Parkinson/Percy Weasley

I really enjoy the hate-to-love potential of these ships, and of Pansy - she was consistently nasty to Harry &co. every time she showed up in the books, she tried to turn Harry over to the Death Eaters, and yet... I just really like 'what if people get the chance to grow and change and become better', I guess. (Or AUs where they're forced to grow and change faster. That's good too.) As for specific prompts -

- They're assigned to the same group project and have to work together in order to avoid failing.
- Caught in some kind of magical accident that throws them back in time/into some weird alternate dimension/gives them a telepathic link/bodyswaps them/some other weird thing
- Pansy defects to the Order and it's super awkward. Maybe they have to go on a mission together?
- Post-war they end up working together. (Harry and Pansy are both teachers, or Aurors? Pansy's doing marketing or something similar for Ginny's Quidditch team? Pansy and Percy are in the same Ministry department or both working in the Wizengamot? Hermione and Pansy are both researchers?)
- They're at the same fancy party, and end up hiding in the same back room from people they don't want to talk to... repeatedly.
- Pansy has information one of the others needs (political info for Hermione or Percy's run for Minister, maybe, or something for the war?)
- Pansy's run into would-be Death Eaters hoping to resurrect the cause who figure she'll be with them, but the Carrows did an excellent job convincing her that Death Eaters are the last people she wants to be in charge... so she has to find someone who can use that information to stop them. And then she gets more involved than she'd planned.
- Percy and Pansy in the Ministry during the war. Percy's a spy, Pansy has information he needs, and neither of them do a good job of avoiding feelings.
- Pansy takes a bet to seduce someone she assumes would never want anything to do with her. Whoops, she caught feelings.
- The only people willing to socialise with Pansy post-war are the Death Eaters' old supporters. On one visit she finds baby Delphini and immediately rescues her, since the idea of forcing a kid to become a Dark Lady and restore a terrible regime is pretty horrifying. But she's afraid if she brings the kid to the Aurors they'll panic about Baby Voldemort, so she seeks help from someone she hopes will be more reasonable.


Marauders

I'm really interested in characters who started out as good people but ended up going the other way. We didn't get to see a lot of young Peter in canon (probably why there's so many fics where he was a bafflingly terrible person even as a kid), but I find it hard to believe that he was always the kind of person who'd sell out those closest to himself to protect himself. What led him down that path? Did he choose every step, or was he manipulated? And of course this isn't something you can really look at without the other Marauders, the people he loved and betrayed. What would it have taken for things to have gone another way? If Peter hadn't betrayed them, what would their lives have looked like?/if Voldemort hadn't ever started a war in the first place, where would they have ended up?


Worldbuilding: Any

How does magic actually work? Do the words mean something, or are they just there to provide the power of suggestion? What about potions - what does it take to get a bunch of presumably-toxic ingredients to alchemise into an actual potion? Does anyone ever work out how to combine magic and technology, and what does that look like/how does it affect the magical world? Are there any researchers out there working on Muggle problems/fields with magic? Are there any major changes to Hogwarts/the Ministry/other parts of the magical world post-canon, and how does that look? Are there any parts of the magical world that go right past 'huh, magical culture is unusual!' to 'hey WHAT' to Muggles and Muggle-borns (like, I don't know, taxes don't exist so how does the Ministry pay its employees, or something along those lines), and what is it?


Worldbuilding: Hogwarts

What does Hogwarts look like, post-canon? Do the classes ever change, or the class sizes? I'll admit I'm really fond of those fics where the author clearly has a bone to pick with Hogwarts' organisational structure and suddenly there's fifteen more teachers and a bunch of extra classes, and I'd really enjoy a fic where someone very organised ends up in charge of Hogwarts somehow and seizes that opportunity with both hands. As far as other stuff goes... how do the teachers have time to do all that, anyway? Time turners? Is Hogwarts intelligent as a result of bathing in all that magic for centuries, and to what degree? If Hogwarts had a major influx of students (say, all the magic being used in Muggle areas during the war turned out to cause a bunch of Muggle babies to become magical), how would they deal with that, and what would it look like? Does anyone ever start a magical primary school, and if so, does that affect the Hogwarts curriculum (say, they all have a really good grounding in magical history and flying)?


Worldbuilding: Pureblood culture

Pureblood/magical culture is something that I do think would have developed as something that's similar, but not quite the same, to Muggle culture. There's going to be overlap, since (no matter what blood purists think) there's information flowing from Muggle culture via Muggleborns, but at the same time... there are a lot of Purebloods who deliberately avoid knowledge of the Muggle world or who totally misunderstand what they do know, and I'd bet a lot of Muggle-born or raised people who have fairly minimal contact with the Muggle world after finishing Hogwarts and as a result miss out on changing cultural trends. That seems like it'd make it fairly likely for a parallel, similar-yet-different culture to build up.

As for specific prompts: what are some major differences in magical culture that trip Muggleborns up - or similarities to Muggle culture Purebloods have no idea exist? Is there a magical religion, and what does that look like? Does magical fashion ever take cues from Muggle (especially post-war)? Does magical culture change significantly post-war - like, people wanting to show they're Hip With Muggles because that's the done thing - and does it last, or is it just another trend? If magical technology comes to exist, how does that affect magical culture?

Black Widow

Note: while obviously the movie is placed very specifically between Civil War and Infinity War, I'd honestly be totally fine if the events/ramifications of either or both of these movies were ignored. Like, have the Avengers be friends still! (Maybe the Civil War in this universe was more of a cold war between the Avengers who wanted to fight or amend the Sokovian Accords via PR and legislation, and the ones who kept going out to do vigilantism and getting the authorities angry at them?) Natasha lives through Endgame, or gets snapped back into existence with everyone else! If you want to write canon-compliant that's also great, but some of my prompts will definitely lean away from canon and I'm absolutely fine with receiving a fic based on that.


Yelena Belova & Natasha Romanoff

Natasha managed to take Yelena with her when she escaped. Maybe they both joined SHIELD together, or maybe Yelena ended up doing something totally different with her life.

Or: roleswap AU. Yelena escaped and Natasha ended up being brainwashed instead. Does Yelena end up joining SHIELD, or does she strike out on her own? Would Natasha go into hiding the way Yelena did after being un-brainwashed, or would she choose a different path? How do they end up finding one another again?

Yelena and Natasha spend time together post-movie - maybe they're trying to hold things together post-Snap, or maybe in a universe where that didn't happen and they're just having a nice time. (Given it's them, 'a nice time' might mean that Yelena's crashing an Avengers mission. Who knows?)

What ends up happening with the Widows? Do they all end up staying with Yelena (and potentially Natasha), or splitting up? What do they end up doing - do they want ordinary lives, or do they decide to try to help people like Natasha did post-defection?

Because of reasons, Natasha has to secretly go undercover as Yelena (maybe Yelena's injured, or got tagged with some kind of handwavey bio-molecular tracker that'll pass out of her body just slowly enough that she can't do the mission, etc.), and the 'secretly' part requires Yelena to go undercover as her in the Avengers so nobody finds out. Shenanigans ensue.

Yelena comes to visit the Avengers. Maybe it's post-movie and she's come to borrow some of Bruce's equipment to make more of the anti-brainwash stuff, maybe it's earlier (she was worried that Natasha might've been brainwashed, and wanted to check on her?), maybe later (post-Endgame, come to check in on Natasha, who she'd noticed hadn't been present for the climactic battle?). Hell, maybe the Widows show up for the Endgame fight... But basically what I'm interested in here is everyone's reactions. What do the Avengers think of Natasha's sister? Did any of them know about her? (Presumably Clint, but other than him? And surely he never expected to meet her.) What does Yelena think of them? Who does she get along with, and who does she dislike/pretend to dislike in order to annoy them?

Thor

Jane Foster/Thor
Jane Foster/Loki
Jane Foster/Darcy Lewis
Jane Foster & Darcy Lewis
Jane Foster & Thor
Jane Foster & Loki
Darcy Lewis & Loki
Darcy Lewis/Loki


Things I'm interested in include:

Someone gets/has superpowers

Maybe Jane keeps the Aether (or Darcy gets it) or being possessed by it has weird, superpower-giving aftereffects? Maybe someone picks up Mjolnir (and if so - what do Thor and/or Loki think about it? How does Thor handle knowing he won't get Mjolnir back unless Jane dies or gives it up? What does he do?). Maybe one of them already had powers, and her secret comes out when the Destroyer attacks. How either (or both) of them having powers affect canon? Would Jane or Darcy end up joining the Avengers? Going to space to have adventures? Vigilante-ing? Doing their best to continue with their normal lives, except terrible disasters keep striking the world that they have to go deal with?


Someone gets recruited by SHIELD/Hydra

It'd be fairly reasonable for SHIELD to want to keep an eye on Jane post-Thor, either openly (by recruiting her or offering her money) or covertly (by paying Darcy or someone else in her vicinity to keep an eye on her). It would also be fairly reasonable for Hydra to want to do the same thing... though they would probably be less likely to go for the open option. How might that play out?


Loki banished instead of Thor

How different would the events of the movie end up being? I don't see Loki hanging around Puente Antiguo (not unless he realised Jane was researching a Midgardian version of the Bifrost, anyway, and even then maybe not), but Jane would still know that he'd fallen out of the storm, and that her research was headed in the right direction. Would she run into him again, maybe if he realised she was his best chance of getting off Midgard, or would Jane just keep plugging away on her own? Would she end up building her own version of the Bifrost, or having to come up with a way to deal with the Aether on her own?


Space adventures

... and if Jane did build her own Bifrost or accidentally launch herself into space with the Reality Stone (or if the same happened to Darcy), what would she do there? What kind of fascinating science and aliens might they meet, and what kind of adventures might they have? If you want to write Guardians crossover fic, invent aliens or planets, or write a canon divergence in which Jane accidentally saves the universe by doing some small thing that absolutely ruins Thanos's plans, please do!


Time travel

What if Jane's would-be Bifrost accidentally transports people through time, not space? What would a late-canon version of Jane or Darcy do if they were flung into an earlier time, either in their younger bodies or their present-time own? Would they try to keep time the same, or start desperately changing things? How might that interact with other AUs I've suggested above - say, if Darcy were recruited to become a SHIELD agent, how would she deal with her knowledge about Hydra? Or might Jane's future knowledge about the Infinity Stones make it easier for her to handle the Aether, maybe making it possible for her to survive her possession the second time around?


Other AUs that could be interesting:

In-universe coffee shop AU (or other in-universe versions of mundane AUs - maybe a university AU? I just want mundane-style AUs where Thor's still an alien and there's weird shit going on, honestly); urban fantasy AU; dimension-hopping; running into alternate-dimension versions of oneself; meeting at a different point in canon.

WandaVision

Darcy Lewis/Monica Rambeau/Jimmy Woo
Darcy Lewis & Monica Rambeau & Jimmy Woo

I am absolutely going to be equally happy for gen or shipfic for this grouping. The most fun part of these three, for me, is the vibe, the way they bounce off each other. Like when Darcy and Monica do science together, or Jimmy and Monica do Serious Federal Agent stuff, or Jimmy and Darcy are on completely the same (dumbass) wavelength... they all relate to one another in completely different ways, but it all works.

As far as prompts go...

Weird Stuff Happens to Darcy, Monica and Jimmy as a result of the Hex. For example:

- They all end up stuck in WandaVision. Maybe they remember the outside world, maybe they don't, but either way they find their way back to each other.

- They end up actually in the past, or in an alternate dimension/timeline, or bodyswapped, or... some other kind of weirdness, and have to work out how to fix things - maybe with the added obstacle that they all believe they're stuck in the weirdness alone, and take a little while to realise they have friends trapped in it too. If time travel - do they get back, or stay there, and do they maintain the past or change it?


What ends up happening to Monica and her new powers? Does she sign the Accords, or keep her abilities a secret - and what do Darcy and Jimmy (especially Jimmy) think of that?

Monica goes to space to do whatever it is the Skrulls want her for, and Darcy and Jimmy come along for the ride.

Different people keep assuming that different combinations of Darcy/Monica/Jimmy are dating + the third wheel. Confusion and shenanigans ensue.

AU where the Sokovia Accords never happened. Monica is a solo hero, Darcy is the hacker she met online who gets her the information she needs to do her job, and Jimmy is the exasperated SHIELD agent who's her main point of contact/is trying to arrest Darcy's hacker ID for stealing SHIELD info/is in charge of the SHIELD agents who are failing to deal with one or both of them (/whatever other reason you can come up with for Monica not to know his face. Maybe SHIELD agents wear masks for some reason in this AU??). Absolutely none of the three of them are aware that they know each other in real life.

Titans

Amy Rohrbach

I got unreasonably attached to Amy in her short time on screen, given she spent the entire time draped in big, obvious death flags, and it's made me incredibly curious about what the show would've looked like had she survived. She doesn't strike me as someone who would have just sat around and waited for Dick to reappear, so... what might she have done? Contacted him, maybe, trying to convince him to come back, or to tell her what the hell he was doing - or maybe she would have followed him. What weird conclusions might she have come to, following in the wake of Dick's adventures? What would she have thought or done if she found out her new partner was Robin? And what the hell would she have put in her reports when her boss wanted to know what she'd found out?

Hi, writer! Thank you so much for writing for me! You can find me on AO3 as rosestone.

I've done my best to provide thoughts, prompts and my views on the AU tags I've picked below. However, if you find your muse tugging you off in another direction, please feel free to go for it! I'm thrilled to see what the end result is.


Harry Potter - Thor - The Creature Court

Top

Likes

• Outsider perspective


• Identity porn


• Worldbuilding


• Character studies


• AUs including (but not limited to!) canon-divergence, fusions, setting AUs. When it comes to setting AUs, I especially enjoy:
  
  • a) a setting AU used as a vehicle for character study, exploration of how the characters became their canon selves in a non-canon setting, or similar worldbuilding - for example, if the Avengers are in a coffeeshop AU, what's Natasha's background if not the Red Room? What's the equivalent of Anakin's Fall to the Dark Side if he's in a high school AU?
  
  
  • b) non-mundane AUs in a mundane setting. For example, taking the coffeeshop Avengers from above - how do they maintain their secret identities while also being baristas? How did they all end up there - is the coffeeshop a cover for SHIELD, or did every one of them take a job/become a customer with no idea that anybody else at the coffeeshop wasn't an ordinary civilian, forcing them to desperately try to keep their secret identities from their "ordinary" co-workers?


• Time travel


• Pining, especially clueless mutual pining


• Hate to love


• Fake dating


• Gen, especially gen focused around people becoming friends/learning to trust other people/having to take a leap of faith on other people


• Non-standard formats such as epistolary, newspaper articles/articles from a history book/other in-universe meta

DNWs

• Noncon/dubcon


• Character bashing


• Major character death (excluding fake death)


• Incest


• Explicit underage sex (below 17 years of age; implied or offscreen sex is fine)


• Issuefic


• Harry being raised to believe Voldemort was right (AUs in which Harry is raised by someone affiliated with Voldemort, such as a Death Eater, but still grows up to oppose him are OK)


• Voldemort Was Right AUs

Harry Potter

Part One

Petunia Evans Dursley; Sirius Black/Petunia Evans Dursley; Petunia Evans Dursley & Lily Evans Potter; Petunia Evans Dursley/Severus Snape; Dudley Dursley

Note: if you're writing a Lily-centric fic, I won't consider it a violation of my major character death DNW if she dies in the fic/prior to the fic's beginning.

HP: Petunia Evans Has Magic

What would that look like? What house would she get sorted into? Would she love magic the way Lily did, or still end up wanting a "normal" life, or maybe love it but go back to the ordinary world anyway because of the war - or would she fight? If she did, maybe it'd be just for Lily's sake, or maybe she'd want to fight back herself. Would she and Lily still fall out in this AU, or would they be close?

For the ships above - does Severus decide he likes Petunia in this AU, or do they still clash, and maybe eventually overcome that? I feel like Petunia and Sirius probably wouldn't get on at all in the beginning - they're too different - so how do they get past those rocky beginnings? Maybe they're spending time together because of Lily and James, or they're sharing custody of Harry after their deaths. Which could be awkward if she'd decided to go back to the normal world and ended up married to Vernon, since I doubt he'd like Sirius...

And what would life look like for Dudley here? Is he magical too - or not? Does he grow up in the magical world, or (if Petunia is caring for Harry) do they end up going Muggle to hide from the media/Death Eaters?


