Dear Yuletide Writer, 2021

[kainosite]

Greetings, O 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. (Also I needed to list a bunch of classical declamation prompts and I was too lazy to make a separate post.) 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
Classical Rhetorical Exercises – Any
La Comédie Humaine - Honoré de Balzac – Corentin
Enemy at the Door (TV) - Klaus Reinicke, Dieter Richter
Engrenages | Spiral (TV) – Laure Berthaud, Joséphine Karlsson
19th Century CE French Politics RPF – Jacques-Antoine Manuel

All about me:

AO3 name: 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 also fine.

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 need 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.
• Classical rhetorical exercises.

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.


Classical Rhetorical Exercises

Characters: Any

Fandom Specific (lack of) DNW: I'm waiving my usual "No mutilation or maiming" rule on this one, because sometimes you gotta ask pirates to chop off your son's hands. When in Rome...

In classical antiquity higher education consisted of training in rhetoric and oratory, and students were assigned themes on which to give a speech. The most advanced of these rhetorical exercises were the controversiae, in which students were given a legal case and asked to argue for either the prosecution or the defense. Compilations of these declamation exercises have survived, and they are wacky: the majority center around the activities of a set group of stock characters in a hypothetical city-state with a totally fictitious legal system. This universe was shared across the whole Greco-Roman world, with the same absurd laws, characters and tropes popping up in rhetoric schools from Hispania to Gaza across a span of centuries.

In short, it was a fandom, a sort of distributed kink meme for legal nerds, in which the teachers provided the prompts and their students supplied the fills. And not just students! Grown-ups liked to do declamation exercises too, as a brain teaser or a competitive party game. Professional rhetoricians would even do public performances of the speeches to entertain an audience and advertise their skills.

The four extant compilations in Latin are Seneca the Elder's Oratorum et Rhetorum Sententiae Divisiones Colores, Calpurnius Flaccus' Declamationes and Quintilian/pseudo-Quintilian's Declamationes Maiores and Declamationes Minores. In Greek there is Sopater's Division of Questions, and some declamation exercises in the works of Libanius and Choricius of Gaza.

Most of these texts are available online in the original Latin or Greek (thanks to ricardienne for the links!), but they're harder to find in English. (I'm not sure that all the Libanius controversiae have ever been published in translation at all.) The best place to look for them is in academic libraries or on the high seas. You can also look on Amazon, but I really don't recommend it; these books tend to have small print runs and several of them now cost upwards of a hundred dollars.

You can preview Calpurnius Flaccus' declamation prompts on Google Books.

The Loeb Classical Library has published all of Possibly-Quintilian's Lesser Declamations online in two volumes – if you don't have a subscription you can read it with persistence and the dextrous use of private browser windows.

It also has a slightly cursed version of Seneca's controversiae that lacks a comprehensive table of contents, thereby guaranteeing you the full rambling old man shouting at clouds experience of the intros. It can be accessed in the same way as Quintilian.

A recent translation of Choricius of Gaza’s rhetorical exercises (well, from 2009; that's recent by the standards of this fandom) conveniently received a very detailed write-up in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review that includes all the declamation prompts.

But you don't actually need to read any of these texts except for flavor, because I'm going to copy and past my favorite declamation prompts into this letter.

What I like about it:

I love how recognizably fannish this two-thousand-year-old subculture is, with its own conventions and tropes and fanon that slowly accretes into a ridiculous impenetrable glob. One of my favorite things about studying Classics is that little jolt of connection you feel when you're reading an ancient text and you realize that Socrates, a man who lived so long ago that he worried about what the invention of writing might be doing to Kids These Days, is being sarcastic, and not only can you recognize his sarcasm, but all these years later it's still funny. I get the same feeling of kinship looking at Classical Rhetorical Exercises Fandom. And because of that communal process of building on each other's work, the declamation prompts can get hilariously convoluted.

Here are some of my favorites:

The Two Deadly Doctors (Calpurnius Flaccus 13)

The law:
- There is a reward for slaying a tyrant.

The case:
Suspecting that he had been given poison by his personal doctor, a tyrant tortured the man, but he steadfastly denied it. The tyrant sent for the city's doctor. The city doctor told the tyrant that he had indeed been given poison by the other doctor, but that he would administer an antidote. He gave the tyrant a cup of the antidote, and, after draining it, the tyrant immediately died. They dispute over the reward.

