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skazkaMy brain is not firing on all cylinders right now, but I'm glad to kick off the Yuletide season and to read about what you want to write! My letters get longer every damn year, but I hope you'll be able to get something out of it all that sparks your imagination, and I in no way expect you to fit everything I describe into your story this year. That would be a headache and a half.
General 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, social media, 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
- emotional repression
- 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 and family relationships
- sex making everything awkward afterward
- 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
- object insertion
- 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
- kink with and without conventional sex acts involved
- 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, trauma bonding between perpetrator and victim, connections between victims of the same perpetrator, 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 straightforwardly desire but that they believe will help them achieve some goal, for instance. I don't care as much for ravishment tropes where the victim secretly wanted it all along despite their token protests, scenarios where afterward the rape is a non-issue for everyone involved, or where rape results in unambiguous true love and a happily ever after. (Fucked-up trauma bonding, however, is another story.)
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, past relationships, etc.
Any level of intensity or non-intensity with regard to sex, violence, character death and other dark stuff is fine by me, including major character death and downer endings on a character-specific scale. 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 especially enjoy AUs that racebend characters, always-a-girl genderswaps, and fic where characters are written as trans, with all the ways that might impact a character's lived experience.
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 -- other metrical forms are fair game.
I usually do the fun mini-challenges that accompany Yuletide; once they’re up, I’ll link them here. EDIT: Yuleporn and Crueltide! If you want to check out my past exchange letters, you can find them here.
I would not like to receive fic that includes:
Free-verse poetry; high school or HS teacher/HS student AUs; Harry Potter AUs/fusions; pregnancy as a central plot element; unrequested incest or child sexual abuse themes; depictions of self-harm via cutting or of disordered eating. I don't want to read explicit sex involving characters under 16. (The general background existence of teenage sexuality and teens possessing sexual desire is fine.)
This year I would also prefer no focus on contemporary 21st century tragedies (school shootings, Hurricane Katrina, focus on the death toll of COVID, etc.) and no fic featuring noncanonical police violence or real-life modern-day hate groups.
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Asteroid City (2023)
(Asteroid City is a recently released film and is available on various streaming services as well as in physical media form. The screenplay is also available in print/PDF.)
- Conrad Earp
Schubert Green indignantly refers to Conrad as a fragile genius — what’s fragile about him? What’s his working relationship with Green like? How much does Schubert know about the relationship between Conrad and this actor he’s “discovered”? What’s with the pyjamas and fantastic dressing gown? Is Conrad reclusive by nature? What’s his life like out on Long Island? I would love to read stories from the production, including canon divergences and mishaps of all kinds, or from previous collaborations.
In the film itself, Ricky Cho getting shaken down by government officials for his supposed seditious activities and refusing to name names is clearly a gag about HUAC and the Red Scare, but in the play version of Asteroid City, this hypothetical play we’re watching be performed in 1955, that’s no laughing matter! (All the Junior Stargazers are dear to my heart but Ricky is probably my favorite and his fearless student journalism is a big part of that.) What’s Conrad Earp’s relationship to the persecution of those with perceived links to Communism? His career seems to be pretty robust, especially if his picturesque subject matter has insulated him from criticism, but I’m obsessed with the way the different climates (professional, political, and… literal) of New York theater vs. Hollywood film informed the career decisions of so many writers working in this era. I’d love anything that touches on his previous work, or alludes to what the rest of his oeuvre is like.
The play’s Atomic Age themes, and on a meta level the film’s own themes about living in an era of terrible precarity and trying to find meaning, are out of line with Earp’s more picturesque preoccupations (the cowboys… so many hunky cowboys) but really right in line with the shape “life west of the Rocky Mountains” has taken with the United States’ hard pivot into Cold War-era anxiety. What’s on Conrad Earp’s mind when he’s writing Asteroid City, the play? How do the themes of the play reflect Earp’s interests as an artist? What kind of research went into the cast of characters? (The child characters in-universe are big faves for me as a former Gifted Child conference-attending junior nerd who found friendship among fellow child nerds; what is Conrad exploring there?)
Feel free to explore the creative process the film itself fast-forwards through for the audience’s sake. The figure of Midge in particular, a glamorous and intense actress with a troubled life and an attraction to challenging material, feels like she may have been written with the “real” figure of Mercedes Ford in mind… never mind the other actually-real women she’s clearly inspired by, including but far from limited to Marilyn Monroe. Is Earp writing to the strengths of performers he already knows, and how do the players differ from their fictional roles?
Jones Hall appears during the first not!Actors Studio meeting and already seems to be interested in Conrad in a really cute and intriguing way— what’s the story there, what motivates him, and what informs how Conrad reacts to being pursued? I love the exchange between them right as they’re clearly about to go to bed together — ”Okay?” / “Okay.” — you can write about scenes from their relationship, what the two of them share and how they relate to one another. The compressed time frame of their affair is also interesting to me — it doesn’t need to be the greatest love story of the century for it to be something profoundly meaningful to everybody involved, and I’d be especially interested in stuff that explores the place that art and theater has in their relationship, as a thing that draws them together in more than one way.
Conrad’s death is a really pivotal element of the film, and I’m not particularly interested in a story that undoes that entirely, but I’m interested in the aftermath — what more there is to know about a man from his work, from his home, from the impact left on those who survive him? What happens to all his homoerotic cowboy memorabilia? Who gets to hang on to the material aspects of his legacy and who’s shut out?
This film seems like an especially great fit for in-universe documents — retrospectives on theater, television, and the stage-to-screen adaptation process of the 1950s, the New York theater world of the postwar years, reexamination of the career of a celebrated queer playwright… in the decades after his death, is Earp’s work reexamined, or all but forgotten? Any kind of excerpts from biographies (maybe not even of Earp — is he ultimately a footnote in Jones Hall’s career? In Mercedes Ford’s?) or from podcasts or what have you would be great. I have a huge soft spot for writing about the history of the arts, especially the personalities and forces at work in midcentury American film and theater — from the factual to the salaciously dishy to the outright fabricated. (I personally feel like the connection between Earp and Tennessee Williams some have made is a mostly superficial one — there are other queer midcentury playwrights! — but this New Yorker piece about a Williams biographer who may or may not have just made shit up about imagined encounters with the man does make me think about the kind of emotional attachments we form to artists via their work, especially artists whose works have a resonance with us as marginalized people, and the temptations of, well, writing real person fanfiction when we’re supposed to be writing real person nonfiction.)
Shipwise, I’d love fic that deals with his canonical relationship with Jones Hall (whatever that might have looked like) or shipping him with anyone else, including OCs, and gen.
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George Smiley novels - John Le Carre
(John Le Carre's spy novels should be pretty widely available wherever books are sold and in a variety of formats. Dieter Frey appears in-person in Call For The Dead only.)
- George Smiley; Dieter Frey
I’ve been on a years-long Le Carre spiral and loving every second of it, but for Yuletide I’ve opted to make requests largely centered around Call For The Dead. Feel free to pick and choose what later JLC/Smiley series lore you choose to incorporate, but consider it all fair game.
I am dying for anything about Smiley and Frey together, whether slash or gen — scenes from their past as first teacher and student and then handler and agent, scenes from the period of their separation even if they’re only present in one another’s thoughts or as a troubling memory, scenes from their canon-era interactions or in some course of events where the whole thing goes off the rails in a newer and differently terrible way. If you feel up to it, I’m always interested in fic where the events of the Cold War as we know them take a different turn, including a scenario with a cold war gone hot.
Dieter and Smiley are fabulous opposites in a whole laundry list of ways, not least of all the physical — Dieter, the kind of man who draws stranger’s eyes toward him through imperious Byronic charisma and not insignificant physical beauty vs. Smiley, who only garners strangers’ attention when they’re laughing at the sight of a little funny fat man in a bad suit having to run to catch the train. Smiley is certainly abundantly aware of his own appearance, both its benefits and its drawbacks, and it gives his descriptions of Dieter (long before Guillam and co. actually meet him) an additional poignancy for me as well as great psychosexual spice — not only Frey’s good looks but his highly visible areas of difference that put him at even greater personal risk under Nazism than even his convictions alone. Both men are in very different positions wrt politics and ideology and I’d love anything dealing with the way the Second World War and then the Cold War both draw them into unlikely collaboration and force them apart.
