Yuletide 2017 Letter (updated 10/11/17)

[skazka]

tropes and likes / DNWs / challenges

An American Werewolf In London (1981) | The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (2007) | Dark City (1998) | The Dark Tower - Stephen King | Philip Marlowe - Raymond Chandler | We Were Liars - E. Lockhart



Some general things I dig:

- historical details, material culture, pop culture
- allegiances and loyalty (especially loyalty kink!)
- monsters! ghosts, vampires, werewolves, revenants...
- psychological horror
- body horror (surprise new orifices, involuntarily changing bodies, parasites, viral transformations, losing control over your own body and mind…)
- gothic horror tropes -- mysteries and the macabre
- noir tropes -- doubles! identity trouble! perversity, pessimism, fatalism, and menace!
- claustrophobia, doubt, guilt, and decay
- trauma and PTSD, memory and personal baggage
- adventures, mayhem, and voyages of self-discovery
- road trips
- character death
- spooky atmosphere -- decaying hotel rooms, sinister places, oppressive atmospheres
- cozy atmosphere -- small-scale domesticity, hospitality
- poetry and songs
- goofy humor
- religious themes and elements
- family relationships and parental baggage
- friends-to-lovers, allies-to-friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers-while-remaining-enemies
- partners in crime
- dramatic irony
- in-universe documents (letters, manuscripts, etc.)
- unusual formats (interactive fiction, illustrated fic, etc.)
- continuing adventures and rebuilding friendships

Ship-wise, I dig intimacy between friends and allies, and screwed-up bleak bad-guy hatesex, and just about anything between those poles, really. (I love noncon and dubcon, especially antagonistic or psychologically muddled angles and characters making difficult bargains using sex.) I especially enjoy loyalty kink, agonized pining both reciprocated and unreciprocated, hurt/comfort with one or more parties getting tragically roughed up or whumped to hell and back and needing stoic ministrations, hurt/comfort where a rough or unpleasant person is the recipient of the comfort whether they like it or not, sex happening before feelings and then feelings show up to the party and make everything weird, enemies-to-lovers, quarrelsome but ride-or-die friendships turned romantic, and characters who just can't stay away from each other. I know my likes sound pretty grim, but I'm equally happy and thrilled to receive gentle domestic comfort!fic.

If you're interested in writing smut: I love size differences, age differences, aggressive inexperienced characters, body worship, oral, handjobs, frottage and non-penetrative sex, clothed/semi-clothed sex, hatesex and fighting-turned-fucking, breathplay, inhibitions and interpersonal baggage in the bedroom, anonymous or pseudo-anonymous hookups, noncon and dubcon, painful or clumsy but fun and tender sex, tragically clumsy fail sex, wound fingering, sexy use/misuse of magic powers, characters seeking sex for comfort, characters having sad sex while thinking of other people (especially if it's two people thinking about the same person!), sadomasochism, rough body play, smoking/sharing cigarettes/cigarette burns, and time-period-specific sexual practices and meeting places.

I'm fine with any format/structure of fic, from casefic to character study to PWP. As far as nominated characters, you are under zero obligation to include all (or only) my requested characters in the same fic! I'm up for anything in terms of plot and structure: plotty longfic, short and sweet introspection, mysteries, casefic, PWPs, cracky hijinks, five-times fic, etc. Pairing-wise, I've tried to make mention of specific ships I'm especially fond of, including those that extend beyond requested characters, but I'm not monoshippy in any fandom and I'm pretty flexible. I dig slash, femslash, het, gen, and anything else you want to bring to the table genders-wise; feel free to write any kind of pairing you like or none at all, as well as multiple pairings, OT3s and poly relationships, etc. Any level of intensity or non-intensity with regard to sex, violence, character death and other dark stuff is fine by me, including major character death and downer endings on a character-specific scale. (My one caveat is that I don't care so much for broad-scale or widespread bad endings -- so localized misery is a go and you can torment individual characters as much as you like, as well as deal with the big ambitions of someone like Flagg in The Dark Tower, but no slaughtering David's entire family for real along with half of New York in An American Werewolf In London, for instance, or Dark City fic where the experiment survivors who can't Tune are killed off en masse.) A lot of my canons deal on some level with real-life social issues (homophobia, sexual violence, abuse, etc.) and I often appreciate that as an element of these canons' texture; you're welcome to incorporate those social factors in fic or pass by them as you're comfortable.

