Dear Yuletide Writer, 2020
Oct. 24th, 2020 01:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kainositeWelcome, dear Yuletide writer!
Thank you for offering to write me a story. 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 here's some further information if you want it.
This letter is rather long, but please don't be intimidated or annoyed – it's not because I'm picky and hard to please. I talk a lot here because I'm naturally longwinded and I haven't said much about these fandoms elsewhere, which means my letter is the sole guide to my preferences for an author who wants one. 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 likes and dislikes 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.
Contents
General Info
La Comédie Humaine - Honoré de Balzac – Corentin
Engrenages | Spiral (TV) – Laure Berthaud, Joséphine Karlsson
19th Century CE French Politics RPF – Jacques-Antoine Manuel
Political RPF - UK 20th-21st c. – Walter Harrison, Bernard "Jack" Weatherill
The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982) – Paul Chauvelin, Percy Blakeney
Crossovers
All about me:
AO3 name:![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
Kainosite
Triggers: None
DNWs:
• Anything combining sex and digestion. Hand-feeding, licking chocolate off a lover, scat, watersports... none of this please. Anal and oral sex are fine, and so is swallowing come. Using a cucumber for a dildo or sex on the dining room table are okay too. But no sexy games with fondue.
• Guro, maiming, mutilation, scarification, branding, knifeplay, needle play. I’m totally up for the characters getting a thorough pummeling or getting stabbed in duels or battles – a bit of blood is fine, bruises are a plus – but please don’t amputate a limb or put out an eye.
• 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 into 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 lecture about my heartfelt belief in the ability of politics to effect change, but don't be fooled by my cynical fandoms: I'm a progressive at heart.
• 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.
• 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, 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:
Balzac is a mean-spirited reactionary, but I 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's a keen observer of humanity and an incisive, intelligent critic of just about everything he sees, even institutions like the aristocracy or patriarchy which he himself supports. He has a deep understanding of power dynamics and the emotional realities of abuse, and he's too sincere a misanthrope to let his own faction off the hook: he situates good and bad characters across the political spectrum and gives his adversaries fair representation. Engaging plots, well-drawn characters and a fundamental honesty about human nature make his books well worth reading despite his awful politics.
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 way too much, which means I'll be delighted with almost anything you choose to write about him: case fic 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. 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 sleep out under the stars with Commandant Hulot 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 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.
Prompts:
• Fouché was in Vendôme from 1784-1787, when Corentin was 7-10 years old. This throws a wrench in the "illegitimate son" hypothesis. Corentin's old enough to be at Vendôme College along with Fouché, 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? Corentin says to Vautrin that he was "very intimate with the late Duc d'Otranto, to my misfortune" – what does he mean by that? Does he resent his position of eternal instrument while Fouché’s biological children get plum government jobs and join the nobility and Fouché's other protégé Manuel gets to shine in the Chamber of Deputies? Did Corentin get in trouble for the fruitless domiciliary visit in Une ténébreuse affaire? Is there dub-con? Daddy issues?
• What if Corentin really is Fouché's "âme damnée" and a Citizen of Hell? Maybe when Fouché was raiding churches during the Terror he stole a relic that gives him control of the demon Corentin (named for the saint who first bound him, naturally), and he’s been using Corentin as his instrument ever since. This makes things a bit tricky when Fouché sends his agent out into the provinces to put down royalist insurrections – naturally Fouché can’t entrust his pet demon with the relic – but maybe there’s a way to temporarily transfer the obedience spell to another master?
• 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"?
• Les Chouans was a tragic missed opportunity for Hulot to acquire a friend who is a sharper operator than he is in the political and interpersonal spheres, and for Corentin to acquire a mentor figure with a functioning moral compass. They just need some nice fic writer to knock their heads together until they grudgingly learn to respect one another (or kiss). Perhaps Corentin gets kidnapped by the Chouans or follows Montauran into Marie’s house in Fougères and gets in over his head, and Hulot needs to come charging to his rescue. Years later Corentin can return the favor by sorting out Hector for him.
• Or maybe the whole demi-brigade decides to adopt Corentin as their mascot. They could dress him up as a little soldier! Or help Hulot spank some republican virtue into him.
• 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.
Engrenages | Spiral (TV)
Characters: Laure Berthaud, Joséphine Karlsson
A very dark French criminal justice procedural in the vein of Law & Order ("In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two incestuously entangled groups: the police judiciaire who investigate crime, and the magistrates who give them their orders. These are their stories.") with a female lead. For a few seasons the show centered on police detective Laure Berthaud, prosecutor Pierre Clément, and investigating judge François Roban, but Pierre flounced out of the magistrature and later got stabbed to death, leaving a former antagonist, defense attorney Joséphine Karlsson, to prop up the lawyerly side of the triangle. The show is big on police brutality, corruption within the magistrature and burnt corpses in cars, and pretty much everyone is dodgy except Roban who is only dodgy in the cause of justice. The French say it's realistic.
Amazon Prime has the first seven seasons and Hulu the first five, with English subtitles. (Search under Spiral). Season 8 just aired on Canal+ in France, but it hasn't been subbed in English yet and I haven't seen it. If you have and you want to include it, feel free; don't worry about spoiling me. But you definitely don't need to have seen it to write these prompts.
What I like about it:
The show is well written, and from an American perspective the window into an inquisitorial justice system is interesting (and makes you feel marginally better about our own atrocious criminal justice system). Laure should have been fired for misconduct seven seasons ago but she's nevertheless very likable, even when she's doing stuff like seducing the commissaire of the neighboring department so she can steal the bullet that would incriminate her dodgy subordinate for accidentally shooting a guy in the lung. Roban has an appealing if slightly deranged commitment to seeing justice done at all costs and bears an endearing resemblance to a giant bird. And Engrenages has a gift for giving terrible people plausible redemption arcs, most notably Joséphine, who started out as a venal mob lawyer but whose heart grew three sizes after helping some immigrants.
Optional details:
I've been longing for more interaction between these two ever since Laure barged into Joséphine's apartment to blackmail her and they had that fraught confrontation back in Season 2. The show keeps teasing it, but it never delivers. That's where you come in.
Femmeslash would be great, a better fix-it for the colossal mess S6 left them in would be great, casefic would be great, Laure and Joséphine going for a girls' night out and doing karaoke would be great. Joséphine seems to end up calling Laure every time she's in crisis – there's got to be a reason for that, right? Or maybe it's time for Joséphine to return the favor and bail Laure out of one of her many, many disasters.
They can be friends or enemies or lovers or some combination of the three – just write something about their relationship, romantic, platonic or professional, and I'll be happy.
Laure and Joséphine are bright, driven women fighting for a place in a man's world and they care about justice when they're not too busy committing serious professional standards violations, which makes it hard not to root for them. Unfortunately, between their terrible life choices and the ambient bleakness of the Engrenages universe, rooting for them is a doomed enterprise. After Pierre's death it really looked for about five minutes like something good might happen between them: bonding over shared grief and alcohol, or fun cop vs. defense attorney adventures with Joséphine occupying Pierre's former slot in the show's traditional cop/judge/lawyer triumvirate, or even canon f/f. (Caroline Proust said she was up for it, and Laure's fucked every other hot recurring character, so why not?) Instead we got a rape plot and attempted vehicular homicide.
This is so not where I hoped this was going. Dear writer, please console me for my disappointment.
I am very fond of Roban and find myself inexplicably attached to Herville post-S5 finale, and I welcome their presence in any fic, especially considering Herville's fate in S7. (Is there an equivalent to shipping where you want people to work together professionally? Because Herville and Laure were weirdly cute together in S6. Never thought I'd come to say that.) Tintin is well shot of these human disasters but I welcome him too. Gilou... exists.
I'd prefer not to have Laure/Gilou as a big focus, but feel free to include it in the background if you want.
Prompts:
• Femmeslash! Laure has had some pretty bad luck with men, and should consider alternatives. Joséphine is very attractive, very available, and does not have high moral standards for her lovers. It's a match made in heaven.
• THAT SCENE. You know the one I mean. (If you don't, it's the one in S2 E8 where Laure storms into Joséphine's apartment, encounters her in her dressing gown, talks about her tits and how much she hates her, and then Joséphine tells her that deep down they're the same. If that's not an invitation to foeyay I don't know what is.)
• All the boozy mourning for Pierre seems like it should lead to consolation sex. Joséphine drank a whole bottle of wine and then invited Laure over to her apartment in the middle of the night so she could sob on her shoulder. I mean, come on.
