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Yuletide 2019 Letter
Happy Yuletide! In accordance with the seasons, here is my annual tl;dr Yuletide letter -- feel free to incorporate as little of it as you like. I'm skazka @ AO3 and my past letters can be found here. If I'm nominating more than one character in a fandom, feel free to write about any requested character alone; ditto for including other unrequested characters in addition to my requested main characters.
Likes:
Some general things I dig:
- historical details, material culture, pop culture
- allegiances and loyalty (especially loyalty kink!)
- dreams and nightmares, feverish visions, neurasthenia
- psychological horror
- body horror (surprise new orifices, involuntarily changing bodies, parasites, viral transformations, losing control over your own body and mind, etc.)
- gothic horror tropes (mystery, wonder, and the macabre, decaying old houses, ancestral curses, family secrets, etc.)
- noir tropes (doubles! identity trouble! perversity, pessimism, fatalism, and menace!)
- claustrophobia, doubt, guilt, decay
- trauma and PTSD, memory and personal baggage, disability
- road trips and travel
- character death
- angst (angsty tormented ladies! angsty tormented dudes! stoic suffering!)
- sturdy/muscular women with tender hearts
- spooky atmosphere -- decaying hotel rooms, sinister places, oppressive atmospheres
- cozy atmosphere -- small-scale domesticity, hospitality, characters looking after each other, running a household, making a home
- goofy or dark humor, humor in general
- religious themes and elements (whether positive or more ambivalent)
- family relationships and parental baggage
- in-universe documents (letters, manuscripts, academic journals, etc.)
- unusual formats (interactive fiction, illustrated fic, etc.)
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 especially enjoy:
- loyalty kink
- friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers-while-remaining-enemies
- agonized pining both reciprocated and unreciprocated
- one-night stands with complicated emotions attached, or purely sexual relationships leading to unexpected feelings
- hurt/comfort -- one or more parties getting tragically roughed up or whumped to hell and back and needing stoic ministrations; h/c where a rough or unpleasant person is the recipient of the comfort whether they like it or not; h/c where a villainous character is doing the comforting; cautious or grudging h/c
- quarrelsome but ride-or-die friendships
- characters who just can't stay away from each other
- domesticity and tenderness coming before characters become lovers
If you're interested in writing smut, I love:
- size differences
- age differences
- body worship
- oral sex (cunnilingus, fellatio, rimming)
- handjobs
- frottage and non-penetrative sex
- clothed/semi-clothed sex
- fancy clothes, uniforms, layers, dressing and undressing
- hatesex and fighting-turned-fucking
- breathplay
- inhibitions and interpersonal baggage in the bedroom
- anonymous or pseudo-anonymous hookups (especially in semi-public places -- public parks, train compartments, dormitories and barracks)
- noncon and dubcon
- painful/clumsy but fun and tender sex, OR, tragically clumsy fail sex
- wound fingering
- 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
- time-period-specific sexual practices and meeting places.
I love noncon and dubcon, especially mutually antagonistic or psychologically muddy angles and characters making difficult bargains using sex. I appreciate a focus on difficult/complicated emotions and experiences and the conflicted side of dubcon -- a character having sex they don't uncomplicatedly desire but that they believe will help them achieve some goal, for instance. For noncon I especially like to read about horror, discomfort, resistance, self-disgust, and anger on the victim's side; for perpetrator attitudes I like reading about hatred, mixed feelings, obsessive love, contempt, and the like, but I don't care much for explicit noncon/dubcon with victims or perpetrators under 16, ravishment tropes where the victim secretly wanted it all along/hated it at first but came to love it, scenarios where afterward the rape is a non-issue as though it hadn't happened, or where the rape results in unambiguous true love and a happily ever after. I'm fine with non-explicit noncon and dubcon and would be just as happy with only the aftermath or implication portrayed if that's more in your comfort zone.
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 open to whatever pairings you want to bring to the table. I dig slash, femslash, het, gen, and anything else; feel free to write any kind of pairing you like or none at all, as well as multiple pairings, OT3s and poly relationships, infidelity, 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. A lot of my canons deal on some level with real-life social issues (homophobia, sexual violence, domestic 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 fine with all different formats and structures for 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, and 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 and genre/pastiche AUs. Let the world be your oyster there.
I love AUs that racebend characters, always-a-girl genderswaps, and fic where characters are written as trans; I especially enjoy transfic that isn't focused on coming out or self-discovery, or where the character's canonical gender doesn't change, just the character's presumed cis status. (Trans man Roddie Ayres or trans woman Caroline, for instance.) I'm also happy to receive crossovers and fusions -- if you're not sure if I'm familiar with a fandom judging from my AO3 fandom list or past request letters, feel free to ask via a mod. I'd be happy to receive poetry, but would rather not receive free verse -- any other metrical forms are fair game.
If you want to check out my past exchange letters, you can find them here. This year I'm also planning on participating in several other Yuletide challenges like Crueltide/Yuleporn: Crueltide | Yuleporn
DNWs:
I'd rather not receive fic featuring unrequested depictions of self-harm, eating disorders, suicide, child sexual abuse, or incest. (Suicidal ideation as well as Caroline's canonically suggestive death in Little Stranger is fair game, as is the CSA subtext in Mary Reilly/Turn of the Screw and past underage for Hickey in The Terror.) I don't want to read explicit sex involving characters under 16.
*
The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters
- Roderick Ayres, Caroline Ayres
I loved this novel to pieces, and it does a tremendous job pulling apart the societal underpinnings of gothic fiction through its incisive use of historical place and time.The Ayres siblings are mostly seen through Faraday's eyes, and that casts them in an interesting and complicated light; I love the narrator's compelling presence as one lens through which the story unfolds, but I'd love to get more of the two of them outside that structure, either scenes we never glimpse from Faraday's POV in canon or without that narrative filter.
Roderick's struggles at Hundreds don't start with his accident, but that certainly didn't make his life much easier -- what was his boyhood there like, and what was his sense of his inheritance as the only son? I love Roderick's passion for machines and engineering -- cars, planes, just about anything else by the sound of things -- and would love fic that deals with the past few decades' worth of technological advancements as they've arrived (or haven't arrived) at the house. I would love anything to do with his experience of disability after the war -- encounters with other disabled servicemen, his experiences in the period of immediate recovery, or something set in the period of Roddie's homecoming after his smash. Or anything else to do with wartime experiences, whether shaded with the gothic in their own right, perhaps in ways that Faraday couldn't perceive if he were privy to them, but that Caroline and Roddie can. Did Caroline and Roderick see much of each other during the course of the war, or correspond at all? How did their paths diverge?
The novel is shy around the matter of homosexuality considered relative to Waters' regular oeuvre, but I would be very interested in a reading of both of the Ayres siblings as queer -- whether they're fully conscious of it or not. (Though I can't imagine Waters isn't conscious of that aspect of the novel, especially with Caroline -- the Wrens were the only branch of the British armed forces where homosexuality wasn't formally outlawed, though that didn't mean that women who loved other women had an especially easy time either.) I'd love anything about Caroline's friendships and relationships during the war, or Roddie's experiences and connections in the RAF.
