You may be acquainted with the night

- Survival in rough situations

Aloy,    

So I am 90% through Frozen Wilds and have finished the main game at the time of writing this and I have a LOT OF FEELINGS about this game, this universe, these characters. SO MUCH. I selected Aloy as the character but you are welcome to include ANYONE else in the cast, or write about her from anyone else's POV. I only ask you leave Nil out of it, his head isn't something I want to see inside of.

On a personal note, I'm adopted, so found family stories mean a lot to me. Likewise stories like Aloy's, with in/out group dynamics, hit really hard. Also, it's really easy to read Aloy as ace and so I do for my own headcanon. You don't have to yourself, but if you want to queer the narrative I'd love her to be slow to figure out romance and for sex to be... not very interesting. I love how clueless she is when folks are hitting on her as is, and you can pretty much ship her with anyone (but preferably not Nil, Sylens, or the morally disreputable).

Prompts (I am going to try to do these in sortof character connected chunks)

With Rost
Rost works a bit better on paper than on screen, I think, and his 'final test' with Aloy is a great example of that. We have two things that bug me:

 

1) He has Aloy go hunting this SUPER SCARY NEW BEAST ALONE WITH NO REAL WARNING or even ANSWERS and at the end says "Do you get it" and when she answers "Yes! I can hunt on my own!" he goes "NO you're SUPPOSED TO CARE ABOUT PEOPLE" (to paraphrase)
 

I feel like the game devs realized they didn't give Aloy reason to care about the Nora as a whole, and that here Rost could do so but... too little to late? This doesn't work. Rost is a smart man and not entirely emotionally broken, at least not from what we see, he's just hidebound and cautious. If you like writing Rost, what would him raising Aloy to care about the Nora (without stepping into their spaces/breaking taboo) look like?

2) Aloy has made clear for a very long time that she doesn't really care about the Nora (see point 1) and that her plan is to find out about her mother and then almost certainly come back 'home'. Rost knows outcasts who return don't always find themselves able to, or he should based on the game's worldbuild. His "now I am leaving you so you have no choice but to go to them' makes...no sense with knowing a) how Aloy is likely to break taboo when she TALKS ABOUT IT CASUALLY and has no respect for it, and b) he's never given her reason to want to be part of the Nora, as far as we are shown in canon.

I'd love to see an alternate take on this with Aloy calling him out about what is essentially abandoning her. He gets a pass in game by dying nobly to save her but if he hadn't, he'd have literally abandoned her to deal with living with the Nora on her own, just like her tribe had abandoned her with him. I feel like Aloy could have said a lot more and swung his mind around, or at least they should have had an actual conversation.

With Avad
I love Aloy's interactions with Avad, her straightforward nature and his political dealings and I feel like he finds her very refreshing. I'd love to see things investigating how many times Aloy has saved Avad, Avad's family, Avad's people... I mean, the man OWES HER and that could be interesting to play with. What are Carja romance traditions like? What if Aloy doesn't recognize that she's being courted? What if Avad wants to court but has to deal with politics and someone wanting him to have a noble wife? 

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Because this show is a webseries aimed at kids, they only ever gloss the surface of subjects that really REALLY ought to have conversations or entire episodes about. I want fic that tackles the stuff they keep skipping over, or barely mention. Let's talk about abusive parents, bad friendships, and what Happily Ever After really means. I love what this show could have been and am genuinely sad it was cancelled because of internal politics and Disney being jerks, so getting to see some depth and resolution would mean a ton to me!

If you're a huge Apple fan, I'll admit I find the series does her no favors as she's honestly more selfish than anything and really needs some solid lessons in self awareness, but I can also admit that she's a teenage girl who is a reflection of her upbringing and societal expectations, so it's less hate and more a desire to see her actually grow.

Prompts: 

Dragon Games especially gives me so so many feelings. There's so much to unpack in that set of episodes that I feel never really got dug into due to the nature of the show. Consider the following a series of thoughts/questions/ideas that you could take ANY point from and write about and I'd be extraordinarily happy.