I would love any scenes from their time working together during the war, especially dealing with tradecraft. It seems reasonable to assume they didn’t have a great deal of leisure time to spend together, but I’m fascinated by all the banal-yet-risky ins and outs of wartime intelligence work, so if you’ve ever felt inspired to write a casefic-style mystery for Smiley and his cohort during their WWII days (before Le Carre’s own timeline tweaking) or even just scenes from the type of clandestine activity both men got up to separately and together I would be really happy. On the flipside, if you would like to fill out more scenes from the relationship between Dieter Frey and both/either of the Fennans, I would really love that — I find the Fennans’ marriage really heartbreaking and the novel’s themes around the deep traumas of the Holocaust are really powerful.
Any kind of scene of constrained cooperation after Dieter’s gone and made the jump to East Germany — something canon-divergent from the novel’s last act where Frey survives and now he and Smiley are both in it with the Circus all over again, or simply something where Frey survives long enough into the next decade of the Cold War to continue bedeviling Smiley from afar. I’d also be interested in how it would change the trajectory of Smiley’s own career and the later events of the Smiley novels if he’d managed to bring Dieter over in the first place after the war — no guarantees how that would have gone, but either way it’d be seriously interesting.
Shipfic-wise, Smiley is scrupulous enough (and careful enough at his job) that I’m curious what might bring him to take that step into physical intimacy — if they ever do, since absolutely unhinged pining also suits this pairing very well and I’m happy for anything across the whole spectrum of possibilities. The association between homosexuality and just about any ideology an individual might despise, whether left or right, goes deep, and certainly both men would be aware of that too even back in Smiley’s university cover days; I’d go nuts for anything that deals with romantic or erotic undercurrents in their relationship no matter what but something dealing with the ideological and professional baggage too would be an extra treat. Does Dieter make the first move? Does it happen in the kind of context where it seems like death is imminent and then oops, it isn’t, now what? How different are their experiences of sexuality?
For more general Smiley content, I’m especially interested in fic set during the early slightly-wobbly period where the tone and scope of Le Carre’s novels isn’t necessarily what it will be later — in many ways both Call and A Murder Of Quality feel like they’re in conversation with the grand tradition of the British mystery novel, and I’d love any missing scenes from that timeframe, alternate possibilities or alternate solutions, or any moments later on in Smiley’s illustrious career where he’s stuck unraveling a murder mystery during his downtime and doing it quietly very well.
I love Smiley’s relationships with Guillam, Mendel, Connie, and of course Ann, as well as the Circus’ other denizens — feel free to include them in fic, explore their POVs, or give any one them equal screentime to my two requested characters. I’m especially smitten with the absolutely agonizing push and pull perpetually going on between Smiley and Ann, and would love anything where she’s present even if only in Smiley’s own mind. (The way the BBC radio plays include her as almost a persistent ghost troubling Smiley’s thoughts is really delicious to me.) What, if anything, does Ann learn (or already know) about the Fennan affair and about Dieter? The film A Deadly Affair weirdly prefigures Bill Haydon by having Frey and Ann have an affair — it’s a semi-baffling choice for me but I’d still kill to get some of her POV on what’s gone on while she’s been away, especially if you choose to write Smiley as an excruciatingly discreet gay or bi man.
How does Frey’s career in espionage mirror Smiley’s and how does it differ? How similar and how different is he from his up-and-coming counterparts on the other side of the Berlin Wall? I love the look into the East German intelligence community we get in Spy Who Came In From The Cold, where the consequences of the Fennan affair are still reverberating outward, and I’d really enjoy any fic that situates him in that community and explores its inner workings and internal tensions. (I love the various East German intelligence crew we meet, especially Jens Fiedler, so if you can work him in there somehow, go for it.) I would also love anything where he’s the one probing into an espionage-adjacent mystery.
Ship-wise, these books are a free-for-all for me — I’m interested in how the two requested characters interact on either an & or a / basis, but feel free to include any other relationships you enjoy here, as well as all the relationships we see in canon (Jim and Bill, Connie and Hilary, the Fennans, and ofc the eternally messy ongoing thing between Smiley and Ann). For additional noncanonical m/m ships, Smiley/Mendel and Smiley/Guillam are both well-loved by me. I also ship Dieter with either or both of the Fennans or any of his East German comrades.
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Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
(This canon is a series of four novels published between 1981 and 2006 and they should be widely available in various formats — Will Graham appears in person only in the first, Red Dragon. If you're picking up the series for the first time, Hannibal Rising is a somewhat grudgingly-written sequel, and isn't integral to any of my prompts this year.)
- Will Graham
I enjoy the absolutely wild ramp-up this series takes, from the relatively restrained procedural focus of Red Dragon to the more operatic focus of Hannibal, and I love every point along that spectrum up to and including, well, a significant amount of Hannibal Rising, and that’s all I have to say about that. I really enjoy the heightened, tense, sometimes cynical, sometimes absurd world these novels are set in (much like our own, of course) and while my prompts are pretty focused on Graham’s whole deal please feel free to include any of the characters from these books up to and including Paul Krendler.
It’s certainly not coincidental that Will’s career in forensics and with the FBI occurs chronologically smack-dab in this often-fictionalized golden age of FBI profiling — there’s a whole lot of narratives that aren’t embedded in the public imagination quite yet, and whole areas of forensic science that look very different than they do now. How did Will find his way to the FBI?
I would be thrilled to receive 1001 words of Will working a past case, or going through the high-tech-circa-1981 procedures around evidence collection and forensic analysis, or the kinds of connections he makes with his colleagues and the professional disagreements between them. I love how Will brushes off all the bullshit about the way he thinks, even as the way he thinks is so delightfully concrete and vivid — when Crawford comes down to Florida to try to get him back in action for One Last Score, he defends the seeming leaps in reasoning he makes with ”The evidence was there,” and that’s a kind of mental mode that I find really fun to engage with even as I’m curious about what exactly said bullshit about the way he thinks must look like among his colleagues. How could the pursuit of Dolarhyde gone off the rails, or taken on a different climax? Fix things, break things, remix things, shake it all about — I’m super easy. Please put Will Graham in some Situations!
Will Graham’s situation post-Red Dragon is not a pretty one, literally and figuratively. He seems to be entirely out of commission as far as FBI work goes by the time of SOTL, and I don’t blame him in the least — is there any kind of circumstance that could induce Crawford and his successors at the Bureau to try and reach out again, or that could remotely induce Will to reciprocate with interest? Did Mason Verger ever reach out to Will in the interest of his “get Hannibal” quest? Was Will ever tempted or did he tell him to fuck off? The reality of Will dealing with major, disfiguring injuries is a tough one and I’d be interested in the way that concrete reminder of his experiences impacts his life post-RD.
How much does Will know or not know about Clarice Starling? What’s his entirely professional opinion about Crawford’s choice to use Clarice as essentially bait? In fact, anything you can do to get this guy to cross paths with Clarice would thrill me — they operate in different ways and they have very different wheelhouses, Clarice has had experiences that Will’s never going to have had, but they’re united by some very weird shared experiences, not least among which is having spent some reluctant quality time with Dr. Hannibal Lecter, MD.
I really love the assorted female characters of this series and would love to see what any of them would bring to an interaction with this guy — Ardelia, Reba, Margot, Wendy, Hobbs’ unnamed daughter, Phyllis. (Phyllis who brought Will books when he was in the hospital! God! What a detail.) I also really enjoy Will’s relationship with Molly and all the fraught layers it has around their respective pasts. There’s clearly a lot they share, but Molly’s her own person with her own past, another marriage under her belt that ended pretty hard, her own cranky racist parents who don’t get along well with her husband, and a kid who’s having to navigate a lot of crazy shit around his new stepdad. (Who also shares his same name, bc Thomas Harris, why.)
Side note: I love genderswap fic that explores how a character’s career would have been impacted by sexist norms, and so much of SOTL underscores the climate of sexism at the FBI — if Will were a woman, how would have her trajectory been different? What kind of shades would that have added to her hiding out in Florida with her wife, semi-retired, then getting dragged back into the field and shit hitting the fan in a major way?
Hannibal Lecter himself is such a relatively minor player in Red Dragon relative to later books, but he’s already so deliciously terrible and memorable — I’d love to read about what on earth these two made of each other in their first two meetings, before things popped off and got unambiguously adversarial, and what they made of each other afterward. Or hell, expand that window of time a little and explore it in fic anyway. I love Hannibal’s pure pettiness and the way he’s so clearly trying to amuse himself as much as exert power or exercise control — what does Will make of that, and what motivates his reticence to talk about the experience, apart from the annoyance factor of everybody wanting to know? Did Will end up having to testify in court about catching Lecter, or did getting lightly disemboweled get him a hall pass on that?
