Dear Yuletide Writer 2026
Oct. 12th, 2026 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skazkaI can't believe it's Yuletide season already. What the hell, and also, how.
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, the intersection of psychological phenomena and physical ones
- 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, protective 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
- attention lavished on breasts — fondling, sucking, biting, tit torture, tit worship
- 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, 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 between perpetrator and victim, 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. Ensemble pieces are very welcome, as are stories exploring my requested characters from the perspective of others. 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. 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
- Focus on pregnancy/childbirth or OC offspring
- Unrequested incest or child sexual abuse
- Depictions of self-harm via cutting or of disordered eating
- PIV sex with transmasculine characters being penetrated vaginally
- works made with generative AI
- explicit sex involving characters under 16.
This year I would also prefer no focus on contemporary 21st century tragedies (ex. real life school shootings or transphobic legislation); noncanonical police violence, or real-life modern-day hate groups/far-right political movements.
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
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.
*
FX's Legion (2017-2019)
(Legion is a closed canon TV show — three seasons, twenty-seven episodes. As of this letter’s writing, if you’re in the US it’s available streaming on Hulu; knowledge of the X-Men comics is a fun bonus but not required.)
- Amahl Farouk
Excerpts from Division 3’s dossier on Farouk, or vignettes/historical materials referring to his past before Charles Xavier shows up. Canon seems agnostic on whether Farouk’s claims of being 2000+ years old are bluster or the real deal; I personally lean toward reading him as being a fair bit younger than that (coming of age and discovering his own powers in the 18th century) but regardless this puts him in a really interesting gray area for mutants before the modern era. When did Farouk find out his body is invulnerable to destruction attempts, or did he know at all before? How did other people like the Mi-Go Order find out he can’t just be chopped up or burned?
Or scenes of Farouk as a world traveler, past and present — his elegantly nasty dandy thing and his love of language suggest really interesting things about his past and I’m interested in his complicated relationship to language, culture, and imperialism. (With a further wrinkle in it caused by the fact that he himself is a major-league bastard totally comfortable with tyranny as long as he’s the tyrant — both things can be true!) I’m also curious about what exactly he’s doing post-s1-finale that takes him to… nightclubs? Real and/or fake astral nightclubs? Dance battles optional. What’s he up to while trying to track down the location of his own corpse?
I find the way Farouk’s modus operandi — as a parasite, as a manipulator — incorporates a sort of telepathic identity theft to be fascinating, and I would be really interested in fic that explores that, especially the moments where his victim’s personality and knowledge seems to be spilling over. How much of s1’s fake!Lenny is anything like Lenny Busker at all? How much is even like Farouk? How much of it resembles Benny the always-smiling pusher at all? How much of Farouk is left in Lenny even once she’s broken free or been cast out? I find this totally creepy from a psychological horror POV but I’m also curious how everyone involved experiences it. Farouk’s possession or influence seems to meld his victims’ frame of references with his own — he’s like a magpie collecting shiny stuff however incongruous (Frankie Goes To Hollywood!) or inappropriate. I’m interested in the intersection between the mundane real-life phenomena his influence can be read as a metaphor for (mental illness itself, cognitive distortions and toxic habits, poisonous parents, all kinds of abuse dynamics) and the emphatically fantastical, supernatural reality of being a mutant who really can do these things, no metaphor necessary.
Farouk wins, gets his body back, rules the word… now what? What does he expect or want for his endgame there and does he enjoy it as much as he thinks he will? I’d love to see some bad-guy-wins AU stuff where one of Farouk’s several gambits in canon works out to his satisfaction — or at least in a way he thinks will satisfy him.
Scenes from pocket universes, fantasies, dreams, illusions, all the kinds of not-quite-real reality that comic books do so well — I am a huge sucker for how the show plays around with symbolism and heightened realities
The dynamic between David and Farouk is so up my alley and I’m interested in any explorations of the dynamic between them. These two lend themselves to really mindfucky noncon/dubcon — I love that it’s impossible to tell how sincere Farouk ever is about anything until the very end, and even if he’s grown attached to David that hasn’t stopped him from putting him through hell, so either and/or both of these guys doing monstrous things for love (or at least desire) is my favorite thing. I’d also be interested in seeing what kind of preamble would be necessary for David to reciprocate or at least tolerate Farouk’s attraction — what would need to change, or what kind of deception would need to take place?
Similarly I love the horror/intimacy/horrifying intimacy/intimate horror of engaging with someone who’s known you while you haven’t had the same privilege — or conversely, Farouk catching actual feelings for someone (even nonsexual feelings for the guy he’s seen as a clueless pawn at best and a human prison the rest of the time!) and freaking the fuck out about it. Do with that what you will. Or dirtybadwrong and/or emotionally confusing (on both sides) business with David — I’m kind of fascinated by how readily Farouk will flip from acting like the archest of arch-enemies toward David to an indulgent father to a long-suffering wronged lover, and it seems like really ripe territory. I’m not so much interested in fic where Farouk really did literally raise David in the conventional sense or where any sexual interest in David comes before David’s ~16 or so but that messy, dirtybadwrong gray area (Farouk saying he’s tried to force David to love him ”for 30 years, since you were a baby… my baby” in s02e11, my god!) is right up my alley.
