Yuletide 2021 letter

[skazka]

Happy Yuletide, gang -- I'm skazka @ AO3 and this is my customary too-long Yuletide letter. This letter gets way too long and you are under zero obligation to use any of it beyond what's mandatory -- I just get way too excited talking about this stuff.

- Likes
- DNWs
- Dune - Frank Herbert (Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen)
- Edward, Edward - Lolah Burford (Edward Clare Armstrong)
- The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters (Caroline, Roderick)
- Mary Reilly - Valerie Martin (Mary Reilly)
- HBO's Rome (Gaius Octavian Caesar)
- These Violent Delights - Micah Nemerever (Julian Fromme)

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
- captivity, whether literal or metaphorical (house arrest, claustrophobia, bonding with one's captors/captives, bogus politeness from host to 'guest', being technically free to physically leave but psychologically restricted)
- ghosts (poltergeists, spirit visitations, seances, 19th century Spiritualism, vengeful spirits)
- 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!)
- politics, treachery, backstabbing, institutional drama, farce
- claustrophobia, doubt, guilt, decay
- conversely, characters with unusual or offbeat viewpoints being businesslike, confident, and competent
- trauma and PTSD, memory and personal baggage
- disability and the body
- road trips and travel
- character death
- angst (tormented ladies! 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
- 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, fingering
- 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 reading about all kinds of consent issues, especially mutually antagonistic or psychologically muddy angles and characters making difficult bargains using sex. I appreciate a focus on difficult/complicated emotions and internal conflict -- a character having sex they don't uncomplicatedly desire but that they believe will help them achieve some goal, for instance. I don't care much for ravishment tropes where the victim secretly wanted it all along despite their protests or hated it at first but came to love it, scenarios where afterward the rape is a non-issue as though it hadn't happened at all, or where rape results in unambiguous true love/a happily ever after.

I'm fine with all different formats and structures for fic, from casefic to character study to domestic fluff to plotless porn. You are under zero obligation to include all (or only) my requested characters in the same fic, and I'm happy for other characters to appear. 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 totally on board with alternate universes of all kinds. 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 enjoy AUs that racebend characters, always-a-girl genderswaps, and fic where characters are written as trans, especially fic where the character's textual presentation doesn't change, just the character's presumed cis status.

I'm 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 also be happy to receive poetry, but would rather not receive free verse -- any other metrical forms are fair game.

In addition to all this bananas tl;dr I plan on doing Crueltide and Yuleporn this year — links tba. I am doing Crueltide and Yuleporn! If you want to check out my past exchange letters, you can find them here.

DNWs:

Free-verse poetry; teacher/student sex; pregnancy as a central plot element; unrequested incest or child sexual abuse themes; noncanonical depictions of self-harm, suicide, or eating disorders. I don't want to read explicit sex involving characters under 16. This year I would also prefer no focus on contemporary 2010s politics and no fic with police violence, real-life hate groups, or COVID-19.



*

Dune - Frank Herbert

(This canon is a widely-available 1965 science fiction novel series, and you can get your hands on them wherever books are sold. Almost all my prompts here relate to events in the first book, so feel zero obligation to canon review beyond that.)

Signup Prompts: I love this sullen, murderous little backstabber with his incredible space clothes and his key role in multiple different factions’ schemes that all get resoundingly screwed-up — anything you write with him at the center of it would make me very happy. I really enjoy the thematic possibility that if he weren’t being raised as the vessel for House Harkonnen’s unpleasant imperial ambitions he could have been a better person and used his considerable abilities including genetic inheritance for something more than an unpleasant life and a nasty death, but I also love his canon-typical surly, sulky, resentful, treacherous, kind of horny self. He’s a very conscious polar opposite of Paul in many ways — they’re the Goofus and Gallant of the far future, Paul is a virgin until Chani while Feyd has a whole bevy of doomed concubines — and I’d love to see that taken in any direction. I’d love any fic dealing with the political makeup of the Dune universe and Feyd-Rautha’s place in it — the Baron’s plans to make him his brother’s successor so he comes off like a benevolent peacemaker just by being more sneaky and less brutal, the Bene Gesserit’s attempts to make awful super-babies by orchestrating reproduction between Feyd and the House Atreides offspring that ends up being Paul, and especially Feyd’s own attempts to expedite the whole “inheriting my wicked uncle’s title and property” process by extra-nasty assassination attempt. Anything exploring his relationship with Paul, either the theoretical one the Bene Gesserit administration seem to have planned out for the two of them before Jessica’s exercise of her autonomy threw a wrench in the works or the hate-fueled rivalry thing they have going in canon. Or on a very different note, anything exploring Feyd-Rautha’s deeply fucked-up, deeply resentful familial relationships with his brother or with the Baron — I find the element of grooming in the latter really interesting as a pretty dark inversion of how young Paul’s household members have trained him up, and as someone with an eternal appetite for stories where evil protégés backstab their even eviller mentors (or where they attempt to) I’d love anything unpacking that complicated push and pull of resentment, dependence, obvious unreciprocated attraction, and queasy fear there. Any alternate outcomes around his canonical death, whether that’s oriented around canon divergence or just switching up the ensuing outcomes. Gholas, ghosts, future historians trying to patch together dueling narratives of his brief nasty life and stabby nasty death? While I’m not requesting Paul this year, I find the whole “Muad’dib’s terrible purpose” thing fascinating and if you want to write Feyd dealing with the fallout of Paul attempting to buck his canonical destiny or otherwise alter the trajectory of the Golden Path, I would adore that. Across the board, I love the world and characters of these novels and am down for any collection of characters you’d like to bring into the story as long as there’s substantial focus on Feyd-Rautha. Ship-wise, I’m interested in Feyd-Rautha paired with anyone in House Harkonnen or House Atreides, but especially Paul, the Baron, Piter, and Feyd’s canon concubines, as well as with Irulan Corinno, Jessica, Chani, and Margot Fenring.

- Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen

Right off the bat: I’ve read the original Frank Herbert Dune novels and the (by now super apocryphal) Dune Encyclopedia, I’ve seen the Lynch film and the 2000 miniseries, and by the time this exchange’s reveals are out I’ll have seen the 2021 Villeneuve film. I haven’t read the various prequel novels but I’m familiar with the Wiki-able details. For the purposes of core plot/character ages/character descriptions/etc. I’d prefer you to stick to book canon, but if you want to bring in worldbuilding or other developments from other adaptations or extended materials please feel free to go wild.

I’m seriously hankering for some House politics and intrigue among the Harkonnens! How much does Feyd-Rautha know about the Baron’s (ngl, fairly obvious) intentions to swap him out for his brother, and how old is he when he puts that together? How aware is he of the Baron’s other clear intentions for him, and how does he feel about that?

Scenes of Feyd-Rautha’s education in nastiness —with the Baron and Piter both in play and Glossu not that far off, there’s not a decent role model in sight, and I’d love any scene illustrating the way the House’s virtues of sneakiness and brutality have impressed themselves on him. How aware is he that other Houses don’t operate quite like the one whose leadership he’s being prepped to inherit? I would especially love scenes where he interacts with Piter in whatever capacity — I love that terrible little twisted mentat too and the two of them must have had some deeply weird encounters over the course of Feyd’s upbringing. The amount of unpleasant incest energy in his workplace can’t have passed Piter by — how do he and the future na-Baron view one another?

Conversely, anything with Feyd outside of the closed environment of his House: maybe Giedi Prime is just the kind of place where you take whatever fun you can get, but it’s fascinating to me that canon suggests Feyd-Rautha is uniquely popular there for his gladiatorial accomplishments and maybe more. I’d love fic with Feyd-Rautha pulling a Prince Hal and going ostensibly undercover with his adoring public. Maybe he gets laid, maybe he gains important insights into interplanetary realpolitik, probably he stabs somebody.

What if the book one assassination attempt on the Baron succeeds and Feyd-Rautha finds himself baron proper just in time for Paul to royally fuck things up for him? I’d really love any take on this particular point of divergence, from canon pastiches where plot ensues to introspection about how weird it is when you finally get what you want and the loathsome benefactor who groomed you for power is out of the picture.

More about the barely-seen encounter between Feyd-Rautha and Margot Fenring. She gets up to quite a bit with Feyd while the Baron’s not around, and I’d love a deeper look at that, especially the Bene Gesserit-specific techniques Margot employs to further her own agenda with him and to what degree he’s aware of the dangers there. I also just love Margot and her husband humming away at one another so if you want to write another seduction scenario that’s just an intergalactic bedroom farce during the Imperial equivalent of one of those Edwardian country house parties where everyone’s swapping partners and hatching schemes I’d love that.

Scenes from an arranged marriage between Feyd-Rautha and Irulan — this seems to have been at least one of the Baron’s many gambits, and I see the two of them as foils to one another along the strict societal (and Bene Gesserit-enforced) gender divide of canon. I’d love to see the two of them as a hideous power couple or as grudging allies against a continuing Fremen resistance with or without Paul at the helm — I’m hugely interested in alternate timelines and alternate possibilities for Paul’s terrible messianic purpose, and I’d love something where Paul is still a formidable presence as a religious martyr or the gadfly making House Harkonnen’s lives hell.

Scenes from an arranged marriage between Feyd-Rautha and Paul — either with always-a-girl Paul (I’m fine and down for transmasculine Paul Atreides in any other context than this one given the Bene Gesserit clearly expect babymaking) or in any other context where reproductive incompatibility is on the table but there are strong incentives to make things work. I love the additional variable that recognized concubinage enters into the otherwise pretty recognizably feudal and patriarchal structure of the Houses, so if you want to bring that into play with any of these scenarios I would love it. These two characters are definitely intended as foils for one another, with chesty sullen Feyd as wiry and prophetic Paul’s evil counterpart, so any and all other liaisons between the two are great too —hatesex, noncon or dubcon going either way, visions, dream-sharing, grudging cooperation, unexpected common ground, enemies to lovers, or belligerent concubinage, or something else.

On the flipside, I would love a pitch-dark treatment of whatever the fuck is clearly happening between Feyd-Rautha and the Baron. All of Frank Herbert’s prejudices as a writer really pop out when he’s writing about Baron Harkonnen but I find him a compellingly nasty character regardless and whatever’s happening between him and his nephew is clearly so fucked up that the Dune Encyclopedia’s in-universe author remarks on it.

This one is truly the scenario I would have written hundreds of little snippets of if I’d only found Dune as an angsty teenager: Feyd-Rautha gets fostered out to House Atreides (as a prisoner exchange situation, as a hostage situation, something something kanly, arranged marriage substitute, what have you) and bounces around like a maladjusted potentially-murderous cuckoo in the nest. I’d love this in conjunction with Feyd/Paul, or weird, mommy-complex Feyd/Jessica.

