coaltide | One Wank After Another

There's someone in a fandom of mine who has a lot of DNWs that ban any mentions of prior sexual or romantic relationships, so everyone must be a complete virgin who has never had even a crush on anyone else, and these DNWs do apply to canonical relationships. It appears to apply to every character in the story, not just the requested characters, and they have also banned F/F and F/M, so no heterosexual married OCs briefly mentioned in the background of a crowd scene and no mentions of the character's parents. They appear to be attempting to use their DNWs to make their writer write them a fic where their ship is completely and totally obsessed with each other.

This is also a historical canon and they have DNW'd any modern AUs, but also any anachronisms, which was brought up more than once in their list, so that's also kind of tricky to make work. Not impossible, but tough, since it would be anachronistic for them to be totally fine with being gay without having any prior exposure to the concept that it was fine. Could maybe thread the needle on this, but it would require real thought. They don't seem to want a fic that's heavy on the historical homophobia either.

I could maybe make it work, except that one of the requested characters has been canonically previously married with kids. This is, in my opinion, pretty important to how they act in canon. The requester seems hung up on this point enough that I would worry that even if I made sure that there were no explicit or implicit references to this canonical relationship, the way that I would write that character might not be enough of a pure as the driven snow virgin for them.

This participant sounds a lot like someone I've written for in the past, and if we're thinking of the same person, I found them extremely easy to please. What I did was think of my fic for them as a 'capsule' in which the requested pair existed, with no past events mentioned. It was actually very easy and I didn't feel boxed in, but then again I *did* want to write a fic where that pairing was completely obsessed with each other, so YMMV.

As for avoiding anachronisms, I just set the fic in a canon location and drew all the imagery from it. One of the characters in the pairing I wrote is canonically repressed and standoffish, so that worked really well to explore his angst about being attracted to another man, although I didn't go too heavy on this.

I think that if you avoid all mentions or suggestions of previous relationships and focus the story on the requested pairing, you'll be golden!

"It's not railroading at all! It's perfectly easy to do if the exact fic they wanted is the one you wanted to write anyway!"

I think the keyword here was "YMMV", coalie. Chill.

If "Don't mention past relationships" is "railroading" and "forced to write fic to spec" to you, maybe you're not a great fit for exchanges, because you don't seem to be remotely creative or good at this.

I'm just summarizing what coalie above said, man. Didn't say anything about my own preferences re: railroading.

To me, the DNWs and likes together read less as "Don't mention prior relationships" and more as a want for an AU where zero prior relationships ever happened. The first is super easy, the second becomes something I find railroad-y and isn't what I want to write, which is why I removed the fandom from my offers.

DC

less as "Don't mention prior relationships" and more as a want for an AU where zero prior relationships ever happened

They're the same for the reader.

You're writing a story. If you don't mention or allude to something happening within the story, then to the reader it will be like it never happened.

No one is stopping you from having long and detailed headcanons about the thing happening offscreen.

But that's the core issue of the whole thread. Some coalies feel that their recip "basically wants a commission" because for them anything that limits their creative freedom equals "commission". It's lack of flexibility in their writing skills combined with an attitude that fundamentally doesn't understand the "gift" part in "gift exchange".

A laundry list of all the exact ways you want this ship written and all the hurdles the author needs to dodge to make the gift enjoyable to you is a tiny bit more than "anything that limits creativity", but keep wanking.

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