kimaracretak (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fiachairecht) wrote2020-05-30 12:21 am
fiachairecht) wrote2020-05-30 12:21 am
multifandom horror 2020 - in progress
(Will be finished by the night of June 3rd!)
Hello friend, it is time for horror and maybe femslash, and I am so excited to see what you will write for me! If you want inspiration beyond this letter I am also![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
kimaracretak, where I have a small but reflective-of-things-I-like set of bookmarks, and kimaracretak on 8tracks if you want #aesthetic musical inspiration.
I love all these canons for the worldbuilding and mytharcs as well as their characters and relationships, and I am easy to please as long as you stay away from my DNWs (both general and canon-specific), so don't feel like you Have to write any of my specific prompts. Don't read anything into relative lengths of sections, I am equally happy to get something for anything in this letter! Some of these prompts are reused from old letters, and if you have written them for me before, rest assured that I loved your fic, I am simply greedy and would like to see every possible take on my favourite scenarios. I've done my letter a bit differently this time, prompting by horror types rather than by ship or character, but I've gone on about my love for those in previous letters.
I love everything from short introspection bits to long plotty missionfic to sex scenes as ways to explore character/setting/worldbuilding, and I don't need a lot of romance in my ships: sex for power, manipulation, or just between friends who want to have fun is also great. Please no unrequested ships unless specifically allowed for, but feel free to combine any compatible ones from my requested ones.
Likes || Art Likes|| Dark Likes || Smut Likes || DNWs || Dare Me - Megan Abbott || I Saw the Dead - Martin Green (Song) || Overwatch ||The Silmarillion & Other Histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
General: Codependent teenage best friends AND not-not sexual obsession with #unavailable older women in positions of authority, I am immensely catered to. Also it's basically Lana Del Rey - She's not Me.mp3 and The Amazing Devil - Battle Cries.mp3 in f/f canon form, so what's not to love? I'd love something that leans into the fever-dream horror of consumption of it all. All the obsession, all the clinical-sensual interest in what bodies can do, all the levels of genuinely caring (or genuinely hateful!) mentorship that ultimately can't do anything but fail. I love ladies and noir and glitter and murder, you can't disappoint me! For this request, I'd love something that picks up on the dark inherent in the book and magnifies it, including making my requested faves the cause of the horror (e.g. Addy/Beth on a serial killing spree).
Fandom-specific DNW: Bad end (permanent mindbreak, imprisonment, or death) for the requested characters. Anyone else, including the rest of the squad, is fair game.
Medium: Fic emphasising sexual content, fic not emphasising sexual content.
Requested Ships/Characters:
Body Horror: There's a lot of body horror inherent to cheerleading, in the book, from the eating disorders to the injuries to the constant threat of falling during a stunt and snapping your neck. So something that leans into that - the transformation and the pain of transformation, manipulating each other's broken bones to turn them into something Else.
Cosmic Horror: The girls discover something awful when stargazing at Lanvers. Colette comes to Sutton Grove and finds it's basically a cheerleader-led cult and has to decide whether to join them or destroy them (or maybe Beth or Addy makes that choice for her).
Folk Horror: Sure, the dying industrial town isn't quite as isolated as some of the traditional folk horror settings — but there's no reason you can't isolate them even further in fic! Or lean into the girls as the isolated community (cheerleading squad as agent of horror!), set apart from everyone else in town. Psychogeography and Sutton Grove: something about the contrast between the industrial ruins and places like Lanvers and the gorge. Something about cheerleading legends/folklore — a girl, maybe the Flyer having to be sacrificed to ensure success at States? The Sutton Grove town leaders want Colette to save the town via taking the squad to championships, but the girls have darker plans for how to use Colette. A straightforward Blood on Satan's Claw AU would delight me.
Killer Horror: Serial killer AUs!! Beth and Addy as killers being mentored by Colette, Beth murdering her way through the Marines, the girls finding out about Colette's past as a killer, Addy or Colette turning on the squad.