The Crossdressing General (Choricius 11)

The law:
- War heroes are to be commemorated with a painting, showing them in the clothes they wore at the victory.

The case:
A triumphant general defeated the enemy by disguising himself as a woman while making a night raid. Not wishing to be seen wearing a dress, he argues that laws should not require a man to accept a prize against his will.

The Stabby Son, the Destitute Dad and the Pirates (Seneca 1.7)

The law:
- Children must support their parents or be imprisoned.
- It's legal (and indeed virtuous) to kill tyrants.
- It's legal to kill adulterers if you catch them in the act.

The case:
A man killed one of his brothers, a tyrant. The other brother he caught in adultery and killed despite the pleas of his father. Captured by pirates, he wrote to his father about a ransom. The father wrote back to the pirates, saying that he would give them double the ransom money if they cut off his son's hands. The pirates let the son go. The father is in need; the son is not supporting him.

The Conveniently Timed Wedding (Quintilian 247)

The law:
- Rape victims may opt either to marry their rapist or to have him executed.
- Wives inherit their husband’s property.

The case:
A rich young man committed rape. While the victim was deciding what to do with him, he sent his relatives to her to ask her to marry him. After hearing their pleas, she wept in silence. The young man stabbed himself. Before he died, she opted for marriage. The relatives and the wife all claim his property.

The Brave Tyrannicide (Quintilian 253)

The case:
There were tyrants in two neighboring city-states. When somebody killed the tyrant of one, the tyrant of the neighboring city demanded that they surrender the tyrannicide to him and threatened war unless they gave him up. The tyrannicide proposes that he should be surrendered.

"I'll Disown You If You Don’t Stop" (Quintilian 322)

The law:
- It's legal to kill tyrants or those plotting tyranny.
- Fathers can disinherit their sons.

The case:
A young man came into a public meeting with a sword drawn and bloodstained and said that he had killed his father because he was planning to become a tyrant. He led a magistrate into the house and showed the preparations for tyranny. When the body was searched, a letter was found addressed to the son, with the words: "I'll disown you if you don’t stop, and if you oppose me in court, I shall reveal my reasons." The young man is accused of plotting tyranny.

Tyrannicide by Xanatos Gambit (Choricius 7)

The law:
- A prize is awarded for killing tyrants.

The case:
A man went to the palace in order to kill the city’s tyrant, but only managed to kill the man’s son. The tyrant then committed suicide from grief. The speaker claims he is responsible for the tyrant's death and demands the prize.

The Exposed Rape Baby (Calpurnius Flaccus 51)

The law:
- Rape victims may opt either to marry their rapist or to have him executed.

The case:
A certain man raped two women. When brought before the magistrates, one woman demanded marriage, the other his death. The magistrates supported the more merciful course of action. After the wedding took place, the other woman gave birth to the child she had conceived during the rape. She then exposed it. The rapist, who was by then the husband of the first woman, took up and acknowledged the child, and began to raise it. He is accused by his wife of maltreatment.

The Disinherited Son and the Debt Slave (Calpurnius Flaccus 14)

The law:
- Debtors who default on their debts shall serve as slaves to the moneylender.
- Fathers can disinherit their sons.
- A disinherited son shall possess none of his father's estate.
- The estates of freedmen shall revert by right to their former masters.

The case:
A man disinherited one of his two sons. Afterwards the father defaulted on a debt to a moneylender and became his slave. The disinherited son settled the account, securing his father's release, and granted him his formal freedom from the obligation to himself. When the father died, the disinherited son, according to his rights as a former master, and the other son who is the father's natural heir, both claim the estate.

Optional details:

Classical rhetorical exercises could be absolutely ridiculous, like a cross between a law exam and Jerry Springer with bonus pirates, and they deserve to become a Yuletide fandom in all their quirky glory.

I am up for whatever you decide to do with them, whether you want to actually write up some controversiae or flesh out a story around one of the prompts or go off in a weird meta direction – maybe the characters revolt at having their trauma turned into speech fodder for generations of Roman schoolboys, or maybe you'd like to write something about the rhetoricians as a fandom. Let your creativity run wild!

I've included a bunch of declamation prompts in my letter, but don't feel bound by them, or even by the nominated characters – if there's some other prompt out there that calls to you, feel free to write about that one instead.