I would go absolutely cuckoo bananas for any fic incorporating or constituted of in-universe documents pertaining to the life of Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen. While it sounds like it’s been decanonized pretty damn fast, I love all the conflicting future historians’ axes to grind coming out in the Dune Encylopedia, framed as an in-universe document attempting to reconstruct the people and places with which the historical Muad’dib interacted, and Feyd-Rautha and the gang are no exception to that fascinating treatment — feel free to use that or any other supplementary book material as a jumping-off place, or any other in-universe texts. (History plays, conspiracy theories, alternate histories…)

Ship-wise, I’m interested in Feyd-Rautha paired with anyone in House Harkonnen or House Atreides, but especially Paul, the Baron, Piter, and Feyd’s canon concubines, as well as with Irulan Corinno, Jessica, Chani, and Margot Fenring. (Hasimir Fenring can come too.)

Smut-specific prompts: Fighting turned fucking; gladiator gangbangs and/or gladiatorial battle enthusiast gangbangs; hand stuff; in-universe erotica; ritual/mandatory sex bc of reasons; group sex; size differences; dirtybadwrong anything.

*

Edward, Edward - Lolah Burford

(This canon is an 1973 novel; to my knowledge it's no longer in print, though a digital copy is pretty easy to find on questionable download sites like Libgen. You can still get your hands on a physical copy wherever used books are for sale; prices on Bookfinder vary from ~$15-150 USD.)

Signup Prompts: The canon of my heart for Gothic, fucked-up, fabulous drama! I adore so many things about this book but a big one of them is how absolutely unrestrained it is in exploring what it wants to be -- coming-of-age narrative, fucked-up incest romance, research infodump, kinky whumpfic, all at once and all to the hilt. In that spirit, please go hogwild with anything you write here. I am deeply interested in bad things happening to Edward -- noncon, dubcon, beatings, abduction, torture, any manner of unpleasant stuff and especially its aftermath. The novel's themes of trauma, dark family history, and seemingly unbreakable cycles of harm all really work for me so consider this a blank check to explore those as seriously and psychologically or as pulpily and metaphorically as you so desire. On the flipside, I'd love to see Holland suffer and Edward finding himself in a new position for once -- my secret wish all novel long was for Edward to turn the tables on the Earl, one way or another, and as improbable as it might be I'd love some kind of revenge or expiation for all the suffering these two inflict on one another. In general I find their relationship equally fascinating and infuriating in the best way and I'd love anything exploring alternate possibilities there, missing scenes from their complicated affair, fallout from discovery, or I'd be equally interested in Edward exploring relationships with other people during or after his complicated affair with Holland -- I love the tantalizing suggestions of what he might have had with Marion had the Earl not interfered, and I'd be interested in other kinds of politically-active rakehell mischief Edward and Marion might have gotten up to during their university days. Edward's relationship with Anne is also right up my alley, and I'd love to see more of the two of them making their way in a world that seems pretty harsh on earnest and vulnerable young people. With my own research interests and sympathies I also love the novel's courtesans, and if you manage to incorporate them into fic or even give their perspectives on canon's major drama I would love it. This one could mix and match with any other prompt or plotline that occurs to you, but I'm just saying... ghosts. I would love some ghosts in the mix here, or vampires, or old-school werewolves, whether they're making Edward's life more difficult or reaching out for something like justice. I ship Edward with the Earl, Marion Alleyn, Anne, and various canon courtesans/any original or historical courtesans.
- Edward Clare Armstrong

This book is stone-cold bonkers, and I am not exaggerating or just being polite when I say any fic for it would thrill me in a major way, but this is Yuletide so you might want a little more to go on than that. Edward is the closest thing I've ever encountered to a male gothic heroine -- anything more dealing with the high-drama aristocratic tension of his family history and personal life would be very welcome. More 18th century research porn, more continuing Sadeian adventures in innocence and experience, more Edward whump! Get him sick, injure him, beat him, have him get kidnapped and brutalized again. (With bonus points for the Earl finding out and being brutally torn between jealousy that someone or something else has mistreated his ward and, well, whatever other emotions that kind of thing might stir up in a complicated and possessive lover.) I'd be dying for all kinds of fic about trauma here, especially the various literally and metaphorically claustrophobic situations in which Edward finds himself -- his dependency for material support on a man who is both his father and his sexual partner, his limited world, the way he's barred from the rest of his family, his tendency to get locked up in priest holes.

Another joy: religious themes out the waz! The canon is certainly interested in the appeal of Methodism to Edward's own disposition and the deep influences of religion for better or worse on both Edward and his father's viewpoints -- the religious controversies of the Georgian era are very much alive for these characters and that's an interesting angle on the period for me.

Edward's all-encompassing curiosity and love is a really interesting counterpoint to the dark gothic extremity of the series of events that sends him to live with the Earl, and I'd love to see more about it -- his lonely boyhood spent learning to make butter and hate tyranny, his attraction to Wesley and Shakespeare, his love of the material side of rural life, and ultimately his romantic relationships. I would also love anything exploring Edward's darker side or taking him to a darker place -- Edward grappling with his faith and his calling, more clashes with Tyne or between his sincerely-felt beliefs regarding hurt and forgiveness with the reality of his relationships. I love the absolute smorgasbord of personal suffering Edward goes through in this novel, but part of me desperately wants him to snap, whether that looks like a cold turning-away for good from a damaged and compelling lover (my mental touchstone for this is always The Heiress (1949) for some reason), a conscious campaign of seduction, frank self-destruction, or a straight-up guns-blazing, bloody-murder revenge plotline. I love, love, love parricide as the capstone to a complicated relationship -- or hell, filicide, sorry Edward -- so I am definitely opting into major character death here. Duels! Poisons! Hauntings! Wars! Flights to the continent! Just give Edward some satisfaction, for heaven's sake.

