Dear Yuletide Writer, 2017
Greetings, Mysterious Yuletide writer!
Thank you for offering to write me a story. Whoever you are, you have excellent taste in fandoms and I'm sure I'll love whatever you write. My optional details in the requests over at AO3 give a basic idea of what I'm looking for, but if you'd like a bit more information about my preferences, here it is.
I'm afraid this letter is quite long, but please don't be intimidated or annoyed. I wax prolix here because I'm naturally long-winded and because my journal is fairly empty (as you can see, in recent years it consists entirely of Yuletide letters) so my letter is the main guide to my preferences for an author who wants one, not because I'm picky and hard to please. If you're not someone who likes getting a lot of additional detail, feel free to skip it entirely.
Beneath the cut you will find my squicks and more detailed thoughts on yaoi, the characters, the fandoms, and possible directions you may want to take your story in, if you find yourself in need of inspiration.
All about me:
Triggers:
None
Squicks:
• Anything combining sex and digestion. Feeding a lover strawberries, licking chocolate or whipped cream off them, force feeding, scat, watersports... none of this please. I don't mind parts of the digestive tract doing double duty as an erogenous zone - anal and oral sex are fine. So is using a cucumber for a dildo or sex on the dining room table. But no sexy games with fondue.
• Mutilation, scarification, knifeplay, needle play. Killing the characters or beating them to a pulp is fine by me, but for some reason it bothers me if you give them a papercut first. Nothing with sharp edges please, unless someone is getting stabbed by criminals.
• Ageplay and infantilization. Spanking is lovely, but let’s keep it between grown-ups acting like grown-ups.
Everything else is a-okay. Violence, character deaths, torture, non-con or dub-con, mind games, twisted power dynamics, general bleakness - all fine! I love dark fics. I love fluffy or uplifting stories too, so don't feel obliged to write something dark, but if that's the direction your muse takes you then feel free to go for it. Holiday fic is fine too.
Things I like in stories:
• Worldbuilding. I like getting the sense that the story is a little window into a larger world where other people are going about their business and events are happening just offscreen, instead of a window on a few characters interacting inside a bubble surrounded by vacuum. Unless they're in space and they actually are interacting in a bubble surrounded by vacuum. But even then they probably have to think about where they're going to refuel.
• Challenging the text. I'm fond of these fandoms or I wouldn't have requested them, but I'm not... protective of them. If some character is marginalized by the canon, I'd love to see a story from their perspective. If you've noticed a plothole, I'd love for you to latch onto it and rip it to shreds and then think up an explanation to set it right. I'm always interested in the answers to questions like "If Galadriel lives in the shady primeval forest where does she grow the grain for all that lembas?"
• Politics. I'll spare you the passionate Enjolras-style lecture about my heartfelt belief in the ability of politics to effect change, but let's just say that these fandoms didn't land on my list by accident.
• Clever characters being clever.
• Clever characters being outsmarted by even cleverer characters.
• Power struggles, hierarchies, how these arrangements are negotiated and balanced and change over time and in response to changing circumstances.
• Culture clashes.
• Women kicking ass.
• Victories for social justice, democracy or tolerance.
• Depressing defeats for social justice, democracy or tolerance that still leave seeds of hope for the future.
• Characters trying to balance competing obligations and loyalties: personal vs. professional, practical vs. ideological, etc.
• Gen fic. Casefic, wacky adventures, character studies - they're all great.
• Shipping, as long as shipping is not the only thing in the fic. (Good characterization counts as a second thing.) Het, slash, femmeslash, polyamory, threesomes - I like them all. I'm not protective of my favorite pairings, either, so feel free to pair anyone with anyone.
• Explicit porn, as long as sticking Tab A into Slot B is not the only thing in the fic. (Good characterization counts as a second thing.) D/s and BDSM are welcome.
• Humor.
• All the dark stuff from the list above.
• Characters I like being cute and fluffy and happy together.
As you can see, I like a wide variety of things! Write something that makes you happy, and I will almost certainly be happy too.
A few things I dislike:
• Crackiness to no obvious purpose. I don't mind an AU where all the characters are living room furniture, but if you're going to write one the choice of furniture should be telling us something about the characters.
• Idiot plots. If characters have to suffer a major drop in IQ for a story to make sense, it needs a different plot. Stupid romantic comedy misunderstandings that could be cleared up in five minutes fall into this category.
• Healing cock, instantaneous peace after the crowning of a king or the birth of some biracial baby, and other forms of magical recovery from personal or national traumas. Good stories are like real life: events have consequences and people have to live with them.
On to the fandoms! I'll give a brief overview of what each one is and where to find it, so if you want to switch and learn about a new fandom you'll know what you're getting into.
La Comédie Humaine - Honoré de Balzac
Characters: Corentin
The Comédie Humaine is Honoré Balzac's sweeping panorama of French society, institutions and politics during the first half of the nineteenth century. Comprised of more than ninety novels and short stories, it's an ambitious body of work that paints a satirical and finely detailed picture of French life during this era. It's also an early example of a multimedia franchise: the Comédie Humaine characters all inhabit the same universe and pop up in multiple books at different times and in different roles, and also star in a set of spin-off plays.
What I like about it:
I actually rather dislike Balzac - he traffics in a reactionary nostalgia he's too clever to sincerely believe in, and I find him mean-spirited, idiotically snobby and eager to tear things down without any real ambition to build anything in their place.
But I have to admit, the guy writes good books. He's a keen observer of humanity and an incisive, intelligent critic of just about everything he looks at. His plots are generally engaging, his characters are compelling, well-drawn and memorable, and if I'm not overly impressed with his values I do admire his robust commitment to his worldview that everything is shit and his willingness to let bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people in his novels in support of that thesis. He has a deep understanding of power dynamics and the emotional realities of abuse, and while his politics are awful he situates good and bad characters across the political spectrum and gives his adversaries fair representation.
Corentin appears in the following books:
- Les Chouans | The Chouans
- Une ténébreuse affaire | The Gondreville Mystery | An Historical Mystery | Murky Business
- Splendeurs et Misères des courtisanes | Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans | A Harlot High and Low
- Les Petits Bourgeois | The Lesser Bourgeoisie | The Middle Classes
You don't need to read all of them to write this request, but you should probably read Une ténébreuse affaire and be conversant with what Corentin does in the other three. (Ctrl+F on Corentin's name and skimming the relevant sections will suffice; you definitely don't need to understand what's happening with Balzac's full cast of thousands.)
The books are all in the public domain, so they can be found for free online in both French and English via Wikisource, Google Books or both. They may also be available in your local library.
Optional details:
I love Corentin and there are a grand total of zero fics about him, so the world is your oyster here. I would be happy with casefic or a character study or PWP, gen or slash or het.
