General Exchange Letter

[kitsunerei88]

Dear Creator,

Thank you for writing, arting, or otherwise creating for me! This is my general exchange letter, which holds most of my likes, dislikes, and so on--if you're looking for more precise guidance, you can feel free to look around the rest of my exchange letters tags to see what I've requested before, etc. I generally don't change my tastes, so whatever I wrote in a past letter is almost certainly valid on top of whatever I've written in my sign-up. I hope you enjoy writing as much as I'll enjoy reading!

GENERAL

General Likes:

• Fics that are character-focused, character-driven, and deal with character exploration or character development. Show me aspects of a character I never considered before, or explorations of how a character's upbringing influences their worldview! I also especially love minor characters, particularly BIPOC characters!
• Fics as challenge, whether it be a challenge on canon, on fanon, on fandom, or a comment on our own reality. Basically, I like literary shit, don’t be afraid to go literary and write reflective shit that talks about politics.
  A focus on relationships, particularly how a character interacts with the world around them, and other characters based on their upbringing and worldview.
• Thematically, I love when characters are put in a tough spot, moral ambiguity, and themes around honour, duty, and responsibility.
• All flavours of AU. Canon-divergence, Modern AUs, Mundane AUs, crossovers, etc, especially if it interacts with one of the above. I especially like Rule 63 AUs because of the potential for exploring gender and how it impacts and socializes characters.
• Worldbuilding, especially through in-universe documents (please consider this an opt-in to pretty much whatever in-universe document or weird in-universe storytelling device you can dream up).
• Alongside the worldbuilding, I really like accuracy and real-life details. My favourite fics have included discussions of 9/11, I’ve written fic where R2P is a big deal, I suspect I’m known for my legal shit, and so—if you have specialized knowledge of something, I love seeing it!
• Friendship! I love friendship, especially of the ride-or-die variety!
• Romance of all varieties: fluff, happy endings, drunken confessions, friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers, fake dating, fake marriage, arranged marriages, established relationships, slow-burn, shovel talk, and pining (mutual or otherwise). In general, I prefer M/F pairings, but I don’t mind M/M or F/F pairings and prefer them if canon.
• Smut-wise, I love first times, gentle sex, rough sex, possessive themes, mild BDSM (e.g. bondage, spanking with a hand), D/s with femsub, impregnation and pregnancy.

I am always open to treats!

General Dislikes:

In general, unless specifically requested, I don't tend to enjoy crack fic, soapbox fic/issuefic, amnesia fic, body swaps, cringe comedy, and plots based on miscommunication or jealousy. If there is hurt, I usually like comfort, or I often just can't get through it—same goes for angst (unless explicitly requested, of course). That said, these are general dislikes—they're not DNWs, I have liked fics with all these, and I have sometimes requested these things. If you have an idea that you’re worried might come close to one of these, don’t worry and go for it.

Hard DNWs:

Please note that these are my general hard DNWs. In some cases, there may be sections where some (or all!) of them won't apply, and in that case follow what was in the sign up.

• Character bashing. In general, I like to imagine that all characters are like people—they're complex, and they have an array of good points and bad points.
• Harm or death to pregnant women, children or small animals (background mentions or past references is fine, as are things like statistics—I just don’t want to be dragged through it in detail, like please don’t make this a central point of the fic).
• Except otherwise indicated, non-canonical major character death, graphic violence and torture (graphic being “more than what is in canon”), non-con or dub-con, PWP or large age differences (>15 years)
• Adultery or infidelity (specifically, this is mostly about the betrayal--if you have a plot where two people are married for convenience and happen to have other relationships, that wouldn't trigger as long as everyone knows and doesn't care)
• Smut-wise, I DNW A/B/O, age play, humiliation, bloodplay, cannibalism or vore, watersports, scat, mpreg, snuff, or underage (<15). In general, I otherwise recommend sticking to things I've said above as "likes"--I would say I'm still working out the things I like and I have no idea what kinks I might have or not.

COMMON FANDOMS REQUESTED

I do tend to ask for a lot of the same fandoms over and over again, so here is a quick run-down of general comments for things that I ask for all the time. Of course, you can explore old exchange letters as well, which will tend to have more details!