Post-s3-finale fic set in the timeline version where David’s raised by Charles Xavier — how does Farouk metabolize all that information and memory his future!self imparts to him? How does he feel about David (either timeline’s David) with what he’s seen and what he’s experienced?
Farouk getting to know Syd face to (real) face in between seasons 2 and 3 — super emotionally and psychosexually fucked on a lot of layers! She’s met the fake Lenny in s1 and she’s seen Farouk’s impact on David’s life, what does she make of the actual guy? What does he make of her? Or with the postapocalyptic sadder-but-wiser future version of Syd — does Farouk think he can seduce her to his way of doing things, or mindfuck her?
Farouk’s dynamic with Lenny is also amazing and totally creepy — I’d love to see more from that sunny, picturesque gilded cage and his unsettling dynamic with both Lenny and Oliver. I’m especially interested in exploring the pretty tough implications of how Lenny narrates her experiences both as they happen and when she’s in Division 3 custody — rape doesn’t sound out of line with the kind of nastiness the Shadow King enjoys perpetuating, but none of the characters ever mention it again (even Lenny) and there’s a lot of space for character studies, psychological horror, and/or weird depressing porn there.
Farouk relating to Oliver as a fellow telepath with an entirely different philosophy and approach to their conflict, Oliver clearly fearing and hating him even through the haze of faux affability… Or his encounters with Melanie, who crucially isn’t a mutant at all, where he plays on her resentments and griefs totally mercilessly — is he acting on her, through her, or something in between? I’m also intrigued by the way he acts toward Switch, and I’d love more of Farouk getting his hooks into Melanie or exploiting her vulnerabilities
I’d love to see Farouk in one of the timelines of the various alternate Davids — what’s his relationship to his host like when David’s a cozy idyllic suburban dad, or a ruthless corporate overlord, or a drifter with a meth problem? The easiest explanation for the happily partnered dad timeline would be no Farouk at all, but what fun is that, I ask you… what kind of bargains have the two of them made?
Ship-wise, I especially enjoy shipping this guy with David, Syd, and Oliver, as well as anybody and everybody else. (Including OCs/fleshing out his astral hotties as actual people or whatever he had with Geraldine. Well, “relations” is what he claims to have had with Geraldine, but whether that was more of a romance or… something else.)
Fandom-specific DNWs: I’m interested in fic that weaves in X-Men comics canon in all its many facets, including comics characters who don’t appear in the show proper — what the fuck is Magneto doing during all this? -- but I’m not interested in fic that incorporates the regular MCU or for the Fox/Disney X-Men films.
*
Peeping Tom (1960)
(Peeping Tom is a standalone feature film available wherever films of its era generally are, but as of this letter’s posting, if you’re in the US and have a library card you may be able to watch it free on Kanopy.)
- Mark Lewis
This film frames Mark’s intense fetishistic focus on film and the camera as painful as well as pleasurable — the sheer force of his desires seems to overwhelm him but whether that lands as more pitiful or more monstrous probably depends on the viewer. Mark has this disarming mix of earnestness and overwhelming compulsions to violence, and I’m really interested in how those go together. What’s the Watsonian explanation for Mark’s accent? Did he ever spend time outside the house where much of the film’s action take place? His father seems to have treated their home as a controlled laboratory space for his wildly unethical experiments; how did the world outside it enter in to Mark’s childhood, if at all? What’s the deal with his stepmother? Did she know about the extent of the experiments? She could be enthusiastically complicit (like many seem to have been — the scene where Mark seeks out the psychoanalyst only to hear him praise his father’s research, my god!) or a horrified opponent or somewhere (anywhere) in between those two poles — there’s something unsavory there that’s ready to be picked apart.
One thing I find interesting about this film is how oddly removed and distant Mark is with the women he both photographs and kills -- it's like he can only engage with women comfortably through the tidily negotiated relationship of photographer and subject, which... yikes! There’s a real atmosphere of weird sex in this film that surprised me even coming to the film through its influence on later, much raunchier pictures — the juxtaposition of tightly buttoned-up discomfort and repression with overt, sometimes garish come-ons is certainly a big element of the film’s social commentary. How might this manifest in Mark’s relationship to Helen or her expectations (maybe fears) as they become closer? What’s Mark’s relationship to the prospect of actual partnered sex with another person like? You can read his murders as oblique depictions of sexual encounters (or sexual assaults) through the symbolic language of film or as a total substitution for the act itself — his relationship to physical intimacy is deeply awkward and I could be persuaded of just about any conclusion here. Similarly, I feel like the film is pretty bold for its era in conveying how the traumas of Mark’s childhood have shaped his relationship to sexuality and intimacy, in a range of ways — I’d be interested in a reading of his relationship to his father as one of incestuous abuse or something uncannily close to it, a kind of unnameable horror that’s hardly any easier to convey or to process in this lonely and repressive milieu. How might that surface as he goes about his unhappy, obsessive work?