I'd be interested in further encounters with the titular stranger, the malevolent and sometimes petty force that exerts itself over Hundreds and the Ayres family -- feel free to fill in the blanks of unseen encounters during Faraday's tenure at Hundreds, or is there any chance of the phenomena Roddie so hates and fears following him to the institution even after he's been expelled from Hundreds itself? Given the animating obsessions and resentments that drive the forces haunting Hundreds, is there any chance of escape? How much of her sister does Caroline suspect, and what does she finally glimpse?
Or suppose Caroline manages to make her escape from the house itself -- I confess I always find her death just agonizing so if you want to fix that any way you can think of, especially if Betty helps, I'd love that. If a gothic novel is the romance between a girl and a house -- Faraday having coopted the form in his own way -- is there any possibility of a divorce between Caroline and Hundreds? What does life after haunting look like? Likewise, a canon-divergent piece where Roderick's fate plays out differently (whatever that looks like in your imagination, even if it's still tragic) would be right up my alley.
I love the novel's scenes of struggle against entropy -- from the waves of cultural changes that seem profoundly threatening to people like the Ayres to the physical deterioration that time and use exert on Hundreds Hall. You could write a thousand words just about looking after a shabby old house and I would love it. Caroline is really the haunted gothic heroine I've been waiting for all my life -- sturdy, sensitive yet sensible, kinda butch, loves dogs -- and I love the ways she's grounded in the physical world. Her slightly careless existence isolated from much of the world may not look like Faraday's standard for womanhood, but she's more interested in all her own baggage to wrangle. Caroline must be equally if not more aware than Faraday of the ways she's being shuttled around socially in an attempt to set her up with a suitable mate and save the house in the process, so what does she make of that? Does she steel herself to the prospect, or recoil from it, or both? What's her life like when Faraday's gaze isn't on her, and what is her relationship with her brother like?
I'd love to read more about the decadent fall-of-the-house-of-Ayres themes, both the literal decay of Hundreds Hall and the termination of the Ayres family line without issue. Really, if you want to pull out all the Gothic stops here -- Rebecca, The Turn of the Screw, M.R. James, have at it -- or embrace the class issues, I would be really into it, so feel free to weave in any other gothic/horror elements or inject some (further) intertextuality.
Ship-wise, I'd be interested in fic that deals with Caroline's canonical relationship with Faraday in all its complexity; I'd also be interested in Roderick/Faraday, and all the differentials of age/experience/class between them -- how weird could that professional and personal relationship get? I'd also be interested in Caroline/Brenda or any of her other wartime friends, or Roderick/any of his RAF buddies, including the younger navigator whose passing he grieves so pointedly. ('You know his navigator died, when their plane came down? I think he blamed himself for that. It was nobody’s fault, of course. —No one’s but the Germans’, I mean. But they say it’s always hard on the pilots when their crews are lost. The boy was younger than Roddie; only just nineteen. Rod used to say that it ought to have been the other way around: that the boy had had more to live for than he did.')
Smut likes: Body worship. Mutual masturbation. Body hair. Significant dressing and undressing. Uniform kink. Oral sex. Anything employing Faraday's questionably therapeutic devices for less than pure purposes. Medical kink. Anything that leans into the boyish aspect of Roderick's attractiveness -- situational homosexuality, wartime masculinities, wild repression, societal baggage in the bedroom -- or the more sturdy, sensible aspects of Caroline's -- her strong hairy legs, her attractive disheveledness, schoolgirl pashes extended into wartime adulthood, furious sexual repression.
*
The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
(This novella is in the public domain and can be accessed at Project Gutenberg, as well as elsewhere.)
- Miles, Flora
I love this story to pieces, its eerie depiction of the ambiguity of supposed childhood innocence and the way it establishes its dread creeping fear on a direct line into the darkest parts of the Victorian psyche. With regard to apparitionist/non-apparitionist schools of thought I like to have my cake and eat it too, so feel free to come down on either or both sides of that line or weave back and forth across it as you desire. Feel to write any kind of crossover with then-contemporary or modern weird fiction, ghost stories, or horror fiction. Or simply 19th century children's fiction -- if you've ever wanted to cross this novella over with A Little Princess or The Secret Garden, now is your time.
With regard to the novella's adults, I'm not especially interested in Quint as a character but I'm very interested in Jessel, the second governess, Mrs. Grose, the kids' deadbeat guardian, and the characters in the framing story for that matter. I do take the reading that there's a solidly sexual element to Quint's supposed malign influence on the children as well as Jessel and that Mile's offenses leading him to be sent down from school likewise related to sex, either directly or indirectly -- I'm fine with characters having typically Victorian views of sexual abuse and sexual knowledge and I prefer an interpretation where Quint remains an unpleasant figure even at his most magnetic. (If the CSA reading isn't one you prefer, feel free to elide, avoid, or omit it entirely in favor of another.) I'm familiar with most adaptations of this story, including The Innocents, but would prefer no cross-pollination in fic with Britten's opera, The Turning, or The Nightcomers.
I love the double-edged ambiguity of Miles, the role-transgressing jauntiness of Flora, the kids' shadowy yet thoroughly Victorian backstory, and the pure banality of how they both end up wealthy yet unwanted; anything about the two of them either separately or together, or any missing scenes from their lives and experiences with their creepy and/or flakey guardians would be welcome. We learn that Miles did (or rather said) something bad away at school; I'd love an outside POV on that from a fellow student, perhaps one of those that he himself says he liked, or an adult's account of something barely-glimpsed and even less understood. (Or Miles' own unreliable account, unmediated by the governess-narrator?) In an AU where Miles survives and is still a piece of work, how might he himself he frame the narrative of the haunting? Does he ever end up going back to school? In such an alternate continuation, do the hysterical associations between Miles and precocious wickedness linger?
Flora is rather younger than Miles and is exempted from some aspects of the expected Victorian path to adulthood by dint of being a girl, but as a result the governess seems even less equipped to deal with her when she's not being sweet and charming. Her confidence and courage give the governess narrator the willies, and her supernatural cockeyed qualities take a rather different form than her brother's. Does she take the ghosts of Bly with her when she goes on to her next residence after the story's finish? How might the shadow of the Quint-Jessel affair and the second governess' hysteria linger with her? The governess narrator mentally characterizes Flora's relationship toward Miles as being one of girlish adulation for an intellectually and physically superior male relative, but it doesn't have to be -- feel free to turn those gendered expectations inside out, or to explore what else bonds siblings together.
I'd love any postcanon fic -- what's it like to survive a ghost story, or not to survive one? If you want to give either Miles or Flora a literary afterlife (in a canon-divergent AU or otherwise) I would love it -- either as writers and artists themselves, or preserved in another contemporary document like a case study or a series of gossipy letters. I'd love something where they echo other sets of famous literary siblings or blaze new literary trail. Might postcanon Flora outliving her brother mean living to tell her own version of the spectral experiences, perhaps contesting other accounts? Whether that's a riff into ultra-bleak feminist autobiography, Jamesian ambiguity, or dark comedy, I'm down. I'm a sucker for all the long shadows associated with Haunted Child characters all grown up, and Miles and Flora could conceivably have lived through all kinds of fin de siecle fun if Miles' untimely death hadn't intervened -- if you want to subvert or rearrange that cut-shortness, go to town writing an adult version of the siblings that's equally opaque, canny, and ambiguous, or that turns with time into something altogether different.
