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malachiical) wrote2025-05-14 07:46 pm
malachiical) wrote2025-05-14 07:46 pm
Entry tags:
Summer of Horror Letter 2025
(A few ideas for each subgenre will be added ASAP! As will a link, in the How to Survive Camping table of contents, to the final bonus story...)
Hello, potential Summer of Horror creators! Thank you and welcome to my letter post! :P I'm Mal or Mali (malachiical @ AO3 as well); I'll try to keep each individual section of this letter brief, and you should be able to skip to wherever you like with anchor links and/or just expand the parts relevant to you via cut. I hope our horror ids align and you have a blast writing, because I'm definitely looking forward to whatever you come up with!
SFW Likes
Crossover Fandom (Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!/Ouran High School Host Club)
Kanamori Sayaka & Ootori Kyouya
This ship strikes me as fascinating and with a ton of potential for fun stuff! Kanamori and Kyouya are incredibly different people, but also have enough similarities that I can easily see them getting each other (at least on some level), quickly getting on each others' radar, and both quickly ending up respecting one another, being impressed by one another, and/or seeing the value in one another... And also being both similar and different enough that they're each able to throw the other off balance. I feel like if they came into each others' orbit they'd both quickly decide they need to find out what they can about each other, and about each others' clubs. I can also easily see them being on mostly equal footing -- though I have a preference for Kanamori having the upper hand more often if there is a bit of an imbalance! And I feel like they'd make a scary good team if and when they did come together, so I could also see them both being savvy enough to seek the other out as a useful contact to get and to uphold...
Plus there's just the general club dynamics. Kyouya and the Host Club getting dragged into Film Club shenanigans? Kanamori and the Film Club finding themselves involved in Host Club madness? ABSOLUTELY YES.
...But seriously. Two calculating glasses-wearers (well, sort of) who basically run their clubs from the wings, try to corral their more excitable members, and have a penchant for blackmail? This could make for a really fun dynamic where they might butt heads at first, but could quickly come to realize the other is a maybe dangerous but also potentially very useful ally to have. Kanamori making sure that she and the other Film Club members are basically un-blackmail-able while Kyouya is often able to call her bluffs in turn could be very fun. The both of them separately organizing things to make sure their club gets a real solid benefit out of any interactions they have, help they give, or deals they make could be a really fun dynamic! As well as eventually actively working together to make sure they both benefit... Feel free to change details, of course, but that's basically the vibes I'm imagining here.
Horror Genres Requested
How to Survive Camping (Fainting--Goat)
Beau & Kate
[Where you can find the stories free online: Here! (A table of contents; most links are via the Wayback Machine.)]
These characters have such a wild relationship with one another; I have not been able to get over it since I first read these stories, and a re-read brought all of that back not just full force but redoubled.
She hates him and is afraid of him, and she loves him like she loves the barn cat with the kinked tail or the plant her uncle gave her. She irritates him, and a lot of things about being near her and interacting with her outright hurts him, and he'll miss her. She was willing to give her life for him and she will fight him to the actual death and the very thought of him dying scares and pains her. He has a claim on her life and wants to use her to become something more instead and is willing to die for just the chance that she will do as he hopes. They have stabbed each other and saved one another's lives. She knows people ship them online and she trolls the shippers and him about it; he trolls her too just for kicks, often in the same apparently irritated deadpan as ever. He has made terrifying enemies because he chose her. She refilled his skull cup and basically soulbonded them together and he accepted that and tied his life to hers. She gave him a name and an identity. The people who read her stories love him because they see him through her eyes...
All this to say, this messy, messy relationship that is in its own way full of love and the effort, through fear and pain, to love, in their own ways, just absolutely fills and shatters my heart. I love how much they are there for each other and how much they are willing to do for each other when it comes down to it, while also being pretty brutal with each other at times and, when it comes down to it, being both willing to sacrifice themself for the other but also willing to harm or kill the other. And Kate is so, so human and Beau is so inhuman but in some unexpected ways they do meet each other in the middle, even if neither really wants to admit it, which I adore.
(I also love the weird gender stuff going on with Beau; it feels very relatable while also feeling very inhuman in ways I enjoy! I think it makes sense to interpret Beau as basically nonbinary or arguably the equivalent of a trans man, given how he looks different to everyone, including different genders, until his "self" starts to solidify due to Kate's stories describing him and her getting him a name. And I also adore that -- how entwined she is in his forming identity, how she gives him a name and does in fact start to solidify and change who he is, and how despite saying he can't change he still does start to change around her and go against his own nature even when it hurts!)
Horror Genres Requested
The Last Halloween (Webcomic)
Doctor Fugue & Robert
Doctor Fugue & Ringley & Robert & Shirley
Mona & Robert
Solo: Doctor Fugue
Solo: Robert
[Where you can find the comic: Here!
Book 1 is by far the most pertinent; that's 7 chapters/about 114 pages.]
I adore the weird, only slightly nodded to history between Doctor Fugue, Ringley, Robert, and Shirley -- how Robert and Shirley just roll with most of Ringley's shit and are both super patient with him and also don't particularly buy into his whole demeanor, how Done Shirley seems to be with Fugue at all times and how Robert seems to respect him enough to take Mona to him for help but also disrespect him enough to flat-out tell her he's not a good doctor (deserved, tbh), even how Doctor Fugue treats them all as children when Robert is... very much not that, but of course Robert is keeping a huge secret from them all! I also just love the absurdity of three undead "children" doing odd jobs including graverobbing and corpse-stealing for a ghostly mad scientist trapped forever in an abandoned church. That rules.
I also absolutely adore Robert and Mona's dynamic, and how it shifts throughout Book 1. How he starts out giving a bit of help but admits later that he wasn't at all invested in her survival and assumed she'd die quickly; how he eventually comes to root for her and even slowly tell her (almost) the entire truth about what he knows and what he is; how he sacrifices himself for her in the end so blatantly. Their heart-to-hearts in the later part of Book 1 really get to me! I even love how Mona still hasn't figured out all of Robert's secrets and lies, at least not by the end of Book 1: particularly, the lie at the lake when he said it was lucky their monster attacker's human was already dead when that is very much not how things work, and in fact the monster probably already having killed its human and become immortal is probably the only reason Robert stepped in and killed it himself! (I also kind of love the little detail that Robert was obviously the "straight man" of the group before Mona showed up and took over that role!)
Doctor Fugue & Robert, and especially Doctor Fugue/Robert, probably needs the most explaining, since their interactions are minor and not particularly significant. But the more I thought about them individually, I liked what their slight interplay does say about them and how the shapes of their arcs work together. This section might also give some ideas about what I like about both of them individually...
Doctor Fugue is undead, a doctor and supernatural (mad) scientist, a Victorian-ish ghost. One who haunts the church and can't leave. He employs what he thinks of as a little group of undead children to help him graverob bodies for his raising-the-dead experiments (as well as upgrading/replacing Jangles's various bits). He's a big faker; Robert flat-out says he's not a good doctor, which is proven very correct when Mona comes back. He not only hands a ten year old a magic weapon he knows nothing about and sends her and the other "kids" out with completely incorrect information, he's apparently sent multiple "group[s] of untrained misfits to their deaths without actually nowing what was going on," to the point that Charon's chewed him out about it at least once before. Fugue shoves a magic sickle into Mona's hands and pushes her out the door with a few undead "child" chaperones during the Apocalypse so that she can go take care of it; this is a whole bunch of terrible decisions all in a clump, made worse by him not understanding the situation and actually sending them on a wild goose chase in the end. Mona has to chop up and even kill multiple monsters, nearly dying more than once and actually losing an arm to the ordeal, something she makes clear to Fugue that she'll never forgive him for (which he finds fair). His whole arc seems to involve him getting a huge dose of guilt for once in his unlife, realizing just how badly he fucked this little group up, seeming to have a change of heart about the "playing Dr. Frankenstein" thing and trying in some small ways to start to make amends.
