Three Sentence Ficathon 2022

[rthstewart]

This post is NOW CLOSED TO NEW PROMPTS!  PLEASE POST YOUR NEW PROMPTS HERE, IN POST 2!  Do continue to fill prompts here but please put all new prompts in Post 2.

 

Welcome to the Three Sentence Ficathon!

Here's a Friending meme!

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 at bit after about 2 weeks and especially once we open a new post because this one is approaching 4,500 comments.
• 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.

Here's my attempt at a text box that might go horribly awry.

<br /><a href="https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/172142.html" _fcksavedurl="https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/172142.html"><img src="https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/file/71907.jpg" _fcksavedurl="https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/file/71907.jpg" alt="" title="3 Sentence Ficathon 2022 Banner" /></a>




How long will it go?
The 3SF closes to new prompts on February 13, 2022. The entry stays open permanently and people post fills all year long.  (There were a bunch of new posts to the 2021 3SF this week!)

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 (and much more). 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, protect yourself, 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 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.

 

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



      

Comments

[svgurl]

Elementary, Joan/Jamie, play pretend

[dawen]

any, any, thunderstorms

[word_devourer]

Ooh, I'm not familiar with this situation and character, but I love the vibes I'm picking up.

[(Anonymous)]

Any, any, unexpected mercy

[be_themoon]

opens mouth

shuts it

i showed this comment to rudy and he laughed at me, RUDE

but yes this was excellent and it did make me very sad, thank you

Re: Narnia, Lucy and Peter

[kalira]

Oh this is so lovely a look at not only Peter (perhaps from the one of his siblings who always expected and trusted him to handle everything) but Lucy as well. ♡

Re: Labyrinth, Jareth

[kalira]

bahaha, that's fantastic! XD

[demigodscum]

Din isn't sure how they got here: Manda'yaim, him Mand'alor, her (only, she would say, only) his riduur.

He isn't sure what it means when Bo-Katan lets her touch linger on his throat, or when she spends the entire day visiting the ruins of the old Royal Palace, or when she leaves the city limits to go out into the desert on her own, or when she locks the door to their room — or whether it means anything at all (anything more than respect, which is her justification) that she refuses to address Din by name while he's armed with the Darksaber.

The only thing he's sure of, though, is that Bo-Katan seldom has only one reason for doing anything, and that's as much as Din will ever know.

[grandmemester]

Arrowverse, Ragdoll, claustrophobia

[word_devourer]

They had agreed, early on, that though their situations were very similar, what with having temporarily been together with one side of Paris' premier superhero duo/new power couple, that certainly wasn't reason enough for the two of them to be together; after all, they were people, not products with a 'people who bought this also bought' notification attached.

That said, if Kagami found herself more comforted than she should be by Luka's total lack of confusion at her sometimes-fumbling attempts to be sociable, or couldn't quite take her eyes off the smooth, thoughtless way his fingers moved along the frets of his guitar, that was a completely different story. And if Luka just happened to hear fragments of her name echoing in everything he listened to, or caught himself smiling at the way she always knew what she wanted and sometimes invited him along, well... two notes harmonized best when there was just the right amount of difference between them.

[petra]

The worldbuilding I can feel around the edges of this story makes my fingers itch with wanting to learn more. This reads as arranged marriage fic (and did even before I googled riduur), wherein Bo-Katan clearly has an agenda, and it is not to sleep peacefully at his side.

The machinations run deep.

Re: And He Isn’t You (MCU No Way Home, MJ/Peter Parker (sort of))

[vialethe]

Right?? That movie brought up a lot of unanswered questions as to how this whole spell works and exactly what it means for Peter and everyone he's ever met and every place he appeared in the digital record...

[goodbyebird]

Wheel of Time, Moiraine/Siuan, pufferfish.

[goodbyebird]

Wheel of Time, Nynaeve, tools.

[goodbyebird]

Wheel of Time, Lan & Moiraine, shield.

[topaz_eyes]

Any, any, they got a midnight voice like some beckoning saint

[demigodscum]

This rings true, for what little I know of those shows.