There's lots of room for missing scenes from the novel's events, or predating the second governess' arrival -- if you want to write anything from the children's POV, or any scene or exchange that might have transpired between them, I'd love that. Sinister secrets of Bly, uncanny geographies, or just the homey niceness of a fine old house grown suffocating and strange -- what else lies under the surface of that lake? Are there less-frequented rooms with their own dark histories? I'd love anything that contrasts the childhood landscape of the place (as a big old house with lots of odd corners and cozy rooms) with the adult scenes that have played out in its various locations. I'd love to read fic set during the first reign of Miss Jessel, especially if it's delivered through the children's slightly skewed and childish perspective -- the kids as spectators on an adult's psychological deterioration, or another sinister system of decay and collapse. Or set the fucked-up psychosexual snarl between the servants and their charges playing out at Bly against the backdrop of another grander-scale sort of downfall -- in a riff on late-19th-century invasion literature, or a crisis due to epidemic disease, or the undead takeover depicted in Kim Newman's Anno Dracula.
Or write epistolary fic from the perspective of a modern (or less-than-entirely-modern) historian trying to untangle the threads of life at Bly -- the written manuscript of the governess' tale is a key piece of the novel's framing, but what other documents of life in an Essex country house might serve to inform or illuminate what transpired there for an inquisitive scholar? If you're writing fake documents/epistolary fic, feel free to include Miles and Flora only in their textual afterlives rather than in person, or have one/both show up for an unexpected bit of oral history if you dare. I love fake academic writing, letters, framing stories, and all that good stuff, so if the spirit moves you I would adore a meta take on the lives (and deaths) of the children and adults who dwell at Bly. I'd also love to read anything that tweaks the narrative conventions of Victorian children's literature and/or literature about children, especially for horror or black comedy -- saintly dead kids, boys' own adventures, unspecified but surely filthy vices, Alice in Wonderland-style slightly sinister romps.
I don't have any particular ships I'm dying to see during the canon era but period-typical school relationships between Miles or Flora with same-aged friends or postcanon relationships for any survivors are also totally fine. If you write fic about the fucked-up relationship snarl between Jessel, Quint, and the children, or about Miles' nonspecific indiscretions at school, I'd prefer no explicit sexual content involving the kids.
*
AMC's The Terror
(You can stream season one of The Terror on Hulu -- it's a standalone season of ten episodes.)
- Cornelius Hickey
Further adventures of this little murderous S.O.B., please! Hickey's a nasty piece of work no matter what, but I'd love to see his wonderfully pragmatic ambitions play out differently. There are a couple points where the expedition itself could have taken a different turn, and I'd love an alternate trajectory for impending doom -- something where Franklin doesn't die so early on and Crozier has to decide whether or not to mutiny with Hickey inserting himself as Crozier's wannabe lieutenant in it all? Something where Hickey doesn't murder Irving and Farr and has to contrive some other occasion for easily stage-managed conflict?
Who was E.C. before he became Hickey? I'd love a prequel or missing scene from canon -- scenes from his scruffy childhood, something set back in England before he takes on the identity of the real Cornelius Hickey, something early in his courtship with Gibson, something with him learning more about how to bluff his way through an Arctic voyage, a scene of him through another character's perspective, a missing scene from his mutiny or the aftermath of his very public flogging. I like the occasional moments where Hickey does the right thing, or close to it -- for instance his attempt to cut loose the trapped crewmen during Carnivale, even if that backfires on one particular member of the crew -- and I'd love to read something where Hickey manages to be surprisingly decent while still being a brutally pragmatic scruffy cannibal. If Hickey wins, or manages to cajole Crozier around to seeing things his way, what does his victory look like?
I'm a huge sucker for morality-swapped/role-swapped AUs where canonical heroes are positioned as villains, and the morally gray quality of the show's protagonists makes that an especially attractive prospect -- I can imagine Crozier ending up in a darker moral place than in canon pretty easily, but what would it take for Hickey to step up and be more heroic than usual while still being his usual pragmatic self?
I'd love to read a canon-divergent AU where Irving doesn't snitch on Hickey and Gibson -- what changes? A lot, or only a little? -- or something where the events of "Punished, As A Boy" go off the rails in a different way, perhaps sparking an entirely different mutiny where Hickey isn't the one in the driver's seat. Or something where Hickey actually has to cooperate with Silna and follow her lead instead of trying to use her as a bargaining chip -- he clearly thinks he gets what's going on between her and the tuunbaq, but judging by the tuunbaq's response to his overtures he's far off the mark, and his self-serving attitude is the polar opposite of her sense of responsibility.
So how does Hickey understand the supernatural? How does he understand the soul? Maybe something set late in the mutiny when Hickey's going a little bit weird -- is he really communing with spirits on some level? is he ascending to a higher plane? Is he starving and losing his shit? Hickey as freaky urban mystic, proto-Marxist rebel, Jean Genet-flavored queer criminal, or Arctic tyrant. If you're feeling extra-indulgent, whump the hell out of Hickey and let him deal with it with his customary well-adjusted humility -- I am a simple reader with simple needs and I love to see surly little men get beat up.
I'd love to read your AUs set during the same time period as canon (1845 and thereabouts) but on dry land -- prison AU? women's prison AU? -- or any setting-update AUs set in the second half of the 20th century. Stick Hickey in the shifting political climate of the 1970s, or the independent music scene of the 1990s, and have him ruin that instead. Across the board, I'd also love alternate takes on the show's horror aspects -- a Frankenstein fusion? A vampire AU influenced by the Demeter sequence in Bram Stoker's Dracula? Something with a danger in the ice more like the creature of John Carpenter's The Thing, or a more Lovecraftian horror? Write something incorporating nineteenth-century spiritualism (AU where Hickey is a fraudster back on dry land?) or Georgian dream interpretation.
Or if you'd like to write something lighter, I'm fascinated by the history of shipboard entertainments on Arctic and Antarctic voyages, so I'd love to read fic where Hickey gets dragged into participating in an amateur shipboard theatrical, or writes for a shipboard newspaper. If you're feeling festive, there's always the possibility of something set on the previous overwinterings in the ice on Christmas or New Year, or a celebration of days getting longer again -- Hickey contending with other people's impromptu attempts to replicate the experience of a cozy Victorian Christmas when trapped on board ship with nobody but sweaty sailors. (If you need any inspiration, check out Shane McCorristine and Jane Mocellin's Christmas at the Poles: emotions, food, and festivities on polar expeditions, 1818–1912. If you don't have access, have a Hippo hit me up on the Yuletide Discord and I'll ahem a copy of it your way.)The crews of Erebus and Terror finding various ways to remedy the monotony of their predicament (and in general the grand polar exploratory tradition of going stir-crazy and doing weird shit to ward off tedium) is an eternal fascination for me and I'd be totally into any peek at that.
In the tradition of my other letters this year, if you'd like to write historical document fic or in-universe written materials for this fandom it would thrill me. Like a lot of people, I've taken the plunge into academic journals and transcribed naval documentation and cryptic genealogical records for the sake of Franklin expedition details, and any riffing on the ephemera of the expedition or in-universe analysis of the ways the show's narrative diverges from real history using the language of Victorian newspaper editorials or 21st century academic articles would tickle me pink.