I’m really interested in the history of photography and its societal impact, and that’s a playground this film is clearly having so much fun with, from the newsagent’s shop full of cheesecake photos to the film studios where poor Vivian just wants a damn screen test. (In the screenplay I got the implication from Vivian’s guarded comments that other photographers have expected her to trade sex for their services and that she’s glad Mark hasn’t even as their relationship has a pretty intimate, borderline flirty edge. God, that’s sad!) Compulsive re-takes and replays, framing and editing, imposing narrative upon events by the act of viewing them and following them… all the good stuff if you like films about filmmaking that are also films about trauma and fetishism and haunting! I would be interested in Mark’s intense fetishism translated to an earlier era of photography or a somewhat later one — I don’t know that the brutal entwining of sex and death in this film would be nearly as shocking to audiences if the film came out just ten years later but that in itself says something fascinating about uniquely British attitudes toward sex, violence, and the photographic image. I adore the thought of this film’s plot and themes playing out against the backdrop of other eras and their relationships to media, pornography, gender, sexuality, depictions of violence. For one option, Böhm’s performance in this film — haunted, urgent, frightening yet pitiful — reminds me so much of Peter Lorre in M, and I could see him in the context of 1930s Weimar Germany and its complicated relationships to true crime, Lustmord, the photographic image, violence, women, and of course human cruelty. Or the second half of the 19th century, where the meaning of the still image (including the images of the beloved dead, like the clips of young Mark viewing his mother’s body, and the images of victims of violence and war) is getting negotiated even as the mechanics of the art form and its techniques are blossoming
Anything involving Mark’s fetishistic relationship to camera equipment — as a phallus, a weapon, a scrutinizing eye, a thing to spend all his wages on! I would love to see this interwoven with the camera/filmmaking enthusiasts of the era, hobbyism, correspondence and shopping and working over the mechanics of film photography. This description of Mark’s workroom in the screenplay — Some of the equipment is ancient - but none of it is old. All of it glistens with the affection of its owner. — is so interesting to me, but all this has a sting in its tail where the original photography enthusiast in the house was Mark’s monstrous father.
All this makes fertile ground for supernatural stuff exploring the intersection of haunting and the recorded image… I’m always down for ghosts, metaphorical and literal, and they’re a natural fit for the film’s themes around obsessive repetition and the past enduring into the present.
Mark’s relationship with Helen is so up my alley — if you want to explore alternate ways this story could go, please be my guest, I find her earnest good-hearted attempts to reach out to this oddball neighbor of hers to be really moving even as the film wastes zero time in showing how they go badly awry. What does Mark see in her and the world she represents? How could things have gone differently between them, and how is Helen different for what she’s experienced at the end of the film? Similarly, his interactions with Mrs. Stephens, who experiences Mark’s disturbed interior life in such a hands-on way — she’s the first one to clock something’s up, and I’m really interested in the way that awareness for her seems to involve both her parental/social instincts and her experience of navigating the world while blind. I’d be very interested in anything exploring her outside POV on Mark, the things she may know about the history of the building in which she and her daughter live that poor Helen doesn’t, or different scenes from their acquaintance. I love how salty, wounded, and yet clearly affectionate Mrs. Stephens is, and can’t help wondering what kind of chord she strikes with Mark’s rampant mother(/stepmother) issues. Their climactic scene together is so nightmarish on so many levels and a big part of that is the viewer’s awareness of all the ways this situation could go fatally wrong for both of them; how could that have gone differently?
Something to do with the strange working relationship between Mark and the models he photographs — many of which he ends up murdering. I would be really interested in an account of Mark’s crimes or even just his odd comings and goings from one of their POVs. One of them being interviewed (by the press? By the cops?) after his gruesome end, a memoir after they get famous, a letter to a friend — I really want to know how he’s perceived and how his deeply weird presence and his crimes have impacted how these women — and many others — must experience the world after all this. I’m also really interested in Mark’s response to Lorraine — shock, fascination, instantaneous repulsion-obsession-desire, spurred not so much by Lorraine’s disfigurement as by her anger and fierceness in the face of unwanted intrusive gazing. How does she perceive him and his immediately, deeply weird reaction to her?
For in universe fic of a different kind, I need to know what an absolute nightmare story the events of Mark’s childhood as an experimental subject and the existence of a photographic record of its cruelties must be in the whole medical-academic sphere his father was once esteemed in. Even if Mark didn’t grow up to be a serial killer, those facts would be pretty appalling! I’d be interested in reading about the film’s events through their impact on different disciplines/professions or how the in-universe public reacted to the whole “unwittingly renting a house secretly wired for video and sound by a murderous perv” thing.
Ship-wise, I’m open to anything or nothing, including relationships with OCs, but I’m especially interested in his relationships with Helen, Vivian, Lorraine, Milly, and Mrs. Stephens.
Fandom-specific DNW note: Readings of the Lewis family milieu as incestuous/sexually abusive are welcome here. I'd prefer not to read explicit on-the-page depictions of or flashbacks to sex acts involving children under 16.
*
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
(Sunset Boulevard is a standalone feature film available to rent or stream in many places.)
- Norma Desmond
Norma, Norma, Norma! I love this dark, peculiar, cynical film that’s still somehow imbued with so much love for cinema and the people who make it. Norma is iconic for excellent reasons — she’s a diva! she’s a gorgon! she’s a victim of a profoundly misogynistic system that both hates and fears older women, God forbid difficult older women, but she’s also kind of a fabulous monster who’s made her own monument to live in. I love her and it would be a treat to spend any more time in her diabolical company.
I would love fic dealing with any of the ephemera of stardom and film fandom in Norma’s era — it seems unlikely to me that Norma’s truly been forgotten after her heyday as much as that her own devastating insecurities prevent her from engaging with her admirers. (How does it feel to be a true-blue Norma Desmond fan from the silent days and open up your newspaper to see your favorite actress just got caught red-handed in the murder of a screenwriter-turned-gigolo?)