I'm totally on board with AUs, especially those that riff on or echo the original canon events/ setting. Canon-divergent and for-want-of-a-nail AUs are very welcome, as well as alternate settings, alternate time periods (Early Modern England AU? Ancient Rome? Regency?) and genre/pastiche AUs. (Summer camp romp, film noir, 80s YA, torrid romance novel?) Let the world be your oyster there. I love AUs that racebend characters, always-a-girl genderswaps, and/or fic where characters are written as trans, though I prefer all of these not to be agonizing tales of unremitting prejudice and hardship -- more of a "what if?" scenario that deals with identity as well as the other elements of the canon. (I'd be fine with any of these premises as its own starting place, if that stokes your imagination, or combined with any other prompt.) I'm also fine with crossovers -- if you're not sure if I'm familiar with a fandom from my AO3 fandom list or past request letters, feel free to ask via a mod.

If you want to check out my letters from the past few years, you can find them here: [2016] [2015] [2014] [2013] This year I'm also planning on participating in several other Yuletide challenges like Crueltide/Yuleporn -- keep an eye on this space! ETA: My Yuleporn prompts are here and my Crueltide prompts are here.


DNWs:

I'd rather not receive fic with self-harm, eating disorders, noncanonical suicide, child sexual abuse, or unrequested incest. I don't want to read explicit sex involving characters under 16.

(I'm all right with general teenage romance and the presence of sexually active teenagers, which is very much canon for several of my fandoms. Dark Tower also has canonical adolescent sexual assault in Flagg's backstory; feel free to touch on that in fic or to deal with its fallout at length, I'd just rather not read fic where that incident is the detailed main event. Likewise, a couple of my canons have canonical suicide, like Lennox's faked death and Jack urging David to kill himself in AAWIL; I'm cool with these elements and the presence of suicide as a foregone conclusion for characters who die that way in canon, but please don't dwell on scenes of completed suicide.)

Dislikes:

I don't care for unrequested teacher/student ships, generic modern-day mundane AUs, characters overhearing each other masturbating or having sex, spanking, "kissing practice"-type tropes, omegaverse elements, urban fantasy werewolf tropes like packs and alphas, zombie/vampire/werewolf apocalypses (individual undead people are just fine), apocalypse fic/post-apocalyptic settings in general, noncon where the victim starts liking it and consenting to it partway through, fic incorporating contemporary RL tragedies, or noncanonical elements of Nazism.

I'd also prefer no convenient love interest disposal -- infidelity, polyamory/multiple concurrent relationships, AUs where canonical love interests never dated, and canon ships being framed as having broken up amicably in the past are all fine by me, just not a festival of dead girlfriends or a primary emphasis on how past relationships don't matter in comparison to this One True Love.

*

An American Werewolf In London (1981)
- David Kessler, Jack Goodman

[This movie is available streaming on Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Epix.]

I love this movie's killer mix of disarming humor and genuinely skin-crawling primal fears -- its sense of atmosphere and era-specific place (that porno theater!) and its enthusiastic leaning into its own bittersweet goofiness as much as beautifully rendered effects and scares. The relationships in it are genuinely sweet, despite all their weirdness -- and the way Jack and David's friendship continues beyond the grave, totally off-kilter and macabre but also genuinely affectionate and good-humored, is everything to me.

Right off the bat, what happens if somebody in a position of authority does believe David? (Or at least believe him far enough to lock him up somewhere he can't go on a rampage, if not quite to the full extent of "I was bitten by a werewolf out on the moors and now I'm cursed to transform into a monstrous beast every full moon".) Or if he does manage to make it somewhere with a sparser density of easily-mauled civilians than the middle of a major city? You can get as much mileage as you like out of the transformation-horror stuff (maybe even capitalizing on the stuff that we can't as immediately see in the visual medium of film -- David seems to black out for most of his time spent in wolf form, is there an alternate potential take on how he puts it all together again the morning after?) or in general the great mix of comedy and honest-to-God foreboding and doom this canon has going for it.

I'd love to read anything about Jack's canon predicament -- he's trapped in an especially ghoulish position being both clearly dead and also unable to pass on until David does, so his physical form is deteriorating pretty much indefinitely while his consciousness sticks around. Anything exploring that bind would be right up my morbid alley: Jack continuing to bug David from beyond the beyond, an alternate take on their canon scenes together, etc.