HP: Dudley Dursley Also Has Magic

This is an AU I find really interesting! Like... how would his parents have reacted to Dudley's magic, given how they canonically feel about it? Did Harry know, or was he as surprised as they were? How does Dudley's presence change canon otherwise - like, does he affect Harry's Sorting? Do they end up becoming friends - and if not, who does he befriend? How do Petunia and Vernon cope - do they end up deciding that this magic thing is all right after all, or blame each other for Dudley's magic, maybe even split up - and if so, does Petunia remain single or end up in a relationship with a wizard?

Potential prompts: Dudley's experiences in the magical world. Harry's experiences in a magical world where he can't just pretend the Dursleys don't exist for most of the year. How does Dudley's presence in his new House affect his roommates? What if Dudley ended up with the diary instead - what would Tom do to him, and how would Ginny's year have gone instead?


Part Two

Percy Weasley; Harry Potter; Hermione Granger; Draco Malfoy; Hermione Granger & Harry Potter & Ron Weasley; Tom Riddle

Quick note - if you want to write shipfic, feel free. I'd be entirely happy to receive any combination of the above characters (excluding Tom), and honestly I'm very much a multishipper, so if you want to write a ship that includes a character not in the above list... provided it doesn't include a DNW, I'll almost certainly enjoy it!


HP: Percy Weasley is a spy for the Order of the Phoenix during the war

I love Percy! I'm really curious about what this would have looked like for him. What changed his mind about the Order - or was he recruited really early and his attitude towards Dumbledore was always a cover? Who recruited him, and how? Is his primary role to spy on the Ministry, or does he end up getting recruited into the Death Eaters? For a fic focused on somebody else - does the Order know about his role, and what do the various members think about it?

Potential prompts: Percy's experience as a spy. Percy's Ministry exploits post-war as an acknowledged hero - how does he use, or misuse, his new political power? How do the Weasleys react to finding out he's a spy? Or his ex-Death Eater colleagues, realising as they see him in the witness box at their trials that he was never on their side? What about an entry in a future History of Magic text - what's Percy's legacy, and the legacy of other characters who were also heavily involved in that part of the war?


HP: Voldemort Never Rose to Power

Why not? Did something happen to Tom, or did he simply decide on a different path (for example, becoming a teacher, or a researcher, or seeking political power under his own name)? What did the Marauders' time look like without the threat of war hanging over everybody's heads? Did the less polarised environment allow friendly relationships to develop that didn't in canon (say - did the Marauders and Snape ever become friendly, maybe in school because they were never enemies to the same level or after it because they grew up and realised they were being ridiculous)? Were there other conflicts (political, say?) and if so, how did they change the magical world? Or in Harry's time - what was his childhood like, and the childhoods of other kids whose families were affected by the war? Do they still end up mixed up in various ridiculous adventures, and if so, what? Different friendships? Different Sortings?


HP: Harry Wasn't Raised by the Dursleys

So, who was Harry raised by? Sirius and/or Remus? McGonagall? An OC Muggle family who found him? A regretful Peter Pettigrew? A time-travelling friend/classmate/rival/himself? Or - how would Harry being raised by someone else affect the story? What would Hogwarts look like in this AU from the perspective of another student or a teacher - like, does a Harry who had a kinder upbringing take less risks? Know more about magical culture, which changes his behaviour? Etc., etc.


HP: Somebody Else is the Boy/Girl Who Lived

What's the prophecy in this AU? Did Voldemort interpret it correctly, or did he accidentally pick someone totally random to grant Prophecy Power to? Potential prompts: what does Harry's life look like without the burden of being the Boy Who Lived? What shenanigans does he get into despite not having to worry about Voldemort coming after him (because, let's be real, he would). What if the prophecy kid is Hermione, or Ron, or Draco, or frankly anyone else - how do they deal with it? If they're the kid of a Death Eater, how do they reconcile their parents' loyalties with the fact that they don't actually want to let Voldemort kill them - and, for that matter, how do their parents (if they survived) or guardians deal with it? For a kid whose parents are magical, how did they deal with the pressure of growing up in the magical world, around people who venerated them for something they don't even remember? If Muggleborn - how weird would that be, and how many magical people looking for them did they meet as a kid in hindsight?

Writing all this made me really want BWL Percy. Probably because he'd deal really badly with that kind of pressure. But there's a lot of interesting potential in the Weasley family in general there, honestly. Especially if Molly and Arthur survived because Bill was babysitting when Voldemort came to call...


HP: Alternate Sorting AU

I love AU Sortings. A lot. The parts I specifically love fall into two categories: a) the sort of character-study fic that's looking at the reasons that a particular character got sorted differently or the effect their alternate sorting had on them; or b) broader-focus fics that are more along the lines of 'what effect did this character's alternate sorting have on the story?' For example - if Percy Weasley had ended up in Slytherin, might he have been more politically aware when he entered the Ministry and avoided falling for Fudge's refusal to admit the truth? If Tom Riddle had Sorted Hufflepuff, what would the war have looked like, if there'd been one at all? I'm guaranteed to enjoy Sorting AUs no matter which character the AU applies to, even if that character is completely out of left field. Like, if what you really want to write is a look at Harry's childhood had Petunia been a Ravenclaw witch, or what the magical world would look like if Severus Snape weren't a Slytherin? Please write that fic. I am extremely curious to see what it'd look like!


ALL: Space AU

WIZARDS IN SPACE. Wizards sneaking aboard spaceships? Wizards using magic to create their own spaceships, or space settlements? An AU set in the far future in which canon happened, but in SPACE? Hogwarts aboard a space station? How do wizards and witches hide in the future, anyway? Presumably they've worked out a way to avoid blowing up technology with magic, or any random Muggleborn kid could accidentally destroy the spaceship or space station they were living on, but that wouldn't mean that sufficiently large amounts of magic might not have an effect. And what kinds of technology might be interfaced with magic in the future?

Potential prompts: what does Voldemort's quest for power look like in this setting? Is he still taking advantage of blood purity biases, or in the future does that not exist? What kind of culture shock would a Muggleborn face going from the pure-tech Muggle world to whatever weird tech-magic hybrid Hogwarts has? Are there aliens, and do they have magic too?


All: Costumed Vigilante AU

There's something I find deeply funny about the idea of wizards pretending to have superpowers. Like, not even a superpower AU: straight up "Oh, you want to know what my powers are? I, uh... I can... sometimes I can change reality by thinking really hard? And muttering magic words under my breath? But this is not actual magic, let me make that clear. Magic isn't real, so obviously I can't do it. Hahaha, imagine if magic was real!"

So... are the wizard(s) responsible pretending to be superheroes in a world that only knows them through comics and movies? Blending in with an existing hero population? (In this case, feel free to have walk-on cameos or mentions of heroes from other properties if you want, but please don't let them overtake the story.) And what do the Aurors/ICW think of this blatant violation of the Statute - assuming, of course, they can actually find the perpetrator...

Potential prompts: A series of Aurors' reports detailing their search for the witch or wizard repeatedly breaking the Statute under the guise of a comic-book style hero. Draco Malfoy attempts to make amends for his past (or current) time with the Death Eaters by helping Muggles, in the most ludicrously dramatic way possible. A muggle-born character (Hermione? Dean? Justin? Penelope Clearwater?) is unable to resist the temptation to play at heroism just the once (but, of course, it isn't just once...). Neither is Harry, with his notorious saving-people thing.


All: Canon's Plot Is Interrupted By An Alien Invasion

This tag is primarily in here because I find the idea of the Second Wizarding War being unexpectedly interrupted by an alien invasion to be incredibly ridiculous. What would they do? How would Voldemort and the Order react to their war being interrupted? Would they try to keep fighting, or reluctantly join forces against the invasion? Is it a worldwide thing, or did they land specifically in a magical area like Hogwarts or Diagon Alley, leaving the Muggles none the wiser? What are the various responses in the magical community, especially pureblood vs. Muggle-born/raised? And are they able to fight off the aliens or come to a detente with them... and, if so, what happens with the war they'd been fighting? Can they still go back to being enemies, having spent all that time fighting the same foe?


ALL: Multiple Characters Travel Back in Time

I really enjoy time travel fics - not just for their potential as a source of canon divergence AUs (what would they change, given the chance? What additional changes to history might that unintentionally cause?) but also because it sort of... sets the character up for some interesting internal stuff. How do they hide the fact they've travelled through time? What do they think of their younger self's choices in hindsight, and how do they handle suddenly being up close and personal with their past mistakes? If it's a Peggy Sue, how do they handle having to pretend to be a younger, more innocent version of themselves, knowing what terrible things are going to happen to them and the people around them in the future? There's a lot of potential there.

Who goes back? What are their intentions? How many people have gone back - and do they know they aren't the only ones, or is it more of a slow realisation as it becomes more and more obvious that they aren't the only one altering history? Do the characters manage to agree on what they're doing, or are their plans too diametrically opposed for that to work? And what are their reasons - somebody trying to make Harry's childhood happier, or stop the Potters (or someone else - the Longbottoms? Another character?) from coming to a bad end? A Death Eater trying to change history and win retroactively? If so, do they stay on that side, or do they end up realising they're much happier not getting tortured randomly? Or does this take place later in the timeline - is it Sirius's death somebody's trying to stop? Or Myrtle's, or Cedric's? Turning Tom to the side of good? Saving Voldemort (or someone who died fighting him) the second time around?

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Thor

Darcy Lewis; Jane Foster; Jane Foster/Darcy Lewis; Darcy Lewis/Loki; Jane Foster/Thor; Jane Foster/Loki

Thor: Loki is banished instead of Thor

So, how would that go? Would he tell Jane about Asgard, because he realised Jane was the most likely mortal in the area to actually understand what was happening or because he respected her knowledge or because screw Odin, or would he refuse to have anything to do with mere mortals? End up in SHIELD's custody, maybe? And how would he end up proving himself to Odin, considering that Thor wouldn't be particularly likely to do something stupid like sending the Destroyer after him (not with the intent to kill him, anyway...) What if the loss of his powers affected the illusions hiding his Jotun ancestry - or would he lose all of his powers? Maybe the magic would stay. And, if Loki really did end up stuck on Midgard in the long term... what would he do?


Thor: Thor & Mjolnir Landed Separately; Somebody Else Finds Mjolnir
MCU: Thor does not regain his powers and remains exiled

Who finds Mjolnir? How do they gain the ability to use it - holding off the Destroyer, or some other threat, or by some more internal change that leads to worthiness? Or, alternately: what happens to Thor? Where does he land, and what does he do there? How long does it take him to realise he might not be able to find Mjolnir, or might not get Mjolnir back at all? What kind of shenaniganry does he get into on Earth? And if Darcy or Jane get Mjolnir - what do they do with it? Keep it a secret? Go out superheroing? Do they end up working for SHIELD, or part of the Avengers? If they end up running into Thor, how does he deal with the realisation that he's definitely not getting Mjolnir back, and what does he choose to do with his life on Midgard?


ALL: Character who doesn't have a Superpower in Canon has one or gains one

For the purposes of this tag, I'm counting being an alien as "having a superpower". My thoughts on Jane or Darcy acquiring Mjolnir as a superpower can be found above; other than that... Aftereffects of the Aether, or an AU where it doesn't harm her (or she manages to control it and stop it from killing her) and she gets to keep it? Jane or Darcy get recruited by SHIELD and accidentally come into contact with something that gives them superpowers? Darcy acquired powers through total random weirdness some time before the events of Thor and has just been quietly going about her life trying not to attract attention from the authorities/studying her powers, until one day the Destroyer comes to town and she has no choice but to use them?


ALL: Multiple Characters Travel Back in Time

Because what's better than one person Peggy Sueing it up? Multiple people, of course, each with their own agenda and plans for how best to change the past, and quite possibly unaware they aren't the only one who's jumped back - because, after all, who else could possibly have the knowledge of magic/science/however else they got back to do it? Nobody! Clearly the only possible reason events could be happening differently this reason is their own imperfect memory. Clearly.

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The Creature Court

Delphine & Rhian & Velody; Ashiol d'Aufleur/Livilla/Velody; Ashiol d'Aufleur/Garnet/Velody

Creature Court: Velody Never Gave Her Powers to Garnet

There are two ways this can go, I guess: maybe Velody never met Garnet that night, and her powers developed as per usual for the Creature Court until she got recruited... or she did meet him, refused to give him her power, and spent years deliberately avoiding the Court because all she knew about them was that they'd wanted to take her abilities, and she didn't want to risk that the next time she ran into them they'd be less polite.

In scenario A, did Velody manage to keep her daylight life, or did she get sucked into the Court the way Garnet and Ashiol were when they were recruited? How much do Delphine and Rhian know - and do they end up getting involved too, or pulling away from her?

In scenario B... how much does Velody manage to work out about the Court from her occasional spying attempts? How much does she know about her own powers? Is she still a King, or does she end up working her way up piecemeal from occasional deaths? Do Delphine and Rhian know about her powers? If Rhian's weird powers-onset thing still happens, does she tell Velody and Delphine what really happened? And how does Velody end up coming into contact with the Court, in the end?

Creature Court: Livilla's Blood Oath was a Terrible Seduction Attempt

Ok yes look I am aware this is ridiculous BUT I just think it would be great if Livilla had different motives re: the blood oath. Like... maybe she wanted to fuck Velody instead of fuck over Ashiol. Maybe she thought Velody would never go for it, so she'd get second best by at the very least getting a chance at some voyeurism (and also maybe she put a stipulation into the oath that they had to fuck within a certain amount of time, so she'd actually get that voyeurism). Maybe Velody was more into it than Livilla expected! Who knows!

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Update 9/9/20 - Author, I am very sorry this letter hasn't been completed yet. RL has been kicking my arse in spectacular fashion. I promise I'm working on it!


Likes:

• Outsider perspective


• Identity porn


• Worldbuilding


• Character studies


• AUs including (but not limited to!) canon-divergence, fusions, non-mundane setting AUs


• Time travel


• Pining, especially clueless mutual pining


• Hate to love


• Fake dating


• Gen, especially gen focused around people becoming friends/learning to trust other people/having to take a leap of faith on other people


• Non-standard formats such as epistolary, newspaper articles/articles from a history book/other in-universe meta

Further Notes:

Identity porn: What I like about identity porn can really be broken down into two categories:

a) That sort of... superhero-comics-y thing where multiple people have secret identities they're keeping from each other and they have to work around the problems that causes. Say - A and B both have secret identities. They're friends in real life, enemies when they put their masks on. Or maybe A meets B's hero identity through work and has to deal with feelings for them while also fighting crime by their side. Or A and B hate each other in real life and are fuckbuddies when they're being heroes. Or A's crushing on B and also B's hero side, and has to choose between them, not realising they're the same person. Or A sadly pretends not to have a crush, because B's clearly dating super!B, and how could they ever have a chance? I especially like identity porn where both people involved have secret identities (and, in the case of pairings where one character canonically has a secret identity and the other doesn't, I'm quite happy to receive an AU fic in which the non-secret-identity character has one).

b) The more, I don't know, philosophical side of it? By which I mean: I like stories about identity, generally speaking. Character studies; character studies about an AU version of that character who could have existed if only were different; fics where characters have to acknowledge something about themselves that they'd rather not confront; fics where characters who dislike one another have to work together, leading them to realise that hey, maybe he's not so bad... and maybe they were kind of shitty too. That kind of thing! And identity porn gives a really interesting dimension to that kind of fic. Does the character see their secret identity as being the same person as them? Do they make deliberate changes in their opinions, behaviour, etc. in order to throw others off the scent, and if so, how does that affect them? How do they make the choice to tell or not tell their loved ones about their secret? How do they deal with the knowledge that they're perfectly fine lying to those they care about in the name of some nebulous greater good? If they tell their loved one about their secret identity and it turns out they also have a secret, and it's that they're nemeses - how does the character deal with that? With the knowledge that they're quite capable of being friends with/falling in love with someone they're ideologically or morally opposed to? How does wearing a mask - whether it's a superhero's mask, an online pseud, or some other disguise - affect them, and how do they change as a result of that experience?


Character studies: I like fics that give characters greater interior life than we can see in canon, or that look at why they might have made a particular choice (or, in an AU, not have made that choice). Internal conflict is great! - for example, people who have to make difficult choices that go against who they thought they were, and how they deal with that; or characters who've made terrible choices and then have to reconcile that new knowledge about themselves. I also really like fics where characters have to work with people they don't necessarily like, and maybe coming around to see their point of view or even liking them.