This is my most self-indulgent request for every fandom about fictional artists — fake in-universe documents about Norma, her work, her times, and her misdeeds! These can be as involved as you want them to be or the briefest oblique references, I just really love that kind of thing especially as the decades go by and attitudes begin to shift. Movie magazines, newspaper gossip, remakes of Norma Desmond pictures, performers inspired by her silver screen brilliance, real fanmail — in general her reception and her legacy in her own lifetime are super interesting to me. Let alone how much things are about to hit the fan after the ending of the film! I’m totally fine with fic that handwaves realistic legal proceedings but that ending is so iconic and bleak. How do the survivors — Betty, Max, Sheldrake, Artie? — process it all? Does the murder become a part of Norma Desmond’s greater myth, or is it too dissonant with her screen persona for fans to reconcile? Show her legend through the distorting lens of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, or a TV movie fictionalizing the case, or the police reports.
Winter is the season for ghost stories — Norma’s house already has the vibe of a mausoleum, has she ever dabbled with seances or been visited by one of her contemporaries who’s already passed on? Feel free to weave in the real figures and legends of Norma’s era of filmmaking, as well as original characters or cameos from the rest of fictionalized golden age Hollywood. (I… may be a huge fan of movies about movies and movie-making — Singin’ In The Rain, Asteroid City, Barton Fink, Hail Caesar, Day Of The Locust, hell, even Boogie Nights — so intertextuality with existing fake films, fake directors, and fake actors is very welcome but in no way required.)
I’m really interested in Norma’s relationship with Max, all the shapes it might take and the devastating way it’s revealed so late into the game. What was the arc of their work history together like? Did they ever try to end their collaboration, from either side of things? Behind closed doors, does Norma ever acknowledge the submerged history between them that Joe isn’t privy to, or is it just easier to rewrite that past? Max being a German-speaking immigrant (played by real director Erich von Stroheim!) feels like a riff on Josef von Sternberg and his real-life contorted relationship with Marlene Dietrich — within Norma’s four walls, time can be coerced into standing still, but there are plenty of other reasons why European emigre directors of this era could feel deeply troubled about a bygone era. What has he given up for Norma, and what was the power dynamic of their relationship like before Norma went full-on Miss Havisham with it all? In theory a director isn’t subject to the same constraints as a leading lady — plenty of these guys made movies forever! — but style trends and studio politics are unforgiving — could he break away from her if he wanted to? Did he ever make a play to escape before getting drawn back into her orbit? Did she ever make a play to escape Max’s hold on her only to get sucked back in? To return, on her own terms? What motivates Max’s feelings for her — love of some sort, certainly, but maybe pity, cruelty, guilt, resentment, or all of the above, or something else? What role does control play in their strange living situation?
Norma’s capable of cruelty and manipulation but she’s also been through a hell of a lot, and I’d love a story that unravels some of the darker incidents in her past where she’s been a victim or the wronged party. Or just good old-fashioned offscreen drama and sniping and sideswiping. Mutual cruelty, famous grudges, battling divas, falling-outs with old collaborators or sparring with silent-era frenemies once the cameras stop rolling? Scenes from a troubled production or chaotic press junket — movie production can be rocky enough in 2026, what about more than a hundred years earlier?
Norma as an artist making creative decisions — clearly her screenplay for the Salome picture is no great shakes (reminded of the Henry James description of overstuffed narratives as “loose, baggy monsters”…) but I’d love to see her influences and how she understands the creative process as a less than professional writer. Could she have made another, better movie ten years earlier, or ten years later? What about a worse one?
How did Norma get into the movies, anyway? The silent years brought together a lot of oddball performers from different walks of life, many of whom had larger-than-life presences or major emotional scars left on them by the winding paths that brought them to the screen — are there multiple versions of the story of how Norma Desmond got discovered? (Maybe she discovered herself.) Is “Norma Desmond” itself an assumed name? What did she discard on her way to the screen, and what did she pick up?
I love the twisted, suggestive eros that surrounds Norma from her first scenes — I’d be happy to receive all kinds of smut with her and the character(s) of your choice. As a screen goddess at the height of her powers, Hollywood had fairly different norms regarding sexuality and the public vs. the private world of stardom — does she ever get off to the memories of star-studded sex romps from days gone by, or is that something she prefers to leave on the cutting-room floor? What myths and stories inform her own fantasies, besides plainly that of Salome?
We get the sense that Joe may not be Norma’s first gigolo — who was her first? Was it something she entered into with open eyes, was it a surprise? I do like to think that Norma wasn’t always quite as entrenched in her self-constructed fantasy world as she is by the time of the film (in fact, she almost certainly can’t have been) so were earlier runs at intimacy, sex, and/or romance part of her retreat into luxurious seclusion, or did she think she’d sworn that off? If things shook out a little differently, could she have found herself with Betty Schaefer as a plaything instead? Or both Betty and Joe, her own matched set of collaborators, competitors, and playthings?
Ship-wise, again, I'm open to everything or nothing -- her canonical relationships with Joe and Max, pairing her with Betty, past and future lovers of any gender, and so on.
Fandom-specific DNW note: Dealing with Norma's canonical suicide attempts is fine, but please no on-the-page depictions of Norma in the act of harming herself or succeeding in taking her own life.