I have to confess that unlike in my more traditional fandoms, I don't have a clear sense of what I'm looking for here. I just saw the declamation exercises and thought "This needs to be a Yuletide fandom!"

It seems to me there are a lot of directions you could go with this:

• Go Old School and actually do the rhetorical exercise: pick a prompt or prompts and write up the controversiae.

• Or make up some new prompts (modern AU? Increasingly absurd scenarios?) in the spirit of the originals, and write controversiae for those instead. Complete with analysis, if you like!

• Treat a declamation prompt (or some combination of prompts; perhaps you'd like to create a Classical Declamation Exercises Cinematic Universe where the crossdressing general from Choricius 11 picks up the exposed baby from Calpurnius Flaccus 51 to enhance his disguise, and then decides to adopt him) like an Original Works prompt and write a fic based off it. If you're going to do this, I would like you to try to preserve the general atmosphere of the canon – these characters aren't just archetypes floating in a void, they inhabit a weird, legalistic, Hellenistic world with clearly defined customs and political structures and chronic tyranny problems and very strong views about rewarding war heroes.

• Or add a twist to one of the prompts, and tell that story instead. For instance, it seems to me that the obvious solution to the "Two women, one rapist" problem is for one to marry him, the other to have him executed after the wedding, and then for the two of them to split his property.

• Alternatively, go meta! Maybe the inhabitants of Controversiapolis decide they're sick of of being constantly disinherited and raped and subjugated by tyrants for the edification of generations of Roman schoolboys, and they revolt and find a way to liberate themselves. Or perhaps they should sue the rhetoricians for damages in real world court? They must be pretty good at lawsuits by now.

• Or maybe it's the rhetoricians themselves you'd like to write about, and their peculiarly fannish culture. Modern AU where Seneca the Elder starts a huge flamewar on the Controversiae listserv with his snarky reviews of everyone else's declamations?

• Some kind of interactive fiction where the reader needs to navigate through a maze of twisty little legal principles, all alike, to successfully make a case for the prosecution or defense? I don't even know. I am up for some extremely weird fic here.


La Comédie Humaine - Honoré de Balzac

Characters: Corentin

Fandom specific DNW: Corentin/Lydie

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.

DNW: Ageplay, sexy food games, watersports, scat, guro or maiming, Corentin/Lydie.

I was 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… 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"?

• Contenson turns out to have a secret backstory as a double agent embedded with the counterrevolutionary aristocrats (relayed in The Seamy Side of History) that culminates in him betraying Rifoël du Vissard to his death and joining the police. Given the obvious point of connection here, I can't help but detect Corentin's hand in this, especially if he had an unpleasant encounter with Vissard back in 1799. How did that all go down?

• 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.

Enemy at the Door (TV)

Characters: Klaus Reinicke, Dieter Richter

Fandom specific DNW: Nazi apologism. EatD strikes a delicate balance of humanizing the German characters while making it clear that all of them, not just Reinicke, are the agents of a deeply evil regime, and I’d prefer for you to strike the same balance.

A subtle, well-written British TV series from the 1970s about the Nazi occupation of Guernsey. Unusually for a WW II drama, it isn't really about fighting Nazism; its concern is almost entirely with the question of complicity, both on the part of the island's Controlling Committee, which must balance the need to maintain a functional working relationship with their occupiers for the sake of the civilian population with the risk of collaboration, and on the part of the non-Nazi Wehrmacht officers. It's quite clever about normalizing the Germans for the viewer – most of them are very likable, and Kommandant Dieter Richter especially comes off as charming and eminently reasonable – and then ripping away that illusion and making it clear that they are party to something monstrous. Without ever being didactic about it, it's one of the more effective demolitions of the clean Wehrmacht myth I've seen.

You can watch it on Amazon Prime, or depending on your region, stream it for free on Roku.

What I like about it:

Enemy at the Door is a delicately-drawn study in moral luck, rendered with historical accuracy and a keen eye for detail. Richter, Freidel and Kluge aren't intrinsically bad people, but history has set them a difficult test and they are failing it, with catastrophic consequences for the people under their rule. Trying to run an ethical Nazi occupation was a doomed project from the outset, and their refusal to confront this obvious reality draws them ever more deeply into the crimes of the regime. And the islanders find themselves similarly compromised: being trapped on a small island with a huge German garrison makes effective resistance almost impossible, and the Nazis' kid-gloves approach to the Channel Islands makes provoking them distinctly unappealing. But if they all just keep their heads down and try to wait out the war, they give their tacit consent to the occupation. It's a show that asks hard questions about what to do when taking up arms against evil isn't really an option, questions that are probably more relevant to most of our lives than those raised by flashier war dramas.

