Dear Trick-or-Treat Author,

Hi there! First of all, thank you very much for offering one of my fandoms! I’ve tried to put together some thoughts and prompts for each of them, but basically, just know that these are all canons and characters I love, and if you already have a story in mind for any of them, go for it. :) Everything here is just to help supply ideas.

I love genfic; I also love both slash and friendships that occupy some ambiguous, intimately platonic in-between space. I like darkfic and light fic, happy endings, unhappy endings, ambivalent or unresolved endings. Spooky stuff is great, shippy stuff is also great. Even my DNW list is somewhat flexible — just keep it in mind and use your own discretion. :)

Likes:

❤ Spooky Stuff:

• Cosmic horror / "weird" fiction / the uncanny
• Magical realism / Borgesian fabulation / mythic elements
• Gothic / darkness / macabre / ruminations on mortality
• Haunted spaces / haunted objects / all senses of the word "haunted"
• Psychological horror / suspense
• Liminal spaces (thresholds, crossroads, ruins, dreams, altered states)

❤ General / Stylistic Stuff:

• Descriptive detail / imagery / textures / objects
• Settings / spaces / histories / worldbuilding
• Canon compliance / missing scenes / episode tags
• Outsider viewpoint / character study
• Set pieces / one-shots / five things / 5+1
• High fantasy / epic / travel / adventure
• Unreliable narration / conflicting narratives
• Passage of time / change and adaptation / lost chances / looking back

❤ Character Tropes:

• Self-discipline / controlled emotions / stoic characters being stoic
• Confessions / accidental reveals / in vino veritas / stoic character’s mask slips
• Moral complexity / gray areas / hard choices / tragic flaws
• Loyalty / devotion / self-sacrificing love (reciprocated or otherwise)
• Isolation / alienation / otherness / outside-looking-in
• Disguises / lies / masks / secrets / identity porn
• Self-deceptions / blind spots / realizations / moments of truth

❤ Shippy Stuff:

• Complicated relationships / conflicted loyalties / unstable power dynamics
• Platonic intimacy / borderline gen
• Forced proximity / trapped together / sharing a room, bed, etc.
• Things left unspoken / mutual understandings / shared history
• Established relationships / domestic moments
• First times / new experiences

❤ Hurt/Comfort Tropes:

• Hurt-no-comfort / comfort rejected / “everything’s fine”
• Exhaustion / collapse / fainting / vomiting / headaches / fever
• Nightmares / breakdowns
• Regret / guilt / doubt / fear / grief / general existential angst
• Field medicine / bedside vigils / treating or bandaging injuries
• Physical comfort / emotional support / just being there / offering to stay

Do-Not-Wants:

• Explicit sex (Would prefer fade-to-black if anybody’s pants are about to come off; anything above-the-waist or otherwise non-explicit is okay.)
• Real-world deadly diseases (Most anything else is fine: fantasy illness, poison, injury, possession, etc.; anything canonical or canon-typical is fine.)
• Unrequested pairings (If it's mentioned in a prompt, go for it! Anything canonical or implied by canon is also fine as a background ship.)
• Coddling / infantilization (Give me all the iron woobies. >_> Would also prefer no pet names or terms of endearment like "baby," "honey," etc., unless canonical.)
• Present-tense narration / 2nd-person POV / 1st-person POV (Unless in epistolary sections or similar.)
• AU / crossover / fusion / crackfic (Canon divergence is fine, and for this exchange I'm also fine with ghosts/spirits/supernatural stuff in any fandom.)

