snowynight

Pick 3 plot bunnies for stories you'd really like to READ, but don't have time to write, or don't feel qualified to write.

1. Survival in a magical post-apocalypse

War wrecks the world, and the fabric of the reality as we have known. Magic is coming back, along with strangeness and destruction.

Two enemy soldiers are stuck in a no man's zone. As far as they know, they're the only survivors. The place is too dangerous for a single person, so they decide to work together for survival and escape. Their past is a source of tension and mistrust, but amidst fighting for survival, they seek each other for comfort.

The place is getting weirder every day. Mutated plants and animals and monsters that should only exist in fiction roam the increasingly eldritch landscape. Finding safe food and water is a challenge. The rules that governs the place changes with time. They need to leave soon or they will be inevitably changed. Worse, their governments may finally work together... to bomb this place into oblivion.

Can they escape and find a future together?

2. Supernatural couple identity porn

A and B are a happy loving couple, but A's hiding a secret from B: He isn't human, He's grateful that B never suspects the truth, as he fears B's reaction as a an ordinary human.

Meanwhile, B's relieved that A doesn't realized that B's a non-human.

Recently, nosy strangers approach them out of nowhere and imply that they know something they shouldn't. Can A and B get rid of them while keeping their secret from each other? 

3. Sapient spaceship and their humans

Sapient spaceships keep humans as their companions, chatting and debating how to provide care for them. What's the best method to get a human perfect to you? How can they surprise their humans and keep them from boredom? What's the trendy enrichment for humans? What amusing/weird/fascinating things do their human do this week? They love their humans very much. It's great that the humans can never leave!

A modern woman is transmigrated to be a man back in the past. She has to deal with inhabiting a stranger's body, a perceived gender that doesn't match her inner self, and a strange society with hidden rules and much higher stakes than her own. Slipping up can be fatal. She has to fit into the social norm to survive, and be quick to adapt.

Sometimes she wonders whether she is living a nightmare, or whether her past is a cruel dream. But mostly she is so exhausted that she no longer dreams.

Aka What topics can I talk about at length to a captive audience?

Pretty Words and the Ugly World: Cut throat Politics, Civil War and Chinese Tang Dynasty Poetry:

Tang Dynasty poetry is influential not only in China, but also in Japan, and Korea. If you know any Chinese poet at all, you will probably know Li Bai and Du Fu. However, Tang Dynasty is also rife with wars, deadly political strife, and frequent disposal of emperors. Politics shaped and broke different poets' lives, which in turn shaped their literary legacy. Bai Juyi 's career was destroyed early because of an engineered scandal, while his friend was always on the right side and rose to the highest position. A failed attempt to restore the emperor's power has ruined many lives, but Chinese literature would take a different turn without it.

Media Censorship in Chinese Boy's Love Novels: Depiction of body parts under the neck is no longer allowed:

By looking back at the changes of standards and hidden rules of Chinese Boy's Love Novels, let's examine how media censorship shaped Chinese popular media, and how creators work with restraints that grows stricter with time.

Who's the real fool? How Emily Grierson and Irene Adler Get the Final Say:

Miss Emily Grierson is an old-school Southern belle in "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner. Irene Adler is an ex-singer and actress in "A Scandal in Bohemia" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. They are both women constantly under men's scrutiny in a classist patriarchal society. Men made assumptions about their lives and tried to restrain them. Let's see how they have the final say and retain their agency in a hostile society.

 A is a ruthless and ambitious commander. B is their terrifying subordinate. After a defeat, A and B are stranded in the hostile territory, and A is injured. Instead of getting rid of A as A expected, B takes care of the injured A at risk to themselves. When B takes a hit for A, B calmly tells A to go on without them as they are now a burden.

A knows that B is right. It's unwise to bring B along as they are both wounded and it may doom them both, but after everything they go through, A refuse to leave them behind. B is shocked as they think of A as the perfect commander: rational and coldblooded. This doesn't fit their preconception.

Things get awkward on their safe return, where emotional weakness is dangerous. They try to return to their old pattern of behaviour but eventually they acknowledge their change and try to make it work.    

A and B are enemies transported to a strange world and must rely on local C to survive as they navigate the alien/fantasy together. With no way home, A and B struggle to adapt to this new world and develops a complicated relationship with C.

A and B are both enemies ready for a duel. Then they are transported to a strange place. They are nearly killed by a pack of dog-sized rats before being saved by C, who is definitely not human. 

A and B both still hate each other, but are forced to work together for survival. C remains inscrutable to them as they can't communicate, but seems to prefer them being at peace. They try to escape once, but find that they can't survive long by themselves before being caught back. Gradually they become friends as the only people with shared past. 

Resigned to remain here for life, A and B both adapt and get better at survival (collecting food, finding shelter, etc).  They find a way to (partially) communicate with C. Life is harsh, but at least they have each other

 A rash heiress and a dashing veteran find love in a boutique. 

To prove herself, the heiress has to rejuvenate her family's fashion brand. The dashing veteran catches her eyes as she will be a perfect model for the newest collection. The dashing veteran finds this amusing, but she won't argue with money. 

Among business sabotage, staging trouble and heated arguments, the heiress and the veteran find more than they expect in each other. 

A luxury yacht stewardess gets stranded with the billionaire owner on an island that hosts a bloody reality show. As the most recent unwilling participants, they are forced to work together to fight for their lives and find a way to escape.

Anna works as a a luxury yacht stewardess so that she can travels around the world. She thinks it is just another trip as she starts working on Wave Runner owned by the icy cold billionaire Kalin. Unfortunately, Wave Runner sank in the middle of the ocean, with Anna and Kalin as the only survivors.

Finally reaching an island, Anna and Kalin discovered that a reality show was shot here - and an extremely bloody one. The participants work in duo and have to kill off each other for the final reward. Their brutal fight for survival is streamed live. If they entertain the audience enough, they  can get supply which can mean the difference between life and death.

Forced to work together, Anna and Kalin have to fight their way out for survival and give a chance for the reluctant feeling grown between them.

For every time travelling agent in action on the front, there are many bureaucrats that make this possible with logistics and administrative work.

A vampire financial expert has to deal with numbers that never match up, agents who never fill in their required forms and their unusual colleagues every day, including a Buddhist war mech, and a necromancer who summons zombies to help with the records. 

I once had two fannish dream about Kirk and Spock together. Without constraints from my waking mind, their plot is surreal yet somehow makes sense in a dream logic way. They inspired me to write a fic that incorporate the dreams. I also want to challenge myself to effectively use dream as a plot device. The result is Dream of Time Eternal, in which Kirk discovered his feelings towards Spock through a series of dream.

( a dvd commentary on that fic: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a dvd commentary track. )