Apple. Apple. I genuinely feel bad for her on one hand, because she's clearly coming from a terrible relationship with her mother, but at the same time she is focused on her 'Happily Ever After' to the point of doing irreparable harm to her friends and her future kingdom. She's obsessed with it - and this doesn't feel like a 'because my mother wants me to be' thing, but as a self driven need. She spends 3/4 of the series trying to encourage Raven to give up her freedom and choice, to become 'evil', while at the same time calling Raven her 'best friend'. Is that what friends do to one another? Apple doesn't seem to ever really question it, not even when Raven calls her on it.

Apple hurts Charming and her focus is on her happily ever after. Apple frees the Evil Queen and worries about her reputation (and happily ever after) instead of the threat to her school. She only sees the mistake when she's been betrayed and the school is already destroyed. She literally needs the world to end to realize she's done something wrong. What are the consequences of this, really? Does she even ever realize how far she's gone before she apologizes and 'makes right'?

Apple seems to think that she and Raven are supposed to be best friends, 'forever after', but there isn't a lot of... well, plot to support this? It's clearly her motivation at points, but her mother and Raven's mother aren't friends, and there's no indication of villains and royals getting along in general story beats, so where does that come from? What makes her think that they are going to be friends, when even Raven points out (in the stables) that you can't be on both sides, in Apple's perfect idea of the future. 

After Apple apologizes Raven forgives her SO fast, which I honestly wish had been expanded on and that Apple had to work harder for, because this isn't one mistake, this is the last straw in a long line of frankly abuses. Right after that Apple is poisoned and Raven apologizes for daring to... want to live her life, for staying around and making friends and not leaving everyone and everything behind. Apple never gets to hear that or understand it. She seems to finally clue in at the very end that 'being enslaved by the evil queen isn't what Raven would want' and that she might have to find her own happily ever after in another form, but there's something in how long it takes and how much it takes to get there, and how little reflection Apple gets to have on her enchanted sleep, or the fact that Darling Charming is actually her true love.

So in other words: Some self reflection from Apple and Raven, maybe Apple having to work to regain Raven's trust, maybe Raven reflecting on the life she was willing to sacrifice for her friends in the hope they could defeat her mother - there was no guarantee after all, maybe Apple's friends telling her that Raven needs time to heal, I'd love to see actual repercussions for what Apple did, and growth. (I mean, how many of their friend group is grateful to Raven for what she did, and hearing her suggest she shouldn't have and what their lives would have been destined to be if Raven hadn't fought for herself and her friend

Non Dragon Games Prompts :

Apple finding out what Raven's future would be in their "Happily Ever After'

What does Apple think Raven's future is, in their predestined story, knowing how Raven's mother is treated, how all villains are treated? How would she handle finding out about Raven's  'real destiny' that Raven was shown from the book?  I'd like to think that she's not malicious, just selfish and clueless, and Raven ending in chains and shunned being her actual ending might just be something Apple's never considered.

Bonus points: at one point earlish in the series, Raven agrees to sign the book to save her friends. This is an incredibly selfless act - but what that would have meant for Raven? Do any of her friends know or understand at all? What if Apple gets to see the outcome of that choice, and what it means to Raven? Raven is so selfless compared to Apple, I'd love to see that really examined.
 
Raven distancing herself from her mother: 

The Evil Queen is exactly that, and a terrible, manipulative, gaslighting creature who cares not one bit about her daughter, a fact that is made abundantly clear, yet the series always plays it as a "Well, she's just like that" acceptances. We've seen Raven be angry, but I feel like after Dragon Games we have a whole new level of angry where it is abundantly clear that the EQ doesn't want raven, she wants a dress-up doll. 

"She's going to be evil because I gave her no choice! All of my plotting and planning has finally got me what I want"

I would love to see Raven refuse to speak to her mother, and have Raven's friends and Adults in her life support that.

Apple and Raven really discussing their mothers and the fact that they're not very good people nor mothers.
Exactly what it says on the tin, Snow White isn't exactly a great parent either. The two of them bonding over what is frankly abuse (and maybe seeing that their relationship could be healthier in the future) would be great.