Paranormal Horror: GHOSTS! Beth dies after her jump from the pyramid and haunts Addy and/or Colette. The ghost of a dead cheerleader possess someone on the squad. Something about the St Reggie's girl who killed herself in the woods. Colette as a supernatural creature - I'm fond of vampires, but go wild! - especially if she's feeding on the girls/their energy in some way. Spin out the decaying industrial town setting and send the characters to explore a haunted/abandoned place in Sutton Grove.
Psychological Horror: Anything magnifying the fucked-up Beth-Addy-Colette relationships, all the manipulation and possessiveness leading to a point where they're not sure what the world outside each other looks like. Something about Beth's vaguely-prophetic dreams - does she slip further and further into them until she doubts what reality is?
Violent Horror: Love is a kind of killing and cheerleading is a type of violence! Take all the body horror stuff I loved above to the extreme - the girls literally picking each other apart to see how they work, maybe killing Emily after she breaks her leg? Or combine with killer horror, Will and Kurtz and the rest of the Marines being tortured/killed by the girls (and then they have sex in the blood of their enemies :D).
General: The video is on youtube here, and the lyrics are here. Slight preference for female characters. Any kind of bad end welcome for this request.
Medium: Art not emphasising sexual content, fic not emphasising sexual content.
Requested Ships/Characters:
Body Horror: The lyrics make me think broken or twisted necks or dismemberment, but something about the horror of bodies after death, or bodies warped by endless dance, or bodies being eaten...
Cosmic Horror: I want to know more about 'the back room where I saw the dead'! Creepy reality-warping pocket dimension? Will the dead ever crawl out? What other incomprehensible horrors are there along with the dead?
Dark Fantasy: The dead were 'dancing like children' and there's a long history of fairies making their victims dance to death and there's the carnival-esque instrumental interlude (3:04 - 4:27) soo let your creepy circus/fairy dance dreams run wild! (Optional extra thematice Vibes: Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti is my favourite dark carnival book).
Folk Horror: This fits folk horror plots so well - strangers laughing at the outsider, old men leading the singer astray - so any type of 'narrator and their darling come to small town, see much more than they wanted' situation.
Gothic Horror: vAMPIRES, especially with the 'good deed in exchange for a sin' lyric - saving a vampire in return for being turned into one themself?
Killer Horror: How did the dead get dead? Is it the narrator, the person they're singing to, someone else entirely? Chases through vast landscapes are great, or even chases through 'the back room', whatever form that takes. 5 people killed + 1 who got away. Any type of mentor/protege stuff involving training someone to kill.
Paranormal Horror: Many dead could easily mean many ghosts - how are they coping with their afterlife?
Psychological Horror: The narrator spends all song trying to get someone to come see the dead with them - what other levels of fucked-up manipulation/encouragement are there in that relationship? Anything about the dead showing up in dreams first, before slipping into reality - and, perhaps, being less and less confined to the back room.
Violent Horror: Art of bodies, or, given you take the torso and I'll take the head, art of people eating bodies. Cannibalism in general - not to get repetitive, but let them chomp!
General: I love the lush expansiveness of Tolkien's work, the history and the care and the sheer amount of space characters are allowed to take up and that we are able to fill in. My favourite bits are the horror and the weird fey things, and I'm happy to see my requested characters as either the victim or the cause of the horror! I'm entirely happy to just have the canon husbands not mentioned, but I have no infidelity-related squicks, dislike Eol, and do like Celebron, Earendil, and Gorlim, if that becomes relevant to your writing. Turin/Nienor as a background ship is fine. Loads more Tolkien-specific notes in last year's Innumerable Stars letter.
Fandom-specific DNW: Half-elves who did not canonically choose mortality choosing mortality, LaCE-style elven marriage-for-life or soulbonds (fucked-up eldritch-horror-y telepathic bonding is fine & encouraged), movie canon, Maglor in history.
Medium: Art not emphasising sexual content, fic not emphasising sexual content.
Requested Ships/Characters:
Body Horror: I mean Lúthien canonically rips the skin from Thuringwethil's corpse and wears it as a cloak so - lean into that! What it feels like to wear a monster's skin and feel your own skin and bones start to crack and shift in turn. Lúthien returning to the ruins to try to put Thuringwethil's skin back on her corpse, and raising a new awful creature. Anything leaning into the monstrous aspects of Thuringwethil's vampire form, and how she changes others (let the vampire chomp!!). Valar wearing (unintentionally?) horrifying forms - Yavanna with plants growing from her, Uinen as a sea monster, etc - and how the elves/men/dwarves react to it. Lalaith plague-ravaged even as a ghost.