If you like historical RPF, I'd love a fic about Corentin's relationship with Fouché or a crossover that pits him against a baby Chabouillé early in their careers. If your taste runs more to sinister plots, it would be fun to see him go up against Vautrin again. Or what if he's forced to work with Laurence de Cinq-Cygne to thwart some Restoration-era plot against the Bourbons? Or if you're more in the mood for domestic drama, he could babysit Peyrade after one of his benders or spend a cozy-yet-creepy-around-the-edges Christmas with Lydie.
Pick whichever era/book/character group you prefer and run with it. My sole request is no Corentin/Lydie.
I was probably drawn to Corentin at first because Balzac so clearly hates him, but he's interesting in his own right. In a series that can basically be summed up as "the venality of evil", Corentin... isn't. Virtually everyone around him is grifting for money or fame or power, but post-Chouans Corentin seems content to remain in the shadows and quietly do his job (with the occasional detour to take revenge on rude aristocrats). He rebuffs Talleyrand's offer of higher status. He's earned/embezzled enough for a comfortable middle-class existence - financial security, a first-floor apartment in a mediocre neighborhood, two servants, a carriage when he wants one - but no more than that. He has, as Balzac says, "neither passions nor vices". When he needs a stiff drink he drinks sugar water.
Corentin definitely has a moral code of some sort, but it's a blue and orange morality totally orthogonal to the values of his time. He disdains the contemporary loathing for spycraft. He seems sincerely devoted to the good of the police service, but in an era when the police are profoundly political he has no apparent allegiance to any political faction. He cares nothing for funerary customs - a social convention so strong that even the great cynic Vautrin honors it! - and lets his best friend be buried in a pauper's grave. Yet he takes care of Peyrade's mentally ill daughter in his own home for eleven years. Desperate though he is to find a successor and a husband for Lydie, he doesn't conscript Théodose until Théodose proves he has no honor that could be compromised by a career in the police. Peyrade dies because Corentin gets stuck in the middle of nowhere for nine days because he lets someone else take the last seat in the diligence. And in marked contrast to the protagonists in three of these four books, Corentin never uses sexual violence.
We're presumably not supposed to admire Corentin's sang-froid, cunning and predatory patience as much as I do, but his other good qualities are genuine virtues and in the Comédie Humaine vanishingly rare. We're meant to hate him, but he comes off better than many of Balzac's heroes.
Some prompts:
• Assuming that Fouché's Comédie Humaine timeline is consistent with his timeline in our universe, he's in Vendôme from 1784-1787, when Corentin is 7-10 years old. This throws a wrench in the "illegitimate son" hypothesis. Corentin is old enough to be at the Vendôme College while Fouché is teaching there, but Fouché teaches high school logic. What could a ten-year-old possibly have done to attract the interest of a high school teacher? (Besides the interest Catholic priests notoriously take in prepubescent boys, which, uh… sure, if you want to go there.)
• What's their working relationship like? Does Corentin resent his position of eternal instrument while Fouché’s legitimate kids get plum government jobs and join the nobility? Did he get in trouble for the fruitless domiciliary visit in Une ténébreuse affaire? Is there dub-con? Daddy issues?
• Peyrade seems to have taken the whole "Once I was the student, now I am the master" swap with surprisingly good humor. He's twenty years older! How did the hierarchy switch happen? Did Fouché order it? Did Peyrade just wake up one morning and say "Hey, you're smarter, you should be in charge"?
• Everyone in the Comédie Humaine seems convinced that Corentin did something sinister and brilliant in Les Chouans. In fact Corentin contributed virtually nothing to the success of the mission, which depended entirely on Marie and Montauran's asinine decision to arrange a suicidal tryst in a garrisoned town. Did Corentin just go back to Paris and lie his head off? Is he trying to convince himself he planned the whole thing so he won't be upset about Marie? Is he upset about Marie?
• Laurence de Cinq-Cygne is smart and badass and she and Corentin hate each other with a passion. They should fuck. Not during the domiciliary visit because they both had too much work to do, but Laurence in Paris is a different gal and there are no more secrets between them. And prudent though it might be, I can’t believe the honor of the Cinq-Cygnes would allow the matter to rest with the score standing 5-1 Corentin.
• Chabouillé from Les Mis/Real Life is someone whom Corentin should encounter professionally. Evil baby bourgeois cops in the Directory or the Empire! Probably trying to destroy each other (Corentin had to get arrested those two times somehow) and falling back on hatesex once they discover they're evenly matched.
• Are Corentin and Vautrin really quits? Vautrin still seems pretty angry about Lucien, and Corentin did swear vengeance for Peyrade's death. And nobody said the length of three corpses separates them in bed. I don’t normally have strong top/bottom preferences but given the way they present themselves physically - how Vautrin vaunts his strength whereas Corentin consistently tries to appear feebler than he really is, Vautrin actually picking Corentin up and putting him out of the room like a naughty cat - I'm pretty sure Vautrin thinks he’s topping and Corentin thinks he’s topping from the bottom. (Which if either of them is correct in this belief is up to you.) Feel free to add in Vautrin’s daddykink or Corentin’s possible daddy issues.
La Cousine Bette - Honoré de Balzac
Characters: Lisbeth Fischer, Valérie Marneffe
A novel in which Bette Fischer suffers one slight too many at the hands of her inconsiderate rich relatives and decides to rain down the fires of hell upon all their heads. She enlists the mistress of the family patriarch, her neighbor Valérie Marneffe, to help with her scheme, and through the combined powers of Bette's brain and Valérie's beauty the pair manage to wreak epic revenge and amass quite a lot of money before they are finally thwarted by a combination of overreaching and assorted dei ex machina.
What I like about it:
The Comédie Humaine is not short on magnificent bastards, but Bette is their queen. La Cousine Bette features one of the greatest revenge plots ever written, and while Bette's actions are morally indefensible there comes a point when you just have to sit back and admire a master at work.
That would be attraction enough, but the book also has fascinating gender politics. Balzac is a raving misogynist but of a very specific kind: he's willing to grant his female characters full agency and interiority and in his books they are as intelligent, courageous, active, and audacious as the men. Bette is easily the most clever and strong-willed person in La Cousine Bette and the prime driver of most of the action. But she has to be the antagonist, because while Balzac will happily bestow all these talents on his female characters, they are only allowed to employ them in selfless devotion to their husbands and children. As a spinster, Bette lacks the nuclear family necessary for female virtue and is therefore doomed to villainy.
But Balzac is also a very keen observer of power and abuse in all its forms, and he's unable to completely blind himself to the evils of patriarchy. He examines its power structures as he does any power structure he encounters, and then ferrets out ways for a clever member of the subaltern class to hack the system and turn it to their advantage. The result is what we might call weaponized femininity in its true form: exploiting your enemies' gendered assumptions about your role, your ambitions, and your capacities to fuck them up. Valérie is your typical evil temptress leading all the men astray with her feminine wiles, but Bette is something much more sophisticated. Her deliberate use of the traditional female emotional and physical caretaker role to lure her enemies into a deadly trap is a plotline I've never seen done before, and perhaps one that only Balzac with his odd combination of misogyny and insight could write. The result is a book that's inadvertently feminist in its themes, if not in its narration.
