Three Sentence Ficathon 2021

[rthstewart]

We have now opened a new post, for new prompts! Please leave all new prompts there. You may continue to fill existing prompts here. If you didn't get a prompt filled here, feel free to post it on the new post!

Welcome to the Three Sentence Ficathon!
2 Feb. 2021 See important edit below regarding where to find unfilled prompts.

What is the 3 Sentence Ficathon?
This is an open exchange where you answer a prompt with a fic consisting of only three sentences. It's open to all fandoms and you can post and fill as many prompts as you like, as many times as you want.

What do I do first?
You can start 3SF by posting prompts! When posting a prompt please format it this way:

fandom, character(s), prompt word/sentence.

Only one prompt per comment please. So, for example,

Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi, I don't like sand."

Open ended and anthropomorphic fills are popular too, such as:

Any, Any, "I don't like sand."

or

Earth geography, sand, "I don't like humans very much, either."

What happens after that?
You answer other posters' prompts in three sentences (or more if you can't stop yourself) and fill as many prompts as you want, as many times as you wish. If you see that a prompt you loved has already been filled, go ahead and fill it again! Multiple fills of the same prompt are allowed and even encouraged! (We get really fun stories going this way).

Can I still post if I need more than 3 sentences? Or should I just abuse grammar in ways the English language never contemplated?
Yes. Yes.

But I'm not a member of Dreamwidth
No problem. You can comment anonymously or through open ID

I'm really overwhelmed by all the prompts and how much there is and how fast it goes. I can't read 1,000 prompts and fills. It's too much. 
I hear this a lot and it keeps a lot of people from participating.  The 3SF is big and it moves fast, especially at first.  I get overwhelmed, too, and I'm hosting the thing. With 2020 and 2021 sucking so badly you don't want something that's supposed to be fun cause you anxiety.  I have a couple of suggestions for managing the 3SF volume. 

• First, really, you don't have to read every prompt and fill on every page.  You can start at the last page of this and just go forward, or back a page or two.  It's fine.
  
• You can come and go as time and energy allow, you don't have to participate the whole time, and it drops off quite a bit by mid-February.
• Even after the 3SF and new prompting end, people fill prompts all year long.
• You can fill an already filled prompt and you can can leave a prompt that's already been prompted before.  People do it all the time. 

Always make sure you're looking at top-level comments only, not threaded. That helps a lot. Your screen should look like this.




But shouldn't I read everything to see if someone already prompted the same prompt I want to leave if someone already filled it? 
No.  Prompt as many times as you want, as much as you want.  It doesn't matter if someone prompted the exact same prompt.  Go ahead and prompt again!

I left a prompt and no one filled it.  Can I prompt it again?
Absolutely!

Can I spread the word?
Yes, please. I generally fail at creating banners and embed codes but if you create one and make it really idiot-proof, I might be able to post and share it.  Feel free to cross-post this entry. If you create your own banners or icons, let me know and I'll share!
Please share the 3SF with your followers, friends, and any channels and comms you are active on.  I'll post on fandom calendar, Tumblr, and Twitter, but I don't have many connections in other spaces such as Discord.

How long will it go?
The 3SF closes to new prompts on February 28, 2021. The entry stays open permanently and people post fills all year long.

Are there any rules about cross-posting?
Nope, you can post wherever you want, whenever you want. A lot of folks collected their responses together and posted them on AO3 under the 3 sentence fiction tag. 3SFs are a terrific prompt for remixes and could be helpful for Yuletide bears, too.

What about spoilers, content and archive warnings, triggers, pairings, ratings, tags, and squick?

I thought a lot about this. It boils down to reader beware.  In my experience, this typically gets too big, moves too fast, and the stories are too short for content warnings and ratings to even apply. It is too big for me to moderate in this way. You should assume spoilers are fair game and that the initial poster and the responder have opted to use no content warnings or tags. This means AO3 content warnings for dubcon, violence, canon character death, underage, etc. COULD be present. I've found personally that I can skim and scroll by stuff that, from the prompt, I can tell isn't my favorite flavor of delicious cake. Use your best judgment and be prepared to skip over things that aren't your thing. In this format, the obligation is on you, the reader, to protect yourself from triggering content.
Some posters do include warnings and spoiler tags in subject lines or include spoiler space, but they don't have to do so.

Why is 3SF split among several posts?  That seems confusing.
It is confusing and we always lose momentum once we have to move to a second post. The reason is because at 5,000 comments to a single post, DW installs a human test CAPTCHA, which is a pain for users.  So, once this entry gets to the upper 4,000 comments, I open a new post.  If you've been waiting until things slow down to participate, when we open a second post is often a good place to join.

If I have questions, what do I do?
I'm rthstewart everywhere, here, Twitter, Tumblr, gmail and AO3.

