Black Box 2021
Jun. 9th, 2021 02:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sincereouslyDear creator,
I'm so excited to see what you come up with for this exchange! Hope you have a great time with it. Prompts are here if you want them, but if you have another idea that's inspiring you I'm happy to see that too.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me through the mods. I'm also sincereously on AO3.
General fic likes:
Worldbuilding (especially magical, religious and cultural worldbuilding)
Canon divergence
Bickering, friendly and not-so-much
Introspection
Moments of quiet intimacy during breaks in the action (especially good for missing scenes in between what we see in canon)
Complicated women, and complicated relationships between complicated women
Slowly building intimacy/respect together - slow burn in general
Taking care of injured people
Forced proximity (undercover together, trapped together, accidental/arranged marriage, fake dating, etc.)
Elaborate plans that may or may not work out
Improvising new plans as you go along
"That's an extremely bad plan, of course I'm in" type situations and interpersonal dynamics
Getting in way over your head but throwing yourself headfirst into the plan anyway
Repressed characters learning to let go
Struggling against temptation (and giving into it)
General art likes
I love a wide range of art styles, so I don't have much of a preference there. For art-specific prompts:
Characters holding onto each other - hugs, or keeping each other up, or restraining each other, it all works.
Illustrations of your favorite moment in the show
Costume designs
General DNWs:
Character bashing
Canon-divergent death of any requested characters (canonical deaths are fine)
Non-canonical child death
Setting change AUs (ex. coffeeshop, high school, modern AU, etc.)*
Formalized dom/sub relationships
Ageplay
Omegaverse
Mpreg
Excretory kinks
Rape/noncon (dubcon - sex pollen with both/all characters dosed, sex in arranged marriages, fuck-or-die, etc. - are fine)
Underage under 15 and unrequested non-canonical ships with 15+ year age gaps (mentions of canon examples of both are acceptable, but please don't make them the focus of the fic)
Cross-gen incest
Animal abuse
Fic devoted primarily to examining real-world issues/-isms (please don't feel that you have to avoid them, but I'd rather they not be the entirety of what the work is about)
Hopeless endings (endings can be dark, but not without any shred of hope)
For both fic and art, please keep the level of violence at about what it is in canon.
*Canon-dependent, applies to Dreamgirls, Fiddler, and Gypsy but not to Macbeth or Doctor Faustus.
Dreamgirls (OBC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLMkq_yTcS0
Dreamgirls (OBC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2P_NSW-zvQ
Dreamgirls (Berlin, 1998): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJKVs3dI1bY
Dreamgirls script: https://vdocuments.mx/dreamgirls-script.html
Fiddler on the Roof (Broadway Revival, 2015, part 1): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjOC2RrG5hA
Fiddler on the Roof (Broadway Revival, 2015, part 2): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xWFgu1pXSI
Fiddler on the Roof script: https://www.bournplayers.org.uk/Fiddler/doc/script.pdf
Gypsy (Broadway Revival, 2008, Patti LuPone as Rose): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFTnBdH99Zg
Gypsy (Broadway Revival, 2008, Patti LuPone as Rose): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuSCaVkfsz4
Gypsy (American Musical Theater of San Jose, 2006): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbBlynih_78
Gypsy script: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V70lbg4ZX0FE0IgT5EF3Jst3GAe8Qv1I/view
I've seen enough different versions of Macbeth and Doctor Faustus that picking examples out is hard, but if you want a specific production let me know and I'll see if I can find an example of it. Otherwise, pick your favorite! Some scripts, if you find that helpful:
Macbeth (Folger Shakespeare): https://shakespeare.folger.edu/downloads/pdf/macbeth_PDF_FolgerShakespeare.pdf
Doctor Faustus (A text): http://elizabethandrama.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Doctor-Faustus-A-Text-Script.pdf
Doctor Faustus (B text): http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.03.0011
Dreamgirls, Fiddler, and Gypsy also have movie versions, and while none of them are exact matches to the stage version they're very close.
Also, that huge musical masterlist that might be relevant to people's interests:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201123073651if_/https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rut7cTYValeBSSisnPQhd60EZltvFz1-S_IYI_RK-AI/edit
The links are no longer clickable, but many of the videos are still available. Just be sure that the link reads "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[whatever the video address is]" to be sure it works.
FANDOMS
General About
My sign-up ended up following two themes: women finding themselves and having complicated relationships with each other in musical theater and people ambitiously seeking supernatural power and regretting it (or not).