My other requests reflect this same obsession of mine but I love anything that’s written in the format of an in-universe document — letters from one character to another, excerpts from paperwork and medical notes, papers published in professional journals and their retractions, deep dive research on the events of the novels or the trashy pop-history version? Will Graham’s own writings would also be really interesting, and he does have at least one interested party out there who canonically enjoys writing bitchy rebuttals to psychology papers he considers to be subpar...
I’m familiar with all the various adaptations of these books and I’ve enjoyed all of them, even the musical; I’m happy to read fic that mixes and matches elements across these adaptations or explores what putting a book character in their film or show counterpart’s position might look like or vice-versa, but as far as character appearances, timelines, interpersonal dynamics, and the like, I’d prefer fic to reflect book canon.
I ship Will Graham with… damn near everybody, really, including his canonical marriage, but Will/Clarice and Will/Hannibal might be an especially good fit here. All canonical pairings are fair game as well (including Hannibal/Clarice) and I have a soft spot for Clarice/Ardelia even just in the background.
Fandom-specific DNWs: fic set in NBC or CBS show canon; modern-day AUs; noncanonical instances of brainwashing. (Clarice's canonical fate is fine to feature but you have zero obligation to have it be permanent, either.)
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Hell House - Richard Matheson
(This canon is a 1971 standalone novel. It should be widely available both in physical and digital forms; you can compare prices at Bookfinder.)
- Ben Fischer
I really enjoy Fischer’s status as this self-sabotaged, formerly promising boy medium — I have a massive penchant for characters who have been raised up for some purpose or cause that’s now defunct or out of reach, and who have to deal with that sense of failure, so anything you want to explore with that and his position in the Hell House enterprise, so clearly keeping himself detached and impartial to avoid faceplanting into brutal tragedy all over again, would be great. More scenes from the period of time where he’s keeping well clear of the whole midcentury psychic medium industrial complex, or deliberately trying to ruin what’s left of his reputation with deliberate fraud — does the supernatural still find him, even as he’s determined to outrun it, or does he adapt to its absence from his life?
I’d love something with a gender-swapped version of Fischer, with the various ways that would inflect her story and the way her fall from promising young medium to fraud and burnout would be perceived and how it would alter the gender calculus of the main group during the experiment — I love transfic too and I’d especially love something with a transfeminine Fischer (whether she’s presenting as a woman or having to slip uneasily back into the closet for the duration of the project or something in between) as this stubbornly self-shaped midcentury woman, like the Wendy Carlos of reluctant mediumship, stuck revisiting this painful place from her past on a different footing. (Would also love how this complicates everything to do with Edith!) Feel free to mix and match any gender stuff with any other plot ideas or character study stuff that tickles your fancy also.
Emeric Belasco really does tower over the events of the novel (as smug as he’d be about that, and as ready as Ben would be to knock him down a peg) and I’d love anything that explores the dynamic of how he haunts Fischer specifically — as a spirit, an energy imprint, a psychic scar, or just a rich asshole with really bad vibes. There’s some subtext around Fischer’s first encounter with Belasco that evokes sexual assault (especially given Belasco’s other rapey manifestations toward unlucky mediums like Florence) and it sometimes shades how I read the novel’s climax, so I’d love any treatment of that. Even taking his traumatic survivor status just as a psychic shock without a sexual dimension to it, I’d be really interested in anything dealing with the ways Ben is having to voluntarily face, or not face, the shadow of this hugely momentous event that happened while he was still really young. How does that sense of adult return to the site of a hideous event of one’s youth flavor the ultimate confrontation with Belasco, or other possible confrontations we don’t get? Are there rooms in the Belasco house he remembers from his first ordeal there? I love how the novel uses the opulent physical grounds of the house (the fucking steam room!) as a playing-field for all different flavors of nastiness, and the ugly bits of history that still linger, ones that Fischer discloses and ones that he keeps to himself.
There’s moments in the novel where the party dynamics between the characters are beginning to show some clear faultlines — Dr. Barrett and Fischer grouped together as men, Fischer and Florence together as mediums, even Edith’s torment throwing her in Fischer’s direction as a simultaneously nonthreatening-but-dangerous dude — and I’d love any kind of character study or interaction between the house’s reluctant guests. There’s definitely some early-1970s misogyny in the mix on both a Watsonian and Doyleist level but I especially love the dynamic of Fischer and Edith as sort of a pair of survivors for a while there, and I’d love more of them. Likewise I’d love missing scenes or something filled in of how Fischer as a burned ex-medium feels about Florence’s very gentle, at times downright rosy view of her supernatural responsibilities.
Sex and sexual violence in horror aren’t everyone’s cup of tea for extremely understandable reasons but they’re very much part of the novel’s atmosphere for me and you can feel free to explore them as little or as much as you like. The aftermath of Florence’s spirit rape is really hideous stuff, and I definitely wouldn’t say no to something where Florence gets to survive one way or another and they do get to up and leave (even with a hell of a lot of baggage) or, on a less nice note, where the nightmarish compulsive sexuality she experiences in the aftermath boils over onto Ben directly. Or on another angle, I’d love something where the house’s corrosive sexuality tries or succeeds in disturbing the dynamic between Fischer and Dr. Barrett. For all Matheson explores fucked-up internalized homophobia and fractured female desire between Edith and Florence, he’s scrupulous to avoid any sexuality between men, even of the most benign kind, and I won’t stand for it.
I’d love anything postcanon — do Fischer and Edith stay in touch at all after that shattering Christmas? Does Ben go back to his drifter life? If Fischer and Florence did manage to get the fuck out before the Reversor goes smashy-smash (with Edith in tow? With or without Barrett?) it isn’t necessarily the end to their ordeal — I’d love anything where shit goes off the rails in an entirely different way than it does in the novel. What if old man Deutsch picks an even less convenient time to die, or insists on turning up in person? What does Fischer’s repressed side look like, and what would happen if it were to pop off even half as volcanically intensely as Florence’s?
One perennial Yuletide fave for me takes the form of in-universe documents, and given the various characters’ relationship to parapsychology as a discipline and to ghosts as a phenomenon I would love snippets from literature of different stripes relating to the "clearing" of Belasco’s mansion or the goings-on that transpired there. Oral histories, suppressed journal articles, trashy true crime -- Fischer can feature as a writer, a narrator, a pissed-off reviewer breaking down all the inaccuracies, or just one of many players. If nothing else here grabs you, I would love just more scenes from Hell House, its long and grim history of all manner of degradation and debauchery — if you chose to go purely with pre-canon worldbuilding about Belasco’s coterie of victims or the impact of years of carefully cultivated viciousness, I would be happy as a clam.
Ship-wise, I tend to read Fischer as some flavor of queer, including asexuality (Roddy McDowall’s performance in the film really brings some triumphant gay rage and I love it so much) but what happens in the awful cursed mansion stays in the awful cursed mansion and I’m down for reading anything you want to write, with any pairings.
Fandom-specific DNW notes: Feel free to deal with the suggestions of self-injurious behavior in Florence’s breakdown, but I’d prefer no blow-by-blow descriptions of self-injury. I waive the under-16 DNW for anything dealing with Ben during the failed 1940 session, but nothing where he’s younger than that. General references to teenage sexuality or themes around Belasco depravity encompassing younger teens is fine.
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Primal Fear (1996)
(This canon is a live-action legal thriller with a terrific cast and should be widely available in a variety of formats wherever you watch movies; as of 10/13/2023, it's streaming on Paramount Plus in the US.)
- Aaron Stampler
This character is tailor-made for me both as a heartbreaking brutalized innocent and a gloating rat bastard, and I’m also interested in what lies between those two extremes — the moments you can see hesitation or anger under the placid naïf act (right off the bat, when Vail comments on Rushman generously permitting Aaron to remain at Savior House once he’d come of age and you can fully see… something… flicker across Aaron’s face) or the pain and fear underneath his aggressive macho play-acting as Roy. The film could be so close to a neo-noir but it never takes the plunge — how does the tone change if it does? What kind of noir-inflected moods or elements could come into play here — corruption, doubles and duplicity, disillusionment, fatalistic bleakness, the pleasures of a really good double-cross?
Where’s Aaron when his period of treatment has run out? What does starting over look like? In real life a NGRI verdict is serious stuff and it’s hardly the brief pit stop Janet Venable paints it as — one recurring element I’ve encountered in accounts of forensic psychiatric care from people who were in it is the way patients’ behaviors are framed as pathological and connected to their previous actions no matter what they’re really motivated by or where they fall in the range of responses and actions commonly understood as normal outside an institutional context. I can’t imagine this working out particularly well for Aaron as he navigates that space, and I’d love to see scenes from that milieu, especially where his real damage bumps up against his act. (I’m totally fine with depictions of psychiatric hospitalization that span the spectrum of experience from genuinely beneficial in whole or part to unambiguously harmful and damaging, or a mix of both, but you can also fudge reality to be more in line with the world of the film.)