Feel free to explore the aspects of Edward and the Earl's relationship that a 1970s novel can only handle allusively -- I'd love porn with emotions here and anything dealing with the complicated interplay of pain and pleasure/attraction and remorse that characterizes their coming together. I really love the interplay in relationships with stark inequalities around (but certainly not limited to) age and rank -- the Earl's awareness that his son is young and fresh while he himself is old and jaded, and the exchange of power and experience vs. youth and beauty. I love the Earl as a character but I'm also desperate to see these two clash -- tell me about times when Edward has had (or lost) the upper hand, about more times when Edward crosses his uncle (purposefully? unwittingly?) and the fallout from that, or different turns their relationship could have taken.

While we're going into the complicated sexual relationships of the Tyne family, I would love fic with Edward having sex with his father's mistress -- the one who physically resembles him. She gets a seriously, seriously dark fate in canon, and if you choose to give her an alternate ending or enlist her in a broader plot to give the Earl some just deserts. Any and all of the canon courtesans are welcome in fic.

His relationship with Marion Alleyn at Oxford is wildly romantic for me and I'd love anything where it goes differently, for the better or otherwise, or takes a deeper set of twists and turns. It's hard to come back from your dad fucking your first college boyfriend, true, but there's a lot of possibilities there worth ficcing. If you'd rather explore earlier territory I'd also love fic where the threat of sexual bargaining during Alleyn's kidnapping becomes a reality, or where Marion is the one who introduces Edward to sex as well as radical politics and has the privilege and misfortune of unraveling his friend's complicated relationship with his guardian. Alleyn may say nothing shocks him, and he's pretty blasé about what he thinks their relationship is like at the time of his Divinity exams, but there's quite a bit about the Earl he doesn't know. I'd also love fic where Edward and Marion end up on picaresque Regency adventures together, mixed up in politics or on the high seas. (If you're hankering to write an Austen crossover, now is your time!)

I also love Edward's canonical relationship with Anne, as little as we get of it -- I appreciate that she first turns up as a pistol-packing avenger in men's clothes (my favorite period-piece trope on the planet might be pragmatic crossdressing) and I'd love more of what draws the two of them together and what the future might hold, or missing scenes. If you do go a revenge-plot route, I'd love for her to be involved, and her position so already entrenched in the great Armstrong family drama is a lot of fun for me.

Historical cameos would be great here, and canon has a lot of fun with them, so feel free to include real historical figures. If you want to go a bonkers but very welcome route -- in-universe historical documents from decades or centuries later. Maybe some later person writes a biography of James Noel Holland, scandalous Earl of Tyne (or of Edward himself -- what does he go on to do? what might his later impact on history be?) and there's a great deal of scholarly controversy over it, or a historian uncovers something in the archives that suggests the dark sexual snarl at the heart of Edward's family life.

Maybe needless to say here given my other likes, but feel free to go balls-to-the-wall on the weird porn here! Self-indulgent historical research spiraling is also very welcome -- Burford's digression into how exactly her characters take snuff is a little much for even me, but feel free to hew as close or stray as far from the material realities of the 18th and early 19th century as you feel like.

Ship-wise, I ship Edward with the Earl, Marion, Anne, and with various courtesans. I'd also be down for Marion/Anne/Edward as an OT3, but I'd prefer no happy mutual polyamorous trios or threesomes with the Earl involved. (Dysfunctional love triangles are fine, however.)

Smut-specific prompts: whew! I want Edward to get fucked every which way. Tie him up, brutalize him, pull his hair, cut his hair, have him get nonconned, it's all good. Nipple kink, Regency tit torture, biting, semi-public sex, pseudo-anonymous sex, clothed or partially-clothed sex (especially, in the case of m/f sex, where layers of the woman's clothing are lifted/unpinned/loosened but not removed) and literary allusions in the boudoir. I'd also love anything with Edward causing deliberate pain, especially with the Earl -- wound-fingering, rough sex, breathplay, or just topping him with as little concern for his well-being as his father shows him the first time they have sex.

One fandom-specific caveat here relating to my DNWs: the canon has plenty of sections where Edward and the Earl interact with erotically/romantically-charged beats while Edward is a child by the standards of his own era. No need to ignore or retcon what's in the book or to exile it from discussion in dialogue, but I would prefer no on-the-page intimacy between them in fic, even intimacy short of sex, while Edward is younger than sixteen.

*

The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters

(This canon is a novel published in 2009; it's still widely available in print, including in ebook form.)