Or on a happier note, pre-canon interactions between Jack and David or adventures for them separately -- in a lot of ways they're quintessential college boys for their era before horror finds them, very funny and very flawed, and the way they allude to that history as friends before tragedy happens really sells me on that friendship. Could trouble have found them before they even left for England? Or could their doomed backpacking jaunt have gone off the rails in some other way?

Or an AU where Jack survives getting mauled, but at a price -- is two werewolves really that much better than one werewolf and one undead revenant? Are both of them then stuck getting trailed by an ever-increasing crowd of their werewolf victims? Because that would suck. Or where Jack lives and it's David trying to hack it at being undead.

Despite being an ocean away from each other, the interactions between David and his family really get to me (the phone call and even David's nightmare, in a way) and anything that bridges that distance would be great. What's that family history like? Jack alludes to some of his own experiences and disappointments now that he's dead -- how'd that go, the experience of being around for your own funeral and the associated grief, considered in all seriousness? What the hell happens if David does make it back home again? (I mean… short of everyone in his loving family getting horribly murdered by werewolves, which is darker than even I am willing to go for Yuletide.) How do you get back in the swing of things after getting werewolfed on?

One of the things I love about this canon is David (like Landis himself) being Jewish and I'd love fic where that remains as a detail or as a theme. Or anything dealing with the screwy cosmology of a universe with werewolf rules that are in a way pretty classic, and in another way pretty startling and off the wall -- the full-on tragedy of the film's ending is a feature and not a bug for me, but if you did want to explore possible solutions to the werewolf predicament besides death, I'd be 100% on board for that. (Enlist Alex if you like!) Intense research library montages/Universal Horror canon-trivia quests optional but appreciated.

Ship-wise, I love Jack/David -- set during their time at college, their time backpacking before the werewolf stuff goes down, or awful pining complicated by the whole "horrible revenant" issue -- and whatever kind of uneasy menage springs up when you're cohabiting with your girlfriend but your super dead best friend pops in from time to time to deliver dire warnings. I find David/Alex perfectly heartbreaking in canon so I'd be happy to read about that too.

*

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
- Robert Ford

[This film is available streaming on HBO.]

I love the way Jesse James is realized as an individual in this film primarily through Bob's eyes, and the way Bob exists in orbit around him -- his exhaustive cataloguing of all Jesse's various qualities, real and fictitious, the way his eyes are constantly on him and his squirrelly mix of inexperience and cagey mettle. His obsession with Jesse is like something out of a dream, and I love the mix of creepy-crawly eroticism and frank terror inspired by the man's presence. I ship the two of them like crazy, and in general appreciate the way they function as counterparts of one another, the young upstart and the old master -- Bob might be Jesse James' biggest fan, but they're made of different stuff and I'm interested in Bob's cascading disillusionment with Jesse's brutality as the time runs out on the James Gang and the various genuine dangers and imagined slights add up to an atmosphere of feverish suspicion. Bob's admiration is half-pitiable and half-sinister, with a weird undercurrent of resentment that is just fascinating, and I'd love any kind of fic where he acts on that toxic cocktail of emotions or where it becomes unavoidable in another way.

Fever dreams! Heists! Paranoia! More stuff exploiting the hothouse atmosphere of any of the guys' hideouts -- all these guys playing with guns and passing around copies of The Lustful Turk in feverish seclusion must make for a pretty paranoid environment for realizing your complicated feelings in. (Or alternately, the more mannerly way Bob tries to insert himself into Jesse's family life -- helping out Jesse's wife, associating with Jesse's kids, a kind of distant cousin.) In general, I'm interested in the way things break down even as Bob grows into greater knowledge and experience, greater knowledge of the kind of man Jesse James really is, maybe? -- I'd love to read anything with Jesse's disability as Bob observes it, or the various other festering wounds in play. (I'd also be a sucker for boundary-blurring bedsharing, Bob navigating the physical world of the 1880s and all the fixtures of adult men's lives, or other instances of the spooky symmetry between Jesse and Bob that Bob seems to like trying on for size toward the end.)