General: I love these books as a changeling story, I love them as a story of nature-as-entity, I love them as a story of how desolation is never bleak and usually alive. I would prefer you use the characters' professions to describe them (eg "the psychologist" ) in narration, rather than their names. The canon by nature is playing with some pretty dark questions about embodiment and environmental catastrophes and death, but there's plenty of potential for the horror of light and joy as characters give themselves back over to Area X (or are taken over by Area X!), so don't be afraid to lean into that. I've read all three books and my prompts do get kinda spoilery, but if you've only read Annihilation, I welcome fic based only off that. I love the journal style of Annihilation and epistolary fic is especially welcome for this fandom. Entirely original expeditions welcome. Any kind of bad end welcome for this request.
Medium: Art not emphasising sexual content, fic not emphasising sexual content.
Requested Ships/Characters:
Body Horror: Plant based body horror!! I am especially fond of flowers growing out of eye sockets and fingers being replaced with vines and plants coming together to form not-quite replicas of missing expedition members, but anything will do! I love fic and art that leans into the transformative aspects of Area X - the Biologist becoming something else, the Psychologist letting pieces of her body go after she falls from the lighthous, pre-existing plants/creatures finding new homes in corpses - and the potential for awful joy/the tension between release and loss there. Anything about changelings and doppelgangers and coming back wrong.
Cosmic Horror: I'm always kinda 50/50 on whether I believe Area X is something alien that fell to Earth, it depends on my mood when I do a re-read. But I would like to see your take on it, if you do believe it! If not, I LOVE, nature-as-cosmic-horror, entirely incomprehensible even to someone like the Biologist who studies it for a living. Pre-canon expeditions would be a great way to explore that, especially journals from previous expeditions, how others tried to cope with the impending mindbreak.
Dark Fantasy: Area X as magical corruption, being manipulated by the Psychologist (who is in turn being manipulated?)
Folk Horror: Wicker Man AU?? The Southern Reach compound is Summerisle, the Psychologist is Lord Summerisle, the expeditions are sacrifices? Or explore some barely-human-anymore encampments from before the barrier came down (or formed out of the remains of a previous expedition) and how they handle new expeditions arriving.
Gothic Horror: Area X has no explicit vampires. Area X should have vampires. Something that leans into the paradoxical claustrophobia of the vast world inside the barrier. Dreamsharing.
Killer Horror: Expeditions turning on each other - trying to find out what's picking them off one by one and then finding out its one of their own.
Paranormal Horror: Ghosts on the base. Something that leans into nature possessing humans.
Psychological Horror: *Points at the psychologist* She's my fave and I'd like her to be awful to everyone else. Training other expedition psychologists, especially if she purposefully leaves gaps so she eventually has to go on one herself. More insight into the hypnosis sessions, including the development/testing of the trigger words.
Violent Horror: I don't have much specific for this one tbh! Take anything from above, especially killer or body horror, and lean into the gore, really.
Hello friend, it is time for horror and maybe femslash, and I am so excited to see what you will write for me! If you want inspiration beyond this letter I am also
I love all these canons for the worldbuilding and mytharcs as well as their characters and relationships, and I am easy to please as long as you stay away from my DNWs (both general and canon-specific), so don't feel like you Have to write any of my specific prompts. Don't read anything into relative lengths of sections, I am equally happy to get something for anything in this letter! Some of these prompts are reused from old letters, and if you have written them for me before, rest assured that I loved your fic, I am simply greedy and would like to see every possible take on my favourite scenarios. I've done my letter a bit differently this time, prompting by horror types rather than by ship or character, but I've gone on about my love for those in previous letters.
I love everything from short introspection bits to long plotty missionfic to sex scenes as ways to explore character/setting/worldbuilding, and I don't need a lot of romance in my ships: sex for power, manipulation, or just between friends who want to have fun is also great. Please no unrequested ships unless specifically allowed for, but feel free to combine any compatible ones from my requested ones.