Signup Prompts: I would love any pre-canon fic about Roddie and Caroline growing up at Hundreds -- was there a presence there before Faraday came? Could there be? Or fic set during the war and its immediate aftermath, dealing with Caroline's service and training or Roddie's time in the RAF and recovery from his smash -- I'm head over heels with Waters' twist on wartime-bonding-as-queercoding and I'd love something that touches on same-gender relationships during this period for both of them. Flesh out Caroline's relationship with Brenda and their peers, or Roderick with his fellow pilots -- if you read either of them as queer, I'd love fic about the complicated paths to self-awareness and covert social opportunities that characterize this era. (Have they ever bonded over that? Are they even mutually aware of one another's queerness? How did that factor into Roderick's postwar trauma?) What were the two of them like as kids, individually or together? What were their school days like? How do they remember their dad, vs. how Mrs. Ayres seems to remember him? If you want to throw any other M.R. James-y supernatural curveballs at either of the siblings, go for it, or just showcase the way that the constant battle against entropy and the fraught upkeep of Hundreds has impacted their lives before Betty and Faraday arrive. Fic set during the timeframe of canon, dealing with both siblings' struggles to keep the house afloat and their guarded complicated relationships with Faraday and one another. Roderick's growing awareness of some entity that's taken issue with him comes to the reader filtered to a degree by Faraday's POV of skepticism; how does he understand all the gothic fuckery he's going through, and what makes it distinct from his immediate-postwar adjustment issues? What type of disturbances might Caroline sense that Faraday himself isn't aware of? If you want to settle the question of whether Caroline realizes (or believes) Faraday is the originator of the house's phenomena, or whether Roderick realizes how much his doctor is to blame for the family's current misfortune, feel free. Spectral torment, love and lust, bonding, self-discovery, rescue or ruin -- I'd love another twisty gothic take on how canon shakes out and feel free to diverge as much as you like from these characters' ultimate fates. I ship Caroline with Faraday, Brenda, and OFCs; I ship Roderick with Faraday, his unnamed RAF navigator, and OMCs.
- 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. I'd also love any crossovers or intertextual engagement with Mary Renault's The Charioteer or Sarah Waters' own The Night Watch.

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 women 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 electrical devices for less than pure purposes. Medical kink. Anything that leans into the boyish interwar 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, female masculinity, furious sexual repression.

*

Mary Reilly - Valerie Martin

(This canon is a 1990 novel still widely available in print, including in ebook form.)

Signup Prompts: Mary's inner life and values really interest me -- some of her views are distinctly unflattering and alien to the modern reader but I love her distinct voice and the commitment to the gnarly side of domestic life. The novel's framing device of Mary's own private diary and the task she's given of writing an account of her childhood trauma for her master's edification suggest really interesting things about the act of writing and the various things Mary is doing in narrating her own inner life -- I would especially love first-person fic, epistolary fic, or fake academic documents fic for this fandom, where Mary provides a written account of a scene that we don't see or an alternate ending, or a later writer supplements Stevenson's documents surrounding the original "strange case" with this document written in the hand of a working woman. I'd love to read anything about Mary's relationship with her master as seen through her eyes -- the complicated dynamics of service and class and the Deserving Poor, all that wild repression and fierce secret opinion, the complexity of her attraction and the possibility of hewing out a relationship that runs counter to the expected norms of Victorian society but still uses those norms for its structure and allure. I'd also love more about Mary's relationship to Hyde -- is she at all jealous of this sulky youth stealing away her master's attention? How does her own sturdy vigor measure up to Hyde's wickedness? If you want to give these two a little more face-time together I would adore that -- I'm a sucker for all the class and gender baggage around the figure of Hyde and that could play really interestingly opposite Mary, but Hyde's malignancy also stirs up associations with Mary's girlhood abuse and that's all kinds of complicated. What does Hyde's nature as a self-made man adopting the accoutrements of gentlemanhood reflect on Mary's own struggle to keep her private animal nature under perpetual iron-willed control? What would Mary look like in her master's clothes? On a very shallow note, I would love to read anything where Mary suffers heroically and is inwardly tormented and all that good stuff. She is a really incredible Neo-Victorian woobie and I would love to read about her in all kinds of Neo-Victorian scenarios -- contending with vampires and spirits, facing down societal and technological change, squaring off with sex -- or in crossovers with works of 19th century literature. I'm still a sucker for Kim Newman-style "all 19th century literature exists in the same shared multiverse because I say so" crossovers, and I'd love to see Mary's sober level-headed self encountering the denizens of gothic lit and weird fiction. (I'd especially love crossovers with other works of the 1880s-1910s -- if you're not sure if I know a particular work, go for it, consider this carte blanche for the obscure fin de siecle crossover of your heart.) I ship Mary with both Jekyll and Hyde, Mrs. Farraday, the murdered girl and her friends, any OFCs, and any female characters from late 19th century literature.
- 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 and 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. My one caveat re. DNWs would be no focus on explicitly trans-exclusionary feminism. The whole rest of feminist theory and thought is your oyster.

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.

*

HBO's Rome

(This canon is a two-season HBO drama series from 2005-2007, available on DVD and in digital download format as well as streaming on HBO's various streaming platforms.)