The film's natural scenery is really gorgeous, so I'd love fic that leaves those claustrophobic interiors behind and takes off on a creepy little road trip -- messing around in the woods or getting up to no good in desolate places, or any kind of jaunt into the more traditional structure of the Western. I'd love to read about some of Bob's alternate possibilities he considers, "everything wonderful that could come true" -- what does he consider? I imagine a couple possible scenarios: escaping his situation or triumphing in his life of crime, winning Jesse or ingratiating himself into a cozy little Howard family household, a version where he does get the applause he expects for putting down a wanted criminal or where all is forgiven and the tension between the Ford boys and Jesse doesn't have to end in a death. Or something where it does end in confrontation and death, but the boiling over of the tension between Jesse and Bob takes place somewhere outside the family home. I'd love to read something where it's Bob who dies -- is that a mere footnote in the greater history of Jesse James, or can he go out in some semblance of style? Could he ever resign himself to that fate the way Jesse resigns himself to his own?

I'd be open to historical divergences and alternate histories where the errors that take down the James gang shake out differently -- something where Bob makes a name for himself as an infamous criminal, not just an infamous backstabber and an American Judas? -- or post-canon fic filling in the missing scenes after Bob shoots Jesse. Scenes from his stage career and the weird blurring of identities that occurs as he plays out his great triumph/great betrayal, his thorny relationship with his dying brother living high on the hog as the stars of their Manhattan theater show, or scenes from his last years in isolation where his name and reputation still manage to follow him in Colorado.

Given the feverish, slightly blurred, Deakinized look of the film and the way it deals with the long legacy of certain acts I'd love weird supernatural fic -- hauntings, revenants, hallucinations, tormenting spirits, or that most pernicious of frontier pests, Missouri vampires.

Ship-wise, I love Jesse/Bob -- the mix of hero worship and not-so-subliminal desire to eclipse said heroes, the massive gulf in experience between them, the genuine threat each of them poses to each other -- and have a lot of feelings about Bob/Charley too if you're down to write feverish, doomed incest between two people defined by their guilt. (Likewise, I'm down for any combination of the two ships!) I requested both of these ships for Raremaleslashex this year, if you're interested in some more ship-specific prompts.

*

Dark City (1998)
- Dr. Daniel P. Schreber

[This movie… used to be available streaming on Hulu, and I have my fingers crossed it will return!]

This film was basically MADE FOR ME (gothick noir aesthetics, memory fuckery, alien mindsets that are irreconcilable to human mindsets, blond Kiefer Sutherland...) and I'd be interested in anything that explores it in all its lonesome, haunting Nighthawks-y glory. Anything about the life of the city before Murdoch does his thing would really make me happy. (I'm open to fic that takes place after the city's experienced sunlight, too, but I just have a lot of "well, what now?" questions about the position the cast are left in post-canon.) More scenes of citizens being rearranged and rewritten in topsy-turvy ways (like the fabulously creepy dining-room scene where workers become bosses, labor concerns are turned inside-out, and architecture rearranges itself) or anything about the geography and sinister geometries of the city. Anything to do with the city's nightlife -- do they have a queer scene in Dark City? A theater scene? What would the Strangers possibly make of voluntarily going and pretending to be someone else for a couple hours at a time?

I'm really interested in the horror aspects of Schreber's position, the complicity in evil or at the very least unpleasant acts that's facilitated his survival and his complicated emotions about the things he's done. I'm interested too in the kind of nightmare quality of the experiment-city, the limitations placed on on the bounds of recollection and how malleable memory and personal history are under the experiment's conditions. Even Schreber's immediate distinctive qualities -- his accent, his disabilities -- seem like they're malleable across scenes and memories. How does Schreber's norms and values reflect his situation, or the way he's been plucked out of time? (For that matter, was he plucked from the kind of grim interwar decade the landscape of the city suggests, or does he come from sometime or someplace else entirely? Feel free to be as vague or as contradictory with this as you want; I love the creeping horror of how much in this film is left uncertain and how little these characters seem to really know for certain about themselves.) What's it like doing business with the Strangers? How did they initiate their questionable working relationship with Schreber, and why did they pick him? I imagine their goal of understanding humanity in order to learn from humanity's individuality might have seemed sympathetic to him at first before shit got very obviously weird -- I'd love to read about some possible alternate fates for him or other trips around the metaphorical spiral he's taken, maybe some background on the time he's shown forced to overwrite his own memories the way he does the natives of the city. Or any other kind of glimpse at his private life, such as it was or might be in a future out from under the thumb of the Strangers.

