Shipswap author letter
Dear shipswap author,
You are amazing and I am an idiot who has picked just the wrong week to be busy with social engagements every evening. Thus, this is still sort of a place-holder post and I'm so sorry and swear I will fix this on Saturday as I will be refusing to leave my house that day on account of its being The Bad Day of arbitrarily preordained romantic nonsense.
So, um, watch this space for reasons why I love the ships I love and lots of my congratulating you for having really great taste. I promise you I will be raving about why Peter/Nightingale is the most beautifully awkwardly repressed ship ever to be born of two guys who are generally pretty far from repressed (except about the war, okay, yes, sorry Nightingale); why Bill and Jim break my heart into a million pieces and I don't even want you to fix it; and why I ship Ronan Lynch with everyone he loves because the boy's love is too strong not to make me ship it.
Okay, right, so:
Rivers of London
Peter/Nightingale
I moved to London well over a year ago now and, a while after that, I read the first Rivers of London book and, I'll be honest with you, my immediate feeling was stupid excitement at the fact that I had been to a lot of those places and that Peter's loving but not remotely idealised version of London rang true to me, even as someone who has known the life outside the big smoke and grew up somewhere closer to the Herefordshire village of Foxglove Summer than to Peter's beloved home within the boundary of the M25.
That said, as the books went on, I definitely valued them for more than just the novelty of their setting. Well, I did from the beginning, too, really. Who could fail to be taken in by Peter as a narrator? And then there's the fact that Peter has this amazing rapport with a backwards-ageing, card-carrying magical DI whom he initially thinks is trying to pick him up and with whom he lives. And they have these stupidly complementary skills and fantastic banter and they never talk about their actual issues but they show plenty of appreciation of one another. Oh, this ship.
Which brings me to - things I think are/would be awesome in Peter/Nightingale fic:
- Peter being surprisingly competent and Nightingale not being surprised at all.
- Any kind of awkward grudging acknowledgement that feelings are a thing (which, let's be honest, they'd pretty much both be able to do less than grudgingly in other circumstances, they're both just not quite comfortable pushing forward with the thing between them given the power/status structures they're embedded in). This could include: Peter making a bit of an unintentional confession and having a freak out and ultimately having to have Nightingale talk him down, or some kind of established relationship fic where they consider how they got to be in that place.
- I've always wanted to write a sort of ridiculous future fic about the implications of the whole backwards-ageing thing on their relationship. I have this image of Peter looking in a mirror one day and realising that Nightingale looks younger than him now. Hell, maybe Peter ages backwards, too, after a while, maybe they keep ageing back and forth for centuries. Who knows. So, if this interests you, too, dear author, go for it.
- Casefic is of course one of the most treasured and wonderful things in this fandom - because who doesn't want to see Peter and Nightingale doing what they do best and solving magical crime? So, if you have the patience and desire to write a wonderful mystery about queer goings on in Londontown (or anywhere else for that matter), go right ahead.
Some other things/tropes that I really love in this fandom are:
- unsurprisingly, based on the above: London things! Though if you don't know much about London, don't feel you have to do a load of research just for this.
- like just about everyone in this fandom, I am totally behind hurt/comfort for this ship, whether it's Nightingale's recovery from the end of book 1 or Peter being sad or wounded, it's all good.
Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy
Bill/Jim
Oh god, do I have to tell you how these to left me bruised and ruined and so, so empty and sad? Do I have to tell you how best friends who betray each other is my personal favourite dynamic and the Achille's heel of my emotional stability? Because I think you can probably infer that just from the fact that I ship this.
This is a fandom that I never properly let myself get into because I have such intense feelings about their relationship in the source material (both the novel and the film adaptation - I'm afraid I've not seen the TV series). For the most part, I've just let the big hole they tore in my heart stay there and I pick at it sometimes, on my own. The few fics I've read have been beautiful though, so I thought I'd request that you rip another little hole in my heart. Here are some thoughts about how you might do it:
- I once half-wrote a story (a draft I'll probably never post or finish) about Jim saving Bill instead of killing him and their having to live with the fall-out of it all, their own not-quite happily ever after - because it's not as though they could ever truly break away. If you wanted to make that a thing, too, man, it would hurt me but it would be wonderful to see.