Harry Potter
I have a few favourite tropes and kinds of fics for this, which come up all the time:

• Rule 63 is amazing for this fandom, because gender issues are sort of rife throughout the novels. Even in the more progressive areas, we can see that JKR hugely valorises motherhood (see: Molly Weasley), that she disrespects women who are openly feminine (see: treatment of Cho Chang and Fleur Delacour), and then there’s JKR’s comments on trans-persons.... There’s just so much to work with when you mess around with gender in this universe, and I love it.
• War: I'm a massive nerd who... probably reads too much about law, terrorism, international relations, etc. I know more than I should about how wars work, and public service, and all the things. So, essentially, even a cursory scratch beneath the surface shows that quite a lot of the actual war and post-war part of HP just doesn’t make sense. I would love if you took a perspective that made the war realistic.
• Post-War and Redemption: Running a bit along the lines of the above, war is messy. Character relationships post-war are going to be equally messy! I love watching characters develop from the people they had to be during a hopefully realistic war and re-adapting to peaceful society—regardless of whether they were on the side of right or wrong. In order words, please, give me some realistic war trauma for some characters to work through.
• Worldbuilding: I’ll take pretty much anything for worldbuilding because there are So Many Questions and So Many Unsatisfactory Answers. High society pureblood culture is a good example, because while fanon often interprets this as aristocracy-like with arranged marriages and so on, I’m less convinced that is actually the case (or... make a case for it for me). Other options include the inner workings of the Ministry of Magic, international relations, relations with Muggles if any, how does the Statute of Secrecy Work…?
• In general, I will say here that I prefer worldbuilding that emphasizes that even with magic, witches and wizards are still human and are still eminently fallible. I tend to prefer worldbuilding that brings the wizarding world closer to the non-magical world, whether the people who are in it realize it or not--my headcanon is that until the Statute of Secrecy, wizards occupied the same world as we do, and that even afterwards, given a small population and continuing influx of Muggleborns and halfbloods, wizarding culture isn't far off from non-magical culture. To the extent that people are wearing robes and are not Christian (because... I'm going to come right out and say it, Christianity had effectively exterminated paganism by about 1000, so (British) purebloods should really be Anglican-but-with-weird-theology if you want to be strictly accurate), it is as a result of some sort of "Return to Merlin" movement where wizarding culture explicitly rejected Muggle culture and reinvented their own past. Overall, I like stories that are about our shared humanity.

For Harry Potter, I do have a fandom-specific DNW of "narrative justification of pureblood supremacy or blood discrimination". What I mean by that is approaches like "well, Muggles would wipe out wizards", "pureblood just means magical", etc. It's fine if a character believes this stuff, but if it comes up, it should get called out. Basically, I don't want a story about how e.g. Draco and the Malfoys had a point, or they were actually right, or they were just trying to protect their special wizarding culture. 


Tortall
For Tortall, I have two pairings I ask for all the time: Neal/Yuki and Daine/Numair.

• For Neal/Yuki, I love Neal as a character because he’s got so much going on behind him—he’s the oldest page in years, and reading between the lines, it’s clear that he entered knight-training because his two elder brothers died and left him as the heir to the duchy. He occupies a position of high privilege, being heir to a duchy, and he isn’t afraid to wield that authority if it suits him. He’s also funny, and he’s self-deprecating—in short, he's complicated, and I love complicated characters. And there’s Yuki, and everything we know about Yuki can be summed up in a few sentences. She’s Yamani, one of Princess Shinkokami’s closest friends; she’s from the noh Daiomoru house, which is one of the oldest and most prestigious houses in the Yamani Isles. She’s a mage, because she goes to the Midwinter mages party. She’s “plump and peppery”, and she can wield the shukusen and naginata, and the bow. She joins the Queen’s Riders. And somehow, in the period of Squire, there's a whole intense romance between them that culminates in their engagement. But HOW, one asks? Good question, and I've written it three times and I still want more.


• For Daine/Numair, despite their age difference, I think they work in a way that neither of them could work with anyone else. Numair is one of the most powerful mages in the world, which sets him in a class apart; Daine is half-divine and also one of the most powerful mages in the world. Both of them are slightly terrifying to everyone else around them. They can understand each other in a way that no one else can, and I love that for them. And I also love the fact that their age difference causes conflict.

For both of these pairings and for Tortall in general, I have a bizarre love of Modern AUs, so really any Modern AU is going to go over well with me!