For the first (Dreamgirls, Fiddler, and Gypsy), I love the strong personalities at play and how they play off each other. Oftentimes these women are seeking out their dreams, and in doing so they have to confront the restrictions of their society, the restrictions of their own abilities, and each other to find out who they are and what will make them happiest. I also like how these women care about each other, because they do deeply care but sometimes have a very dysfunctional way of showing it, and I'd like to see explorations of those relationships. The settings here are important as well, and I'd love to see any worldbuilding that goes into those, including incorporating historical facts about the time periods (the Dreams interacting with real-life Motown groups, for example, or the characters in Fiddler practicing more Jewish religious traditions, or what daily life on the vaudeville circuit was like for Rose, June, and Louise).
For the second (Macbeth and Doctor Faustus), I like Lady Macbeth's and Faustus' reckless pursuit of power. (Macbeth's too, but Lady Macbeth is certainly more willing to throw herself headlong into magic forces when there's a chance to fulfill her goals). Their ambition, self-belief, and self-reliance is a heady combination and makes for some compelling characters, and I'd enjoy seeing how the world looks from their perspectives. They're also the kind of people who'd get up to some incredibly wild plans to get what they want, and seeing those plans unfold would be fun to see. I'd also love to see more about the supernatural worlds they invoke to try to gain power - how they work, how alien they are from the "real" world in terms of perception and morality, how they see the world of mortals, any of that would be great. The actual setting matters to me less here than it does for the musicals, and I'd be open to reimaginings in different settings that follow the same script (and if you can find links to productions that have those reimaginings, I'd love to see them!).
Dreamgirls
Requests: Effie White, Deena Jones, Lorrell Robinson, Effie White & Deena Jones & Lorrell Robinson, Effie White & Deena Jones, Effie White/Deena Jones
Prompts:
- How did the girls first come together as a group? Were they all friends growing up (Effie talks about her and Deena once being best friends), or did they meet later on and bond over their shared desire to sing? I'd love to hear about their successes and failures pre-fame, and them sharing their big dreams with each other.
- Effie mentions that she saw Deena at Deena's mother's funeral and wanted to talk to her, but there were "too many people in the way". What would have happened if they had had the chance to talk? What would that conversation have been like?
- When the show ends, they've reconciled but they're also on different paths. What would happen if they reunite again a few years later, while Effie's rising in the music business again and Deena's in her movie career and Lorrell's pursuing a life without Jimmy in it? Anything about them rebuilding their friendships and how them going after their own dreams is turning out. (I didn't request Michelle here, but you can also bring up what she's doing at this point, besides marrying CC).
- Curtis was supposed to love Effie. So was Deena. (Take that however you will).
Fiddler on the Roof
Requests: Tzeitel, Hodel, Chava, Chava & Hodel & Tzeitel, Golde/Tevye, Motel/Tzeitel, Hodel/Perchik, Chava/Fyedka
Prompts:
- Anatevka is almost another character in this show, and it'd be cool to see slice-of-life stories about living in Anatevka, growing up and living according to traditions (and, sometimes, bending those traditions just a bit when they don't work as well).
- Any stories about the couples growing into married life together. For the girls' romances, we see the courtship but relatively little of life after the wedding - how were Motel and Tzeitel preparing for the new baby, or how were Hodel and Perchik trying to make a home in Siberia, or how did Chava and Fyedka balance their different religions and cultures in everyday life together? I'd also love backstory about Golde and Tevye, total strangers who found themselves bound together and only much later realized that hey, maybe we do love each other, after all (even if it takes a lot for either of them to admit it).
- Epistolary stories about Tzeitel, Hodel, and Chava keeping in contact even when they're continents apart at the end of the show.
- I like to think that the whole family did make it to America eventually. What would that reunion be like? How would they all have changed and what would still be the same?
Gypsy
Requests: Louise, June, Rose, Louise & June, Louise & Rose
Prompts:
- Missing scenes of the family, Herbie, and the boys on the road, practicing the routines and occasionally conning their way out of jams. I love seeing the complex mix of love and self-centered ambition that Rose has for her daughters, and the mix of love and frustration and hunger for approval that the girls feel for Rose, and I'd like to see that coming through in their everyday lives.
- Rose teaching her daughters the things she thinks they need to learn, and the lessons that they learned from her without her meaning to. (I also like the moments where June and especially Louise are taking a page from Rose's books to get what they want, and where they're more alike than they might want to acknowledge).