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, the intersection of psychological phenomena and physical ones
- 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, protective 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
- attention lavished on breasts — fondling, sucking, biting, tit torture, tit worship
- 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, 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 between perpetrator and victim, 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. Ensemble pieces are very welcome, as are stories exploring my requested characters from the perspective of others. 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. 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
- Focus on pregnancy/childbirth or OC offspring
- Unrequested incest or child sexual abuse
- Depictions of self-harm via cutting or of disordered eating
- PIV sex with transmasculine characters being penetrated vaginally
- works made with generative AI
- explicit sex involving characters under 16.
This year I would also prefer no focus on contemporary 21st century tragedies (ex. real life school shootings or transphobic legislation); noncanonical police violence, or real-life modern-day hate groups/far-right political movements.
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
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.
*
FX's Legion (2017-2019)
(Legion is a closed canon TV show — three seasons, twenty-seven episodes. As of this letter’s writing, if you’re in the US it’s available streaming on Hulu; knowledge of the X-Men comics is a fun bonus but not required.)
- Amahl Farouk
Excerpts from Division 3’s dossier on Farouk, or vignettes/historical materials referring to his past before Charles Xavier shows up. Canon seems agnostic on whether Farouk’s claims of being 2000+ years old are bluster or the real deal; I personally lean toward reading him as being a fair bit younger than that (coming of age and discovering his own powers in the 18th century) but regardless this puts him in a really interesting gray area for mutants before the modern era. When did Farouk find out his body is invulnerable to destruction attempts, or did he know at all before? How did other people like the Mi-Go Order find out he can’t just be chopped up or burned?
Or scenes of Farouk as a world traveler, past and present — his elegantly nasty dandy thing and his love of language suggest really interesting things about his past and I’m interested in his complicated relationship to language, culture, and imperialism. (With a further wrinkle in it caused by the fact that he himself is a major-league bastard totally comfortable with tyranny as long as he’s the tyrant — both things can be true!) I’m also curious about what exactly he’s doing post-s1-finale that takes him to… nightclubs? Real and/or fake astral nightclubs? Dance battles optional. What’s he up to while trying to track down the location of his own corpse?
I find the way Farouk’s modus operandi — as a parasite, as a manipulator — incorporates a sort of telepathic identity theft to be fascinating, and I would be really interested in fic that explores that, especially the moments where his victim’s personality and knowledge seems to be spilling over. How much of s1’s fake!Lenny is anything like Lenny Busker at all? How much is even like Farouk? How much of it resembles Benny the always-smiling pusher at all? How much of Farouk is left in Lenny even once she’s broken free or been cast out? I find this totally creepy from a psychological horror POV but I’m also curious how everyone involved experiences it. Farouk’s possession or influence seems to meld his victims’ frame of references with his own — he’s like a magpie collecting shiny stuff however incongruous (Frankie Goes To Hollywood!) or inappropriate. I’m interested in the intersection between the mundane real-life phenomena his influence can be read as a metaphor for (mental illness itself, cognitive distortions and toxic habits, poisonous parents, all kinds of abuse dynamics) and the emphatically fantastical, supernatural reality of being a mutant who really can do these things, no metaphor necessary.
Farouk wins, gets his body back, rules the word… now what? What does he expect or want for his endgame there and does he enjoy it as much as he thinks he will? I’d love to see some bad-guy-wins AU stuff where one of Farouk’s several gambits in canon works out to his satisfaction — or at least in a way he thinks will satisfy him.
Scenes from pocket universes, fantasies, dreams, illusions, all the kinds of not-quite-real reality that comic books do so well — I am a huge sucker for how the show plays around with symbolism and heightened realities
The dynamic between David and Farouk is so up my alley and I’m interested in any explorations of the dynamic between them. These two lend themselves to really mindfucky noncon/dubcon — I love that it’s impossible to tell how sincere Farouk ever is about anything until the very end, and even if he’s grown attached to David that hasn’t stopped him from putting him through hell, so either and/or both of these guys doing monstrous things for love (or at least desire) is my favorite thing. I’d also be interested in seeing what kind of preamble would be necessary for David to reciprocate or at least tolerate Farouk’s attraction — what would need to change, or what kind of deception would need to take place?
Similarly I love the horror/intimacy/horrifying intimacy/intimate horror of engaging with someone who’s known you while you haven’t had the same privilege — or conversely, Farouk catching actual feelings for someone (even nonsexual feelings for the guy he’s seen as a clueless pawn at best and a human prison the rest of the time!) and freaking the fuck out about it. Do with that what you will. Or dirtybadwrong and/or emotionally confusing (on both sides) business with David — I’m kind of fascinated by how readily Farouk will flip from acting like the archest of arch-enemies toward David to an indulgent father to a long-suffering wronged lover, and it seems like really ripe territory. I’m not so much interested in fic where Farouk really did literally raise David in the conventional sense or where any sexual interest in David comes before David’s ~16 or so but that messy, dirtybadwrong gray area (Farouk saying he’s tried to force David to love him ”for 30 years, since you were a baby… my baby” in s02e11, my god!) is right up my alley.
Post-s3-finale fic set in the timeline version where David’s raised by Charles Xavier — how does Farouk metabolize all that information and memory his future!self imparts to him? How does he feel about David (either timeline’s David) with what he’s seen and what he’s experienced?