Signup Prompts: Octavian is my favorite cold-blooded little poetry enthusiast and I want more of his adventures! I'd love fic that fills in missing scenes or explores canon's timeskips, giving his perspective or involvement in political wrangling or the vast interpersonal drama of Late Republican Rome. Octavian can be ruthless and aloof but he can also be wonderfully clear-eyed about some things, so I'd love scenes from his s2 political career or anything exploring alternate ways things might have gone in the critical period around Caesar's death. What-if scenarios are great here, as well as deeper dives into how the HBO Rome version of known historical events might have gone. I love the whole cast of characters and historical contemporaries we're dealing with so feel free to bring in other players or write an ensemble piece so long as Octavian is smack-dab in the middle of it. If you're into both Roman history and missing scenes, I would be especially interested in fic filling out the conflicts with the Liberatores where Antony and Octavian are acting as allies. Octavian's relationships are endlessly fascinating to me -- family drama out the waz, shagging his sister, supposedly shagging his great-uncle, making war on your mom's ex, and so much more. I'll have more relationship-specific (including pairing-specific) prompts in my letter but I'm especially interested in his relationship with Caesar, which seems to be marked both by genuine mutual esteem and mutual ruthlessness, and his massive beef with Antony. What would happen if Octavian and Antony were just slightly better at playing nice for their mutual benefit, or if the eventual conflict between the two of them had a different victor? Further adventures of Julius Caesar and his very own pet sociopath? The actor-change timeskip in s2 always cracks me up (can't believe Mark Antony slapped Octavian so hard he aged ten years) but I'd enjoy fic that fills in what happened during those months of Octavian's absence from Rome proper. I also love Octavian's parallel relationships with Octavia and Livia -- they're both fascinating astute women stuck in the circumscribed roles of aristocratic Roman matrons-in-the-making but Octavian seems attracted to something really different in each of them. To what extent was Octavian really in love with, or at least experiencing lust for, his sister before Servilia pushes the two of them together? What's it like to go from being in the middle of his sister and mother's quarreling to being a cause of geopolitical strife in his own right, and what's it like for Octavia to go from relatively sedate intimacy with her younger brother to recognizing something seriously monstrous in him? Livia doesn't get a lot of screen time relative to say, Atia, but I'd love a look into their BDSM power couple thing in the making and what makes the pair of them tick. I ship Octavian with Caesar, Antony, Agrippa, Octavia, Titus Pullo, Brutus, Livia, and just about everyone else.

The odd fandom out this year, setting-wise! I went down the HBO Rome rabbit hole this year during self-isolation and it has been a balm to my soul. In another life I was a wannabe Latinist so any Classical content you want to cram in there is very welcome, but I'm also extremely loosey-goosey with the historical research so if you're not comfortable there or just want to play first and foremost in the landscape we're given in canon, I'd love that too.
- Gaius Octavian Caesar

Really I am happy with anything that has spooky cold-blooded poetry-lover Octavian getting up to no good. This show's setting is a lot of fun for me, and I welcome fic that deals with all kinds of politicking, public events, cultural differences, societal mythmaking, romantic and sexual intrigues, the complicated family dynamics between Atia and her offspring, and any random bits of actual non-HBO history that you feel inclined to incorporate for your own amusement. Octavian has an impressive future ahead of him but I'm not especially interested in fic about him in later life as full-blown Caesar Augustus -- if you want to diverge from the historical record, however, feel free to deal with his later life as much as you like. This guy is my not-so-secret fave (both as frosty sensitive youth in s1 and as a glacial hunk with murder eyes in s2) but the whole cast here is near and dear to my heart, from Vercingetorix to Vorena, so feel free to run wild with an ensemble piece so long as Octavian is in the middle of it all.

Octavian's relationship with Caesar is a big area of interest for me -- I would love more scenes of the two of them together as Octavian closes the gap between young adulthood and the mature desire for power he's settled on by the ripe old age of nineteen. Octavian's a quiet one for much of canon, so I'd love a look at what he sees in his famous relative, or his awareness of Caesar's flaws more substantial than just physical vulnerability. I'd also love to see more of what Caesar sees in Octavian -- nepotism and an appreciation for his ability to keep a secret are certainly parts of it, but they both have a tendency toward the cold-blooded and I find that fascinating as a source of potential commonality. Canon doesn't really touch the then-contemporary allegations that Octavian earned his status as Caesar's heir through a sexual relationship, but I'd love to see how just the allegation of that would play out in the HBO Rome universe, as well as what the reality of that might look like, if you're so inclined. I ship Caesar and Octavian every which way, and if you're interested in more ship-specific prompts feel free to check out my 2020 RMSE letter

From Anthony Everitt's biography of the historical Augustus:

Caesar decided it was time to give the young man some administrative experience. He turned over to him the responsibility for managing the theatrical program of the triumphal celebrations. Keen to show his commitment, Octavius stayed to the end of all the performances, even on the hottest and longest days. This strained his already delicate health and he fell seriously ill. Caesar was beside himself with anxiety and, to cheer him up, visited the sufferer every day or sent friends in his place. Doctors were in permanent attendance. On one occasion a message came while he was dining that Octavius had suffered a serious relapse and was in danger of dying. The dictator leaped up at once and ran barefooted to the house where Octavius lay. Frantic and deeply upset, he cross-examined the doctors about their patient’s prognosis and then sat down by the boy’s bedside. Gradually Octavius recovered, but he remained weak for some time.

Show!Octavian doesn't appear to share his RL counterpart's health issues during this period of his life (apart from using poor health to beg off sparring with Titus Pullo) but I'd love fic dealing with those issues anyway -- anything dealing with the tension between his oversized and precocious ambition and the uncertainty of living with frail health in the ancient world (or especially the overlap with Caesar's own illness and its significance for his political career) would be fabulous.

I'd love more scenes of Octavian and Octavia at any point as brother and sister with one-time jaunts into incest -- what on earth is going on with Octavian that that incest gambit works? What if it turned back on Servilia in a way she hadn't expected? I genuinely love everything about Octavia in her own right, so the two of them interacting in any capacity would thrill me -- solving a mystery, covering up a murder, becoming Rome's #1 incestuous power couple together, or just figuring out what their relationship is like when they're out from under the pressure of a shared family name. What does Octavia make of her brother's budding capacity for calm cruelty? What are some other times in their relationship where the two of them have sought out one another for comfort, or just for a co-conspirator?