I'd love fic exploring Schreber's various disabilities (what's the toll that the Strangers have taken on him, and what's from something else?), something exploring the bathhouse stuff, experiments in memory he's undertaken -- or if you want to peel back another layer from the film's SF exploration of classic noir-y/German Expressionist tropes, if you take the film's paranoid, anxious core to be a metaphor or a delusion, what does the reality look like? Is the real story the story of Schreber's own delusion, or is he a more benign figure factoring in someone else's delusions -- Murdoch's, or Emma/Anna's? (If you want to explore something where he really is a psychiatrist, or receiving psychiatric care, or both, I'd be happy with a take on the field that's as stylized and dated -- hypnosis and insane asylums? -- or as contemporary and humane as you feel like.) Or another paranoid noir vision with the same basic premise of the Strangers' interference in human affairs, just with a different sort of plotline on the surface of it than the serial killer stuff -- I love film noir/hardboiled tropes, especially the skewed gothic version of them that play out in this film, and would love whatever you'd like to do with them.

Ship-wise, I love pairing Schreber with poor haunted Murdoch; I love that they're both allies and hazards to each other, and how Schreber's nominal position as Murdoch's psychiatrist and the way his actions impact Murdoch's psychological predicament add a bit of a weird tinge to even his kinder gestures. It can be as low-key or as explicit as you want, as supportive and redemptive or as creepy and dubcon/noncon as you desire, I'm down for it. (With consent issues running either way, frankly -- Schreber can warp identities and memories with relative ease, but Murdoch can warp their entire reality, so there's possibilities, is what I'm saying. I'd love to see a mutually fucked-up scenario too.) I'm also down for post-canon Murdoch/Schreber/Anna, making their way in a new world as tentative allies, or another iteration with Murdoch/Schreber/Emma in a suitably film noir triangulation of mistrust and codependency. I'd also be very interested in freaky xeno stuff between Schreber and the Strangers -- whether a strange-bedfellows last-resort scenario, or freaky noncon/dubcon as an extension of torture, or something else -- or any kind of complicated trauma bonding with the Strangers or with the other inhabitants of the city.

*

The Dark Tower - Stephen King
- The Man in Black

Nemesis extraordinaire! I'd love fucked-up backstory fic about his progress along the evil-wizard/treacherous-advisor career path, his ultimate ambitions, and what would happen if he actually achieved those ambitions. (Or at least died in a slightly less ignominious way than death by angry horny spider baby.) I love the worldbuilding of this series and the way it partakes in multiple genre traditions with shameless enthusiasm -- the man in black in particular seems to straddle those archetypal storytelling modes. I'm a big sucker for treacherous advisors and sinister drifters so I'd love to read anything about the way he plays these roles in various worlds in the course of his wandering. The way his familiarity with other roles and worlds has penetrated his consciousness -- the figures of speech he uses and the pop culture allusions, whether they come from before Mid-World moved on or some other place -- is really really interesting to me and I'd love fic incorporating that too. Has he been to these other times and places, or has he just absorbed them by cosmic osmosis?

“If you’ve never seen your king and master, how do you know him?”

“He comes to me in dreams. As a stripling he came to me, when I lived, poor and unknown, in a far land. A sheaf of centuries ago he imbued me with my duty and promised me my reward, although there were many errands in my youth and the days of my manhood, before my apotheosis. You are that apotheosis, gunslinger. You are my climax.”

I'm interested in this account of his backstory and recruitment that the man in black gives Roland in The Gunslinger. (It also sums up a lot of what I love about the two of them as a ship in that last sentence, whoops.) Even way back in Eyes of the Dragon Flagg starts off as the king's advisor and undergoes some pretty classic treacherous-fantasy-advisor machinations, but he's already been kicking around for some time powered by sheer bitterness -- how did he get from point A to point B over the course of so many years, from a runaway miller's son somewhere in Delain to about a dozen different identities and aspects? When does this version of Flagg start to realize what he's capable of? One of the few things we know about his origin is that he made the conscious choice not to go home again after being raped, which implies at least that if he'd been less stiff-necked about his destiny he could have gone home -- under what terms did he leave in the first place? Where did he go next after consciously deciding "nah, no fucking way am I going back"? (And then he does end up back in Delain circa Eyes of the Dragon, hundreds of years later, making a real pest of himself.) I liked the appearance he makes, either literally or because Roland (or Gabrielle?) interpolates him there, in the story-within-a-story Roland presents in Wind Through The Keyhole and I'd love a fic inspired by the fickle, double-edged presence of Flagg as the Covenant Man, helping as well as hurting, stirring up unrest through unbearable impositions and teaching Tim to scry using a basin of water and the gearshift of a Dodge Dart.