Likes || Art Likes|| Dark Likes || Smut Likes || DNWs || Dare Me - Megan Abbott || I Saw the Dead - Martin Green (Song) || Overwatch ||The Silmarillion & Other Histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
- Mentorship and loyalty dynamics, including ladies' suicidal world-saving or world-breaking devotion to other ladies, #unavailable older women in positions of authority
- Femslash and female friendship in both the foreground and the background
- Nature and cities and houses and spacecraft as characters (especially when they would like to eat you because they love you), architectural horror
- Vampires, magic, witchcraft, rituals, eldritch things, fey things, eerie things, cosmic horrors
- Feelings about embodiment and iconography, body horror (especially flowers growing out of people's bodies)
- Epistolary fics, IF, poems for poetry canons, song lyrics for song/album canons
- First- and second-person pov, unreliable narrators
- Politics, worldbuilding
- Philosophical, legal, and academic debates
- Flirting, domesticity, sensuality, friends-and-lovers
- Canon-divergent/what-if AUs, Aniara, Vampire: The Requiem, Changeling: The Lost, Scandinoir, and Star Wars Sith AUs
- Conflicted loyalties, moral ambiguity, hero/villain and villain/villain relationships, 'I am the only one allowed to hurt you' hero/villain relationships
- Darkfic
- Arranged marriages, marriages of convenience, married by a technicality
- Relationships negotiated around characters' different vocabularies of trust and care
- 'I hate you I love you I would like to wear your skin as a sign of my devotion' types of relationships
- 'Look what I can make you do to me' kinds of emotional manipulation in relationships
- 'You don't get to save me but you will kill me' types of relationships, especially when the killing doesn't actually happen and they both have to live with that
- Getting back together after messy breakups
- Desire, women who aren't afraid of desire, women who lean too far into desire, women who desire to kill and eat their gods
- Porn as character work.
- Jewel tones, black and white
- Pieces that play with light/shadow
- Landscapes, forests, oceans
- Mist, moonlight, rain
- Tiny humans in otherwise-abandoned landscapes
- Characters covered in blood and/or plants
- Architecture, decaying buildings, abandoned buildings
- Accidental apotheosis, non-consensual apotheosis
- Blood magic, blood kink, blood rituals, blood as art medium
- Body horror
- Conflicted loyalties, abuse of loyalties, loyalty leading people into really bad decisionmaking
- Died and came back wrong, died multiple times and comes back wronger each time
- Doomed ships, ghost ships, ships that should be abandoned but aren't, cursed ships (spaceships/airships/sailing ships all good!)
- Eerily pristine abandoned places, ruined castles/fortresses/villages, other eldritch places
- Folk horror
- Ghosts
- Human sacrifice, ritual scarification, what happens when sacrifices to higher powers aren't accepted
- Identity Issues, especially those stemming from close bonds with another person
- In-universe regional horror, myths, (urban) legends, and folklore
- Killing and eating your gods as a form of worship
- Memory loss
- Nature that wants to crawl inside you and never come out, nature that wants to eat you, sentient malevolent nature
- Necromancy, the unpleasant aftereffects/costs of necromancy
- Oneiromancy, dreamsharing, dreams that bleed into reality, cursed dreams, prophetic dreams
- One character dressing another up to die
- Repeatedly killed and resurrected
- Ritual gone wrong
- There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls trope
- Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
- Unintended consequences of having your future told
- Hair braiding, hair pulling
- Bathing, washing, bath/shower sex
- Painplay, bloodplay, knifeplay, wax play, edgeplay, edgeplay to the edge of death
- Mirror sex, identity porn
- Bondage, shibari/kinbaku, suspension, honour bondage, blindfolds, gags, D/s dynamics (though not 24/7 bdsm lifestyle setups)
- Jewellery and clothes kink
- Dressing or undressing each other
- Spanking, especially as a show of forgiveness or as penance for fucking up at work
- Consent play, somnophilia
- Praise kink, loyalty kink, competency kink
- Public and semi-public sex, having to stay quiet
- Oral sex
- Overstimulation
- Biting, marking
- First time with each other
- Sex for manipulation/political gain/conversion to the other political-military side (success optional)
- Inappropriate use of magic and weapons
- Mutual masturbation
- One person in a threesome directing the other two and getting off watching them.