- I'd love to see the happier days, too. The Cambridge days or the first days at the Circus, when they were the inseparables for all that Bill was certainly still Bill then and far from the perfect person to tie oneself to (but you don't have to mention that if you'd prefer to pretend, or if you think Jim would).
- Or write me some kind of canon divergent AU, a what-if, a what-if-Jim-always-knew, a what-if-he-never-knew, something like that. A what-if Jim stayed pretending to be dead and Bill got away and found him and, somehow, Jim never knew they were living a lie. Or, hell, what if Bill was still Bill but wasn't the mole or might've been but someone else got caught and, really, what's the difference?
Raven Cycle
I had a lot of fun with this book series but, honestly, I mostly really enjoyed Ronan Lynch. I can't help myself, it's true. I just love this broken, bitter, angry, loyal boy who is so consumed by love and loyalty that he turns himself into the knife that's needed to protect the things he loves. He's a boy whose father's death didn't make him sad or broken in the expected way but whose loss twisted and hardened him, made him anchor-less except for his ties to Gansey and stripped him clean of any fears except for harm coming to the few people he has left to love. I guess I should talk a little bit individually about each of the ships I've requested though because it isn't all solely about Ronan.
Ronan/Gansey
For this ship, you should probably just go and read linndechir's letter (hell, you could do that for all my Raven Cycle ships and for RoL, besides). She is my all-round fandom braintwin and what brought me to this fandom in the first place. But, ahem, anyway:
I love these two because they're so wrapped up in each other and loyal. Ronan is willing to follow Gansey anywhere and I think he's also just about the only person who could sway Gansey from his utter devotion to the Glendower quest. Gansey would give it all up to save Ronan and Ronan would do the same for Gansey. Ronan dreams ways of saving Gansey and Gansey always contemplates the impact of his actions and the actions of others on Ronan. It's fucking beautiful.
There's something in me which clings to the bitterness of the fact that Gansey is more balanced than Ronan, has more people and things to care for, needs Ronan less than Ronan needs him. And I actually kind of love the inequality and the tension that comes out of it, as well as the fact that it doesn't actually mean that Gansey loves Ronan any less than Ronan loves him.
Some things you might think about writing:
- Ronan before Niall's death broke him or how it did and how Gansey was there for both of those things.
- Ronan moving into Monmouth, how it happened, why it happened, how it helped. (I could very much go for co-dependency and mutual insomnia and maybe some bed-sharing for all that Ronan couldn't ever let himself sleep for fear of the dreams he might have.)
- What happens when Adam and Noah come along and how Gansey proves to Ronan that it doesn't change things between them.
- And this is going to sound like it's directly cribbed from Linn but, fuck, how could anyone ship this and not love this scene: anything about the substance party in book 2 and how that wilder version of Gansey is the one Ronan loves best. Some continuation of that scene, Gansey staying like that, being bold and reckless and completely there for Ronan, or some other scene from another time Gansey was that version of himself.
Ronan/Declan
To me, Ronan/Declan is a glorious thing - not because they hate each other but because the only way they can cope with the fact that they still give a fuck about each other despite their differences is to bury their care beneath the ways they resent each other. Because Ronan thinks the people he loves are going to die and leave him and because he disagrees with the way Declan chooses to live. He doesn't like that Declan runs around with all those different girls - and, sure, maybe that's partly jealousy, but also it's because for Ronan love is religion and he can't allow for infidelity or casual affairs as anything other than destructive. For Ronan, love is all-consuming, it isn't something you can just mess around with. And that's because that's the kind of love Ronan has had - Ronan, his father's favourite; Ronan, whose best friend would do almost anything for him. And Declan's never had that, Declan is the unloved son, no-one's favourite, and probably doesn't believe he could ever be anything to anyone, not really. So he messes around, sleeps around, doesn't let himself get attached. But he and Ronan love each other and that's where the resentment creeps in alongside the protectiveness and the fierce untameable things that Niall's sons can't help being. I love it. So, write about that, dear author, write me anything about that. Make it explicitly shippy or just make it about them and all the many things between them that still couldn't ever really tear them apart.