Optional details:
Femmeslash would be amazing. If you'd prefer to maintain their intense but non-sexual relationship from the book, that's fine too. I just desperately need some fic about them.
I'd love a canon-divergent AU where Bette and Valérie win the day, or a fic that translates the story into a different setting. Or you could explore their relationship in canon: fluff in which Valérie drags Bette with her to the theater or takes her shopping for curtains, darkfic that looks at all the ways in which they are using each other and the toxic interplay between Valérie's honeyed manipulation and Bette's viciousness and need for power and control. Or Valérie could turn her extensive experience in the art of seduction to a less lucrative but more emotionally fulfilling purpose, and introduce Bette to sex.
The second I finished reading La Cousine Bette I went to look for the Bette/Valérie fic that clearly ought to exist according to Rule 34 and all the laws of nature and man. I was met with a gaping void, an unsettling emptiness, an eerie rent in the fabric of the universe.
Your mission is to fill this void.
Some fic possibilities:
• I'd love an AU where the story follows what feels like its natural course when not derailed by Balzac's misogyny and princes and poisoners ex machina and Bette and Valérie triumph and become evil lesbian vengeance queens of Paris and roll around in their ill-gotten gains in blissful happiness for the rest of their days. Balzac's male villains get to win; why not them?
What do they actually want from their lives, freed from their financial worries? We know Valérie enjoys the good life, but I feel like she's had way too much fun twisting all her lovers around her little finger to go back to the less heady thrills of theater and fine dining. And I doubt she'd keep sleeping with unattractive men once it no longer seemed financially necessary. So what does she do instead? Does she go into salon politics? And what about Bette? She's far too industrious to loll around in idle luxury, and she seems like a woman who expects her money to work for her rather than just sit in a bank account. Does she go into venture capitalism? Real estate?
• The overall plot of the novel is one that could translate easily into different settings, and it would be fun to see an AU version. Maybe Bette is a politician who has a promised ministry ripped out from under her nose by President Hulot and given to his underqualified protégé Hortense, and she teams up with his secretary Valérie to avenge herself on the whole party leadership. Maybe they're ecologists and Steinbock is actually a grant to study alpine ibex that gets awarded to another researcher. Maybe they're naval officers in a space empire and Hortense gets awarded the captaincy of the newly built FS Steinbock because of nepotism.
• Or Bette and Valerie could have sex, because let's be real, Bette really needs to get laid and except for Montès all of Valerie's lovers are probably terrible in bed and the poor woman deserves to orgasm for once. Are they able to be honest with each other, or does Valerie find that either intentionally or unintentionally her long practice in manipulating her lovers transfers to Bette as well?
Political RPF - France 19th c.
Characters: Henri Gisquet
Political RPF about mid-nineteenth century France, or in fandom terms, RPF about the real people who caused the events depicted in Les Misérables and the Comédie Humaine. France in the middle of the nineteenth century is an early modern democracy with all the institutions we expect of a democracy: free elections (albeit with a extremely limited franchise during the Restoration and the July Monarchy), a robust and critical press, a judiciary with the power to curtail the excesses of the executive, and a national ambition not to fall back into civil war. It's a bubbling thermal pool of political philosophy in which our modern concepts of liberalism and socialism are first taking shape. But it also has a capital city which riots at the drop of a hat, provinces which don't even share the capital's language much less its political values, and a legacy of violence and terror less than a generation old that's lurking in the back of everyone's minds. The result of all this ferment is a society riven by irreconcilably different visions for what France should be and what sort of future the government should pursue.
Henri Gisquet embodies these contradictions. A banker by profession, he was a member of one of the major liberal opposition societies during the Restoration and played a small but significant role in the July Revolution that overthrew the Bourbons, signing the court ruling that ordered printers to print banned newspapers in defiance of the king's ordinances and then handing out arms to the revolutionaries once the insurrection started. When conservative Prime Minister Casimir Périer came to power he appointed Gisquet Prefect of Police, and he was the man in charge of suppressing the rebellion that Victor Hugo popularized in Les Mis. Gisquet successfully and repressively ran the police for several years until his political career ended in disgrace when he sued a paper for libel and all his corrupt shenanigans came out in discovery. You can find out more about him at a good library, or from Google Books. (His whole memoirs are up here, if you read French.)
What I like about it:
In our era of intense partisan polarization it's fascinating to open a historical window onto another nation confronting unbridgeable factional divides in its body politic, and I find the centrists of this era especially interesting because they're the ones trying to straddle these yawning chasms and hold the country together. Gisquet is a prime example of this, and he's more fun to study than most of them because his political judgement is hilariously bad.
Optional details:
In the space of two years Henri Gisquet went from an architect of the July Revolution to the Prefect of Police who suppressed the June Rebellion. I'd love to see some fic that deals with Gisquet and the political situation in all its chaos and contradictions: what he thinks of the July Monarchy or the things he's been called upon to do, how a man can topple a government to defend the freedom of the press and find himself arresting newspaper editors just a few years later.
What are his interactions with Casimir Périer like during this era? Périer is much more conservative than Gisquet and disapproved of the July Revolution, so his decision to appoint him Prefect is intriguing.
Alternatively, it's always fun to see him lock horns with Chabouillé. Or he could confront other figures of the time like Charles Jeanne or Armand Marrast or Adolphe Crémieux.
Some potential avenues of ficcage:
• It would be great to see something that depicts Gisquet's interactions with Casimir Périer at the height of their careers. There have been some fantastic fics about the start of their relationship, when Périer took an impoverished young Gisquet under his morally questionable wing and made his career but also made him into his pawn, and others looking at how Gisquet coped with his death. But we haven't had much set in between.
Périer didn't want the July Revolution to proceed at all, and contemporary accounts are full of references to his severity and vicious temper. How did he react to Gisquet defying his wishes and taking the initiative to overthrow the government? Why did he pick Gisquet for Prefect of Police, given his total lack of experience with policing and the dark cloud around his name due to the gun scandal? Was Périer really that desperate, or did he want to give Gisquet a chance to redeem himself in the public eye? Did Gisquet even want to accept the post, or was he doing it as a favor to his beloved mentor?
Slash is fantastic if you ship them, but I'd be happy with platonic mentor and protégé fic too.
• THE GUNS. What even happened with the guns!? Clearly Gisquet was using the commission to reassure his investors that his bank had liquidity and stave off bankruptcy, but that doesn't explain why he accepted such an incredibly overpriced bid, or why the guns he purchased were such defective pieces of crap. What was actually going on? How did Périer react to his own precious protégé dragging his ministry into its first major scandal?