AUs: I really like canon divergence AUs. I like seeing what canon could have been had one little thing changed, whether that's something that occurs close to canon like, say, Loki going to Earth instead of Thor, or something further back like Asgard not cutting off contact with Earth in the first place. I like reading fics where the divergence has led to really weird stuff being normal for the characters, or where it doesn't have a huge effect on the plot but does affect the characters' lives, or where it's actually only having a major effect on one character and the actual POV character is only seeing the aftereffects (say, a Wrong Boy Who Lived AU told from the POV of a tired Ravenclaw who just wants to be left to do weird experiments in peace without any Potter nonsense ruining her day).

I also enjoy setting AUs, but I prefer them to still contain either whatever fantastic elements the canon originally contained or to replace those fantastic elements with a different-but-similar element - so, in the case of my chosen canons, maybe a coffee shop AU where Thor's still an alien, or a Hogwarts AU for Sky High, or wizards in space, or urban fantasy Ant-Man. It's great for multiple reasons: an excuse to shove identity porn into a canon that didn't originally contain it, weird AU worldbuilding (see: wizards in space), an opportunity to do interesting stuff with characterisation (if Thor is a high school AU, how different would Jane be from her older self, and how similar?), building equivalencies to canon events that make sense in the setting AU (in the hypothetical urban fantasy Ant-Man fic, what did Scott do that got him arrested?), so on and so forth.


Time travel: Things I like about time travel include, but are not limited to: the potential AUs that can be created by giving people the ability to do their life over again (or do it over multiple times, in a Groundhog Day-type situation); the possibility of extremely wild AUs happening as a result of things the character(s) didn't expect would have an effect on the timeline while trying to change it to the future they prefer, because who would've thought that would have an effect?; the potential for digging into characterisation and forcing the characters to confront parts of themselves they dislike (for example, watching their past selves make bad life choices or dealing with the immediate aftereffects of those choices at a time when they didn't originally have any idea what was going to happen). Peggy Sues are great; physically travelling into the past and having to work around their young!self is great. Going to the past and then discovering that someone else has also travelled back, from the same timeline or another one, is extra great, especially if they don't have the same goals and have to work around/try to work with/start trying to kill each other.


DNWs:

• Noncon/dubcon (note: dubcon DNW suspended for Creature Court Trilogy)


• Character bashing


• Major character death (excluding fake death)


• Incest


• Explicit underage sex (below 17 years of age; implied or offscreen sex is fine)


• Issuefic


• Harry being raised to believe Voldemort was right (AUs in which Harry is raised by someone affiliated with Voldemort, such as a Death Eater, but still grows up to oppose him are OK)


• Voldemort Was Right AUs


• Romantic relationships between a Muggleborn and someone who genuinely believes in blood purity through to the end of the fic (it's okay if the character's beliefs change over the course of the story/they're a Death Eater but non-voluntarily or only so they can spy/etc.)

Creature Court Trilogy

Ashiol/Garnet/Velody; Ashiol/Livilla/Velody; Worldbuilding

Medium Opt-In: Worldbuilding Headcanon
Medium Opt-In: r/AmITheAsshole Post
Medium Opt-In: /r/legaladvice Post
Medium Opt-In: /r/relationships Post


Thor

Jane Foster; Jane Foster/Loki; Jane Foster & Thor; Jane Foster & Loki; Jane Foster & Darcy Lewis; Jane Foster/Thor; Jane Foster/Darcy Lewis; Worldbuilding

Medium Opt-In: Any In-Universe Documents That Fit the Canon Setting
Medium Opt-In: Conspiracy Board


Things I'm interested in include:

Someone gets/has superpowers

Maybe Jane keeps the Aether (or Darcy gets it) or being possessed by it has weird, superpower-giving aftereffects? Maybe someone picks up Mjolnir (and if so - what do Thor and/or Loki think about it? How does Thor handle knowing he won't get Mjolnir back unless Jane dies or gives it up? What does he do?). Maybe one of them already had powers, and her secret comes out when the Destroyer attacks. How either (or both) of them having powers affect canon? Would Jane or Darcy end up joining the Avengers? Going to space to have adventures? Vigilante-ing? Doing their best to continue with their normal lives, except terrible disasters keep striking the world that they have to go deal with?


Someone gets recruited by SHIELD/Hydra

It'd be fairly reasonable for SHIELD to want to keep an eye on Jane post-Thor, either openly (by recruiting her or offering her money) or covertly (by paying Darcy or someone else in her vicinity to keep an eye on her). It would also be fairly reasonable for Hydra to want to do the same thing... though they would probably be less likely to go for the open option. How might that play out?


Loki banished instead of Thor

How different would the events of the movie end up being? I don't see Loki hanging around Puente Antiguo (not unless he realised Jane was researching a Midgardian version of the Bifrost, anyway, and even then maybe not), but Jane would still know that he'd fallen out of the storm, and that her research was headed in the right direction. Would she run into him again, maybe if he realised she was his best chance of getting off Midgard, or would Jane just keep plugging away on her own? Would she end up building her own version of the Bifrost, or having to come up with a way to deal with the Aether on her own?


Space adventures

... and if Jane did build her own Bifrost or accidentally launch herself into space with the Reality Stone (or if the same happened to Darcy), what would she do there? What kind of fascinating science and aliens might they meet, and what kind of adventures might they have? If you want to write Guardians crossover fic, invent aliens or planets, or write a canon divergence in which Jane accidentally saves the universe by doing some small thing that absolutely ruins Thanos's plans, please do!


Time travel

What if Jane's would-be Bifrost accidentally transports people through time, not space? What would a late-canon version of Jane or Darcy do if they were flung into an earlier time, either in their younger bodies or their present-time own? Would they try to keep time the same, or start desperately changing things? How might that interact with other AUs I've suggested above - say, if Darcy were recruited to become a SHIELD agent, how would she deal with her knowledge about Hydra? Or might Jane's future knowledge about the Infinity Stones make it easier for her to handle the Aether, maybe making it possible for her to survive her possession the second time around?


Other AUs that could be interesting:

Jane going to space and learning/exploring/hanging out with other space-related MCU characters (eg the Guardians); Jane having more encounters with any/all of the Infinity Stones; dealing with aliens who keep showing up on Earth; in-universe coffee shop AU (or other in-universe versions of mundane AUs - maybe a university AU? I just want mundane-style AUs where Thor's still an alien and there's weird shit going on, honestly); urban fantasy AU; dimension-hopping; running into alternate-dimension versions of oneself; meeting at a different point in canon.



Sky High

Warren Peace/Will Stronghold/Layla Williams; Gwen Grayson/Will Stronghold; Gwen Grayson; Layla Williams; Warren Peace; Worldbuilding

Medium Opt-In: Any In-Universe Documents That Fit the Canon Setting


Warren Peace/Will Stronghold/Layla Williams

How might they get together? Would it happen during school, or afterwards? Do they all fight crime together, or do some of them choose different lives - maybe Layla would end up choosing to go into some kind of environmental work, for example, or Warren might decide he didn't want a career where cape-watchers were constantly wondering whether he'd snap and turn into his father. (Not becoming a hero would probably be pretty good for Will, honestly. But I don't think he'd choose it.) How good (or terrible) are they at keeping their secret identities a secret? Do they ever end up fighting Gwen again? How might canon have gone differently if Will had admitted to his parents that his powers hadn't come in yet and he hadn't attended Sky High until he discovered them (which, given the stressful situations he discovered both his abilities in during canon, might be a while...)? Or what if Warren never attended Sky High, and Layla and Will encountered him both as the hot waiter at the Paper Lantern and as a superhero/vigilante whose identity they don't know, or maybe as a villain they're trying to take down (maybe he's infiltrating a local villain organisation so he can take them down?)?


Gwen Grayson
Gwen Grayson/Will Stronghold

There are quite a lot of AUs that could occur around Gwen! What if, having caught Will's attention, she decided to put her original plan on hold and see how much more she could get out of him, or whether she might be able to turn him in the direction of villainy? Or she decided to steal someone else's old weapons - after all, there's a lot of old trophies in the Secret Sanctum she could steal, and being a technopath there's a higher-than-average chance she'd be able to work out what they were supposed to do.

Or, instead: what if Gwen wasn't raised to villainy? She seemed very certain in the movie that the heroes she was de-aging wouldn't remember they'd been heroes, after all, which suggests her knowledge of her old life as Sue Tenny came entirely from Stitches. If Josie or Steve had found her post-de-aging and arranged for her to go into care instead, who might she have become? Still a villain? Heroic by default, but less sure about her future after Stitches found her and explained her true life story? Or would she have decided to go hero all the way? And, if she were presented with a temptation that might allow her to learn more about the history Stitches had told her - say, an opportunity to get into the Strongholds' Secret Sanctum and reclaim the weapon she'd once used to fight against them - what might she choose to do?


Layla Williams
Warren Peace


Worldbuilding

So, what does the world of Sky High look like outside of Sky High itself? Are heroes all essentially freelancers, or do they have larger organisations - government-organised, independent collectives like the Avengers or the Justice League, maybe corporate-sponsored groups? Ditto for villains. Are there any other hero schools (in America, anyway - I assume other countries would have their own)? What about villain schools - does Sky High accept anyone with powers, no matter their parents' alignment, or do the children of villain/villain relationships get excluded because they're considered highly likely to become villains themselves, and as a result would be too much of a risk to educate alongside future heroes? Does the government regulate heroes at all? Are there graduation requirements for Sky High that might limit students' ability to choose to fight crime (say, government-recruited heroes must have received an A in Ethics for Public Heroes...)? What kind of research is happening to try to identify the source of superpowers, since in most people's cases it seems to be hereditary? Is this likely to turn to organisations manufacturing their own superpeople?


Other AUs that could be interesting:

Hogwarts AU; dimension-hopping; running into alternate-dimension versions of oneself; Gwen wins AU.



Harry Potter

Dudley Dursley; Hermione Granger/Harry Potter/Ron Weasley; Hermione Granger/Pansy Parkinson; Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy; Pansy Parkinson/Ginny Weasley; Pansy Parkinson/Harry Potter; Pansy Parkinson/Percy Weasley; Percy Weasley & Weasley Family; Percy Weasley; Worldbuilding

Medium Opt-In: Any In-Universe Documents That Fit the Canon Setting
Medium Opt-In: Recursive Fic of Any of the Recip's Works In This Fandom


Dudley Dursley

All of my Dudley feelings basically fall into the same category: But What If Dudley Was Good, Actually. So like... AU where Dudley and Harry were united against his parents? AU where Dudley has magic, and the Dursleys have to deal with that, and his and Harry's relationship is upended because it turns out Harry's name carries a hell of a lot more weight than Dudley's does in the magical world? AU where Dudley has magic and Harry doesn't, and the Dursleys end up completely changing how they treat the two of them?

Or... future fic? Maybe Dudley and Harry reconcile post-war. Or when Dudley's kid turns out magical. Or Harry never comes back, and Dudley resigns himself to never being able to apologise properly, only WHOOPS turns out he's dating a witch/wizard and his plan to let Harry have a Dursley-free life is failing spectacularly.


Hermione Granger/Harry Potter/Ron Weasley

So... how and when do they get together? These three don't strike me as people who'd actually be good at working out their feelings; they've been friends for so long it might be easy not to realise those friend emotions were actually more. (Look. I love Harry, but he would definitely spend a lot of time thinking about how great it would be to stay friends with Hermione and Ron forever and maybe live with them and never consider why.) Hermione's more likely to realise she's got feelings, I think, but possibly not that Ron and Harry have them... On the other hand, I could see Ron waking up one day, going "OH NO" and then pining for his definitely-straight BFF.

So, like. During the war, kissing in the heat of the moment after nearly dying and then having to work out what it all meant? Huddling for warmth after fleeing Death Eaters? Working out that there's feelings there, but not acting on them because what if they're wrong, and anyway they're in a war, it's the worst possible time... Or, post-war: rehabilitating Grimmauld Place together and coming to a slow realisation, or realising just how reluctant they are to move out/away from each other? Sitting down and working out what they want to do with their lives (teaching? Auror-ing? Politics? Research?) and eventually noticing they've built their futures around the assumption they'll always be together?


Hermione Granger/Pansy Parkinson
Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy
Pansy Parkinson/Ginny Weasley
Pansy Parkinson/Harry Potter

I really enjoy the hate-to-love potential of these ships - they've spent their years at Hogwarts in rival Houses and may have said some pretty nasty things about one another while there; Pansy tried to turn Harry over to Voldemort to save her own skin, and while Draco might have been a reluctant Death Eater he still took the Mark. It seems pretty likely to me that, given all of that, they wouldn't necessarily have straight up become friends post-canon. There's too much bad history. So, given that... how would they have gotten together? For a Hogwarts-era fic, maybe they were forced to work together by a teacher and had to bury their resentments for the sake of not getting bad grades? Caught in some kind of magical accident? Pansy or Draco defected to the Order or the DA and had to deal with the understandable resentments of those on the other side? Or for post-canon - how did they meet again? Did they become co-workers, or maybe meet up at a fancy party while trying to avoid people they'd rather not run into?

Maybe Pansy found work as a political consultant who Hermione reluctantly hired to run her campaign for Minister for Magic. Or some would-be Death Eaters contacted Draco to try to convince him to bankroll their attempt to assassinate some public figure, and he ended up warning Hermione because he doesn't want their world tipped into chaos again, forcing them to work together to avert the threat. Or Harry and Pansy both ended up working at Hogwarts and were forced to find some way to bury the hatchet so their students didn't realise how badly they got along. Or Ginny and Pansy ended up unwillingly working together while the Death Eaters controlled Hogwarts to try to protect the younger children.

Percy Weasley
Percy Weasley & Weasley Family

I really like the idea of Percy having been a spy for the Order. How and when might he have been recruited? Did his family know about it, or just his parents, or none of them at all? What did he have to do to keep his cover in the Ministry - or, in an AU where Voldemort won the first or second wars, in the Death Eaters? Post-war, how did he handle what he'd done, and how did he reconcile with his family? Did his childhood dreams of power within the Ministry still interest him, or did he find a new passion?

For non-spy-Percy fics - well, honestly, all of the above still applies. How long did it take Percy to realise he'd made the wrong choice? Why did he stay in the Ministry until the Battle of Hogwarts - hoping to make a difference, maybe, or knowing if he ran they'd kill him and then he'd never be able to make up for what he'd unwittingly done? What happened to him after the war? Did he ever make Minister for Magic, or maybe use his experiences in Voldemort's Ministry to try to make political change for the better?


Pansy Parkinson/Percy Weasley

Pansy and Percy strike me as people who'd either hate each other at first sight or grow to like one another despite themselves. How might they have gotten together? Maybe Pansy tried to seduce him on a dare, or a bet that she couldn't, only to catch feelings. Or Percy was running for Minister against someone Pansy had a grudge against, she decided to help him so his opponent wouldn't win, and they ended up developing feelings. Or: in a Voldemort Won AU in which Percy was spying on the Ministry, maybe Percy would have ended up recruiting her as Pansy slowly realised that their wonderful new world was even worse than the old one. Or: they're both caught in some kind of magical accident which throws them into the past and the bodies of their younger selves, and despite being on opposite sides of the war end up reluctantly working together, if only because not being able to talk to anyone about their secret makes it worse.

Hi, writer!  Thank you so much for writing for me!  You can find me on AO3 as rosestone.

I've done my best to provide thoughts, prompts and my views on the AU tags I've picked below.  However, if you find your muse tugging you off in another direction, please feel free to go for it!  I'm thrilled to see what the end result is.

For this exchange I've asked for fic in all requests.  I'm happy to receive fic that lands anywhere from G to E, though I haven't given any smut-specific likes or prompts as I'm quite bad at articulating exactly what it is I like in smut, even to myself.  I'm also frankly pretty easy about the &/ separation; I'm less concerned with the exact nature of two characters' relationship than I am with the existence and strength of their relationship overall.  Essentially, if I've requested something as only a & or an /, it doesn't indicate that I specifically and only wanted that relationship configuration, just that I missed that option during noms.  Feel free to write either gen or shipfic!  Also, if I've requested A/B and B/C, I'm always happy to receive A/B/C except when indicated otherwise or when DNWed (eg: incest).  I'll indicate any exceptions to these below, but frankly I'm pretty easy.

Star Wars Prequel Trilogy - Thor - Ant-Man - Harry Potter

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Likes

• Outsider perspective


• Identity porn


• Worldbuilding


• Character studies


• AUs including (but not limited to!) canon-divergence, fusions, setting AUs.  When it comes to setting AUs, I especially enjoy: 
  
  • a) a setting AU used as a vehicle for character study, exploration of how the characters became their canon selves in a non-canon setting, or similar worldbuilding - for example, if the Avengers are in a coffeeshop AU, what's Natasha's background if not the Red Room?  What's the equivalent of Anakin's Fall to the Dark Side if he's in a high school AU?
  