What goes on during Octavian's timeskips away from his mother and sister? What does he get up to with Maecenas and Agrippa? I find the note he leaves Rome on for the final time before the actor-switch a really interesting one, and I feel like we might have gotten more of his relationships with his friends (especially poor smitten Agrippa, who seems like an all right fellow?) if season two hadn't been quite so truncated. So feel free to fill in any of those gaps and gray spaces, or unspool a whole other ulterior narrative about Octavian's earliest days as Caesar's heir. And how does Octavian feel about Caesar's death, on a personal level? On a pragmatic one?

Octavian's relationship with Antony in all its incredible thorniness is a fascinating part of both seasons for me -- we see much of them as foes in canon but not as much of their periods of collaboration, and that's fascinating to me. Octavian's ambitions and willfulness make him a not insignificant obstacle to Antony after the death of Caesar (and maybe before?) but the deep history between Antony and Atia makes the whole thing fraught. I yearn for something where the two of them need to play nicely together in the political/social sphere to achieve some goal that will benefit both of them, whether it's avoiding eventual war or avoiding the wrath of Atia. I do also ship Antony/Octavian, with all the competition and aggression and complicated emotions that entails, and any kind of interactions on the spectrum from battlefield dubcon hatesex to complicated wooing would be fabulous. These two are also featured in my 2020 RMSE letter if you're interested in ship-specific prompts. (Fake ancient Roman dating! Lupercalia fuckfests!)

I also enjoy what we see of Octavian's relationship with Livia in s2, especially but certainly not limited to the kinky sex -- Octavian must go on quite the journey of self-discovery between frankly telling his future bride that he's into impact play and the first time we see her sex-choke the living daylights out of him. If you want to write scenes from their marriage, especially Livia leveling up into a powerhouse of a Roman matron with a finger on the pulse of what makes her oddball husband tick, I would be all about it. The show plays a little fast and loose with the societal judgments placed on well-to-do Roman women, which is all well and good from a HBO production, but I'm also fascinated with the thought of a woman who by all appearances likes a good time figuring out how to make the best of Octavian's emerging stances (in public life if not private) around chastity and matronly morals.

My silliest side wants more of Octavian's adventures with Titus Pullo, with Pullo chatting frankly with this spooky aristocratic boy and getting his unique brand of advice. I'd also love Titus Pullo and Octavian alternating who gets to be the pet sociopath in their relationship. Titus Pullo was born to be a great minion, and Octavian desperately needs a friend and authority figure who's not warped by power, but you can have them get up to any kind of mischief you desire and I'd be all about it.

Ship-wise, Octavian is my versatile fandom little black dress (little white toga virilis?) for this show so consider just about any of his relationships as fair game. I'm interested in his canonical relationships with Octavia and Livia, and I ship him with Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Titus Pullo, Agrippa, Maecenas, and Brutus.

Canon-specific DNWs: I'd prefer no actual sex involving Octavian prior to the point in the first season where he canonically loses his virginity or where he's understood in Roman terms as a bulla-wearing child, but sex where he's older than that and still under 18 is absolutely fine and dandy, and characters kinking on his youth in that context is great.

Smut-specific prompts: hangups and scandals about Roman citizens submitting to be penetrated! I love Octavian's canonical sadomasochism and would adore anything incorporating impact play and choking. Intercrural sex, facefucking, femdom, mutually manipulative dubcon, age differences, class differences, Classical sex positions. (If you can work in someone lowering themselves down onto a dick using a handily-placed strap a la the Warren Cup, you win Yuletide.)

*

These Violent Delights - Micah Nemerever

(This canon is a standalone novel published in 2020; right now it’s available in paperback, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook format, so please fling some $$ the author’s way or get it from your library.)

Signup Prompts: Pre-canon fic dealing with Julian’s school experiences and how they inform his character in the present — the landscape of the prep school he’s left behind him sounds truly heinous, and I’d love to see how that environment shaped his aesthetic and philosophical sensibilities as well as clearly bruising his psyche more than a little. Julian keeps that aspect of his life relatively guarded, issuing out bits and pieces with care as if he’s not certain the entirety of it is compatible with the image of himself he’s trying to put out there — I’d especially love the moments where those past experiences break through to the present day and he’s forced to reckon with what they might mean, and especially how Paul perceives them. Though the novel is about the pair of them, we don’t get a really candid view of Julian totally without Paul’s filter — I’d be really interested in Julian’s POV on canon events we only get via Paul’s perspective, or any sort of missing scene from Julian’s whirlwind relationship with Paul and its violent aftermath. What’s going on with him that he doesn’t share? What do the dark corners of Julian’s psyche look like, and how has the whole banality-of-evil theme pursued him in his own life? Julian’s father is pretty invested in assimilation into non-Jewish circles, at least as Julian himself relates it, but Julian’s moral philosophy is as informed by his experiences of Jewishness as Paul’s is — what’s Julian’s sense of his own identity like? Anything with Julian’s relationships outside of Paul — Joy, his parents, his siblings, Paul’s mother and siblings, especially Audrey who clearly knows what’s up with the two of them (at least to some extent) and is very gently trying to warn her brother about the highs and lows of queer love in a repressive society. Julian’s parents are pretty bluntly unpleasant when we see them through Paul’s lens, but I get the sense there’s more there, even if they’re still pretty lousy parents — is that something Julian will ever be able to see, or is it the kind of thing you just get resigned to as life goes on and you get past the first flush of “murdering my parents would be a great idea, actually”. Alternately, let Julian murder his parents and have things spiral absolutely off the rails in that way. Post-canon fic dealing with all the messed-up fallout of the events of canon — putting the pieces back together, or not. I’d also love any kind of canon divergence where the whole murder scheme goes even better than anticipated, or much much worse. (I appreciated the canon not taking the route of a wholesale rehash of any of the real-life cases of murderously destructive friendship that have nebulously inspired it, but any other direction you want to have things go off the rails is just fine.) All kinds of alternate universes with alternate meetings, either the same place and time but later in life (broke grad student Julian? Scathing academic Julian?) or in wildly different contexts (Soviet defectors, chess champions, zine writers, feuding lepidopterists…) but with the same deliciously fucked-up dynamic. How does meeting on a different footing set up Julian for a different fate, or not? Ship-wise, I’m primarily interested in Julian’s relationship with Paul, but I’d also love Julian/OMC(s) as well as gen.

