Dear Yuletide Writer 2024

[skazka]

Another year of Yuletide! My letters tend to run long, so please feel free to use my overly-wordy thoughts as a jumping-off point for your own creative journey.



General Likes:

Some general things I dig:

- historical details, material culture, pop culture
- in-universe documents (letters, manuscripts, academic journals, social media, etc.)
- 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
- alternate history and historical canon divergence
- 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
- 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
- too-big dicks and hole stretching
- 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 and manhandling
- 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, or sex under conditions of mutual desire but where some level of coercion is baked in. I don't care as much for ravishment tropes where the victim secretly wanted it all along despite 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 that center on my requested characters -- 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. ETA: Crueltide, Yuleporn, Interactive Fiction! If you want to check out my past exchange letters, you can find them here.

I would prefer not to receive:

Free-verse poetry; high school or high school teacher/student AUs; Harry Potter AUs/fusions; pregnancy and childbirth as a central plot element; unrequested incest or child sexual abuse; depictions of self-harm via cutting or of disordered eating; PIV sex with transmasculine characters being penetrated vaginally. I don't want to read explicit sex involving characters under 16. This year I would also prefer no focus on contemporary 21st century tragedies like school shootings or the death toll of COVID-19, noncanonical police violence, or real-life modern-day hate groups/far-right political movements.





Asteroid City (2023)
Edward, Edward - Lolah Burford
Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris
Smiley Series - John Le Carré
Strange Angels - Kathe Koja
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Asteroid City (2023)

(Asteroid City was released in 2023 and is available on various streaming services as well as in physical media form. The screenplay is also available in print/PDF.)

- Conrad Earp

Signup Prompts: I really want to know more about Conrad Earp's life and work! He's at the margins of the film due to its focus on his work, but the suggestions of his personality that filter through in his writing and the bits of him we see when he appears are really fascinating to me. What's the rest of his oeuvre like, and how does it engage with the preoccupations we see in his staged work, from Atomic Age malaise and extraterrestrial incursion to lonely nerds and hunky cowboys? What's Earp's relationship to the changes of the first half of the 20th century, and to the Cold War-era tensions that ooze out of the in-universe play even in moments of comedy? What elements of the play's narrative are tailored to the strengths of his actors and what kind of relationship does he have to the New York theater community? (I find the way we always seem to see him in pajamas and incredible print bathrobe even in the actors' studio to be a really interesting element — in one way it's a classic Wes Anderson flourish of costuming whimsy, but on another, is Earp an eccentric or a recluse or something else entirely?) If you're interested in writing about the show's ensemble I'd love to learn more about the relationship the playwright has to the actors tasked with embodying his work, and vice-versa; have any of them performed in his works before? What kind of backstage politics are in play? I'd also be perfectly happy with a character study of Connie's artistic intentions or all the not-necessarily-cinematic struggles of getting a play hammered out on paper. I'd love fic exploring Conrad's relationships to Schubert Green (who seems to be an admirer of his — a frequent collaborator? Friend, frenemy, professional partner, ex-lover?) and with Saltzburg Keitel as a creative force and power player in this feverish close-knit world of artists and actors. I love his relationship with Jones Hall, where so much is suggested in even their first face-to-face meeting. Explore what their affair was like, what Conrad sees in Jones' embodiment of this character he's made, what's been transpiring between them and how much their fellow artists know about it. One thing I find really compelling about their relationship is how it's bracketed by the timeline of Asteroid City the play's production for stage and screen, and cut short by Conrad's unexpected passing — how does that relatively brief affair impact their shared artistic legacies? In the aftermath of Conrad's death, what happens to his legacy? Are his plays still being performed in the decades to come, or does he become more of a footnote in the biographies of the actors who first brought those works to life? The film's many-layered narrative really gets my imagination going, and if you wrote anything with epistolary elements or in in-universe document form (academic writing, podcast transcripts, memoirs?) I would love you forever. I ship Conrad Earp with Jones Hall, Schubert Green, Griff Gibson's actor, Saltzburg Keitel, and anybody else you want to pair him with. Treats are welcome!

At one point, 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? Was he ever a Junior Stargazer of sorts?)

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? What’s his relationship to Ford like — was he gearing toward her on purpose, or did he have a totally different dramatic type in mind?