• Gisquet has a hateboner for Armand Marrast the size of the Eiffel Tower, due to the aforementioned gun scandal, Marrast's reporting on the same, and the ensuing libel trial. I swear 30% of his memoirs is just him bitching about Marrast articles that hurt his delicate little feelings. It's been ten years and the man went to jail for exposing the gun scandal, but Gisquet cannot let it go.
It would be fun to pit them against each other during the June Rebellion era when Marrast is once again a free man publishing articles about how Gisquet is terrible at his job. Or maybe they meet up again after Marrast loses the 1849 Assembly elections, having presided over the June Days repressions as Mayor of Paris and become almost as unpopular as Gisquet, and after an initial round of vindicated gloating Gisquet is moved to sympathy and they bond over their shared political disgrace and assaults on civil liberties.
• How does Gisquet cope with the entrenched civil service bureaucracy at the Prefecture, which most likely opposes the reforms that Périer expects him to implement? It's always fun to see him lock horns with Chabouillé, and from time to time they must come into conflict over issues a trifle more substantive than Gisquet's predilection for delectable young secretaries.
• There's honestly no excuse for this prompt except that I love Adolphe Crémieux way too much and as one of the defense attorneys in the Gisquet Guns trial and the June Rebellion cases he and Gisquet would have encountered each other in their professional capacities, but I'd love a fic throwing them together. I'll take anything here, really. Legal snark? Hatesex? Périer and Gisquet trying to intimidate Crémieux into dropping his cases and not causing them any more trouble? (But if you go this last route please don't be too rough with him. He is tiny and precious.)
The Village (TV)
Characters: Stephen Bairstow
Set in the Derbyshire Dales in the early years of the twentieth century, The Village is basically Downton Abbey as reimagined by angry socialist MP Dennis Skinner. Instead of focusing on the rich family that owns the local manor and how their servants can help them, The Village focuses on the Middletons, a family of poor farmers in the local village, and how the lords of the manor, poverty, John Middleton’s alcoholism and WW I combine to make their lives awful. True to its name, it follows the lives of everyone in the village, and the goal is to make a series for every decade of the twentieth century- so far they've done two and we're up to the mid-1920s. It's a realistic but grim look at rural poverty in England around the turn of the century, but to prevent it from being unrelentingly depressing it also features such excellent things as the rise of the Labour Party and Maxine Peake's acting.
I don't think there is any legal way to watch this if you missed seeing it on the BBC when it aired, but as usual the internet provides.
What I like about it:
This show combines social realism, nice scenery and Maxine Peake, so I'm basically incapable of forming an objective opinion on it. I think it probably is quite good, though, apart from Old Bert's voiceover narration. The writing is decent and Peake's Grace Middleton is fantastic in every way. I like the show's values, but it manages to express them without being completely one-sided: earnest but opportunistic Labour politician Bill Gibby is a pretty good example of this, as are the Allinghams up at the manor.
The Allinghams are basically awful but each have a single moment of human decency per person per series, which is exciting because you can never be quite sure when it will arrive. Also, they're engaging and generally competent awful people, and their family has some real problems not entirely of its own making: eldest son Edmund is gay, middle son George went off to WW I and came back with shellshock, and daughter Caro is mentally ill and trapped in a society which does everything possible to exacerbate her problems. You actually feel some degree of sympathy for matriarch Clem who's trying to hold it all together, even though the thing she's trying to hold together is a regressive class system.
Optional details:
I love Stephen Bairstow's increasingly bizarre and codependent partnership with the Allingham family, and it would be great to get some fic about it. In the space of two seasons Bairstow has gone from being Edmund's eyes in the village to more or less running his political life, arranging a tolerable marriage for him, saving Caro from drowning, and getting Caro the son she desperately misses and Clem the grandchild she desperately wants. The power dynamics of this shift intrigue me. Bairstow is still a servant and seems to have the family's best interests at heart, but they've come to a point where he's willing to act against orders if he feels the situation warrants it and he's not exactly "loyal retainer" material. Can the Allinghams trust him? Do they deserve his help? What does he really want from them and from his life?
I'd be happy with any fic about the situation: Machiavellian political shenanigans, the aftermath of the sacking/blackmail confrontation, Caro's reaction to finally having a real ally in her life, Bairstow/Edmund, Bairstow/Clem.
Some fic ideas:
• Politics! Spin doctoring is a bit more intense in London than in Derbyshire, especially if you have to conceal your boss's sexuality from the press. What's happening in Westminster? Are there other Tory MPs angling to stab Edmund in the back and steal his job? (What am I saying, of course there are.) Is Bill Gibby down in London trying to get planning permission and perhaps overhearing some dangerous gossip? Or maybe Grace Middleton is going to try for Edmund's seat, now that Bert's old enough to run the farm and Bill has somewhat scuppered his chances for reselection.
• Speaking of Grace, the fight to save the village from the reservoir. Grace teaming up with these jerks for the greater good would be amusing, and I also like Bill Gibby a lot, so I'd love to see a fic about this plotline.
• The Continuing Fall (and Rise?) of the House of Allingham. I love Clem and Edmund and Harriet and I don't mind Caro and George, so anything with the family hanging out together or trying to control each other's lives or having enormous rows and Bairstow lurking ominously in the background would be great.
• Caro finally has someone in her immediate vicinity who cares about her best interest and is willing to take aggressive action on her behalf. That must be a new experience for her. How is she taking it?
• Speaking of which, Caro's horrible shrink/abuser/husband mysteriously and fortuitously vanished between Series 1 and 2, never to be mentioned again. How did that happen? Clem and Edmund acquired him in the first place, so presumably they didn't get rid of him. Did Bairstow? Collaboration between George and Bairstow to drown him in the pond and hide the body?
• Slash. I can't even imagine what the dynamics of Bairstow/Edmund would be, but if you have ideas I would love to read them. D/s or some weird switching arrangement that operates in parallel with their weird professional switching arrangement very much welcomed. Also class kink and/or awkwardness.
• Het. Clem and Bairstow have an intriguing and increasingly intimate love/hate relationship, and while Clem might think sleeping with the servants is infra dig it's also possible she's loftily above such bourgeois scruples. Class kink and/or awkwardness again welcome.
• Bairstow spanking Edmund for being a petulant brat and annoying his mother/sister/Harriet/Robert/senior figures in the Conservative Party/Bairstow. (Sorry. I have no shame and a clear mental image of Bairstow pinning Edmund over the back of the sofa and taking his belt to him.)
• A spiteful Downton Abbey/The Village crossover fic in which the Crawleys and the Allinghams end up in some kind of rich people social competition with each other and the Crawleys suffer a crushing defeat because Clem + Edmund + Bairstow are a quasi-competent team of awful rich people whereas everyone at Downton Abbey is basically an idiot except for Violet and Daisy. (See previous point re. shame. If you like Downton Abbey and/or have standards, this prompt is probably not for you.)
Crossposted to Dreamwidth: https://kainosite.dreamwidth.org/5154.html. Comment there or here.
