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h/c exchange letter
Mar. 15th, 2023 01:04 amGeneral h/c likes: realistic head injuries/concussion, mental illness, ptsd, past (or very recent) rape trauma, noncon AS the hurt/whump, temporary or chronic loss of mobility, cuddling for warmth, the usual suspects (bullets! Stab wounds! Blood loss!), hair petting/forehead kisses.
DNW: non-canonical underage sex, noncon within a requested pairing (not against noncon generally), unrequested trans headcanons or gender-dysphoria-heavy stuff, feminization, scat/watersports, sexy roleplaying, lots of dirty talk, dramatic misunderstandings as a major plot device, characters agonizing over amount/lack of sexual experience (they can note a difference if appropriate! I actually like that! I just don’t like it being a Big Moral Issue that characters have Anxiety About in either direction,) body parts freezing solid and breaking off (yes this is extremely specific but I’ve encountered this twice and wanted to crawl out of my skin both times. Thank you, friend who described the scene from The Boys to me in the car. I could have gone through my life not knowing about that. But now I do. And I would rather not. So I’m putting it in my DNWs. Just in case. lol.)
The Murderbot Diaries
Fandom-specific DNW: would prefer no explicit sexual/romantic murderbot ships in this fandom. (canon human relationships fine) and would prefer if you maintained Murderbot's canonical aversion to touch in most situations.
Okay! I feel like this fandom is catnip for hurt/comfort. Murderbot is constantly flinging itself headfirst into danger and has no idea how to respond to its friends being concerned about it, or just, you know, the concept of friends. As of writing this letter I've listened to all the novellas (some several times) but haven't finished Network Effect. I love all the humans but I think Mensah and Gurathin are my favorites. Here are some prompts!
Murderbot gets injured in a way that the Preservation medical system isn’t sure how to completely fix and has to deal with long-term effects, either permanently or while the Preservation humans figure out a better fix in lieu of going to the wretched The Company™.
Murderbot is stressed trying to deal with an injury and someone expressing Compassionate Human Worry Emotions over it just drives it over the edge and it has an ‘oh my god everyone leave me the fuck alone I can’t deal with this right now’ meltdown because it doesn’t know how to respond to that and doesn’t have the brain space to think about more than one crisis right now. (Humans Are Talking To Me is absolutely a crisis.)
Possibly related to the above: PreservationAux humans trying to figure out how to help a murderbot that just wants to be alone when it’s in distress.
Murderbot is injured in a way that impacts mobility and has to figure out how to cope with that. On top of Murderbot being deeply frustrated by its situation, given how much heavier than a human it is the humans might not be able to physically support it or help it up if it falls down. (See Gurathin prompts: maybe Gurathin is the one practical one who just goes “if I bring you a chair to lean on can you get up by yourself” and Murderbot is like wow someone with brains. I think I might not hate him anymore, actually. I cannot admit that.)
*Murderbot voice* Lying on the floor is a choice I made and I am completely 100% fine yes the shaking is normal.
Murderbot running diagnostics over and over trying to figure out what exactly is wrong and how to fix it.
Murderbot, extremely visibly not at all fine, responding to all concern with “I’m fine” (humans are. Not convinced.)
Possession-adjacent virtual meddling: Murderbot gets hacked or cyber-attacked somehow, recovers but is traumatized.
(Maybe Murderbot is doing something similar to the damaged ship in Fugitive Telemetry, I felt so bad for it—too messed up to coherently explain what’s wrong, or somehow prevented from saying it, signaling for help with scrambled data. Maybe it contacts Gurathin through the feed and he notices pretty quickly that it doesn’t sound right.)
Dr. Mensah trying to explain that she doesn’t actually want to see her idiot sacrificing itself for her and Murderbot grappling with this.
I feel like Gurathin (once he and Murderbot have gotten more used to each other and aren’t hissing and smacking at each other like 2 feral cats) would be good at dealing with Murderbot when it absolutely does not want to be dealt with, I feel like they’re on the same wavelength a lot of the time (maybe why they hate each other so much at first.) Some of it could be from experience if some of Gurathin’s augments are because of his own disability/injury. I feel like he’d be good at providing comfort and support in practical, non-mushy ways that wouldn’t make Murderbot want to crawl out of its skin—the others mean well but Murderbot has no idea how to respond to worry/compassion/people being upset that you’re leaking fluids even though this is your job and happens to you all the time and up until last year nobody cared about it.
Death Rides a Horse
*predictably* AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! anyways,
DNW: Bill being raped. (Threats are ok. And this doesn’t apply to Ryan, I generally headcanon him with rape trauma, which you’re welcome to explore if you wish.)
*gestures at the movie* we’ve got a lot to work with here!! Easy canon options: what if Bill actually does get shot by the last of Cavanaugh’s goons before Ryan can kill him and then Ryan has to both get him out of town fast and make sure he doesn’t die? Or, h/c after Bill breaks Ryan out of jail and realizes he was a) tortured b) thrown out of a moving cart c) almost hanged because he was d) blamed for Walcott’s crime AGAIN. Or, canon divergence where circumstances force the two to team up pre-finale, or they’re working together post-canon, etc. I just love them.
Hurt Bill:
Ryan spends the first part of the movie trying to maintain some distance between them but always drops what he’s doing to help Bill when he needs it. So I’d like to see a more extreme version of that, where Bill is seriously injured and Ryan entirely lets down his guard to take care of him. How does this change their relationship?
Ryan surprised and touched that Bill trusts him. Maybe Ryan lets slip how much he cares about him, or vice versa.
Hurt Ryan:
Ryan needs help with an injury but isn’t used to being helped.
Bill noticing that Ryan flinches at unexpected touches.
Ryan: a coping mechanism that isn’t alcohol, revenge, justified paranoia or having silent private panic attacks all night? Sounds fake.
Post-canon, Ryan and Bill meet again and Ryan admits he doesn’t know what to do with himself now and wishes Bill would just kill him. Bill does not do that.
Both or either:
I think they both need to recognize how self-destructive they are. Bill never comes up with a plan more survivable than “walk into the bad guy bar through the front door and start throwing punches” and has to keep getting rescued by Ryan, who of course is on his own revenge/extortion mission… Ryan is more careful about it but I do feel like he probably wouldn’t be quite so bold if he wasn’t at least a tiny bit suicidal. And then of course there’s the whole “offering Bill a bullet to shoot him with” at the end so double points for that!
Red Dead Redemption:
Fandom-specific likes (optional): high-honor Arthur, Hosea/Arthur or Hosea & Arthur, past or complicated Hosea/Dutch, Arthur getting whumped to hell and being helpless in specific situations but also being a BAMF generally.
Hurt Arthur: oh boy there are so many ways to hurt Arthur! Canon (also an option) aside, here are some: drags himself back to camp after being injured and horse-less in the wilderness, gets shot at more accurately than usual, gets beat up and/or raped (there’s the canon Sonny NPC interaction but you could also go with another NPC or an OC), seeks approval from Dutch when he’s in one of his Moods™ and instead gets an unhinged rant about how he’s going to betray them all and Dutch can see it in his eyes… legendary fish got away..
I like his dynamic with Hosea, whether it’s platonic or romantic, but I do particularly like to see them shipped, there’s not too much of that in the tag!
Rev. Swanson: I love the mission where you rescue Swanson, primarily from himself but also from two separate groups of people and then a train. I love that he’s got a whole gang of outlaws to take care of him while he struggles with his addiction. He’s such a sad wet pitiful scrap of man, I think it would be good for him to feel useful sometimes. I think in a moment of lucidity he could sense emotional distress from Arthur and go into his old religious minister Counseling Mode and actually provide some needed support, to the surprise of everyone involved. I think this would be good for both of them.
