Are you tired of conventional RusLiet that either feels too cutesy or too one-sided? Are you a curmudgeon who only sees the negative in life? Are you a contrarian who sees a ship and thinks about how it should fall apart? Do you just want to see Tolys and Ivan reenacting Spy vs. Spy cartoons, blowing each other up and hitting one another on the head with large and unwieldy mallets?
Have I got the event for you.
Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to put forth your aversion to joy and conflict resolution into a 3k-10k story covering the power struggle between the two characters. You can make this political or you can focus entirely on the human element, so long as you put the work in to be coherent as fiction. As an “anti-ship” style event, the goal is to explain why these two should NOT be in a relationship, or why said relationship would be fraught or outright doomed.
There are no prompts like in a regular weekly event. I believe the concept stands on its own well enough and with too little fannish exploration, and conventional prompts would actually take away from creator agency. In the absence of prompts, I will offer instead a list of parameters.
Works no less than three thousand words and no more than ten thousand words. This is to challenge writers to write something in a set-up and pay-off format but not grow overwhelmed by too large an idea.
Focus. Show the resentment and its consequences, show whether its unidirectional or reciprocated, show how they curdle the very air of any room they enter together. Please do not depict “the good times” as more than an afterthought.
Relatedly, this is not about what ships they should be in. Other ships should be excluded beyond offhand mentions in order to bolster the narrative.
While it is allowed and encouraged, this is not a horror/gore-themed event. Please be sure to dig into more than Vanya’s entrails.
Please tag your works appropriately with all warnings, and @ me at this blog so that I can share everything. I expect a level of abusive dynamics will be explored, if not more, so please allow people to dive in or avoid these things as they desire. Just as importantly, be respectful of one another. You can always blacklist the ship name and avoid all of this if even exploring it in this fashion boils your blood.
Posting dates: August 10-16 2026.
@hetaliacalendar
Thank you to @roszabell for making the banners for me <3