A special thank you to conuly  .
Last year, Conuly started logging all unfilled prompts.
This year's (2021) unfilled prompts are here.
Last year's (2020) unfilled prompts are here.

Conuly asks that you not reply, as they want to be able to edit and add more prompts to the list.
Conuly does this just because they are an awesome person but should you want to write them fic in thanks, you can find a birthday wish list here.

Here is the 3SF 2021 Friending Meme to show of your new DW account.

Here, have some icons and banners and let me know if you've created your own!

 

text box you can try to cut and paste

<a href="https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/166704.html" _fcksavedurl="https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/166704.html" _fcksavedurl="https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/166704.html" _fcksavedurl="https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/166704.html" target="_blank"><img src=" https://imgur.com/f3B21LX.png?2" _fcksavedurl=" https://imgur.com/f3B21LX.png?2" _fcksavedurl=" https://imgur.com/f3B21LX?2" _fcksavedurl=" https://imgur.com/f3B21LX.png?2" alt="" /></a>

Comments

[scrivespinster]

Fallen London, any, Collecting coins

[(Anonymous)]

Yu-Gi-Oh! DM, Serenity Wheeler, touch

[(Anonymous)]

stars align (hoshiai no sora), tsubasa/takenouchi, noise

[petra]

<3 <3 <3 Edmund would be an absolute terror to teach if he put his mind to it.

[(Anonymous)]

any, any, cheesy pop songs

[(Anonymous)]

any, any, "And I flat out refuse to have one of those lives that I wouldn’t even want to read about." -One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies by Sonya Sones

[(Anonymous)]

any, any female character, finding a way to be a girl that doesnt hurt

[buttonloops]

HA.

Edmund's terse reply of "Sir" is so excellently chosen, delightful contrast to the gargantuan sentence preceding, really love it

Sailor Moon

[arysthaeniru]

Rei's hands close around Ami's, mirth dancing in her eyes, as the others finish transforming back to normal around them.

"Ice Queen," she teases, gently, pressing heat into the chilled digits of her best friend's hand. "You don't get this cold when you use Bubble Spray Attack."

Ami shrugs, and tries not to flush at the searing heat that erupts along her body, wherever Rei touches her. "But this is more useful to everybody, so it doesn't matter." A sudden boldness seizes her, when she meets Usagi's mischievous gaze across the way, "Besides, Rei-chan, you'll always warm me up, won't you?"

Re: Star Wars: original trilogy

[buttonloops]

oh threepio, never change. this is a delight

Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina

[tellshannon815]

She's been trying to tell herself over and over again ever since her encounter with the Eldritch Terror version of Edward Spellman, that man wasn't who Edward would have been had he lived. Ambrose had told her that the people who returned were not themselves; Sabrina shouldn't take to heart his rejection of her on the grounds that Lucifer Morningstar was her biological father.

Yet the experience had made her grateful to have been raised by her aunts; Zelda to ground her in witch society, Hilda understanding her need to maintain her links with her mortal side and her friends, both of them always there for her; Sabrina couldn't deny that aunts (and cousins, of course, she said to Ambrose) were the best.

[eagleoftheninth]

Any, any, "if your parents weren't dead already I'd kill them for what they did to you"

Re: Fill: Chuubo's Marvellous Wish-Granting Engine, Seizhi/Miramie

[arysthaeniru]

I am actually not, haha! I guess that's a testament to the mood your writing created, hehe.

[scytale]

Yes! :D

[arysthaeniru]

"You know, when I first heard the name, it almost sounded fake to me. I figured it was on purpose." Jet's trying to be sympathetic, but Faye doesn't really want his pity-filled voice aimed in her direction, as sharp as the scissors he uses to neatly snip, snip, snip the bonsai's leaves.

Faye doesn't need pruning anymore. She has so little to herself.

"Coming from you, I'll take it as a compliment." she deflects, looking down at her manicured nails. Had that strange, cheerful high-schooler in the videos liked the glint and shine of a perfectly-crisp manicure too? Or had she been more than an intricate set of polished mirrors, aimed to reflect whatever people wanted to see back at them?

[(Anonymous)]

Narnia, Reepicheep et al. The mice of Narnia were an unseen force defending the US Capitol from insurrectionists on 1/6.

Yakuza/Ryu Ga Gotoku

[arysthaeniru]

"You make a series of incisions into the pork, and then season it afterwards. Makes it more flavourful," Fei Hu explains, as Majima watches him dice up the food with the same precision and intricacy that he wields every one of his exotic rare weapons in their training sessions.

It's been a long day, almost eight hours straight of working at both Sunshine and the Grand, so Majima doesn't quite have the correct filter, and muses bluntly, "Wonder if my skin'd taste'a chillis by this point." He remembers vaguely, the pain of that torture, down in the Hole.