Or anything about his time and treachery in Gilead, his fucked-up relationship with Gabrielle and the massive Freudian whammy it puts on Roland -- something filling in the time Roland recalls seeing Marten dance with Gabrielle, maybe, more Gothic-novel fuckery about their affair or any of the other treacherous irons the man had in the fire apart from that affair. Likewise, anything to do with his role relative to Steven Deschain -- what kind of advice does Marten give? When Steven says he's known about Marten's affair for two years, how did he find out about them? Or anything exploring the glimpses of interaction between Marten and Roland (teaching him hypnosis? teaching him other stuff that's as treacherous yet handy as what the Covenant Man teaches Tim?) or exploring the conflict that ultimately destroys Gilead -- sowing chaos and dissent via fringe groups is kind of what other versions of Flagg do, as a rule, so what was his part in Farson's movement like?

(On another note: my hankering for Child ballad/murder ballad/folk song-based fic in this fandom is strong, or just fic that incorporates snippets of music and lore the way the books do, both real and fake.)

Anything exploring his corrupting, persuasive qualities and the way he arranges things to pose the most torturous moral dilemma possible, his godawful sense of humor and his casual nastiness, his casually predatory behavior, the moments where even justified criticism (like Callahan calling him cruel) catches him off-guard and seems to actually hurt his godawful feelings, his creepy shapeshifting and borderline-gratuitous use of pseudonyms. Or further EVIL WIZARD ADVENTURES -- errands for the Crimson King, magical artifact collection (the movie version seems especially committed to completionism in that regard, which is intriguing) or his first encounter with any of the orbs… I would also love love love fic exploring the jawbone that Roland picks up and the presence it seems to exert on him between The Gunslinger and The Waste Lands, whether in a mindfucky way or With Sexy Results or both, but I recognize the inherent difficulties in writing fic about a haunted jawbone. I'd be happy with fic about any of the man in black and Roland's interactions, really -- for fic set later in canon, I'd love fic about his palaver on parenthood with Mia.

If you're interested in genderswap, I'd be really interested in a take where Flagg is a creepy lady drifter, or where Roland and the man in black are both women -- the division between wizards and witches in the Dark Tower series follows some pretty firm gender lines (as do gunslingers up to a certain point) and I'd love to see that epic awful archetypal rivalry between two women. Speaking of archetypes, Stephen King kind of went hog-wild with this guy's role in the broader Stephen King Universe (or whatever you'd call it) and I'm familiar with most of King's other work, so if you'd like to write something where some iteration of the man in black under his various names strolls real casually through another King work -- cooling his heels in 'Salem's Lot or crashing parties at the Overlook, bugging the co-eds of New Sharon College from Strawberry Spring, playing faux-benevolent godfather to Carrie White or making things harder for the girl who loved Tom Gordon, and so on -- without necessarily being the primary driving force of that story's freestanding plot, I would be super into it.

I ship this guy with just about everybody, in an awful manipulative way -- I'd be interested in screwed up Marten/Gabrielle Deschain or three-way Marten/Gabrielle/Steven, with extra treachery and future taunt potential. I ship him with Roland big time (you are my climax, indeed) with all the screwed-up history that the man in black's various roles add to that -- something between him and Roland in their palaver at the end of The Gunslinger would be especially up my alley, or another go-round where their archetypal pursuit and struggle gets kinda weird (sexually), or creepy dream visitations with weird subtext and/or weird text, anything at all, really. I'd also be down for demon-lover-archetype-y stuff between him and the rest of Roland's ka-tet -- maybe not all at one time, but I can see him playing Eddie's brother issues like a harp for instance, or Susannah's ideals and her duality. Fucking with people via their dreams! Setting them up for disastrous decisions! Making it weird for everybody! Weird porn as far as the eye can see! But really, this guy is my terrible, terrible little black dress -- pair him with Callahan, or Susan, or the Tick-Tock Man, or Farson, or Maerlyn (whether as incest or just as a terrible idea) or Mia, or the Crimson King, I'm super easy. I'd prefer nothing shipping him with Jake, however, barring some kind of Eight Days of Luke scenario where they're briefly more-or-less the same age. For non-MiB ships if you feel like slipping them in there, I love Roland/Eddie/Susannah as an OT3 and really any of Roland's ka-tets as polyamorous tangles.