• Laura is besieged on all sides by men who want to parent her baby. A nice problem for a mostly-single mother to have, you might think, but not one that seems to be working for Laure. Despite her pathological avoidance of the situation and her abdication of parental rights, it's clear she doesn't want to give Romy up entirely – she kept that crib in her living room for six months! – but she's completely unresponsive to Brémont's frankly heroic efforts to convince her to coparent with him, and even with Gilou's support and encouragement she's afraid or unwilling to raise Romy herself.
You know what could help here? Someone who is as completely unprepared, unenthusiastic, and psychologically unfit for parenthood as Laure is. Enter... Joséphine! I honestly think having a partner who is as freaked out by the situation as she is might help Laure cope.
• Cellmates! Joséphine had some good chemistry with Lola, but obviously her true destinedsoulcellmate is Laure. Laure's done so many crimes over the years that you're honestly spoiled for choice when it comes to reasons to send her to jail. And I can't imagine a French prison is a particularly comfortable place for a former police officer - Laure might need Joséphine's talents at working the system to get her out of a tight spot.
• It is really unclear how Eric Edelman persuaded Vern to flip during the reconstruction. It felt rather like the writers realized the audience was sick of the #MeToo attempted murder case from hell and just wanted that whole plotline to go away, which was true, but having inflicted it on us I feel they owed us a more satisfactory conclusion. Maybe something sensible should happen instead, like Gilou accidentally shooting Vern in the lung so he can't testify.
• I cannot believe that the first thing Joséphine did after getting out of prison was to show up at Laure's apartment and crash on her couch, and then they didn't even fuck. They had wine! And Laure's probably not familiar with how alcohol interacts with her antidepressants yet! And everyone is traumatized and emotionally unbalanced! Such a golden opportunity for an ill-advised one night stand, cruelly squandered. Someone should rectify this.
• Laure saved Joséphine from kidnapping and probable murder (well, technically Ali saved her, but Laure was the one to pull her out of the car and hug her afterwards). Joséphine should thank her, if you know what I mean. Or possibly get kidnapped again by another shady client so Laure can save her some more.
• Judge Wagner is the unsung hero of this show. The writers obviously want you to root against him, and you do because if he prevails there'd be no show, but he's right almost 100% of the time and French policing would be in a far better state if he got his way. I'd love to see a fic from his perspective, either one where he finally succeeds in getting Laure sacked or the tragic, prolonged saga of his many, many failures. Joséphine can defend her, assuming she's not in prison.
19th Century CE French Politics RPF
Characters: Jacques-Antoine Manuel
Political RPF about 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 an extremely limited franchise during the monarchies censitaires and some impressive voter suppression tactics), 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.
This year I'm requesting Jacques-Antoine Manuel, a Restoration-era liberal politician famous for his integrity, his eloquence, and his unwavering resistance to the absolutist Bourbon monarchy, who stands at the center of some of the period's most pivotal events.
Manuel began his political career as the protégé of Napoleon’s sinister police chief Joseph Fouché during the Hundred Days, first writing for his newspaper and then becoming Fouché's mouthpiece in the Chamber of Deputies. Fouché used Manuel’s eloquence to buy time and block the ascension of a Bonapartist dynasty so he could maneuver France into a position to negotiate the Bourbons’ return, something he saw as the only way for the defeated nation to secure a constitutional monarchy and some hope for a democratic future. Nevertheless, to a young republican idealist like Manuel it must have felt like a terrible betrayal.
In 1815 Manuel met the popular songwriter Pierre-Jean de Béranger and struck up a friendship that would make them the 19th century French political RPF OTP to end all OTPs. In 1823 he was expelled from the Chamber of Deputies on a bullshit pretext because the government was so desperate to shut him up. The obvious remedy was to reelect him, but his colleagues feared he was too controversial and would damage the electoral prospects of the whole liberal slate. They used dirty tricks to block his candidacy, effectively ending his political career.
Shortly afterwards Béranger moved in to Manuel's apartment, and they lived together until Manuel's tragic death three years later. Béranger wanted nothing from Manuel's estate but his pocket watch and his mattress, which he slept on for the rest of his life. When he died thirty years later he was buried beside Manuel in the same grave, where their medallions now gaze into each other's eyes for eternity. Neither of them ever married, and although Béranger slept with women during his life, he didn't during the years when he knew Manuel. There's no historical proof that they were lovers, but the circumstantial evidence is pretty compelling.
Although Manuel died before the July Revolution brought down the Bourbons, he still shaped the regimes that followed through his protégé Adolphe Thiers, future prime minister, president, and all-around moral disaster. In 1821, Thiers came to Paris with nothing but 100 francs in his pocket and a letter of introduction to Manuel. Manuel took him under his wing, bringing him into his political circle and getting him a job as a columnist at the Constitutionnel, the leading liberal newspaper of the day. It was the launch of Thiers' political career, which would culminate in him massacring 30,000 Parisians and then saving French democracy. In between, he accidentally put two despots on the throne, blew up the Second Republic, got himself exiled, tried to stop one catastrophically stupid war, and caused another.
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 divides in its body politic. Nineteenth century France was a mess, and Manuel had a front row seat for much of that turmoil. He's a bridge between eras, linking Fouché, the Terrorist of the First Republic, to Thiers who would go on to found the Third. He's also a bridge between assholes, a single good man surrounded by a sea of bad ones, and it's interesting to see how someone so upright navigates a political climate more suited to realpolitik and cynicism. Also he's a classic iron woobie and his relationship with Béranger is very endearing.
Optional details:
Manuel has a connection with many of the major figures of French politics in the first half of the eighteenth century, and I'd love a fic that digs into his relationships with any of them.
It seems evil skips a generation in French politics, because Fouché is creepy as hell and although Thiers ultimately redeemed himself and fulfilled all Manuel's hopes for him, he did so while standing atop a mountain of corpses. Yet sandwiched in between them is Manuel, a shining beacon of liberalism and integrity. How did he preserve his idealism amidst this sea of cynics, opportunists and authoritarians, and what price did he pay for it?
I'm totally up for shipping Manuel with any of his contemporaries, whether it's a heartwarming romance with Béranger or dubcon with Fouché or Marchangy. But gen political adventures would be great too!
Prompts:
• It's interesting Manuel trusted Fouché enough to associate with him at all, much less move into his house, write his newspaper columns for him, and speak for him in the Chamber. Perhaps it wasn't entirely predictable that a regicide would turn his coat and start working for the Bourbons, but Fouché had already presided over the repression of the Jacobins on behalf of the Directory and founded Napoleon's secret police. Neither his authoritarian tendencies nor his opportunism were a secret. What was Manuel thinking, allying himself with such a patron? How did he feel about Fouché's sudden but inevitable betrayal?
• Manuel was famously handsome, possibly gay, and living in Fouché's house. Fouché was such a reptilian weirdo that I feel like they probably didn't bone, but I am open to persuasion on this point.
• Béranger never has a bad word to say about anyone, even Marchangy who persecuted him, but he haaaates Fouché. Even if Manuel doesn't think he was exploited and betrayed by his patron, his boyfriend clearly does.
• Speaking of betrayals, opposition leader Casimir Périer gave a magnificent speech in Manuel’s defense when he was expelled from the Chamber in 1823 but then possibly conspired to end his career a year later. Hatesex or politically fraught H/C, anyone? (Also they’re the two hottest French politicians of their day; they’re both famous for it in contemporary sources. It would be a tragic waste if they never fucked.)
• Louis Marchangy prosecuted the Carbonari conspiracy of which Manuel was secretly a member. At the trial that condemned the four sergeants of La Rochelle to death, he famously said “Here the real culprits are not in the dock, but on the lawyers’ benches.” He was referring to Mérilhou, but one can easily imagine he felt the same anger and frustration towards the politicians who hid in the shadows and let the young soldiers be sacrificed in their place. And how better to expiate those feelings than through hatesex?
• Béranger, on the other hand, is full of love and touching odes to his dead boyfriend, and he and Manuel deserve a little happiness together before the bitter tides of history or my fondness for whump fic sweep it all away.
• Chief among the likely causes of their future misery is Thiers, their little protégé who went to the bad. Maybe Manuel should try to spank some basic human decency into him. In support of this proposal, I submit the following anecdote from Henri Malo's 1932 Thiers biography:
• Or maybe Manuel should trying fucking some human decency into him instead. Béranger can join in too, if he likes. Heck, throw in Thiers' BFF and person-whose-couch-he-was-crashing-on Mignet, another protégé whom Manuel set up in political journalism, and make it an OT4.