  
  • b) non-mundane AUs in a mundane setting.  For example, taking the coffeeshop Avengers from above - how do they maintain their secret identities while also being baristas?  How did they all end up there - is the coffeeshop a cover for SHIELD, or did every one of them take a job/become a customer with no idea that anybody else at the coffeeshop wasn't an ordinary civilian, forcing them to desperately try to keep their secret identities from their "ordinary" co-workers?


• Time travel


• Pining, especially clueless mutual pining


• Hate to love


• Fake dating


• Gen, especially gen focused around people becoming friends/learning to trust other people/having to take a leap of faith on other people


• Non-standard formats such as epistolary, newspaper articles/articles from a history book/other in-universe meta

DNWs

• Noncon/dubcon


• Character bashing


• Major character death (excluding fake death)


• Incest


• Explicit underage sex (below 17 years of age; implied or offscreen sex is fine)


• Issuefic


• Harry being raised to believe Voldemort was right (AUs in which Harry is raised by someone affiliated with Voldemort, such as a Death Eater, but still grows up to oppose him are OK)


• Voldemort Was Right AUs

Star Wars Prequel Trilogy

Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker; Padmé Amidala/Obi-Wan Kenobi; Padmé Amidala & Leia Organa & Luke Skywalker; Padmé Amidala

Drama!  Betrayal!  Manipulation!  Padmé's glorious wardrobe!  Two rather competent people fumbling their way through the world's most awkward romance!  (Yes, I do appreciate that.  They're just both so hilariously bad at it.)  And so, so many options for AUs... really, this fandom almost seems tailor-made for this exchange. 

SWPT: Padmé starts the Rebellion
SWPT: Padmé survives
ALL: Canonically Dead Parent Survived To Raise Their Children

I sort of see these as all of a type.  Obviously, Padmé would not have had to survive to have started the rebellion; her role in starting it could refer to her having taken a stronger part in the Delegation of 2000, or to an AU in which the Rebellion started secretly before Anakin's Fall and the creation of the Empire when she and others saw the writing on the wall, or even to Padmé's death as a sort of inspiration for what would become the Rebel Alliance.  ... But I have to admit, when I see the tag, my first thought is something along the lines of "So Padmé survived and helped start it, right?"

So.  How did she survive?  How did she get away from Mustafar?  How did she get back into contact with her fellow Delegation senators without giving her survival away - or did she decide to make herself a giant flashing neon distraction for the Empire/rallying point for those who weren't pleased by what was happening in the Republic but weren't sure how to make a difference?  What happens with Luke and Leia - does she keep them with her or find them somewhere safer to live?  Does she hold out hope that Anakin might be redeemable, or give up on him?  Allow herself to find love again, or channel all her energy into the cause?

SW: Padmé is Force-sensitive

I love Force-sensitive Padmé.  And there are a lot of ways that can go!  Jedi Padmé?  Sith Padmé?  Padmé who left the Order before actually becoming a Jedi, or whose parents refused to hand her to the Temple, or who wasn't quite Force-sensitive enough for them to recruit?  Does she know that what she's feeling is the Force, or is that a mystery until she meets Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon?  Can she use the Force at all, whether in blatant ways like levitation or more subtle skills like persuasion, mild precognition, or just being unusually good at picking up on other people's moods?  And what kinds of canon divergence might this lead to?  Maybe Padmé realising something's up with Palpatine much earlier in canon, or that something bad was going to happen to Qui-Gon and coming up with some way around it?

SW: Anakin is a Rebel leader and Padmé is a Sith

And jumping off from that - specifically Sith Padmé!  When and how was she recruited by Palpatine?  Is she still the Queen/Senator?  If so, how does she balance those roles with her Sithly duties (after all, Sidious just has to appear ominously by hologram to keep up his end of things; it's the apprentices who actually have to go out and fight all the time!)?  Or is she recruited later the way Anakin was?  And Anakin - is he a Jedi in this scenario, who managed to keep from Falling because Palpatine didn't bother to corrupt him, or who managed to be just resistant enough to his blandishments not to be interesting to Palpatine?  Or is he just an ordinary non-Force-sensitive guy who Padmé rescued from Tatooine because he was a kid and obviously the good, kind Queen of Naboo couldn't leave him there (or she genuinely didn't want to, or was recruited later and was still a perfectly ordinary Queen then...) who ended up getting involved in the Rebellion to try to help other people the way Padmé helped him and was rather shocked to find she was on the opposite side?

ALL: Origin Swap

A lot of my thoughts about this tag are covered above... but of course, an origin swap can cover more than just that!  Would an Anakin born into the Naberrie family on Naboo become interested and involved in politics the way Padmé was?  How would Padmé deal with Tatooine, the Jedi Temple, and Palpatine's attempts to manipulate her?  Or what about Obi-Wan - what if he'd been born on Tatooine and Anakin was the new Knight who had to train him, or Padmé?  How would that go?

Star Wars: Anakin Skywalker Doesn't Turn to the Dark Side

Another one with potential.  Does he or someone else work out what Palpatine's up to early, forcing Palpatine to come up with another plan?  Does he waver on the edge, only to choose the Light Side at the last minute?  Does Palpatine end up winning in this AU, sending Anakin and Padmé on the run together to join the Alliance, or do they manage to defeat him?  Or does he decide to delay the formation of the Empire just a little longer in the hope he might turn Anakin after all - or, maybe, one of those fascinating and powerful children of his...

SW: Qui-Gon survives the battle with Maul

Would Obi-Wan still become Anakin's master, or would Qui-Gon take him on, leaving Obi-Wan to have a more traditional early Knighthood experience?  If so, what would Obi-Wan do with his time?  Having seen what life on the Outer Rim is really like, would he break away from the Jedi's non-interference?  Would he end up meeting Padmé again sooner than in canon, or not run into her again until the war started?  How would Obi-Wan and Anakin feel towards each other as brother-padawans rather than their canon relationship?  And how different would Anakin be having had a different master - would his relationship with Qui-Gon be as good as his relationship with Obi-Wan was in canon, or better, or worse?  Would Qui-Gon have found out about him and Padmé, and what would he have done about it if so?  Would he and Padmé even have met again, or would that particular mission have gone to Obi-Wan instead?

SWPT: Padmé and Obi-Wan get married for political reasons

How and why?  Is this during TPM, some kind of response to the invasion of Naboo, or later in the timeline?  What do the Jedi think of Obi-Wan's choice - is he going against their wishes (and risking getting thrown out of the Order, if he hasn't left already), or have they given him some kind of dispensation to get married as long as no Attachment occurs (and, if so: does Obi-Wan really believe he can manage it?  How long does he keep believing that?)?  Is the marriage a purely political one, or are there feelings in play - and, if so, are they both aware of that?  Or are they quietly pining for one another under the impression their feelings can never be reciprocated?  If Anakin and Padmé are in a relationship in this AU, what does Obi-Wan do when he finds out?  Do he and Padmé stay in a purely platonic relationship, or does he end up falling for her anyway - and if so, how does it end up working out between the three of them?

ALL: Dimension hopping to find a timeline that isn't doomed
ALL: Dimension travel to a significantly diverged timeline

There are just so many interesting things to do with dimension travel.  What does the dimension (or dimensions) the characters jump to look like, and how radically different is it to their own, and why?  Like, an AU where Palpatine took over earlier, or got caught and stripped of office, or died in an accident a decade earlier and inexplicably the Clone Wars never started?  AU where the Republic was taken over by the Sith much earlier?  AU where Jedi can legally fuck?  AU where Qui-Gon didn't die, or Padmé never became Queen, or Anakin never left Tatooine, or Obi-Wan didn't take him as his Padawan?  What would the character(s) doing the dimension hopping think of the new worlds they found themselves in?  What would they do if they found themselves face to face with their alternate versions?  How would they deal with revelations in those worlds that shed light on secrets in their own - say, Palpatine being evil, or Padmé and Anakin's secret relationship?  How would the experience of travelling between dimensions change them?

ALL: Main character goes back in time to the body of their younger self and changes what happened
ALL: Multiple Characters Travel Back in Time
ALL: Possessed by time travelling future self

I really enjoy time travel fics - not just for their potential as a source of canon divergence AUs (what would they change, given the chance?  What additional changes to history might that unintentionally cause?) but also because it sort of... sets the character up for some interesting internal stuff.  How do they hide the fact they've travelled through time?  What do they think of their younger self's choices in hindsight, and how do they handle suddenly being up close and personal with their past mistakes?  If it's a Peggy Sue, how do they handle having to pretend to be a younger, more innocent version of themselves, knowing what terrible things are going to happen to them and the people around them in the future?  There's a lot of potential there.  As far as the specific tags - what if Obi-Wan/Padmé/Anakin had the opportunity to save Qui-Gon's life?  Or to take Shmi away from Tatooine when Anakin left?  What might they change on Naboo, or in the Jedi Temple, or in the Senate?  How would they react to Palpatine?  If it's "Multiple Characters Travel Back In Time" - who?  Do they all have the same agenda (is Palpatine also a time traveller?) - and if not, how do they come into/resolve their conflicts?  Do any of them actually know they aren't the only time traveller, or are they stumbling around baffled because they're sure such-and-such a thing didn't happen that way last time, but it's been a long time, maybe they're misremembering...  For "Possessed by future self" - how do they handle it?  It'd be a pretty weird situation, having someone who's you but also a complete stranger in your head.  Do the two versions compete for space?  Come to a détente?  Do they even agree on whether the future version is telling the truth (after all, who'd want to believe that someone they liked and trusted was evil, or that they or someone they cared for was going to Fall)?

ALL: Prophecy subverted/denied/unfulfilled AU

What if the Prophecy of the Chosen One didn't apply to Anakin at all (or to Luke)?  Would anyone realise it, or would they stay convinced that his power in the Force was definitely a sign?  Maybe the Chosen One hadn't been born yet; maybe they had, and they ended up fulfilling it, much to the surprise of the Jedi who believed it was Anakin.  Or maybe the prophecy was fulfilled, but not in the way the Jedi had expected.  Personally I find "extinct Sith = balance" to be kind of a weird interpretation, especially since that "balance" would probably only last a fairly short time; what's to stop another Jedi from Falling, tracking down old Sith documents, and starting the cycle again?  A story that looked at what balance might actually look like could be really interesting.

ALL: The female characters are the main characters

What would the Prequel Trilogy look like if Padmé were the main character?  How would the story change if she was the one it rotated around?  (Honestly, I don't have a ton of ideas for this tag; it sounds cool and I really feel like cool things could be done with it but I don't know how to articulate that sense of Look, Shiny.)

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Thor

Jane Foster & Loki; Jane Foster & Thor; Jane Foster/Darcy Lewis; Jane Foster/Loki; Jane Foster/Thor; Jane Foster

I enjoy all the Thor movies pretty equally, so feel free to set your fic whenever you feel!  Obviously, given my nominated relationships are basically all "Jane plus someone else", the first two would be the simplest, but I'd be quite happy to receive fic set in Ragnarok in an AU where Jane was also there.  I'm also not terribly fussed if you want to toss in characters I haven't nominated (either from the Thor movies or from the Avengers) or write something I've nommed as & or / as the reverse; what I'm really interested in is the characters interacting, rather than specifically gen or shipfic.

Thor: Thor & Mjolnir Landed Separately; Somebody Else Finds Mjolnir

Who finds it?  How do they gain the ability to use it - holding off the Destroyer, or some other threat, or by some more internal change that leads to worthiness?  Or, alternately: what happens to Thor?  Where does he land, and what does he do there?  How long does it take him to realise he might not be able to find Mjolnir, or might not get Mjolnir back at all?  What kind of shenaniganry does he get into on Earth?

ALL: Characters Meet at a Different Point in Their Canon

There's a lot of possibility here.  Thor gets tossed to Midgard earlier, or later?  Loki goes adventuring of his own accord (or gets exiled like Thor did in canon) - does he land in more or less the same position as Thor?  Find Jane in her position at the university, or run into Darcy as she sprints around hastily getting things together for their trip to New Mexico?  If neither Thor nor Loki lands in New Mexico, what ends up happening to Jane's research?  Does she end up getting pulled into SHIELD's orbit anyway, or does she stay out searching for evidence, only to run into one or both of them when Odin sends them to find out who the hell's sent an army to attack a world that's (technically) under his protection?

ALL: Main character goes back in time to the body of their younger self and changes what happened

Given later developments in canon, pretty much any of the characters I've requested might want to make a few little adjustments to their past.  And even if they went back with the intention only to change what was absolutely necessary (say, Loki or Thor changing what happened during Thanos's attack on the surviving Asgardians), of course they might not succeed.  There's a lot they could have forgotten about their past in the intervening years!  Or they might have gone back with the intent to change as much as possible - screw the past, it sucked!  This trope, of course, dovetails fairly neatly with my next requested tag...

ALL: Multiple Characters Travel Back in Time

Because what's better than one person Peggy Sueing it up?  Multiple people, of course, each with their own agenda and plans for how best to change the past, and quite possibly unaware they aren't the only one who's jumped back - because, after all, who else could possibly have the knowledge of magic/science/however else they got back to do it?  Nobody!  Clearly the only possible reason events could be happening differently this reason is their own imperfect memory.  Clearly.

ALL: Origin Swap

Jane as Thor?  Or Loki?  What does Jane, with her scientific spirit and love of discovery, look like on Asgard?  Or Thor or Loki on Earth?  How would Loki and Thor's sibling relationship translate if Jane took one of their places, and what would cause Jane to be banished to Midgard?  And why would either Loki or Thor be there to meet her?  Science, or some other reason?

ALL: Urban Fantasy AU

I don't have many specific ideas for this; it just seems like it'd be fun.  How does the Thor universe translate into urban fantasy?  Are Loki and Thor magic users/vampires/werewolves/some other kind of creature, and what kind?  Is Loki still Secretly Adopted, and if so, what kind of creature is he actually?  Is Jane still a scientist and Darcy her assistant, or something else - and if they're doing science, did they stumble across the secret urban fantasy parts of their seemingly mundane world by accident, or were they chasing clues deliberately?  Or are they even human at all?  Or, hewing a little closer to canon - what if Jane and Darcy are the urban fantasy natives, and it's Thor and/or Loki who come stumbling into it, fresh from Asgard and quite baffled to discover a whole secret world has developed on Midgard since Asgard's last official contact with it...

ALL: Versions of same hero from different dimensions team up

Go wild!  I'm very happy to play fast and loose with the definition of "hero" here - versions of the character who're actually villains?  Sure.  Versions who're completely normal but willing to help out however they can?  Also great!  Given that Thor was originally derived from comics, I don't mind if you choose to use some AU versions of the characters from other Marvel properties, though I should note for the record my comics/cartoon knowledge is patchy (though, also for the record, I've voluntarily read fic for Marvel canons I haven't consumed before... it's usually pretty easy to follow along with basic canon knowledge, since it's all pulling from the same pool).  Or, y'know, just make up heroes!  It's AUEx, we're all doing a lot of that :D

ALL: Character who doesn't have a Superpower in Canon has one or gains one

For the purposes of this tag, I'm counting being an alien as "having a superpower".  My thoughts on Jane acquiring Mjolnir as a superpower can be found above; other than that...  Aftereffects of the Aether, or an AU where it doesn't harm her (or she manages to control it and stop it from killing her) and she gets to keep it?  Jane gets recruited by SHIELD and accidentally comes into contact with something that gives her superpowers?  Jane acquires powers through total random weirdness some time before the events of Thor and has just been quietly going about her life trying not to attract attention from the authorities/studying her powers, until one day the Destroyer comes to town and she has no choice but to use them?  (For the record, I'd be equally interested in any of these scenarios featuring Darcy; I really enjoy stories about very ordinary people who get flung into extraordinary situations.  But this is the All Jane Foster All The Time signup, so it only seemed fair to use her name.)

MCU: Loki is banished instead of Thor

So, how would that go?  Would he tell Jane about Asgard, because he realised Jane was the most likely mortal in the area to actually understand what was happening or because he respected her knowledge or because screw Odin, or would he refuse to have anything to do with mere mortals?  End up in SHIELD's custody, maybe?  And how would he end up proving himself to Odin, considering that Thor wouldn't be particularly likely to do something stupid like sending the Destroyer after him (not with the intent to kill him, anyway...)  What if the loss of his powers affected the illusions hiding his Jotun ancestry - or would he lose all of his powers?  Maybe the magic would stay.  And, if Loki really did end up stuck on Midgard in the long term... what would he do?