Thank you for offering to write me a story. Whoever you are, you have excellent taste in fandoms and I'm sure I'll love whatever you write. My optional details in the requests over at AO3 give a basic idea of what I'm looking for, but if you'd like a bit more information about my preferences, here it is.
I'm afraid this letter is quite long, but please don't be intimidated or annoyed. I wax prolix here because I'm naturally long-winded and because my journal is fairly empty (as you can see, in recent years it consists entirely of Yuletide letters) so my letter is the main guide to my preferences for an author who wants one, not because I'm picky and hard to please. If you're not someone who likes getting a lot of additional detail, feel free to skip it entirely.
Beneath the cut you will find my squicks and more detailed thoughts on yaoi, the characters, the fandoms, and possible directions you may want to take your story in, if you find yourself in need of inspiration.
All about me:
Triggers:
None
Squicks:
• Anything combining sex and digestion. Feeding a lover strawberries, licking chocolate or whipped cream off them, force feeding, scat, watersports... none of this please. I don't mind parts of the digestive tract doing double duty as an erogenous zone - anal and oral sex are fine. So is using a cucumber for a dildo or sex on the dining room table. But no sexy games with fondue.
• Mutilation, scarification, knifeplay, needle play. Killing the characters or beating them to a pulp is fine by me, but for some reason it bothers me if you give them a papercut first. Nothing with sharp edges please, unless someone is getting stabbed by criminals.
• Ageplay and infantilization. Spanking is lovely, but let’s keep it between grown-ups acting like grown-ups.
Everything else is a-okay. Violence, character deaths, torture, non-con or dub-con, mind games, twisted power dynamics, general bleakness - all fine! I love dark fics. I love fluffy or uplifting stories too, so don't feel obliged to write something dark, but if that's the direction your muse takes you then feel free to go for it. Holiday fic is fine too.
Things I like in stories:
• Worldbuilding. I like getting the sense that the story is a little window into a larger world where other people are going about their business and events are happening just offscreen, instead of a window on a few characters interacting inside a bubble surrounded by vacuum. Unless they're in space and they actually are interacting in a bubble surrounded by vacuum. But even then they probably have to think about where they're going to refuel.
• Challenging the text. I'm fond of these fandoms or I wouldn't have requested them, but I'm not... protective of them. If some character is marginalized by the canon, I'd love to see a story from their perspective. If you've noticed a plothole, I'd love for you to latch onto it and rip it to shreds and then think up an explanation to set it right. I'm always interested in the answers to questions like "If Galadriel lives in the shady primeval forest where does she grow the grain for all that lembas?"
• Politics. I'll spare you the passionate Enjolras-style lecture about my heartfelt belief in the ability of politics to effect change, but let's just say that these fandoms didn't land on my list by accident.
• Clever characters being clever.
• Clever characters being outsmarted by even cleverer characters.
• Power struggles, hierarchies, how these arrangements are negotiated and balanced and change over time and in response to changing circumstances.
• Culture clashes.
• Women kicking ass.
• Victories for social justice, democracy or tolerance.
• Depressing defeats for social justice, democracy or tolerance that still leave seeds of hope for the future.
• Characters trying to balance competing obligations and loyalties: personal vs. professional, practical vs. ideological, etc.
• Gen fic. Casefic, wacky adventures, character studies - they're all great.
• Shipping, as long as shipping is not the only thing in the fic. (Good characterization counts as a second thing.) Het, slash, femmeslash, polyamory, threesomes - I like them all. I'm not protective of my favorite pairings, either, so feel free to pair anyone with anyone.
• Explicit porn, as long as sticking Tab A into Slot B is not the only thing in the fic. (Good characterization counts as a second thing.) D/s and BDSM are welcome.
• Humor.
• All the dark stuff from the list above.
• Characters I like being cute and fluffy and happy together.
As you can see, I like a wide variety of things! Write something that makes you happy, and I will almost certainly be happy too.
A few things I dislike:
• Crackiness to no obvious purpose. I don't mind an AU where all the characters are living room furniture, but if you're going to write one the choice of furniture should be telling us something about the characters.
• Idiot plots. If characters have to suffer a major drop in IQ for a story to make sense, it needs a different plot. Stupid romantic comedy misunderstandings that could be cleared up in five minutes fall into this category.
• Healing cock, instantaneous peace after the crowning of a king or the birth of some biracial baby, and other forms of magical recovery from personal or national traumas. Good stories are like real life: events have consequences and people have to live with them.
On to the fandoms! I'll give a brief overview of what each one is and where to find it, so if you want to switch and learn about a new fandom you'll know what you're getting into.
La Comédie Humaine - Honoré de Balzac
Characters: Corentin
The Comédie Humaine is Honoré Balzac's sweeping panorama of French society, institutions and politics during the first half of the nineteenth century. Comprised of more than ninety novels and short stories, it's an ambitious body of work that paints a satirical and finely detailed picture of French life during this era. It's also an early example of a multimedia franchise: the Comédie Humaine characters all inhabit the same universe and pop up in multiple books at different times and in different roles, and also star in a set of spin-off plays.
What I like about it:
I actually rather dislike Balzac - he traffics in a reactionary nostalgia he's too clever to sincerely believe in, and I find him mean-spirited, idiotically snobby and eager to tear things down without any real ambition to build anything in their place.
But I have to admit, the guy writes good books. He's a keen observer of humanity and an incisive, intelligent critic of just about everything he looks at. His plots are generally engaging, his characters are compelling, well-drawn and memorable, and if I'm not overly impressed with his values I do admire his robust commitment to his worldview that everything is shit and his willingness to let bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people in his novels in support of that thesis. He has a deep understanding of power dynamics and the emotional realities of abuse, and while his politics are awful he situates good and bad characters across the political spectrum and gives his adversaries fair representation.
Corentin appears in the following books:
- Les Chouans | The Chouans
- Une ténébreuse affaire | The Gondreville Mystery | An Historical Mystery | Murky Business
- Splendeurs et Misères des courtisanes | Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans | A Harlot High and Low
- Les Petits Bourgeois | The Lesser Bourgeoisie | The Middle Classes
You don't need to read all of them to write this request, but you should probably read Une ténébreuse affaire and be conversant with what Corentin does in the other three. (Ctrl+F on Corentin's name and skimming the relevant sections will suffice; you definitely don't need to understand what's happening with Balzac's full cast of thousands.)
The books are all in the public domain, so they can be found for free online in both French and English via Wikisource, Google Books or both. They may also be available in your local library.
Optional details:
I love Corentin and there are a grand total of zero fics about him, so the world is your oyster here. I would be happy with casefic or a character study or PWP, gen or slash or het.