• If all that fails, he can try haunting him. Manuel's image is graven on the pediment of the Panthéon, no thanks to Thiers, who tried to get the artist to change the design because he was afraid his dead mentor would be too politically controversial. It's very well placed for glaring down at people Eyes of Notre Dame-style.
Political RPF - UK 20th-21st c.
Characters: Walter Harrison, Bernard "Jack" Weatherill
What it says on the tin: RPF about the people who have been running Britain for the past hundred years or so. The Parliament of the United Kingdom is one of the oldest legislative bodies in the world, which means it’s had hundreds of years to develop a unique institutional culture with bizarre traditions dating back centuries and a certain theatrical air to its proceedings. Colorful personalities and political parties strongly divided along ideological lines provide a ready cast of heroes and villains, making it a prime target for political RPF. And no period of its recent history was more dramatic than the 1974-1979 Parliament, when the two Deputy Chief Whips battled it out to decide the fate of Jim Callaghan's struggling Labour government.
The Labour Party was just short of a majority in the House of Commons, which meant they could be thrown out of power by a vote of no confidence. To prevent this they had to madly scrabble around for votes by making deals with the minor parties, getting all their own MPs to show up to vote, and keeping the opposing Tory MPs from voting whenever possible. It was quite important that the government survive, because they were keeping Margaret Thatcher out of power and as soon as she got in she was going to either save Britain (the rightwing view) or make a huge mess that would lead to all of Britain's current social and economic woes (the leftwing view), but by any standard do a lot of harm to the sort of people who voted Labour.
The man in charge of the day-to-day operations to make sure this didn't happen was Labour's Deputy Chief Whip Walter Harrison, who came up with some ingenious and dubiously legal tricks to win every vote. (These included issuing MPs with disguises so they could vote twice, letting sick MPs live in the House of Commons so they could vote from their beds, and once jamming part of his body through the closing door of the voting lobby and saying it should count as a fractional vote since he was halfway in the room.) Opposing him was the ridiculously nice and honorable Tory Deputy Chief Whip Jack Weatherill. Jack was as clever as Walter and knew a few tricks of his own, but his outstanding feature was his decency.
Although their jobs were dedicated to thwarting each other at every possible turn, the two men were friends. On the night the government finally fell they had an incredible confrontation: Jack offered to destroy his own career by abstaining from the confidence vote to honor a gentleman's agreement between them, and Walter refused to accept his sacrifice and chose to let the government go down instead. (To give you a sense of the magnitude of this, there was a Labour MP who was on his deathbed and the whips were seriously discussing whether it would be worth killing him by dragging him down to Westminster if it meant they could win this vote. Several people including the dying MP himself were in favor of this plan, although Walter ultimately vetoed it.)
This history is covered magnificently in James Graham's play This House, but unfortunately the play has finished its run, and the National Theatre Live video of the production doesn't seem to be available online. If you really want you can buy the script here, but it's unlikely to be in your library and anyway it seems unfair to ask someone to read a script.
So if you haven't seen it you'll have to make do with the RL versions of Walter and Jack. Their Lolitics wiki pages are here and here, and here is an adorkable C-SPAN interview of Jack in his later incarnation as Speaker of the House of Commons. (There's a particularly entertaining bit of transatlantic comedy at 8:00 where the C-SPAN reporter asks him how much all the state portraits of the speakers could be sold for and Jack is politely aghast.)
I'm equally amenable to This House fanfic or RPF, whichever takes your fancy. (The primary difference of course being theatrical!Jack's fabulous blond quiff, but fans of both may feel there are some characterization differences as well.)
What I like about it:
Walter and Jack have an odd couple charm to them – the bluff, devious Yorkshire electrician vs. the urbane, honorable Savile Row tailor – that makes them an engaging partnership/rivalry, or an appealing slash pairing if you're into that sort of thing. I enjoy watching them try to outwit each other in their competition to win every vote, and the high stakes lend enormous tension to the interplay between their jobs and their friendship. They're opposing generals in a sort of civilized war and the future of their country is at stake, but in the final choice between friend and country they both chose to stand by their friend.
Optional details:
Walter and Jack's high-stakes chess game to maneuver their MPs into the right lobbies is endlessly entertaining, and I love both their friendly rivalry and their ultimate loyalty to each other.
I'm open to any fic that touches on their relationship. If you ship them, I'd be very happy with some slash. If not, gen case fic about some of their parliamentary shenanigans or the story of their first encounter or a thoughtful character study looking back over their careers would be lovely too. Or even an AU that maps their dynamic onto a different setting. There are a grand total of three fics about them apart from James Graham's play, so the world is pretty much your oyster here.
Prompts:
• The slash potential is vast. Jack must have learned something in that posh boarding school, right?
• Jack is a vegetarian and Walter likes plain, hearty meals centering around meat. I sense a rich vein of comedy waiting to be mined.
• Whiply shenanigans! I’d love some fic of Walter and Jack running around Parliament trying to whip votes, unwhip the other side's votes, and plotting various schemes to that end. Possibly involving seducing each other as a distraction.
• What happened in the aftermath of the 1979 election? Jack was immediately fired as Deputy Chief Whip by Thatcher and became Deputy Speaker, so in essence his offer to abstain was his last act as a whip and as a Tory. During that period the Deputy Speakers were appointed by the agreement of the whips, so Walter would have had some say in this. He released Jack from their agreement to save the career that Jack then threw away – how did he feel about his costly gift being spurned?
• Jack ends up as Speaker and eventually goes to the House of Lords. Walter gets shafted by his leadership and denied a peerage, so they don't get to hang out together in the politicians' retirement home. How does it all work out for them?
• The "friendly rivals" dynamic seems like it would translate well to a variety of AUs. Whips in spaaaaaace? The historical AU where Walter is a Roundhead and Jack is a Cavalier? I dunno, surprise me.
The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982)
Characters: Paul Chauvelin, Percy Blakeney
A TV movie adaptation of Baroness Orczy's historical superhero novels, starring Anthony Andrews as the eponymous hero, Jane Seymour as his French wife Marguerite, and Ian McKellen as Chauvelin, the French official charged with hunting him down. English nobleman Percy Blakeney and his buddies have been rescuing French aristocrats from the Terror by means of clever disguises and exciting chase scenes, and shield themselves from suspicion by playing the part of brainless fops in public. Nevertheless, Percy manages to win Marguerite's heart with his sly wit and dashing good looks, which becomes a problem when Robespierre tasks Marguerite's bitter ex Chauvelin with tracking down the Pimpernel. Marguerite is ignorant of her husband's secret identity and a malicious rumor has driven a wedge between the newlyweds, but when Chauvelin realizes he can use Marguerite to unmask the Pimpernel, the scene is set for a dramatic confrontation involving identity porn, ballroom dancing, tearful reconciliations, hostages and a sexy stripping duel.
You can rent it on various streaming services, or, um, not rent it.
What I like about it:
The Scarlet Pimpernel is fun brain candy, and this is my favorite version of the story. Any filmed version has the advantage of stripping out Orczy's reactionary narration, and this one in particular made some excellent adaptation choices. It starts earlier so it can really sell the viewer on Percy and Marguerite's romance before jerking the rug out from under them, and while I'm not fond of Chauvelin creeping on Marguerite their past relationship does mean that he's better integrated into the overall story arc. By folding in El Dorado it cuts out the anti-semitism from the end of the first book and replaces Percy doing something he arguably should not be doing, ie. liberating traitors so they can continue to incite hostile foreign powers to invade their country, overthrow French democracy and reinstate an odious dictatorship, with something that he absolutely should be doing, namely rescuing a nine-year-old child from a government hoping to slowly torture him to death through abuse and neglect because it's politically dangerous to send him into exile and it would look bad to execute him.
It's also very well cast. Andrews is an extremely likable Percy, appropriately insufferable in his fop mode and touchingly vulnerable when his marriage to Marguerite is on the rocks, Seymour is fierce and gorgeous as Marguerite, and McKellen is the only Chauvelin I've seen who really captures book Chauvelin's vibe of menace wrapped up in a small, neat, genteel package - a feat all the more impressive since he's only an inch shorter than Andrews. Also he's baby Ian McKellen and he has big sad eyes.