Farouk getting to know Syd face to (real) face in between seasons 2 and 3 — super emotionally and psychosexually fucked on a lot of layers! She’s met the fake Lenny in s1 and she’s seen Farouk’s impact on David’s life, what does she make of the actual guy? What does he make of her? Or with the postapocalyptic sadder-but-wiser future version of Syd — does Farouk think he can seduce her to his way of doing things, or mindfuck her?
Farouk’s dynamic with Lenny is also amazing and totally creepy — I’d love to see more from that sunny, picturesque gilded cage and his unsettling dynamic with both Lenny and Oliver. I’m especially interested in exploring the pretty tough implications of how Lenny narrates her experiences both as they happen and when she’s in Division 3 custody — rape doesn’t sound out of line with the kind of nastiness the Shadow King enjoys perpetuating, but none of the characters ever mention it again (even Lenny) and there’s a lot of space for character studies, psychological horror, and/or weird depressing porn there.
Farouk relating to Oliver as a fellow telepath with an entirely different philosophy and approach to their conflict, Oliver clearly fearing and hating him even through the haze of faux affability… Or his encounters with Melanie, who crucially isn’t a mutant at all, where he plays on her resentments and griefs totally mercilessly — is he acting on her, through her, or something in between? I’m also intrigued by the way he acts toward Switch, and I’d love more of Farouk getting his hooks into Melanie or exploiting her vulnerabilities
I’d love to see Farouk in one of the timelines of the various alternate Davids — what’s his relationship to his host like when David’s a cozy idyllic suburban dad, or a ruthless corporate overlord, or a drifter with a meth problem? The easiest explanation for the happily partnered dad timeline would be no Farouk at all, but what fun is that, I ask you… what kind of bargains have the two of them made?
Ship-wise, I especially enjoy shipping this guy with David, Syd, and Oliver, as well as anybody and everybody else. (Including OCs/fleshing out his astral hotties as actual people or whatever he had with Geraldine. Well, “relations” is what he claims to have had with Geraldine, but whether that was more of a romance or… something else.)
Fandom-specific DNWs: I’m interested in fic that weaves in X-Men comics canon in all its many facets, including comics characters who don’t appear in the show proper — what the fuck is Magneto doing during all this? -- but I’m not interested in fic that incorporates the regular MCU or for the Fox/Disney X-Men films.
*
Peeping Tom (1960)
(Peeping Tom is a standalone feature film available wherever films of its era generally are, but as of this letter’s posting, if you’re in the US and have a library card you may be able to watch it free on Kanopy.)
- Mark Lewis
This film frames Mark’s intense fetishistic focus on film and the camera as painful as well as pleasurable — the sheer force of his desires seems to overwhelm him but whether that lands as more pitiful or more monstrous probably depends on the viewer. Mark has this disarming mix of earnestness and overwhelming compulsions to violence, and I’m really interested in how those go together. What’s the Watsonian explanation for Mark’s accent? Did he ever spend time outside the house where much of the film’s action take place? His father seems to have treated their home as a controlled laboratory space for his wildly unethical experiments; how did the world outside it enter in to Mark’s childhood, if at all? What’s the deal with his stepmother? Did she know about the extent of the experiments? She could be enthusiastically complicit (like many seem to have been — the scene where Mark seeks out the psychoanalyst only to hear him praise his father’s research, my god!) or a horrified opponent or somewhere (anywhere) in between those two poles — there’s something unsavory there that’s ready to be picked apart.
One thing I find interesting about this film is how oddly removed and distant Mark is with the women he both photographs and kills -- it's like he can only engage with women comfortably through the tidily negotiated relationship of photographer and subject, which... yikes! There’s a real atmosphere of weird sex in this film that surprised me even coming to the film through its influence on later, much raunchier pictures — the juxtaposition of tightly buttoned-up discomfort and repression with overt, sometimes garish come-ons is certainly a big element of the film’s social commentary. How might this manifest in Mark’s relationship to Helen or her expectations (maybe fears) as they become closer? What’s Mark’s relationship to the prospect of actual partnered sex with another person like? You can read his murders as oblique depictions of sexual encounters (or sexual assaults) through the symbolic language of film or as a total substitution for the act itself — his relationship to physical intimacy is deeply awkward and I could be persuaded of just about any conclusion here. Similarly, I feel like the film is pretty bold for its era in conveying how the traumas of Mark’s childhood have shaped his relationship to sexuality and intimacy, in a range of ways — I’d be interested in a reading of his relationship to his father as one of incestuous abuse or something uncannily close to it, a kind of unnameable horror that’s hardly any easier to convey or to process in this lonely and repressive milieu. How might that surface as he goes about his unhappy, obsessive work?