If you like historical RPF, I'd love a fic about Corentin's relationship with Fouché or a crossover that pits him against a baby Chabouillé early in their careers. If your taste runs more to sinister plots, it would be fun to see him go up against Vautrin again. Or what if he's forced to work with Laurence de Cinq-Cygne to thwart some Restoration-era plot against the Bourbons? Or if you're more in the mood for domestic drama, he could babysit Peyrade after one of his benders or spend a cozy-yet-creepy-around-the-edges Christmas with Lydie.
Pick whichever era/book/character group you prefer and run with it. My sole request is no Corentin/Lydie.
I was probably drawn to Corentin at first because Balzac so clearly hates him, but he's interesting in his own right. In a series that can basically be summed up as "the venality of evil", Corentin... isn't. Virtually everyone around him is grifting for money or fame or power, but post-Chouans Corentin seems content to remain in the shadows and quietly do his job (with the occasional detour to take revenge on rude aristocrats). He rebuffs Talleyrand's offer of higher status. He's earned/embezzled enough for a comfortable middle-class existence - financial security, a first-floor apartment in a mediocre neighborhood, two servants, a carriage when he wants one - but no more than that. He has, as Balzac says, "neither passions nor vices". When he needs a stiff drink he drinks sugar water.
Corentin definitely has a moral code of some sort, but it's a blue and orange morality totally orthogonal to the values of his time. He disdains the contemporary loathing for spycraft. He seems sincerely devoted to the good of the police service, but in an era when the police are profoundly political he has no apparent allegiance to any political faction. He cares nothing for funerary customs - a social convention so strong that even the great cynic Vautrin honors it! - and lets his best friend be buried in a pauper's grave. Yet he takes care of Peyrade's mentally ill daughter in his own home for eleven years. Desperate though he is to find a successor and a husband for Lydie, he doesn't conscript Théodose until Théodose proves he has no honor that could be compromised by a career in the police. Peyrade dies because Corentin gets stuck in the middle of nowhere for nine days because he lets someone else take the last seat in the diligence. And in marked contrast to the protagonists in three of these four books, Corentin never uses sexual violence.
We're presumably not supposed to admire Corentin's sang-froid, cunning and predatory patience as much as I do, but his other good qualities are genuine virtues and in the Comédie Humaine vanishingly rare. We're meant to hate him, but he comes off better than many of Balzac's heroes.
Some prompts:
• Assuming that Fouché's Comédie Humaine timeline is consistent with his timeline in our universe, he's in Vendôme from 1784-1787, when Corentin is 7-10 years old. This throws a wrench in the "illegitimate son" hypothesis. Corentin is old enough to be at the Vendôme College while Fouché is teaching there, but Fouché teaches high school logic. What could a ten-year-old possibly have done to attract the interest of a high school teacher? (Besides the interest Catholic priests notoriously take in prepubescent boys, which, uh… sure, if you want to go there.)
• What's their working relationship like? Does Corentin resent his position of eternal instrument while Fouché’s legitimate kids get plum government jobs and join the nobility? Did he get in trouble for the fruitless domiciliary visit in Une ténébreuse affaire? Is there dub-con? Daddy issues?
• Peyrade seems to have taken the whole "Once I was the student, now I am the master" swap with surprisingly good humor. He's twenty years older! How did the hierarchy switch happen? Did Fouché order it? Did Peyrade just wake up one morning and say "Hey, you're smarter, you should be in charge"?
• Everyone in the Comédie Humaine seems convinced that Corentin did something sinister and brilliant in Les Chouans. In fact Corentin contributed virtually nothing to the success of the mission, which depended entirely on Marie and Montauran's asinine decision to arrange a suicidal tryst in a garrisoned town. Did Corentin just go back to Paris and lie his head off? Is he trying to convince himself he planned the whole thing so he won't be upset about Marie? Is he upset about Marie?
• Laurence de Cinq-Cygne is smart and badass and she and Corentin hate each other with a passion. They should fuck. Not during the domiciliary visit because they both had too much work to do, but Laurence in Paris is a different gal and there are no more secrets between them. And prudent though it might be, I can’t believe the honor of the Cinq-Cygnes would allow the matter to rest with the score standing 5-1 Corentin.
• Chabouillé from Les Mis/Real Life is someone whom Corentin should encounter professionally. Evil baby bourgeois cops in the Directory or the Empire! Probably trying to destroy each other (Corentin had to get arrested those two times somehow) and falling back on hatesex once they discover they're evenly matched.
• Are Corentin and Vautrin really quits? Vautrin still seems pretty angry about Lucien, and Corentin did swear vengeance for Peyrade's death. And nobody said the length of three corpses separates them in bed. I don’t normally have strong top/bottom preferences but given the way they present themselves physically - how Vautrin vaunts his strength whereas Corentin consistently tries to appear feebler than he really is, Vautrin actually picking Corentin up and putting him out of the room like a naughty cat - I'm pretty sure Vautrin thinks he’s topping and Corentin thinks he’s topping from the bottom. (Which if either of them is correct in this belief is up to you.) Feel free to add in Vautrin’s daddykink or Corentin’s possible daddy issues.
La Cousine Bette - Honoré de Balzac
Characters: Lisbeth Fischer, Valérie Marneffe
A novel in which Bette Fischer suffers one slight too many at the hands of her inconsiderate rich relatives and decides to rain down the fires of hell upon all their heads. She enlists the mistress of the family patriarch, her neighbor Valérie Marneffe, to help with her scheme, and through the combined powers of Bette's brain and Valérie's beauty the pair manage to wreak epic revenge and amass quite a lot of money before they are finally thwarted by a combination of overreaching and assorted dei ex machina.
What I like about it:
The Comédie Humaine is not short on magnificent bastards, but Bette is their queen. La Cousine Bette features one of the greatest revenge plots ever written, and while Bette's actions are morally indefensible there comes a point when you just have to sit back and admire a master at work.
That would be attraction enough, but the book also has fascinating gender politics. Balzac is a raving misogynist but of a very specific kind: he's willing to grant his female characters full agency and interiority and in his books they are as intelligent, courageous, active, and audacious as the men. Bette is easily the most clever and strong-willed person in La Cousine Bette and the prime driver of most of the action. But she has to be the antagonist, because while Balzac will happily bestow all these talents on his female characters, they are only allowed to employ them in selfless devotion to their husbands and children. As a spinster, Bette lacks the nuclear family necessary for female virtue and is therefore doomed to villainy.
But Balzac is also a very keen observer of power and abuse in all its forms, and he's unable to completely blind himself to the evils of patriarchy. He examines its power structures as he does any power structure he encounters, and then ferrets out ways for a clever member of the subaltern class to hack the system and turn it to their advantage. The result is what we might call weaponized femininity in its true form: exploiting your enemies' gendered assumptions about your role, your ambitions, and your capacities to fuck them up. Valérie is your typical evil temptress leading all the men astray with her feminine wiles, but Bette is something much more sophisticated. Her deliberate use of the traditional female emotional and physical caretaker role to lure her enemies into a deadly trap is a plotline I've never seen done before, and perhaps one that only Balzac with his odd combination of misogyny and insight could write. The result is a book that's inadvertently feminist in its themes, if not in its narration.