More about his relationship to literature — some of the film’s use of that theme (and certainly in the novel) treats it as a bit of a shortcut for “Aaron is a smart person” but I’d love to see more of what that looks like personally for him when he’s not using books to plant cryptic murder clues, or what his future plans might look like.
Aaron's relationship to Martin Vail really interests me, especially when he frames their relationship as lawyer and client in terms of co-conspirators working together — as a real lover of fucked-up duos it gives my heart a thrill when he compares their courtroom improv to dancing, and I’d be interested in fic exploring any aspect of how his stories of the crime are constructed in collaboration with Martin’s prompting and his expectations. I love seeing Aaron run rings around this guy but I also love when Vail’s keen sense for vulnerability and dishonesty allow him to land a blow on Aaron — once he's no longer stunned by the realization that his client's not who he thought he was, is there any chance of Vail using that very insight against him?
Do they meet again after Aaron's sentence? What happens if Aaron won’t leave Marty alone, or if he has to rely on him for something even after his big gloating reveal in the film’s final act? These two have great fucked-up shipping potential with all the layers of power imbalance going on, and even if it's never physically consummated I'd love fic that digs into the fucked-up joy Aaron takes in getting one over on his hard-boiled attorney and how much he enjoys versus resents being the object of Vail's concern.
The feigned duality between Aaron and Roy really lets Aaron express seemingly contradictory emotions, ironically given the theorized mechanisms of DID presented in the film — love and anger, being an aggressor and being a victim, gratitude and betrayal, naivete and cynicism. I’d love any fic exploring both those complicated emotions: how Aaron’s real experience might lie somewhere between the two extremes of his personas as he presents them, what he covers up and what he reveals whether he intends to or not.
The film never really sells me 100% on the idea that Linda is even dead — we don’t see enough to sell the motivation of jealousy, and Aaron crowing about getting away with her murder may be intended to play out like a sting in the tail of the film’s last scenes but it doesn’t quite land for me. Maybe it’s the contrast between how unambiguously not-alive Aaron’s primary victim is, and maybe it’s feeling bad for her as a character we really see exclusively in the context of videotaped sexual exploitation, but I would love to see any exploration of her relationship to Aaron, or fic where Linda isn’t dead and her survival and ability to speak for herself complicates things further. If Aaron lied about killing her: why? If he’s telling the truth, how might that crime still end up having consequences for him after all?
In general: what’s up with the interpersonal dynamics between the people singled out for the Archbishop’s abuse? How do Alex and Aaron relate to each other, and to Linda? How do they perceive each other and their respective roles as subordinates and favorites of the Archbishop? Is there a version of this story where they’re working together to any degree? Interpersonal relationships between people who share the same abuser, or whose abuse involved multiple people interacting with each other at the direction of an authority figure, can get pretty ugly — I’m down for fic exploring the full spectrum of emotions there.
Ship-wise, I especially love seeing Aaron paired with Martin Vail (on any level, subtextual or textual) but I’m also interested in his other canonical relationships (Linda, Alex, Rushman, Arrington, maybe in a weird fucked-up triangulated way Janet Venable?) or pairing him with OCs.
Fandom-specific notes/DNWs: I’m familiar with the novel and fine with adding elements from it or alluding to it but I’d prefer fic to reflect film canon. I’d prefer not to receive PWP-style fic solely dealing with explicit sexual exploitation at Savior House; fic dealing with the emotional and legal fallout of abuse, fics dealing with the interpersonal relationships surrounding it, or fic depicting other noncon/dubcon encounters explicitly or otherwise are all absolutely fine.
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Strange Angels - Kathe Koja
(This canon is a standalone novel published in — you can find it in print from its original run and it's had a relatively recent digital release afaik.)
- Robin
We encounter Robin through Grant’s eyes, but I’d love a story that turns that focus right around, turning the lens of scrutiny back on this strange man intruding into his already unsettled life and the question of what it is he actually wants. How does Robin experience Grant’s attention and obsession? How right or wrong is Grant in his perception of his effect on Robin? Their relationship isn’t quite artist and muse, not quite artist and patron — I’m really interested in all the fucked up closeness between these two, and I found a lot of quiet horror in the gulf between their respective experiences and the way they end up entwined with one another in ways that blur the line between protection and control.
Do Grant’s expectations of Robin’s ethereal, delicate nature ever begin to chafe? There are clearly times where the reality of Robin’s schizophrenia and the side effects of his medications defy either attempts to romanticize them or attempts to make the experience of loving a mentally ill person something comprehensible and digestible, one self-help book at a time. How might the course of events change if a wrench were thrown in the works at one point or another — if Saskia shows up in Robin’s life earlier, or if Johnna’s attempts to protect her former patient from whatever the fuck she thinks Grant is doing to him (and whatever Grant is doing to him) get more traction?
If you’re interested in historical AUs, please feel free to explore their dynamic in a different milieu, maybe one with different language and baggage around Robin’s illness. The fucked-up artist-and-patron/artist-and-muse thing would fit right into 18th century Romanticism and its obsession with the transcendent and the sublime and the Gothic, but that’s also an era with a very different understanding of illness, too. How might that look? The theme of dark experiments between two increasingly reclusive men and the exploration of other kinds of perception, other ways of seeing, reminded me of later 19th/early 20th century weird fiction (Vernon Lee, E.F. Benson, M.R. James’ haunted heroes, even Lovecraft’s more homoerotic moments) so there seems like really fertile material there too. Even setting the novel’s events two decades earlier or two decades later would make a really significant difference in Robin’s experiences of the psychiatric system
I would also love to read other takes on how the horror could come into play with this story — the horror of entanglement and blurring boundaries between self and other, mutual dependency, private resentment, private fear. There’s that incredible moment in this novel where they’re both about to embark on their ill-advised sensory deprivation experiment and Grant sees something on Robin’s face he can’t recognize or name, only to later identify it as absolute terror — I would really love any kind of scenes from their time together exploring dreams and altered states of consciousness plumbing the weird undercurrents of those exercises and what they’re trying to achieve, what they’re like for Robin, how Grant’s obsession sets the tone and what Robin himself is trying to plumb.
I’m interested in takes on Robin’s relationships that explore their messy dimensions, especially the element of love as an ambiguous and painful force— his clearly fucked-up, burned-out, exhausted relationship with his birth family and how that primes him for Grant’s attention. Whatever Grant feels for Robin is deeply muddied by a whole range of complex feelings, and there’s a lot of potential for destructive sparks to fly even before Saskia enters the picture.
I’m really interested in his interactions with Saskia, the complexity of what they share — mirror images, fellow sufferers, friends, lovers, brother and sister. She’s capable of being assertive, tough, and candid when he can’t be — I’d love to see scenes of his care for her, her caring for him, and the things they share that Grant isn’t or can’t be privy to. I’d also be interested in how sexuality enters between the three of them — Robin’s self-knowledge of his own sexuality (or does he just seem secure by contrast?) versus Saskia’s unsettled awareness of how men look at her, Grant’s intense possessive jealousy, and the various ways erotic desire and other emotions get triangulated. How do Robin’s identities — as a person with a schizophrenia diagnosis, as a queer person — connect to one another?
Robin’s fate is characterized in terms of transformation, apotheosis, becoming, and the messy agonies of it are riding the knife’s-edge line between bodily illness and body horror — I would love something unpacking the horror of his fall and how it seemingly defies rational explanation, much as his experience of psychosis drives a edge between him and the world as it’s commonly understood to work.
Imagery around light is a strong presence in this book, and more than a little imagery surrounding fire and what it’s like to burn — Robin’s associated with a painful strain of goodness, like a prophet or a martyred saint, but there’s other aspects of the spiritual or the angelic, fallen angels and angels of death. What happens if their dynamic becomes suffocating enough that Robin has to free himself (from Grant? From this earthly plane?) by any means necessary?
I’m also interested in other kinds of becoming that Robin might experience — take it in a gothic direction, a cosmic horror direction, an existential direction, a metafictional one, or something else entirely. There’s no real pat fix-it possibilities here but I’m also very happy to read fic where things end up better for Robin, or where Robin’s able to get some independent agency over his own artistic endeavors outside of just being Grant’s pet hermit.