Super-duper-optionally, I would love a crossover with another wasteland-Western canon (The Hateful Eight, Ravenous...) or where Flagg runs into other sinister drifter archetypes from fiction -- Judge Holden from Blood Meridian? BOB from Twin Peaks? The title character from The Hitcher? I'm familiar with the role of Flagg's analogue in The Stand, though I haven't read it yet because I'm a wimp about post-apocalyptic stuff -- so extensive allusions to his role in that novel might be lost on me but don't stint on my behalf, that's 100% in the spirit of King! I've picked up the comics but I'm not strongly committed to the things they add to the Dark Tower universe, so feel free to incorporate them or ignore them. I've also seen and enjoyed the film, and would be happy with fic that bridges the gap between the books' canon and the go-round we see in the film.

*

Philip Marlowe - Raymond Chandler
- Terry Lennox

I love Terry Lennox as a disruptive force in Marlowe's life -- though he'd be terrifically apologetic if you called him that, probably. Lennox is sort of mysterious and sublime and doomed when we meet him as a white-haired alcoholic, but he's got some serious mettle -- I'd love to read a fic about his military service or his experiences in captivity, his relationship with his comrades that inspires such loyalty after the fact and perhaps a little guilt from guys like Mendy Menendez and Randy Starr. His lingering alcoholism is sort of the tip of the iceberg in terms of his psychological makeup in the canon era -- I'd love a fic that deals with that or a fic about any of the other ways his traumatic experiences during the war manifest themselves in his present day, how they flavor his alienation among the idle rich, or something with Lennox getting to touch base with other veterans after the war, even though his experiences weren't all universal ones. Marlowe's seen some shit in his time, too -- maybe a vignette from their friendship, or an AU where the situation with Sylvia goes differently and they get more time to explore each other's company and various personal faults without murder charges or faked death hanging over anybody's head? I would be totally, totally interested in fic about Lennox faking his own death, too -- that's got to do a number on you, even for somebody who's already reinvented himself a couple times over.

I'm interested in all the snarls of identity around Terry Lennox -- the big one is his identity change at the end, but even before that his name, his nationality, and his apparent age (among other things) are a little in flux. Have him solve (or cause) a mystery of his own, cross paths with other shady veterans/fatal hommes of page and screen, or explore the person his various protectors and spouses know him as -- what was his marriage with Sylvia like in the day-to-day? His love affair with Eileen? On a darker note, I know the novel hinges on the fact that Terry didn't murder his wife, but I can't help but feel Marlowe would have some complicated emotions about him even if he did, and being polite and appealing and a war hero doesn't actually stop a person from murdering their spouse -- so I'd love to read an AU where Eileen and Terry are both guilty, just of different stuff, or any other dark take on the same qualities that make Lennox so compelling to the people who care about him. (Starr and Menendez discovering the guy who saved their necks during the war has a shady side?)

Post-canon fic would also suit me great -- something where his final parting from Marlowe's not so final, where they cross paths again in Mexico or he undergoes yet another reinvention, or something where he finally bites the dust for real.

If you're at all interested in writing genderswap fic, I'd love fic about a female Terry Lennox -- in canon he's got a little in common with the figure of the femme fatale even as a guy, but with a woman -- still an alcoholic, still a divorcee, still screwed up from the war -- that seems like it'd ramp way up to me, and I'd love fic exploring that. (Female Marlowe optional, but great.) I'd also be very interested in trans dude Terry Lennox, with all the wrinkles that would present for his trajectory in life and maybe the additional level of identity fuckery that would ensue after his "death" -- but I'm always down for trans characters, especially ones with intensely loyal and more-than-a-little-shady pals.

Ship-wise, I love Lennox/Marlowe, and would be thrilled to receive fic for it -- I have a couple more specific prompts in this year's Raremaleslashex letter, but in general any exploration of their relationship anywhere along the spectrum from sublimest smarm to ill-advised hookups to "yes, they are definitely banging/cohabiting/reuniting post-canon for a doomed happily-ever-after" would make me happy. I'm also interested in a take where his relationship with Mendy Menendez (and/or Starr) is a romantic one, with crazy doomed loyalty and all the stuff they've participated in together that civilians might not grasp in the same way. (How much of his P.O.W. experiences does Menendez know about? How much remains to be said, or can't be said?) Chandler's writing is not entirely devoid of, well, some definite opinions about homosexuality and non-straight identities; that's something I'm really interested in here rather than put off by, and I'd be comfortable reading fic that incorporates some degree of homophobia, internalized/background or otherwise, as well as fic that doesn't deal with that directly.