Optional details:
Femmeslash would be amazing. If you'd prefer to maintain their intense but non-sexual relationship from the book, that's fine too. I just desperately need some fic about them.
I'd love a canon-divergent AU where Bette and Valérie win the day, or a fic that translates the story into a different setting. Or you could explore their relationship in canon: fluff in which Valérie drags Bette with her to the theater or takes her shopping for curtains, darkfic that looks at all the ways in which they are using each other and the toxic interplay between Valérie's honeyed manipulation and Bette's viciousness and need for power and control. Or Valérie could turn her extensive experience in the art of seduction to a less lucrative but more emotionally fulfilling purpose, and introduce Bette to sex.
The second I finished reading La Cousine Bette I went to look for the Bette/Valérie fic that clearly ought to exist according to Rule 34 and all the laws of nature and man. I was met with a gaping void, an unsettling emptiness, an eerie rent in the fabric of the universe.
Your mission is to fill this void.
Some fic possibilities:
• I'd love an AU where the story follows what feels like its natural course when not derailed by Balzac's misogyny and princes and poisoners ex machina and Bette and Valérie triumph and become evil lesbian vengeance queens of Paris and roll around in their ill-gotten gains in blissful happiness for the rest of their days. Balzac's male villains get to win; why not them?
What do they actually want from their lives, freed from their financial worries? We know Valérie enjoys the good life, but I feel like she's had way too much fun twisting all her lovers around her little finger to go back to the less heady thrills of theater and fine dining. And I doubt she'd keep sleeping with unattractive men once it no longer seemed financially necessary. So what does she do instead? Does she go into salon politics? And what about Bette? She's far too industrious to loll around in idle luxury, and she seems like a woman who expects her money to work for her rather than just sit in a bank account. Does she go into venture capitalism? Real estate?
• The overall plot of the novel is one that could translate easily into different settings, and it would be fun to see an AU version. Maybe Bette is a politician who has a promised ministry ripped out from under her nose by President Hulot and given to his underqualified protégé Hortense, and she teams up with his secretary Valérie to avenge herself on the whole party leadership. Maybe they're ecologists and Steinbock is actually a grant to study alpine ibex that gets awarded to another researcher. Maybe they're naval officers in a space empire and Hortense gets awarded the captaincy of the newly built FS Steinbock because of nepotism.
• Or Bette and Valerie could have sex, because let's be real, Bette really needs to get laid and except for Montès all of Valerie's lovers are probably terrible in bed and the poor woman deserves to orgasm for once. Are they able to be honest with each other, or does Valerie find that either intentionally or unintentionally her long practice in manipulating her lovers transfers to Bette as well?
Political RPF - France 19th c.
Characters: Henri Gisquet
Political RPF about mid-nineteenth century France, or in fandom terms, RPF about the real people who caused the events depicted in Les Misérables and the Comédie Humaine. France in the middle of the nineteenth century is an early modern democracy with all the institutions we expect of a democracy: free elections (albeit with a extremely limited franchise during the Restoration and the July Monarchy), a robust and critical press, a judiciary with the power to curtail the excesses of the executive, and a national ambition not to fall back into civil war. It's a bubbling thermal pool of political philosophy in which our modern concepts of liberalism and socialism are first taking shape. But it also has a capital city which riots at the drop of a hat, provinces which don't even share the capital's language much less its political values, and a legacy of violence and terror less than a generation old that's lurking in the back of everyone's minds. The result of all this ferment is a society riven by irreconcilably different visions for what France should be and what sort of future the government should pursue.
Henri Gisquet embodies these contradictions. A banker by profession, he was a member of one of the major liberal opposition societies during the Restoration and played a small but significant role in the July Revolution that overthrew the Bourbons, signing the court ruling that ordered printers to print banned newspapers in defiance of the king's ordinances and then handing out arms to the revolutionaries once the insurrection started. When conservative Prime Minister Casimir Périer came to power he appointed Gisquet Prefect of Police, and he was the man in charge of suppressing the rebellion that Victor Hugo popularized in Les Mis. Gisquet successfully and repressively ran the police for several years until his political career ended in disgrace when he sued a paper for libel and all his corrupt shenanigans came out in discovery. You can find out more about him at a good library, or from Google Books. (His whole memoirs are up here, if you read French.)
What I like about it:
In our era of intense partisan polarization it's fascinating to open a historical window onto another nation confronting unbridgeable factional divides in its body politic, and I find the centrists of this era especially interesting because they're the ones trying to straddle these yawning chasms and hold the country together. Gisquet is a prime example of this, and he's more fun to study than most of them because his political judgement is hilariously bad.
Optional details:
In the space of two years Henri Gisquet went from an architect of the July Revolution to the Prefect of Police who suppressed the June Rebellion. I'd love to see some fic that deals with Gisquet and the political situation in all its chaos and contradictions: what he thinks of the July Monarchy or the things he's been called upon to do, how a man can topple a government to defend the freedom of the press and find himself arresting newspaper editors just a few years later.
What are his interactions with Casimir Périer like during this era? Périer is much more conservative than Gisquet and disapproved of the July Revolution, so his decision to appoint him Prefect is intriguing.
Alternatively, it's always fun to see him lock horns with Chabouillé. Or he could confront other figures of the time like Charles Jeanne or Armand Marrast or Adolphe Crémieux.
Some potential avenues of ficcage:
• It would be great to see something that depicts Gisquet's interactions with Casimir Périer at the height of their careers. There have been some fantastic fics about the start of their relationship, when Périer took an impoverished young Gisquet under his morally questionable wing and made his career but also made him into his pawn, and others looking at how Gisquet coped with his death. But we haven't had much set in between.
Périer didn't want the July Revolution to proceed at all, and contemporary accounts are full of references to his severity and vicious temper. How did he react to Gisquet defying his wishes and taking the initiative to overthrow the government? Why did he pick Gisquet for Prefect of Police, given his total lack of experience with policing and the dark cloud around his name due to the gun scandal? Was Périer really that desperate, or did he want to give Gisquet a chance to redeem himself in the public eye? Did Gisquet even want to accept the post, or was he doing it as a favor to his beloved mentor?
Slash is fantastic if you ship them, but I'd be happy with platonic mentor and protégé fic too.
• THE GUNS. What even happened with the guns!? Clearly Gisquet was using the commission to reassure his investors that his bank had liquidity and stave off bankruptcy, but that doesn't explain why he accepted such an incredibly overpriced bid, or why the guns he purchased were such defective pieces of crap. What was actually going on? How did Périer react to his own precious protégé dragging his ministry into its first major scandal?