Ship-wise, I’m interested in any combination of Robin, Grant, and Saskia, as well as everybody’s canonical relationships (Grant’s with Johnna, Robin’s with Eddie) and hypotheticals involving OMCs/OFCs.
General 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, social media, 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
- emotional repression
- 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 and family relationships
- sex making everything awkward afterward
- 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
- object insertion
- 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
- kink with and without conventional sex acts involved
- 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, trauma bonding between perpetrator and victim, connections between victims of the same perpetrator, 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 straightforwardly desire but that they believe will help them achieve some goal, for instance. I don't care as much for ravishment tropes where the victim secretly wanted it all along despite their token protests, scenarios where afterward the rape is a non-issue for everyone involved, or where rape results in unambiguous true love and a happily ever after. (Fucked-up trauma bonding, however, is another story.)
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, past relationships, etc.
Any level of intensity or non-intensity with regard to sex, violence, character death and other dark stuff is fine by me, including major character death and downer endings on a character-specific scale. 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 especially enjoy AUs that racebend characters, always-a-girl genderswaps, and fic where characters are written as trans, with all the ways that might impact a character's lived experience.
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 -- other metrical forms are fair game.
I usually do the fun mini-challenges that accompany Yuletide; once they’re up, I’ll link them here. EDIT: Yuleporn and Crueltide! If you want to check out my past exchange letters, you can find them here.
I would not like to receive fic that includes:
Free-verse poetry; high school or HS teacher/HS student AUs; Harry Potter AUs/fusions; pregnancy as a central plot element; unrequested incest or child sexual abuse themes; depictions of self-harm via cutting or of disordered eating. I don't want to read explicit sex involving characters under 16. (The general background existence of teenage sexuality and teens possessing sexual desire is fine.)
This year I would also prefer no focus on contemporary 21st century tragedies (school shootings, Hurricane Katrina, focus on the death toll of COVID, etc.) and no fic featuring noncanonical police violence or real-life modern-day hate groups.
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Asteroid City (2023)
(Asteroid City is a recently released film and is available on various streaming services as well as in physical media form. The screenplay is also available in print/PDF.)
- Conrad Earp
Schubert Green indignantly refers to Conrad as a fragile genius — what’s fragile about him? What’s his working relationship with Green like? How much does Schubert know about the relationship between Conrad and this actor he’s “discovered”? What’s with the pyjamas and fantastic dressing gown? Is Conrad reclusive by nature? What’s his life like out on Long Island? I would love to read stories from the production, including canon divergences and mishaps of all kinds, or from previous collaborations.
In the film itself, Ricky Cho getting shaken down by government officials for his supposed seditious activities and refusing to name names is clearly a gag about HUAC and the Red Scare, but in the play version of Asteroid City, this hypothetical play we’re watching be performed in 1955, that’s no laughing matter! (All the Junior Stargazers are dear to my heart but Ricky is probably my favorite and his fearless student journalism is a big part of that.) What’s Conrad Earp’s relationship to the persecution of those with perceived links to Communism? His career seems to be pretty robust, especially if his picturesque subject matter has insulated him from criticism, but I’m obsessed with the way the different climates (professional, political, and… literal) of New York theater vs. Hollywood film informed the career decisions of so many writers working in this era. I’d love anything that touches on his previous work, or alludes to what the rest of his oeuvre is like.
The play’s Atomic Age themes, and on a meta level the film’s own themes about living in an era of terrible precarity and trying to find meaning, are out of line with Earp’s more picturesque preoccupations (the cowboys… so many hunky cowboys) but really right in line with the shape “life west of the Rocky Mountains” has taken with the United States’ hard pivot into Cold War-era anxiety. What’s on Conrad Earp’s mind when he’s writing Asteroid City, the play? How do the themes of the play reflect Earp’s interests as an artist? What kind of research went into the cast of characters? (The child characters in-universe are big faves for me as a former Gifted Child conference-attending junior nerd who found friendship among fellow child nerds; what is Conrad exploring there?)
Feel free to explore the creative process the film itself fast-forwards through for the audience’s sake. The figure of Midge in particular, a glamorous and intense actress with a troubled life and an attraction to challenging material, feels like she may have been written with the “real” figure of Mercedes Ford in mind… never mind the other actually-real women she’s clearly inspired by, including but far from limited to Marilyn Monroe. Is Earp writing to the strengths of performers he already knows, and how do the players differ from their fictional roles?
Jones Hall appears during the first not!Actors Studio meeting and already seems to be interested in Conrad in a really cute and intriguing way— what’s the story there, what motivates him, and what informs how Conrad reacts to being pursued? I love the exchange between them right as they’re clearly about to go to bed together — ”Okay?” / “Okay.” — you can write about scenes from their relationship, what the two of them share and how they relate to one another. The compressed time frame of their affair is also interesting to me — it doesn’t need to be the greatest love story of the century for it to be something profoundly meaningful to everybody involved, and I’d be especially interested in stuff that explores the place that art and theater has in their relationship, as a thing that draws them together in more than one way.
Conrad’s death is a really pivotal element of the film, and I’m not particularly interested in a story that undoes that entirely, but I’m interested in the aftermath — what more there is to know about a man from his work, from his home, from the impact left on those who survive him? What happens to all his homoerotic cowboy memorabilia? Who gets to hang on to the material aspects of his legacy and who’s shut out?
This film seems like an especially great fit for in-universe documents — retrospectives on theater, television, and the stage-to-screen adaptation process of the 1950s, the New York theater world of the postwar years, reexamination of the career of a celebrated queer playwright… in the decades after his death, is Earp’s work reexamined, or all but forgotten? Any kind of excerpts from biographies (maybe not even of Earp — is he ultimately a footnote in Jones Hall’s career? In Mercedes Ford’s?) or from podcasts or what have you would be great. I have a huge soft spot for writing about the history of the arts, especially the personalities and forces at work in midcentury American film and theater — from the factual to the salaciously dishy to the outright fabricated. (I personally feel like the connection between Earp and Tennessee Williams some have made is a mostly superficial one — there are other queer midcentury playwrights! — but this New Yorker piece about a Williams biographer who may or may not have just made shit up about imagined encounters with the man does make me think about the kind of emotional attachments we form to artists via their work, especially artists whose works have a resonance with us as marginalized people, and the temptations of, well, writing real person fanfiction when we’re supposed to be writing real person nonfiction.)
Shipwise, I’d love fic that deals with his canonical relationship with Jones Hall (whatever that might have looked like) or shipping him with anyone else, including OCs, and gen.
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George Smiley novels - John Le Carre
(John Le Carre's spy novels should be pretty widely available wherever books are sold and in a variety of formats. Dieter Frey appears in-person in Call For The Dead only.)
- George Smiley; Dieter Frey
I’ve been on a years-long Le Carre spiral and loving every second of it, but for Yuletide I’ve opted to make requests largely centered around Call For The Dead. Feel free to pick and choose what later JLC/Smiley series lore you choose to incorporate, but consider it all fair game.
I am dying for anything about Smiley and Frey together, whether slash or gen — scenes from their past as first teacher and student and then handler and agent, scenes from the period of their separation even if they’re only present in one another’s thoughts or as a troubling memory, scenes from their canon-era interactions or in some course of events where the whole thing goes off the rails in a newer and differently terrible way. If you feel up to it, I’m always interested in fic where the events of the Cold War as we know them take a different turn, including a scenario with a cold war gone hot.
Dieter and Smiley are fabulous opposites in a whole laundry list of ways, not least of all the physical — Dieter, the kind of man who draws stranger’s eyes toward him through imperious Byronic charisma and not insignificant physical beauty vs. Smiley, who only garners strangers’ attention when they’re laughing at the sight of a little funny fat man in a bad suit having to run to catch the train. Smiley is certainly abundantly aware of his own appearance, both its benefits and its drawbacks, and it gives his descriptions of Dieter (long before Guillam and co. actually meet him) an additional poignancy for me as well as great psychosexual spice — not only Frey’s good looks but his highly visible areas of difference that put him at even greater personal risk under Nazism than even his convictions alone. Both men are in very different positions wrt politics and ideology and I’d love anything dealing with the way the Second World War and then the Cold War both draw them into unlikely collaboration and force them apart.
I would love any scenes from their time working together during the war, especially dealing with tradecraft. It seems reasonable to assume they didn’t have a great deal of leisure time to spend together, but I’m fascinated by all the banal-yet-risky ins and outs of wartime intelligence work, so if you’ve ever felt inspired to write a casefic-style mystery for Smiley and his cohort during their WWII days (before Le Carre’s own timeline tweaking) or even just scenes from the type of clandestine activity both men got up to separately and together I would be really happy. On the flipside, if you would like to fill out more scenes from the relationship between Dieter Frey and both/either of the Fennans, I would really love that — I find the Fennans’ marriage really heartbreaking and the novel’s themes around the deep traumas of the Holocaust are really powerful.