- What were the last few weeks before June left like? She got married to Tulsa three weeks before leaving - did Louise know at all, or did June keep everything a secret from her? What was their last conversation like?
- I'd also be interested in seeing the sisters reunite and reflect on how their lives have gone at some point after canon. (You can take as much or as little as you want from the real-life Gypsy Rose Lee and June Havoc here, including inventing something new).
Doctor Faustus
Requests: Faustus, Mephistopheles, Faustus/Mephistopheles
Prompts:
- I'd love to see some more of the canon-typical tricks Faustus was pulling during the 24 years, with Faustus reveling in his powers and thinking how clever and powerful he is while Mephistopheles is rolling his eyes the whole time but going along with it anyway. Interactions with Lucifer and other devils could also work here, with Faustus faced with this almost overwhelming power in a terrifying hellscape but throwing himself headlong into it anyway.
- Conversely, I'm also interested in those times where Faustus almost gets some self-awareness of how badly he's fucked up and consequently how badly he's fucked, but never quite gets there until the end. A moment of quiet talking with Mephistopheles would work well with that here.
- Mephistopheles as a demon is going to have a fascinating perspective on this whole scenario, and it'd be great to see his very non-human view of Faustus, the mortal world, and the world of the supernatural during the time that he's bound to Faustus.
Macbeth
Requests: Lady Macbeth, Hecate/Lady Macbeth, Macbeth/Lady Macbeth
Prompts:
- Generally I'm interested in anything with Lady Macbeth's POV on the events of canon - her relationship with Macbeth, her ambition, her ruthlessness, possibly her interests in the supernatural world and what it can provide for them, and also the moments where she does feel some sort of remorse or guilt for what she's doing but refuses to stop anyway.
- Hecate appears to Lady Macbeth during the scene in Act 1 where she demands the spirits "unsex me here". A deal with the devil (or rather, close contriver of all harms) ensues. Any insight into the world of the supernatural would also be great here, strange and horrifying as it can be.
- What happens if Lady Macbeth's the one who goes to the witches for more prophecies, and not Macbeth (or if she and Macbeth go together)? What would they want from her in return? Are there lines that even she will not cross?
I'm so excited to see what you come up with for this exchange! Hope you have a great time with it. Prompts are here if you want them, but if you have another idea that's inspiring you I'm happy to see that too.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me through the mods. I'm also sincereously on AO3.
General fic likes:
Worldbuilding (especially magical, religious and cultural worldbuilding)
Canon divergence
Bickering, friendly and not-so-much
Introspection
Moments of quiet intimacy during breaks in the action (especially good for missing scenes in between what we see in canon)
Complicated women, and complicated relationships between complicated women
Slowly building intimacy/respect together - slow burn in general
Taking care of injured people
Forced proximity (undercover together, trapped together, accidental/arranged marriage, fake dating, etc.)
Elaborate plans that may or may not work out
Improvising new plans as you go along
"That's an extremely bad plan, of course I'm in" type situations and interpersonal dynamics
Getting in way over your head but throwing yourself headfirst into the plan anyway
Repressed characters learning to let go
Struggling against temptation (and giving into it)
General art likes
I love a wide range of art styles, so I don't have much of a preference there. For art-specific prompts:
Characters holding onto each other - hugs, or keeping each other up, or restraining each other, it all works.
Illustrations of your favorite moment in the show
Costume designs
General DNWs:
Character bashing
Canon-divergent death of any requested characters (canonical deaths are fine)
Non-canonical child death
Setting change AUs (ex. coffeeshop, high school, modern AU, etc.)*
Formalized dom/sub relationships
Ageplay
Omegaverse
Mpreg
Excretory kinks
Rape/noncon (dubcon - sex pollen with both/all characters dosed, sex in arranged marriages, fuck-or-die, etc. - are fine)
Underage under 15 and unrequested non-canonical ships with 15+ year age gaps (mentions of canon examples of both are acceptable, but please don't make them the focus of the fic)
Cross-gen incest
Animal abuse
Fic devoted primarily to examining real-world issues/-isms (please don't feel that you have to avoid them, but I'd rather they not be the entirety of what the work is about)
Hopeless endings (endings can be dark, but not without any shred of hope)
For both fic and art, please keep the level of violence at about what it is in canon.