I ship Hickey with practically everybody, so consider this carte blanche. I'd love fic about his canonical relationship with Gibson, where there's a lot of unspoken complexity, desire, and prickliness going back and forth. I love that Gibson seems to be the only person who's really comfortable putting Hickey down as well as capable of it, so I'd love to see more of their push and pull: any more tender moments or alternate pathways for Gibson the experienced sailor and Hickey the sneaky greenhorn, and really anything where Gibson isn't purely the browbeaten victim of Hickey's wiles. For noncanonical pairings I'd especially love to read Hickey/Jopson, Hickey/Goodsir, Hickey/Tozer, and I especially have a soft spot in my heart for Hickey/Crozier; if you want further (but by no means comprehensive) Hickey/Crozier ship prompts, check out my previous exchange letters here and here.
Bonus smut prompts: Hickey topping physically bigger, higher-ranking, and/or older characters. Size kink in general. Loyalty kink. Anachronistic cigarette kink. (Okay, so we can fanwank them as really skinny cigars or something, that's life.) Beard burn. Fully clothed sex. 19th century sex work. Noncon and dubcon, with Hickey on either side of things. Hickey showing a more sexually repressed character a good time, or a bad one. Hickey being sexually experienced but bewildered by stuff like emotional intimacy, or pillow talk, or rimming.
Mary Reilly - Valerie Martin
- Mary Reilly
I love this book to bits, both on its own merits and as a canny transformative take on classic lit. Without 19th century genre fiction I wouldn't be in fandom (thank fuck for Dracula) but Strange Case was a late addition to my repertoire and I'm thrilled to have an outside-POV take on it that brings such fascinating dimensions to the fairly dude-heavy original text.
I love this novel's sense of heightened erotic atmosphere, even as Mary herself cleaves with firm purpose to repression and proper decorum -- if you want to engage with that on any level, either solo or in the context of her relationship with Henry Jekyll, I'd be only too happy to read it. Certain passages of the novel are pretty clearly inspired by the writings and experiences of Hannah Cullwick, a nineteenth-century diarist and working woman whose complex relationship with the middle-class barrister Arthur Munby revolved around the erotics of service. I would love anything where Mary enters into a similarly complicated and ambivalent relationship with her master, and her way of navigating that under her own terms and while reckoning with her own desires. What would it be like to take a position of negotiated power over her master, and to engage with his own complex relationship with desire?
I really enjoy and appreciate this novel's treatment of trauma, and the tangible presence of Mary's girlhood hardships in her strictly-managed adult life. The process of disclosure and concealment between Mary and her master draws them together just as it keeps them separated -- Mary's past experiences and present thoughts can scarcely be expressed to anyone, but they clearly demonstrate that she's had much of her short lifetime to reckon with (and perhaps repress) those things that can't be spoken of in polite company. Her account of her father's drinking clearly strikes a chord with Jekyll, and Hyde's presence clearly strikes a chord with her that's similar to her past suffering under her father's attention -- just about anything dealing with that would make me happy.
The interlude at Mrs. Farraday's rooms after Hyde's crime there, with the murdered girl's friends and perhaps colleagues coming to find her condition, always makes me want more of that milieu -- Farraday herself rubs Mary deeply wrong for some very legitimate reasons, but she seems more sympathetic to the murdered girl's mourners, and if you were to write a canon-divergent AU where Mary's more involved with those girls' lives after that chance meeting or interacts with them further I'd eat it up.
The domestic sphere is defined in this novel through a whole lot of hard work -- scrubbing, washing, brushing, hauling, polishing, and plenty of dirt that has to be forcibly cleared away to permit the respectable home to function. If you'd like to write anything about Mary's work, her relationships with Cook/Annie, or in general the intricacies of Victorian material culture from the POV of the person who has to do the serving rather than being served, I'd love that. I'd also love anything that deals with Mary's physical strength and capability and the contrast the novel draws (and Mary herself is certainly aware of) between her lower-class, hard-working vigor and her master's elevated and cerebral fragility. The Stevenson novel reiterates a few times that Hyde is small and stunted compared to his own master -- is there any chance that Mary could subdue him? Would the doctor's clothes hang better on Mary than they do on Hyde? If things go Cullwick-and-Munby-shaped, do the two of them ever consciously try on or shed roles? (Assuming that Jekyll stays alive long enough to do so -- if you want to fudge his canonical fate in both novels, feel free to do so.)
I'm especially interested in the novel's depiction of the Jekyll/Hyde duality considered from Mary's own viewpoint, especially when the original story's rather short on female characters across the board -- Jekyll is the closest thing to Mary's ideal gentleman, while Hyde unsettles and repulses her. If you'd like to show alternate scenes or encounters between Mary and Hyde, I'd love that, especially anything that plays on the reading of Hyde as a newly-minted gentleman struggling to enjoy the finer things in life (his own suite of rooms, for instance) with the effortless pleasure of a natural-born cad. He occupies a very different place in the Victorian rubrics of class and social status than Mary, and his relationship to her master is even more complicated than her own if such a thing is even possible -- if you want to explore more of their fucked-up triangulation, or to explore Mary's feelings for this young man who has inexplicably wormed his way into her master's confidences, I would love that. Mary's initial flicker of jealousy when she thinks that Hyde is her master's newest project and is supplanting her is like a jolt of identity kink for me and I'm a sucker for Strange Case riffs where people suspect the doctor and his rough young protege are more than platonically intertwined so inject extra jealousy there if you feel. On the flipside, so to speak, I'd also love fic about Mary's canonical relationship with Henry Jekyll and any alternate paths it might have taken. All the scenes with the doctor examining Mary's scars really rove across that line between patronizing professional queasiness and personal tenderness, and their relationship suggests a host of missed opportunities and potential for moments of mutual recognition.
The novel's framing device of a recovered manuscript seems like it would lend itself well to epistolary fic between later correspondents or meta fic in other unusual formats -- BBS posts, academic writings and book reviews, Twitter scandals! -- dealing with the afterlife of Reilly's writing. Bonus points if you incorporate the various schools of historical thought and feminist theory that produced works like this one when combined with the Neo-Victorian novel form.
Ship-wise, I love Mary's complex canonical relationships with both Jekyll and Hyde; I'd also be happy to read fic that pairs her with Mrs. Farraday, the murdered girl's friends, an OFC, or other female characters from 19th century literature. (Mina Murray? Rosa Budd? Grushenka Svetlova? Sybil Vane?)
Smut-specific prompts: you know that whole wildly fraught sequence with Jekyll's injured ankle and Mary having to assist him? Make it weird. Well, weirder. Or that scene where Mary must carefully and cautiously feed him his breakfast -- feel free to whump either or both of them freely for the sake of weird touchy-feely intimacy This seems like a great fandom for kink that doesn't involve intercourse in obvious ways, and I wouldn't be disappointed to receive that in this or any fandom -- size differences, age differences, class differences, sturdy women with sturdy muscles, the thrill of restrictive garments, the many pleasures of dirt! -- but if you'd like to write sexy stuff with sex in it, I'd especially love cunnilingus, body worship, fucked-up knifeplay, undernegotiated roughness, and dubcon/noncon involving Hyde. If you'd want to write more insidious dubcon or noncon involving Mary's sainted master, I'd be here for that too.