Any kind of scene of constrained cooperation after Dieter’s gone and made the jump to East Germany — something canon-divergent from the novel’s last act where Frey survives and now he and Smiley are both in it with the Circus all over again, or simply something where Frey survives long enough into the next decade of the Cold War to continue bedeviling Smiley from afar. I’d also be interested in how it would change the trajectory of Smiley’s own career and the later events of the Smiley novels if he’d managed to bring Dieter over in the first place after the war — no guarantees how that would have gone, but either way it’d be seriously interesting.
Shipfic-wise, Smiley is scrupulous enough (and careful enough at his job) that I’m curious what might bring him to take that step into physical intimacy — if they ever do, since absolutely unhinged pining also suits this pairing very well and I’m happy for anything across the whole spectrum of possibilities. The association between homosexuality and just about any ideology an individual might despise, whether left or right, goes deep, and certainly both men would be aware of that too even back in Smiley’s university cover days; I’d go nuts for anything that deals with romantic or erotic undercurrents in their relationship no matter what but something dealing with the ideological and professional baggage too would be an extra treat. Does Dieter make the first move? Does it happen in the kind of context where it seems like death is imminent and then oops, it isn’t, now what? How different are their experiences of sexuality?
For more general Smiley content, I’m especially interested in fic set during the early slightly-wobbly period where the tone and scope of Le Carre’s novels isn’t necessarily what it will be later — in many ways both Call and A Murder Of Quality feel like they’re in conversation with the grand tradition of the British mystery novel, and I’d love any missing scenes from that timeframe, alternate possibilities or alternate solutions, or any moments later on in Smiley’s illustrious career where he’s stuck unraveling a murder mystery during his downtime and doing it quietly very well.
I love Smiley’s relationships with Guillam, Mendel, Connie, and of course Ann, as well as the Circus’ other denizens — feel free to include them in fic, explore their POVs, or give any one them equal screentime to my two requested characters. I’m especially smitten with the absolutely agonizing push and pull perpetually going on between Smiley and Ann, and would love anything where she’s present even if only in Smiley’s own mind. (The way the BBC radio plays include her as almost a persistent ghost troubling Smiley’s thoughts is really delicious to me.) What, if anything, does Ann learn (or already know) about the Fennan affair and about Dieter? The film A Deadly Affair weirdly prefigures Bill Haydon by having Frey and Ann have an affair — it’s a semi-baffling choice for me but I’d still kill to get some of her POV on what’s gone on while she’s been away, especially if you choose to write Smiley as an excruciatingly discreet gay or bi man.
How does Frey’s career in espionage mirror Smiley’s and how does it differ? How similar and how different is he from his up-and-coming counterparts on the other side of the Berlin Wall? I love the look into the East German intelligence community we get in Spy Who Came In From The Cold, where the consequences of the Fennan affair are still reverberating outward, and I’d really enjoy any fic that situates him in that community and explores its inner workings and internal tensions. (I love the various East German intelligence crew we meet, especially Jens Fiedler, so if you can work him in there somehow, go for it.) I would also love anything where he’s the one probing into an espionage-adjacent mystery.
Ship-wise, these books are a free-for-all for me — I’m interested in how the two requested characters interact on either an & or a / basis, but feel free to include any other relationships you enjoy here, as well as all the relationships we see in canon (Jim and Bill, Connie and Hilary, the Fennans, and ofc the eternally messy ongoing thing between Smiley and Ann). For additional noncanonical m/m ships, Smiley/Mendel and Smiley/Guillam are both well-loved by me. I also ship Dieter with either or both of the Fennans or any of his East German comrades.
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Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
(This canon is a series of four novels published between 1981 and 2006 and they should be widely available in various formats — Will Graham appears in person only in the first, Red Dragon. If you're picking up the series for the first time, Hannibal Rising is a somewhat grudgingly-written sequel, and isn't integral to any of my prompts this year.)
- Will Graham
I enjoy the absolutely wild ramp-up this series takes, from the relatively restrained procedural focus of Red Dragon to the more operatic focus of Hannibal, and I love every point along that spectrum up to and including, well, a significant amount of Hannibal Rising, and that’s all I have to say about that. I really enjoy the heightened, tense, sometimes cynical, sometimes absurd world these novels are set in (much like our own, of course) and while my prompts are pretty focused on Graham’s whole deal please feel free to include any of the characters from these books up to and including Paul Krendler.
It’s certainly not coincidental that Will’s career in forensics and with the FBI occurs chronologically smack-dab in this often-fictionalized golden age of FBI profiling — there’s a whole lot of narratives that aren’t embedded in the public imagination quite yet, and whole areas of forensic science that look very different than they do now. How did Will find his way to the FBI?
I would be thrilled to receive 1001 words of Will working a past case, or going through the high-tech-circa-1981 procedures around evidence collection and forensic analysis, or the kinds of connections he makes with his colleagues and the professional disagreements between them. I love how Will brushes off all the bullshit about the way he thinks, even as the way he thinks is so delightfully concrete and vivid — when Crawford comes down to Florida to try to get him back in action for One Last Score, he defends the seeming leaps in reasoning he makes with ”The evidence was there,” and that’s a kind of mental mode that I find really fun to engage with even as I’m curious about what exactly said bullshit about the way he thinks must look like among his colleagues. How could the pursuit of Dolarhyde gone off the rails, or taken on a different climax? Fix things, break things, remix things, shake it all about — I’m super easy. Please put Will Graham in some Situations!
Will Graham’s situation post-Red Dragon is not a pretty one, literally and figuratively. He seems to be entirely out of commission as far as FBI work goes by the time of SOTL, and I don’t blame him in the least — is there any kind of circumstance that could induce Crawford and his successors at the Bureau to try and reach out again, or that could remotely induce Will to reciprocate with interest? Did Mason Verger ever reach out to Will in the interest of his “get Hannibal” quest? Was Will ever tempted or did he tell him to fuck off? The reality of Will dealing with major, disfiguring injuries is a tough one and I’d be interested in the way that concrete reminder of his experiences impacts his life post-RD.
How much does Will know or not know about Clarice Starling? What’s his entirely professional opinion about Crawford’s choice to use Clarice as essentially bait? In fact, anything you can do to get this guy to cross paths with Clarice would thrill me — they operate in different ways and they have very different wheelhouses, Clarice has had experiences that Will’s never going to have had, but they’re united by some very weird shared experiences, not least among which is having spent some reluctant quality time with Dr. Hannibal Lecter, MD.
I really love the assorted female characters of this series and would love to see what any of them would bring to an interaction with this guy — Ardelia, Reba, Margot, Wendy, Hobbs’ unnamed daughter, Phyllis. (Phyllis who brought Will books when he was in the hospital! God! What a detail.) I also really enjoy Will’s relationship with Molly and all the fraught layers it has around their respective pasts. There’s clearly a lot they share, but Molly’s her own person with her own past, another marriage under her belt that ended pretty hard, her own cranky racist parents who don’t get along well with her husband, and a kid who’s having to navigate a lot of crazy shit around his new stepdad. (Who also shares his same name, bc Thomas Harris, why.)
Side note: I love genderswap fic that explores how a character’s career would have been impacted by sexist norms, and so much of SOTL underscores the climate of sexism at the FBI — if Will were a woman, how would have her trajectory been different? What kind of shades would that have added to her hiding out in Florida with her wife, semi-retired, then getting dragged back into the field and shit hitting the fan in a major way?
Hannibal Lecter himself is such a relatively minor player in Red Dragon relative to later books, but he’s already so deliciously terrible and memorable — I’d love to read about what on earth these two made of each other in their first two meetings, before things popped off and got unambiguously adversarial, and what they made of each other afterward. Or hell, expand that window of time a little and explore it in fic anyway. I love Hannibal’s pure pettiness and the way he’s so clearly trying to amuse himself as much as exert power or exercise control — what does Will make of that, and what motivates his reticence to talk about the experience, apart from the annoyance factor of everybody wanting to know? Did Will end up having to testify in court about catching Lecter, or did getting lightly disemboweled get him a hall pass on that?
My other requests reflect this same obsession of mine but I love anything that’s written in the format of an in-universe document — letters from one character to another, excerpts from paperwork and medical notes, papers published in professional journals and their retractions, deep dive research on the events of the novels or the trashy pop-history version? Will Graham’s own writings would also be really interesting, and he does have at least one interested party out there who canonically enjoys writing bitchy rebuttals to psychology papers he considers to be subpar...