Trick-or-Treat Preferences:

• I'm requesting fic for all fandoms
• The choice of trick or treat is up to you :)

Requested Fandoms:

• 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)

• 鹿鼎記 | The Duke of Mount Deer (TVB 1984)

• 狄仁傑之通天帝國 | Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010)

• Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien

• Notre-dame de Paris | The Hunchback of Notre-dame – Victor Hugo

镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)

Requested characters: Shen Wei, Zhao Yunlan, Chu Shuzhi

    

Canon Intro: I probably don’t need to introduce this show or sell anybody on it, but to summarize, it takes place in a sci-fi version of modern China where there’s a special branch of law enforcement for dealing with superpowered alien beings that sometimes escape from the dismal underground city where they’re supposed to live, according to a treaty made 10,000 years ago. The plot is often wildly nonsensical, but it’s a fun premise and there are a lot of great characters, and the slash is barely even pretending not to be canon, Chinese censorship notwithstanding. If you matched me on something else but want to check this out, it’s 40 episodes long and available to watch for free, with English subtitles, on YouTube or Viki.

(It's also downloadable here, but there's a cap on how much you can download from the site per month. If you download all the episodes as .zip files you may be able to get all 40 without going over the limit.)

Note on DNWs: For this fandom, I am 100% okay with fix-it-AU/canon-divergence such that the events of episode 40 do not happen (or happen very differently). If you want to just hand-wave the whole concluding episode and write post-canon fic where our guys are carrying on with their lives much as before, that's fine! Given all the timeline weirdness, I feel like canon-compliance is kind of subjective for this fandom anyway.

Thoughts/Prompts:

• Some things I’m particularly into on this show: loyalty and protectiveness; shifting identities and masks; cross-cultural relationships (worldbuilding re: Dixing culture welcome!); dramatic goth costumes and spooky underworld stuff. I love Lao Chu being repressed and volatile and contrary and just generally a badass. As for Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan, I do very much ship them, and am fascinated by the whole weird circular-timeline/mutual-debt situation they've got going on, with seemingly no true temporal starting point. I'd love to see either of them separately, or with other characters (non-romantically). Spooky stuff with either or both of them would be great.
• Some possibilities for genfic on a seasonal theme: spooky casefic, otherworldly stuff in Dixing or other creepy/haunted spaces (caves, basements, woods at night, etc.), weird dark-energy stuff, unexpected phenomena with the Holy Tools, another arcane-biology field-trip gone awry, Shen Wei was wrong when he said there were no monsters...
• On a related note: the "Master of Nightmares" got into several characters' heads during the last few episodes of the show, but not everyone's. I'd be interested to see what sort of nightmare sequence Shen Wei or Zhao Yunlan might have experienced, if one (or both) of them had fallen under the spell. Go as dark as you want with this.
• I'm always happy to see Chu Shuzhi and Guo Changcheng together (whether as a pairing or as platonic but just really really close). For something spooky, since normally everything terrifies Guo, I'd especially like to see the tables turned, e.g. something where Chu somehow gets spooked for once, and Guo has to shift into protector-mode. (He doesn't have to be good at it.) Actually, regardless of seasonal themes, I have so far found zero fics on AO3 that feature Guo looking after Chu rather than the other way around. I can't be the only one waiting for somebody to fill this gap!
• I also love seeing Shen Wei and Chu Shuzhi together, not in a shippy way but just, Chu being self-sacricingly devoted, Shen appreciating it. Chu on a side mission for the Envoy, not directly connected with the SID? Chu's reaction when he finds out Shen Wei is the Envoy?
• I’m pretty much guaranteed to love any variation on "bad things happen to Shen Wei, and Zhao Yunlan has to look after him." I particularly like seeing this done with conditions/experiences that are unique to Dixingren, and thus difficult for Zhao to respond to or fully understand, and I like the idea that Haixing medicine either doesn’t work well on Dixingren or might somehow react badly with dark energy -- or that Shen Wei in particular has somewhat unusual (more ancient?) biology that responds differently to some substances, even if they aren't typically harmful to other Dixingren (e.g. alcohol, canonically). Basically, whatever you want to rig so that we end up with Zhao Yunlan wanting to help but not really knowing what to do, and meanwhile also having to deal with Shen Wei’s unconvincing but determined insistence that he’s fine.
• Alternatively, "bad things happen to Zhao Yunlan." This might work best earlier in canon, when Shen Wei is still trying to conceal his identity and can’t openly use his healing powers—or there may be things his powers simply don’t work on. Anyhow, something in the way of Shen Wei being firmly, earnestly solicitous, and Zhao Yunlan finding this both comical and utterly endearing. (And honestly, after episode 8, I wouldn’t put it past Zhao to purposely arrange to be in a condition where Shen would need to take him home.)
• Interactions between "Kunlun" and Shen Wei in the time-travel sequence. I can’t tell how long Zhao Yunlan actually spends in that timeline, but I like to imagine that it was a pretty long while—like, weeks at least? I love the role reversal where suddenly Zhao Yunlan is the more senior, experienced figure who knows things Shen Wei doesn’t know. How does Zhao navigate the relationship after traveling back in history, given the knowledge that his actions as "Kunlun" will shape how Shen Wei remembers him when they meet "again"?
• I’d love to see more interaction between Zhao Yunlan and the Black-Cloaked Envoy, especially while the latter’s identity is still secret and he has to be weird and evasive about everything (and meanwhile Zhao Yunlan has just... no sense of hierarchy or boundaries at all). I also love Zhao’s mingled delight and bafflement when he confirms that the Envoy is Shen Wei, but he still sort of sees them as distinct personalities, and is caught a little off-guard every time he notices one of them displaying the behaviors of the other.