• Gisquet has a hateboner for Armand Marrast the size of the Eiffel Tower, due to the aforementioned gun scandal, Marrast's reporting on the same, and the ensuing libel trial. I swear 30% of his memoirs is just him bitching about Marrast articles that hurt his delicate little feelings. It's been ten years and the man went to jail for exposing the gun scandal, but Gisquet cannot let it go.
It would be fun to pit them against each other during the June Rebellion era when Marrast is once again a free man publishing articles about how Gisquet is terrible at his job. Or maybe they meet up again after Marrast loses the 1849 Assembly elections, having presided over the June Days repressions as Mayor of Paris and become almost as unpopular as Gisquet, and after an initial round of vindicated gloating Gisquet is moved to sympathy and they bond over their shared political disgrace and assaults on civil liberties.
• How does Gisquet cope with the entrenched civil service bureaucracy at the Prefecture, which most likely opposes the reforms that Périer expects him to implement? It's always fun to see him lock horns with Chabouillé, and from time to time they must come into conflict over issues a trifle more substantive than Gisquet's predilection for delectable young secretaries.
• There's honestly no excuse for this prompt except that I love Adolphe Crémieux way too much and as one of the defense attorneys in the Gisquet Guns trial and the June Rebellion cases he and Gisquet would have encountered each other in their professional capacities, but I'd love a fic throwing them together. I'll take anything here, really. Legal snark? Hatesex? Périer and Gisquet trying to intimidate Crémieux into dropping his cases and not causing them any more trouble? (But if you go this last route please don't be too rough with him. He is tiny and precious.)
The Village (TV)
Characters: Stephen Bairstow
Set in the Derbyshire Dales in the early years of the twentieth century, The Village is basically Downton Abbey as reimagined by angry socialist MP Dennis Skinner. Instead of focusing on the rich family that owns the local manor and how their servants can help them, The Village focuses on the Middletons, a family of poor farmers in the local village, and how the lords of the manor, poverty, John Middleton’s alcoholism and WW I combine to make their lives awful. True to its name, it follows the lives of everyone in the village, and the goal is to make a series for every decade of the twentieth century- so far they've done two and we're up to the mid-1920s. It's a realistic but grim look at rural poverty in England around the turn of the century, but to prevent it from being unrelentingly depressing it also features such excellent things as the rise of the Labour Party and Maxine Peake's acting.
I don't think there is any legal way to watch this if you missed seeing it on the BBC when it aired, but as usual the internet provides.
What I like about it:
This show combines social realism, nice scenery and Maxine Peake, so I'm basically incapable of forming an objective opinion on it. I think it probably is quite good, though, apart from Old Bert's voiceover narration. The writing is decent and Peake's Grace Middleton is fantastic in every way. I like the show's values, but it manages to express them without being completely one-sided: earnest but opportunistic Labour politician Bill Gibby is a pretty good example of this, as are the Allinghams up at the manor.
The Allinghams are basically awful but each have a single moment of human decency per person per series, which is exciting because you can never be quite sure when it will arrive. Also, they're engaging and generally competent awful people, and their family has some real problems not entirely of its own making: eldest son Edmund is gay, middle son George went off to WW I and came back with shellshock, and daughter Caro is mentally ill and trapped in a society which does everything possible to exacerbate her problems. You actually feel some degree of sympathy for matriarch Clem who's trying to hold it all together, even though the thing she's trying to hold together is a regressive class system.
Optional details:
I love Stephen Bairstow's increasingly bizarre and codependent partnership with the Allingham family, and it would be great to get some fic about it. In the space of two seasons Bairstow has gone from being Edmund's eyes in the village to more or less running his political life, arranging a tolerable marriage for him, saving Caro from drowning, and getting Caro the son she desperately misses and Clem the grandchild she desperately wants. The power dynamics of this shift intrigue me. Bairstow is still a servant and seems to have the family's best interests at heart, but they've come to a point where he's willing to act against orders if he feels the situation warrants it and he's not exactly "loyal retainer" material. Can the Allinghams trust him? Do they deserve his help? What does he really want from them and from his life?
I'd be happy with any fic about the situation: Machiavellian political shenanigans, the aftermath of the sacking/blackmail confrontation, Caro's reaction to finally having a real ally in her life, Bairstow/Edmund, Bairstow/Clem.
Some fic ideas:
• Politics! Spin doctoring is a bit more intense in London than in Derbyshire, especially if you have to conceal your boss's sexuality from the press. What's happening in Westminster? Are there other Tory MPs angling to stab Edmund in the back and steal his job? (What am I saying, of course there are.) Is Bill Gibby down in London trying to get planning permission and perhaps overhearing some dangerous gossip? Or maybe Grace Middleton is going to try for Edmund's seat, now that Bert's old enough to run the farm and Bill has somewhat scuppered his chances for reselection.
• Speaking of Grace, the fight to save the village from the reservoir. Grace teaming up with these jerks for the greater good would be amusing, and I also like Bill Gibby a lot, so I'd love to see a fic about this plotline.
• The Continuing Fall (and Rise?) of the House of Allingham. I love Clem and Edmund and Harriet and I don't mind Caro and George, so anything with the family hanging out together or trying to control each other's lives or having enormous rows and Bairstow lurking ominously in the background would be great.
• Caro finally has someone in her immediate vicinity who cares about her best interest and is willing to take aggressive action on her behalf. That must be a new experience for her. How is she taking it?
• Speaking of which, Caro's horrible shrink/abuser/husband mysteriously and fortuitously vanished between Series 1 and 2, never to be mentioned again. How did that happen? Clem and Edmund acquired him in the first place, so presumably they didn't get rid of him. Did Bairstow? Collaboration between George and Bairstow to drown him in the pond and hide the body?
• Slash. I can't even imagine what the dynamics of Bairstow/Edmund would be, but if you have ideas I would love to read them. D/s or some weird switching arrangement that operates in parallel with their weird professional switching arrangement very much welcomed. Also class kink and/or awkwardness.
• Het. Clem and Bairstow have an intriguing and increasingly intimate love/hate relationship, and while Clem might think sleeping with the servants is infra dig it's also possible she's loftily above such bourgeois scruples. Class kink and/or awkwardness again welcome.
• Bairstow spanking Edmund for being a petulant brat and annoying his mother/sister/Harriet/Robert/senior figures in the Conservative Party/Bairstow. (Sorry. I have no shame and a clear mental image of Bairstow pinning Edmund over the back of the sofa and taking his belt to him.)
• A spiteful Downton Abbey/The Village crossover fic in which the Crawleys and the Allinghams end up in some kind of rich people social competition with each other and the Crawleys suffer a crushing defeat because Clem + Edmund + Bairstow are a quasi-competent team of awful rich people whereas everyone at Downton Abbey is basically an idiot except for Violet and Daisy. (See previous point re. shame. If you like Downton Abbey and/or have standards, this prompt is probably not for you.)
Crossposted to Dreamwidth: https://kainosite.dreamwidth.org/5154.html. Comment there or here.