*

We Were Liars - E. Lockhart
- Cadence Sinclair, Gatwick Patil

[There are unmarked spoilers for the book and its primary twist after this point, heads up if you haven't read it yet!]

I love this book's atmosphere to pieces, so anything you write set on the family's little slice of WASPy paradise -- or beyond, given how Cadence and Gat carry that atmosphere with them when they leave -- would be cool. The Sinclair family is all kinds of screwed up in some very classic ways and some new and exciting ones that the book saves for later in the game, so anything that touches on their combination of lustrous fancy East Coast dynasty cachet and serious dysfunction would make me happy. Happy times set during Summer 14 or sad stuff set whenever would make me equally happy.

Maybe something where Cadence and Gat escape together, either a sanctioned trip abroad or an escape attempt -- whether they can kick off the shackles of their family and their upbringing entirely, or whether they drag that stuff behind them wherever they go as a couple of rich runaways. (Or one rich runaway and the ghost of her dead boyfriend -- I like the psychological presence of the other Liars in Cadence's mind, but I'd love a more straight-up supernatural take too. Or something where the Liars (or even just Cadence and Gat, or Cadence/Gat/Mirren) cook up a more overtly criminal (rather than just accidentally manslaughter-inducing) plot to keep the family together -- I'm a massive sucker for situations where characters are so constrained by circumstances that murder feels like the only possible solution, when really it's no solution at all, and I kept honestly expecting the novel to go there even though it never really did. Murder! Blood pacts! Road trips and bank robbery! Any old thing.

Gat's perspective on the relationship between him and Cadence, or ghost!Gat's perspective on what's become of her since the fire, would really interest me -- he seems in some ways like a more mature and world-weary figure than Cadence is, he's more awake to the injustice of the world outside Beechwood than she is and he experiences the family's racism (and in general the sense of himself as a benignly tolerated outsider at best, an intruder at worst) in a much more painful, pointed way than she ever will, but he's also as much a kid in the process of self-discovery as she is and I'd love some further scenes of his life on the island, what his memories of time there are like, or an alternate trajectory of how his entanglement with Cadence might have turned out. I love their conversations and philosophical interplay in the book, but feel free to have them just shooting the breeze like a couple of dingus teenagers, or making further bad choices.They have a really sweet and honest rapport.

Cadence and Gat's relationship is already stigmatized in a way that's blatantly unfair but I'd love to take it a step further with some TRAGIC INCEST or the like -- maybe something where they're angsty step-siblings, or where Cadence and Gat are both girls, or where their canonical affinity is just a little more enforced than it is in canon? I'd also love to read something tangled-up and romantic between Cadence and Mirren; Mirren's canonical state of cheerful enthusiasm about sex and romance -- she's right at the cusp of when that starts to be a possibility for her when she dies, and her death means she's never going to get to live the fullness of that -- is so heartbreaking and I'd love for her to get a little time to shine. I'd love confusing polyamorous emotional snarls among the Liars, doomed island banging, or anything screwy and emotionally unwise.

I'd love horror fic set on the island, whether that means a deranged killer stalking Martha's Vineyard or a more insidious kind of change taking place there. Gat unlocking creepy family secrets or exorcising spirits? Cadence's cluster of post-traumatic ailments taking a gothic turn? Parts of the book feel like they could be taking place in another era, but I'd love a historical!AU where they actually are -- the Roaring 1920s, the interwar era, or long earlier than that if you feel like delving deep. In general, any fic about hazy, tragic, doomed sunbaked summers spent with the extended Sinclair clan -- I'd love to read any little scene interpolated during Summer 15 or set against the backdrop of Summer 16's fragmentation and disturbance. Something where Gat lives too and is as dislocated and traumatized as Cadence is? Or something where it's Cadence who's the literal/metaphorical ghost, haunting Gat and the other Liars or stuck reliving her past summers all out of order? The book's twist didn't tick me off like I know it did some other readers, but if you'd like to remix it or alter it to be more like what you personally were yearning for, or play more with the novel's unreliable narrator, have at it.