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Ant-Man

Scott Lang/Hope van Dyne

There's a lot I like about this particular set of movies.  The lightheartedness; the heist plot; Hope being incredibly competent; Scott maybe not being as competent, but trying to do the right thing, even if it might end up screwing him over (and often does).  I've only nommed one ship, but that's more because those were the characters that I felt the most confident I could come up with a decent set of prompts for; feel free to toss in background ships, references to past ships, and Cassie if you feel like it.  Scott's history and relationships are a pretty large part of his characterisation, and as both a reader and a writer I prefer fics that take that kind of thing into account.

For this ship, I would prefer to receive it only as /, not &.

ALL: Character A is Character B's Boss

For this tag, I'd prefer Hope to be the boss.  Is Scott working for Pym Technologies?  Is this an AU where Hope's taking the lead on the mission against Cross, rather than Hank?  Or maybe Hope broke away from her father after he refused to tell her what happened to Janet, used her inheritance from her mother to buy out Vistacorp... and then, thanks to Scott, discovered there was serious financial mismanagement going on?

ALL: Characters Meet at a Different Point in Their Canon

I have to admit I really like the idea of Hope and Scott knowing each other pre-canon.  How and why - well, there's a lot of potential options, from a disastrous blind date or chance meeting at university to Hope having had a brief involvement with criminal elements before Scott started working for Vistacorp.  Or maybe they knew each other a little better than that; I am also pretty fond of the idea that Hope may have found Janet's apparent death suspicious, and tracking down a seemingly-beneficent thief who had a level of knowledge about electrical engineering that might enable him to get past Hank's security systems to find out the truth would definitely be one way she might have met Scott while investigating.

ALL: In-universe coffeeshop AU

All right, so Scott working at a little independent coffeeshop rather than Baskin-Robbins wouldn't be a huge AU, but I am tickled by the idea.  How would Hank have convinced him to join in on the mission against Cross if Scott hadn't gotten fired for being a criminal?  What if he couldn't figure out a way and Hope had to do it all herself - or maybe, realising that Hank might've had a point that Scott would be useful in the mission even if she didn't actually want to recruit him, she might've had to come up with some way she could convince Scott to help her plan the robbery?  How might that have changed canon?  Or maybe Hope owns the coffeeshop that Scott works for, rather than working at Pym Technologies?

ALL: Role Swap AU

What if Scott managed to recover from his whistleblowing better than in canon, and ended up working for Hank?  What if Hope ended up leaving some time before that and becoming a criminal (say, because she believed Hank had killed Janet and wanted to develop skills that might help her steal documents with the truth from him/steal from him and ruin him financially?  And what if, some years after that point, Hank needed a thief to steal secrets from his own company, and his protege Scott happened to know one he'd run into during his brief brush with the wrong side of the law, and Hope happened to have run into a dead end in her own quest for truth and figured maybe it was worth confronting her father head-on if it meant finally getting closure...

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Harry Potter

Creator's Choice of Canon or Original Character(s)

For this fandom I've chosen the character tag "Creator's Choice of Canon or Original Character(s)".  After some thought, I realised I'd honestly probably enjoy these tags no matter what character they're about, even fairly minor ones.  It's fun to read tropey Drarry, or Hermione/Pansy, or any other combination of common characters - but I also quite like stories that focus on less frequently seen characters, especially when a more popular character is the one who'd usually get the limelight in that particular AU.  For example - would I enjoy a Sorting AU about Harry?  Yes.  Would I enjoy a Sorting AU about Moaning Myrtle, or Dumbledore, or Tom Riddle, or Hermione's OC younger sister?  Also yes.  I welcome het, slash, femslash, OT3s and mores, and gen equally.  To make things easier, I'm also going to put a couple of prompts for different characters by each tag.  Feel no obligation to follow those; they're there for the benefit of people like me who find writing based on "do whatever!"-type letters much harder than using prompts.

HP: Harry Wasn't Raised by the Dursleys

So, who was Harry raised by?  Sirius and/or Remus?  McGonagall?  An OC Muggle family who found him?  A regretful Peter Pettigrew?  A time-travelling friend/classmate/rival/himself?  Or - how would Harry being raised by someone else affect the story?  What would Hogwarts look like in this AU from the perspective of another student or a teacher - like, does a Harry who had a kinder upbringing take less risks?  Know more about magical culture, which changes his behaviour?  Etc., etc.

HP: Gilderoy Lockhart teaches during Harry Potter's 5th year instead
HP: Gilderoy Lockhart's crimes uncovered via investigative journalism

I'm really interested to see what changes to canon either of these would create.  In the case of Gilderoy escaping justice - how did he get away with it?  How long did it take for his crimes to be uncovered, and what was the loose thread that led to the whole thing being unravelled?  Who was the investigator - Rita Skeeter?  One of his old students, suspicious about his motives in hindsight and wanting to find out whether they were right to be?  There are a lot of different things that could be done with this fic - a fic set in the courtroom?  Or focused on shocked ex-fans?  The article itself, laying out his sins?

Or, in the case of Gilderoy teaching in 5th year - what does that look like?  How different are the students' reactions to him - still a lot of swooning, or has an extra few years of terrible DADA teachers made them more suspicious of his motives?  Does Umbridge try to force him to teach out of Slinkhard?  Does she have a crush on him, or does she think his stories are too lurid for children to hear?  How different would the DA look when it's primarily driven by anger at having a useless teacher pre-OWLs/pre-war, rather than that much more personal animosity that Umbridge elicited?

HP: Dudley Dursley Also Has Magic

This is an AU I find really interesting!  Like... how would his parents have reacted to Dudley's magic, given how they canonically feel about it?  Did Harry know, or was he as surprised as they were?  How does Dudley's presence change canon otherwise - like, does he affect Harry's Sorting?  Do they end up becoming friends - and if not, who does he befriend?

Potential prompts: Dudley's experiences in the magical world.  Harry's experiences in a magical world where he can't just pretend the Dursleys don't exist for most of the year.  How does Dudley's presence in his new House affect his roommates?  What if Dudley ended up with the diary instead - what would Tom do to him, and how would Ginny's year have gone instead?

HP: Lily becomes the new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher

Is this in an AU where Lily (and possibly also James) didn't die, or before Voldemort came for them?  How is she, as a teacher?  Does she manage to end the curse - or, maybe, is that where Voldemort comes in?  Potential prompts: a student's view of Professor Evans/Potter (maybe one of the older Weasleys would have overlapped with her tenure?).  Inter-faculty discussions.  Lily's (and James's?) attempts to find and end the curse before it endangers her.  Maybe, for a lighter AU, Harry's experience growing up in Hogwarts as the only faculty member's kid present for a long time (unless a surviving Lily and James decided to have more kids, anyway!), or Lily's realisation that Petunia's second or third kid has magic and it's up to her to explain it to Petunia in such a way that she won't freak out.  Or - if Lily's at Hogwarts all the time, what's James up to?  Or - what do some of the other teachers who would have taken over from Lily in the future do if she does manage to defeat the curse?  What happens if Quirrelmort is actually the Muggle Studies teacher?  What does OotP look like with Umbridge vs. Lily?

HP: Percy Weasley is a spy for the Order of the Phoenix during the war

I love Percy!  I'm really curious about what this would have looked like for him.  What changed his mind about the Order - or was he recruited really early and his attitude towards Dumbledore was always a cover?  Who recruited him, and how?  Is his primary role to spy on the Ministry, or does he end up getting recruited into the Death Eaters?  For a fic focused on somebody else - does the Order know about his role, and what do the various members think about it?

Potential prompts: Percy's experience as a spy.  Percy's Ministry exploits post-war as an acknowledged hero - how does he use, or misuse, his new political power?  How do the Weasleys react to finding out he's a spy?  Or his ex-Death Eater colleagues, realising as they see him in the witness box at their trials that he was never on their side?  What about an entry in a future History of Magic text - what's Percy's legacy, and the legacy of other characters who were also heavily involved in that part of the war?

HP: Tom Riddle escapes the diary

When and how?  Does he escape in a similar-to-canon scene?  Manage to get just enough juice out of Ginny to survive when the diary was destroyed?  Maybe Ginny (or some other character who ended up with the diary instead) works out what's happening and comes up with a way of separating him from them that doesn't involve them dying, or he ends up genuinely befriending whoever has the diary and has to come up with a better solution himself?  And what happens next?  Does ex-diary Tom believe the same things Voldemort does?  Do they work together, or end up fighting - and how do the Death Eaters respond to the appearance of a junior version of their old boss, especially if he shows up before Voldemort's resurrection?

HP: Somebody Else is the Boy/Girl Who Lived

What's the prophecy in this AU?  Did Voldemort interpret it correctly, or did he accidentally pick someone totally random to grant Prophecy Power to?  Potential prompts: what does Harry's life look like without the burden of being the Boy Who Lived?  What shenanigans does he get into despite not having to worry about Voldemort coming after him (because, let's be real, he would).  What if the prophecy kid is Hermione, or Ron, or Draco, or frankly anyone else - how do they deal with it?  If they're the kid of a Death Eater, how do they reconcile their parents' loyalties with the fact that they don't actually want to let Voldemort kill them - and, for that matter, how do their parents (if they survived) or guardians deal with it?  For a kid whose parents are magical, how did they deal with the pressure of growing up in the magical world, around people who venerated them for something they don't even remember?  If Muggleborn - how weird would that be, and how many magical people looking for them did they meet as a kid in hindsight?

Writing all this made me really want BWL Percy.  Probably because he'd deal really badly with that kind of pressure.  But there's a lot of interesting potential in the Weasley family in general there, honestly.  Especially if Molly and Arthur survived because Bill was babysitting when Voldemort came to call...

HP: Wrong Boy Who Lived AU - Harry has a twin people believe is the Boy Who Lived (but Harry is)

I enjoy played-straight versions of this trope, but I'll admit I do also really like alternate takes as well - say, a fic that doesn't take it for granted that Dumbledore and the Potters are horrible people, or that doesn't dive immediately into "Harry is an eleven-year-old genius Slytherin Wizengamot Lord who's great at politics" (or that does, because that may be ridiculous but it's also pretty iddy for me... but does it differently than standard!)

Potential prompts: A fic written from the perspective of one of Harry's (or his twin's) friends or classmates, showing the changes from canon as a result of this AU.  An article by Rita Skeeter about the scandalous discovery that there are two Potter children, and one of them was raised by Muggles!  The twins swap places, Prince and the Pauper style.  Voldemort attempts to turn Harry to his side, assuming he'll resent the Potters - how does that go for him?

HP: Voldemort Never Rose to Power

Why not?  Did something happen to Tom, or did he simply decide on a different path (for example, becoming a teacher, or a researcher, or seeking political power under his own name)?  What did the Marauders' time look like without the threat of war hanging over everybody's heads?  Did the less polarised environment allow friendly relationships to develop that didn't in canon (say - did the Marauders and Snape ever become friendly, maybe in school because they were never enemies to the same level or after it because they grew up and realised they were being ridiculous)?  Were there other conflicts (political, say?) and if so, how did they change the magical world?  Or in Harry's time - what was his childhood like, and the childhoods of other kids whose families were affected by the war?  Do they still end up mixed up in various ridiculous adventures, and if so, what?  Different friendships?  Different Sortings?

HP: Voldemort Won the First Wizarding War

What does the magical world look like as a result?  Has Voldemort's reign spilled over into the Muggle world, or are they still mostly unaware of the magical world?  Is the ICW planning on an intervention?  What's the status of Muggleborns - have they been abandoned to the Muggle world, increasingly confused about the strange things happening around them?  Taken by the Order before the Death Eaters can find them?  Killed or enslaved by the Death Eaters?  And what's the status of the Order - recruiting?  Fighting back successfully, or in a holding pattern?  Are they successfully infiltrating the Ministry/Death Eaters... and at what cost to the infiltrators?

HP: Alternate Sorting AU

I love AU Sortings.  A lot.  The parts I specifically love fall into two categories: a) the sort of character-study fic that's looking at the reasons that a particular character got sorted differently or the effect their alternate sorting had on them; or b) broader-focus fics that are more along the lines of 'what effect did this character's alternate sorting have on the story?'  For example - if Percy Weasley had ended up in Slytherin, might he have been more politically aware when he entered the Ministry and avoided falling for Fudge's refusal to admit the truth?  If Tom Riddle had Sorted Hufflepuff, what would the war have looked like, if there'd been one at all?I'm guaranteed to enjoy Sorting AUs no matter which character the AU applies to, even if that character is completely out of left field.  Like, if what you really want to write is a look at Harry's childhood had Petunia been a Ravenclaw witch, or what the magical world would look like if Severus Snape weren't a Slytherin?  Please write that fic.  I am extremely curious to see what it'd look like!

HP: Character Combines Magic and Technology; Kicks Off Tech Revolution

Is it just one character, or several working together?  Muggle-born, or magically raised?  (Not that I think most non-Muggle-raised wizards would ever consider playing with technology, but there are probably plenty of halfbloods who've grown up with a reasonable understanding of the non-magical world, and I don't think the Weasley twins would consider themselves too good to play around with Muggle technology, either.)  Was it something the character(s) were doing for a purpose - a deliberate experiment, frustration over their inability to use technology around magic, hoping they could get some kind of commercial application out of it - or idle curiosity that led to a completely unexpected discovery?  And what's the outcome on the magical world?  Culture shock, or some kind of cultural revolution?  Does it lead to increased understanding of the Muggle world, a backlash from Purebloods who don't want anything to do with it, or cause the magical world just to go off on a weird little cultural tangent of its own, eerily similar-yet-different to Muggleborns who enter it?

HP: Muggles Find Out About Magic

How?  Is it an organised decision by the ICW, realising that sooner or later Muggle technology would catch up with them so they might as well get ahead of it?  A rebellion by a group of Muggle-born and raised witches and wizards who've realised the authorities won't try to get ahead of the curve and that trying to keep denying that magic exists is a failing proposition?  A discovery driven by the progress of science?  A total accident after something unignorably magical happens and there's too many witnesses to keep ignoring it?  And what's the fallout?  How do magical and non-magical people end up co-existing?

ALL: One Character Writes Tell-All Novel

Obvious candidate: Rita Skeeter.  What would she make of Harry's childhood, or some of the adventures he had at Hogwarts?  But of course, there were plenty of other students at Hogwarts who might have seen Certified Weird Shit going on around Harry and other characters, without having either the emotional connection that might have kept them from writing about it or a close enough connection to actually have accurate information.  How ridiculous might some of Harry's adventures sound filtered through several degrees of separation?  Or some other character - Dumbledore?  Draco?  Percy, nearly to his lifelong ambition of becoming Minister of Magic and therefore ripe for hit pieces by his political enemies?

All: Characters Accidentally Change the World with Improvised Ritual

Who did it, and why?  Was it to try to stop Voldemort or change something horrible he'd done, or for some pettier reason (I don't know, like... they thought it'd reveal their One True Love except it didn't go that way, or it did but it also did something else)?  And what was the accidental change they made to the world?  A change to the timeline?  To some important part of the magical world, like how magic works or the relationship between the magical and Muggle worlds?  Something less major but still widespread, like... everyone suddenly being a Parselmouth?  And how many people are aware of the change, anyway?  Just the people who were actually involved in the ritual, or everyone in the magical world/magical Britain?  (Who would, in that case, probably be very curious about what the hell's going on and whose fault it all is...)

Potential prompts: Harry, Ron and Hermione try to use a ritual to stop Voldemort.  Voldemort tries a ritual to stop them.  Somebody attempts to use a ritual to make their loved one functionally immortal; it doesn't work quite the way they expected.

ALL: In-universe coffeeshop AU
ALL: Coffee Shop AU

I really like mundane AUs as an opportunity to explore characterisation - what does, say, Ginny Weasley look like in an AU where she's not a witch and therefore wasn't ever possessed by a cursed diary?  What events would have to have happened in her life for her to be similar to her canon self?  How is she the same, and how is she different?  In-universe mundane AUs can be really interesting too, though, because what do they look like?  Is this an AU set in a coffeeshop in Diagon Alley, where mundane problems like shitty customers and a broken coffee machine exist alongside weirder ones like a random kid's accidental magic turning the tables into butterflies, magical creatures from the pet shop down the way escaping into the back room, and the peace being disturbed by occasional explosions from Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes?  A Muggle coffeeshop that just happens to have an unusually large number of magical people among its employees and customers, all having to come up with increasingly convoluted explanations for how they know one another and what the strange things that keep happening around the shop are actually being caused by?  Or is this some kind of identity-porn-y AU in which magical people (or just these specific characters) are living in secret in the Muggle world, and don't know each other, and are both doing their best to keep their magic a secret while weird stuff they're sure they couldn't have had anything to do with happens all around them?