I also find it the best adaptation for Percy/Chauvelin shipping. For one thing, they added a stripping duel. More importantly, because the narrative laws of the Pimpernel universe mean that Percy will always, always come out on top, I really need to trust that his intentions towards Chauvelin are fundamentally benevolent, and 1982 Percy gives me more confidence than most. Specifically, I think he proved himself with the firing squad incident. It was of course a magnificent set piece of trolling that any Percy would be hard pressed to resist, but critically, this version of it required that Margeurite also briefly believe that he was dead. I don't think he would have put her through that just for the lulz. Rather, I think his explanation to Chauvelin was partially sincere: he knew he was about to ruin Chauvelin's day and possibly his life, and he wanted to give him his little moment of happiness before he brought the guillotine down. Also, he doesn't do the deliberately-messing-up-Chauvelin's-name thing, which shows an unusual regard for Chauvelin's feelings.
Optional details:
Percy/Chauvelin is a woefully underrepresented pairing and if you wanted to fix that you would be my hero, but I'd also be very happy with gen adventure fic.
If you ship them, I'd love some hatesex or winner-of-the-engagement-gets-to-fuck-the-loser dubcon, possibly the sort where Chauvelin comes down with a bad case of feelings and Percy has to find some delicate way to handle them. Maybe their next stripping duel goes a bit further, or Chauvelin realizes the only way to stop Percy reciting his stupid poem is to shut him up with a kiss. Or maybe Percy needs to give him a good hard spanking. Feel free to add Marguerite in as well and make it a threesome.
If not, you could fill in some of the gaps from the movie or write about what happens afterwards, or translate one of the book plots into the 1982verse. An enemies-forced-to-work-together story could also be a lot of fun.
Prompts:
• Book plots! The movie is great but a little frustrating in how much it compresses the timeline and thus denies us so many fun adventures in which Chauvelin chases Percy around France like a crazy stalker or Percy gets bored and goes looking for trouble because he misses his "amusing friend". I'd love to see the 1982 characters take on one of the plotlines from the novels.
• Percy's captivity, for instance, which the movie glosses over but which in El Dorado involves seventeen days of sleep deprivation to try to torture him into revealing the Dauphin's location, with Percy on the verge of collapse and Chauvelin "gazing on him to the full content of his heart" and briefly feeling sorry for him and then trying to induce Stockholm syndrome.
• Maybe the guards go a bit further with Percy than they do in book canon, and Chauvelin finds himself having to interrupt a beating or a rape… or deliberately holding back until it’s finished, so he can come in afterward to offer comfort and bandage Percy’s wounds.
• What happens to Chauvelin after the movie? 1982 Robespierre is not particularly maniacal and book Chauvelin outlives the much nastier book version, so presumably he'll be fine, but that's going to be an awkward meeting. And I imagine it's going to be harder to sell Percy on a rematch in Boulogne given how their last sword fight turned out.
• Or will it? Nobody spends a duel carefully cutting off their opponent's clothes by accident, especially when they know they're going to need the waistcoat they're divesting of all its buttons in the immediate future. Percy clearly delights in his superior swordsmanship, but at this point he should probably just drop the metaphor and prove he’s the better man with his dick. And he ordered his men to strip Chauvelin afterward with a disproportionate amount of relish. True, he didn't want to do it himself... but maybe he was just worried he'd enjoy it too much.
• I feel like the obvious tack to take here is winner-of-the-engagement-gets-to-fuck-the-loser dubcon which Percy doesn't mind at all because hatesex is fun and it makes for a great diversion from whatever his real scheme is, and which Chauvelin totally does mind but pretends he doesn't because it would disgrace the Republic to react to a temporary defeat with less equanimity than Percy. Chavuelin probably started it one time when he had Percy captive, and then Percy turned the tables on him the next time their positions were reversed without realizing that Chauvelin had contracted an acute case of feelings about it. So Percy just thinks he's found a new way to be annoying and keeps doing it, but meanwhile Chauvelin is (as usual in Pimpernel-related situations) on the cusp of a nervous breakdown.
But feel free to put your own spin on it! The classic enemies-are-forced-to-work-together-for-reasons or enemies-get-trapped-together-in-a-confined-space-and-fuck-out-of-sheer-frustration tropes could serve you well here. Or Hébertists-made-them-do-it, which I'm honestly surprised Orczy never wrote herself.
I realize that Marguerite presents some difficulties for this pairing, and I’m open to any solution that doesn't involve killing her off or permanently breaking her up with Percy. Maybe she’s being super French and they both just assume the marriage is open by default, maybe homosexual infidelity doesn’t count in her eyes, maybe they have a Chauvelin-specific arrangement where Percy can fuck him as long as he tells her every last detail the second he gets home, and Chauvelin knows this and it just adds to the humiliation. Or you could delay the Blakeneys' reconciliation by a few months so Percy can fuck Chauvelin while the two of them are still on the outs.
• Or perhaps the solution is a threesome! 1982 Marguerite had a thing for Chauvelin at one point, so even if she detests him at the moment there’s a spark there that could be rekindled. I'm sure she'd enjoy watching her husband give "her little Chauvelin" a thorough rogering, or she can grab a strap-on and join in, or she can make Chauvelin put all that big "you deserve a man who can satisfy your desires" talk to the test. Maybe Chauvelin and Percy should have a contest to see who can bring her off the fastest.
* Spanking! 1982 Chauvelin has big sad eyes and it would be immensely satisfying to see Percy put him over his knee and spank him until he cries. He's quite dastardly even by Chauvelin standards, reneging on his either-ors and being a jealous creep towards Marguerite, so he really has it coming. And you can't look at the little gleam in Percy's eye at the start of their sword duel and tell me Percy wouldn't enjoy it. He just needs an excuse.
• Did Chauvelin put Marguerite's name on the St. Cyr denunciation in a deliberate attempt to break her up with Percy? Because if so that was a very low move (in the book she actually made the denunciation) but I can't see any other purpose to it. Perhaps Marguerite should have the honor of spanking him for that one.
Crossovers
Several of these canons overlap in setting and theme, and I’d love to see a crossover. (Or throw in Les Misérables instead, if that takes your fancy.)
• Fouché has two protégés: Manuel, whose bright star shines from the tribune of the Chamber of Deputies, and Corentin, who in serving Fouché will never get "honor nor any position [he] can acknowledge". No doubt Corentin prefers to remain in the shadows, but he can't fail to be struck by the contrast between the destinies Fouché has allotted to them – Manuel is being set up to perhaps be Prime Minister one day, and Corentin will only ever be a policeman and a spy. And it must be weird for Manuel too, to have this sinister double and know that if he had different talents and a less exacting sense of personal honor, Fouché might be employing him in a very different capacity.
What's their relationship like? Is Corentin jealous, or does he spend the Hundred Days smirking to himself over how Manuel is being duped? Does Fouché expect him to aid Manuel's career, either by protecting him from the shadows or more directly by giving him blowjobs so Manuel can practice giving his speeches in the face of even the most pressing distractions? And what happens once Fouché is exiled, or after his death? Fouché's republican project will take decades to come to fruition, and Corentin's commitment to it seem unlikely to outlive him – unless Manuel can win his loyalty in his own right.
• According to Béranger, after Waterloo Fouché sent one of his own agents in Manuel's place, pretending to be Manuel, to treat with the Seventh Coalition, because he was afraid the real Manuel would say something too republican and compromise the peace negotiations. That strategem has Corentin's fingerprints all over it.
• What if a surviving Gérard or Gudin got involved with the Carbonari and Corentin had to find a way to extricate them, or used the information they'd inadvertently leaked to him to blackmail Manuel?
• I'm amused by the degree to which Corentin is a hybrid of Percy and Chauvelin, having inherited Percy's blond hair, incroyable fashion sense and love of disguises and trolling, and book Chauvelin's height, creepily penetrating gaze and fondness for elaborate revenge plots. The timeline doesn't work in either a Watsonian or a Doylist sense – Percy is too young to be Corentin’s parent even in a mpreg universe, and there’s no evidence Orczy ever read Balzac – but who knows, maybe sixteen-year-old Corentin stumbled across one of their duels and thought "Life goals!"
• Or maybe he and Fouché run afoul of Chauvelin in Thermidor Year II, when Fouché was running around Paris hiding from Robespierre's agents and trying to organize the Reaction. It would be fun to see these great schemers of the Terror square off against each other, perhaps with young Corentin caught in the middle? According to Balzac he's been imprisoned twice, and Chauvelin does love taking hostages…
Thank you for offering to write me a story. 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 here's some further information if you want it.