鹿鼎記 | The Duke of Mount Deer (Hong Kong 1984)

Requested characters: Hong-hei Emperor, Wai Siu-bou

    

Canon Intro: Okay, yes, I know this series is more than a bit dated, with its roughly Star Trek TOS-level production values, flimsy props, absurd plot devices, and recurring misogyny. BUT. It's still such an absolute gem. It's based on a classic yet perversely genre-subversive wuxia anti-epic by Louis Cha, and centers around the improbable and complicated relationship between a trickster street-kid and the maturing boy-Emperor whom he unexpectedly befriends. It stars Tony Leung and Andy Lau back when they were both very young.

If you came here for something else but are curious about the show, all 40 episodes are viewable with English subtitles here (and also on TVB's official YouTube channel, but only with traditional Chinese subtitles). I also wrote up a ridiculously thorough, screencap-illustrated recap of the series a few years ago, here.

Note on Names: For character names, etc., feel free to use whatever transliteration style you prefer, Mandarin or Cantonese (e.g. 韋小寶 can be "Wei Xiaobao," "Wei Xiao Bao," "Wai Siu Po," "Wai Siu-bou," etc.).

Thoughts/Prompts:

• I think the thing I love most about this show is how deeply flawed both of the main characters are, while still being sympathetic and generally likeable. If you're looking to write single-character fic about either one of them, maybe just sort of go from there? I'd love to see any kind of character-study, episode tag, set piece, or anecdote focusing on either of them, from whatever angle. The Emperor being entitled and insensitive, regarding other people as pawns or possessions, or becoming increasingly manipulative, calculating, and dangerous over time. Wai Siu-bou being irremediably reckless, defiant, sly, greedy, or just plain oblivious. Or, of course, either of them in one of their better moments.
• For a more seasonal genfic option: This isn't really a spooky sort of canon, but there's enough wuxia weirdness that I feel like ghosts or "dark magic" woudn't be at all out of place. Wai Siu-bou could run into all manner of supernatural stuff in the course of his many adventures, or he and the Emperor could investigate some weird happenings on the palace grounds. Or the Emperor could investigate alone, lamenting that he doesn't have Wai Siu-bou with him for backup.

• The rest of these prompts include both characters and fall somewhere between slash and friendship-fic. Short version: I basically love every single canon interaction between these two, from the fluffy scenes where they’re just fooling around or getting up to mischief together to the darker scenes where their trust issues, identity issues, or power-dynamic issues take the foreground. I also love all the scenes where either character gets very protective about the other one, and branching from there, I feel like h/c fic could work well for them, especially since they both have so many possible sources of distress, and so few other places to look for help or consolation.