- Unrequested m/m or m/f ships, unless specified.
- Rape/noncon (dubcon is fine)
- Kidfic, breeding, pregnancy including unconventional forms like fpreg/oviposition, age-regression and time-travel to see kid versions of characters
- Permanent death of female characters, unless prompted for (ghosts & came-back-wrong & other temporary deaths always fine)
- Scat, watersports, emetophilia, enemas
- A/B/O
- Food in/on genitalia or used as sex toys, weight gain/stuffing kink (fantasy body horror and metaphors are fine)
- 'Only one destined true love' AUs like soulmates or hanahaki disease
- Detailed descriptions of injuries to feet, amputated feet (minor/referenced injuries are fine)
- Zombie apocalypse fic, day-to-day survival in the postapocalyptic wasteland fic (exploration of ruins from dead civilisations is fine)
- Issuefic, fic focussing on characters' romantic/sexual/gender identities, characters describing themselves with canon-atypical or anachronistic romantic/sexual/gender identity terms
- 'It was all a dream' sort of mindfuckery
- 'I am too old to be loved' angst in age-gap ships
- Bodyswap fic, crackfic
- Sex involving under-16s.
- Mentions of Brexit in contemporary canons
- Safeword/colour checkins
General: Codependent teenage best friends AND not-not sexual obsession with #unavailable older women in positions of authority, I am immensely catered to. Also it's basically Lana Del Rey - She's not Me.mp3 and The Amazing Devil - Battle Cries.mp3 in f/f canon form, so what's not to love? I'd love something that leans into the fever-dream horror of consumption of it all. All the obsession, all the clinical-sensual interest in what bodies can do, all the levels of genuinely caring (or genuinely hateful!) mentorship that ultimately can't do anything but fail. I love ladies and noir and glitter and murder, you can't disappoint me! For this request, I'd love something that picks up on the dark inherent in the book and magnifies it, including making my requested faves the cause of the horror (e.g. Addy/Beth on a serial killing spree).
Fandom-specific DNW: Bad end (permanent mindbreak, imprisonment, or death) for the requested characters. Anyone else, including the rest of the squad, is fair game.
Medium: Fic emphasising sexual content, fic not emphasising sexual content.
Requested Ships/Characters:
- Addy Hanlon/RiRi Curtis
- Beth Cassidy/Addy Hanlon
- Beth Cassidy/Colette French
- Colette French/Addy Hanlon
- Addy Hanlon
- Beth Cassidy
- Colette French
Body Horror: There's a lot of body horror inherent to cheerleading, in the book, from the eating disorders to the injuries to the constant threat of falling during a stunt and snapping your neck. So something that leans into that - the transformation and the pain of transformation, manipulating each other's broken bones to turn them into something Else.
Cosmic Horror: The girls discover something awful when stargazing at Lanvers. Colette comes to Sutton Grove and finds it's basically a cheerleader-led cult and has to decide whether to join them or destroy them (or maybe Beth or Addy makes that choice for her).
Folk Horror: Sure, the dying industrial town isn't quite as isolated as some of the traditional folk horror settings — but there's no reason you can't isolate them even further in fic! Or lean into the girls as the isolated community (cheerleading squad as agent of horror!), set apart from everyone else in town. Psychogeography and Sutton Grove: something about the contrast between the industrial ruins and places like Lanvers and the gorge. Something about cheerleading legends/folklore — a girl, maybe the Flyer having to be sacrificed to ensure success at States? The Sutton Grove town leaders want Colette to save the town via taking the squad to championships, but the girls have darker plans for how to use Colette. A straightforward Blood on Satan's Claw AU would delight me.
Killer Horror: Serial killer AUs!! Beth and Addy as killers being mentored by Colette, Beth murdering her way through the Marines, the girls finding out about Colette's past as a killer, Addy or Colette turning on the squad.