I’m familiar with all the various adaptations of these books and I’ve enjoyed all of them, even the musical; I’m happy to read fic that mixes and matches elements across these adaptations or explores what putting a book character in their film or show counterpart’s position might look like or vice-versa, but as far as character appearances, timelines, interpersonal dynamics, and the like, I’d prefer fic to reflect book canon.
I ship Will Graham with… damn near everybody, really, including his canonical marriage, but Will/Clarice and Will/Hannibal might be an especially good fit here. All canonical pairings are fair game as well (including Hannibal/Clarice) and I have a soft spot for Clarice/Ardelia even just in the background.
Fandom-specific DNWs: fic set in NBC or CBS show canon; modern-day AUs; noncanonical instances of brainwashing. (Clarice's canonical fate is fine to feature but you have zero obligation to have it be permanent, either.)
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Hell House - Richard Matheson
(This canon is a 1971 standalone novel. It should be widely available both in physical and digital forms; you can compare prices at Bookfinder.)
- Ben Fischer
I really enjoy Fischer’s status as this self-sabotaged, formerly promising boy medium — I have a massive penchant for characters who have been raised up for some purpose or cause that’s now defunct or out of reach, and who have to deal with that sense of failure, so anything you want to explore with that and his position in the Hell House enterprise, so clearly keeping himself detached and impartial to avoid faceplanting into brutal tragedy all over again, would be great. More scenes from the period of time where he’s keeping well clear of the whole midcentury psychic medium industrial complex, or deliberately trying to ruin what’s left of his reputation with deliberate fraud — does the supernatural still find him, even as he’s determined to outrun it, or does he adapt to its absence from his life?
I’d love something with a gender-swapped version of Fischer, with the various ways that would inflect her story and the way her fall from promising young medium to fraud and burnout would be perceived and how it would alter the gender calculus of the main group during the experiment — I love transfic too and I’d especially love something with a transfeminine Fischer (whether she’s presenting as a woman or having to slip uneasily back into the closet for the duration of the project or something in between) as this stubbornly self-shaped midcentury woman, like the Wendy Carlos of reluctant mediumship, stuck revisiting this painful place from her past on a different footing. (Would also love how this complicates everything to do with Edith!) Feel free to mix and match any gender stuff with any other plot ideas or character study stuff that tickles your fancy also.
Emeric Belasco really does tower over the events of the novel (as smug as he’d be about that, and as ready as Ben would be to knock him down a peg) and I’d love anything that explores the dynamic of how he haunts Fischer specifically — as a spirit, an energy imprint, a psychic scar, or just a rich asshole with really bad vibes. There’s some subtext around Fischer’s first encounter with Belasco that evokes sexual assault (especially given Belasco’s other rapey manifestations toward unlucky mediums like Florence) and it sometimes shades how I read the novel’s climax, so I’d love any treatment of that. Even taking his traumatic survivor status just as a psychic shock without a sexual dimension to it, I’d be really interested in anything dealing with the ways Ben is having to voluntarily face, or not face, the shadow of this hugely momentous event that happened while he was still really young. How does that sense of adult return to the site of a hideous event of one’s youth flavor the ultimate confrontation with Belasco, or other possible confrontations we don’t get? Are there rooms in the Belasco house he remembers from his first ordeal there? I love how the novel uses the opulent physical grounds of the house (the fucking steam room!) as a playing-field for all different flavors of nastiness, and the ugly bits of history that still linger, ones that Fischer discloses and ones that he keeps to himself.
There’s moments in the novel where the party dynamics between the characters are beginning to show some clear faultlines — Dr. Barrett and Fischer grouped together as men, Fischer and Florence together as mediums, even Edith’s torment throwing her in Fischer’s direction as a simultaneously nonthreatening-but-dangerous dude — and I’d love any kind of character study or interaction between the house’s reluctant guests. There’s definitely some early-1970s misogyny in the mix on both a Watsonian and Doyleist level but I especially love the dynamic of Fischer and Edith as sort of a pair of survivors for a while there, and I’d love more of them. Likewise I’d love missing scenes or something filled in of how Fischer as a burned ex-medium feels about Florence’s very gentle, at times downright rosy view of her supernatural responsibilities.
Sex and sexual violence in horror aren’t everyone’s cup of tea for extremely understandable reasons but they’re very much part of the novel’s atmosphere for me and you can feel free to explore them as little or as much as you like. The aftermath of Florence’s spirit rape is really hideous stuff, and I definitely wouldn’t say no to something where Florence gets to survive one way or another and they do get to up and leave (even with a hell of a lot of baggage) or, on a less nice note, where the nightmarish compulsive sexuality she experiences in the aftermath boils over onto Ben directly. Or on another angle, I’d love something where the house’s corrosive sexuality tries or succeeds in disturbing the dynamic between Fischer and Dr. Barrett. For all Matheson explores fucked-up internalized homophobia and fractured female desire between Edith and Florence, he’s scrupulous to avoid any sexuality between men, even of the most benign kind, and I won’t stand for it.
I’d love anything postcanon — do Fischer and Edith stay in touch at all after that shattering Christmas? Does Ben go back to his drifter life? If Fischer and Florence did manage to get the fuck out before the Reversor goes smashy-smash (with Edith in tow? With or without Barrett?) it isn’t necessarily the end to their ordeal — I’d love anything where shit goes off the rails in an entirely different way than it does in the novel. What if old man Deutsch picks an even less convenient time to die, or insists on turning up in person? What does Fischer’s repressed side look like, and what would happen if it were to pop off even half as volcanically intensely as Florence’s?
One perennial Yuletide fave for me takes the form of in-universe documents, and given the various characters’ relationship to parapsychology as a discipline and to ghosts as a phenomenon I would love snippets from literature of different stripes relating to the "clearing" of Belasco’s mansion or the goings-on that transpired there. Oral histories, suppressed journal articles, trashy true crime -- Fischer can feature as a writer, a narrator, a pissed-off reviewer breaking down all the inaccuracies, or just one of many players. If nothing else here grabs you, I would love just more scenes from Hell House, its long and grim history of all manner of degradation and debauchery — if you chose to go purely with pre-canon worldbuilding about Belasco’s coterie of victims or the impact of years of carefully cultivated viciousness, I would be happy as a clam.
Ship-wise, I tend to read Fischer as some flavor of queer, including asexuality (Roddy McDowall’s performance in the film really brings some triumphant gay rage and I love it so much) but what happens in the awful cursed mansion stays in the awful cursed mansion and I’m down for reading anything you want to write, with any pairings.
Fandom-specific DNW notes: Feel free to deal with the suggestions of self-injurious behavior in Florence’s breakdown, but I’d prefer no blow-by-blow descriptions of self-injury. I waive the under-16 DNW for anything dealing with Ben during the failed 1940 session, but nothing where he’s younger than that. General references to teenage sexuality or themes around Belasco depravity encompassing younger teens is fine.
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Primal Fear (1996)
(This canon is a live-action legal thriller with a terrific cast and should be widely available in a variety of formats wherever you watch movies; as of 10/13/2023, it's streaming on Paramount Plus in the US.)
- Aaron Stampler
This character is tailor-made for me both as a heartbreaking brutalized innocent and a gloating rat bastard, and I’m also interested in what lies between those two extremes — the moments you can see hesitation or anger under the placid naïf act (right off the bat, when Vail comments on Rushman generously permitting Aaron to remain at Savior House once he’d come of age and you can fully see… something… flicker across Aaron’s face) or the pain and fear underneath his aggressive macho play-acting as Roy. The film could be so close to a neo-noir but it never takes the plunge — how does the tone change if it does? What kind of noir-inflected moods or elements could come into play here — corruption, doubles and duplicity, disillusionment, fatalistic bleakness, the pleasures of a really good double-cross?
Where’s Aaron when his period of treatment has run out? What does starting over look like? In real life a NGRI verdict is serious stuff and it’s hardly the brief pit stop Janet Venable paints it as — one recurring element I’ve encountered in accounts of forensic psychiatric care from people who were in it is the way patients’ behaviors are framed as pathological and connected to their previous actions no matter what they’re really motivated by or where they fall in the range of responses and actions commonly understood as normal outside an institutional context. I can’t imagine this working out particularly well for Aaron as he navigates that space, and I’d love to see scenes from that milieu, especially where his real damage bumps up against his act. (I’m totally fine with depictions of psychiatric hospitalization that span the spectrum of experience from genuinely beneficial in whole or part to unambiguously harmful and damaging, or a mix of both, but you can also fudge reality to be more in line with the world of the film.)