This letter is rather long, but please don't be intimidated or annoyed – it's not because I'm picky and hard to please. I talk a lot here because I'm naturally longwinded and I haven't said much about these fandoms elsewhere, which means my letter is the sole guide to my preferences for an author who wants one. 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 likes and dislikes 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.
Contents
General Info
La Comédie Humaine - Honoré de Balzac – Corentin
Engrenages | Spiral (TV) – Laure Berthaud, Joséphine Karlsson
19th Century CE French Politics RPF – Jacques-Antoine Manuel
Political RPF - UK 20th-21st c. – Walter Harrison, Bernard "Jack" Weatherill
The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982) – Paul Chauvelin, Percy Blakeney
Crossovers
All about me:
AO3 name:
Triggers: None
DNWs:
• Anything combining sex and digestion. Hand-feeding, licking chocolate off a lover, scat, watersports... none of this please. Anal and oral sex are fine, and so is swallowing come. Using a cucumber for a dildo or sex on the dining room table are okay too. But no sexy games with fondue.
• Guro, maiming, mutilation, scarification, branding, knifeplay, needle play. I’m totally up for the characters getting a thorough pummeling or getting stabbed in duels or battles – a bit of blood is fine, bruises are a plus – but please don’t amputate a limb or put out an eye.
• 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 into 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 lecture about my heartfelt belief in the ability of politics to effect change, but don't be fooled by my cynical fandoms: I'm a progressive at heart.
• 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.
• 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, 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:
Balzac is a mean-spirited reactionary, but I 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's a keen observer of humanity and an incisive, intelligent critic of just about everything he sees, even institutions like the aristocracy or patriarchy which he himself supports. He has a deep understanding of power dynamics and the emotional realities of abuse, and he's too sincere a misanthrope to let his own faction off the hook: he situates good and bad characters across the political spectrum and gives his adversaries fair representation. Engaging plots, well-drawn characters and a fundamental honesty about human nature make his books well worth reading despite his awful politics.
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 way too much, which means I'll be delighted with almost anything you choose to write about him: case fic 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. 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 sleep out under the stars with Commandant Hulot 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 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.
Prompts:
• Fouché was in Vendôme from 1784-1787, when Corentin was 7-10 years old. This throws a wrench in the "illegitimate son" hypothesis. Corentin's old enough to be at Vendôme College along with Fouché, 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? Corentin says to Vautrin that he was "very intimate with the late Duc d'Otranto, to my misfortune" – what does he mean by that? Does he resent his position of eternal instrument while Fouché’s biological children get plum government jobs and join the nobility and Fouché's other protégé Manuel gets to shine in the Chamber of Deputies? Did Corentin get in trouble for the fruitless domiciliary visit in Une ténébreuse affaire? Is there dub-con? Daddy issues?
• What if Corentin really is Fouché's "âme damnée" and a Citizen of Hell? Maybe when Fouché was raiding churches during the Terror he stole a relic that gives him control of the demon Corentin (named for the saint who first bound him, naturally), and he’s been using Corentin as his instrument ever since. This makes things a bit tricky when Fouché sends his agent out into the provinces to put down royalist insurrections – naturally Fouché can’t entrust his pet demon with the relic – but maybe there’s a way to temporarily transfer the obedience spell to another master?
• 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"?
• Les Chouans was a tragic missed opportunity for Hulot to acquire a friend who is a sharper operator than he is in the political and interpersonal spheres, and for Corentin to acquire a mentor figure with a functioning moral compass. They just need some nice fic writer to knock their heads together until they grudgingly learn to respect one another (or kiss). Perhaps Corentin gets kidnapped by the Chouans or follows Montauran into Marie’s house in Fougères and gets in over his head, and Hulot needs to come charging to his rescue. Years later Corentin can return the favor by sorting out Hector for him.
• Or maybe the whole demi-brigade decides to adopt Corentin as their mascot. They could dress him up as a little soldier! Or help Hulot spank some republican virtue into him.
• 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.
Engrenages | Spiral (TV)
Characters: Laure Berthaud, Joséphine Karlsson
A very dark French criminal justice procedural in the vein of Law & Order ("In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two incestuously entangled groups: the police judiciaire who investigate crime, and the magistrates who give them their orders. These are their stories.") with a female lead. For a few seasons the show centered on police detective Laure Berthaud, prosecutor Pierre Clément, and investigating judge François Roban, but Pierre flounced out of the magistrature and later got stabbed to death, leaving a former antagonist, defense attorney Joséphine Karlsson, to prop up the lawyerly side of the triangle. The show is big on police brutality, corruption within the magistrature and burnt corpses in cars, and pretty much everyone is dodgy except Roban who is only dodgy in the cause of justice. The French say it's realistic.
Amazon Prime has the first seven seasons and Hulu the first five, with English subtitles. (Search under Spiral). Season 8 just aired on Canal+ in France, but it hasn't been subbed in English yet and I haven't seen it. If you have and you want to include it, feel free; don't worry about spoiling me. But you definitely don't need to have seen it to write these prompts.
What I like about it:
The show is well written, and from an American perspective the window into an inquisitorial justice system is interesting (and makes you feel marginally better about our own atrocious criminal justice system). Laure should have been fired for misconduct seven seasons ago but she's nevertheless very likable, even when she's doing stuff like seducing the commissaire of the neighboring department so she can steal the bullet that would incriminate her dodgy subordinate for accidentally shooting a guy in the lung. Roban has an appealing if slightly deranged commitment to seeing justice done at all costs and bears an endearing resemblance to a giant bird. And Engrenages has a gift for giving terrible people plausible redemption arcs, most notably Joséphine, who started out as a venal mob lawyer but whose heart grew three sizes after helping some immigrants.
Optional details:
I've been longing for more interaction between these two ever since Laure barged into Joséphine's apartment to blackmail her and they had that fraught confrontation back in Season 2. The show keeps teasing it, but it never delivers. That's where you come in.
Femmeslash would be great, a better fix-it for the colossal mess S6 left them in would be great, casefic would be great, Laure and Joséphine going for a girls' night out and doing karaoke would be great. Joséphine seems to end up calling Laure every time she's in crisis – there's got to be a reason for that, right? Or maybe it's time for Joséphine to return the favor and bail Laure out of one of her many, many disasters.
They can be friends or enemies or lovers or some combination of the three – just write something about their relationship, romantic, platonic or professional, and I'll be happy.
Laure and Joséphine are bright, driven women fighting for a place in a man's world and they care about justice when they're not too busy committing serious professional standards violations, which makes it hard not to root for them. Unfortunately, between their terrible life choices and the ambient bleakness of the Engrenages universe, rooting for them is a doomed enterprise. After Pierre's death it really looked for about five minutes like something good might happen between them: bonding over shared grief and alcohol, or fun cop vs. defense attorney adventures with Joséphine occupying Pierre's former slot in the show's traditional cop/judge/lawyer triumvirate, or even canon f/f. (Caroline Proust said she was up for it, and Laure's fucked every other hot recurring character, so why not?) Instead we got a rape plot and attempted vehicular homicide.
This is so not where I hoped this was going. Dear writer, please console me for my disappointment.
I am very fond of Roban and find myself inexplicably attached to Herville post-S5 finale, and I welcome their presence in any fic, especially considering Herville's fate in S7. (Is there an equivalent to shipping where you want people to work together professionally? Because Herville and Laure were weirdly cute together in S6. Never thought I'd come to say that.) Tintin is well shot of these human disasters but I welcome him too. Gilou... exists.
I'd prefer not to have Laure/Gilou as a big focus, but feel free to include it in the background if you want.
Prompts:
• Femmeslash! Laure has had some pretty bad luck with men, and should consider alternatives. Joséphine is very attractive, very available, and does not have high moral standards for her lovers. It's a match made in heaven.
• THAT SCENE. You know the one I mean. (If you don't, it's the one in S2 E8 where Laure storms into Joséphine's apartment, encounters her in her dressing gown, talks about her tits and how much she hates her, and then Joséphine tells her that deep down they're the same. If that's not an invitation to foeyay I don't know what is.)
• All the boozy mourning for Pierre seems like it should lead to consolation sex. Joséphine drank a whole bottle of wine and then invited Laure over to her apartment in the middle of the night so she could sob on her shoulder. I mean, come on.