Robert, on the other hand, is posing as an undead, a doll cursed to life by voodoo. Until he tells Mona and Shirley, literally no one in the group including Fugue knows that he's a monster, not undead at all, and is also immortal (or what they call immortal) due to killing his human several decades prior; he claims to be an undead to avoid the attention of the Phagocyte. He's around 117 years old, if not a bit older, and he's often the closest thing the group has to a straight-man; he keeps his own secrets, even when it would be really helpful to share, because he rarely feels invested in others, and he doesn't tend to personally lend much of a hand, especially not to save people. He's calm and soft-spoken, good with normal human adults, and very calmly makes threats when called for as well (and sometimes even commits violence against his undead "friends," such as sewing Ringley's mouth shut, though they don't seem to mind). He, and let me state this again, killed his own human, Gene, decades before the canon starts, and tells the story at one point about how they had been one another's dearest friends and Robert had ruined Gene's entire life thoroughly until Gene had asked Robert to kill him. He says that it was and is his nature. He shows that this may not be as true as he thought.
Robert goes along on the save-the-world quest to keep everyone on track and give them even a tiny chance, but he saves Mona's life once and then tells her he'll never do it again so she'd better learn to save herself. Mona does learn, however, despite him keeping a lot of information back and outright lying at times, and he becomes more attached and invested in the outcome of their mission. It even gets to the point that he eventually fully opens up, becomes somewhat more reassuring (and even open to affectionate touch, which was Not a thing for him at first), sort of steps into a mentor role to Mona, and promptly sacrifices his own life to give her a fighting chance. His own arc involves him actually becoming attached to the situation and its people for once, to the point of purposefully sacrificing his life to give Mona a chance to survive and succeed (on what is, unbeknownst to them, a fool's errand), even admitting his own origins and past and coming face-to-face with the fact, for the first time, that maybe his nature as a monster is something he can choose to act counter to.
...So Fugue sends Mona, Robert, and the others off on a pointless quest that gets one of them killed and nearly kills two more of them, and is having to live with that fuck-up (figuratively speaking). He's obviously hit pretty hard by Robert's death and Mona's hatred of him, and comes to regret his choices and the results they had on the others, actually swearing off using corpses to make more undead for a while as he decides to use one of the fresh corpses to save Shirley's life instead. And by the end of Book One Fugue still hasn't even been made aware that Robert was a monster the whole time and has sort of... fused with the magic sickle that's supernaturally bonded to Mona. Overall, the canon, or at least Book 1, is a very interesting set of characters and relationships who are all affected and shaken badly by the general situation but also by the lies told and secrets kept, primarily by Fugue but also arguably by Robert, and the idea of two of them together even platonically (but also not...) really intrigues me.
Horror Genres Requested
Slay the Princess (Visual Novel)
Voice of the Cold & Voice of the Paranoid
[If you don't actually own the game, you can find the following videos on YouTube:
• BAI GAMING Video #1 - Pertinent parts are at 50:50-58:35 (The Razor, starting at the point where all the voices start coming in) and 2:12:52-2:56:12 (The Nightmare, with Voice of the Paranoid, and The Moment of Clarity with everyone)
• BAI GAMING Video #2 - Pertinent parts are at 57:46-1:06:59 (The Apotheosis, with Voice of the Paranoid) and 1:39:37-2:53:04 (The Spectre and The Wraith, with Voice of the Cold)
• Slay the Princess - The Spectre & The Wraith - Pertinent part is at 31:00-48:28 (The Wraith variation, with Voice of the Cold and Voice of the Paranoid)
• BAI GAMING Video #3 - Pertinent part is at 2:53:14-3:09:25 (The Wild, with Voice of the Paranoid)
• BAI GAMING Video #4 - Pertinent parts are at 26:22-46:40 (The Burned Grey, with Voice of the Cold), 1:30:29-1:49:54 (The Drowned Grey, with Voice of the Cold), and 1:53:08-2:41:07 (The Nightmare variations, with way more from Voice of the Paranoid)
• Slay the Princess - All Endings - Potentially pertinent part is at 26:15-28:09 (A New Dawn ending)
PRISTINE CUT ADDITIONS:
• Apotheosis Fight + Unravelled/Grace Endings (Paranoid) [Slay The Princess - The Pristine Cut] - About 40 minutes, with Voice of the Paranoid.
• The Cage Route in Slay the Princess - Playthrough and Route Endings - Pertinent part is at 27:49-48:57 (with Voice of the Paranoid).
• Adversarial Fury - Contrarian/Broken/Cold [Slay The Princess - The Pristine Cut] - Pertinent part is 1:08:59-1:42:38 (with Voice of the Cold).
• Fury - Quantum Beak (you can respawn) [Slay The Princess - The Pristine Cut] - Pertinent part is 22:39-39:10 (with Voice of the Cold).
• Happily Ever After Route in Slay the Princess - Playthrough and Route Endings - 37:39 minutes, with Voice of the Paranoid. (It isn't possible to get Paranoid in this route anymore, for the record! All of this is Skeptic now. But I still think what was there is interesting...)
• The Princess and the Dragon Route in Slay the Princess - Playthrough and Route Endings - About 51 minutes, with Voice of the Cold.
Watching all of the above pertinent parts would take about 7 and a half hours, but you can easily knock it down to about 2 hours and 5 minutes by just watching their main routes: The Nightmare in the first video (2:12:52-2:40:21), The Spectre in the second video (1:39:37-2:28:30) and the Princess and the Dragon video, and The Wraith variation with both of them (31:00-48:28). Or watch whatever bits of whatever playthroughs you like...
Or, of course, play it yourself; just go with whatever works for you! :D]
These two really, really intrigue me. They don't get to interact that much, but they're quite interesting in The Wraith route, and also have moments in some of the other routes -- and some similarities and general qualities -- that make me think that they could really catch the other's attention if given more opportunity.
For one thing, they are both very aware of and surprisingly in control of their bodies. (Well, their shared body. The protagonist's body. Let's just say "their bodies" for simplicity.) Voice of the Cold constantly talks about choosing to just stop feeling things, both emotions and any negative physical sensations; their back-and-forth of "Do we have to explain to you why pain is bad?" "You have to explain to yourself why it isn't," is VERY cool. But despite Voice of the Paranoid being obviously high-strung, he also has an immense amount of steel to him, not only manually running the body's autonomic nervous system during The Nightmare route, but also showing up specifically to keep Voice of the Broken in check during The Apotheosis route after Broken let The Tower into their mind which led to their death.
There are also little details, such as the fact that Cold usually shows up after you kill the Princess in cold blood and then yourself, and Paranoid also encourages killing yourself if you become trapped in The Nightmare route due to killing her. This actually leads to Cold showing up... And interestingly, before that, if the protagonist says to the Hero and the Paranoid that it'd be fine to be stuck in the void forever because they're the best company, Paranoid says, "Oh, you could do better than us," and that's right before Cold comes into the picture. In The Wraith route, he and Cold and Hero and the protagonist have to all work together to toss their body into the void with The Wraith in it, if they choose that route, and the "everyone on the count of three" moment Paranoid takes charge of is just neat.