• I’d love to see a post-canon reunion, maybe many years later, when both characters are much older and have lived very separate lives. Maybe Wai Siu-bou ends up in some new crisis or under arrest, and the Emperor gets wind of it and decides to intervene. How would they react to seeing each other again? How estranged would they be, or how naturally would they fall back into familiarity? And how easy, or difficult, would it be for them to separate again?
• These two come from very different worlds, but how much of an effort do they each make to "cross over"? For instance, maybe Wai Siu-bou needs to go through some training in courtly behavior, or maybe the Emperor tries to give him some basic reading/writing lessons or teach him to play chess. On the other side, maybe the Emperor is willing to let Wai Siu-bou get him drunk, or teach him to gamble?
• I mean, they do a lot of wrestling, so go wherever you want with that. And then, I also love how sometimes it seems like they meet up in the sparring room intending to wrestle, but then they accidentally end up just hanging out and chatting and eating pastries instead. Especially if one or the other of them has something to angst about.
• So there’s that one scene where Wai Siu-bou rushes to the Emperor’s room in the middle of the night, and the Emperor tells the guards to let him in, and then invites him to sleep there. Does Wai Siu-bou ever take him up on this offer? Platonically or otherwise?

狄仁傑之通天帝國 | Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (2010)

Requested characters: Di Renjie

    

Canon Intro: A fantasy-historical wuxia film which follows the martial-arts-and-sleuthing adventures of Di Renjie (a fictional Chinese detective-hero who has appeared in various types of popular media since the 18th century, and was originally very loosely based on a renowned judge of the early Tang Dynasty). The movie seems like it really wanted to be China’s answer to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, but just didn’t quite get there, which is a shame: It’s got lovely sets and costumes, an awesome fantasy-historical setting, and a fascinating cast of characters. I would have loved for this film’s plot to have spanned a whole miniseries, with all the character development and worldbuilding and plot-unfolding that that would have entailed, instead of getting crammed into two chaotic hours of action-heavy film time.

If you matched me on something else but are thinking of checking out this film, the internet tells me you can watch it for free on Tubi or Pluto. It’s also available to rent or buy on Amazon, Vudu, Sling, and iTunes.

Note on the prequels: There are two, but most of my prompts don’t presume any familiarity with them. If you want to check them out, they’re also online, but not free. The first one, Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon (2013) is available on Vudu and Viki. The second, Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings (2018), is on Netflix, Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, and Sling.

Thoughts/Prompts:

• I really love the idea of the Phantom Bazaar, and was disappointed that we see so little of it in the film. Spooky underground city, caves, underground rivers, Stygian ferryman, creepy magical black-market bazaar, all in an ancient wuxia setting with shape-shifting and monsters... I want a whole miniseries just about this. Anyway, I’d be happy to see any story that further develops the Underground City, whether in terms of its physical features or its culture, inhabitants, visitors, merchandise, history, etc. It seems like Di Renjie is already pretty familiar with the place, but we never hear anything about why. What brought him there before?
• More specifically, I’d love to see a post-canon story about Di Renjie living in the Phantom Bazaar. Is there any hope that he can be cured? Is Wang experimenting to try to cure him? What is Di doing in the meantime? Has he retired? Is he still solving mysteries? Is Wang teaching him the ways of transfiguration?
• Casefic! This could be post-canon (maybe Di has been cured, or maybe he’s just working at night and/or remotely from within the Phantom Bazaar), or it could be canon-concurrent, if you want to expand on the case that he solves during the film (or have him on some other side case at the same time, or whatever). Incidentally, magic and monsters are canon here, so horror-tending Halloween casefic is definitely a go.
• I’d also be happy with any expansion or further development of the events of the film itself, which to me feels like a condensed and simplified adaptation of some much longer and more complicated work, like a novel or comic series or something. What might have been in the "original" story that got cut out or simplified for the film version? Character interactions, setting details, historical digressions? Subplots, side adventures, quiet interludes? Explanations for why Di has so many hats?
• [This prompt supposes knowledge of the prequels.] Pre-canon fic, whether casefic or otherwise, would be great too. Di Renjie (with or without Shatuo) must have had plenty of other adventures during the ~12 years between the end of the second prequel and being charged with treason. I'm open to his relationship with Shatuo as either platonic or slash, if you want to keep them together.
• [This prompt supposes knowledge of the second prequel.] Following from that last thought, one idea in particular: In the second prequel, Di Renjie develops some kind of mysterious illness that is never explained, and never really relevant to anything. When asked about it at the end of the film, he says it’s caused by a "demon" inside him. (The way the final battle plays out might lead one to infer that an internal "demon" must be a metaphor for hatred, but there’s never any indication that Di Renjie hates anyone, so... ???) Anyway, whenever Di has any kind of serious bout of this mystery illness, Shatuo has to look after him, which is an invitation to h/c if I ever saw one. How is Di ultimately cured?