Likes:
Some general things I dig:
- historical details, material culture, pop culture
- allegiances and loyalty (especially loyalty kink!)
- dreams and nightmares, feverish visions, neurasthenia
- psychological horror
- body horror (surprise new orifices, involuntarily changing bodies, parasites, viral transformations, losing control over your own body and mind, etc.)
- gothic horror tropes (mystery, wonder, and the macabre, decaying old houses, ancestral curses, family secrets, etc.)
- noir tropes (doubles! identity trouble! perversity, pessimism, fatalism, and menace!)
- claustrophobia, doubt, guilt, decay
- trauma and PTSD, memory and personal baggage, disability
- road trips and travel
- character death
- angst (angsty tormented ladies! angsty tormented dudes! stoic suffering!)
- sturdy/muscular women with tender hearts
- spooky atmosphere -- decaying hotel rooms, sinister places, oppressive atmospheres
- cozy atmosphere -- small-scale domesticity, hospitality, characters looking after each other, running a household, making a home
- goofy or dark humor, humor in general
- religious themes and elements (whether positive or more ambivalent)
- family relationships and parental baggage
- in-universe documents (letters, manuscripts, academic journals, etc.)
- unusual formats (interactive fiction, illustrated fic, etc.)
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 especially enjoy:
- loyalty kink
- friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-friends-to-lovers, enemies-to-lovers-while-remaining-enemies
- agonized pining both reciprocated and unreciprocated
- one-night stands with complicated emotions attached, or purely sexual relationships leading to unexpected feelings
- hurt/comfort -- one or more parties getting tragically roughed up or whumped to hell and back and needing stoic ministrations; h/c where a rough or unpleasant person is the recipient of the comfort whether they like it or not; h/c where a villainous character is doing the comforting; cautious or grudging h/c
- quarrelsome but ride-or-die friendships
- characters who just can't stay away from each other
- domesticity and tenderness coming before characters become lovers
If you're interested in writing smut, I love:
- size differences
- age differences
- body worship
- oral sex (cunnilingus, fellatio, rimming)
- handjobs
- frottage and non-penetrative sex
- clothed/semi-clothed sex
- fancy clothes, uniforms, layers, dressing and undressing
- hatesex and fighting-turned-fucking
- breathplay
- inhibitions and interpersonal baggage in the bedroom
- anonymous or pseudo-anonymous hookups (especially in semi-public places -- public parks, train compartments, dormitories and barracks)
- noncon and dubcon
- painful/clumsy but fun and tender sex, OR, tragically clumsy fail sex
- wound fingering
- 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
- time-period-specific sexual practices and meeting places.
I love noncon and dubcon, especially mutually antagonistic or psychologically muddy angles and characters making difficult bargains using sex. I appreciate a focus on difficult/complicated emotions and experiences and the conflicted side of dubcon -- a character having sex they don't uncomplicatedly desire but that they believe will help them achieve some goal, for instance. For noncon I especially like to read about horror, discomfort, resistance, self-disgust, and anger on the victim's side; for perpetrator attitudes I like reading about hatred, mixed feelings, obsessive love, contempt, and the like, but I don't care much for explicit noncon/dubcon with victims or perpetrators under 16, ravishment tropes where the victim secretly wanted it all along/hated it at first but came to love it, scenarios where afterward the rape is a non-issue as though it hadn't happened, or where the rape results in unambiguous true love and a happily ever after. I'm fine with non-explicit noncon and dubcon and would be just as happy with only the aftermath or implication portrayed if that's more in your comfort zone.
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 open to whatever pairings you want to bring to the table. I dig slash, femslash, het, gen, and anything else; feel free to write any kind of pairing you like or none at all, as well as multiple pairings, OT3s and poly relationships, infidelity, 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. A lot of my canons deal on some level with real-life social issues (homophobia, sexual violence, domestic 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 fine with all different formats and structures for 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, and 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 and genre/pastiche AUs. Let the world be your oyster there.
I love AUs that racebend characters, always-a-girl genderswaps, and fic where characters are written as trans; I especially enjoy transfic that isn't focused on coming out or self-discovery, or where the character's canonical gender doesn't change, just the character's presumed cis status. (Trans man Roddie Ayres or trans woman Caroline, for instance.) I'm also happy to receive crossovers and fusions -- if you're not sure if I'm familiar with a fandom judging from my AO3 fandom list or past request letters, feel free to ask via a mod. I'd be happy to receive poetry, but would rather not receive free verse -- any other metrical forms are fair game.
If you want to check out my past exchange letters, you can find them here. This year I'm also planning on participating in several other Yuletide challenges like Crueltide/Yuleporn: Crueltide | Yuleporn
DNWs:
I'd rather not receive fic featuring unrequested depictions of self-harm, eating disorders, suicide, child sexual abuse, or incest. (Suicidal ideation as well as Caroline's canonically suggestive death in Little Stranger is fair game, as is the CSA subtext in Mary Reilly/Turn of the Screw and past underage for Hickey in The Terror.) I don't want to read explicit sex involving characters under 16.
*
The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters
- Roderick Ayres, Caroline Ayres
I loved this novel to pieces, and it does a tremendous job pulling apart the societal underpinnings of gothic fiction through its incisive use of historical place and time.The Ayres siblings are mostly seen through Faraday's eyes, and that casts them in an interesting and complicated light; I love the narrator's compelling presence as one lens through which the story unfolds, but I'd love to get more of the two of them outside that structure, either scenes we never glimpse from Faraday's POV in canon or without that narrative filter.
Roderick's struggles at Hundreds don't start with his accident, but that certainly didn't make his life much easier -- what was his boyhood there like, and what was his sense of his inheritance as the only son? I love Roderick's passion for machines and engineering -- cars, planes, just about anything else by the sound of things -- and would love fic that deals with the past few decades' worth of technological advancements as they've arrived (or haven't arrived) at the house. I would love anything to do with his experience of disability after the war -- encounters with other disabled servicemen, his experiences in the period of immediate recovery, or something set in the period of Roddie's homecoming after his smash. Or anything else to do with wartime experiences, whether shaded with the gothic in their own right, perhaps in ways that Faraday couldn't perceive if he were privy to them, but that Caroline and Roddie can. Did Caroline and Roderick see much of each other during the course of the war, or correspond at all? How did their paths diverge?
The novel is shy around the matter of homosexuality considered relative to Waters' regular oeuvre, but I would be very interested in a reading of both of the Ayres siblings as queer -- whether they're fully conscious of it or not. (Though I can't imagine Waters isn't conscious of that aspect of the novel, especially with Caroline -- the Wrens were the only branch of the British armed forces where homosexuality wasn't formally outlawed, though that didn't mean that women who loved other women had an especially easy time either.) I'd love anything about Caroline's friendships and relationships during the war, or Roddie's experiences and connections in the RAF.