• Laura is besieged on all sides by men who want to parent her baby. A nice problem for a mostly-single mother to have, you might think, but not one that seems to be working for Laure. Despite her pathological avoidance of the situation and her abdication of parental rights, it's clear she doesn't want to give Romy up entirely – she kept that crib in her living room for six months! – but she's completely unresponsive to Brémont's frankly heroic efforts to convince her to coparent with him, and even with Gilou's support and encouragement she's afraid or unwilling to raise Romy herself.
You know what could help here? Someone who is as completely unprepared, unenthusiastic, and psychologically unfit for parenthood as Laure is. Enter... Joséphine! I honestly think having a partner who is as freaked out by the situation as she is might help Laure cope.
• Cellmates! Joséphine had some good chemistry with Lola, but obviously her true destined
• It is really unclear how Eric Edelman persuaded Vern to flip during the reconstruction. It felt rather like the writers realized the audience was sick of the #MeToo attempted murder case from hell and just wanted that whole plotline to go away, which was true, but having inflicted it on us I feel they owed us a more satisfactory conclusion. Maybe something sensible should happen instead, like Gilou accidentally shooting Vern in the lung so he can't testify.
• I cannot believe that the first thing Joséphine did after getting out of prison was to show up at Laure's apartment and crash on her couch, and then they didn't even fuck. They had wine! And Laure's probably not familiar with how alcohol interacts with her antidepressants yet! And everyone is traumatized and emotionally unbalanced! Such a golden opportunity for an ill-advised one night stand, cruelly squandered. Someone should rectify this.
• Laure saved Joséphine from kidnapping and probable murder (well, technically Ali saved her, but Laure was the one to pull her out of the car and hug her afterwards). Joséphine should thank her, if you know what I mean. Or possibly get kidnapped again by another shady client so Laure can save her some more.
• Judge Wagner is the unsung hero of this show. The writers obviously want you to root against him, and you do because if he prevails there'd be no show, but he's right almost 100% of the time and French policing would be in a far better state if he got his way. I'd love to see a fic from his perspective, either one where he finally succeeds in getting Laure sacked or the tragic, prolonged saga of his many, many failures. Joséphine can defend her, assuming she's not in prison.
19th Century CE French Politics RPF
Characters: Jacques-Antoine Manuel
Political RPF about 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 an extremely limited franchise during the monarchies censitaires and some impressive voter suppression tactics), 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.
This year I'm requesting Jacques-Antoine Manuel, a Restoration-era liberal politician famous for his integrity, his eloquence, and his unwavering resistance to the absolutist Bourbon monarchy, who stands at the center of some of the period's most pivotal events.
Manuel began his political career as the protégé of Napoleon’s sinister police chief Joseph Fouché during the Hundred Days, first writing for his newspaper and then becoming Fouché's mouthpiece in the Chamber of Deputies. Fouché used Manuel’s eloquence to buy time and block the ascension of a Bonapartist dynasty so he could maneuver France into a position to negotiate the Bourbons’ return, something he saw as the only way for the defeated nation to secure a constitutional monarchy and some hope for a democratic future. Nevertheless, to a young republican idealist like Manuel it must have felt like a terrible betrayal.
In 1815 Manuel met the popular songwriter Pierre-Jean de Béranger and struck up a friendship that would make them the 19th century French political RPF OTP to end all OTPs. In 1823 he was expelled from the Chamber of Deputies on a bullshit pretext because the government was so desperate to shut him up. The obvious remedy was to reelect him, but his colleagues feared he was too controversial and would damage the electoral prospects of the whole liberal slate. They used dirty tricks to block his candidacy, effectively ending his political career.
Shortly afterwards Béranger moved in to Manuel's apartment, and they lived together until Manuel's tragic death three years later. Béranger wanted nothing from Manuel's estate but his pocket watch and his mattress, which he slept on for the rest of his life. When he died thirty years later he was buried beside Manuel in the same grave, where their medallions now gaze into each other's eyes for eternity. Neither of them ever married, and although Béranger slept with women during his life, he didn't during the years when he knew Manuel. There's no historical proof that they were lovers, but the circumstantial evidence is pretty compelling.
Although Manuel died before the July Revolution brought down the Bourbons, he still shaped the regimes that followed through his protégé Adolphe Thiers, future prime minister, president, and all-around moral disaster. In 1821, Thiers came to Paris with nothing but 100 francs in his pocket and a letter of introduction to Manuel. Manuel took him under his wing, bringing him into his political circle and getting him a job as a columnist at the Constitutionnel, the leading liberal newspaper of the day. It was the launch of Thiers' political career, which would culminate in him massacring 30,000 Parisians and then saving French democracy. In between, he accidentally put two despots on the throne, blew up the Second Republic, got himself exiled, tried to stop one catastrophically stupid war, and caused another.
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 divides in its body politic. Nineteenth century France was a mess, and Manuel had a front row seat for much of that turmoil. He's a bridge between eras, linking Fouché, the Terrorist of the First Republic, to Thiers who would go on to found the Third. He's also a bridge between assholes, a single good man surrounded by a sea of bad ones, and it's interesting to see how someone so upright navigates a political climate more suited to realpolitik and cynicism. Also he's a classic iron woobie and his relationship with Béranger is very endearing.
Optional details:
Manuel has a connection with many of the major figures of French politics in the first half of the eighteenth century, and I'd love a fic that digs into his relationships with any of them.
It seems evil skips a generation in French politics, because Fouché is creepy as hell and although Thiers ultimately redeemed himself and fulfilled all Manuel's hopes for him, he did so while standing atop a mountain of corpses. Yet sandwiched in between them is Manuel, a shining beacon of liberalism and integrity. How did he preserve his idealism amidst this sea of cynics, opportunists and authoritarians, and what price did he pay for it?
I'm totally up for shipping Manuel with any of his contemporaries, whether it's a heartwarming romance with Béranger or dubcon with Fouché or Marchangy. But gen political adventures would be great too!
Prompts:
• It's interesting Manuel trusted Fouché enough to associate with him at all, much less move into his house, write his newspaper columns for him, and speak for him in the Chamber. Perhaps it wasn't entirely predictable that a regicide would turn his coat and start working for the Bourbons, but Fouché had already presided over the repression of the Jacobins on behalf of the Directory and founded Napoleon's secret police. Neither his authoritarian tendencies nor his opportunism were a secret. What was Manuel thinking, allying himself with such a patron? How did he feel about Fouché's sudden but inevitable betrayal?
• Manuel was famously handsome, possibly gay, and living in Fouché's house. Fouché was such a reptilian weirdo that I feel like they probably didn't bone, but I am open to persuasion on this point.
• Béranger never has a bad word to say about anyone, even Marchangy who persecuted him, but he haaaates Fouché. Even if Manuel doesn't think he was exploited and betrayed by his patron, his boyfriend clearly does.
• Speaking of betrayals, opposition leader Casimir Périer gave a magnificent speech in Manuel’s defense when he was expelled from the Chamber in 1823 but then possibly conspired to end his career a year later. Hatesex or politically fraught H/C, anyone? (Also they’re the two hottest French politicians of their day; they’re both famous for it in contemporary sources. It would be a tragic waste if they never fucked.)
• Louis Marchangy prosecuted the Carbonari conspiracy of which Manuel was secretly a member. At the trial that condemned the four sergeants of La Rochelle to death, he famously said “Here the real culprits are not in the dock, but on the lawyers’ benches.” He was referring to Mérilhou, but one can easily imagine he felt the same anger and frustration towards the politicians who hid in the shadows and let the young soldiers be sacrificed in their place. And how better to expiate those feelings than through hatesex?
• Béranger, on the other hand, is full of love and touching odes to his dead boyfriend, and he and Manuel deserve a little happiness together before the bitter tides of history or my fondness for whump fic sweep it all away.
• Chief among the likely causes of their future misery is Thiers, their little protégé who went to the bad. Maybe Manuel should try to spank some basic human decency into him. In support of this proposal, I submit the following anecdote from Henri Malo's 1932 Thiers biography:
Béranger inherited the horsehair mattress on which Manuel had slept, and a carpet. One day while visiting the songwriter, Thiers said to him: "Why, this carpet belonged to Manuel!" "How did you recognize it?" Béranger asked. "I've looked down at it so many times when Manuel scolded me!” replied Thiers.I draw from this story two conclusions. One, Manuel was trying to instill some sense of republican virtue in Thiers, it just didn't take. Two, either Thiers was capable of shame at one stage in his development, or the spanking AU is not an AU.
