Dear Hurt-Comfort Exchange Author,

Thank you very much for offering one of my fandoms! Hurt/comfort is one of my all-time favorite fic tropes, so honestly I’m pretty much guaranteed to love anything you write for me in this exchange. :) My fandoms, freeforms, etc. are in alphabetical order below.

I’ve included prompts for each fandom in case you’re looking for ideas, but all my prompts are very, very optional! If you already have something in mind for the freeform we matched on, absolutely go for it. :D You can also scroll to the end of this letter for some extra freeforms that I liked but may not have requested to match on in my signup.

My AO3 account is open to treating!

❤ General Likes:

I love all kinds of hurt/comfort (and hurt-no-comfort), especially sickfic and angst. I love steady, self-disciplined characters, competence, hard choices, moral gray areas, complicated and difficult relationships, loyalty and devotion, sacrifice, obsesssion, suspicion, pining, secrets and masks, conflict, guilt, loss, trauma... as well as affection, trust, intimacy, domestic moments, friendship, and quiet slice-of-life. I love darkness and haunted spaces, cosmic horror, magical realism, scenery porn, and worldbuilding about places and cultures and histories.

I’m a big fan of stories that fit into the canon universe rather than diverging from it in major ways, and I also love post-canon stories about characters later in life, bittersweet reunions, and reflections on time and change and lost chances.

Genfic and slash are both great (including preslash, get-together, or established relationship), as well as platonically-intimate relationships that fall somewhere in between. I love subtle gestures of intimacy and indirect touches (wearing someone else’s jacket, smoking off their cigarette), and forced proximity tropes of all kinds (snowed in, only one room, one bed, one blanket). Trope subversions are also great. :D

A few more specific notes:

Darkfic: I like dark stories a lot, and am very open to explorations of dark themes and profoundly flawed characters or choices. I don’t need things to get better or be resolved in the end — give me whatever ending you think suits the story, whether that means happy, ambiguous, bittersweet, or outright depressing and hopeless.

I also love dark settings, often literally (tombs, caves, night, storms), and anything tending toward cosmic or psychological horror. Lighter stories in more cheerful settings are also welcome! I certainly don’t need everything to be sadness and rain. ;) I’m just saying, if you did want to write something dark for these fandoms, I’m totally here for it.

Iron woobies: I love seeing characters who are (or at least try to be) stoic about their suffering, either hiding it from other characters and insisting they’re fine, or else acknowledging that there’s a problem but trying not to be a burden while they work through it (...until they reach a breaking point and just can’t anymore). I love resilient characters who can keep their composure under stress, and proud or even arrogant characters who have an image to maintain and don’t want to be seen showing weakness. Also, non-stoic characters who may seem emotionally open, but still have their own boundaries, or who may seem flippant or careless, but will always come through when it counts. <3

Hurt/minimal-to-no-comfort: My favorite h/c stories tend to focus on the hurt at least as much as the comfort, rather than being primarily fluff. I’d also be totally fine with a hurt-no-comfort outcome for any of my requested freeforms — maybe comfort is offered but rejected, or doesn’t actually help much, or backfires and makes things worse, or the hurt character hides their distress so well that the one who would have comforted them never knows... Tl;dr, hurt/comfort is great; hurt/even-more-hurt is also great. XD

Do-Not-Wants:

❌ Explicit sex. (Fade-to-black or otherwise non-explicit is fine. I generally prefer a G or T rating for sexual content, though I’m fine with higher ratings for violence, language, etc.)

❌ Non-canonical death of major canon characters.

❌ AU, including setting-change AU, stuff like soulmates, wingfic, genderswap, etc., and major canon divergence such as changing the outcome of an important mission or a character’s canon backstory. (Small-scale canon divergence is okay.)

❌ Crossover or fusion. (Notes: For show canons based on books, incorporating book-canon elements into a story is perfectly fine. For TLTR, outright supernatural horror instead of handwavy science is also fine. For Star Trek, I really only want the universe of TOS and the original six movies — please disregard the AOS/Reboot movies, Discovery, etc.)

❌ First- or second-person narration, unless in epistolary fic, diary entries, or similar.

❌ Requested characters using non-canon pet names or terms of endearment like “baby,” “honey,” etc.

❌ Overtly romantic/sexual pairings within the Iron Triangle. (Canon-typical off-the-chart levels of platonic intimacy are fine. XD Highly unsubtle OT3 vibes, also fine. I’d just prefer nothing overtly sexual.)

Requested Fandoms:

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

• 盗墓笔记重启 | The Lost Tomb Reboot (TV)

• Star Trek: The Original Series

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

    

General Thoughts:

Hah, well, this is my fandom-of-one, which I’m going to keep on requesting even though I know the chances that anyone else is into it are very very small. XD

(Here’s my canon promo from Yuletide and my very spoilery series recap post, and here’s where you can watch the show with English subs.)

I love how well-meaning and yet deeply flawed both of the main characters are, and how they keep struggling to maintain the fiction of an equal friendship in spite of the massive power imbalance between them. They both have conflicting identities to juggle, secrets they share only with each other and secrets they keep from each other; they're both manipulative in different ways, and they have moments of protecting each other and moments of selfishly putting each other at risk. There are some intense loyalty tropes here, right alongside a lot of deception and mutual suspicion, alongside... all the chaos of a trickster street-urchin getting mixed up in the affairs of the imperial court. XD

These guys have so much drama, the whole insurmountable social distance between Emperor and subject, all the kowtowing and swearing fealty, the threats of beheading, the magnanimous acts of forgiveness, promotion, demotion, rewards, reprimands... and yet things often seem to balance back out anyway, because Wai Siu-Bou is just so goddamn irrepressible, and most of the Emperor’s efforts to control him simply fail. I love how their boyhood wrestling matches gradually become a sort of metaphor for their whole dynamic, with so much external and internal conflict.

