Dear Yuletide Writer, 2025
Oct. 16th, 2025 05:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kainositeGreetings, 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 (I'm requesting Cicero; you might have seen this coming) and I haven't said much about these fandoms elsewhere, which means my letter is the sole guide to my preferences for an author who wants one. If you're not someone who likes getting a lot of additional detail, feel free to skip it entirely.
Beneath the cut you will find my likes and dislikes and more detailed thoughts on yaoi, the characters, the fandoms, and possible directions you may want to take your story in, if you find yourself in need of inspiration.
Contents
General Info
La Comédie Humaine - Honoré de Balzac – Corentin
Enemy at the Door (TV) - Klaus Reinicke, Dieter Richter
Engrenages | Spiral (TV) – Laure Berthaud, Joséphine Karlsson
Rome (TV 2005) – Marcus Tullius Cicero
All about me:
AO3 name:![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p2.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
Kainosite
Triggers: None
DNWs:
• Anything combining sex and digestion. Hand-feeding, licking chocolate off a lover, scat, watersports... none of this please. Anal and oral sex are fine, and so is swallowing come. Using a cucumber for a dildo or sex on the dining room table are okay too. But no sexy games with fondue.
• Guro, maiming, mutilation, scarification, branding, knifeplay, needle play. I’m totally up for the characters getting a thorough pummeling or getting stabbed in duels or battles or cut up during torture – 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.
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.
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 (TV)
Characters: Laure Berthaud, Joséphine Karlsson
A very dark French criminal justice procedural in the vein of Law & Order ("In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two incestuously entangled groups: the police judiciaire who investigate crime, and the magistrates who give them their orders. These are their stories.") with a female lead. For a few seasons the show centered on police detective Laure Berthaud, prosecutor Pierre Clément, and investigating judge François Roban, but Pierre flounced out of the magistrature and later got stabbed to death, leaving a former antagonist, defense attorney Joséphine Karlsson, to prop up the lawyerly side of the triangle. The show is big on police brutality, corruption within the magistrature and burnt corpses in cars, and pretty much everyone is dodgy except Roban who is only dodgy in the cause of justice. The French say it's realistic.
Amazon Prime has 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 destinedsoulcellmate is Laure. Laure's done so many crimes over the years that you're honestly spoiled for choice when it comes to reasons to send her to jail. And 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.
Rome (TV 2005)
Character: Marcus Tullius Cicero
Fandom specific DNW: My usual maiming and mutilation DNW still applies here, but if you need to posthumously dismember some people and post their body parts around the Forum, do what you gotta do.
A lavish HBO series about the fall of the Roman Republic, from the start of the civil wars to Octavian's ascension. The protagonists are a pair of common soldiers, Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo, but major players like Caesar, Pompey, Mark Antony, Brutus, Octavian and his mother Atia, Servilia, and Cicero also get prominent roles. It's a well-written show with a fantastic cast, and while it’s politics-as-soap-opera and its commitment to historical accuracy is loose at best, it does an excellent job of conveying vibes, both in terms of the politics and personalities and in terms of the general culture.
You can watch it on HBOMax, pay to watch it through other streaming services, or seek it on the high seas.
What I like about it:
Rome is a convincing portrayal of a society with values that are in some ways very different to our own, and the people who have to live in it. Despite the historical inaccuracies there are a lot of subtle touches scattered around to reward the classicist: translated Latin phrases in the dialogue, the spot-on curse tablets, the weird way in which both civil government and warfare are religious functions. The acting really is superb, and the show does all parties justice: while it’s broadly pro-republican, it makes it very clear why a victory for the optimates would not be an unambiguous win. And a story about a flawed democracy collapsing into despotism feels unfortunately relevant to our own era.
Optional details:
Cicero is charming, and he’s delightfully whumpable both personally and politically. Elegiac character studies, political maneuvering, canon divergence AUs, fluffy shipfic, fix-it fic, make-it-worse fic – there’s so much to explore here and I’d be happy with any of it!
If you’re inclined toward slash, he’s very cute with Brutus, and he’s so physically afraid of Mark Antony and Antony takes such pleasure in it that the dub-con or non-con practically writes itself.