ALL: Magical College AU

So... what if Hogwarts was actually a university?  What would that look like?  Are there different classes?  Degrees of study - and if so, what?  Is there still a House system?  (I'll admit I don't know of anything similar in British universities - I guess an American version would have fraternities, but I... am not sure if the Brits do?)  What would the fight against Voldemort look like in this AU - is he still threatening the entire magical world, or does he have a somewhat narrower focus, like taking down the university that refused to hire him?  What about a fic set from the POV of a faculty member, or an ordinary student not involved in the weirder stuff that goes on at the school (because come on, it's Hogwarts but with an adult population and a stronger focus on magical research; of course there'd be weird shit)?  A research paper, or a record of a student's attempt to write one as they're constantly interrupted by such dramas as inter-House sports fights, giant parties, somebody loosing a Basilisk onto school grounds, and the latest disaster to befall the latest DADA professor?

ALL: Space AU

WIZARDS IN SPACE.  Wizards sneaking aboard spaceships?  Wizards using magic to create their own spaceships, or space settlements?  An AU set in the far future in which canon happened, but in SPACE?  Hogwarts aboard a space station?  How do wizards and witches hide in the future, anyway?  Presumably they've worked out a way to avoid blowing up technology with magic, or any random Muggleborn kid could accidentally destroy the spaceship or space station they were living on, but that wouldn't mean that sufficiently large amounts of magic might not have an effect.  And what kinds of technology might be interfaced with magic in the future?

Potential prompts: what does Voldemort's quest for power look like in this setting?  Is he still taking advantage of blood purity biases, or in the future does that not exist?  What kind of culture shock would a Muggleborn face going from the pure-tech Muggle world to whatever weird tech-magic hybrid Hogwarts has?  Are there aliens, and do they have magic too?

All: Costumed Vigilante AU

There's something I find deeply funny about the idea of wizards pretending to have superpowers.  Like, not even a superpower AU: straight up "Oh, you want to know what my powers are?  I, uh... I can... sometimes I can change reality by thinking really hard?  And muttering magic words under my breath?  But this is not actual magic, let me make that clear.  Magic isn't real, so obviously I can't do it.  Hahaha, imagine if magic was real!"

So... are the wizard(s) responsible pretending to be superheroes in a world that only knows them through comics and movies?  Blending in with an existing hero population?  (In this case, feel free to have walk-on cameos or mentions of heroes from other properties if you want, but please don't let them overtake the story.)  And what do the Aurors/ICW think of this blatant violation of the Statute - assuming, of course, they can actually find the perpetrator...

Potential prompts: A series of Aurors' reports detailing their search for the witch or wizard repeatedly breaking the Statute under the guise of a comic-book style hero.  Draco Malfoy attempts to make amends for his past (or current) time with the Death Eaters by helping Muggles, in the most ludicrously dramatic way possible.  A muggle-born character (Hermione?  Dean?  Justin?  Penelope Clearwater?) is unable to resist the temptation to play at heroism just the once (but, of course, it isn't just once...).  Neither is Harry, with his notorious saving-people thing.

All: Canon's Plot Is Interrupted By An Alien Invasion

This tag is primarily in here because I find the idea of the Second Wizarding War being unexpectedly interrupted by an alien invasion to be incredibly ridiculous.  What would they do?  How would Voldemort and the Order react to their war being interrupted?  Would they try to keep fighting, or reluctantly join forces against the invasion?  Is it a worldwide thing, or did they land specifically in a magical area like Hogwarts or Diagon Alley, leaving the Muggles none the wiser?  What are the various responses in the magical community, especially pureblood vs. Muggle-born/raised?  And are they able to fight off the aliens or come to a detente with them... and, if so, what happens with the war they'd been fighting?  Can they still go back to being enemies, having spent all that time fighting the same foe?

ALL: Switched at birth with a different character in the same canon

How and why?  Was it by accident (the classic "picked up the wrong baby in St Mungo's"-type thing) or deliberate?  And if so, why?  Convinced their child was a Squib, maybe?  And how does everybody deal with the discovery?  What do the kids do with the knowledge their birth parents are someone different, and how do their parents explain the situation/deal with the knowledge?  Did anyone suspect something was up because of the kid's appearance, or was everybody totally unaware?

ALL: Character comes into an inheritance with strange conditions

Who, and how, and what?  Something they inherited from a direct ancestor?  Something given to Harry as thanks for defeating Voldemort the first or second time, or to another character for equally weird reasons (e.g.: To Miss Hermione Granger, for doing such an excellent job of annoying various Pureblood idiots throughout your school years...)?  A creature inheritance?  A semi-sentient magical construct with the ability to choose whoever's most worthy of it pops into town and announces it's just been inherited?

ALL: Character finds out they have a child they didn't know about
ALL: Character learns parent is someone unexpected

Another fun couple of tropes, with lots of options!  Severitus is a well-known trope in this vein, of course; but what if Sirius or Regulus happened to sow some wild oats, or James before his marriage?  I am not a giant fan of Muggleborn characters discovering they're secretly a Pureblood, largely because this often descends into "The only reason Hermione is so smart and good at magic is because she's The Purest Pureblood Ever", but hey, maybe Hermione's actually Severus's second cousin through his Muggle father (much to both their horror).  And Pureblood characters who've got a lot invested in their conception of themselves as pureblood, and therefore better, finding out that they're actually not pureblood and having to deal with that knowledge could be really interesting.

All: Arranged marriage to bring peace between two countries/species on the verge of a war

We've probably all run across a fic like this at least once/have a terrible take on this trope hidden away somewhere from when we were a teenager.  It's a classic for a reason, after all!  Who's being matched up?  Are the people doing the choosing at least trying to put together a reasonable-seeming match, or are they accidentally or deliberately putting together people who won't get along (maybe because said person (Snape?) is the lowest-status person on their side, so the Death Eaters are both insulting the Order and allowing their Pureblood followers to make more socially-advantageous marriages; maybe because if the marriage fails the treaty fails, and just because they can't openly encourage their candidate to antagonise their spouse doesn't mean they can't make it as easy as possible for the marriage to break up...)?  Are the new couple aware that their spouse may be part of a faction that does not want to make peace, and how concerned are they about the possibility that they might try to provoke them into a divorce?  What weirdness might they not expect from their new spouse, whether it's strange Pureblood traditions, old family secrets, or a determination to spend more time in the Muggle world?  (For this prompt, I'd also consider something along the lines of "The Minister of Magic decides to create a Marriage Law to prevent war from breaking out" to be equivalent, if you want to write something with multiple couples; I'd also be happy to receive an OT3 (say, James and Severus wed to end the war, and then end up hooking up with Lily) or other more complex relationships (say, Harry weds Astoria, and despite initially seeing each other as enemies they do eventually become close friends, but don't fall in love; they stay married to prevent war, but Astoria ends up with Ginny while Harry dates Ron and Hermione.))

ALL: Prophecy subverted/denied/unfulfilled AU

Off the top of my head... the prophecy was misinterpreted and actually referred to someone else entirely (some other child, or maybe an adult who was born in July/left the country and happened to return around that time)?  The prophecy was a fake designed to get Trelawney a job?  The prophecy was a fake, but there was another real one?  The prophecy was real, but it didn't have anything to do with Voldemort, and actually referred to some other Dark Lord who hadn't risen yet?  The prophecy was real, but a time traveller screwed everything up?  There was a secret second half to the prophecy?  Something else?

ALL: Sense8 soft-AU; like canon but 2+ characters are part of a cluster

I don't have any particular opinions about this; it just sounded cool.  I guess some options could be things like... are the cluster characters canonically friends, or enemies whose telepathic connection leads them to become friends and change the course of canon?  Does a cluster in this AU have to consist of 8 people/people born at the same moment, or are the requirements looser?  Is this a known phenomenon among wizards, and is it considered good (the sign of a powerful wizard, maybe?) or bad (because some historical Dark Lord got together with his cluster and used their connection to become fantastic duellists/defeat interrogation/cast otherwise impossible horrible spells?), and therefore something they have to keep secret?  How might the connection interfere with stuff like Harry's horcrux, Ginny's possession, Remus's lycanthropy, or young Severus's developing skills in Occlumency and Legilimency?

ALL: You've Got Mail AU

Honestly, I don't have anything particularly complex to say about this one: two characters somehow end up anonymously in contact with each other (a personals ad in the Prophet or the Quibbler?  Someone works out how to make computers compatible with magic, sets up a wizard chatroom, and they get on well enough to start sending PMs?  They meet at a masked ball, spend the evening talking books or snarking about the other attendees, and start sending regular owls?), completely unaware that IRL they hate each other... and then, at some point, the truth comes out and they have to work out how to deal with it.  Potential pairings... honestly, any Gryffindor/Slytherin combo I can think of?  I honestly ship pretty much any possible combination there.

ALL: Characters become friends/allies earlier than canon

What would Harry's life look like if he'd managed to befriend Hermione on the train instead of later?  Or Severus's if he'd managed to end up on the same side as some of the other Order members in school, rather than significantly later?

ALL: Dimension hopping to find a timeline that isn't doomed
ALL: Dimension travel to a significantly diverged timeline
ALL: Travel between alternate timelines

There are just so many interesting things to do with dimension travel. What does the dimension (or dimensions) the characters jump to look like, and how radically different is it to their own, and why? Presuming the characters' timeline is doomed because it's a Voldemort Won scenario or similar - how was that averted in the other timelines? Did he die young, or make a friend who turned him away from conquest, or decide to go into politics instead? Did somebody else manage to defeat him, or prevent him from resurrecting? Or is the point of divergence even further back - like, what happened with Grindelwald in this universe? Or maybe the divergence is something else entirely. Maybe someone's tiny choice a century ago means the alternate dimension's Muggleborn rights situation is very different to canon, and as a result a lot of Voldemorts supporters are a) actually pro-Muggleborn or b) already have the kind of power Voldemort was aiming for in canon, meaning he can't get a foothold in that camp... but hey, maybe the Muggleborns would support him instead? Maybe the change is something utterly random, like Hogwarts being in a different location, or Arthur Weasley being the Minister for Magic. There's a lot of possibilities!

ALL: Multiple Characters Travel Back in Time
ALL: Going back in time to fix the future

I really enjoy time travel fics - not just for their potential as a source of canon divergence AUs (what would they change, given the chance?  What additional changes to history might that unintentionally cause?) but also because it sort of... sets the character up for some interesting internal stuff.  How do they hide the fact they've travelled through time?  What do they think of their younger self's choices in hindsight, and how do they handle suddenly being up close and personal with their past mistakes?  If it's a Peggy Sue, how do they handle having to pretend to be a younger, more innocent version of themselves, knowing what terrible things are going to happen to them and the people around them in the future? There's a lot of potential there.  For "Multiple Characters Travel Back" - who goes back?  What are their intentions?  How many people have gone back - and do they know they aren't the only ones, or is it more of a slow realisation as it becomes more and more obvious that they aren't the only one altering history?  Do the characters manage to agree on what they're doing, or are their plans too diametrically opposed for that to work?  For "Going back in time to fix the future" - who, and why?  Somebody trying to make Harry's childhood happier, or stop the Potters (or someone else - the Longbottoms?  Another character?) from coming to a bad end?  A Death Eater trying to change history and win retroactively?  If so, do they stay on that side, or do they end up realising they're much happier not getting tortured randomly?  Or does this take place later in the timeline - is it Sirius's death somebody's trying to stop?  Or Myrtle's, or Cedric's?  Turning Tom to the side of good?  Saving Voldemort (or someone who died fighting him) the second time around?

ALL: Being in a time loop together leads to getting together
ALL: Character A travels backward to fix love interest B's death and now on there are two of A

And some shippier time travel prompts!  What caused the time loop, and how do they get out of it?  Do they manage to change anything else - say, if it's a loop centred around a particular event one or both of them were trying to change - or is escape the only option?  In "Character A travels backwards to fix B's death", did they know they'd end up duplicating themselves, or did they think it'd be a Peggy Sue situation?  Do they consider trying to outcompete their younger self for B's attentions, or did they decide to leave young!A and B to their romance and hide out on the other side of the world, since they're extraneous now - and what do young!A and B think of that?

ALL: Possessed by time travelling future self

Keyword: possessed.  How utterly weird would it be on both sides - the younger self suddenly struggling for control of their own body, dealing with a constant little voice in the back of their head that has an awful lot of opinions about their life choices and how terrible they are, and the older self shocked to discover that they didn't just seize possession of their younger self when they got there, and they can't just take over, and desperately trying to work out whether to tell their younger self about all the awful things that might happen in the future...  What would Tom do if Voldemort dropped in on him?  Sure, he gets lots of power and learns some awesome forbidden magic; he also gets murdered by an infant, spends years as a wandering spirit, and apparently loses his looks and (in Tom's opinion) at least some of his sanity.  Or Ginny - how would she handle her first year at Hogwarts after realising a) she's being possessed by an older version of herself and b) according to that older version, she's also being possessed by a cursed book?  What if someone Marauders-era got the same treatment - Lily faced with memories of the moments before her death, Sirius with an older self who spent over a decade in Azkaban, Severus or Peter with the realisation that their older selves did some terrible things and (maybe) have terrible regrets to go with them, and they have the option to do better, if only they can summon up the courage to change...

ALL: Versions of same hero from different dimensions team up

I'm very happy to play fast and loose with the definition of "hero" here - versions of the character who're actually villains? Sure. Versions who're completely normal but willing to help out however they can? Also great!  And, of course, it's quite possible that those dimensions will have very different heroes - sure, in canon Harry's the star of the show, but maybe a few dimensions across there's a different Boy Who Lived, or Harry's achievement was totally overshadowed when Daphne Greengrass defeated the next Dark Lord after Voldemort, or Tom Riddle decided to seek power through politics instead, set himself up as a dictator, and ended up being defeated by a coalition headed by Lily Evans... much to the surprise of the very ordinary versions of these people who got pulled into an interdimensional fight.

Top

Hi, writer!  Thanks for writing for me - I'm super excited to see what you end up creating.  Normally I'd start out with a general likes section, but in constructing this letter I've realised that a lot of the things I'd usually put in a general likes section are things that I only specifically want for one or two sections of this letter, so those are going to end up a bit spread out.  But I have come up with a few extremely general general likes, so:

• Identity porn - both the traditional superhero-comics type and a more sort of... thoughts about identity thing?  Like, is this character lying about themselves?  Are they lying just to the people around them, or have they started to believe the lie too?  If they have - what happens if that breaks down?  Who gets to see behind the mask?  Have they become the mask? - etc.


• Morally grey characters doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, or the right thing for the wrong reasons.  Or maybe they're lying to themselves about which parts are right or wrong.


• In het pairings, I prefer the female character be on top/dominant if there's some kind of power imbalance in play.


• As far as rating goes, I'm open to anything from G to E, though there are definitely a few requests here where one of those would make significantly more sense than the other.


• For some reason, this exchange is really making me want crackfic. So if you have an idea that tends in that direction, go for it!

Fandoms: Harry Potter MCU The Creature Court Original Work

Harry Potter

I have three separate signups for this one, so I'll be dividing my thoughts accordingly. Generally speaking, though, this is not a canon where I care a whole lot about sticking to canon.  I love this world and all the building blocks it gave us... but they're building blocks.  It's like a movie set made of Legos.  If I'm writing I have a tendency to steal bricks and start building my own, more interesting sets, and I see no reason to hold others to a different standard.  Make up weird new kinds of magic!  Build political structures!  Invent historical incidents!  Or don't, it's all cool.  Also, for the record, I haven't seen Fantastic Beasts or Cursed Child or read Pottermore since back when the potions game was on it, but I've probably osmosed enough via ficreading to understand what's going on if you want to include canon from any of them.

Part One - Ginny Weasley Fics

It may seem like this section is a weird mish-mash strangely fixated on Ginny Weasley and that is for a REASON. Canon seems to suggest that Ginny just got over her possession and that's nice I guess? It's probably very good for her healthwise? But that is not what i'm looking for. I am here for a Ginny who is NOT over it; she's fucked up and has a head full of stuff she can't talk about because it'll make her family worry, especially since it's actually kind of interesting. Tom was a psychopath but he was a psychopath who knew vast amounts about magic, especially the kinds a good girl isn't supposed to like, and as a result she knows a bunch of horrible spells she doesn't want to use (except maybe on Tom) and a bunch of illegal spells she doesn't want to use (except that everything Tom knew about them made them sound incredibly fascinating. And dangerous, but she's survived possession already, right?) and also legilimency, which she didn't really have a choice about using until she managed to figure out how to keep herself from invading the minds of everyone around her.

