Dear Rule 63 Creator 2024

[reconditarmonia]

Note: I've been trying out Dreamwidth for my letters because Tumblr keeps removing formatting possibilities. My letters from before Yuletide 2023 can be found on Tumblr.

Hi! Thank you for writing/drawing for me! I’m reconditarmonia here, on Tumblr and on AO3. If you have any questions for me...er, contact the mod email :)

Moby-Dick | Sleep No More | Spinning Silver

General likes:
– Loyalty kink! Trust, affectionate or loving use of titles, gestures of loyalty, replacing one’s situational or ethical judgment with someone else’s, risking oneself (physically or otherwise) for someone else, not doing so on their orders. Can be commander-subordinate or comrades-in-arms.
– Heists, or other stories where there’s a lot of planning and then we see how the plan goes.
– Femslash, complicated or intense relationships between women, and female-centric gen. Women doing “male” stuff (possibly while crossdressing).
– Relationships that aren’t built on romance or attraction. They can be romantic or sexual as well, but my favorite ships are all ones where it would still be interesting or compelling if the romantic component never materialized. Stories whose emotional climax or resolution isn’t the sex scene, if there is one.
– Uniforms/costumes/clothing.
– Stories, history, and performance. What gets told and how, what doesn’t get told or written down, behavior in a society where everyone’s consuming media and aware of its tropes, how people create their personas and script their own lines.
– Minority/diaspora feelings and themes.

Smut Likes: clothing, uniforms, sexual tension, breasts, manual sex, cunnilingus, grinding, informal d/s elements, intensity.

General DNW: rape/dubcon, torture, other creative gore; unrequested AUs, including “same setting, different rules” AUs such as soulmates/soulbonds; PWP; food sex; embarrassment; focus on pregnancy; Christmas/Christian themes; infidelity; unrequested polyamory; focus on unrequested canon or non-canon ships; unrequested trans versions of characters; breakups; jealousy; focus on grief; unequal levels of investment in a relationship (including concerns about same that turn out to be unwarranted), or the idea of a character accepting something they're unhappy with as the most they're going to get; characters apologizing to their partner when they don't actually know what they did to upset them; characters who are written in a sexual context within the fic being ignorant about sex/anatomy (inexperienced is fine); the word "pussy"

A note: if we matched on an / ship, I generally don’t require you to include a kiss, sex, or overt romantic language if you feel that you’d have to shoehorn it in. I’ll trust that you wrote it with shippy intent.

About Rule 63 Exchange specifically: I have no strong preference for character names, with a slight preference for sticking with their canon names; it’s up to you whether you want to justify any resulting names that would be unusual for women or just gloss over it. As far as characters’ personalities and gender expression are concerned, I tend to want to see them as similar to their canon selves, just female. I’m probably fine with unrequested characters also being swapped to female, but feel free to check if you’re not sure. I don’t expect, nor particularly want, a big deal made over characters’ strong gender identity qua identity as female or whatnot.

I’ve requested General Audiences on everything, and additionally Explicit on Sleep No More. All my requests are for fic, but I welcome art treats.

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Fandom: Moby-Dick
Ship(s): F!Ishmael/F!Queequeg, F!Captain Ahab & F!Pequod Crew; F!Captain Ahab & None; F!Captain Ahab & F!Moby Dick

I’d love to know more about these female sailor(s) and what drives them. A female Ishmael might still decide to sign on to a ship whenever she gets the blues, but it’d be socially fairly different, mightn’t it? (Worldbuilding-wise, I’d be more interested in a world where sailing and whaling are still typically male things as in our world, even if you make them a little less exclusively male, than an egalitarian or matriarchal world; something that women might do, without necessarily disguising themselves as men, but a GNC thing to do.) Would her already diverging from the “expected” female path in this regard affect her reception of Queequeg as someone who’s an outsider to Nantucket society, and the intimacy she offers? What does she still find outlandish? As for Queequeg herself, is her life a typical female life for her home culture, or not?

As for Ahab - just imagine this fanatic, tragic, vengeful character as a woman - with the willpower not only to do all the things canonical male Ahab does but also in a society where women aren’t really supposed to sail or kill or lead! Is she the odd one out in an otherwise male crew, or are there more women in the crew by the time she’s captain? Was she already a whaler when she lost the leg or, in this AU, did this drive her to become one? WHAT IF THE WHALE IS ALSO FEMALE, how does this affect any of the Symbolism or Drama?

I love pastiche for this, if you’re interested.