And in a general sense, I really think they could... see something interesting in each other. Paranoid is nervy and definitely hasn't shut off his emotions at all, but he also has that aforementioned steel and sharp control over himself/his body/The Body, that might be even more intriguing and impressive based on how unexpected it is. And Cold is a dangerous person, yes, but is actually less dangerous to the other voices than someone like the Broken or even the Smitten, and might also be easier to predict than someone like the Opportunist or even the Hunted -- you know exactly what his danger is, if he's going to be dangerous. And at the same time, Paranoid seems to trust the other voices in a way he doesn't trust anyone "other," and Cold seems to want to help the other voices, often trying to give them advice on how to get through situations without breaking down. There's an automatic sort of rapport there that makes it more likely they'd get close to each other than if they were just ordinary people with their same personalities.
Also, speaking of that, I do love the bodysharing and would be super into that if you want to roll with it, but I also love a theoretical post-canon situation where maybe the voices are all getting their own bodies. You don't even have to get into how and why they have different bodies if you want to do that; just handwaving it would be fine!
Horror Genres Requested
Hello, potential Summer of Horror creators! Thank you and welcome to my letter post! :P I'm Mal or Mali (malachiical @ AO3 as well); I'll try to keep each individual section of this letter brief, and you should be able to skip to wherever you like with anchor links and/or just expand the parts relevant to you via cut. I hope our horror ids align and you have a blast writing, because I'm definitely looking forward to whatever you come up with!
- General Likes
- - SFW Likes
- - Smut Likes
- - Favorite Horror Canons
- Crossover Fandom (Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!/Ouran High School Host Club) - Kanamori Sayaka & Ootori Kyouya
- - Horror Genres Requested
- - DNWs
- - Opt-Ins
- - Canon-Specific Likes
- How to Survive Camping (Fainting--Goat) - Beau & Kate
- - Horror Genres Requested
- - DNWs
- - Opt-Ins
- - Canon-Specific Likes
- The Last Halloween (Webcomic) - Doctor Fugue & Robert; Doctor Fugue & Ringley & Robert & Shirley; Mona & Robert; Solo: Doctor Fugue; Solo: Robert
- - Horror Genres Requested
- - DNWs
- - Opt-Ins
- - Canon-Specific Likes
- Slay the Princess (Visual Novel) - Voice of the Cold & Voice of the Paranoid
- - Horror Genres Requested
- - DNWs
- - Opt-Ins
- - Canon-Specific Likes
SFW Likes
- Descriptions of making out tbh
- Pining and culmination of pining: getting together, kissing, romantic tension/UST being resolved, mutual pining or initially one-sided pining, pining that lasts for weeks or even years
- Flirting, confident or awkward or just fuckin disastrous
- Extreme loyalty
- TRUST
- Intense relationships and general intensity
- One character carrying or helping physically support the other!
- Hurt/comfort! Fics with a balance on both or ones that lean towards more comfort than hurt are faves; feel free to get deep in the hurt but I love a sizeable focus on the comfort!
- Happy or at least hopeful/somewhat upbeat endings
- Fluff, snapshot moments of what's going on in their lives
- Canon divergent AUs, change one thing about a canon and maybe other things happen differently
- Trans headcanons where it's not A Thing in the fic: No coming out or explanations necessary, or it's just accepted and not super dwelled on, no Having To Deal With Bigotry or issuefic or anything, just character(s) happen(s) to be trans
- First times and milestones (sexual and/or romantic)
- Frot, scissoring, intercrural, grinding against ass, basically all that stuff
- Handjobs, fingering, oral
- Clothed sex, partially clothed sex, and clothing kink
- Inexperience, awkward, clumsy but eager and enjoyable sex
- BDSM, either just vibes, trappings/tones, or more formal
- Praise kink and instructions/requests/begging flavors of dirty talk
- Orgasm delay (though not total denial), edging
- XENO. Xeno xeno xeno I am so into xeno; play around with any nonhuman characters not having normal human genitalia and I am here for it; tentacles, cloacas, both sets of genitalia at the same time, genitals resembling flowers or wet pinecone dick, nothing there but touching can still get them off, even freakier (positive) things like possession being sexual somehow, legit whatever you can think of just g o f o r i t ~
- Strap-on sex in general, and also when it's treated like a dick (including handjobs/blowjobs)
- Manhandling, hair pulling, love bites and scratches, rough but not outright painful (or only pleasantly painful) sex
- Multiple orgasms, "forced" orgasms that are still enjoyable
- E n t h u s i a s m and detailed descriptions of sex, just go for it
- In general, I prefer the terms: penis, cock, dick, length; vagina, vulva, cunt, or pussy; nipples, ass, and testicles/balls can just be called those things; come or cum are both fine spellings (just not "cumming")
- PIV in trans smut (if applicable) is fine; oral and PIA sex super welcome; alternatives are also loved
- Ju-On (2002)
- Possum
- Let's Scare Jessica To Death
- The Others
- Jurassic Park
- Pan's Labyrinth
- Train to Busan
- Lake Mungo
- Poltergeist
- Mama
- The Ritual
- Thir13en Ghosts
- Home with a View of the Monster
- Afflicted (2013)
- Driven (2019)
- The Haunting of Hill House
- Midnight Mass
- Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories
- Kowabon
- Perfect Blue
- Another
- Uzumaki by Junji Ito
- "The Enigma of Amigara Fault," "Falling," "Scarecrows," and "Street of Gravestones" by Junji Ito
- Fuan no Tane (Seeds of Anxiety, all three series) by Masaaki Nakayama
- The Last Halloween by Abby Howard
- Through the Woods by Emily Carroll
- "The Sacker Street Ghost" by skelehime
- The Left/Right Game
- How to Survive Camping by Bonnie Quinn (fainting--goat)
- Pet Sematary by Stephen King
- The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
- "It" by Theodore Sturgeon
- "Details" by China Miéville
- "Alice's Last Adventure" by Thomas Ligotti
- "Past Sunset" by Vivian Van Velde
- "The One They Took Before" by Kelly Sandoval
- "The Music of Erich Zann" by H. P. Lovecraft
- "She Hides Sometimes" and "A Thing With Teeth" by Nino Cipri
- Slay the Princess
- Night in the Woods (sort of)
- Silent Hill 1-4 and Shattered Memories
- Fatal Frame 1-4
- The Nameless Game & The Nameless Game: Eye
- Amnesia: The Dark Descent
- Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs
- Home Safety Hotline and its DLC
- Devotion
- Who's Lila?
- Close Your Eyes by Gamagami
- Anatomy by Kitty Horrorshow
Crossover Fandom (Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!/Ouran High School Host Club)
Kanamori Sayaka & Ootori Kyouya
This ship strikes me as fascinating and with a ton of potential for fun stuff! Kanamori and Kyouya are incredibly different people, but also have enough similarities that I can easily see them getting each other (at least on some level), quickly getting on each others' radar, and both quickly ending up respecting one another, being impressed by one another, and/or seeing the value in one another... And also being both similar and different enough that they're each able to throw the other off balance. I feel like if they came into each others' orbit they'd both quickly decide they need to find out what they can about each other, and about each others' clubs. I can also easily see them being on mostly equal footing -- though I have a preference for Kanamori having the upper hand more often if there is a bit of an imbalance! And I feel like they'd make a scary good team if and when they did come together, so I could also see them both being savvy enough to seek the other out as a useful contact to get and to uphold...
Plus there's just the general club dynamics. Kyouya and the Host Club getting dragged into Film Club shenanigans? Kanamori and the Film Club finding themselves involved in Host Club madness? ABSOLUTELY YES.