The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien

Requested characters: Denethor II

Fandom-Specific DNWs: Evil!Denethor

  

Canon Intro: I ...I don’t think I need to introduce this canon. ;)

I love many things about LotR, but the relevant point for this request is that — as you may have guessed — I’m a Denethor fan. Apparently I have a thing for hubris and characters who think they’re unbreakable, especially if they’re mostly right.

Thoughts/Prompts:

• I’ll honestly be delighted with basically any Denethor-centric fic, whether he’s alone or with pretty much any other canon character (Mithrandir, Turgon, Imrahil, Saruman...). In terms of timeline, I’m especially interested in stories set sometime during Denethor’s youth, his father’s stewardship, or the early years of his own stewardship. But really anything is good! (In particular, if you can find a way to do something spooky for a seasonal theme, go for it.) Some more specific ideas:
• In general, I’m up for anything focusing on Denethor and the palantír. When does he start using it? What does he see? How does it change him? Who notices? Does he ever question whether he ought to be using it at all? These could be early scenes or anything all the way up to the events of Return of the King.
• I’d love any exploration of the rivalry between Denethor and Aragorn (or Denethor’s perception of a rivalry, whether or not Aragorn is aware of it). Probably my favorite thing about Denethor’s story arc is the ironic way his preference for Boromir over Faramir seems to parallel his own father’s preference for Aragorn over him, which makes one wonder how exactly he felt about Aragorn, and about Aragorn being the favorite. Was there ever any feeling of brotherhood between them? Did Denethor resent Aragorn but also recognize, to some extent, the reasons why Ecthelion favored him? And how did Aragorn feel about becoming the favorite-son of another man’s father? (You can also check my current Shipoween letter for more prompts with this pairing.)
• Denethor and his sons (either or both of them, at whatever age): angst, fluff, adventure, domestic — whatever works for you, whether that means a chilling instance of Denethor showing blatantly unfair preference to Boromir (and maybe reflecting on why he thinks this is justified/necessary), or a heartwarming moment of Denethor being actually decent to Faramir. Training sessions, lessons, trials, preparing for battle, returning from a journey...
• Denethor and Ecthelion -- maybe something that takes place in Denethor’s youth (before Aragorn shows up and starts hogging all the attention), or maybe late in Ecthelion’s life as he’s preparing to pass the stewardship on to his son (and maybe not-so-secretively wishing his son were someone else). Or, just in general, Denethor dealing with (or failing to deal with) a lot of conflicted but mostly negative emotions about his upbringing.
• Not exactly a prompt, but: I think outsider viewpoints could work well here. We might see Boromir and Faramir talking about their father. Ecthelion watching his son. Finduilas remembering when she first met her husband. King Aragorn paying respects to the last Ruling Steward. Maybe even thoughts from the viewpoint of some canonically-implied OC, like a guard or attendant.