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Fandom: Sleep No More
Ship(s): Mrs. Danvers | Catherine Campbell/F!Duncan, F!Speakeasy Bartender/Hecate, NB!Speakeasy Bartender/Hecate

• Mrs. Danvers | Catherine Campbell/F!Duncan - OBSESSED with this idea? Entirely new angle for the Rebecca parallels. The pining, the class difference, the attempts to make (F!)Duncan live again...wow. That said, I am not usually a big Danvers or Duncan follower, and some of the interpretations of those roles that might actually make it closer to Rebecca in terms of character dynamics (like the way some Duncans almost seem to be sexually harassing Danvers?) don't compel me. I loved seeing Gabrielle and Andrew R do these roles because they're similar ages and married IRL; their ballroom duet was stunningly beautiful and dreamy, and the duet that sometimes reads kind of unpleasantly to me was in this instance incredibly tragic because it seemed like Danvers had accepted that Duncan was dead and was regretting resurrecting him, rejecting something that she had once wanted because it wasn't the same. ANYWAY, add to all of that the intimacy of Danvers dealing with a f!Duncan's clothing/hair/toilette? Their dance together being something that couldn't happen at a proper ball because of class but also, here, gender? (I know and love the Malcolm and Boy Witch dance in ballroom, ignore or or mention it as seems right to you.) What is Danvers's issue with Lady Macduff, anyway? Does Duncan being female change Danvers's thoughts about or relationship with the Porter? (also sad, gay) Or with the witches? (in general I am very interested in the intersection of magic and outsider-ness and queerness in this show)


• F!Speakeasy Bartender/Hecate, NB!Speakeasy Bartender/Hecate - I looooove the cross-casting of this role. The character’s easy confidence and utter mastery of their domain, combined with that animal devotion to Hecate, are very cool and sexy when the person in the waistcoat and the sleeve garters is a bald butch with tattoos, apparently. (side note: when I saw it performed this way, I'd read the character as a butch woman, learned afterwards that the performer is nb and uses she/they pronouns, but either way, it's interesting to me that this Speaks is a gender non-conforming character in a way the usual one is very much not. I'm also pretty psyched that some of the show ephemera now refers to the character in a gender-neutral way. My prompts are the same for both of these tags.)
  
  I love this Speaks as Hecate’s creature/enforcer/weapon. How/why did Hecate choose Speakeasy and what does she think of or do with their devotion and service? (THE VIAL OF TEARS SCENE asdsjhasjkhd, it killed me.) And what’s this Speaks’s story? Were her GNC presentation or sexuality a factor in her getting involved in the underground booze business and/or Hecate’s service, and how do they affect her dealings with people now - the witches, Fulton, anyone else? (Or, for that matter, the opposite! Did the gender nonconformity happen after the magic/service?) Did they do small magic before becoming Hecate’s familiar, or did that come after/as a result of it? How do she and Hecate think about each other - is Speakeasy in love with Hecate, is sex one of the ways Hecate controls her human pet? How does it work to be or to have a human familiar? (I have even more prompts in previous letters, if you need more inspiration.)
  
  If you are writing for the nb tag specifically, I prefer to see trans and nb characters in historical settings written/conceptualized in a way that makes sense with how people might have thought at the time. This doesn't mean defaulting to the most common, mainstream view at all times (I certainly get fed up with the "no one thought of gayness as something you were, only something you did" meme, no, plenty of people absolutely thought of themselves or others as innately gay) but it's important to me not to treat trans/nb-ness as a phenomenon that cannot exist outside of recent and culturally specific frameworks and language.


• other not-ship-specific things I like in this fandom: all of these characters' little charms and rituals, characters who are racial/ethnic minorities, the witches, the question of how people's powers actually work, magic/outsider places that are carved out from the "normal" world (like the apothecary shop)

Fandom-Specific DNWs/Exceptions:

• if you write Hecate/f!Speakeasy, consider my DNW of unequal investment waived, as long as Speaks isn't under the impression that it is equal or upset by that. F!Speakeasy/Sexy Witch, Hecate/Agnes, Hecate/other witches are okay as concurrent background ships and would not violate my poly DNW, but please don't include/suggest any relationship negotiation or prioritization (trying to organize anyone's life around multiple relationships) or manipulation of Speakeasy's jealousy.


• If you write sex for f!Speaks/Hecate, please don't write a scene where Hecate subs to "let go" or is "service dommed"; I'm only interested in a D/s dynamic for them if Hecate is the dom.

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Fandom: Spinning Silver
Ship(s): Miryem Mandelstam/F!Staryk Lord

I love Miryem, and I’m so interested in the ways that making the Staryk Lord a woman would change Miryem’s entry into the Staryk world and the romance that eventually develops between them. Maybe same-sex marriage is common among the Staryk, and that’s one of the customs that are new and unfamiliar to Miryem in this new world. Would this be a Miryem who had never imagined being attracted to a woman before but comes to fall for the Staryk Lady, or one who simply couldn’t have imagined being able to marry one and have that be a normal life? (For values of “normal” that include ice lands and gold magic!) How does the fact of the marriage being same-sex affect Miryem’s initial understanding of it as a business arrangement, or for that matter, affect her understanding of the offer of queenship as a marriage at all? What makes them fall for each other?

Canon Miryem wonders what her role as queen is, thinking that she’d know about managing a household and having children and sewing if she were married to a human lord - is it the same if she has a fairy wife instead of a fairy husband, more so because there’s not even the hope of a gendered complementarian aspect to fall back on, less so because the Staryk Lady is there as an example of what a female monarch in the Staryk lands does? Does Miryem try to be more like her, or to find her own accounting-powers-and-personal-bonds niche?

It’s so important to canon Miryem to have a Jewish wedding with the Staryk Lord - what would that look like here? What happens when she comes back to the human world not only the queen of a magic country, but married to a woman (and in love with her, depending on when you set it)?

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Thank you!