...But seriously. Two calculating glasses-wearers (well, sort of) who basically run their clubs from the wings, try to corral their more excitable members, and have a penchant for blackmail? This could make for a really fun dynamic where they might butt heads at first, but could quickly come to realize the other is a maybe dangerous but also potentially very useful ally to have. Kanamori making sure that she and the other Film Club members are basically un-blackmail-able while Kyouya is often able to call her bluffs in turn could be very fun. The both of them separately organizing things to make sure their club gets a real solid benefit out of any interactions they have, help they give, or deals they make could be a really fun dynamic! As well as eventually actively working together to make sure they both benefit... Feel free to change details, of course, but that's basically the vibes I'm imagining here.
Horror Genres Requested
- Comedic Horror
- Institutional Horror
- Monster Horror
- Paranormal Horror
- Science Fiction Horror
- Supernatural Horror
- Survival Horror
- Feel free to mix and match any of the above horror subgenres!
- I did not request, but am opting into elements of: Cosmic Horror, Dark Fantasy, Folk Horror, Gothic Horror, Killer Horror, Psychological Horror
- Noncon/dubcon
- Feederism, weight gain, inflation, pregnancy (mentions of OCs being pregnant are fine)
- Scat, watersports (desperation is fine), vomit kink (someone throwing up not in a kink context is fine)
- Vore, bestiality, mommy- or daddykink, somnophilia, 24/7 D/S
- Permanent character death (undead, including ghosts, are fine and don't count for this DNW!)
- Halves of a ship feeling like they really just don't like or care about each other at all
- Requested characters having sexualities that mean they aren't compatible with each other, even if you don't write them as a ship
- Being ashamed of or hating one's body (even for trans stuff, if you write it; just no focus on dysphoria please)
- Unrequested AUs (canon divergence is fine)
- Unrequested identity headcanons for canon characters (mentions for OCs are fine)
- Unrequested poly for the requested characters (mentions of OCs being in poly relationships with one another is fine; minor background ships, poly or not, are fine)
- Requested characters being permanently separated in any way, or at risk of it, by the end of the story
- Unhappy endings
- Treats in general, and also art treats!
- Longfic!
- Third person or first person POV; past or present tense.
- Anything that might deserve the "Graphic Depictions Of Violence" warning, so long as that isn't between my requested characters.
- Genderswapping any or all of the Host Club boys (including writing F/F!).
- Trans headcanons; I really love both Kanamori and Kyouya as trans girls, but anything except Kyouya as a trans boy works for me! I am also open to trans headcanons for any other characters; I especially like x-gender for Haruhi and Doumeki and trans man Watabiki, and I don't want trans girl Haruhi, but other than that feel free to do whatever!
- I am open to the following background ships: Haruhi/Tamaki, Kasanoda/Tetsuya, Asakusa/Mizusaki, Doumeki/Hikaru and/or Kaoru, OC/OC, and obviously things like parents existing.
- I'm also open to past (or even lingering) one-sided Kyouya->Tamaki, Kanamori->Asakusa, and/or Kanamori->Mizusaki if you are writing Kanamori/Kyouya as a ship.
- I am open to Kanamori/Mizusaki if you are not writing Kanamori/Kyouya as a ship.
- Various ways of facilitating the crossover! Both canons always having taken place in the same universe at the same time (whether it's handwaving Eizouken into the past or Ouran into the 2050s)? Both canons taking place in the same world but at different times, with Kanamori/the Film Club getting sent back in time or Kyouya/the Host Club getting sent forward? One character or group getting sent into the other's universe? (Is it an isekai where some of the Film Club members have even watched the Ouran anime?) Doing a crossover AU to shunt them both into the same other canon? Feel free to have fun with this or just handwave it all!
- Taking place while they're all in high school or while they're all in college.
- General AUs: Aged up, genderswap (see above), apocalypse or post-apocalypse stuff (including but not limited to zombies), dark magical girl, horror-cyberpunk, horror VR, urban fantasy, ghost hunters, monster hunters, bounty hunters.
- Crossover AUs: The Last Halloween, Annihilation, Left 4 Dead series, Fatal Frame series, Silent Hill series, Phasmophobia.
- Also, feel free to take any of the above AUs and make them not quite AU: Have the apocalypse hit during canon, or have them discover [urban fantasy stuff] is real, or have them decide to explore a haunted house, or have them visit a town much like Silent Hill, but set it all in the canon world! Or even just have the horror element be a part of the Film Club's shared imaginary world! (Does it become more real/leak out into the real world or not?)
- How bonkers both the Host Club and the Film Club really are! And the idea of what their combined energy might be.
- The weirdnesses of the Film Club members, especially in the manga: The implication that they can actually bring others into their shared imagination space to "really" experience it, Doumeki's legit super-hearing, Sakurada's ability to completely change her voice to sound any age or gender or even almost 100% like a specific other person...
- Kanamori and Kyouya being completely evenly matched, or Kanamori having a slight edge.
- Kanamori and Kyouya joining forces rather than being at odds.
- How much Kanamori obviously cares underneath her "we're not friends" and apparent money-grubbing; how much Kyouya blatantly cares underneath his own icy and calculating act.
- NAMING CONVENTIONS. I love how the Film Club members almost always call each other and other peers [Surname]-shi, and how when she's not being called "Kanamori-shi" she's being called "Kanamori-kun." Would she call the Host Club members by their surnames and with -shi as well; would she call Kyouya "Ootori-shi"? And would Kyouya call her Sayaka, or stick with Kanamori like everyone else calls her? And what might it take for one of them to call the other something else for a change?
- All the stealth "20 minutes into the future" soft sci-fi of Eizouken: It taking place in the 2050s, the little mentions about the war, how parts of the city are flooded and influence the weird architecture...
- I love everything about the Den of Evil in the Eizouken manga; there is so much to play with there!
- I also love the vibes of the ~test of courage~ episode of Ouran TBH.
How to Survive Camping (Fainting--Goat)
Beau & Kate
[Where you can find the stories free online: Here! (A table of contents; most links are via the Wayback Machine.)]
These characters have such a wild relationship with one another; I have not been able to get over it since I first read these stories, and a re-read brought all of that back not just full force but redoubled.
She hates him and is afraid of him, and she loves him like she loves the barn cat with the kinked tail or the plant her uncle gave her. She irritates him, and a lot of things about being near her and interacting with her outright hurts him, and he'll miss her. She was willing to give her life for him and she will fight him to the actual death and the very thought of him dying scares and pains her. He has a claim on her life and wants to use her to become something more instead and is willing to die for just the chance that she will do as he hopes. They have stabbed each other and saved one another's lives. She knows people ship them online and she trolls the shippers and him about it; he trolls her too just for kicks, often in the same apparently irritated deadpan as ever. He has made terrifying enemies because he chose her. She refilled his skull cup and basically soulbonded them together and he accepted that and tied his life to hers. She gave him a name and an identity. The people who read her stories love him because they see him through her eyes...
All this to say, this messy, messy relationship that is in its own way full of love and the effort, through fear and pain, to love, in their own ways, just absolutely fills and shatters my heart. I love how much they are there for each other and how much they are willing to do for each other when it comes down to it, while also being pretty brutal with each other at times and, when it comes down to it, being both willing to sacrifice themself for the other but also willing to harm or kill the other. And Kate is so, so human and Beau is so inhuman but in some unexpected ways they do meet each other in the middle, even if neither really wants to admit it, which I adore.
(I also love the weird gender stuff going on with Beau; it feels very relatable while also feeling very inhuman in ways I enjoy! I think it makes sense to interpret Beau as basically nonbinary or arguably the equivalent of a trans man, given how he looks different to everyone, including different genders, until his "self" starts to solidify due to Kate's stories describing him and her getting him a name. And I also adore that -- how entwined she is in his forming identity, how she gives him a name and does in fact start to solidify and change who he is, and how despite saying he can't change he still does start to change around her and go against his own nature even when it hurts!)