*Canon-dependent, applies to Dreamgirls, Fiddler, and Gypsy but not to Macbeth or Doctor Faustus.
Some resources
Dreamgirls (OBC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLMkq_yTcS0
Dreamgirls (OBC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2P_NSW-zvQ
Dreamgirls (Berlin, 1998): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJKVs3dI1bY
Dreamgirls script: https://vdocuments.mx/dreamgirls-script.html
Fiddler on the Roof (Broadway Revival, 2015, part 1): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjOC2RrG5hA
Fiddler on the Roof (Broadway Revival, 2015, part 2): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xWFgu1pXSI
Fiddler on the Roof script: https://www.bournplayers.org.uk/Fiddler/doc/script.pdf
Gypsy (Broadway Revival, 2008, Patti LuPone as Rose): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFTnBdH99Zg
Gypsy (Broadway Revival, 2008, Patti LuPone as Rose): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuSCaVkfsz4
Gypsy (American Musical Theater of San Jose, 2006): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbBlynih_78
Gypsy script: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V70lbg4ZX0FE0IgT5EF3Jst3GAe8Qv1I/view
I've seen enough different versions of Macbeth and Doctor Faustus that picking examples out is hard, but if you want a specific production let me know and I'll see if I can find an example of it. Otherwise, pick your favorite! Some scripts, if you find that helpful:
Macbeth (Folger Shakespeare): https://shakespeare.folger.edu/downloads/pdf/macbeth_PDF_FolgerShakespeare.pdf
Doctor Faustus (A text): http://elizabethandrama.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Doctor-Faustus-A-Text-Script.pdf
Doctor Faustus (B text): http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.03.0011
Dreamgirls, Fiddler, and Gypsy also have movie versions, and while none of them are exact matches to the stage version they're very close.
Also, that huge musical masterlist that might be relevant to people's interests:
https://web.archive.org/web/20201123073651if_/https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rut7cTYValeBSSisnPQhd60EZltvFz1-S_IYI_RK-AI/edit
The links are no longer clickable, but many of the videos are still available. Just be sure that the link reads "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[whatever the video address is]" to be sure it works.
FANDOMS
General About
My sign-up ended up following two themes: women finding themselves and having complicated relationships with each other in musical theater and people ambitiously seeking supernatural power and regretting it (or not).
For the first (Dreamgirls, Fiddler, and Gypsy), I love the strong personalities at play and how they play off each other. Oftentimes these women are seeking out their dreams, and in doing so they have to confront the restrictions of their society, the restrictions of their own abilities, and each other to find out who they are and what will make them happiest. I also like how these women care about each other, because they do deeply care but sometimes have a very dysfunctional way of showing it, and I'd like to see explorations of those relationships. The settings here are important as well, and I'd love to see any worldbuilding that goes into those, including incorporating historical facts about the time periods (the Dreams interacting with real-life Motown groups, for example, or the characters in Fiddler practicing more Jewish religious traditions, or what daily life on the vaudeville circuit was like for Rose, June, and Louise).
For the second (Macbeth and Doctor Faustus), I like Lady Macbeth's and Faustus' reckless pursuit of power. (Macbeth's too, but Lady Macbeth is certainly more willing to throw herself headlong into magic forces when there's a chance to fulfill her goals). Their ambition, self-belief, and self-reliance is a heady combination and makes for some compelling characters, and I'd enjoy seeing how the world looks from their perspectives. They're also the kind of people who'd get up to some incredibly wild plans to get what they want, and seeing those plans unfold would be fun to see. I'd also love to see more about the supernatural worlds they invoke to try to gain power - how they work, how alien they are from the "real" world in terms of perception and morality, how they see the world of mortals, any of that would be great. The actual setting matters to me less here than it does for the musicals, and I'd be open to reimaginings in different settings that follow the same script (and if you can find links to productions that have those reimaginings, I'd love to see them!).
Dreamgirls
Requests: Effie White, Deena Jones, Lorrell Robinson, Effie White & Deena Jones & Lorrell Robinson, Effie White & Deena Jones, Effie White/Deena Jones
Prompts:
- How did the girls first come together as a group? Were they all friends growing up (Effie talks about her and Deena once being best friends), or did they meet later on and bond over their shared desire to sing? I'd love to hear about their successes and failures pre-fame, and them sharing their big dreams with each other.
- Effie mentions that she saw Deena at Deena's mother's funeral and wanted to talk to her, but there were "too many people in the way". What would have happened if they had had the chance to talk? What would that conversation have been like?