Re: pls continue to be this rude

[demigodscum]

Ooh, I quite like this.

"The armor is the weapon. The body is how you use it." A+

[goodbyebird]

Wheel of Time, Liandrin, exile.

Avengers, Bucky (& a mention of Clint)

[(Anonymous)]

Bucky wonders if it was like this for Steve when he came out of the ice, though it's certainly not now. He never sees Steve in the early hours unable to sleep. It’s a relief to see Clint already sitting on the couch, curled up in blankets, TV on quietly, letting him know that he’s not the only one whose memory is dancing with ghosts in the dark.

[scytale]

No sounds of laughter or excitement ring out in the marketplace, and the merchants are blank-eyed and listless, letting her haggle the price down far too easily.

The indifferent gossips tell her that the god has not yet been found, and she thanks them for the news and takes the long mountain path back to her small house; when her handsome husband returns from the flocks at twilight, she tells him her worries, her words dripping with fear at the strange new world they live in.

"There's nothing we can do," he says, wrapping his arms around her and kissing her until she feels safe again; the night cradles her like the embrace of wings and Psyche thinks about how fortunate she is to wed such a loving, considerate man, to live in a house filled with joy and happiness, even in a world where all passion has flown away.



(with thanks to nyappytown at tumblr for taking a quick look to make sure the sentences make sense, mistakes my own)

[goodbyebird]

Arcane, Jinx & Sevika, shopping. (I MEAN)

Narnia, Digory & Polly

[arveldis]

When the world at last came into focus, Digory and Polly discovered that the pool they had jumped into led to a world altogether strange: They found themselves standing on what seemed to be opposite sides of a dividing line, separating a land of snow and ice and driving winds, as cold as the depths of winter—which Polly stood in, shivering and wrapping her sweater tighter around her body—from a land of knee-high grass and birdsong and sunlight, as warm as the fullest flush of summer—which Digory stood in, peeling his coat from his shoulders.

“What is this place?” Polly asked, teeth chattering, and she at once leapt over to Digory’s side, where in an instant the warmth of the sun melted the snowflakes that had been gathering on her hair and shoulders, and she let out a great sigh of relief and tilted her face up to the sunlight.

“I don’t know,” said Digory, bending over to look at the divide between the two lands more closely—it was merely a furrow of empty soil, and the two lands abutted against it—before shivering in a sudden chill despite the warmth and adding, “but let’s not stay here any longer.”

[demigodscum]

This is exactly what I was going for \o/

[ruanchunxian]

Katy

Shaun asks her once why she goes by her English name when Ruihua doesn’t even have one.

“Because he’s the boy and is supposed to eventually carry on the family and heritage, I guess,” Katy says, shrugging, having never really thought about it that much – in her head, she is always Katy first, before she is Ruiwen, “but that obviously doesn’t stop random white dudes down at the shop going, ‘I’mma call you Ray for short’ on the rare chance they deign to speak to us.”

And if their Chinese names are going to be pushed to the sideline anyway, in Katy’s case it’s at least going to be her choice.  

---

Ruiwen

“Which characters for rui and wen make up your name?”

This isn’t a question that anyone has ever asked Katy, not in America, anyway, but then Shaun is not ABC and the meanings behind the syllables matter to him, still.

A memory Katy previously thought long forgotten blooms in her mind. Waigong was introducing her and her brother to some friends of his, and explained their names as, “祥瑞的瑞, 十色雯华的雯华: rui as in xiangrui, and wenhua as in shise wenhua.”

Over the years, Katy has forgotten what that actually means even if she can sort of parrot the explanation still.

Apparently, she and her brother both are auspicious clouds, according to some ancient poem that Shaun cites: “Xiangrui means auspicious, lucky, and wenhua refers to multicoloured clouds that form when sunlight shine through it. Ruiwen and ruihua can both be used to refer to this cloud form which is considered good omens.”

Katy is not well-versed enough in what education is like in China to tell whether this level of knowledge is normal, even if Shaun is giving her this explanation like it is common knowledge.

“Of course, you should probably ask Waipo to confirm if that’s what it’s actually supposed to mean,” Shaun concludes.