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. I’m familiar with the other films of Wes Anderson and would enjoy crossover encounters there as well, especially with his other midcentury-set films like The French Dispatch and Moonrise Kingdom.

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Edward, Edward - Lolah Burford

(This canon is an 1973 novel; to my knowledge it's no longer in print, though a digital copy is pretty easy to find on questionable download sites like Libgen. You can still get your hands on a physical copy wherever used books are for sale; prices on Bookfinder vary from ~$30-300 USD.)

- Edward Clare Armstrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One fandom-specific caveat here relating to my DNWs: the canon has plenty of sections where Edward and the Earl interact with erotically/romantically-charged beats while Edward is a child by the standards of his own era. No need to ignore or retcon what's in the book or to exile it from discussion in dialogue, but I would prefer not to receive on-the-page intimacy between them in fic, even intimacy short of sex, while Edward is younger than sixteen.

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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, the novel Red Dragon, and his canonical post-RD fate is touched upon early in Silence of the Lambs. 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

Signup Prompts: The procedural elements of this novel are really fascinating to me— not just old school profiling and Graham’s own process for getting into the mindsets and motivations of the killer he’s seeking, but all the cutting-edge early 1980s forensics tech and the collaboration it requires. I’d love fic exploring any aspect of this, from Will’s early career to his arrival at the FBI and beyond. Will’s first encounters with Hannibal Lecter are described but not seen — I would really like to read more of that period, how good Hannibal really is at pretending respectable normalcy and how the two of them see through one another. I could read a zillion words of these two needling at each other. Exhausted, sometimes earthy Will makes a really great foil to Lecter’s cultivated, sometimes bitchy wickedness. (I do ship them in a way that the NBC show does not remotely satisfy and would love anything exploring how that might come to pass.) Missing scenes or interpolations from their grudging collaboration, scenes of what could have been, more malicious little messages on mauve paper? Red Dragon, the novel, is pretty centralized in focus in a way the later books aren't, and naturally I want to see it taken apart and put back together totally differently. Could the Dolarhyde case go off the rails in some other way? Could it have ended differently? (Every time I read this book or watch its film adaptations I always find myself wishing in a weird way that Reba could win — that there's some way for Dolarhyde to overcome his nature, even broken and wounded — but that might be overly optimistic.) What kind of moving parts would need to be changed around in the plot to put Will and his team in a different position regarding the Tooth Fairy killings? Or scenes from Graham’s withdrawal from society after Dolarhyde nearly kills him and things seem to have fallen apart with Molly — within the FBI he seems to have become something of a cautionary tale, if not quite a blot on Jack Crawford's record, and I'd be equally happy to read fic where Graham figures out a way of existing with the trauma of his experiences that's as close to bearable as possible as I would read fic about him being washed-up, drunk, disfigured, and miserable. (Which is a lot. I would like to read fic about that a lot, too.) Similarly I am dying for fic that deals with the later events of the novels through Will's eyes, as a character study or something more involved with him as an active player — Will reacting to Clarice Starling’s role in apprehending yet another killer, to Lecter’s escape, and everything that comes after that. He and Clarice come from pretty different generational cohorts at the FBI, but I have the feeling they'd have plenty to talk about if they did meet. Did he ever get any overtures from the kind of macabre souvenir-seekers who come looking for Lecter-related tidbits, or from the Verger family estate? How would that go over? 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. Treats are welcome!

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 Silence of the Lambs 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, 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 to Molly, 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.)

Wrt my underage/incest/CSA DNWs, exploring canonical instances of these themes, or their place in the fabric of violent crime and individual psychology a la the Dolarhyde family clusterfuck, is totally fine.