I also love the earlier scenes where they’re genuinely friends, and I love how hard they both try to keep it that way, against all the odds. Fluffy/comic takes on the fandom are entirely welcome. With all its (admittedly numerous) faults, I really do love this show, and I adore pretty much every canon interaction between the main characters, and would be delighted to see more of them doing just about anything. :)

My requested h/c freeforms are below, organized by “hurt” character. I didn’t specifically request “both hurt” in my signup, but feel free to take that route, too!

Pairings: Hong Hei & Wai Siu-Bou, Hong Hei/Wai Siu-Bou

Medium: Fic

Note on Names: For character names, etc., whatever transliteration style you prefer is fine, Mandarin or Cantonese (e.g. 韋小寶 can be "Wei Xiaobao," "Wei Xiao Bao," "Wai Siu Po," "Wai Siu Bou," etc.).

盗墓笔记重启 | The Lost Tomb Reboot (TV)

    

General Thoughts:

Look, I mean... the hurt/comfort and platonic intimacy tropes on this show are truly beyond anything, so seriously just more of canon would be amazing. All the domestic stuff at Wushanju and during the Warehouse 11 sequence, Pangzi putting blankets on Wu Xie, carrying him, both of them sleeping against each other’s shoulders all the damn time, canonical huddling for warmth, canonical only-one-bed and how they always seem to sleep side by side even if there are no beds and everyone is just lying on the ground in a cave... and of course, everyone being a BAMF basically 100% the time whether they’re injured or not, protecting each other, hiding their injuries from each other, getting very pissed off about it when they find out... I’m very much here for all of this.

For this request, the only pairing I’m asking for is Wu Xie & Wang Pangzi, but that being said, I definitely think of the Iron Triangle as a unit, and I’d be very happy for Xiaoge to be around as well, either taking equal part with the others in the story or just dropping in for a cameo, as he does. And though I’m not looking for romantic fic for this fandom, Iron Triangle OT3 vibes are perfectly welcome!

Apart from the hurt/comfort tropes on the show, I also LOVE all the dark underground tomb stuff, dangerous ancient traps and mechanisms, possibly-haunted artifacts, psychological horror, labyrinths, thunder and rainstorms, rescue missions, competence porn, etc. — basically, Tomb Shenanigans in any form. Which is to say: I’ll be delighted with a gift that is pure distilled hurt/comfort with no plot whatsoever, and I’ll also be equally delighted with just one or two hurt/comfort moments built into a story about tomb-adventuring. And maybe some rain. ;)

For my requested freeforms, I’m technically only requesting “hurt Wu Xie,” but I’d also be very happy with “both hurt” (or “all hurt,” if Xiaoge is there). Maybe ideally with different characters hurt in different ways, or at different times? (I love, for instance, how the show staggered the different characters losing and regaining their sight in the Mute Princess Tomb sequence, with just that one brief poignant scene where they were all blind at once.)

Oh, and incorporating stuff from other parts of the DMBJ franchise is fine. :) I’d prefer for the story to be mostly grounded in TLTR, though, since I’m not at all caught up on everything else!

Pairings: Wang Pangzi & Wu Xie

Medium: Fic

Star Trek: The Original Series

    

General Thoughts:

I love this show in all its dated, low-budget crackiness, and I especially love Kirk and Spock’s relationship, platonic or otherwise. I’m requesting just the two of them, but you’re welcome to include as much McCoy as you like (and I’m fine with suspiciously-intense platonic OT3 vibes between all three of them). <3 Feel free to include anybody else from TOS canon, too.

In general, I love what a mess Kirk can be and how he somehow manages to hold things together anyway. I love the continual tug-of-war between reason and feeling, as it plays out both externally between Spock and McCoy and internally for everyone. I love the moments when Kirk doubts himself or questions his own motives or fears his command powers are slipping, or when he gets reckless and Spock or McCoy has to step in and do damage control. I love all their mutual reliance and trust and banter and conflict, their sense of duty to the ship and the crew and Starfleet, and all the damage they take all the damn time, and how endlessly resilient they all are.

I love all the moral ambiguity and dubious choices on the show, and Kirk’s obsession with the idea that mankind “wasn’t meant for paradise” and that being human is inherently a struggle. I love Spock being eminently Vulcan, or trying hard to be Vulcan under difficult conditions, and all the ways in which he is genuinely very much not human, and doesn’t want to be.

A few things I’m not particularly into: time-travel or time-loop plots, courtship or soul-bonding, body-sharing/body-swap, rapid aging/de-aging, happiness-pollen type plots where characters’ personalities change dramatically, settings that look exactly like Whatever-Era Earth, and alternate dimensions like the Mirrorverse.

Some settings I do love are the Enterprise itself, alien or uninhabited planets, colonies, space stations, weird drifting ghost ships, shore leave spots, actual Earth (e.g. ST:V-esque Camping Times of the Future), or any truly weird other dimensions that aren’t a what-if AU of canon. I’d be happy with anything set either during the Five-Year Mission or anytime afterward, though I’d prefer to ignore any canon later than The Undiscovered Country. (So, like, if you want to write Old Married K/S in a way that would contradict Generations, that’s totally fine.) I love slice-of life, episode tags, missing scenes, 5+1. Missionfic is also great.

I’ve listed my requested freeforms below, organized by “hurt” character. I didn’t specifically request “both hurt” in my signup, but that option is welcome as well!

Pairings: James T. Kirk/Spock, James T. Kirk & Spock

Medium: Fic

More Freeforms!

A list of freeforms I’d enjoy seeing in any story where they make sense, even if I didn’t put them in my signup for every fandom: