Dear Spacer

[extrapenguin]

Likes

• Same-sex relationships, especially F/F.
• Narratives of reconstruction: fixing something, whether that be a country, a piece of equipment, a relationship, or a person. (Examples: Nirvana in Fire, Zuko's arc in Avatar: the Last Airbender)
• Journeys of discovery, whether the discoverers be the characters or the reader.
• Redemption arcs. Rehabilitative justice.
• Narratives where something happens; plot. External conflicts. Casefic.
• Comedy of Errors -type things.
• Crack taken seriously.
• Untitled Goose Game crossovers of the type where the goose comes to visit the canon.
• Engineering, especially of the sort that keeps civilization running – sewage, maintenance, transport etc – plus fault analysis and infrastructure design stuff.
• Characters expressing caring for each other by feeding each other/giving each other tea.
• Good mentor figures/teachers who have their students' best interests at heart and succeed.
• Class issues and other tensions between origins and current presentation (eg. alien whose species is considered monsters in disguise as a human).
• Worldbuilding!
• Weird physics.
• Tea.
• Competence porn.
• Enthusiasm in general.
• Xenobiology, aliens, very alien aliens.
• Loyalty, loyalty kink, people loyal way past the point of reasonableness.
• Loving descriptions of small details/of how systems run; insertion of Shown Their Work details.
• Happy endings.

I like both shipfic and gen. If you're choosing between something you think the characters would do in a situation and something on my likes list, please err on the side of what you feel is right for the characters and story in general.

DNW

• Setting change AUs (eg: Hogwarts AU, Coffee Shop AU) (exception: In Space AUs of canons not already In Space are fine)
• Christianity, mentions of "sinning".
• Humiliation, especially public.
• Incest, including foster/adopted relationships. (Unless requested – Shen Wei/Ye Zun is fine.)
• Stories about motherhood.
• Unrequested het between humans or humanoid creatures. (Dolphins are fine, spiders are fine, people having parents is fine, the fabric of society being canonical and het-enabling is fine.)
• Requested characters being presented as/rendered utterly helpless; the "damsel in distress" trope; woobiefication.
• Stories about mourning unwelcome changes to/realizations about the body, with "body" defined broadly, (ex: acquiring a disability, infertility, weight gain) and the associated grief/angst.
• Stories about mourning a dead person.
• Purity kink – this includes soulmates, demisexuality, single-target sexuality, etc.

Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky

Fanfiction
I've just started Children of Ruin and will have finished it by reveals.

Worldbuilding: Stomatopod History & Culture
Tell me anything! How did the stomatopods make first contact with the spiders? What do they think of their spider neighbors? What to they think about space and the humans that came from there? What ocean-things weigh on their minds and occupy their collective cultural consciousness?

Worldbuilding: Other abandoned terraforming projects
We see one unintended success state and one failure state – how else could the terraforming projects fail? Something like Solaris, or a multi-sentient species-kill-species world, or something where the virus did not quite work as intended and there were even more unforeseen consequences? Something where the virus ends up making everything look more like Ediacaran biota due to interaction with alien virus-equivalents? Go nuts!

Guardian

Fanfiction

Worldbuilding: Timekeeping in Dixing
What sorts of natural cycles does Dixing have? Are there calendars based on lava flows, algae blooms, etc? What about hourglass-turning and the Lord of Dixing's fiat? Something specific to dark energy? Is there sectarian schism between people who measure time by one means and people who use another?

Worldbuilding: Origin of Dixing powers
What are the powers based on? What is dark energy, anyway? Did the original Dixingians bring over idk nanobots that suffuse the planet and which Dixingians can connect to and use to alter the environment? Are Dixing powers genetic, and if so, why do Shen Wei and Ye Zun have different ones, or do they actually have the same root power but use it differently?

Worldbuilding: Limits of Dixing powers
What are the boundaries of Dixing powers? We know dark energy powers (like the visions Zhao Yunlan gets) can violate causality, so is someone's power faster than light travel? Is anything conserved – momentum, energy, mass, etc? Could someone's Dixing power be transforming spin ½ particles into spin 1 particles? Altering probability wavefunctions?

Worldbuilding: Genetic relationship between Dixingians & Yashou & humans
Given all the remarks about e.g. Lai Su having Dixingian blood and mirror Zhou Weiwei not thinking infertility would ever be an issue in her marriage, I suppose crossbreeding is possible and Dixingians (and Yashou?) are very humanoid. Are they the same species, and if so, why? Why aren't the Dixingians and Yashou more alien? What's the difference that lets Yashou and Dixingians use dark energy? Are Shen Wei and Ye Zun and their cohort significantly different genetically to Chu Shuzhi and all the other modern-day Dixingians?

Worldbuilding: Alien Forebears Of The Dixing And Yashou (Guardian (TV))
(See above prompt as well.) Who were they, what were they like, why did they come to Haixing, and why are their descendants so humanoid? Were there two species already on the spaceship, or did they only diverge on contact? Is there a particular reason they chose to look like humans? Are the modern Dixingians and Yashou even descended from the aliens who came here, or did the aliens instead genetically modify human populations to be their legacy due to reasons?