Ronan/Niall
Yes, yes, I know, I am a terrible person with my father/son incest ship. But they aren't exactly a normal family and Ronan is so destroyed by Niall's death that there is definitely hero worship there at least. And I will take genfic about hero worship as a substitute for shippy fic, I will definitely take that.
But also then there's just Niall Lynch, force of nature, to whom no ordinary laws apply, and Ronan loves him so fucking much. And they're both dreamers, both used to transgressing the boundaries of what is conventionally real and what can be real, what can be done. So I'd be interested in seeing this as a consensual, ambiguously or unambiguously sexual relationship. Maybe they dream it and each of them thinks he's dreamed a version of the other and doesn't realise until after they've woken that it was real. Or maybe it's all one-sided on Ronan's side, at least as desire goes, or Ronan doesn't know whether it is just him or not.
If something does happen, I'd prefer that Ronan initiated it, for the obvious power imbalance reasons, or at least that you keep it obviously consensual.
__
Aaaaand, now that I've written way too much, I bet you're wishing I'd just left this as a placeholder and let you run with your own ideas. But, hey, it's not as though I'd likely object too much to that, as long as you don't write mpreg or non-con for my ships. I think those are my only big "do not wants", other than prominent inclusion of other non-requested ships.
I hope you can have some fun with this, author anon! If you're worried that I might not dig whatever you're writing, maybe contact me via the mods or via Linn (whose letter is linked above and contains her contact details, since she could discretely check with me or likely downright know already if I'd be down with most things).
You are amazing and I am an idiot who has picked just the wrong week to be busy with social engagements every evening. Thus, this is still sort of a place-holder post and I'm so sorry and swear I will fix this on Saturday as I will be refusing to leave my house that day on account of its being The Bad Day of arbitrarily preordained romantic nonsense.
So, um, watch this space for reasons why I love the ships I love and lots of my congratulating you for having really great taste. I promise you I will be raving about why Peter/Nightingale is the most beautifully awkwardly repressed ship ever to be born of two guys who are generally pretty far from repressed (except about the war, okay, yes, sorry Nightingale); why Bill and Jim break my heart into a million pieces and I don't even want you to fix it; and why I ship Ronan Lynch with everyone he loves because the boy's love is too strong not to make me ship it.
Okay, right, so:
Rivers of London
Peter/Nightingale
I moved to London well over a year ago now and, a while after that, I read the first Rivers of London book and, I'll be honest with you, my immediate feeling was stupid excitement at the fact that I had been to a lot of those places and that Peter's loving but not remotely idealised version of London rang true to me, even as someone who has known the life outside the big smoke and grew up somewhere closer to the Herefordshire village of Foxglove Summer than to Peter's beloved home within the boundary of the M25.
That said, as the books went on, I definitely valued them for more than just the novelty of their setting. Well, I did from the beginning, too, really. Who could fail to be taken in by Peter as a narrator? And then there's the fact that Peter has this amazing rapport with a backwards-ageing, card-carrying magical DI whom he initially thinks is trying to pick him up and with whom he lives. And they have these stupidly complementary skills and fantastic banter and they never talk about their actual issues but they show plenty of appreciation of one another. Oh, this ship.
Which brings me to - things I think are/would be awesome in Peter/Nightingale fic:
- Peter being surprisingly competent and Nightingale not being surprised at all.