I'd be interested in further encounters with the titular stranger, the malevolent and sometimes petty force that exerts itself over Hundreds and the Ayres family -- feel free to fill in the blanks of unseen encounters during Faraday's tenure at Hundreds, or is there any chance of the phenomena Roddie so hates and fears following him to the institution even after he's been expelled from Hundreds itself? Given the animating obsessions and resentments that drive the forces haunting Hundreds, is there any chance of escape? How much of her sister does Caroline suspect, and what does she finally glimpse?
Or suppose Caroline manages to make her escape from the house itself -- I confess I always find her death just agonizing so if you want to fix that any way you can think of, especially if Betty helps, I'd love that. If a gothic novel is the romance between a girl and a house -- Faraday having coopted the form in his own way -- is there any possibility of a divorce between Caroline and Hundreds? What does life after haunting look like? Likewise, a canon-divergent piece where Roderick's fate plays out differently (whatever that looks like in your imagination, even if it's still tragic) would be right up my alley.
I love the novel's scenes of struggle against entropy -- from the waves of cultural changes that seem profoundly threatening to people like the Ayres to the physical deterioration that time and use exert on Hundreds Hall. You could write a thousand words just about looking after a shabby old house and I would love it. Caroline is really the haunted gothic heroine I've been waiting for all my life -- sturdy, sensitive yet sensible, kinda butch, loves dogs -- and I love the ways she's grounded in the physical world. Her slightly careless existence isolated from much of the world may not look like Faraday's standard for womanhood, but she's more interested in all her own baggage to wrangle. Caroline must be equally if not more aware than Faraday of the ways she's being shuttled around socially in an attempt to set her up with a suitable mate and save the house in the process, so what does she make of that? Does she steel herself to the prospect, or recoil from it, or both? What's her life like when Faraday's gaze isn't on her, and what is her relationship with her brother like?
I'd love to read more about the decadent fall-of-the-house-of-Ayres themes, both the literal decay of Hundreds Hall and the termination of the Ayres family line without issue. Really, if you want to pull out all the Gothic stops here -- Rebecca, The Turn of the Screw, M.R. James, have at it -- or embrace the class issues, I would be really into it, so feel free to weave in any other gothic/horror elements or inject some (further) intertextuality.
Ship-wise, I'd be interested in fic that deals with Caroline's canonical relationship with Faraday in all its complexity; I'd also be interested in Roderick/Faraday, and all the differentials of age/experience/class between them -- how weird could that professional and personal relationship get? I'd also be interested in Caroline/Brenda or any of her other wartime friends, or Roderick/any of his RAF buddies, including the younger navigator whose passing he grieves so pointedly. ('You know his navigator died, when their plane came down? I think he blamed himself for that. It was nobody’s fault, of course. —No one’s but the Germans’, I mean. But they say it’s always hard on the pilots when their crews are lost. The boy was younger than Roddie; only just nineteen. Rod used to say that it ought to have been the other way around: that the boy had had more to live for than he did.')
Smut likes: Body worship. Mutual masturbation. Body hair. Significant dressing and undressing. Uniform kink. Oral sex. Anything employing Faraday's questionably therapeutic devices for less than pure purposes. Medical kink. Anything that leans into the boyish aspect of Roderick's attractiveness -- situational homosexuality, wartime masculinities, wild repression, societal baggage in the bedroom -- or the more sturdy, sensible aspects of Caroline's -- her strong hairy legs, her attractive disheveledness, schoolgirl pashes extended into wartime adulthood, furious sexual repression.
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The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
(This novella is in the public domain and can be accessed at Project Gutenberg, as well as elsewhere.)
- Miles, Flora
I love this story to pieces, its eerie depiction of the ambiguity of supposed childhood innocence and the way it establishes its dread creeping fear on a direct line into the darkest parts of the Victorian psyche. With regard to apparitionist/non-apparitionist schools of thought I like to have my cake and eat it too, so feel free to come down on either or both sides of that line or weave back and forth across it as you desire. Feel to write any kind of crossover with then-contemporary or modern weird fiction, ghost stories, or horror fiction. Or simply 19th century children's fiction -- if you've ever wanted to cross this novella over with A Little Princess or The Secret Garden, now is your time.
With regard to the novella's adults, I'm not especially interested in Quint as a character but I'm very interested in Jessel, the second governess, Mrs. Grose, the kids' deadbeat guardian, and the characters in the framing story for that matter. I do take the reading that there's a solidly sexual element to Quint's supposed malign influence on the children as well as Jessel and that Mile's offenses leading him to be sent down from school likewise related to sex, either directly or indirectly -- I'm fine with characters having typically Victorian views of sexual abuse and sexual knowledge and I prefer an interpretation where Quint remains an unpleasant figure even at his most magnetic. (If the CSA reading isn't one you prefer, feel free to elide, avoid, or omit it entirely in favor of another.) I'm familiar with most adaptations of this story, including The Innocents, but would prefer no cross-pollination in fic with Britten's opera, The Turning, or The Nightcomers.
I love the double-edged ambiguity of Miles, the role-transgressing jauntiness of Flora, the kids' shadowy yet thoroughly Victorian backstory, and the pure banality of how they both end up wealthy yet unwanted; anything about the two of them either separately or together, or any missing scenes from their lives and experiences with their creepy and/or flakey guardians would be welcome. We learn that Miles did (or rather said) something bad away at school; I'd love an outside POV on that from a fellow student, perhaps one of those that he himself says he liked, or an adult's account of something barely-glimpsed and even less understood. (Or Miles' own unreliable account, unmediated by the governess-narrator?) In an AU where Miles survives and is still a piece of work, how might he himself he frame the narrative of the haunting? Does he ever end up going back to school? In such an alternate continuation, do the hysterical associations between Miles and precocious wickedness linger?
Flora is rather younger than Miles and is exempted from some aspects of the expected Victorian path to adulthood by dint of being a girl, but as a result the governess seems even less equipped to deal with her when she's not being sweet and charming. Her confidence and courage give the governess narrator the willies, and her supernatural cockeyed qualities take a rather different form than her brother's. Does she take the ghosts of Bly with her when she goes on to her next residence after the story's finish? How might the shadow of the Quint-Jessel affair and the second governess' hysteria linger with her? The governess narrator mentally characterizes Flora's relationship toward Miles as being one of girlish adulation for an intellectually and physically superior male relative, but it doesn't have to be -- feel free to turn those gendered expectations inside out, or to explore what else bonds siblings together.
I'd love any postcanon fic -- what's it like to survive a ghost story, or not to survive one? If you want to give either Miles or Flora a literary afterlife (in a canon-divergent AU or otherwise) I would love it -- either as writers and artists themselves, or preserved in another contemporary document like a case study or a series of gossipy letters. I'd love something where they echo other sets of famous literary siblings or blaze new literary trail. Might postcanon Flora outliving her brother mean living to tell her own version of the spectral experiences, perhaps contesting other accounts? Whether that's a riff into ultra-bleak feminist autobiography, Jamesian ambiguity, or dark comedy, I'm down. I'm a sucker for all the long shadows associated with Haunted Child characters all grown up, and Miles and Flora could conceivably have lived through all kinds of fin de siecle fun if Miles' untimely death hadn't intervened -- if you want to subvert or rearrange that cut-shortness, go to town writing an adult version of the siblings that's equally opaque, canny, and ambiguous, or that turns with time into something altogether different.