Paranormal Horror: GHOSTS! Beth dies after her jump from the pyramid and haunts Addy and/or Colette. The ghost of a dead cheerleader possess someone on the squad. Something about the St Reggie's girl who killed herself in the woods. Colette as a supernatural creature - I'm fond of vampires, but go wild! - especially if she's feeding on the girls/their energy in some way. Spin out the decaying industrial town setting and send the characters to explore a haunted/abandoned place in Sutton Grove.
Psychological Horror: Anything magnifying the fucked-up Beth-Addy-Colette relationships, all the manipulation and possessiveness leading to a point where they're not sure what the world outside each other looks like. Something about Beth's vaguely-prophetic dreams - does she slip further and further into them until she doubts what reality is?
Violent Horror: Love is a kind of killing and cheerleading is a type of violence! Take all the body horror stuff I loved above to the extreme - the girls literally picking each other apart to see how they work, maybe killing Emily after she breaks her leg? Or combine with killer horror, Will and Kurtz and the rest of the Marines being tortured/killed by the girls (and then they have sex in the blood of their enemies :D).
General: The video is on youtube here, and the lyrics are here. Slight preference for female characters. Any kind of bad end welcome for this request.
Medium: Art not emphasising sexual content, fic not emphasising sexual content.
Requested Ships/Characters:
- Any Character(s)
Body Horror: The lyrics make me think broken or twisted necks or dismemberment, but something about the horror of bodies after death, or bodies warped by endless dance, or bodies being eaten...
Cosmic Horror: I want to know more about 'the back room where I saw the dead'! Creepy reality-warping pocket dimension? Will the dead ever crawl out? What other incomprehensible horrors are there along with the dead?
Dark Fantasy: The dead were 'dancing like children' and there's a long history of fairies making their victims dance to death and there's the carnival-esque instrumental interlude (3:04 - 4:27) soo let your creepy circus/fairy dance dreams run wild! (Optional extra thematice Vibes: Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti is my favourite dark carnival book).
Folk Horror: This fits folk horror plots so well - strangers laughing at the outsider, old men leading the singer astray - so any type of 'narrator and their darling come to small town, see much more than they wanted' situation.
Gothic Horror: vAMPIRES, especially with the 'good deed in exchange for a sin' lyric - saving a vampire in return for being turned into one themself?
Killer Horror: How did the dead get dead? Is it the narrator, the person they're singing to, someone else entirely? Chases through vast landscapes are great, or even chases through 'the back room', whatever form that takes. 5 people killed + 1 who got away. Any type of mentor/protege stuff involving training someone to kill.
Paranormal Horror: Many dead could easily mean many ghosts - how are they coping with their afterlife?
Psychological Horror: The narrator spends all song trying to get someone to come see the dead with them - what other levels of fucked-up manipulation/encouragement are there in that relationship? Anything about the dead showing up in dreams first, before slipping into reality - and, perhaps, being less and less confined to the back room.
Violent Horror: Art of bodies, or, given you take the torso and I'll take the head, art of people eating bodies. Cannibalism in general - not to get repetitive, but let them chomp!
General: I love the lush expansiveness of Tolkien's work, the history and the care and the sheer amount of space characters are allowed to take up and that we are able to fill in. My favourite bits are the horror and the weird fey things, and I'm happy to see my requested characters as either the victim or the cause of the horror! I'm entirely happy to just have the canon husbands not mentioned, but I have no infidelity-related squicks, dislike Eol, and do like Celebron, Earendil, and Gorlim, if that becomes relevant to your writing. Turin/Nienor as a background ship is fine. Loads more Tolkien-specific notes in last year's Innumerable Stars letter.
Fandom-specific DNW: Half-elves who did not canonically choose mortality choosing mortality, LaCE-style elven marriage-for-life or soulbonds (fucked-up eldritch-horror-y telepathic bonding is fine & encouraged), movie canon, Maglor in history.
Medium: Art not emphasising sexual content, fic not emphasising sexual content.