- When the show ends, they've reconciled but they're also on different paths. What would happen if they reunite again a few years later, while Effie's rising in the music business again and Deena's in her movie career and Lorrell's pursuing a life without Jimmy in it? Anything about them rebuilding their friendships and how them going after their own dreams is turning out. (I didn't request Michelle here, but you can also bring up what she's doing at this point, besides marrying CC).
- Curtis was supposed to love Effie. So was Deena. (Take that however you will).
Fiddler on the Roof
Requests: Tzeitel, Hodel, Chava, Chava & Hodel & Tzeitel, Golde/Tevye, Motel/Tzeitel, Hodel/Perchik, Chava/Fyedka
Prompts:
- Anatevka is almost another character in this show, and it'd be cool to see slice-of-life stories about living in Anatevka, growing up and living according to traditions (and, sometimes, bending those traditions just a bit when they don't work as well).
- Any stories about the couples growing into married life together. For the girls' romances, we see the courtship but relatively little of life after the wedding - how were Motel and Tzeitel preparing for the new baby, or how were Hodel and Perchik trying to make a home in Siberia, or how did Chava and Fyedka balance their different religions and cultures in everyday life together? I'd also love backstory about Golde and Tevye, total strangers who found themselves bound together and only much later realized that hey, maybe we do love each other, after all (even if it takes a lot for either of them to admit it).
- Epistolary stories about Tzeitel, Hodel, and Chava keeping in contact even when they're continents apart at the end of the show.
- I like to think that the whole family did make it to America eventually. What would that reunion be like? How would they all have changed and what would still be the same?
Gypsy
Requests: Louise, June, Rose, Louise & June, Louise & Rose
Prompts:
- Missing scenes of the family, Herbie, and the boys on the road, practicing the routines and occasionally conning their way out of jams. I love seeing the complex mix of love and self-centered ambition that Rose has for her daughters, and the mix of love and frustration and hunger for approval that the girls feel for Rose, and I'd like to see that coming through in their everyday lives.
- Rose teaching her daughters the things she thinks they need to learn, and the lessons that they learned from her without her meaning to. (I also like the moments where June and especially Louise are taking a page from Rose's books to get what they want, and where they're more alike than they might want to acknowledge).
- What were the last few weeks before June left like? She got married to Tulsa three weeks before leaving - did Louise know at all, or did June keep everything a secret from her? What was their last conversation like?
- I'd also be interested in seeing the sisters reunite and reflect on how their lives have gone at some point after canon. (You can take as much or as little as you want from the real-life Gypsy Rose Lee and June Havoc here, including inventing something new).
Doctor Faustus
Requests: Faustus, Mephistopheles, Faustus/Mephistopheles
Prompts:
- I'd love to see some more of the canon-typical tricks Faustus was pulling during the 24 years, with Faustus reveling in his powers and thinking how clever and powerful he is while Mephistopheles is rolling his eyes the whole time but going along with it anyway. Interactions with Lucifer and other devils could also work here, with Faustus faced with this almost overwhelming power in a terrifying hellscape but throwing himself headlong into it anyway.
- Conversely, I'm also interested in those times where Faustus almost gets some self-awareness of how badly he's fucked up and consequently how badly he's fucked, but never quite gets there until the end. A moment of quiet talking with Mephistopheles would work well with that here.
- Mephistopheles as a demon is going to have a fascinating perspective on this whole scenario, and it'd be great to see his very non-human view of Faustus, the mortal world, and the world of the supernatural during the time that he's bound to Faustus.
Macbeth
Requests: Lady Macbeth, Hecate/Lady Macbeth, Macbeth/Lady Macbeth
Prompts:
- Generally I'm interested in anything with Lady Macbeth's POV on the events of canon - her relationship with Macbeth, her ambition, her ruthlessness, possibly her interests in the supernatural world and what it can provide for them, and also the moments where she does feel some sort of remorse or guilt for what she's doing but refuses to stop anyway.
- Hecate appears to Lady Macbeth during the scene in Act 1 where she demands the spirits "unsex me here". A deal with the devil (or rather, close contriver of all harms) ensues. Any insight into the world of the supernatural would also be great here, strange and horrifying as it can be.
- What happens if Lady Macbeth's the one who goes to the witches for more prophecies, and not Macbeth (or if she and Macbeth go together)? What would they want from her in return? Are there lines that even she will not cross?