Notre-Dame de Paris | The Hunchback of Notre-Dame - Victor Hugo

Requested characters: Claude Frollo

  

Canon Intro: If you're not already familiar with Notre-dame de Paris, I’ll just say that it is an utterly beautiful novel (and probably my single favorite work of fiction ever). It’s full of history and art and religion and passion and violence, humor and tragedy, realism and extravagant Romanticism, blurred lines between "monsters" who are human and men who are monsters, and a lot of meta stuff about the significance and value of literature. If you haven’t read it but are thinking of picking up a copy, try to get one that’s unabridged and follows the definitive 1832 edition (not the 1831 edition from which some chapters are missing). The translation by Alban Krailsheimer (Oxford World’s Classics) is pretty good.

Thoughts/Prompts:

• The only character I'm requesting here is Claude Frollo, but you’re also welcome to include any other characters from the novel that you want. Clopin? King Louis XI? Djali? All good. Also, I’m not looking for shipfic for this fandom, but I'm fine with Frollo's crazy-stalker obsession with Esmeralda being a thing, so if you're writing a story that takes place during canon, don't feel like you need to avoid it.
• Essentially, what I love most about Claude Frollo are all the ways in which he’s a variation on Faust, so any story that plays up his Faust-like qualities would probably be automatically amazing. As a seasonally-appropriate example: I feel like one fascinating thing Hugo did in this novel was to take the traditional Faust story and cut all the supernatural elements out, while retaining a setting in which the characters still believe in magic and the divine. One possible option for re-Faustifying the story might be to put some magic back into it: sorcery, angels/demons, Flamel’s philosopher’s stone. I’m not normally into AUs, but for this canon, I’d be fine with an AU setting of discreetly-magical!15th-century Paris.
• Anything focused on Frollo’s obsession with knowledge (both sacred and profane), and especially anything about his passion for alchemy. Also anything about the way he’s so madly fixated on the idea of transmuting sunlight into gold, seemingly not because of any greed for gold as such, but because he needs even sunlight to be something he can hold and possess. In short, I’m all about Frollo doing proto-sciency stuff that he has reason to believe he might burn in eternal hellfire for.
• Relatedly, I feel like the barely-mentioned episode in which Frollo sneaks into the house that formerly belonged to Nicolas Flamel and goes digging through its moldering, hieroglyph-laden cellars could furnish a whole fic just by itself. Even if he finds absolutely nothing there. (I get the sense that Frollo’s passion for all the things he’s ever been madly obsessed with in his life has been just as intense, and nearly as self-destructive, as his ultimately ruinous passion for Esmeralda.)

• I feel like there’s a lot that could be done just with stuff about Frollo’s youth, from his earlier schooldays to the deaths of his parents and his adoption of his younger brother, and then Quasimodo. Character sketches, or honestly just anything that captures the medieval setting (I love the little details Hugo throws in about Frollo as a young scholar at the Collège de Torchi, “provided with his ink-horn, chewing his pen, scribbling upon his knee, and in winter blowing his fingers”).

• Relatedly, anything about Frollo’s efforts (and failures) at raising Jehan and Quasimodo. This seems to have been a period of his life—maybe the only period of his life—when he was sincerely devoted to human relationships and genuinely wanted to do good, loved Quasimodo despite all the inherent challenges and other people’s prejudices, and indulged and spoiled Jehan out of sheer personal fondness. If you want to do something lighter, these could just be snapshots of a better time. A darker take might follow the characters further into maturity, with Quasimodo losing his hearing and Jehan growing more and more unruly, and Frollo gradually turning back inward as his attempts at human connections all more or less fail.

• Frollo as Pierre Gringoire’s teacher. I mean — these two seem like such an utter mismatch. How did Frollo come to take on the education of this absent-minded, meandering poet? What do the two of them make of one another? What exactly do they have in common? How do they get on?

• I would also love to see more of Frollo’s interactions with the cathedral itself — the statues, the inscriptions, the porches, all the esoteric symbolism of the architecture, or his weird secret cell and its various perverse contents.

   

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  Thank You!

  Truly, I will be delighted no matter what you write for any of my requests! Fluff, darkfic, plot, no plot, slash or gen, anywhere inside or outside the canon timeline. It’s all good. Thank you for offering something on my list!