Optional details:

Reinicke is 99% terrible, but that residual 1% is just human enough that you feel he could do better, and it's a vital necessity for the welfare of everyone on Guernsey that someone or something encourages him to do so, and soon. And who better to undertake this program of moral improvement than Richter, his commanding officer who repeatedly has to mop up after him and who has lost all patience with his crap?

If this task seems beyond human capacity, I would also accept the intervention of supernatural forces, or Richter just giving up in disgust and hatefucking him across his desk.

I've requested these two because Reinicke is my extremely problematic fave and Richter's failure to come up with an effective containment strategy for him drives me nuts, but I love the whole cast, so feel free to focus on someone else instead and just mention them in passing.

One of the brilliant things about EatD is the way it depicts Richter as legitimately cross-pressured. He really can't be handing out sulfanilamide from the army hospital to every child dying of septicemia, because his first obligation to his men. The correct solution to most of his moral dilemmas is "I wouldn't start from here", which, while good advice in general (don't run a Nazi occupation!) is not something that is immediately actionable. It's genuinely hard to figure out what he could do about, say, the treatment of the Todt workers that would actually improve things for them. But there is one area in which he is simply refusing to put in the work, and that is his relationship with Reinicke.

Richter's whole management strategy seems to consist of waiting for Reinicke to do something awful, yelling at him for being awful, and then sitting back and waiting for the cycle to repeat. Reinicke is so manifestly dangerous to everyone on the island that this laissez faire approach amounts to a total abdication of responsibility, and I find it absolutely maddening. It's a challenging situation because Richter doesn’t control Reinicke's career progression and the external incentives are pushing him towards further radicalization, but Richter does have some leverage: he and Freidel are older than Reinicke and outrank him, and it's clear that Reinicke wants their approval and respect. Freidel can make him change records just by glancing at the gramophone! I simply don't believe that Reinicke is incorrigible. Richter could probably get him to commit fewer war crimes if he could contain his loathing long enough to redirect him and provide some incentives for good behavior.

I'm sure babysitting an SS officer isn't how he wants to spend his war, but to paraphrase the immortal words of Yzma, "You really should have thought of that before you became Kommandant of Guernsey."

Prompts:

• The fight between Reinicke and Freidel (and indirectly, Richter) at the end of the first season is actually a skirmish in a much larger battle between the SS and the Wehrmacht that was going on in France at the time, which ultimately resulted in Otto von Stülpnagel resigning in protest at Nazi policy and the SS commander in France being recalled in disgrace. On Guernsey it just resulted in promotions for everyone, but I'm still curious about the fallout, especially why Richter chose not to follow Stülpnagel's example, and why it seems to have taken Reinicke five months to denounce him for correctionalizing the Martel case.

• Another major inflection point in SS-Wehrmacht relations: the failed assassination attempt on Hitler in July 1944. In France Stülpnagel's successor (another Stülpnagel) disarmed the SS and arrested their leadership; when the attempted coup failed the SS commander Carl Oberg made the interesting choice to minimize his retaliation and arrest as few of the conspirators as possible. What happened on Guernsey? Did Richter know of the plan in advance? Did he arrest Reinicke, or vice versa? Or did they decide that nothing they did on Guernsey could possibly affect the outcome, so it would best for everyone to just sit tight and await developments?

• I have a disproportionate fondness for those odd moments in which Reinicke is actually helpful. I think it's intermittent reinforcement – it happens so rarely that every time it does I start madly mashing the lever in the hopes that he'll do it again, but the next twenty times what pops out is a stolen baby or a deranged opinion on Mendelssohn. Anyway, I am here for all the fic where Reinicke isn't terrible for once and no one is quite sure what to make of it.

• Speaking of which, the end of the war. Admiral Hüffmeier had some insane plan to blow up the islands rather than surrender and take everyone, soldiers and civilians alike, out with him, but somehow I don't see Reinicke as the type to go down with his ship. Perhaps the time has come for him to put his credibility as a Nazi hardliner to good use and talk Hüffmeier out of it?