• Or maybe Manuel should trying fucking some human decency into him instead. Béranger can join in too, if he likes. Heck, throw in Thiers' BFF and person-whose-couch-he-was-crashing-on Mignet, another protégé whom Manuel set up in political journalism, and make it an OT4.
• If all that fails, he can try haunting him. Manuel's image is graven on the pediment of the Panthéon, no thanks to Thiers, who tried to get the artist to change the design because he was afraid his dead mentor would be too politically controversial. It's very well placed for glaring down at people Eyes of Notre Dame-style.
Political RPF - UK 20th-21st c.
Characters: Walter Harrison, Bernard "Jack" Weatherill
What it says on the tin: RPF about the people who have been running Britain for the past hundred years or so. The Parliament of the United Kingdom is one of the oldest legislative bodies in the world, which means it’s had hundreds of years to develop a unique institutional culture with bizarre traditions dating back centuries and a certain theatrical air to its proceedings. Colorful personalities and political parties strongly divided along ideological lines provide a ready cast of heroes and villains, making it a prime target for political RPF. And no period of its recent history was more dramatic than the 1974-1979 Parliament, when the two Deputy Chief Whips battled it out to decide the fate of Jim Callaghan's struggling Labour government.
The Labour Party was just short of a majority in the House of Commons, which meant they could be thrown out of power by a vote of no confidence. To prevent this they had to madly scrabble around for votes by making deals with the minor parties, getting all their own MPs to show up to vote, and keeping the opposing Tory MPs from voting whenever possible. It was quite important that the government survive, because they were keeping Margaret Thatcher out of power and as soon as she got in she was going to either save Britain (the rightwing view) or make a huge mess that would lead to all of Britain's current social and economic woes (the leftwing view), but by any standard do a lot of harm to the sort of people who voted Labour.
The man in charge of the day-to-day operations to make sure this didn't happen was Labour's Deputy Chief Whip Walter Harrison, who came up with some ingenious and dubiously legal tricks to win every vote. (These included issuing MPs with disguises so they could vote twice, letting sick MPs live in the House of Commons so they could vote from their beds, and once jamming part of his body through the closing door of the voting lobby and saying it should count as a fractional vote since he was halfway in the room.) Opposing him was the ridiculously nice and honorable Tory Deputy Chief Whip Jack Weatherill. Jack was as clever as Walter and knew a few tricks of his own, but his outstanding feature was his decency.
Although their jobs were dedicated to thwarting each other at every possible turn, the two men were friends. On the night the government finally fell they had an incredible confrontation: Jack offered to destroy his own career by abstaining from the confidence vote to honor a gentleman's agreement between them, and Walter refused to accept his sacrifice and chose to let the government go down instead. (To give you a sense of the magnitude of this, there was a Labour MP who was on his deathbed and the whips were seriously discussing whether it would be worth killing him by dragging him down to Westminster if it meant they could win this vote. Several people including the dying MP himself were in favor of this plan, although Walter ultimately vetoed it.)
This history is covered magnificently in James Graham's play This House, but unfortunately the play has finished its run, and the National Theatre Live video of the production doesn't seem to be available online. If you really want you can buy the script here, but it's unlikely to be in your library and anyway it seems unfair to ask someone to read a script.
So if you haven't seen it you'll have to make do with the RL versions of Walter and Jack. Their Lolitics wiki pages are here and here, and here is an adorkable C-SPAN interview of Jack in his later incarnation as Speaker of the House of Commons. (There's a particularly entertaining bit of transatlantic comedy at 8:00 where the C-SPAN reporter asks him how much all the state portraits of the speakers could be sold for and Jack is politely aghast.)
I'm equally amenable to This House fanfic or RPF, whichever takes your fancy. (The primary difference of course being theatrical!Jack's fabulous blond quiff, but fans of both may feel there are some characterization differences as well.)
What I like about it:
Walter and Jack have an odd couple charm to them – the bluff, devious Yorkshire electrician vs. the urbane, honorable Savile Row tailor – that makes them an engaging partnership/rivalry, or an appealing slash pairing if you're into that sort of thing. I enjoy watching them try to outwit each other in their competition to win every vote, and the high stakes lend enormous tension to the interplay between their jobs and their friendship. They're opposing generals in a sort of civilized war and the future of their country is at stake, but in the final choice between friend and country they both chose to stand by their friend.
Optional details:
Walter and Jack's high-stakes chess game to maneuver their MPs into the right lobbies is endlessly entertaining, and I love both their friendly rivalry and their ultimate loyalty to each other.
I'm open to any fic that touches on their relationship. If you ship them, I'd be very happy with some slash. If not, gen case fic about some of their parliamentary shenanigans or the story of their first encounter or a thoughtful character study looking back over their careers would be lovely too. Or even an AU that maps their dynamic onto a different setting. There are a grand total of three fics about them apart from James Graham's play, so the world is pretty much your oyster here.
Prompts:
• The slash potential is vast. Jack must have learned something in that posh boarding school, right?
• Jack is a vegetarian and Walter likes plain, hearty meals centering around meat. I sense a rich vein of comedy waiting to be mined.
• Whiply shenanigans! I’d love some fic of Walter and Jack running around Parliament trying to whip votes, unwhip the other side's votes, and plotting various schemes to that end. Possibly involving seducing each other as a distraction.
• What happened in the aftermath of the 1979 election? Jack was immediately fired as Deputy Chief Whip by Thatcher and became Deputy Speaker, so in essence his offer to abstain was his last act as a whip and as a Tory. During that period the Deputy Speakers were appointed by the agreement of the whips, so Walter would have had some say in this. He released Jack from their agreement to save the career that Jack then threw away – how did he feel about his costly gift being spurned?
• Jack ends up as Speaker and eventually goes to the House of Lords. Walter gets shafted by his leadership and denied a peerage, so they don't get to hang out together in the politicians' retirement home. How does it all work out for them?
• The "friendly rivals" dynamic seems like it would translate well to a variety of AUs. Whips in spaaaaaace? The historical AU where Walter is a Roundhead and Jack is a Cavalier? I dunno, surprise me.
The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982)
Characters: Paul Chauvelin, Percy Blakeney
A TV movie adaptation of Baroness Orczy's historical superhero novels, starring Anthony Andrews as the eponymous hero, Jane Seymour as his French wife Marguerite, and Ian McKellen as Chauvelin, the French official charged with hunting him down. English nobleman Percy Blakeney and his buddies have been rescuing French aristocrats from the Terror by means of clever disguises and exciting chase scenes, and shield themselves from suspicion by playing the part of brainless fops in public. Nevertheless, Percy manages to win Marguerite's heart with his sly wit and dashing good looks, which becomes a problem when Robespierre tasks Marguerite's bitter ex Chauvelin with tracking down the Pimpernel. Marguerite is ignorant of her husband's secret identity and a malicious rumor has driven a wedge between the newlyweds, but when Chauvelin realizes he can use Marguerite to unmask the Pimpernel, the scene is set for a dramatic confrontation involving identity porn, ballroom dancing, tearful reconciliations, hostages and a sexy stripping duel.
You can rent it on various streaming services, or, um, not rent it.
What I like about it:
The Scarlet Pimpernel is fun brain candy, and this is my favorite version of the story. Any filmed version has the advantage of stripping out Orczy's reactionary narration, and this one in particular made some excellent adaptation choices. It starts earlier so it can really sell the viewer on Percy and Marguerite's romance before jerking the rug out from under them, and while I'm not fond of Chauvelin creeping on Marguerite their past relationship does mean that he's better integrated into the overall story arc. By folding in El Dorado it cuts out the anti-semitism from the end of the first book and replaces Percy doing something he arguably should not be doing, ie. liberating traitors so they can continue to incite hostile foreign powers to invade their country, overthrow French democracy and reinstate an odious dictatorship, with something that he absolutely should be doing, namely rescuing a nine-year-old child from a government hoping to slowly torture him to death through abuse and neglect because it's politically dangerous to send him into exile and it would look bad to execute him.
It's also very well cast. Andrews is an extremely likable Percy, appropriately insufferable in his fop mode and touchingly vulnerable when his marriage to Marguerite is on the rocks, Seymour is fierce and gorgeous as Marguerite, and McKellen is the only Chauvelin I've seen who really captures book Chauvelin's vibe of menace wrapped up in a small, neat, genteel package - a feat all the more impressive since he's only an inch shorter than Andrews. Also he's baby Ian McKellen and he has big sad eyes.