I’m really interested in the history of photography and its societal impact, and that’s a playground this film is clearly having so much fun with, from the newsagent’s shop full of cheesecake photos to the film studios where poor Vivian just wants a damn screen test. (In the screenplay I got the implication from Vivian’s guarded comments that other photographers have expected her to trade sex for their services and that she’s glad Mark hasn’t even as their relationship has a pretty intimate, borderline flirty edge. God, that’s sad!) Compulsive re-takes and replays, framing and editing, imposing narrative upon events by the act of viewing them and following them… all the good stuff if you like films about filmmaking that are also films about trauma and fetishism and haunting! I would be interested in Mark’s intense fetishism translated to an earlier era of photography or a somewhat later one — I don’t know that the brutal entwining of sex and death in this film would be nearly as shocking to audiences if the film came out just ten years later but that in itself says something fascinating about uniquely British attitudes toward sex, violence, and the photographic image. I adore the thought of this film’s plot and themes playing out against the backdrop of other eras and their relationships to media, pornography, gender, sexuality, depictions of violence. For one option, Böhm’s performance in this film — haunted, urgent, frightening yet pitiful — reminds me so much of Peter Lorre in M, and I could see him in the context of 1930s Weimar Germany and its complicated relationships to true crime, Lustmord, the photographic image, violence, women, and of course human cruelty. Or the second half of the 19th century, where the meaning of the still image (including the images of the beloved dead, like the clips of young Mark viewing his mother’s body, and the images of victims of violence and war) is getting negotiated even as the mechanics of the art form and its techniques are blossoming
Anything involving Mark’s fetishistic relationship to camera equipment — as a phallus, a weapon, a scrutinizing eye, a thing to spend all his wages on! I would love to see this interwoven with the camera/filmmaking enthusiasts of the era, hobbyism, correspondence and shopping and working over the mechanics of film photography. This description of Mark’s workroom in the screenplay — Some of the equipment is ancient - but none of it is old. All of it glistens with the affection of its owner. — is so interesting to me, but all this has a sting in its tail where the original photography enthusiast in the house was Mark’s monstrous father.
All this makes fertile ground for supernatural stuff exploring the intersection of haunting and the recorded image… I’m always down for ghosts, metaphorical and literal, and they’re a natural fit for the film’s themes around obsessive repetition and the past enduring into the present.
Mark’s relationship with Helen is so up my alley — if you want to explore alternate ways this story could go, please be my guest, I find her earnest good-hearted attempts to reach out to this oddball neighbor of hers to be really moving even as the film wastes zero time in showing how they go badly awry. What does Mark see in her and the world she represents? How could things have gone differently between them, and how is Helen different for what she’s experienced at the end of the film? Similarly, his interactions with Mrs. Stephens, who experiences Mark’s disturbed interior life in such a hands-on way — she’s the first one to clock something’s up, and I’m really interested in the way that awareness for her seems to involve both her parental/social instincts and her experience of navigating the world while blind. I’d be very interested in anything exploring her outside POV on Mark, the things she may know about the history of the building in which she and her daughter live that poor Helen doesn’t, or different scenes from their acquaintance. I love how salty, wounded, and yet clearly affectionate Mrs. Stephens is, and can’t help wondering what kind of chord she strikes with Mark’s rampant mother(/stepmother) issues. Their climactic scene together is so nightmarish on so many levels and a big part of that is the viewer’s awareness of all the ways this situation could go fatally wrong for both of them; how could that have gone differently?
Something to do with the strange working relationship between Mark and the models he photographs — many of which he ends up murdering. I would be really interested in an account of Mark’s crimes or even just his odd comings and goings from one of their POVs. One of them being interviewed (by the press? By the cops?) after his gruesome end, a memoir after they get famous, a letter to a friend — I really want to know how he’s perceived and how his deeply weird presence and his crimes have impacted how these women — and many others — must experience the world after all this. I’m also really interested in Mark’s response to Lorraine — shock, fascination, instantaneous repulsion-obsession-desire, spurred not so much by Lorraine’s disfigurement as by her anger and fierceness in the face of unwanted intrusive gazing. How does she perceive him and his immediately, deeply weird reaction to her?
For in universe fic of a different kind, I need to know what an absolute nightmare story the events of Mark’s childhood as an experimental subject and the existence of a photographic record of its cruelties must be in the whole medical-academic sphere his father was once esteemed in. Even if Mark didn’t grow up to be a serial killer, those facts would be pretty appalling! I’d be interested in reading about the film’s events through their impact on different disciplines/professions or how the in-universe public reacted to the whole “unwittingly renting a house secretly wired for video and sound by a murderous perv” thing.
Ship-wise, I’m open to anything or nothing, including relationships with OCs, but I’m especially interested in his relationships with Helen, Vivian, Lorraine, Milly, and Mrs. Stephens.
Fandom-specific DNW note: Readings of the Lewis family milieu as incestuous/sexually abusive are welcome here. I'd prefer not to read explicit on-the-page depictions of or flashbacks to sex acts involving children under 16.
*
Sunset Boulevard (1950)
(Sunset Boulevard is a standalone feature film available to rent or stream in many places.)
- Norma Desmond
Norma, Norma, Norma! I love this dark, peculiar, cynical film that’s still somehow imbued with so much love for cinema and the people who make it. Norma is iconic for excellent reasons — she’s a diva! she’s a gorgon! she’s a victim of a profoundly misogynistic system that both hates and fears older women, God forbid difficult older women, but she’s also kind of a fabulous monster who’s made her own monument to live in. I love her and it would be a treat to spend any more time in her diabolical company.
I would love fic dealing with any of the ephemera of stardom and film fandom in Norma’s era — it seems unlikely to me that Norma’s truly been forgotten after her heyday as much as that her own devastating insecurities prevent her from engaging with her admirers. (How does it feel to be a true-blue Norma Desmond fan from the silent days and open up your newspaper to see your favorite actress just got caught red-handed in the murder of a screenwriter-turned-gigolo?)