There's lots of room for missing scenes from the novel's events, or predating the second governess' arrival -- if you want to write anything from the children's POV, or any scene or exchange that might have transpired between them, I'd love that. Sinister secrets of Bly, uncanny geographies, or just the homey niceness of a fine old house grown suffocating and strange -- what else lies under the surface of that lake? Are there less-frequented rooms with their own dark histories? I'd love anything that contrasts the childhood landscape of the place (as a big old house with lots of odd corners and cozy rooms) with the adult scenes that have played out in its various locations. I'd love to read fic set during the first reign of Miss Jessel, especially if it's delivered through the children's slightly skewed and childish perspective -- the kids as spectators on an adult's psychological deterioration, or another sinister system of decay and collapse. Or set the fucked-up psychosexual snarl between the servants and their charges playing out at Bly against the backdrop of another grander-scale sort of downfall -- in a riff on late-19th-century invasion literature, or a crisis due to epidemic disease, or the undead takeover depicted in Kim Newman's Anno Dracula.
Or write epistolary fic from the perspective of a modern (or less-than-entirely-modern) historian trying to untangle the threads of life at Bly -- the written manuscript of the governess' tale is a key piece of the novel's framing, but what other documents of life in an Essex country house might serve to inform or illuminate what transpired there for an inquisitive scholar? If you're writing fake documents/epistolary fic, feel free to include Miles and Flora only in their textual afterlives rather than in person, or have one/both show up for an unexpected bit of oral history if you dare. I love fake academic writing, letters, framing stories, and all that good stuff, so if the spirit moves you I would adore a meta take on the lives (and deaths) of the children and adults who dwell at Bly. I'd also love to read anything that tweaks the narrative conventions of Victorian children's literature and/or literature about children, especially for horror or black comedy -- saintly dead kids, boys' own adventures, unspecified but surely filthy vices, Alice in Wonderland-style slightly sinister romps.
I don't have any particular ships I'm dying to see during the canon era but period-typical school relationships between Miles or Flora with same-aged friends or postcanon relationships for any survivors are also totally fine. If you write fic about the fucked-up relationship snarl between Jessel, Quint, and the children, or about Miles' nonspecific indiscretions at school, I'd prefer no explicit sexual content involving the kids.
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AMC's The Terror
(You can stream season one of The Terror on Hulu -- it's a standalone season of ten episodes.)
- Cornelius Hickey
Further adventures of this little murderous S.O.B., please! Hickey's a nasty piece of work no matter what, but I'd love to see his wonderfully pragmatic ambitions play out differently. There are a couple points where the expedition itself could have taken a different turn, and I'd love an alternate trajectory for impending doom -- something where Franklin doesn't die so early on and Crozier has to decide whether or not to mutiny with Hickey inserting himself as Crozier's wannabe lieutenant in it all? Something where Hickey doesn't murder Irving and Farr and has to contrive some other occasion for easily stage-managed conflict?
Who was E.C. before he became Hickey? I'd love a prequel or missing scene from canon -- scenes from his scruffy childhood, something set back in England before he takes on the identity of the real Cornelius Hickey, something early in his courtship with Gibson, something with him learning more about how to bluff his way through an Arctic voyage, a scene of him through another character's perspective, a missing scene from his mutiny or the aftermath of his very public flogging. I like the occasional moments where Hickey does the right thing, or close to it -- for instance his attempt to cut loose the trapped crewmen during Carnivale, even if that backfires on one particular member of the crew -- and I'd love to read something where Hickey manages to be surprisingly decent while still being a brutally pragmatic scruffy cannibal. If Hickey wins, or manages to cajole Crozier around to seeing things his way, what does his victory look like?
I'm a huge sucker for morality-swapped/role-swapped AUs where canonical heroes are positioned as villains, and the morally gray quality of the show's protagonists makes that an especially attractive prospect -- I can imagine Crozier ending up in a darker moral place than in canon pretty easily, but what would it take for Hickey to step up and be more heroic than usual while still being his usual pragmatic self?
I'd love to read a canon-divergent AU where Irving doesn't snitch on Hickey and Gibson -- what changes? A lot, or only a little? -- or something where the events of "Punished, As A Boy" go off the rails in a different way, perhaps sparking an entirely different mutiny where Hickey isn't the one in the driver's seat. Or something where Hickey actually has to cooperate with Silna and follow her lead instead of trying to use her as a bargaining chip -- he clearly thinks he gets what's going on between her and the tuunbaq, but judging by the tuunbaq's response to his overtures he's far off the mark, and his self-serving attitude is the polar opposite of her sense of responsibility.
So how does Hickey understand the supernatural? How does he understand the soul? Maybe something set late in the mutiny when Hickey's going a little bit weird -- is he really communing with spirits on some level? is he ascending to a higher plane? Is he starving and losing his shit? Hickey as freaky urban mystic, proto-Marxist rebel, Jean Genet-flavored queer criminal, or Arctic tyrant. If you're feeling extra-indulgent, whump the hell out of Hickey and let him deal with it with his customary well-adjusted humility -- I am a simple reader with simple needs and I love to see surly little men get beat up.
I'd love to read your AUs set during the same time period as canon (1845 and thereabouts) but on dry land -- prison AU? women's prison AU? -- or any setting-update AUs set in the second half of the 20th century. Stick Hickey in the shifting political climate of the 1970s, or the independent music scene of the 1990s, and have him ruin that instead. Across the board, I'd also love alternate takes on the show's horror aspects -- a Frankenstein fusion? A vampire AU influenced by the Demeter sequence in Bram Stoker's Dracula? Something with a danger in the ice more like the creature of John Carpenter's The Thing, or a more Lovecraftian horror? Write something incorporating nineteenth-century spiritualism (AU where Hickey is a fraudster back on dry land?) or Georgian dream interpretation.
Or if you'd like to write something lighter, I'm fascinated by the history of shipboard entertainments on Arctic and Antarctic voyages, so I'd love to read fic where Hickey gets dragged into participating in an amateur shipboard theatrical, or writes for a shipboard newspaper. If you're feeling festive, there's always the possibility of something set on the previous overwinterings in the ice on Christmas or New Year, or a celebration of days getting longer again -- Hickey contending with other people's impromptu attempts to replicate the experience of a cozy Victorian Christmas when trapped on board ship with nobody but sweaty sailors. (If you need any inspiration, check out Shane McCorristine and Jane Mocellin's Christmas at the Poles: emotions, food, and festivities on polar expeditions, 1818–1912. If you don't have access, have a Hippo hit me up on the Yuletide Discord and I'll ahem a copy of it your way.)The crews of Erebus and Terror finding various ways to remedy the monotony of their predicament (and in general the grand polar exploratory tradition of going stir-crazy and doing weird shit to ward off tedium) is an eternal fascination for me and I'd be totally into any peek at that.
In the tradition of my other letters this year, if you'd like to write historical document fic or in-universe written materials for this fandom it would thrill me. Like a lot of people, I've taken the plunge into academic journals and transcribed naval documentation and cryptic genealogical records for the sake of Franklin expedition details, and any riffing on the ephemera of the expedition or in-universe analysis of the ways the show's narrative diverges from real history using the language of Victorian newspaper editorials or 21st century academic articles would tickle me pink.