I also find it the best adaptation for Percy/Chauvelin shipping. For one thing, they added a stripping duel. More importantly, because the narrative laws of the Pimpernel universe mean that Percy will always, always come out on top, I really need to trust that his intentions towards Chauvelin are fundamentally benevolent, and 1982 Percy gives me more confidence than most. Specifically, I think he proved himself with the firing squad incident. It was of course a magnificent set piece of trolling that any Percy would be hard pressed to resist, but critically, this version of it required that Margeurite also briefly believe that he was dead. I don't think he would have put her through that just for the lulz. Rather, I think his explanation to Chauvelin was partially sincere: he knew he was about to ruin Chauvelin's day and possibly his life, and he wanted to give him his little moment of happiness before he brought the guillotine down. Also, he doesn't do the deliberately-messing-up-Chauvelin's-name thing, which shows an unusual regard for Chauvelin's feelings.
Optional details:
Percy/Chauvelin is a woefully underrepresented pairing and if you wanted to fix that you would be my hero, but I'd also be very happy with gen adventure fic.
If you ship them, I'd love some hatesex or winner-of-the-engagement-gets-to-fuck-the-loser dubcon, possibly the sort where Chauvelin comes down with a bad case of feelings and Percy has to find some delicate way to handle them. Maybe their next stripping duel goes a bit further, or Chauvelin realizes the only way to stop Percy reciting his stupid poem is to shut him up with a kiss. Or maybe Percy needs to give him a good hard spanking. Feel free to add Marguerite in as well and make it a threesome.
If not, you could fill in some of the gaps from the movie or write about what happens afterwards, or translate one of the book plots into the 1982verse. An enemies-forced-to-work-together story could also be a lot of fun.
Prompts:
• Book plots! The movie is great but a little frustrating in how much it compresses the timeline and thus denies us so many fun adventures in which Chauvelin chases Percy around France like a crazy stalker or Percy gets bored and goes looking for trouble because he misses his "amusing friend". I'd love to see the 1982 characters take on one of the plotlines from the novels.
• Percy's captivity, for instance, which the movie glosses over but which in El Dorado involves seventeen days of sleep deprivation to try to torture him into revealing the Dauphin's location, with Percy on the verge of collapse and Chauvelin "gazing on him to the full content of his heart" and briefly feeling sorry for him and then trying to induce Stockholm syndrome.
• Maybe the guards go a bit further with Percy than they do in book canon, and Chauvelin finds himself having to interrupt a beating or a rape… or deliberately holding back until it’s finished, so he can come in afterward to offer comfort and bandage Percy’s wounds.
• What happens to Chauvelin after the movie? 1982 Robespierre is not particularly maniacal and book Chauvelin outlives the much nastier book version, so presumably he'll be fine, but that's going to be an awkward meeting. And I imagine it's going to be harder to sell Percy on a rematch in Boulogne given how their last sword fight turned out.
• Or will it? Nobody spends a duel carefully cutting off their opponent's clothes by accident, especially when they know they're going to need the waistcoat they're divesting of all its buttons in the immediate future. Percy clearly delights in his superior swordsmanship, but at this point he should probably just drop the metaphor and prove he’s the better man with his dick. And he ordered his men to strip Chauvelin afterward with a disproportionate amount of relish. True, he didn't want to do it himself... but maybe he was just worried he'd enjoy it too much.
• I feel like the obvious tack to take here is winner-of-the-engagement-gets-to-fuck-the-loser dubcon which Percy doesn't mind at all because hatesex is fun and it makes for a great diversion from whatever his real scheme is, and which Chauvelin totally does mind but pretends he doesn't because it would disgrace the Republic to react to a temporary defeat with less equanimity than Percy. Chavuelin probably started it one time when he had Percy captive, and then Percy turned the tables on him the next time their positions were reversed without realizing that Chauvelin had contracted an acute case of feelings about it. So Percy just thinks he's found a new way to be annoying and keeps doing it, but meanwhile Chauvelin is (as usual in Pimpernel-related situations) on the cusp of a nervous breakdown.
But feel free to put your own spin on it! The classic enemies-are-forced-to-work-together-for-reasons or enemies-get-trapped-together-in-a-confined-space-and-fuck-out-of-sheer-frustration tropes could serve you well here. Or Hébertists-made-them-do-it, which I'm honestly surprised Orczy never wrote herself.
I realize that Marguerite presents some difficulties for this pairing, and I’m open to any solution that doesn't involve killing her off or permanently breaking her up with Percy. Maybe she’s being super French and they both just assume the marriage is open by default, maybe homosexual infidelity doesn’t count in her eyes, maybe they have a Chauvelin-specific arrangement where Percy can fuck him as long as he tells her every last detail the second he gets home, and Chauvelin knows this and it just adds to the humiliation. Or you could delay the Blakeneys' reconciliation by a few months so Percy can fuck Chauvelin while the two of them are still on the outs.
• Or perhaps the solution is a threesome! 1982 Marguerite had a thing for Chauvelin at one point, so even if she detests him at the moment there’s a spark there that could be rekindled. I'm sure she'd enjoy watching her husband give "her little Chauvelin" a thorough rogering, or she can grab a strap-on and join in, or she can make Chauvelin put all that big "you deserve a man who can satisfy your desires" talk to the test. Maybe Chauvelin and Percy should have a contest to see who can bring her off the fastest.
* Spanking! 1982 Chauvelin has big sad eyes and it would be immensely satisfying to see Percy put him over his knee and spank him until he cries. He's quite dastardly even by Chauvelin standards, reneging on his either-ors and being a jealous creep towards Marguerite, so he really has it coming. And you can't look at the little gleam in Percy's eye at the start of their sword duel and tell me Percy wouldn't enjoy it. He just needs an excuse.
• Did Chauvelin put Marguerite's name on the St. Cyr denunciation in a deliberate attempt to break her up with Percy? Because if so that was a very low move (in the book she actually made the denunciation) but I can't see any other purpose to it. Perhaps Marguerite should have the honor of spanking him for that one.
Crossovers
Several of these canons overlap in setting and theme, and I’d love to see a crossover. (Or throw in Les Misérables instead, if that takes your fancy.)
• Fouché has two protégés: Manuel, whose bright star shines from the tribune of the Chamber of Deputies, and Corentin, who in serving Fouché will never get "honor nor any position [he] can acknowledge". No doubt Corentin prefers to remain in the shadows, but he can't fail to be struck by the contrast between the destinies Fouché has allotted to them – Manuel is being set up to perhaps be Prime Minister one day, and Corentin will only ever be a policeman and a spy. And it must be weird for Manuel too, to have this sinister double and know that if he had different talents and a less exacting sense of personal honor, Fouché might be employing him in a very different capacity.
What's their relationship like? Is Corentin jealous, or does he spend the Hundred Days smirking to himself over how Manuel is being duped? Does Fouché expect him to aid Manuel's career, either by protecting him from the shadows or more directly by giving him blowjobs so Manuel can practice giving his speeches in the face of even the most pressing distractions? And what happens once Fouché is exiled, or after his death? Fouché's republican project will take decades to come to fruition, and Corentin's commitment to it seem unlikely to outlive him – unless Manuel can win his loyalty in his own right.
• According to Béranger, after Waterloo Fouché sent one of his own agents in Manuel's place, pretending to be Manuel, to treat with the Seventh Coalition, because he was afraid the real Manuel would say something too republican and compromise the peace negotiations. That strategem has Corentin's fingerprints all over it.
• What if a surviving Gérard or Gudin got involved with the Carbonari and Corentin had to find a way to extricate them, or used the information they'd inadvertently leaked to him to blackmail Manuel?
• I'm amused by the degree to which Corentin is a hybrid of Percy and Chauvelin, having inherited Percy's blond hair, incroyable fashion sense and love of disguises and trolling, and book Chauvelin's height, creepily penetrating gaze and fondness for elaborate revenge plots. The timeline doesn't work in either a Watsonian or a Doylist sense – Percy is too young to be Corentin’s parent even in a mpreg universe, and there’s no evidence Orczy ever read Balzac – but who knows, maybe sixteen-year-old Corentin stumbled across one of their duels and thought "Life goals!"
• Or maybe he and Fouché run afoul of Chauvelin in Thermidor Year II, when Fouché was running around Paris hiding from Robespierre's agents and trying to organize the Reaction. It would be fun to see these great schemers of the Terror square off against each other, perhaps with young Corentin caught in the middle? According to Balzac he's been imprisoned twice, and Chauvelin does love taking hostages…