Horror Genres Requested
- Body Horror
- Comedic Horror
- Dark Fantasy
- Folk Horror
- Monster Horror
- Paranormal Horror
- Supernatural Horror
- Survival Horror
- Feel free to mix and match any of the above horror subgenres!
- I did not request, but am opting into elements of: Cosmic Horror, Gothic Horror, Institutional Horror, Killer Horror, Medical Horror, Psychological Horror, Religious Horror, Violent Horror
- Noncon/dubcon (unless otherwise stated)
- Permanent character death (undead, including ghosts, are fine and don't count for this DNW; temporary character death is fine)
- Halves of a ship feeling like they really just don't like or care about each other at all
- Being ashamed of or hating one's body (even for trans stuff, if you write it; just no focus on dysphoria please)
- Requested characters being permanently separated in any way, or at risk of it, by the end of the story
- Unhappy endings
- Unrequested AUs (canon divergence is fine)
- Unrequested identity headcanons (mentions for OCs are fine)
- Unrequested noncanon or poly ships (background canon ships that don't break up the requested pairing are fine; mentions of OCs being in relationships with one another, including poly, is fine)
- Feederism, weight gain, inflation, pregnancy (mentions of OCs being pregnant are fine; breeding kink without any possibility of pregnancy is great!)
- Scat, most forms of watersports (desperation is fine!), vomit kink (someone throwing up not in a kink context is fine)
- Vore, necrophilia, bestiality, hatesex, mommy- or daddykink, 24/7 D/S
- The Lady of Stories written into the fic as Kate's permanent end state, or focus on Kate as her; I see them as separate characters and Kate becoming her as character death
- Kate being a submissive if you write sex! (Kate being more dominant or there being no D/s dynamics at all are both fine)
- Writing Kate as not aroace (I ship them and am into the idea of smut with them; just don't write her as identifying as another sexuality, give her experience or general attraction she doesn't canonically have, etc.)
- Treats in general, and also art treats!
- Longfic!
- Third person or first person POV; past or present tense.
- Pastiche/fic written in the style of Kate's Reddit posts, or not!
- Anything that might deserve the "Graphic Depictions Of Violence" warning.
- Genderswapping Beau so that either from the very start Kate saw her as the lady with the skull cup, or somehow she just ends up taking that form and is equally fine with it. (I am into F/F if you do this!)
- Trans headcanons; I particularly love various takes on Beau's whole gender thing. Does he not connect with human concepts of gender at all? Was he basically "born genderless" but now after getting a name and his appearance solidifying for people, is he sort of like a trans man? If somehow she becomes seen by Kate and everyone else as "the lady with the skull cup," would she be a trans woman? I am open to any of that! I am also not opposed to nonbinary or transmasc Kate (I can see her as basically the "i have a job so idrc about that rn" tweet), and trans woman Kate would be 100% cool as well! Go with whatever!
- Any canon background ships (Kate's parents, Tyler and his wife, the old sheriff and his wife, Bryan/the Fairy) and/or OC ships.
- General AUs: Everyone Lives, genderswap (see above), college, apocalypse or post-apocalypse stuff (including but not limited to zombies), fairy tale, urban fantasy, ghost hunters, monster hunters. (PLEASE keep Beau nonhuman in any case, though!)
- More specific AUs: Kate getting restored from being the Lady of Stories somehow; AU where Beau becomes more human, too, and meets Kate somewhere in the middle so they both stay mostly themselves.
- Crossover AUs: The Last Halloween, How to Survive College, Renfield's Clock, Vespertine, Annihilation, Changeling: The Lost, Home Safety Hotline, Night in the Woods, Silent Hill series, Fatal Frame series.
- Also, feel free to take any of the above AUs and make them not quite AU: Have the apocalypse hit during canon, or have a dark fairy tale thing pop up at the campground, or have them stay at a haunted inn somehow, or have part of the campground or town "spirited away," but set it all in the canon world!
- Basically, if together in any way, these two being not even just each other's "exceptions," with whatever they have being abnormal and nonstandard and weird even for them!
- Canon-typical stuff, whether that's the horror, the humor, or the fantasy/folklore/mythology/fairy tale stuff!
- Fic set during the events of canon, including but not limited to canon divergence AUs
- Specifically a canon-divergence AU where instead of Kate becoming more inhuman, Beau becomes more human... (Or maybe they meet each other halfway but in a more limited capacity, on Kate's side, than in canon?)
- All their dichotomies, their difficult and cruel/ruthless/callous parts, alongside their compassion and care and striving, and how it makes them similar in some ways despite being so different.
- The mutual life-saving! How it's instinctive sometimes and at other times fully thought-out and self-sacrificial!
- The knife fighting and stabbings and things too :)
- THE BANTER.
- How some things HURT BEAU and he'll still do them for Kate! (Masochist.)
- Beau's friendships with the harvesters and with the lead dancer.
- Also the funny dynamic he has with the old sheriff; that convo where the old sheriff basically shovel talked him and then Beau immediately sold Kate out on letting him murder people was so funny to me.
- Kate's relationship with her brother, her relationships with the other inhuman beings, with the old sheriff and his wife, with Bryan...
- NAME STUFF! It feels especially meaningful in this canon! (Kate gave him a name...) I love how canonically Kate went from calling him and thinking of him as "the man with the skull cup" to calling him Beau consistently; I love how Beau calls Kate by name except for when he seems particularly annoyed with her in which case he switches over to "campground manager" like most of the other inhuman things LOL. Anything that plays with their fun dynamic and push-and-pull with names would be great!
The Last Halloween (Webcomic)
Doctor Fugue & Robert
Doctor Fugue & Ringley & Robert & Shirley
Mona & Robert
Solo: Doctor Fugue
Solo: Robert
[Where you can find the comic: Here!
Book 1 is by far the most pertinent; that's 7 chapters/about 114 pages.]
I adore the weird, only slightly nodded to history between Doctor Fugue, Ringley, Robert, and Shirley -- how Robert and Shirley just roll with most of Ringley's shit and are both super patient with him and also don't particularly buy into his whole demeanor, how Done Shirley seems to be with Fugue at all times and how Robert seems to respect him enough to take Mona to him for help but also disrespect him enough to flat-out tell her he's not a good doctor (deserved, tbh), even how Doctor Fugue treats them all as children when Robert is... very much not that, but of course Robert is keeping a huge secret from them all! I also just love the absurdity of three undead "children" doing odd jobs including graverobbing and corpse-stealing for a ghostly mad scientist trapped forever in an abandoned church. That rules.
I also absolutely adore Robert and Mona's dynamic, and how it shifts throughout Book 1. How he starts out giving a bit of help but admits later that he wasn't at all invested in her survival and assumed she'd die quickly; how he eventually comes to root for her and even slowly tell her (almost) the entire truth about what he knows and what he is; how he sacrifices himself for her in the end so blatantly. Their heart-to-hearts in the later part of Book 1 really get to me! I even love how Mona still hasn't figured out all of Robert's secrets and lies, at least not by the end of Book 1: particularly, the lie at the lake when he said it was lucky their monster attacker's human was already dead when that is very much not how things work, and in fact the monster probably already having killed its human and become immortal is probably the only reason Robert stepped in and killed it himself! (I also kind of love the little detail that Robert was obviously the "straight man" of the group before Mona showed up and took over that role!)