• Spanking Reinicke seems unlikely to actually help anything, but Richter would probably find it more satisfying than shouting at him, and he really, really deserves it. Plus, he wears very tight breeches – what more invitation is Richter waiting for? (Presumably, something to make this not a criminal assault on a subordinate, like one of those corporal punishment AUs.)

• While we're throwing the German military code out the window, they should bone. Maybe it's an incredibly ill-advised hatefuck born of mutual frustration, with potentially fatal consequences for Reinicke if they're caught. Maybe Reinicke got infected with sex pollen or he's a secret omega whose heat suppressants have worn off, and Richter faces a miserable choice between fucking him or letting his awful subordinate die. Or perhaps they live in the Rapportverse where Nazi policy on homosexuality is somewhat different and a sexual liaison between the Wehrmacht commander and his SS attaché is mandated by Berlin.

• It really feels like there's a dropped connection between Reinicke and Clare Martel. They're the first characters from the two groups to meet, and they're the most extreme members of their respective sides. Yet they never even have a conversation, apart from that "Good day, Fräulein" that had Clare so incensed in the first episode. I'm not sure where to go with this – preferably not somewhere shippy or murderous – but if you have ideas I'd love to hear them.

• Clare spilled blood on the beach at La Corbière, in a manner rather reminiscent of a human sacrifice. What if Kessler’s death summons something, and everyone has to team up to get rid of it?

• Reinicke strikes me as a prime candidate for supernatural calamity in general. Guernsey has rich veins of folklore and tentacle monsters to mine, and Reinicke is exactly the sort to offend the gods or trigger some fairy tale retribution through rudeness, arrogance, or flat-out murder. Maybe the Clameur de Haro summons Duke Rollo’s vengeful ghost along with calling down the wrath of the Guernésiais legal system, or Reinicke's the idiot who spills blood in the water. Anyway, bad things should happen to him, possibly involving tentacles. Richter can grudgingly rescue him or leave him to his fate.


Engrenages | Spiral (V)

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 all eight seasons, with English subtitles.

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 eight 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, casefic would be great, a fix-it for their terrible life choices 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 I like Lucie Bourdieu too. I also find myself inexplicably attached to Herville post-S5 finale, especially considering his 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.) I would welcome their presence in any fic. Tintin is well shot of these human disasters but he can come along too, along with Beckriche and the rest of Laure's team. 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, or any of the canonical Joséphine pairings.

Prompts:

• Femmeslash! Laure has had some pretty bad luck with men, and should consider alternatives. Joséphine is very attractive, very available, shares her total lack of work/life balance, 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.

• Thanks to Brémont's frankly heroic efforts to persuade her to coparent, Laure is now doing a lot better with Romy, but I think it would still help her to have a partner around to support her. Joséphine clearly has latent maternal instincts given the whole Souleymane debacle, but the trouble with having your heart grow three sizes is that you don't really know how to regulate your newfound compassionate impulses. It would help a lot if she could practice on a child who won't lead her into human trafficking and then get tragically murdered by criminals. Enter... Romy!

• Cellmates! Joséphine had good chemistry with Lola, but obviously her true destined soulcellmate 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 a French prison isn't 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 whole attempted murder plotline and just wanted it to go away, which was true, but having inflicted it upon 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 probably wasn't familiar with how alcohol interacts with her antidepressants yet! And everyone was traumatized and emotionally unbalanced! Such a golden opportunity for an ill-advised one night stand, cruelly squandered. Someone should rectify this.

• While the writers have sadly let me down on the Laure/Joséphine front, it's notable that by S8 all the characters seem to think there's something going on between them – Lola sitting on Joséphine's couch in her booty shorts had huge "She's mine now!" energy, and Edelman's "copine fliquette" felt rather pointed. There's the potential here for some kind of fake dating scenario to fool... criminals? The Parquet? Or maybe just a series of hilarious misunderstandings.

• 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.

• With all the shenanigans I'd forgotten how good Joséphine is at her actual job, but S8 really delivered on the score. I have such a competence kink for good defense advocacy, especially under an inquisitorial system where there's such inequality of arms between the two sides. Please give me all the casefic where Laure foolishly appoints Joséphine as the duty lawyer and then Joséphine proceeds to completely ruin all the cops' plans.

• 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. And letting someone else finally send Gilou to jail was just adding insult to injury! 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 in 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.