Relationship: Ye Zun/Zhu Jiu
Best Minion should get to meet Ye Zun in the flesh! Let him rescue his Boss from empillarment! Does he desire to heal all Ye Zun's trauma with love and his dick? Or maybe he discovers somehow that Ye Zun and the Envoy he so admired are twin brothers – what would the fallout be? Actually, any of Zhu Jiu discovering the twins' backstory would be A+, either through Ye Zun's distorted telling or the actual truth.

Relationship: Shen Wei/Zhu Jiu
Baby Zhu Jiu had such a cute hero worship thing going on! Maybe he could meet his hero earlier, and Shen Wei decide that if he's never getting Kunlun back, maybe he could move on? Or Shen Wei has to attend a party in Dixing, has some sort of reaction to the food (hallucingenic cave mushrooms?) and then Palace Guard Zhu Jiu escorts him to his bedchambers and is all atwitter at the Envoy leaning on him? Zhu Jiu has doubts courtesy of Ye Zun, then goes and actually asks Shen Wei about them due to fortuitous opportunity, instead of canon murdering? Or, Zhu Jiu discovers Professor Shen before Zhao Yunlan does?

Relationship: Shen Wei/Ye Zun/Zhao Yunlan
Scenarios where Zhao Yunlan meets Ye Zun first (either in the present, or in the past due to e.g. the Hallows dumping him onto baby Ye Zun instead of baby Shen Wei)? Or something post-canon-ish where Shen Wei and Ye Zun end up in the same body? Zhao Yunlan is bored and asks the pillar guy why he's doing what he's doing, then has an opportunity to talk his captive audience down (and figure out how to get him out of the pillar; also, wtf Shen Wei, you have a twin brother and weren't telling)? Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei have a Relationship Chat earlier-on where Zhao Yunlan establishes that it'd be very useful if Shen Wei didn't hide important knowledge from him and then figures out an action plan on redeeming his brother-in-law? Ye Zun decides that everything gege's is his as well, sets out to seduce Zhao Yunlan, and gets shown that actually, the world can be kind and forgiving, and his issues can be dealt with? I like both triangle and V-shaped arrangements.

Relationship: Shen Wei & Ye Zun
Look, I just want them to reconcile, okay? Canon divergence where Ye Zun rants at Shen Wei about why he hates him, or Shen Wei comes across Ye Zun much earlier, or just – anything. (Feel free to include other characters in on the getting them to communicate thing!) And then they rebuild, with Ye Zun still raw over the things gege did/didn't do, Shen Wei trying to figure out how to be a responsible big brother as an adult in the future, full of awkward mutual caring. Or something fraught canon-ish where Ye Zun tries to break the timeline and Shen Wei tries to keep the timeline intact?

Relationship: Shen Wei & Li Qian & Professor Zhou (Guardian (TV))
Three academic generations of Science! So, something about generational transfer of knowledge – Shen Wei asking Professor Zhou questions about how to mentor his first PhD student Li Qian? Scientific collaboration? What sort of bioengineers are they, and what do they study? Fungi? Humans? Plants?

Uplift series - David Brin

Fanfiction
Format opt-in: if you want to write a fic entirely in Trinary, or with significant Trinary elements, I'm 100% down for it!

Worldbuilding: Buyur plan for Jijo
Is the Buyur plan simply what they said it would be in Temptation, or is there yet another layer hidden there? Do they have things hidden on Jijo beyond the things mentioned in Temptation? What was the method to their choice of things to leave behind?

Worldbuilding: The Whale Dream
I'd love to see some sort of opening up of what it is and what it means, and how it's reflected in modern Trinary! Do our spacegoing fins miss the song of the humpbacks of Earth's oceans?

Worldbuilding: Trinary
What's it like to think in Trinary all day? What sort of poetic imagery is most popular? What sorts of things count as undertones of Primal that e.g. Makanee is worried about Brookida displaying? How did Trinary form exactly? (Dolphins finding haikus cool and just unilaterally to only communicate using them?) How does thinking in Trinary affect dolphin views of art? What are the images that are considered most poetic, and why? How often do they use Trinary to subtly or not-so-subtly troll humans? What does a Trinary courtship look like? What're dolphins' favorite wordplays?

Relationship: Chissis & Tkett
Chissis and Tkett were the outstanding stars of Temptation for me! I'd gladly read more of their adventures exploring Jijo, maintaining things in the face of entropy, Tkett doing science (and founding a scientific journal just to get a place to publish it in?), and Chissis clawing her way back to sentience!

Relationship: Creideiki/Hikahi, Character: Creideiki
I'd love more of Creideiki & co's galactic escape adventure! How do they reach Earth? What do they stumble upon on the way – Progenitor relics? Illegal, failed, or "failed" Uplift processes? What brought Creideiki to the Shallow Cluster – was his hunch just a hunch, or was there some evidence that led him there which he didn't share with others? How did Creideiki and Hikahi first meet? Did the Streaker and its crew get into adventures before the Shallow Cluster?