Doctor Fugue & Robert, and especially Doctor Fugue/Robert, probably needs the most explaining, since their interactions are minor and not particularly significant. But the more I thought about them individually, I liked what their slight interplay does say about them and how the shapes of their arcs work together. This section might also give some ideas about what I like about both of them individually...
Doctor Fugue is undead, a doctor and supernatural (mad) scientist, a Victorian-ish ghost. One who haunts the church and can't leave. He employs what he thinks of as a little group of undead children to help him graverob bodies for his raising-the-dead experiments (as well as upgrading/replacing Jangles's various bits). He's a big faker; Robert flat-out says he's not a good doctor, which is proven very correct when Mona comes back. He not only hands a ten year old a magic weapon he knows nothing about and sends her and the other "kids" out with completely incorrect information, he's apparently sent multiple "group[s] of untrained misfits to their deaths without actually nowing what was going on," to the point that Charon's chewed him out about it at least once before. Fugue shoves a magic sickle into Mona's hands and pushes her out the door with a few undead "child" chaperones during the Apocalypse so that she can go take care of it; this is a whole bunch of terrible decisions all in a clump, made worse by him not understanding the situation and actually sending them on a wild goose chase in the end. Mona has to chop up and even kill multiple monsters, nearly dying more than once and actually losing an arm to the ordeal, something she makes clear to Fugue that she'll never forgive him for (which he finds fair). His whole arc seems to involve him getting a huge dose of guilt for once in his unlife, realizing just how badly he fucked this little group up, seeming to have a change of heart about the "playing Dr. Frankenstein" thing and trying in some small ways to start to make amends.
Robert, on the other hand, is posing as an undead, a doll cursed to life by voodoo. Until he tells Mona and Shirley, literally no one in the group including Fugue knows that he's a monster, not undead at all, and is also immortal (or what they call immortal) due to killing his human several decades prior; he claims to be an undead to avoid the attention of the Phagocyte. He's around 117 years old, if not a bit older, and he's often the closest thing the group has to a straight-man; he keeps his own secrets, even when it would be really helpful to share, because he rarely feels invested in others, and he doesn't tend to personally lend much of a hand, especially not to save people. He's calm and soft-spoken, good with normal human adults, and very calmly makes threats when called for as well (and sometimes even commits violence against his undead "friends," such as sewing Ringley's mouth shut, though they don't seem to mind). He, and let me state this again, killed his own human, Gene, decades before the canon starts, and tells the story at one point about how they had been one another's dearest friends and Robert had ruined Gene's entire life thoroughly until Gene had asked Robert to kill him. He says that it was and is his nature. He shows that this may not be as true as he thought.
Robert goes along on the save-the-world quest to keep everyone on track and give them even a tiny chance, but he saves Mona's life once and then tells her he'll never do it again so she'd better learn to save herself. Mona does learn, however, despite him keeping a lot of information back and outright lying at times, and he becomes more attached and invested in the outcome of their mission. It even gets to the point that he eventually fully opens up, becomes somewhat more reassuring (and even open to affectionate touch, which was Not a thing for him at first), sort of steps into a mentor role to Mona, and promptly sacrifices his own life to give her a fighting chance. His own arc involves him actually becoming attached to the situation and its people for once, to the point of purposefully sacrificing his life to give Mona a chance to survive and succeed (on what is, unbeknownst to them, a fool's errand), even admitting his own origins and past and coming face-to-face with the fact, for the first time, that maybe his nature as a monster is something he can choose to act counter to.
...So Fugue sends Mona, Robert, and the others off on a pointless quest that gets one of them killed and nearly kills two more of them, and is having to live with that fuck-up (figuratively speaking). He's obviously hit pretty hard by Robert's death and Mona's hatred of him, and comes to regret his choices and the results they had on the others, actually swearing off using corpses to make more undead for a while as he decides to use one of the fresh corpses to save Shirley's life instead. And by the end of Book One Fugue still hasn't even been made aware that Robert was a monster the whole time and has sort of... fused with the magic sickle that's supernaturally bonded to Mona. Overall, the canon, or at least Book 1, is a very interesting set of characters and relationships who are all affected and shaken badly by the general situation but also by the lies told and secrets kept, primarily by Fugue but also arguably by Robert, and the idea of two of them together even platonically (but also not...) really intrigues me.
Horror Genres Requested
- Comedic Horror
- Folk Horror
- Monster Horror
- Paranormal Horror
- Supernatural Horror
- Violent Horror
- Feel free to mix and match any of the above horror subgenres!
- I did not request, but am opting into elements of: Body Horror, Cosmic Horror, Dark Fantasy, Gothic Horror, Killer Horror, Medical Horror, Psychological Horror, Religious Horror, Survival Horror
- Noncon/dubcon (unless otherwise stated)
- Smut with characters under 16
- Permanent character death (ghosts are fine)
- Infidelity or cuckolding kink
- Halves of a ship feeling like they really just don't like or care about each other at all (even with more complicated stuff I am a BIG SOPPY ROMANTIC)
- If they are both in the fic, Doctor Fugue and Robert having sexualities that mean they aren't compatible with each other, even if you don't write them as a ship
- Being ashamed of or hating one's body (even for trans stuff if you write it; just no focus on dysphoria please)
- Characters I ship being permanently separated in any way, or at risk of it, by the end of the story
- Unhappy endings
- Unrequested AUs (canon divergence is fine; things like omegaverse count as AU to me)
- Unrequested identity headcanons (mentions for OCs are fine)
- Unrequested poly (mentions of OCs being in poly relationships with one another is fine)
- Unnecessary use of safewords or stoplight symbols (if the characters are kinking on it that's a fine reason)
- Feederism, weight gain, inflation, pregnancy (mentions of OCs being pregnant are fine)
- Scat, watersports, vomit kink (someone throwing up not in a kink context is fine)
- Vore, necrophilia (with actual dead bodies), bestiality, somnophilia, hatesex, mommy- or daddykink, 24/7 D/S
- A strong focus on Fugue's sexism. (I'd prefer for him to be capable of at least a bit of growth there; bringing it up somewhat in the context of internalized homophobia is fine.)
- Fugue being entirely unrepentant post Book 1, actually
- Implications that Robert and Gene never loved each other, especially that Robert never loved Gene, if that character comes up (doesn't have to be implied to be romantic love or anything)
- Treats in general, and also art treats!
- Longfic!
- Third person or first person POV; past or present tense.
- Anything that might deserve the "Graphic Depictions Of Violence" warning.
- Genderswapping, especially for the male characters!
- Trans headcanons; I especially love the idea of either Robert not having anything like a human view of gender or him basically being transmasc (taking on name and gender due to Gene), but I am also open to any trans interpretations of any of the characters! Just keep Mona's parent nonbinary and I'll love anything else you do.
- I opt into certain background ships: Mona's parent/Ringley's dad, Slugger/Splitter, Mickey/Yona, OC/OC, and of course any canonical parents.
- General AUs: Genderswap, Everybody Lives (well, with the undead still being undead), alternate apocalypse or post-apocalypse stuff (including but not limited to zombies), dark magical girl.
- More specific AUs: AU where the monster apocalypse didn't happen; AU where Robert didn't die to Ba'al or was/is able to be brought back somehow; AU where Fugue is the monster and Robert actually is the undead one (a haunted/cursed doll); AU where Robert is Mona's monster or was Fugue's monster; AUs where time travel and/or soulbonding are a thing.
- Crossover AUs: Annihilation, Night in the Woods, Scarlet Hollow, Silent Hill series, Fatal Frame series, Geist: The Sin-Eaters, Spire: The City Must Fall.