I really like nonconing Arthur. It's even canon, it's just another way his confusing life sucks, and I don't know if he'd, like. Have any idea how to talk about it. Would he want to? I've thought about this rather extensively so below is just the Arthur Noncon Prompt Fest feel free to skip if you don't like that:
This feels like it fits to me. RDR2 is full of characters who might be nice or might try to shoot you, and Arthur is constantly getting ambushed and entrapped and antagonized by random strangers. High-honor Arthur is a testament to the man’s patience and resilience, that he can keep seeing the best in people and offering to help when needed, in a very wild, paranoia-inducing world. It would be interesting to see something disrupt that. I don’t want him completely broken, and anyways I think he’d have to be pretty resilient to the evils of the world to have gotten as far as he has in his line of work already, but I think it would throw him into a tailspin. And what is RDR2 for if not making the poor man suffer.
You could go any direction with this, with any kind of setup. The map is full of bloodthirsty enemies, larger and smaller gangs and solo creeps. He could either be jumped and physically overpowered with a different outcome than the you died screen I saw so goddamn much of while playing or tricked by a person feigning friendliness. If you want to go with a specific named NPC other than Sonny, Tommy seems like a decent option to me, given he’s able to physically overpower Arthur and of all things calls him a pretty boy during their fight, to Arthur’s confusion.
Since this is Arthur Morgan, bonus points for him tracking down and killing the rapist afterwards. Unless it’s Tommy, I think he’s exempt since Arthur canonically gives him brain damage (could be an interesting spin on Arthur trying to kill him in that cutscene if this happens before his canon appearance.)
The fallout here would be interesting also. Does he talk about it at all, or not? Do the other gang members notice that he’s gotten depressed and paranoid, or question why he’s suddenly obsessed with an out-of-character revenge quest?
Bonus points for background consensual Hosea/Arthur, or for extra angst Arthur has an unrequited crush—or Hosea does like him but doesn't want to initiate a relationship for whatever reason. Maybe something makes him reevaluate this. Maybe he's upset he couldn't protect Arthur.
some noncon prompts:
Arthur is generally against unnecessary murder but suddenly with zero context asks a friend to come on an assassination mission with him. The friend is concerned.
Arthur has been bicurious for a while and is just mad that his first time with a man was this.
Arthur’s attempt to rescue another gang member who’s been kidnapped goes very wrong and they’re both raped or Arthur is raped instead before they can get away. (I do feel like he has a very sweet bond with the girls at camp, and I mean… being raped alongside someone sure would uh. Give you some kind of bond. Besties! Not Sadie though, I just—she’s had enough bad experiences already I don’t want to see that. And not Jack, at least not if the attempted rape is successful. Anyone else.)
Hostage situation with a rival gang goes south, culminates in Arthur being raped in front of someone from Dutch’s gang to humiliate or punish him.
Previously high honor Arthur has a low honor phase after the experience. Others in the gang are concerned about the sudden shift. (see his “ain’t nobody innocent in this world” line. Just… completely jaded. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTFIBbP1kTM )
Free space: go wild! There are some supernatural elements to RDR2, ghost and alien easter eggs—I don’t particularly like aliens, but if you want Arthur to be menaced by some kind of werewolf or other ~creature~, go for it. I’m also very fond of ghosts or other undead (RDR1 has the undead DLC and RDR2 has the Saint Denis vampire). General likes here: attacked by some kind of evil fucked up animal while hunting, non human dick, sex pollen/pheromones, nonconned by feral/supernaturally in heat creature, weird ghost sex.
Crossover!
My beautiful baby the Death Rides a Horse/Red Dead Redemption crossover I invented. Someone actually wrote me a fic for it in my last exchange (A Quiet Night in Valentine) and it was glorious! I mostly think Ryan and Hosea should meet and have a mutual gay old man thing going on, maybe some tension with Ryan being a reformed outlaw and Hosea happily resigned to never reforming, but I just think they'd click, I think they'd understand each other and just be great together. I've got a whole paragraph about this in my last letter if you want more information, also the gift I got was very good.
There are plenty of scenarios where either of them could end up hurt or needing to be rescued, it could be a fun sort of outlaw meet cute or reunion if they'd known each other before. Maybe one of them gets stranded, or kidnapped, or one comes upon the other being attacked and helps out, or both team up to escape a bad situation. I like them together.
