melacka

So. 2025 is over and it sucked. Okay, it wasn’t that bad, I guess. I’m just trying really hard not to think of it as a total failure in fandom terms. I feel like I haven’t had a good year creatively since 2022, and that is mostly because of some pretty intense RL stuff that has made creating anything seem like too much emotional effort. There was a significant drop off in output over the last three years and I want to get back in the swing of things. Fandom has long been a place of refuge for me, somewhere I can go to read as much as I want of any sort of story I can find and lose myself for a little while in another world. My levels of reading fic have been very high over the last three years, but writing fic has been a mere fraction of what I would like to be doing. In 2025, for example, I only wrote five fics and all of them were for gift exchanges, one of which I signed up for (Fic in a Box, a total of three fics) and two of which were ones where I picked up a pinch hit but didn’t sign up for (Early Bird Gets The Word and Fandom 5k). I want 2026 to be better. So, for the first time I am going to set some actual goals.

I have a bit of a weird relationship with goals, since I rarely if ever set yearly goals or new year resolutions or anything, but I LOVE having a to do list and endless spreadsheets of things I’d like to do with various (usually vague AF) deadlines, so I guess those are just goals in disguise. I don’t think of them as goals, but I don’t know why since they look an awful lot like goals *facepalm* Also, I have a longstanding tendency to set thoroughly unattainable tasks/lists (again, not thinking of them as goals!) for myself and then abandoning them when I don’t meet the standard I want to. I’ve been doing that since I was a kid and I really should work on stopping that shit, since it never does me any good.

Anyway. My weird relationship with goals aside, I miss writing and participating in fandom and I feel like if I can find my way back to a level that I’m happy with, it might actually make me feel a bit happier in other aspects of my life, as well. Fandom has always been an excellent way for me to find the right kind of distraction and achieve a certain type of satisfaction in terms of writing, so a few achievable goals might be just what I need.

2026 Fandom Goals

Increase Writing Output

2022 was apparently my best year for sheer output. According to my AO3 stats page, I published 99,240 words across 95 works and at least 15 fandoms, which kind of blows my mind a little bit given how little I have written since then. In 2023, I published 40,493 words across 29 works and 13 fandoms. In 2024, I published 58,930 words across 31 works and 8 fandoms (this is the year I participated in a Big Bang and so 27,633 words of that total was for one fic). In 2025, I published a paltry 15,317 words across 5 works and 3 fandoms.

My goal this year is to publish 100k worth of fic.

Complete Movie Challenge + Associated Fic

I keep seeing people on tumblr making a gifset for a movie from every year that they’ve been alive and been super jealous that I have neither the skill nor the inclination to learn the skill to make gifsets. I can, however, watch movies, read fic and maybe even write fic about them. So, my second fandom goal for this year is to complete this challenge with fic, instead of gifs.

I was born in 1987, so I will be watching two movies for each year since then, one I have watched before and one I haven’t seen. I will then read at least one fic per movie and will write a fic for at least a quarter of them. This has the added benefit of watching more movies with my husband, which is one of my non-fandom goals for the year. Yay! I will post a brief review of the movies and the fic I read, thus counting towards my Fandom in 50 goals. This will be a total of 78 movies watched/fics read and 20 fics written (rounded up from 19.5) at a 100-word minimum.

Complete the 2025 Year of the OTP challenge for two different ships

The Year of the OTP challenge isn’t being run in 2026, so I’m just going to use the list from last year (which I wanted to do but never got further than looking at the list and wishing I had something to write) and complete it for two different ships from two different fandoms. I’m going to be really honest, I want to set a goal of five different ships and fandoms, but I am trying to be a little restrained for once. We’ll see how it works out this time.

Complete all WIPs on AO3

At the start of this year, I have three unfinished works on AO3 that have been languishing for a LONG time waiting for me to get back to them. It is, frankly, a little embarrassing how long I have left them unfinished, since two of them were meant to be gift fics. But this is the year I finally finish them, as well as the one gift fic I never finished/published at all. Honestly I cringe whenever I think of them, so it’ll be good to finally clear all AO3 WIPs and mark them as complete. I say AO3 WIPs because I have vague recollections of some extremely dubious HP fic I haven’t looked at since about 2008 on FF.net, and I have zero interest in revisiting them. I just feel like a completely different person to the one who wrote them, and so they will just have to remain unfinished, alas.

And now for a few self-explanatory goals!

Sign up for and complete assignments for at least five gift exchanges

Fill a prompt at fic_promptly at least once a month

Complete a Big Bang/Reverse Bang (any fandom, minimum 10k words written)

Complete the Fannish in 50 challenge

Dear creator

Thanks for stopping by! I’m so excited about this exchange and I can’t wait to see what you create for me. In this letter, I’ll go over some of my general likes, dislikes and DNWs, as well as some more specific information about the fandoms and ships/characters I’m requesting. A couple of things before I get into that, though. First, I am equally happy to receive content for any of my requested fandom, regardless of the order in which they appear in this letter or how much detail I go into when discussing them. I love all of these fandoms and am always looking for new content for them, so whichever one you matched with me on, I will be thrilled to receive content for it. Secondly, I am a multi-shipper across most of the fandoms that I read, and I have very few genuine NOTPs, so as long as you respect my DNWs, any background pairing you fancy is welcome along with the main ship or character I have requested. Where relevant, I have listed which pairings I very specifically Do Not Want for each fandom but if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out via the mods. Also, I haven’t gone into detail about the different opt-ins that I’ve selected as I basically just chose the ones that looked like fun for the fandoms.

General Likes: focus on female characters, friendship, mutual pining, idiots in love, banter, flirting, friends to lovers, enemies to friends to lovers, uneasy allies, antagonistic flirting, AUs, ALL THE TROPES (sharing a bed, trapped together, fake dating, huddling for warmth etc). I’m fine with any rating and most genres.

Prefer not to have: kidfic/pregnancy fic (mentions are fine, just not the main focus of the fic), A/B/O, unhappy endings

Hard DNWs: Non-con/dub-con (unless a sex pollen situation), incest (relationships between cousins in Austen works is fine), bestiality, watersports, hard D/s (mild D/s themes are fine), fisting, non-canon MCD, relentless angst, mpreg, permanent genderswap, humiliation (in both sexual and non-sexual contexts), animal cruelty, horror, graphic description of violence/torture.

And now, on to the fandoms! I have organised them first by category (Books and TV) and then alphabetically. I have given a mix of general prompts and some that are specific to a ship/character. If none of these prompts work for you, however, or if you would prefer to take a prompt from one fandom/pairing and use it for another, please go ahead. I just know it can be helpful to have a few indications of the sorts of things that your recipient likes, but I don’t want to box you in if none of the prompts work for you. Also, for some of the bigger fandoms where I have requested the full number of ships/characters, I don't have prompts for all of them. I just ran out of steam... Sorry. But again, please feel free to take any of the prompts listed below and apply them to your preferred fandom/pairing/character, or just disregard them entirely and do your own thing!

Pairing/Character Specific Prompts

And we're done! Phew, that got really long. I'm sorry if the pairing you were looking for was a little light on prompts (or missing entirely), but please know that as long as you respect my DNWs for each fandom, I'd be happy with any of the above prompts for any of my requests.

Thanks again for stopping by and I can't wait to see what you come up with!