Dear Yuletide Writer, 2024

[kainosite]

Welcome, 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 (or you didn't see this letter because I unlocked it after assignments went out, whoops) 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
Cousin Bette - Honoré de Balzac – Bette Fischer, Valérie Marneffe
Enemy at the Door (TV) - Klaus Reinicke, Dieter Richter
Engrenages | Spiral (TV) – Laure Berthaud, Joséphine Karlsson
Moby Dick - Herman Melville – Starbuck, Flask, Fedallah

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. Unless it's a sperm whale doing it.
• 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.

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

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.

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, of course), 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 all that 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.


Cousin Bette - Honoré de Balzac

Characters: Bette Fischer, Valérie Marneffe

A novel in which Bette Fischer suffers one slight too many at the hands of her inconsiderate rich relatives and decides to rain down the fires of hell upon all their heads. She enlists the mistress of the family patriarch, her neighbor Valérie Marneffe, to help with her scheme, and through the combined powers of Bette's brain and Valérie's beauty the pair manage to wreak epic revenge and amass quite a lot of money before they are finally thwarted by a combination of overreaching and assorted dei ex machina.

The book is in the public domain, so you can read it for free online in both French and English via Wikisource or Google Books – here's an English translation I like, but others are available. You may also be able to find it in your local library.

What I like about it:

The Comédie Humaine is not short on magnificent bastards, but Bette is their queen. La Cousine Bette features one of the greatest revenge plots ever written, and while Bette's actions are morally indefensible there comes a point when you just have to sit back and admire a master at work.

That would be attraction enough, but the book also has fascinating gender politics. Balzac is a raving misogynist but of a very specific kind: he's willing to grant his female characters full agency and interiority and in his books they are as intelligent, courageous, active, and audacious as the men. Bette is easily the most clever and strong-willed person in La Cousine Bette and the prime driver of most of the action. But she has to be the antagonist, because while Balzac will happily bestow all these talents on his female characters, they are only allowed to employ them in selfless devotion to their husbands and children. As a spinster, Bette lacks the nuclear family necessary for female virtue and is therefore doomed to villainy.

But Balzac is also a very keen observer of power and abuse in all its forms, and he's unable to completely blind himself to the evils of patriarchy. He examines its power structures as he does any power structure he encounters, and then ferrets out ways for a clever member of the subaltern class to hack the system and turn it to their advantage. The result is what we might call weaponized femininity in its true form: exploiting your enemies' gendered assumptions about your role, your ambitions, and your capacities to fuck them up. Valérie is your typical evil temptress leading all the men astray with her feminine wiles, but Bette is something much more sophisticated. Her deliberate use of the traditional female emotional and physical caretaker role to lure her enemies into a deadly trap is a plotline I've never seen done before, and perhaps one that only Balzac with his odd combination of misogyny and insight could write. The result is a book that's inadvertently feminist in its themes, if not in its narration.

Optional details:

Femmeslash would be amazing. If you'd prefer to maintain their intense but non-sexual relationship from the book, that's fine too. I just desperately need some fic about them.

I'd love a canon-divergent AU where Bette and Valérie win the day, or a fic that translates the story into a different setting. Or you could explore their relationship in canon: fluff in which Valérie drags Bette with her to the theater or takes her shopping for curtains, darkfic that looks at all the ways in which they are using each other and the toxic interplay between Valérie's honeyed manipulation and Bette's viciousness and need for power and control. Or Valérie could turn her extensive experience in the art of seduction to a less lucrative but more emotionally fulfilling purpose, and introduce Bette to sex.

The second I finished reading Cousin Bette I went to look for the Bette + Valérie fic that clearly ought to exist according to Rule 34 and all the laws of nature and man. I was met with a gaping void.

Your mission is to fill this void.

Prompts:

• Bette and Valérie should fuck. Let's be real, Bette desperately needs to get laid, and except for Montès all of Valérie's lovers are probably terrible in bed and the poor woman deserves to orgasm for once. Are they able to be honest with each other, or does Valérie find that either intentionally or unintentionally her long practice in manipulating her lovers transfers to Bette as well?