- For all of the above AUs, please keep all non-human characters non-human! :D
- Also, feel free to take any of the above AUs and make them not quite AU: Have a totally separate apocalypse hit alongside the Monster Influx, or after that one's settled down so humans and undead and monsters all have to deal with zombies or whatever; have the undead squad have prevented a different kind of apocalypse in the past; have the characters needing to travel cross-country for whatever reason and they wind up in Silent Hill; have the characters become magical girls to save the world, why not?
- Canon-typical tones, both the horror and also the humor.
- The Halloween and general spooky stuff along with the horror!
- Fugue helping Mona resurrect Robert (probably partly out of guilt).
- AUs where time travel, soulbonding, and similar are just A Thing.
- Forgiveness, second chances, trying again somehow...
- Fugue being invisible under his clothes and bandages.
- Post-Book 1 stuff bringing Robert back to life or back as a ghost himself.
- Post-canon (or post-Book 1) fic in general.
- Pre-canon stuff, or fic where the events of canon didn't happen, with Fugue, Robert, Shirley, and Ringley! (And Mona?) The implied history those four have with each other! (Minus Mona.)
- Robert still being alive in Mona's sickle and being able to be brought back and/or show up as a ghost that way.
- The sickle thing, if that idea is used, meaning that Mona is now immortal and also not aging (oops), and potentially exploring her feelings around that.
- Fugue finding out super belatedly that Robert is a monster!
- Protectiveness of any of my requested characters towards the other(s) tbh...
- Fugue eventually being forgiven, at least mostly, at least by most of the characters.
- Alternatively, Mona softening a bit on Fugue but still not forgiving him -- like noticing he's trying hard and maybe feeling sorry for him, maybe he makes her feel more tired than angry now, that sort of thing.
- Mona's relationship with her Book 1 traveling companions; Mona's relationship with her parents.
- Robert and Shirley's friendship especially, out of the initial group, and the way Robert bonded with Mona.
- Fugue's intriguing relationship with Marta! And his thoughts on these weird undead "children" who work for him? (If he does learn that Robert is a monster, does he think of him any differently, respect him more, etc.?)
- Possession, bodysharing, body swapping!
- Nonhuman characters, particularly monsters, being ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ about gender.
- Nicknames! Pet names! Names in general! The characters all just call everyone by name, and I don't think Robert at least would accept a nickname (from anyone but maybe Gene... or Mona, and/or Shirley?), but maybe? Also as a note, especially if you write them at all shippy, but Robert seems to call Fugue "Doctor Fugue" pretty constantly; what might make him shorten that to just Fugue? Or does Fugue have a first name, or can he not recall? And finally... Robert was given Eugene Otto's first name. How does he even feel about that?
- Robert potentially being stronger than he seems, and definitely more durable (outside of other immortal monsters, of course).
- ...Finally I also just want to note that I love invisible people. (Or, well... ghosts, as Robert points out, but Fugue's still invisible besides his clothes and bandages!) And also Fugue's all leg. Legs for days. I like these things.
Slay the Princess (Visual Novel)
Voice of the Cold & Voice of the Paranoid
[If you don't actually own the game, you can find the following videos on YouTube:
• BAI GAMING Video #1 - Pertinent parts are at 50:50-58:35 (The Razor, starting at the point where all the voices start coming in) and 2:12:52-2:56:12 (The Nightmare, with Voice of the Paranoid, and The Moment of Clarity with everyone)
• BAI GAMING Video #2 - Pertinent parts are at 57:46-1:06:59 (The Apotheosis, with Voice of the Paranoid) and 1:39:37-2:53:04 (The Spectre and The Wraith, with Voice of the Cold)
• Slay the Princess - The Spectre & The Wraith - Pertinent part is at 31:00-48:28 (The Wraith variation, with Voice of the Cold and Voice of the Paranoid)
• BAI GAMING Video #3 - Pertinent part is at 2:53:14-3:09:25 (The Wild, with Voice of the Paranoid)
• BAI GAMING Video #4 - Pertinent parts are at 26:22-46:40 (The Burned Grey, with Voice of the Cold), 1:30:29-1:49:54 (The Drowned Grey, with Voice of the Cold), and 1:53:08-2:41:07 (The Nightmare variations, with way more from Voice of the Paranoid)
• Slay the Princess - All Endings - Potentially pertinent part is at 26:15-28:09 (A New Dawn ending)
PRISTINE CUT ADDITIONS:
• Apotheosis Fight + Unravelled/Grace Endings (Paranoid) [Slay The Princess - The Pristine Cut] - About 40 minutes, with Voice of the Paranoid.
• The Cage Route in Slay the Princess - Playthrough and Route Endings - Pertinent part is at 27:49-48:57 (with Voice of the Paranoid).
• Adversarial Fury - Contrarian/Broken/Cold [Slay The Princess - The Pristine Cut] - Pertinent part is 1:08:59-1:42:38 (with Voice of the Cold).
• Fury - Quantum Beak (you can respawn) [Slay The Princess - The Pristine Cut] - Pertinent part is 22:39-39:10 (with Voice of the Cold).
• Happily Ever After Route in Slay the Princess - Playthrough and Route Endings - 37:39 minutes, with Voice of the Paranoid. (It isn't possible to get Paranoid in this route anymore, for the record! All of this is Skeptic now. But I still think what was there is interesting...)
• The Princess and the Dragon Route in Slay the Princess - Playthrough and Route Endings - About 51 minutes, with Voice of the Cold.
Watching all of the above pertinent parts would take about 7 and a half hours, but you can easily knock it down to about 2 hours and 5 minutes by just watching their main routes: The Nightmare in the first video (2:12:52-2:40:21), The Spectre in the second video (1:39:37-2:28:30) and the Princess and the Dragon video, and The Wraith variation with both of them (31:00-48:28). Or watch whatever bits of whatever playthroughs you like...
Or, of course, play it yourself; just go with whatever works for you! :D]
These two really, really intrigue me. They don't get to interact that much, but they're quite interesting in The Wraith route, and also have moments in some of the other routes -- and some similarities and general qualities -- that make me think that they could really catch the other's attention if given more opportunity.
For one thing, they are both very aware of and surprisingly in control of their bodies. (Well, their shared body. The protagonist's body. Let's just say "their bodies" for simplicity.) Voice of the Cold constantly talks about choosing to just stop feeling things, both emotions and any negative physical sensations; their back-and-forth of "Do we have to explain to you why pain is bad?" "You have to explain to yourself why it isn't," is VERY cool. But despite Voice of the Paranoid being obviously high-strung, he also has an immense amount of steel to him, not only manually running the body's autonomic nervous system during The Nightmare route, but also showing up specifically to keep Voice of the Broken in check during The Apotheosis route after Broken let The Tower into their mind which led to their death.
There are also little details, such as the fact that Cold usually shows up after you kill the Princess in cold blood and then yourself, and Paranoid also encourages killing yourself if you become trapped in The Nightmare route due to killing her. This actually leads to Cold showing up... And interestingly, before that, if the protagonist says to the Hero and the Paranoid that it'd be fine to be stuck in the void forever because they're the best company, Paranoid says, "Oh, you could do better than us," and that's right before Cold comes into the picture. In The Wraith route, he and Cold and Hero and the protagonist have to all work together to toss their body into the void with The Wraith in it, if they choose that route, and the "everyone on the count of three" moment Paranoid takes charge of is just neat.