Fei Hu's knife stills and his gaze comes up to rest on his eyepatch. They don't talk about the origin of their scars, though, so he simply takes a handful of diced garlic and presses it into the meat, a sadness permeating through his shoulders, at what they have been through.

[last_haven]

It's funny, what you accept as normal if you don't know anything different--monsters raised in Waterfall never seem to grasp how unsettling the echo flowers are to monsters from other parts of the Underground. The endless, looping whispers of the echo flowers just start to sound like background static; they're easy to forget.

The echo flowers, however, never forget. Even after they hear a new phrase, a trace remains of old voices, engraved on the flower like a tear in a leaf. Hopeful whispers, choked sobs, forgotten songs, and always the wishes of those now gone.

Echo flowers remember what they hear, always.

[MCU/Thor] Hope Ever-Burning

[acequeenking]

Thor's breath catches as the cat circles his legs; it is small and black, and while Loki has generally preferred snakes to cats, both are aloof enough for Loki to take.

"Loki?" He asks; with care he reaches between his legs, tries to rub the head of the cat.

But the cat sprints away, down the street, before Thor can reach its furry temples, and Thor is left unsure whether it is Loki or not -- but still, he hopes.

Re: Yakuza/Ryu Ga Gotoku

[acequeenking]

Oh this is lovely!

Re: Pathologic - Let Them Eat Cake

[acequeenking]

Good last line :)

[(Anonymous)]

‘So as you see, in my household you would never lack anything, and of course there would be no need for this running around and riding, and even-’ the latest of Susan’s suitors, this one a minor prince more odious than most, shudders as he says: ‘fighting’, and throws her what he must assume is a charming smile.
Susan dredges up every last bit of willpower she has left and opens her mouth, intending for a polite but firm rejection, when suddenly a lightning fast projectile shoots out of the sea and hits the prince straight between the eyes, and knocks him out cold.
Before Susan can do more than kneel at his side, finding a strange looking disc-like object about the size of the palm of her hand lying in the sand, the waters part again and this time a determined looking mermaid appears.
The mermaid’s eyes furtively search the beach until they land on Susan and her companion, and then they visibly widen: ‘your majesty!’ she exclaims ‘I am sorry, I didn’t see you there, I don’t suppose you saw..-’ ‘This?’ Susan interrupts, holding up the disc.
She throws the object to the mermaid, who eagerly grasps onto it and immediately dives back down, and moves forward to peer into the water, just about managing to catch the mermaid whack the disc through the water with her tail and race after it.
Susan stares after her, startled and amazed, and when she eventually steps back to try to rouse her suitor she is already thinking about what she’s going to tell her sibling, and whether it might be possible to observe this strange activity again.

[Star Wars] Shmi & Rebellion

[(Anonymous)]

Every time she performs a surgery, Shmi feels the presence of her own (deactivated) chip burrowed somewhere in her flesh and must concentrate to push aside all that tries to overwhelm her; that desperation belongs to the patients she helps, it was never her own.

Shmi is caught only once, but Beru has a Whitesun's memory of masters even two generations later, and her lips, trembling at the sight of blood, remain sealed.

Her younger self might not have recognized these acts as rebellion—her long ago dreams were grandiose—but that feeling when a patient survives is familiar, nonetheless.

Oh hey finally someone who agrees with me that Molly Weasley is terrible and Arthur's an enabler

[last_haven]

Molly finds out about Lily's birth about three weeks too late; she sits in her living room, next to the knitting needles and their perpetual work, and cries. Arthur can only refill her cup of tea as she wails.

"Why won't they talk to me? Wasn't I good mother? Didn't make their lunches, teach them their letters? Didn't I kiss every scrape, didn't I tie every shoe lace?"

Arthur looks down at the sloshing tea as he pours and thinks of all the times he watched her write off Fred and George as hopeless, each time she ignored toddler Ron to fuss over a colicky baby Ginny. He thinks of Bill's pained face as she cut his hair before his wedding only to shriek later when he spelled it long again before the ceremony. He thinks of how Charlie would flinch each time she told him she was was waiting for him to bring home a nice girl, to make her a grandbaby.

Arthur sits, thinking of the times their children died from a thousand cuts, and realizes that it wasn't like he ever there to staunch the wounds.

Arthur doesn't say "well, it was to be expected that they'd leave," but he certainly thinks it.

[siver]

To love your Summoner was simply a matter of course; to fall in love was an act met with pity--a story that could only serve as a warning.
Tidus never understood these whispers and thought the whole thing nonsense until truth after truth was revealed. Love a Summoner or love a dream; maybe they could somehow cancel each other and one and one could still make two instead of zero, or maybe it was only a fool's hope, but if so, he'd choose to be the fool.