I ship Hickey with practically everybody, so consider this carte blanche. I'd love fic about his canonical relationship with Gibson, where there's a lot of unspoken complexity, desire, and prickliness going back and forth. I love that Gibson seems to be the only person who's really comfortable putting Hickey down as well as capable of it, so I'd love to see more of their push and pull: any more tender moments or alternate pathways for Gibson the experienced sailor and Hickey the sneaky greenhorn, and really anything where Gibson isn't purely the browbeaten victim of Hickey's wiles. For noncanonical pairings I'd especially love to read Hickey/Jopson, Hickey/Goodsir, Hickey/Tozer, and I especially have a soft spot in my heart for Hickey/Crozier; if you want further (but by no means comprehensive) Hickey/Crozier ship prompts, check out my previous exchange letters here and here.
Bonus smut prompts: Hickey topping physically bigger, higher-ranking, and/or older characters. Size kink in general. Loyalty kink. Anachronistic cigarette kink. (Okay, so we can fanwank them as really skinny cigars or something, that's life.) Beard burn. Fully clothed sex. 19th century sex work. Noncon and dubcon, with Hickey on either side of things. Hickey showing a more sexually repressed character a good time, or a bad one. Hickey being sexually experienced but bewildered by stuff like emotional intimacy, or pillow talk, or rimming.
Mary Reilly - Valerie Martin
- Mary Reilly
I love this book to bits, both on its own merits and as a canny transformative take on classic lit. Without 19th century genre fiction I wouldn't be in fandom (thank fuck for Dracula) but Strange Case was a late addition to my repertoire and I'm thrilled to have an outside-POV take on it that brings such fascinating dimensions to the fairly dude-heavy original text.
I love this novel's sense of heightened erotic atmosphere, even as Mary herself cleaves with firm purpose to repression and proper decorum -- if you want to engage with that on any level, either solo or in the context of her relationship with Henry Jekyll, I'd be only too happy to read it. Certain passages of the novel are pretty clearly inspired by the writings and experiences of Hannah Cullwick, a nineteenth-century diarist and working woman whose complex relationship with the middle-class barrister Arthur Munby revolved around the erotics of service. I would love anything where Mary enters into a similarly complicated and ambivalent relationship with her master, and her way of navigating that under her own terms and while reckoning with her own desires. What would it be like to take a position of negotiated power over her master, and to engage with his own complex relationship with desire?
I really enjoy and appreciate this novel's treatment of trauma, and the tangible presence of Mary's girlhood hardships in her strictly-managed adult life. The process of disclosure and concealment between Mary and her master draws them together just as it keeps them separated -- Mary's past experiences and present thoughts can scarcely be expressed to anyone, but they clearly demonstrate that she's had much of her short lifetime to reckon with (and perhaps repress) those things that can't be spoken of in polite company. Her account of her father's drinking clearly strikes a chord with Jekyll, and Hyde's presence clearly strikes a chord with her that's similar to her past suffering under her father's attention -- just about anything dealing with that would make me happy.
The interlude at Mrs. Farraday's rooms after Hyde's crime there, with the murdered girl's friends and perhaps colleagues coming to find her condition, always makes me want more of that milieu -- Farraday herself rubs Mary deeply wrong for some very legitimate reasons, but she seems more sympathetic to the murdered girl's mourners, and if you were to write a canon-divergent AU where Mary's more involved with those girls' lives after that chance meeting or interacts with them further I'd eat it up.
The domestic sphere is defined in this novel through a whole lot of hard work -- scrubbing, washing, brushing, hauling, polishing, and plenty of dirt that has to be forcibly cleared away to permit the respectable home to function. If you'd like to write anything about Mary's work, her relationships with Cook/Annie, or in general the intricacies of Victorian material culture from the POV of the person who has to do the serving rather than being served, I'd love that. I'd also love anything that deals with Mary's physical strength and capability and the contrast the novel draws (and Mary herself is certainly aware of) between her lower-class, hard-working vigor and her master's elevated and cerebral fragility. The Stevenson novel reiterates a few times that Hyde is small and stunted compared to his own master -- is there any chance that Mary could subdue him? Would the doctor's clothes hang better on Mary than they do on Hyde? If things go Cullwick-and-Munby-shaped, do the two of them ever consciously try on or shed roles? (Assuming that Jekyll stays alive long enough to do so -- if you want to fudge his canonical fate in both novels, feel free to do so.)
I'm especially interested in the novel's depiction of the Jekyll/Hyde duality considered from Mary's own viewpoint, especially when the original story's rather short on female characters across the board -- Jekyll is the closest thing to Mary's ideal gentleman, while Hyde unsettles and repulses her. If you'd like to show alternate scenes or encounters between Mary and Hyde, I'd love that, especially anything that plays on the reading of Hyde as a newly-minted gentleman struggling to enjoy the finer things in life (his own suite of rooms, for instance) with the effortless pleasure of a natural-born cad. He occupies a very different place in the Victorian rubrics of class and social status than Mary, and his relationship to her master is even more complicated than her own if such a thing is even possible -- if you want to explore more of their fucked-up triangulation, or to explore Mary's feelings for this young man who has inexplicably wormed his way into her master's confidences, I would love that. Mary's initial flicker of jealousy when she thinks that Hyde is her master's newest project and is supplanting her is like a jolt of identity kink for me and I'm a sucker for Strange Case riffs where people suspect the doctor and his rough young protege are more than platonically intertwined so inject extra jealousy there if you feel. On the flipside, so to speak, I'd also love fic about Mary's canonical relationship with Henry Jekyll and any alternate paths it might have taken. All the scenes with the doctor examining Mary's scars really rove across that line between patronizing professional queasiness and personal tenderness, and their relationship suggests a host of missed opportunities and potential for moments of mutual recognition.
The novel's framing device of a recovered manuscript seems like it would lend itself well to epistolary fic between later correspondents or meta fic in other unusual formats -- BBS posts, academic writings and book reviews, Twitter scandals! -- dealing with the afterlife of Reilly's writing. Bonus points if you incorporate the various schools of historical thought and feminist theory that produced works like this one when combined with the Neo-Victorian novel form.
Ship-wise, I love Mary's complex canonical relationships with both Jekyll and Hyde; I'd also be happy to read fic that pairs her with Mrs. Farraday, the murdered girl's friends, an OFC, or other female characters from 19th century literature. (Mina Murray? Rosa Budd? Grushenka Svetlova? Sybil Vane?)
Smut-specific prompts: you know that whole wildly fraught sequence with Jekyll's injured ankle and Mary having to assist him? Make it weird. Well, weirder. Or that scene where Mary must carefully and cautiously feed him his breakfast -- feel free to whump either or both of them freely for the sake of weird touchy-feely intimacy This seems like a great fandom for kink that doesn't involve intercourse in obvious ways, and I wouldn't be disappointed to receive that in this or any fandom -- size differences, age differences, class differences, sturdy women with sturdy muscles, the thrill of restrictive garments, the many pleasures of dirt! -- but if you'd like to write sexy stuff with sex in it, I'd especially love cunnilingus, body worship, fucked-up knifeplay, undernegotiated roughness, and dubcon/noncon involving Hyde. If you'd want to write more insidious dubcon or noncon involving Mary's sainted master, I'd be here for that too.