Requested Ships/Characters:
- Aredhel/Haleth of the Haladin
- Aredhel/Thuringwethil
- Arien/Thuringwethil
- Galadriel/Goldberry
- Goldberry/Melian
- Lúthien Tinúviel/Thuringwethil
- Niënor Níniel & Urwen Lalaith
- Author's Choice of the Valar
- Lalaith
- Maglor
- Thuringwethil
Body Horror: I mean Lúthien canonically rips the skin from Thuringwethil's corpse and wears it as a cloak so - lean into that! What it feels like to wear a monster's skin and feel your own skin and bones start to crack and shift in turn. Lúthien returning to the ruins to try to put Thuringwethil's skin back on her corpse, and raising a new awful creature. Anything leaning into the monstrous aspects of Thuringwethil's vampire form, and how she changes others (let the vampire chomp!!). Valar wearing (unintentionally?) horrifying forms - Yavanna with plants growing from her, Uinen as a sea monster, etc - and how the elves/men/dwarves react to it. Lalaith plague-ravaged even as a ghost.
General: I love these books as a changeling story, I love them as a story of nature-as-entity, I love them as a story of how desolation is never bleak and usually alive. I would prefer you use the characters' professions to describe them (eg "the psychologist" ) in narration, rather than their names. The canon by nature is playing with some pretty dark questions about embodiment and environmental catastrophes and death, but there's plenty of potential for the horror of light and joy as characters give themselves back over to Area X (or are taken over by Area X!), so don't be afraid to lean into that. I've read all three books and my prompts do get kinda spoilery, but if you've only read Annihilation, I welcome fic based only off that. I love the journal style of Annihilation and epistolary fic is especially welcome for this fandom. Entirely original expeditions welcome. Any kind of bad end welcome for this request.
Medium: Art not emphasising sexual content, fic not emphasising sexual content.
Requested Ships/Characters:
- Grace/The Psychologist
- The Anthropologist/The Surveyor
- The Biologist/Ghost Bird
- The Biologist/The Psychologist
- The Biologist & The Psychologist
- The Biologist & The Surveyor
- The Linguist & The Psychologist
- Control
- Ghost Bird
- The Anthropologist
- The Linguist
- The Psychologist
Body Horror: Plant based body horror!! I am especially fond of flowers growing out of eye sockets and fingers being replaced with vines and plants coming together to form not-quite replicas of missing expedition members, but anything will do! I love fic and art that leans into the transformative aspects of Area X - the Biologist becoming something else, the Psychologist letting pieces of her body go after she falls from the lighthous, pre-existing plants/creatures finding new homes in corpses - and the potential for awful joy/the tension between release and loss there. Anything about changelings and doppelgangers and coming back wrong.
Cosmic Horror: I'm always kinda 50/50 on whether I believe Area X is something alien that fell to Earth, it depends on my mood when I do a re-read. But I would like to see your take on it, if you do believe it! If not, I LOVE, nature-as-cosmic-horror, entirely incomprehensible even to someone like the Biologist who studies it for a living. Pre-canon expeditions would be a great way to explore that, especially journals from previous expeditions, how others tried to cope with the impending mindbreak.
Dark Fantasy: Area X as magical corruption, being manipulated by the Psychologist (who is in turn being manipulated?)
Folk Horror: Wicker Man AU?? The Southern Reach compound is Summerisle, the Psychologist is Lord Summerisle, the expeditions are sacrifices? Or explore some barely-human-anymore encampments from before the barrier came down (or formed out of the remains of a previous expedition) and how they handle new expeditions arriving.
Gothic Horror: Area X has no explicit vampires. Area X should have vampires. Something that leans into the paradoxical claustrophobia of the vast world inside the barrier. Dreamsharing.
Killer Horror: Expeditions turning on each other - trying to find out what's picking them off one by one and then finding out its one of their own.
Paranormal Horror: Ghosts on the base. Something that leans into nature possessing humans.
Psychological Horror: *Points at the psychologist* She's my fave and I'd like her to be awful to everyone else. Training other expedition psychologists, especially if she purposefully leaves gaps so she eventually has to go on one herself. More insight into the hypnosis sessions, including the development/testing of the trigger words.
Violent Horror: I don't have much specific for this one tbh! Take anything from above, especially killer or body horror, and lean into the gore, really.