• "The most violent sentiment known to mankind, a woman's love for a woman." Bette is pretty dangerous when provoked. Valérie is smart enough to recognize this and takes care not to anger her, and Bette values Valérie's happiness and is generally content to want whatever Valérie wants, so they manage to avoid conflict in canon. But I am very curious how a fight between them would go down. We know from Steinbock that Bette really does not brook defiance well – what would happen if Valérie chose to disobey her and deviated from the masterplan (say, by skipping Crevel and marrying Montés immediately?)

• Just in general, I'm here for all the dark femmeslash (or dark... extremely intense friendship and con artist revenge alliance) where Valérie gradually awakens to the reality that for all the myriad benefits of this relationship, she has built herself a cage and handed the keys to someone pretty scary, and Bette gradually comes to realize she can't trust Valérie any more than Val's male lovers can.

• Bette is interestingly unpossessive of Valérie in canon. Obviously The Plan requires Val to slut around, so some flexibility on that front was indispensable, but it does seem to go against Bette's fundamental nature to share. Sure, it's funny to watch the men wreck themselves over her, and Bette's such a hater that she could probably bask contentedly in the warm glow of vengeance for quite some time, but won't a day come when she begins to resent giving up all of Valérie's time to these dicks?

• I'd love an AU where the story follows what feels like its natural course when not derailed by Balzac's misogyny and princes and poisoners ex machina and Bette and Valérie triumph and become evil lesbian vengeance queens of Paris and roll around in their ill-gotten gains in blissful happiness for the rest of their days. Balzac's male villains get to win; why not them?

What do they actually want from their lives, freed from their financial worries? We know Valérie enjoys the good life, but I feel like she's had way too much fun twisting all her lovers around her little finger to go back to the less heady thrills of theater and fine dining. And I doubt she'd keep sleeping with unattractive men once it no longer seemed financially necessary. So what does she do instead? Does she go into salon politics? And what about Bette? She's far too industrious to loll around in idle luxury, and she seems like a woman who expects her money to work for her rather than just sit in a bank account. Does she go into venture capitalism? Real estate?

• The overall plot of the novel is one that could translate easily into different settings, and it would be fun to see an AU version. Maybe Bette is a politician who has a promised ministry ripped out from under her nose by President Hulot and given to his underqualified protégé Hortense, and she teams up with his secretary Valérie to avenge herself on the whole party leadership. Maybe they're ecologists and Steinbock is actually a grant to study alpine ibex that gets awarded to another researcher. Maybe they're naval officers in a space empire and Hortense gets awarded the captaincy of the newly built FS Steinbock because of nepotism.

• If I'm honest Cousin Bette really ought to be folded into the general Comédie Humaine fandom, but everyone finds it more convenient to keep it separate for Yuletide. Thus, a "crossover" prompt: Marshal Hulot deserved better than he got in this book, and who better to secure it for him than the police spy he's been fucking on and off since his days in Brittany? It would be fun to watch Bette and Corentin square off against each other, and since Bette is also fond of Marshal Hulot and Corentin presumably also wants revenge on his worthless brother for upsetting him, it seems like some meeting of the minds should be possible here. It's not like Bette even wants the marriage of convenience, really; she just suffers from a lack of better alternatives. But I reckon the French foreign intelligence service needs someone to run their Berlin station, and Bette is a brilliant administrator with fluent German. And poor Valérie probably needs a change of scene after all that unpleasant poisoning drama.


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 is 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 kept teasing it, but it never delivered. 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 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.


Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Characters: Starbuck, Flask, Fedallah

Fandom specific DNWs:
- Fedallah-bashing. Fedallah's goals and motives are obscure, and there's a fair case to be made that he's of Ahriman's party, but whichever side he's on it's pretty clear he's not the main problem here.
- Pip or Dough-Boy paired with anyone other than each other.
- Also, I'm making an exception to my general mutilation and maiming DNW for this one, because sometimes some jerks insist on trying to harpoon you or stab you with a boat-knife and you gotta bite off a few limbs to make a point.