And in a general sense, I really think they could... see something interesting in each other. Paranoid is nervy and definitely hasn't shut off his emotions at all, but he also has that aforementioned steel and sharp control over himself/his body/The Body, that might be even more intriguing and impressive based on how unexpected it is. And Cold is a dangerous person, yes, but is actually less dangerous to the other voices than someone like the Broken or even the Smitten, and might also be easier to predict than someone like the Opportunist or even the Hunted -- you know exactly what his danger is, if he's going to be dangerous. And at the same time, Paranoid seems to trust the other voices in a way he doesn't trust anyone "other," and Cold seems to want to help the other voices, often trying to give them advice on how to get through situations without breaking down. There's an automatic sort of rapport there that makes it more likely they'd get close to each other than if they were just ordinary people with their same personalities.
Also, speaking of that, I do love the bodysharing and would be super into that if you want to roll with it, but I also love a theoretical post-canon situation where maybe the voices are all getting their own bodies. You don't even have to get into how and why they have different bodies if you want to do that; just handwaving it would be fine!
Horror Genres Requested
- Body Horror
- Comedic Horror
- Cosmic Horror
- Dark Fantasy
- Folk Horror
- Institutional Horror
- Medical Horror
- Monster Horror
- Paranormal Horror
- Psychological Horror
- Religious Horror
- Science Fiction Horror
- Supernatural Horror
- Survival Horror
- Violent Horror
- Feel free to mix and match any of the above horror subgenres!
- I did not request, but am opting into elements of: Gothic Horror, Killer Horror
- Noncon/dubcon (unless otherwise stated)
- Permanent character death (temporary death/ghosts/etc. are fine!)
- Infidelity/cuckolding kink
- Halves of a ship feeling like they really just don't like or care about each other at all
- Requested characters having sexualities that mean they aren't compatible with each other, even if you don't write them as a ship
- Being ashamed of or hating one's body (even for trans stuff, if you write it; just no focus on dysphoria please)
- Requested characters being permanently separated in any way, or at risk of it, by the end of the story
- Unhappy endings
- Unrequested AUs (canon divergence is fine)
- Unrequested identity headcanons (mentions for OCs are fine)
- Unrequested noncanon or poly ships (background canon ships that don't break up the requested pairing are fine; mentions of OCs being in relationships with one another, including poly, is fine)
- Feederism, weight gain, inflation, pregnancy (mentions of OCs being pregnant are fine; breeding kink without any possibility of pregnancy is great!)
- Scat, most forms of watersports (desperation is fine!), vomit kink (someone throwing up not in a kink context is fine)
- Vore, necrophilia, bestiality, hatesex, mommy- or daddykink, 24/7 D/S
- Any implication that the characters will just cease existing in the future
- Bodysharing with the protagonist or any other voices (except each other!) by the time sex is happening, if you write smut
- Treats in general, and also art treats!
- Longfic!
- Third person or first person POV; past or present tense.
- Script style like the game itself uses!
- Speaking of which, Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA)-style fic.
- Anything that might deserve the "Graphic Depictions Of Violence" warning.
- Genderswapping; I am open to both F/F and M/F if you write them as a ship!
- Trans headcanons; I especially love genderless Cold and trans woman Paranoid, or both of them being transfem, but I'm open to anything with either them! I'm also down for trans headcanons for any other characters.
- It/its pronouns for Cold or Hunted specifically.
- Turning the voices human, giving the voices human-looking forms, giving them human forms but with wings and maybe claws, giving them full-on bird person forms, giving them forms that look more like... whatever that was in The Princess and the Dragon...
- The voices all having their own bodies, being formless, or sharing a body (all of them or just these two in one body!).
- I opt into certain background ships: Adversary/Stubborn, Broken/Cage, Broken/Fury, Cheated/Thorn, Contrarian/Stranger (or Contrarian/Hero/Stranger), Damsel/Smitten, Den/Hunted, Hunted/Wounded Wild, Opportunist/Wraith, Prisoner/Skeptic; ANY vessel/vessel ships (poly included); ANY voice/voice ships (poly included) that don't include Cold or Paranoid.
- General AUs: Genderswap, apocalypse or post-apocalypse stuff (including but not limited to zombies), hanahaki, urban fantasy, "one or both characters are ghosts," ghost hunters, monster hunters.
- More specific AUs: The Long Quiet and the Shifting Mound's heart keep looping the Constant so much that it starts to break down; alternate voice combinations in chapters they wouldn't usually be found in (so getting Paranoid in The Princess and the Dragon, or getting Paranoid first in Damsel instead of Smitten and then Cold in Happily Ever After, etc.)
- Crossover AUs: Annihilation, Night in the Woods, Scarlet Hollow, Dead By Daylight, Phasmophobia, Silent Hill series, Fatal Frame series, Returnal, NaissancE, Scarlet Hollow, BLAME!, The Last Halloween, Changeling: The Lost, Geist: The Sin-Eaters, Spire: The City Must Fall.
- Also, feel free to take any of the above AUs and make them not quite AU: I especially love when the characters leave the Construct post-game and the world outside is just like that (whatever "that" is!).
- The sheer amount of control these two both seem to have over themselves...
- ...and, alternately, the idea that each might actually be able to make the other come apart. Maybe more than anyone else could manage. Maybe in part because they might just let it happen.
- The "And? What happens next?" ending and the strong hints that the voices will continue to exist and find one another again even after the protagonist and the Princess leave.
- Fic set while in the Construct, maybe even during the events of the game, somehow!
- The "A New and Unending Dawn" ending (whether everyone hates you or not) and the idea of the voices figuring out existence after that.
- Come to that, the strong hints that the voices are actually developing beyond their named traits and becoming their own more rounded individual people: Contrarian in The Stranger version of the "And? What happens next?" ending, Hero protesting being just "a shard of broken glass," Paranoid apologizing for his "fear response" in Razor, all of them wanting to avoid individual death and continue existing...
- The idea of the voices surviving even in the new "Your New World" ending, just being separated completely and irreversibly from the new god that is the Long Quiet, and having to deal with this new world now.
- The voices somehow clawing themselves back into existence after the "Oblivion" ending...
- How Paranoid sometimes seems to be able to get Cold's whole deal, like in the Apotheosis chapter during the tearing sequence.
- On the other side of the coin, Cold's apparent desire to feel things sometimes (most notably in both Grey chapters), as well as his surprising moments of feeling and empathy during the Adversary!Fury chapter.
- How both of them seem to be able to tell the truth of the Construct/the Long Quiet sometimes!
- Mutual fascination with real fondness underneath, even if there's exasperation there too.
- INTENSITY!
- TBH the idea of either or both of these characters being kind of a mess in any sort of normal life/post-Construct scenario. Cold not having any survival instinct and not protecting himself in fights, going long stretches without eating or sleeping (or preening if they still have feathers) because he finds it boring, having trouble feeling or identifying or expressing his own emotions; Paranoid having Issues With Food and/or all kinds of sleep-related problems, having major trust issues, having hallucinations, overpreening if they still have feathers, his increased snappishness when freaked out... And so on.
- That said, character growth, making each other better, protecting each other, and balancing each other out are also loved! As well as Taking Chances and going outside of their comfort zones with each other they might not otherwise!
- I love both characters' friendship with Hero; the idea of Cold being friends with Contrarian, Hunted, and Skeptic; and the idea of Paranoid being friends with (post-Apotheosis) Broken, Hunted, and Opportunist.
- NAME STUFF. Names in general! Nicknames and pet names if you can make it work for them! None of the voices really refer to one another by name or even by description in canon; do they still think of each other as "Voice of the Cold," or just "the Paranoid," or just "Cold," or something like "the paranoid one" or even (as in canon) things like "the jumpy one"? Do they choose names when out of the Construct, either in general or if they're pretending to be human? How might these two come to refer to one another, think about one another? (I like the nickname Para, tbh, even if Cold doesn't use it himself!)