This is my most self-indulgent request for every fandom about fictional artists — fake in-universe documents about Norma, her work, her times, and her misdeeds! These can be as involved as you want them to be or the briefest oblique references, I just really love that kind of thing especially as the decades go by and attitudes begin to shift. Movie magazines, newspaper gossip, remakes of Norma Desmond pictures, performers inspired by her silver screen brilliance, real fanmail — in general her reception and her legacy in her own lifetime are super interesting to me. Let alone how much things are about to hit the fan after the ending of the film! I’m totally fine with fic that handwaves realistic legal proceedings but that ending is so iconic and bleak. How do the survivors — Betty, Max, Sheldrake, Artie? — process it all? Does the murder become a part of Norma Desmond’s greater myth, or is it too dissonant with her screen persona for fans to reconcile? Show her legend through the distorting lens of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, or a TV movie fictionalizing the case, or the police reports.
Winter is the season for ghost stories — Norma’s house already has the vibe of a mausoleum, has she ever dabbled with seances or been visited by one of her contemporaries who’s already passed on? Feel free to weave in the real figures and legends of Norma’s era of filmmaking, as well as original characters or cameos from the rest of fictionalized golden age Hollywood. (I… may be a huge fan of movies about movies and movie-making — Singin’ In The Rain, Asteroid City, Barton Fink, Hail Caesar, Day Of The Locust, hell, even Boogie Nights — so intertextuality with existing fake films, fake directors, and fake actors is very welcome but in no way required.)
I’m really interested in Norma’s relationship with Max, all the shapes it might take and the devastating way it’s revealed so late into the game. What was the arc of their work history together like? Did they ever try to end their collaboration, from either side of things? Behind closed doors, does Norma ever acknowledge the submerged history between them that Joe isn’t privy to, or is it just easier to rewrite that past? Max being a German-speaking immigrant (played by real director Erich von Stroheim!) feels like a riff on Josef von Sternberg and his real-life contorted relationship with Marlene Dietrich — within Norma’s four walls, time can be coerced into standing still, but there are plenty of other reasons why European emigre directors of this era could feel deeply troubled about a bygone era. What has he given up for Norma, and what was the power dynamic of their relationship like before Norma went full-on Miss Havisham with it all? In theory a director isn’t subject to the same constraints as a leading lady — plenty of these guys made movies forever! — but style trends and studio politics are unforgiving — could he break away from her if he wanted to? Did he ever make a play to escape before getting drawn back into her orbit? Did she ever make a play to escape Max’s hold on her only to get sucked back in? To return, on her own terms? What motivates Max’s feelings for her — love of some sort, certainly, but maybe pity, cruelty, guilt, resentment, or all of the above, or something else? What role does control play in their strange living situation?
Norma’s capable of cruelty and manipulation but she’s also been through a hell of a lot, and I’d love a story that unravels some of the darker incidents in her past where she’s been a victim or the wronged party. Or just good old-fashioned offscreen drama and sniping and sideswiping. Mutual cruelty, famous grudges, battling divas, falling-outs with old collaborators or sparring with silent-era frenemies once the cameras stop rolling? Scenes from a troubled production or chaotic press junket — movie production can be rocky enough in 2026, what about more than a hundred years earlier?
Norma as an artist making creative decisions — clearly her screenplay for the Salome picture is no great shakes (reminded of the Henry James description of overstuffed narratives as “loose, baggy monsters”…) but I’d love to see her influences and how she understands the creative process as a less than professional writer. Could she have made another, better movie ten years earlier, or ten years later? What about a worse one?
How did Norma get into the movies, anyway? The silent years brought together a lot of oddball performers from different walks of life, many of whom had larger-than-life presences or major emotional scars left on them by the winding paths that brought them to the screen — are there multiple versions of the story of how Norma Desmond got discovered? (Maybe she discovered herself.) Is “Norma Desmond” itself an assumed name? What did she discard on her way to the screen, and what did she pick up?
I love the twisted, suggestive eros that surrounds Norma from her first scenes — I’d be happy to receive all kinds of smut with her and the character(s) of your choice. As a screen goddess at the height of her powers, Hollywood had fairly different norms regarding sexuality and the public vs. the private world of stardom — does she ever get off to the memories of star-studded sex romps from days gone by, or is that something she prefers to leave on the cutting-room floor? What myths and stories inform her own fantasies, besides plainly that of Salome?
We get the sense that Joe may not be Norma’s first gigolo — who was her first? Was it something she entered into with open eyes, was it a surprise? I do like to think that Norma wasn’t always quite as entrenched in her self-constructed fantasy world as she is by the time of the film (in fact, she almost certainly can’t have been) so were earlier runs at intimacy, sex, and/or romance part of her retreat into luxurious seclusion, or did she think she’d sworn that off? If things shook out a little differently, could she have found herself with Betty Schaefer as a plaything instead? Or both Betty and Joe, her own matched set of collaborators, competitors, and playthings?
Ship-wise, again, I'm open to everything or nothing -- her canonical relationships with Joe and Max, pairing her with Betty, past and future lovers of any gender, and so on.
Fandom-specific DNW note: Dealing with Norma's canonical suicide attempts is fine, but please no on-the-page depictions of Norma in the act of harming herself or succeeding in taking her own life.