Herman Melville's gonzo novel multi-genre hypertext whale experience about the whaling industry, mental illness, philosophy, religion, obsession, revenge, fate, love, hate, duty, civilization, capitalism, group dynamics, the beauty of nature, cetacean behavior, bad whale paintings, sperm squeezing, how to pick up a hot Polynesian boyfriend, and diverse other topics too numerous to list. It's an almost indescribably weird book – a comedy merged with a tragedy merged with gothic horror merged with an adventure novel merged with a detailed technical manual on whale flensing, interspersed with musings on everything from the significance of the color white to why humans like to stick statues up on columns. The basic story of Ahab's quest to avenge himself on Moby Dick has achieved a deep cultural penetration, but the book itself is so much richer and stranger than a simple revenge narrative.

You can find it on Project Gutenberg here, or in your local library.

What I like about it:

Seafaring is an interesting exercise in the creation of microcosms. A ship is an artificial society with its own peculiar laws and customs, all designed to keep a little wooden bubble afloat and on course on a hostile ocean and its occupants from killing each other for the duration of the voyage, which on a whaler like the Pequod could be expected to last three or four years. Melville is unusually thoughtful about this process for a maritime author, and Moby-Dick is unique among ship books in the degree to which it pans out to ask how we got here and where we're going. He's also unusually kind – for a book that glorifies a horrific industry, it's striking how much compassion Moby-Dick has not only for all its human characters, but for their prey. It makes the tragedy of the Pequod's fate come through all the more keenly, but you can't help feeling that the real hero of the story won in the end.

Plus, you have to respect a book where the editor was like "Herman, do we really need to interrupt the plot for a three chapter listicle in which the narrator rates whale paintings?" and the author said "Yes. :)"

Optional details:

Despite everything, Starbuck can't help but love Ahab, and I'd love some fic about their relationship, shippy or platonic. It would also be nice to see him be a little more proactive about averting their doom. Maybe he should try rallying his fellow mates to the cause, or confer with Fedallah, or invent the bomb lance five years early. (Or maybe they do succeed in killing Moby Dick, and it turns out to be a very bad idea.)

Flask isn't worried about white whales but he's still having a rotten time on this voyage: he's constantly hungry and the owners won't let him fornicate. Snacks and sex for Flask! Flask/Stubb or Flask/Daggoo seem like promising possibilities.

As for Fedallah, what is his deal? What is his understanding of the situation aboard the ship, of Ahab or of Moby Dick? What outcome is he hoping for here? Why did someone who can forecast the future with pinpoint accuracy join this ill-fated voyage in the first place?

As the additional tag implies, this is one of those prompts that's actually an "OR", not an "AND", so feel free to just write about one of them or some combination.

I'm always a sucker for sensible lieutenants trying to get their commanders to see reason, so Starbuck won my heart from the first. His situation is so utterly impossible: he's bound by law and custom to unconditionally obey his captain unless the ship is in immediate danger, and even if he were willing to mutiny he doesn't have the charisma to rally the crew away from Ahab. Ahab isn't really in control of himself so no appeal to his better instincts can succeed, but there's enough nobility and humanity left in him that Starbuck can't help falling for him. And Starbuck's getting plenty of ominous leadings but no solutions. (I got a lovely fic about him last year, but what can I say, I'm greedy.)

Flask meanwhile is the Pequod's secret woobie, concealing starvation behind a cheerful smile. I'm charmed by the way he comes off as the boring, normal one until you get him in a whaleboat, whereupon he jumps up and down on his hat and flings it across the ocean like a frisbee and you realize he's just as insane as everyone else, but exclusively about whales.

And then there's Fedallah. On the surface he just seems like a generic yellow peril evil advisor type, but there are a bunch of things about him that don't quite add up, to the point where it's genuinely impossible to tell from the text which side he is on in either the Ahura Mazda/Ahriman or the Ahab/Moby Dick conflicts. If you take the character as written he's full of fascinating contradictions: he's a Parsi but a very irreligious one (his sudre and kusti are nowhere to be seen, he has a tooth carved into a xrafstar, Ahab blows out a flame next to him and he doesn't bat an eye). He displays more animus towards Ahab, whom he nominally works for, than towards Moby Dick, whom he is supposed to be hunting. He can see the future and seems pretty unhappy about his impending death, but he joined this doomed voyage anyway. His inexplicable life choices deserve more attention.