- Julian Fromme

Julian is somewhat more of a cipher than Paul, but only just. If you’re interested at all in missing scenes and alternate perspectives, I would love to see Julian’s perspective on the events of the novel that we only receive filtered through Paul’s perceptions — when they’re first circling one another, when they’re first intimate, as Julian’s parents begin to register that there’s someone their son is spending a lot of time with, as shit proceeds to hit the fan, etc. There’s one way to construct these kind of destructive friendship dyads as consisting of a clear-cut leader and follower, or a good guy and a bad guy in order to absolve one party or another of blame but I’d be interested both in Julian’s own nastiness, the lurking dark corners of his thought processes, and in his moments of genuine vulnerability.

Julian’s godawful prep school backstory is obviously fertile territory for fic-writing so please explore any of those elements and I’ll be happy. Backstory fic is very welcome, fleshing out his relationships and experiences, but the drama enthusiast in me would be especially interested in how he views those experiences once he’s older and with Paul, how he builds narratives around them and in some ways conceals them from Paul’s scrutiny, and any kind of moment where those experiences (sexual exploitation, hazing, mandatory sports, stupid outfits) force their way to the surface and must be addressed between the two of them. What’s it like there under the weight of Paul’s expectations and preconceptions?

What becomes of Julian later in life? Does he experience guilt, and what’s it like? How does he process everything that happened during his chronologically brief but hugely eventful relationship with Paul? What’s the gulf like between where Julian was as an angry young college student vs. who he’ll grow to be in later life? I love writing about trauma and situational bonding, which is certainly one lens through which to understand Julian’s experiences

Alternately, an AU where Paul and Julian meet later in life to start with — as graduate students? Depressed 40somethings? Do they manage to avoid philosophical gestures via murder or do they just end up pursuing another less-than-illustrious course of action in one another’s company? Does Julian end up making an impact in any particular field? How are they different for having escaped the confines of adolescence only to find themselves in the dawning hours of the Reagan era and beyond?

You are cordially invited to murder Julian’s parents (or at least his dad) and see how things go from there. Dad-murder is my eternal weakness and while that thought might be a passing fancy in canon, I think it has legs. One way or another, it’s hardly a simple fix for Paul and Julian’s problems, considered separately and as a unit, and I’d love to read a fic about the fallout of that crime even if (maybe especially if) they get away with it.

Both Paul and Julian have somewhat complicated relationships to masculinity and gender — I would love an AU with always-a-girl Paul and Julian (butch Paul and Julian!) as well as transmasculine Paul and Julian. Especially if the latter lands in a complicated place with the language and self-identification employed by both of them, or if they construe their shared differences differently than one another — if you choose to write an AU where only one of them is trans, I’d like the other one to implicitly recognize the legitimacy however they self-identify, just for my soul’s ease.

Canon divergences are great here as are alternate endings to the whole “enforced suicide pact” thing — I’m all aboard with major character death for this fandom as well as complicated fraught recovery, flight and pursuit, institutionalization and imprisonment, (un)lucky escapes, hauntings and resurrections, or anything else you can think of.

Nemerever’s made comments to the effect that there’s a point in the novel at which Paul and Julian could have patched things up, though he’s guarded about exactly when — please take that as a writer and run with it, or find the point in canon where everything could have gone exponentially worse.

This is the goofy epistolary request I make every year for what feels like every fandom — I would adore in-universe documents for this novel. Off the top of my head, I can imagine a documentary context where Julian is called on to speak about his experiences, as an alumnus of an issue-riddled elite private school or as a novelist or a gay man or as a professional in some field — does he end up going on to a career in psychology? Philosophy? Academia in general? — and I have a feeling he’d be a hell of a critic, whether of visual art, film, literature, or other people’s choices. There’s also the perennial possibility of some kind of true crime coverage, a bunch of armchair amateurs or bored forensic scientists cracking open a decades-old cold case with no apparent motive, where Julian finds himself under scrutiny from the outside.

I love this pretentious little fellow and his reading list and I’d love to read about him any time and anywhere. Please consider this carte blanche to have Julian and/or Paul exist in any other historical context, especially 20th century ones. Chess prodigies, student filmmakers, sex workers, art forgers, leftist revolutionaries, stepsiblings….

Canon-specific DNWs: Please don’t rehabilitate Julian’s relationship with the roommate who had sex with him while he was asleep; similarly, if you’re going to include sexually abusive teachers as an aspect of the unhealthy institutional landscape of late-1960s prep schools, I want Julian and/or Paul to murder them. I don’t want to receive any fics/AUs where Paul and Julian aren’t Jewish.

Smut-specific prompts: Any exploration of Julian and Paul’s canonical undernegotiated rough sex or anything sadomasochistic there; cruising; era-specific meeting places; semi-public sex; hooking up in the car; hooking up in your lover’s former childhood bedroom; hand kink and mouth-fingering; wound fingering; fucked-up consent issues.