- Any kind of awkward grudging acknowledgement that feelings are a thing (which, let's be honest, they'd pretty much both be able to do less than grudgingly in other circumstances, they're both just not quite comfortable pushing forward with the thing between them given the power/status structures they're embedded in). This could include: Peter making a bit of an unintentional confession and having a freak out and ultimately having to have Nightingale talk him down, or some kind of established relationship fic where they consider how they got to be in that place.
- I've always wanted to write a sort of ridiculous future fic about the implications of the whole backwards-ageing thing on their relationship. I have this image of Peter looking in a mirror one day and realising that Nightingale looks younger than him now. Hell, maybe Peter ages backwards, too, after a while, maybe they keep ageing back and forth for centuries. Who knows. So, if this interests you, too, dear author, go for it.
- Casefic is of course one of the most treasured and wonderful things in this fandom - because who doesn't want to see Peter and Nightingale doing what they do best and solving magical crime? So, if you have the patience and desire to write a wonderful mystery about queer goings on in Londontown (or anywhere else for that matter), go right ahead.
Some other things/tropes that I really love in this fandom are:
- unsurprisingly, based on the above: London things! Though if you don't know much about London, don't feel you have to do a load of research just for this.
- like just about everyone in this fandom, I am totally behind hurt/comfort for this ship, whether it's Nightingale's recovery from the end of book 1 or Peter being sad or wounded, it's all good.
Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy
Bill/Jim
Oh god, do I have to tell you how these to left me bruised and ruined and so, so empty and sad? Do I have to tell you how best friends who betray each other is my personal favourite dynamic and the Achille's heel of my emotional stability? Because I think you can probably infer that just from the fact that I ship this.
This is a fandom that I never properly let myself get into because I have such intense feelings about their relationship in the source material (both the novel and the film adaptation - I'm afraid I've not seen the TV series). For the most part, I've just let the big hole they tore in my heart stay there and I pick at it sometimes, on my own. The few fics I've read have been beautiful though, so I thought I'd request that you rip another little hole in my heart. Here are some thoughts about how you might do it:
- I once half-wrote a story (a draft I'll probably never post or finish) about Jim saving Bill instead of killing him and their having to live with the fall-out of it all, their own not-quite happily ever after - because it's not as though they could ever truly break away. If you wanted to make that a thing, too, man, it would hurt me but it would be wonderful to see.
- I'd love to see the happier days, too. The Cambridge days or the first days at the Circus, when they were the inseparables for all that Bill was certainly still Bill then and far from the perfect person to tie oneself to (but you don't have to mention that if you'd prefer to pretend, or if you think Jim would).
- Or write me some kind of canon divergent AU, a what-if, a what-if-Jim-always-knew, a what-if-he-never-knew, something like that. A what-if Jim stayed pretending to be dead and Bill got away and found him and, somehow, Jim never knew they were living a lie. Or, hell, what if Bill was still Bill but wasn't the mole or might've been but someone else got caught and, really, what's the difference?
Raven Cycle
I had a lot of fun with this book series but, honestly, I mostly really enjoyed Ronan Lynch. I can't help myself, it's true. I just love this broken, bitter, angry, loyal boy who is so consumed by love and loyalty that he turns himself into the knife that's needed to protect the things he loves. He's a boy whose father's death didn't make him sad or broken in the expected way but whose loss twisted and hardened him, made him anchor-less except for his ties to Gansey and stripped him clean of any fears except for harm coming to the few people he has left to love. I guess I should talk a little bit individually about each of the ships I've requested though because it isn't all solely about Ronan.
Ronan/Gansey
For this ship, you should probably just go and read linndechir's letter (hell, you could do that for all my Raven Cycle ships and for RoL, besides). She is my all-round fandom braintwin and what brought me to this fandom in the first place. But, ahem, anyway:
I love these two because they're so wrapped up in each other and loyal. Ronan is willing to follow Gansey anywhere and I think he's also just about the only person who could sway Gansey from his utter devotion to the Glendower quest. Gansey would give it all up to save Ronan and Ronan would do the same for Gansey. Ronan dreams ways of saving Gansey and Gansey always contemplates the impact of his actions and the actions of others on Ronan. It's fucking beautiful.