*

George Smiley novels - John Le Carré

(JLC'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

Signup Prompts: I'm familiar with the novels in which George Smiley appears and most of Le Carre's other spy fiction, so feel free to incorporate as much or as little of the broader world of the Circus as you feel like. I'm requesting both Smiley and Frey, but I'm happy to receive fic where only one or the other of them is involved in the onscreen action so long as the other is thematically present. Anything exploring their history together during the war, whether it's individual missing scenes, character study, or full-on casefic dealing with the ins and outs of tradecraft, information-gathering, and high-stakes deception. I love the complicated interdependence of agent and handler, and I love these two men's very different perspectives on the work they're doing and what motivates them. Frey's magnetic intensity and Byronic attractiveness are basically the polar opposite of Smiley's vibe, and his sense of the urgency of his cause has a very different origin -- there's a lot of rich material there where their worldviews and personalities come together, please dig into it! German literature, secret meetings, regrets, weird pining... What happens if Frey does end up in England after the war rather than East Germany? (Even if, and maybe especially if, his actual political convictions don't change.) How does that impact the trajectory of Smiley's later career, and what's the fallout like for Dieter? Any kind of canon divergence where all the moving parts that have to be in place before the Fennan affair can take place are just slightly different. The novel's ending is perfectly gutting and I'm very open to fic that twists the knife even more as well as fic that fixes things, or at least leaves them differently broken. What on earth does Ann ultimately make of what's happened in her absence? How much does she know about Frey anyway? Anything exploring Smiley's relationships with his colleagues, in the context of this one novel or beyond it (especially Guillam, Mendel, Connie, Ann!) or conversely, Dieter's own professional relationships with both Fennans and the whole host of shady East Germans we get in Le Carre's books, especially Spy Who Came In From The Cold. I love how much the first two Smiley novels feel indebted to Golden Age mystery writing, and there seems like really ripe territory for fic in either the earlier or later mode of these books as the shape of Cold War spy fiction begins to solidify. In addition to canon divergence within the events of the novels, if you want to dabble in any kind of alternate history of the Cold War (no "the Nazis win", please) I would love to see these two against the backdrop of a subtly different war. I ship Smiley/Frey, Smiley/Mendel, and Smiley/Guillam, as well as his canonical complicated relationship with Ann. Feel free to ship Dieter with the Fennans (separately or together), Jens Fiedler, Ann, or anybody else. Treats are welcome!

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 Carré’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.

*

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

Signup Prompts: I really want to know more about Robin's POV on the working relationship he has with Grant, or the time the two of them are connected with one another, starting with those first days of their tentative connection forged over art and madness. Robin's emotional world seems from Grant's POV to be so opaque but the moments of recognition that slip through, like the moments it's clear that Robin's deeply frightened by their sensory deprivation experiments (or perhaps by something else?) are so interesting to me and in a way I really want to turn the novel inside-out so we're seeing this journey of perverse discovery or this downward spiral through Robin's own eyes, as a quasi-divine visionary or as an isolated and unhappy queer youth cut out of his family and left adrift, or a little of both. The novel's elements of psychological horror hinge a lot on the way Robin and Saskia's mental illness alienate them from others as well as eroding their own agency — I would love anything horror or character study or both about Robin's experience of their trio's complicated emotionally-incestuous wrangling. In gothic horror especially it's easy for claustrophobia and deprivation to become purely metaphorical but the day to day reality of Robin and Grant's toxic symbiosis and later their residence in Saskia's mother's house really bring out the mundane reality of living within the sharp restrictions of a disabling illness and how the ostensible role of caregiver can become something complicated and monstrous. I'd love to see any of that through Robin's eyes, ways the catastrophic encounters between all three of the novel's main characters could have gone differently or alternate explorations of the same fates. Or fic exploring the ambiguous, emotionally complicated triangulation between Robin, Grant, and Saskia — the ways sexual desire, emotional attachment, and desire for closeness all get mingled up and muddled together. Would things play out differently if Robin were a woman? What other ways could the gender situation begin to get complicated for Robin? I'd also love to see more about Robin's relationship with his own artwork, what he's striving to express or what he means to achieve as well as what the whole art therapy approach advocated by well-intentioned members of the whole institutional apparatus he's trying to escape from ultimately means to him. Or put Robin and his experiences of stigmatized, mysticized mental illness against a different historical backdrop — an 18th or 19th century setting, where two unrelated men living together might in some ways be unremarkable but in others would impose whole other frameworks of power and control on Robin's relationships, or something else entirely, whatever your favorite historical era is. Throughout the novel it's teased that Robin's painful decline may be something more like an apotheosis or a transition from one state to another, from vulnerable humanity to something transcendent — what if he does end up reaching that, becoming an angel after all or something else entirely? There are a lot of ways this can go, from cosmic horror to pure character study, and I'd love to read all of them. Ship-wise, I'd be happy to read any combination of the novel's characters in any permutations, as well as gen. Treats are welcome!

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. From Grant's POV, Robin seems fairly placid, but I'd love to read something where he's allowed to get angry.

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's controlling obsession? 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.