Prompts:

• I know Starbuck isn't keen to help Ahab to his impious end, but given that he can't do anything about the impiety, maybe he should try to avert the end. After Moby Dick chipped all the boats on Day 2 without anyone even getting a lance in they really needed to hold a strategy meeting, and you'd think the chief mate might have something to offer here. Bomb lances? Better naval tactics? Literally any ideas other than "Let's try the thing that's already completely failed twice" or "Stab the 80-ton whale in the face with a six-inch knife"?

• It's common for adaptation Starbucks to approach the other mates for help, and I find it intriguing that book!Starbuck never even tried. Or did he? They're not usually super sympathetic to his concerns, but there were a few times like immediately after the typhoon when they seemed to be of the same mind.

• Ahab can't bring himself to call off the hunt entirely, but he cares enough about Starbuck to sacrifice a whole whaleboat when he's lowering for Moby Dick just to keep him safe. That was a huge concession, one Starbuck didn't even ask for, one which compromises their chances of success and the safety of everyone in the other three boats. How do they both feel about it?

• Does Starbuck feel at all that the owners sold him a pup? He's in an awful position, but he's not the one who put himself there. Peleg was Ahab's chief mate; he knows what Ahab is like. Did they honestly believe he'd just get over the lost leg?

• What if he's been seeing all those bad omens not because the Pequod is doomed, but because killing Moby Dick is a really, really bad idea? I am here for all the bad endings where he is some kind of sacred leviathan or cosmic horror and succeeding in their quest makes everything so much worse.

• That Flask is chronically hungry is an indictment of the entire afterguard: Ahab and Starbuck for letting it happen, Stubb for not caring enough about his friend to stay at the table five minutes longer, and Flask for not having the guts to speak up. The conflict over Moby Dick is genuinely hard to solve, but this is easy! No one even wants this! (And what must Flask's previous ships have been like, that he doesn't feel he can say anything even to Stubb or Starbuck?) Get this poor kid a square meal.

• Telling him to beware of fornication was also pretty uncalled for. It's a three year voyage; let Flask fuck! Stubb is sharing a stateroom with him and is here for a good time, and Daggoo obviously loves him to bits. Flask has options here.

• I cannot emphasize enough how commercially unnecessary it was for Daggoo to let Flask stand on his shoulders in the whaleboat. Flask didn't even ask - Daggoo volunteered! Because he wasn't going to let Flask suffer a moment's frustration over being short if there was something he could do to help. It was very sweet, but it does make you wonder what Daggoo sees in him.

• Size kink maybe? Because they're tailor-made for it.

• What is Fedallah's backstory? Is he an apostate or an atheist? Did he get kicked out of his community for doing forbidden magic or being gay? He's running around with a Chinese jacket and a Muslim name (an alias?) and a turban made from his own hair like a naked sahhu - where did he pick all this up? How does he know the four Filipino guys?

• As evil advisors go, Fedallah is not very committed: his baseline attitude towards Ahab seems to be barely concealed contempt, and he never actually encourages him to pursue Moby Dick. While Ahab trusts him to steer his whaleboat, he notably snubs him as rope guardian. I'm so curious about how they understand their relationship. How did they meet? What possessed Fedallah to ship aboard the Pequod, and what does he hope to accomplish there?

• I find this a hard fandom to write fix-it fic for. The story really does seem to run on iron rails, hurtling towards its tragic conclusion with unstoppable momentum. But there are two people aboard who understand that they're in serious trouble and want to live (three, if we include Pip), and it feels like they could unlock a door to a better ending if only they would pool their resources. Starbuck with his earnest desperation to save the ship and Fedallah with his perfect foreknowledge (and perhaps Pip with his ability to elicit Ahab's compassion) are each holding a piece of the key, but in canon they never put them together. Maybe they should try having a conversation instead of standing on opposite sides of the quarterdeck staring into the ocean in miserable silence.

• Am I saying that the solution to their problems is an Ahab/Starbuck/Fedallah threesome? I'm not not saying that.