More about his relationship to literature — some of the film’s use of that theme (and certainly in the novel) treats it as a bit of a shortcut for “Aaron is a smart person” but I’d love to see more of what that looks like personally for him when he’s not using books to plant cryptic murder clues, or what his future plans might look like.
Aaron's relationship to Martin Vail really interests me, especially when he frames their relationship as lawyer and client in terms of co-conspirators working together — as a real lover of fucked-up duos it gives my heart a thrill when he compares their courtroom improv to dancing, and I’d be interested in fic exploring any aspect of how his stories of the crime are constructed in collaboration with Martin’s prompting and his expectations. I love seeing Aaron run rings around this guy but I also love when Vail’s keen sense for vulnerability and dishonesty allow him to land a blow on Aaron — once he's no longer stunned by the realization that his client's not who he thought he was, is there any chance of Vail using that very insight against him?
Do they meet again after Aaron's sentence? What happens if Aaron won’t leave Marty alone, or if he has to rely on him for something even after his big gloating reveal in the film’s final act? These two have great fucked-up shipping potential with all the layers of power imbalance going on, and even if it's never physically consummated I'd love fic that digs into the fucked-up joy Aaron takes in getting one over on his hard-boiled attorney and how much he enjoys versus resents being the object of Vail's concern.
The feigned duality between Aaron and Roy really lets Aaron express seemingly contradictory emotions, ironically given the theorized mechanisms of DID presented in the film — love and anger, being an aggressor and being a victim, gratitude and betrayal, naivete and cynicism. I’d love any fic exploring both those complicated emotions: how Aaron’s real experience might lie somewhere between the two extremes of his personas as he presents them, what he covers up and what he reveals whether he intends to or not.
The film never really sells me 100% on the idea that Linda is even dead — we don’t see enough to sell the motivation of jealousy, and Aaron crowing about getting away with her murder may be intended to play out like a sting in the tail of the film’s last scenes but it doesn’t quite land for me. Maybe it’s the contrast between how unambiguously not-alive Aaron’s primary victim is, and maybe it’s feeling bad for her as a character we really see exclusively in the context of videotaped sexual exploitation, but I would love to see any exploration of her relationship to Aaron, or fic where Linda isn’t dead and her survival and ability to speak for herself complicates things further. If Aaron lied about killing her: why? If he’s telling the truth, how might that crime still end up having consequences for him after all?
In general: what’s up with the interpersonal dynamics between the people singled out for the Archbishop’s abuse? How do Alex and Aaron relate to each other, and to Linda? How do they perceive each other and their respective roles as subordinates and favorites of the Archbishop? Is there a version of this story where they’re working together to any degree? Interpersonal relationships between people who share the same abuser, or whose abuse involved multiple people interacting with each other at the direction of an authority figure, can get pretty ugly — I’m down for fic exploring the full spectrum of emotions there.
Ship-wise, I especially love seeing Aaron paired with Martin Vail (on any level, subtextual or textual) but I’m also interested in his other canonical relationships (Linda, Alex, Rushman, Arrington, maybe in a weird fucked-up triangulated way Janet Venable?) or pairing him with OCs.
Fandom-specific notes/DNWs: I’m familiar with the novel and fine with adding elements from it or alluding to it but I’d prefer fic to reflect film canon. I’d prefer not to receive PWP-style fic solely dealing with explicit sexual exploitation at Savior House; fic dealing with the emotional and legal fallout of abuse, fics dealing with the interpersonal relationships surrounding it, or fic depicting other noncon/dubcon encounters explicitly or otherwise are all absolutely fine.
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Strange Angels - Kathe Koja
(This canon is a standalone novel published in — you can find it in print from its original run and it's had a relatively recent digital release afaik.)
- Robin
We encounter Robin through Grant’s eyes, but I’d love a story that turns that focus right around, turning the lens of scrutiny back on this strange man intruding into his already unsettled life and the question of what it is he actually wants. How does Robin experience Grant’s attention and obsession? How right or wrong is Grant in his perception of his effect on Robin? Their relationship isn’t quite artist and muse, not quite artist and patron — I’m really interested in all the fucked up closeness between these two, and I found a lot of quiet horror in the gulf between their respective experiences and the way they end up entwined with one another in ways that blur the line between protection and control.
Do Grant’s expectations of Robin’s ethereal, delicate nature ever begin to chafe? There are clearly times where the reality of Robin’s schizophrenia and the side effects of his medications defy either attempts to romanticize them or attempts to make the experience of loving a mentally ill person something comprehensible and digestible, one self-help book at a time. How might the course of events change if a wrench were thrown in the works at one point or another — if Saskia shows up in Robin’s life earlier, or if Johnna’s attempts to protect her former patient from whatever the fuck she thinks Grant is doing to him (and whatever Grant is doing to him) get more traction?
If you’re interested in historical AUs, please feel free to explore their dynamic in a different milieu, maybe one with different language and baggage around Robin’s illness. The fucked-up artist-and-patron/artist-and-muse thing would fit right into 18th century Romanticism and its obsession with the transcendent and the sublime and the Gothic, but that’s also an era with a very different understanding of illness, too. How might that look? The theme of dark experiments between two increasingly reclusive men and the exploration of other kinds of perception, other ways of seeing, reminded me of later 19th/early 20th century weird fiction (Vernon Lee, E.F. Benson, M.R. James’ haunted heroes, even Lovecraft’s more homoerotic moments) so there seems like really fertile material there too. Even setting the novel’s events two decades earlier or two decades later would make a really significant difference in Robin’s experiences of the psychiatric system
I would also love to read other takes on how the horror could come into play with this story — the horror of entanglement and blurring boundaries between self and other, mutual dependency, private resentment, private fear. There’s that incredible moment in this novel where they’re both about to embark on their ill-advised sensory deprivation experiment and Grant sees something on Robin’s face he can’t recognize or name, only to later identify it as absolute terror — I would really love any kind of scenes from their time together exploring dreams and altered states of consciousness plumbing the weird undercurrents of those exercises and what they’re trying to achieve, what they’re like for Robin, how Grant’s obsession sets the tone and what Robin himself is trying to plumb.
I’m interested in takes on Robin’s relationships that explore their messy dimensions, especially the element of love as an ambiguous and painful force— his clearly fucked-up, burned-out, exhausted relationship with his birth family and how that primes him for Grant’s attention. Whatever Grant feels for Robin is deeply muddied by a whole range of complex feelings, and there’s a lot of potential for destructive sparks to fly even before Saskia enters the picture.
I’m really interested in his interactions with Saskia, the complexity of what they share — mirror images, fellow sufferers, friends, lovers, brother and sister. She’s capable of being assertive, tough, and candid when he can’t be — I’d love to see scenes of his care for her, her caring for him, and the things they share that Grant isn’t or can’t be privy to. I’d also be interested in how sexuality enters between the three of them — Robin’s self-knowledge of his own sexuality (or does he just seem secure by contrast?) versus Saskia’s unsettled awareness of how men look at her, Grant’s intense possessive jealousy, and the various ways erotic desire and other emotions get triangulated. How do Robin’s identities — as a person with a schizophrenia diagnosis, as a queer person — connect to one another?
Robin’s fate is characterized in terms of transformation, apotheosis, becoming, and the messy agonies of it are riding the knife’s-edge line between bodily illness and body horror — I would love something unpacking the horror of his fall and how it seemingly defies rational explanation, much as his experience of psychosis drives a edge between him and the world as it’s commonly understood to work.
Imagery around light is a strong presence in this book, and more than a little imagery surrounding fire and what it’s like to burn — Robin’s associated with a painful strain of goodness, like a prophet or a martyred saint, but there’s other aspects of the spiritual or the angelic, fallen angels and angels of death. What happens if their dynamic becomes suffocating enough that Robin has to free himself (from Grant? From this earthly plane?) by any means necessary?
I’m also interested in other kinds of becoming that Robin might experience — take it in a gothic direction, a cosmic horror direction, an existential direction, a metafictional one, or something else entirely. There’s no real pat fix-it possibilities here but I’m also very happy to read fic where things end up better for Robin, or where Robin’s able to get some independent agency over his own artistic endeavors outside of just being Grant’s pet hermit.
Ship-wise, I’m interested in any combination of Robin, Grant, and Saskia, as well as everybody’s canonical relationships (Grant’s with Johnna, Robin’s with Eddie) and hypotheticals involving OMCs/OFCs.