There's something in me which clings to the bitterness of the fact that Gansey is more balanced than Ronan, has more people and things to care for, needs Ronan less than Ronan needs him. And I actually kind of love the inequality and the tension that comes out of it, as well as the fact that it doesn't actually mean that Gansey loves Ronan any less than Ronan loves him.
Some things you might think about writing:
- Ronan before Niall's death broke him or how it did and how Gansey was there for both of those things.
- Ronan moving into Monmouth, how it happened, why it happened, how it helped. (I could very much go for co-dependency and mutual insomnia and maybe some bed-sharing for all that Ronan couldn't ever let himself sleep for fear of the dreams he might have.)
- What happens when Adam and Noah come along and how Gansey proves to Ronan that it doesn't change things between them.
- And this is going to sound like it's directly cribbed from Linn but, fuck, how could anyone ship this and not love this scene: anything about the substance party in book 2 and how that wilder version of Gansey is the one Ronan loves best. Some continuation of that scene, Gansey staying like that, being bold and reckless and completely there for Ronan, or some other scene from another time Gansey was that version of himself.
Ronan/Declan
To me, Ronan/Declan is a glorious thing - not because they hate each other but because the only way they can cope with the fact that they still give a fuck about each other despite their differences is to bury their care beneath the ways they resent each other. Because Ronan thinks the people he loves are going to die and leave him and because he disagrees with the way Declan chooses to live. He doesn't like that Declan runs around with all those different girls - and, sure, maybe that's partly jealousy, but also it's because for Ronan love is religion and he can't allow for infidelity or casual affairs as anything other than destructive. For Ronan, love is all-consuming, it isn't something you can just mess around with. And that's because that's the kind of love Ronan has had - Ronan, his father's favourite; Ronan, whose best friend would do almost anything for him. And Declan's never had that, Declan is the unloved son, no-one's favourite, and probably doesn't believe he could ever be anything to anyone, not really. So he messes around, sleeps around, doesn't let himself get attached. But he and Ronan love each other and that's where the resentment creeps in alongside the protectiveness and the fierce untameable things that Niall's sons can't help being. I love it. So, write about that, dear author, write me anything about that. Make it explicitly shippy or just make it about them and all the many things between them that still couldn't ever really tear them apart.
Ronan/Niall
Yes, yes, I know, I am a terrible person with my father/son incest ship. But they aren't exactly a normal family and Ronan is so destroyed by Niall's death that there is definitely hero worship there at least. And I will take genfic about hero worship as a substitute for shippy fic, I will definitely take that.
But also then there's just Niall Lynch, force of nature, to whom no ordinary laws apply, and Ronan loves him so fucking much. And they're both dreamers, both used to transgressing the boundaries of what is conventionally real and what can be real, what can be done. So I'd be interested in seeing this as a consensual, ambiguously or unambiguously sexual relationship. Maybe they dream it and each of them thinks he's dreamed a version of the other and doesn't realise until after they've woken that it was real. Or maybe it's all one-sided on Ronan's side, at least as desire goes, or Ronan doesn't know whether it is just him or not.
If something does happen, I'd prefer that Ronan initiated it, for the obvious power imbalance reasons, or at least that you keep it obviously consensual.
__
Aaaaand, now that I've written way too much, I bet you're wishing I'd just left this as a placeholder and let you run with your own ideas. But, hey, it's not as though I'd likely object too much to that, as long as you don't write mpreg or non-con for my ships. I think those are my only big "do not wants", other than prominent inclusion of other non-requested ships.
I hope you can have some fun with this, author anon! If you're worried that I might not dig whatever you're writing, maybe contact me via the mods or via Linn (whose letter is linked above and contains her contact details, since she could discretely check with me or likely downright know already if I'd be down with most things).