And then! Tom's back to ruin everything! And she just so happens to have a brain full of spells she could use against him, taught to her by him for maximum irony. And maybe they wouldn't kill him but like... does she care?  He hurt her.  She's fully ready to hurt him back.

Potential scenarios, for those that are looking for promptier prompts, could include:

• Oh no, looks like Voldemort's winning, better get out there and fuck him up


• Oh no, looks like Voldemort's won, better get out there and fuck everyone up


• Oh no, we beat Voldemort but actually everything's still pretty awful because the Ministry is full of rich old purebloods who mostly cared about Voldemort because he was interfering with their livelihoods and who are quite happy to go back to the bigoted status quo.  Perhaps it's time to fuck everything up?

As far as specific pairings go:

Ginny/Pansy and Ginny/Draco - look okay I am very into Gryffindor/Slytherin pairings, because it gives opportunities for lovely angsty stuff like "oh no, my parents are Death Eaters, what do".  I think there's a lot of places that Pansy or Draco's characterisation could go.  Horrified by what the Death Eaters are doing, but unsure how to get out?  Reluctantly committed to the cause because they have family in already and just trying not to think too hard about what's going on?  Doing their best not to get involved?  My preference would be that they end up involved in the fight against Voldemort/societal forces/whatever else by the end, though 'reluctantly involved thanks to their relationship/blackmail/something else' is fine.  I would prefer they didn't start out as a fully committed Death Eater.

Harry/Ginny - Harry gets an awful lot put on his shoulders in canon.  What might he end up looking like if that weight ended up getting to him and he rebelled against the things he's supposed to do - and not do?  Or if he realised everything he and his friends and schoolmates went through defeating Voldemort was all for nothing, because the status quo was determined to stay that way?  Or if Ginny straight-up seduced him to dark magic?

Hermione/Ginny - What If They Go Bad Together.  I personally feel that Hermione cares more about the image of being a good rule-abiding girl than actually following rules. Especially if the rule is "don't do or learn about these types of magic because they're Bad. No, we won't tell you why they're bad, they just are. Drop it." I don't... think that would go well. I especially don't think that would go well if a Hermione who was busily investigating something that's technically illegal ran face-first into a Ginny who was on a Mission Of Revenge against a dude who'd happily murder Hermione. Maybe they should, I don't know, make out, destroy Voldemort, and then destroy the Ministry. Just a thought.

Ginny/Severus - I should note for the record that I'm not into the age difference of Ginny/Severus; this ship is in here basically because like... what if Ginny time-travelled to try to fuck up Tom's first attempt at a rise to power and ended up running into Snape and decided to recruit him into her anti-Tom efforts, taking advantage of his desire to get Lily to like him again, and then like... brainfuck manipulation power-differential.  Possibly with a side of Severus desperately wanting Ginny and hating himself for it because he knows she's bad for him and he's in love with Lily and Ginny's getting him deeper into the Dark Arts which isn't exactly going to help him convince Lily he's a good guy now, and he hates himself and he hates Ginny but also: he really, really doesn't hate Ginny.  (And then like... dark magic.  Fucking with Tom.  etc.)

(I feel a bit like this is railroad-y but honestly writing this has made me realise the appeal of this ship for me is the power differential being totally opposite what you'd expect of this ship and I honestly don't know how you'd get that without the time travel.  Like... the age difference, the fact that he's her teacher, that would very firmly put the power differential on the other foot and that's not iddy for me at all.  Also past!Severus is, as I see it, very vulnerable to manipulation: the Marauders harass him everywhere except Slytherin, and the Slytherins harass him there because he's friends with Lily and all the most powerful people in the House at that point are pro-Voldemort, and even when he pretends to be one of them to try to minimise the conflict there's always going to be a gap.  And I just don't see the Slytherins picking him up immediately after he'd fucked things up with Slytherin.  He'd just be sitting there, lonely and angry and desperate for someone who cared, and along comes a Ginny who's so desperate to stop Tom she'd do just about anything...)

Part Two: But What If Harry's Childhood Didn't Suck

Okay, sure, Harry's childhood being very miserable is extremely British Children's Book of him.  Very traditional!  But like... what if it wasn't that?

When I say "any", I really and truly very literally mean Any.  For the purposes of ensuring his childhood is actually happy, I'm ruling out those AUs where a Death Eater manages to get custody of him and raises him to be Evil, since those could technically still include a happy childhood.  But otherwise?  Go fuckin' wild.

Request-specific DNWs: Harry raised by a Death Eater to become a Death Eater/follow Voldemort (regretful DE trying to get away from his or her past shitty choices is AOK); Harry ending up inexplicably badass/with skills he could not reasonably have gained given his age; incest.

For those who would prefer something promptier:

I am very fond of redemption fics.  AU where Petunia was a better caregiver?  Sure, go for it.  Cracky (or non-cracky) AU where Pettigrew decides that yeah, he fucked up a lot but he's still a better potential parent than the Dursleys?  Yes!  (Obviously in this scenario he'd be not raising Harry to be evil, but instead awkwardly avoiding the question of what happened to Harry's parents, since what happened to them was, well, him.)

Also: time travel.  What if one of his friends ends up thrown back in time and adopts him?  Or family (Dudley?)  Or a rival (what if... Draco Malfoy?  Who desperately does not want this job but can't work out a better option...)

A let's-kidnap-Harry fic from someone the right age to do so?  Yeah, that's great too.  Sirius?  Remus?  Rita Skeeter?  (Yes.  I mean that.  I actually tried to work out how to swing that one once and couldn't work out a motivation for her not to just exploit Harry for articles.  If you can work something out, then absolutely go for it.)

Basically: happy Harry.

Part Three: Sorting AU

SORTING AUs.  I love these!  They're the perfect marriage of a) canon divergence AUs (ranging from fairly mild to extremely wild) and b) CHARACTERISATION.  Oh boy do I love characterisation.  A lot. 

For this request I have nominated ANY.  Obviously this covers a few people and pairings; I am totally happy for any permutation of characters in the tagset, whether it's shipfic, turning an existing ship tag into &, choosing a single person from any of those shiptags, doing an ensemble, etc.  Also for the record, I am happy for literally any character in the canon to show up in the fic, though I can obviously only officially ask for characters who're actually in the tagset.  So if you're writing a Slytherin Harry AU and happen to have some great ideas for a Slytherin Cedric that you want to fit into the background?  Go for it!  I am also very happy to read AUs containing characters who don't canonically have magic attending Hogwarts.

Potential prompts:

Anything from "introspective stuff inside a character's head" to "here is a list of ways this minor difference led to a series of wild changes in canon" would be awesome.

What if [Character] being in [House] somehow fucked up every single one of Voldemort's plans in the most ridiculous way possible?

Compare and contrast of potential houses [Character] could be in and how they could be better or VASTLY WORSE than canon.  Which could probably work as a modified 5 Times fic, or you could throw in 'what if they went to Beauxbatons/Durmstrang/were homeschooled/didn't have magic/refused to believe the letter' to complete the set.

Outsider POV... the Hat?  A teacher?  Rita Skeeter writing about someone who made some great change in the social fabric, being as much of a bitch as she always is?

If you have a yearning to write a fic with in-universe meta or other non-standard formats, this is the time.  Because I love that  and am extremely fascinated by the idea of like... a history book entry about [Character], or a series of letters, or newspaper articles, etc.  (see: Rita Skeeter above.)

MCU

Unlike my earlier requests, this is a bit of a catch-all for various ships and freeforms. For simplicity, I'm breaking it up by freeforms.

Also, a quick note: while I'm doing my best to come up with at least a few ideas per ship/freeform, there's a lot here, so they should by no means be considered The Only Thing I Want.  I just only have so much brain for coming up with prompts, especially when there's this many ships and freeforms.  If you have other ideas that work/think that Prompt X would actually work better with Ship Y/want to throw a bunch of freeforms into a blender and see what happens, please feel free to do so!

Thor Lands Somewhere Else and Somebody Else Gets Mjolnir

Thor/Jane - Jane beating dudes up with Mjolnir? Great. Jane trying to work out how the hell Mjolnir works? Also great. Thor dealing with the fact that he really likes Jane but she has what he wants? DEFINITELY great.

Jane/Darcy - probably not dissimilar to the above, Jane-wise. But the idea of Darcy screwing around with Mjolnir, maybe buckling down to try to find out what else it could do... maybe doing so in a way that makes Jane look at her as an equal, rather than as the intern who inexplicably knew nothing about astronomy or physics...

Steve/Tony - I like the idea of Mjolnir having a mind of its (her?) own. Maybe as it's soaring over Midgard it notices a human undergoing some kind of trial that's making him worthier by the moment, and decides to help out... and so Tony escapes the Ten Rings with Mjolnir instead of/in addition to Iron Man, and then canon changes from there. Or maybe instead Mjolnir notices someone who's definitely worthy but trapped in a coffin of ice, and so Steve wakes up several years early, cold, holding some kind of flying hammer and confused as hell.

Bucky/Darcy - What if the person trapped in an icy prison Mjolnir goes to rescue is Bucky instead? What does the famed Winter Soldier do when gifted a magic hammer with a mind of its own? Or - what does Darcy do when she finds a seemingly brainwashed dude surrounded by Nazis? Did she find him by accident, or did Mjolnir lead her there?

Steve/Darcy - prompts given for either of these characters above still apply, really. In addition - how does Steve meet Mjolnir!Darcy? Does it go well, or badly? And if it's Steve who ended up with Mjolnir - how does Darcy deal with that if she's friends with Thor?

Steve/Darcy/Bucky - prompts given above for any of these characters still apply. In addition - Steve or Darcy wrecking Hydra? Bucky showing up to the Battle of New York with Mjolnir, much to Steve's confusion?

Darcy/Natasha - I cannot imagine that Natasha "Red In My Ledger" Romanov would believe that Mjolnir chose her because she was worthy. How would Darcy react to meeting the woman who a) stole Thor's hammer, b) is definitely worthy of it, and c) doesn't believe that? Or - how does Natasha react to meeting Mjolnir!Darcy at the Battle of New York? Everyone else there has some amount of training, practical experience, or instinct-driven fighting skill; Darcy appears to be nothing more than a university student (who's spent the last little while hiding an alien from the government, and making him decent-quality fake IDs...)

SHIELD Agent Darcy Lewis
Canonically nonpowered character has a badass skill/talent nobody knows about
Accidental Superpower Acquisition
Character Hides/Doesn't Mention Special Abilities, Later Must Reveal Abilities Due to Necessity
Quitting your job by forwarding their misdeeds to the other authorities

I'm putting these together because... they mostly all apply to Darcy?  Because I love the fics where she's a SHIELD agent, or secretly a master thief/con artist/hacker/genius/undercover in Hydra/has some other secret talent from a Mysterious Past (which may or may not actually be mysterious, whatever).  What can I say?  I like it when the Seemingly Ordinary character turns out to not be that.
So like...  Badass Darcy.  Backstory is welcome.  Not backstory is also welcome!  I accept any badasses.

("Quitting your job by forwarding their misdeeds to the other authorities" doesn't fit quite as well as the others, but it's the funniest possible way I could imagine fake!Hydra!Darcy quitting (or even just plain Hydra!Darcy). Don't just quit your job; burn the place down on your way out.)

Potential prompt ideas:

• Natasha recruits Darcy to spy on a mysterious agency she's just discovered (did she catch Darcy doing something questionably legal? Bribe her by offering her a place in SHIELD?). They bond over unexpected Nazis.


• Or - Darcy ends up with superpowers as a result of getting caught up in Hydra's experiments during her time there. How do they deal with that?
• Darcy finds Bucky while undercover in Hydra.


• Darcy has a secret double life as a vigilante. One day, she runs into Steve.

Character has to fake being evil for reasons

This is good shit. Why are they pretending to be evil? Is it for a good or a bad reason? If it's a bad reason, do they know that, or have they convinced themselves it's a fantastic idea? Does anybody else know, or are they living a double life? Does it fall apart, and how?

Specific prompts:

• Tony (or Iron Man) is fake evil.  Maybe he's infiltrating Hydra way way ahead of schedule, maybe Iron Man accidentally got a bad rap early in his career that just wouldn't go away.  Captain America keeps running into Iron Man and he actually seems like a decent dude?  Or - he runs into Tony, works out what he's doing, and then has to sneakily work out how to help him without making it obvious.  Or Tony stumbles into dating Steve, who he believes is a nice totally normal dude, and has to juggle his growing feelings with the evil stuff he has to do for completely legitimate reasons, and also avoid getting caught by this new superhero Captain America...


• As far as other characters go - I can't see Steve doing well at being fake evil.  I suspect he'd go rogue as soon as he was asked to stand by and watch evil being done by someone else.  That said, someone could probably get some decent crack out of it?  For a serious take on it, he'd be better being the straight man opposite, say, fakeHydra!Darcy, or Bucky going undercover in Hydra.


• Natasha would obviously do a good job, and now that I'm thinking about it I'm imagining some ridiculous scenario where she's pretending to be interested in Darcy because she thinks she's spying for Hydra, except that Darcy's actually collecting deliberately terrible information so she can spy on Hydra, who find out about Natasha's apparent interest in her and order Darcy to date her, so they end up in an increasingly ridiculous game of lesbian chicken...


• I am thinking about Jane and/or Thor in the context of this tag and getting nothing, primarily because I think Jane wouldn't do fake evil - if she went bad, she'd go all the way - and I just can't picture Thor in that context at all, but like... if you have an idea, author?  Go the fuck for it.

A sleeps with B to keep them away from dangerous C

My original thought for this freeform was Steve/Darcy or Bucky/Darcy potentially leading to Steve/Bucky/Darcy, with one of two vague ideas. The first started out as Darcy/Steve after Bucky came to live with the Avengers; Darcy worried Steve would fall straight into bed with Bucky, who nobody was really confident was totally de-brainwashed yet, so of course it was her patriotic duty to bang him first so he couldn't make a horrible mistake (right?) Steve, on the other hand, kept seeing Darcy looking at Bucky and biting her lip, which obviously meant she wanted to sleep with him... could he let her do that? No! Of course not! (Bucky, meanwhile, grows more and more exasperated as his memories return. They're sleeping together, and also clearly looking at his abs. There's a solution to this, goddammit, if they weren't both clearly trying to stop the other from sleeping with him!)

Or: Darcy runs into a Bucky who's escaped and is putting himself back together. Darcy's very concerned that Bucky's semi-obsession with Steve will lead him into something he isn't ready for, Bucky's very concerned that Darcy's clear feelings for Steve may put her at risk of spilling the secret (and he's not concerned about himself here, just about the problems it might cause her if the Avengers find out she's been lying to them)... clearly the only possible solution here is for both of them to self-sacrificially lie back and try not to think too hard about how hot their partner is, and how much they'd like to go out on a date... kiss... maybe hold hands...

And then I had thoughts about other ships! After consideration I realised every idea I came up with was the same dynamic - "Oh No, In Order To Protect This Person I Must Bang Them And Not Let On That I Have Feelings Because Clearly They Don't", potentially with a side of threesomes. (Note - if you're writing a fic with this freeform and want to turn it into a non-nominated OT3/other poly relationship, that's fine by me, I'm basically always down for that. Exception here is Thor/Loki.)

Thoughts about specific ships and scenarios that could apply:

Steve/Tony - Tony's broken up with Pepper for whatever reason, but they both still feel fairly strongly about each other and Tony's worried they'll end up falling back into bed together and hurting each other. After Steve finds out, he concludes his only option is to spend more time with Tony to stop him from making bad choices (and maybe wear overly tight shirts to distract him? Flex some? Accidentally fall into bed with him?) Or - Bucky's back, Tony's freaking out, his worry makes Steve think Tony's interested in him (of course not! That's ridiculous, right?) and of course Tony has to go along with it to protect Steve, even though he definitely isn't interested in Steve at all, no matter what Pepper and Rhodey think...

Darcy/Jane - Aliens are dangerous. What if Thor has alien STDs? Or he knocks Jane up with an alien baby that ends up killing her? (Or Darcy. Jane's seen her porn, she knows she's interested in cut blond dudes. She can't let her grad student sleep with someone who might have a non-human-standard dick! What if he hurts her by accident?)

Jane/Thor - Loki's around. Maybe he was never evil in this AU, maybe he's hanging around the Avengers as part of his jail sentence/probation, maybe he's done his redemption and keeps dropping in on Thor to annoy him. He seems like he'd appreciate Jane's mind and maybe know some more esoteric stuff about magic that Thor wasn't ever interested in... and Thor finds his habit of hanging around Jane unnerving. But he knows better than to try to forbid Jane from doing anything, so he has to be sneaky... and maybe take his shirt off to distract her. Or: Jane doesn't believe Loki's reformed, Thor does, and she's determined to keep him away from his brother (and Darcy has some at best questionable advice for how she should do that).

Darcy/Natasha - And now I realise I don't actually have prompts for every ship for this freeform. Natasha just seems too competent? Maybe I'm looking at this tag wrong but it feels to me like it requires a certain level of bad decision-making, in that there are much easier ways to keep someone away from Dangerous C than seducing them. Darcy would trust that Natasha's competent enough to protect herself; Natasha would just tell Darcy what the problem was....

or maybe it's an elaborate honeypot, allowing Dangerous C to think that Darcy was stupid enough to try to seduce Natasha's cover identity in order to protect her when in actuality they're collecting information to bring C down... hmm.

Identity Porn
Identity Porn - flirting while in disguise
Pining - Mutual Pining
Pining - Character thinks another ship is happening (but it isn't)

I love identity porn! As you might have guessed by the sprinkles of it throughout the letter so far. And identity porn and pining go together really well.

Frankly I like all identity porn but I am trying to be more specific here, so: one type of identity porn I really like is where both characters have a secret identity that the other doesn't know (whether this means superhero shenanigans, You've Got Mail/The Shop Around the Corner shenanigans, spies/fandom pseudonyms/etc. shenanigans...) and they have feelings for both the civilian identity and the secret identity.  Especially if a) both characters are sadly pining... how could they ever choose... there's just no way... and/or b) A's civilian identity knows B's secret identity and vice versa and they're both struggling to choose whether they should ask the other out in which guise and/or c) A is under the impression that B is dating B's secret identity and sadly pining... this is all good shit

I don't have many specific prompts here; a lot of what I prompted earlier in this section would also fit with these freeforms. I do have a few, though:

• Steve somehow ends up with a second secret identity... Nomad.


• Tony keeps the fact that he's actually Iron Man a secret, which complicates his feelings for Captain America/Nomad/Totally Normal Guy Steve Rogers.


• Thor lands somewhere else, manages to learn enough about Midgard to blend in, and ends up running into Jane and Darcy while he searches for Mjolnir. He doesn't tell them he's an alien... yet.


• Bucky manages to escape from Hydra, finds somewhere safe to live, and begins blowing up Hydra's bases as revenge. He ends up teaming up with another couple of vigilantes - Nomad and powered!Darcy.

Undercover - Undercover as a couple while pining and have to convince skeptics
Accidental Marriage - Married to Each Other While Undercover Becomes Legally Binding

Look. Who doesn't love some tropey undercover pining/whoops we're married shenanigans? It's great stuff!

I don't have any specific prompts here; potential scenarios could include undercover in or around Hydra, other enemies of SHIELD, or in space. (If it's space, though, I'm pretty sure "oh, whoops, that was legally binding! Haha can't undo it now" is just Jane and Thor's excuse to Odin when they get back to Asgard. They can't split up! It'd create a diplomatic problem! They'll just have to stay married!)

MCU: Weregoat Bucky

In my general likes section I noted I was up for cracky fic. And there's plenty of cracky prompts scattered throughout my letter! But this... this is what that like was there for. I'm normally very bad at coming up with cracky ideas - they tend to go angsty and serious when I'm not looking - but this one just keeps piling it up.

• Brainwashing does not work on Bucky's goat form, because goats are Just Like That. Scheduling assassinations around the time of the full moon is a problem. If they get it wrong, they end up with a goat headbutting everything and also eating everything in sight.


• The headbutting is even more of a problem because his metal limb in his goat form is, illogically enough, his horns


• Pre-serum Steve spent years being bullied by a goat. It was very frustrating then, but it means he knows exactly how to predict Bucky's actions now: whatever would be the most annoying to him and everyone else.


• He brings a mentally-exhausted, still partially brainwashed Bucky home to the Avengers. They are very surprised to see a goat chasing Steve across the compound next full moon, yelling at him about a) his diet b) his sleep cycle c) his habit of getting into fights he can't win d) anything and everything else...


• Weregoat Bucky maybe bites some Avengers. Thanos makes the mistake of invading on a full moon.


• Goats eat anything they can handle. Weregoats probably do worse. What happens if one of them eats the Infinity Gauntlet?


• Quoting from myself - "Something horrible happens and the weregoats converge... they do not have the id-controlling ability to consider matters like "what if using the infinity stones makes things worse". They have no plan but chaos. and the avengers wake up and have to deal with it."

The Creature Court

The odds that anyone will match on this itty bitty book fandom are tiny so my only hope is to write about it as interestingly as possible in the hope someone will say "hey that sounds batshit, i wanna read it, what the fuck" which is ESPECIALLY important in this exchange because finishing my reread just as id pro quo came up made me realise a significant portion of my id is derived directly from this glorious fever dream of a trilogy. A very basic description of the series would be, "a seemingly ordinary young woman discovers she has magical powers, and also a responsibility to use them to defend her city against evil." This leaves out... a lot.

Reasons It Is Great:

• This series is super duper gay. It would genuinely be harder to list off characters who are (probably) straight than ones who aren't.


• It's FASCINATINGLY fucked-up. Are you in the market for people making terrible life choices due to trauma? People having intensely close and fucked-up relationships as a result of a combination of being essentially brothers-in-arms in a secret war and also having been manipulated by the same people as teenagers? Horrible plagues as a result of oathbreaking? Entire cities being eaten by evil? Someone turning into a sentient city? (did i mention the "fever dream" part because there are genuinely bits of this i don't think i could explain. they make sense in context! without context... not so much.)


• If you like me enjoy scenes where the author is like "so you thought this nonpowered female side character was here purely to show the protagonist drawing away from her normal life? well GUESS AGAIN MOTHERFUCKERS SHE HAS POWERS TOO" then guess what motherfuckers you'll like this series too


• Also for any Classics people reading this, a large part of the inspiration for this series was the author going "so hey what would it look like if instead of picking the most appropriate festivals to celebrate, the Romans did EVERY SINGLE ONE of them" and then answering that question.


• It is also. very sexy. 100% of the reason I'm nominating this is because I was rereading, expecting I'd reinforce my existing Velody/Ashiol/Garnet ship but also expecting it'd turn out I'd read a lot into the book that wasn't there. I had not. There is literally a scene where Velody and Ashiol are almost fucking on a table while Velody fantasises about Garnet (Ashiol's ex). That exists. But you know what ELSE exists? A scene where Velody (the main character) has to bribe Livilla into doing something and the bribe she asks for is that, should Velody and Ashiol ever fuck, she gets to watch. This is in CANON. (In canon she's doing it to spite Ashiol because she knows he really wants to fuck Velody and that Velody Would Never re: exhibitionism. This is fandom though and we ship what we like.)

Which brings me to: Livilla/Velody/Ashiol, dubcon voyeurism or dubcon voyeurism to consensual threesome.

There are two possible scenarios I see here (though you may see others, obviously). Option A: some kind of fuck or die. Maybe some horrible murderthing comes from the sky (let's be real: there are a lot of horrible murderthings that fall from the sky, and many of them have weird-ass cures.  This could genuinely be canon) and infects either Ash or Velody and the ONLY POSSIBLE CURE is to fuck a King. Oh no! Obviously Velody can't break her oath! They'll just have to fuck in front of Livilla. How awful.

Option B: Livilla wasn't (only) operating on spite. She was also operating on the desire to fuck Velody, who she assumed Would Never, and therefore her only chance to ever even get near her naked is to watch her fucking Ashiol instead... so when she asks Velody for that oath, she also gives a time limit in which Velody and Ash have to fuck.  This clearly isn't a choice that could come back to bite her in the ass at all - for example, by making her even hornier, or pissing off Velody and forever ruining her chances to sleep with her, or by making Velody aware of her feelings...

Original Work

These are all basically excuses for identity porn because despite being my #1 iddy trope of all time for some reason I couldn't fit it into a lot of these ships. Identity porn is great and I'd honestly enjoy it in any form, from the very specific ships/tags I've requested, to your traditional superhero-y kinds of identity porn, to "The Shop Around the Corner"-type shenanigans; these are mostly intended as suggestions/a guideline to the kinds of things I enjoy. Some of these prompts have ended up more specific because I had a strong idea of what could be interesting when I nominated; don't feel the need to stick to that if you have other ideas.

Civilian Identity of Superheroine/Civilian Identity of Supervillainess

What if... they were dating.  What if they were neighbours pining over each other.  What if they were co-workers who got set up on a blind date.  What if htey keep having to run out on their dates to fight/create Crime.  What if they keep fighting/creating each other's Crime?  What happens when they find out?

Childhood Friend Superheroine playing dumb/Childhood Friend Supervillainess playing dumb

The thing about being a superperson is that you need to keep your Household Name identity separate from your normal person identity.  The thing about having superpowers as a kid, and also knowing someone else who had superpowers as a kid, is that maybe you don't do such a good job of that.  But that's okay!  Because you're both on the same side, right?  You're gonna go off and fight/create Crime together when you grow up!  And maybe you spend a little too much time Not Looking at each other, because you are a pair of heterosexual girls with a totally platonic relationship of Sisters In Arms.  And maybe you never actually discussed your plans to fight/create crime together, but that's okay becuase you don't need to.  It's all fine to leave it unspoken!

And then maybe you grow up and this all turns out to have been bullshit, because apparently you were on totally different sides the whole time, but you can't reveal her secret identity because what if she retaliated (and because you can't quite let go of that little fantasy, or the way she looked slowly waking up the morning of a sleepover, her hair in her eyes and her shirt ridden up just enough to make you want to touch - which was CLEARLY ALL A PLOT)... but which all makes fighting/creating crime in these circumstances significantly more difficult than it ought to be. Something has to be done.

Superheroine/Supervillainess

Identity Porn
Identity Porn - Characters A & B are FWBs but don't know their alternate identities are enemies
Identity Porn - nemeses A & B just found out their secret identities are married to each other
Pining - Denial of feelings even though it's very obvious
"Oh No They're Even Hotter Now"

And to finish off, a general list of fun tropes. The identity porn tags are here both as a general idea of what else could be interesting and as a broader overview of potential places identity porn could go than the fairly specific OW ships above; pining because it pairs super well with any kind of identity porn (like. c'mon. People mistaking other people's identities/dating situations and then pining for them is practically a cornerstone of the trope!); "Oh No They're Even Hotter Now" is really just here for fun.

Hi, Yuletide writer!  Nice to meet you.  You can find me on AO3 as rosestone.  Sorry if my letter misses a few spots; between nerves about dipping my toes in the pool and my habit of remembering Yuletide exists approximately a day after signups close, this is actually my first Yuletide, so I'm not used to letter-writing.  On the plus side, I'm excited to read anything you write, so don't feel the need to stress or stick super closely to prompts.

DNWs: noncon/dubcon, character bashing, major character death. (Fake death that's revealed by the end of the fic is okay, though.)

General likes:

• I'd be happy with either shipfic or gen.
• Identity porn/secret identities is one of my favourite tropes.
• I enjoy AUs, both canon-divergence and alternate-setting, but I prefer it if they aren't mundane AUs (so, for example, A and B meet regularly at a coffee shop and both assume the other is a totally normal person, but they're actually both superheroes).
• I also love worldbuilding a whole lot!
• I'm absolutely up for crossovers or fusions.
• Feel free to write any rating - I am 100% up for smut - but if you go to E, please only write adults having sex (I have no objection to a story set post-canon enough that canonically underage characters are now adults, though).

Sky High

Characters: Will Stronghold, Warren Peace, Layla Williams

I love Sky High. I'm a sucker for superheroes, as you can tell by my other fandoms (it wasn't deliberate, I promise! It just kind of happened!), and this is one of those movies I've kept coming back to over and over again through the years. It's just... fun, and silly, and I love the characters even when they're being teenage idiots.

I ship Will/Warren/Layla super hard; that said, if you'd prefer to write them as a two-person ship plus a friend, or three really good non-romantic friends, that's also good! I just like their dynamic a whole lot. And please feel free to throw in any other characters you want.

Prompts:

• Identity porn in the form of a fake-mundane AU.  Maybe Warren never attended Sky High and Layla and Will only know him as that guy who works at their favourite restaurant... and also as an infamous villain/vigilante/hero they keep running into on the job/etc?
• Or a different take on identity porn: someone is secretly working against the government/some other group in a way that gets them labelled as a supervillain, but they're actually doing the right thing, the story's just been spun against them.  The others are unaware that the villain they're all hunting is their friend/partner.
• What happened after the end of the movie?  Is there any fallout related to Gwen's plot?  Any problems from Warren's dad - or from people who assume he's like his dad and don't like that he's dating/friends with Will and/or Layla?
• Or: what about future fic?  Do they all become heroes, or do they decide to live more ordinary lives?  If they're superheroes, what are their civilian identities, and are they good at keeping them up?  Or terrible?
• What if Gwen escapes and decides to take revenge on them, since they ruined her last revenge/world domination plot?

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Characters: Any

This movie is so good.  The story and the characters and the animation, holy shit, and the music, and I could go on.  It's great. 

When I say Any, I do mean it.  They're all great!  Again, shipfic or gen are both fine, though my prompts here are going to lean gen-er.

Prompts:

• Miles keeping the secret from his parents.  Or failing to.
• In the movie, May doesn't seem to have many qualms about helping Miles out, but to be fair there's kind of an emergency situation going on.  Is she really as comfortable with it as she seemed?  She's already watched this job kill Peter, after all.
• What if Blond Peter hadn't died?  How would that have changed the movie/how would he interact with Miles?
• Is there a Miles in Peter B's universe?  Does he get bitten too?
• Do all the different spiders keep in contact, and how closely?  Interdimensional pizza party at May's place?
• Miles/Gwen.  How do they handle that?  Do they visit each others universes often?  Fight crime?  Have to come up with non-secret-identity-breaking excuses for not seeing each others' friends and families often?
• Outsider perspective fic feat. Ganke!  Does he ever realise what Miles is up to, or does he stay oblivious?
• What exactly is Olivia's backstory with May, anyway?
• What if Aaron hadn't died?  How would that have changed things?  Would he have quit villainy entirely, or become a hero/vigilante?  Kept on villain-ing and "accidentally" screwing things up all the time so fights turned out in Miles' favour?
• ... Is there an Aaron in Peter B's universe?  What would he do if Spider-Man dropped down in front of him in a fight and said "Hey, I've just been to an alternate universe where you have a nephew named Miles who's a superhero, and if Miles exists here too you may want to consider your life choices before you have to choose between him and Kingpin."?
• I could do this all day honestly but the point is, I am up for basically anything in this universe.  Use a prompt or start with one and go wildly off the rails or just do your own thing, I'm gonna enjoy anything set in this universe.

Captain Marvel

Characters: Carol Danvers, Maria Rambeau, Monica Rambeau

I feel like I'm repeating myself, but... I love this movie.  Amnesia?  The twist of the Kree being evil?  Shapeshifting?  Carol being awesome all the time?

As before, I welcome both shipfic and gen, though I'll be honest and say I do ship Carol/Maria.

Please feel free to include any and all other characters; I didn't sign up as Any because I wasn't sure I could come up with prompts for everyone in the tagset, but if the story of your heart is, idk, worldbuilding for the new Skrull homeworld, or something that features another character in a major way, go for it!

Prompts:

• What if Maria and Monica went with Carol when she left to help find a new Skrull homeworld?
• Or: what if they didn't, but she came back?  Permanently, or did she keep flitting in and out of their lives?
• What kind of a person do you grow up to be when you spend your childhood around aliens, secret government agents, and your mother's BFF/partner who has superpowers?  In SHIELD?  In space?  Or something very deliberately ordinary?
• Maria's house ends up being a waystation for young Skrulls (and other aliens?) coming to Earth for university, or their equivalent of a gap year
• That time Maria or Monica walked into a perfectly ordinary public space, made eye contact with Fury, and subsequently got co-opted into a SHIELD operation because he needs help and they technically already know stuff they aren't cleared for, so what's one more thing?
• Maria and Carol were together, but her apparent death, amnesia, and the six years since they've seen each other have put a damper on their relationship; now they have to work out how to get back to where they were.