If not, I’d love an AU where Cicero finally manages to wrangle a win for the Republic that doesn’t immediately get monkey’s pawed, or one where instead of proscribing him Antony and Octavian just abduct him and fight over who gets to torture and co-opt him like two dogs with a rope toy.
I suspect Rome was written by former Latin students exercising a grudge, because there’s a repeated theme where nobody will let Cicero talk. This is all very cathartic, but it has the perverse consequence of sanding off the more irritating elements of his personality to expose the earnest republicanism beneath. Instead of dragging you through a wasteland of subordinate clauses in search of a verb or banging on about Catiline for the fiftieth time, he spends most of the show running around frantically in a futile attempt to stop a bunch of megalomaniacs from making everything worse and prevent a democratic collapse. If he’s a bit more weaselly than his historical counterpart, he’s also tiny and adorable and a bit camp and Mark Antony keeps threatening to murder him, which makes his occasional lapses in courage fairly sympathetic.
He’s also an interesting component of the show’s construction of Roman masculinity/virtus. Most of the male leads lack a natural aptitude for it, but of the whole cast, Cicero is furthest from the mark: he has no military accomplishments, he’s squeamish around violence, he’s easily wearied by privation, physical bravery comes hard to him. And his strategy for handling this (95% of the time be wryly self-deprecating about your deficiencies, and the other 5%, when it really counts, try really, really hard to get it right) is one of the more appealing, especially when contrasted with Octavian’s (double down on the part you find easiest: policing your female relatives’ sexuality) and Antony’s (quadruple down on the part you’re getting wrong: being a total fuckboy).
It adds a potential layer to slash fic, too. Bottoming is incompatible with Roman citizenship: the censors will literally strike you from the electoral rolls. This isn’t a serious career risk for any politician willing to remain closeted, but their concept of civic virtue is so entangled with homophobia and Cicero in particular is so willing to weaponize it that I doubt he could be normal about it. In any consensual relationship I imagine he’d be acutely conscious of the disgrace in transgressing this norm, and it makes rape particularly vicious: not just a violation of the victim’s body but a direct attack on their civic identity. (I should emphasize that you don’t need to engage with any of this – if you’d rather just write a homophobia-free AU that’s totally fine! – but it’s there to explore if you want to.)
I love the whole cast, so feel free to write about whoever you like and to pair off anyone with anyone. I’m prompting for the more obvious Cicero ships, but if the muse calls you to Cicero/Atia or something, follow your heart.
Prompts:
• Cicero and Brutus are very cute together on the military campaign/road trip from hell and later in Rome as guilty surrender-buddies. Fluff before everything goes (more) to shit? Taking some comfort from all the misery in each other?
• Poor Cicero spent the whole ride over to Caesar’s camp practicing his surrender speech only to discover that Caesar only has eyes for Brutus. It’s very funny, but it must be a terrible anti-climax for him. He should seek Caesar out later to get some closure.
• You know who else is not enjoying this surrender? Mark Antony. While Caesar is closeted with Brutus doing whatever those two do together, maybe Antony should take his feelings out on Cicero. They might both find it cathartic.
• Cicero is a more reliable political asset to Octavian as a dead martyr than a living orator, but at the end of the day he is Cicero – there’s a certain cachet to co-opting him that can’t be achieved by killing him. And if, hypothetically, one did not anticipate one’s alliance with Mark Antony lasting forever, a guy who can get him declared an enemy of the state with a single speech might be useful to keep around, provided he could be frightened into compliance. Lepidus doesn’t want to do any proscriptions at all, so Octavian has some room to maneuver here – Antony is potentially outvoted.
• It showed tremendous restraint on Antony’s part to just send his men to kill Cicero instead of wanting to be there in person to watch him squirm, but let’s be honest: restraint is not the quality we most value in him. And what a tragic missed opportunity to tell Cicero “Say a woman’s role suits me best to my cock.”
• Also a tragic missed opportunity to provide an object lesson for certain snotty brats getting too big for their praetexta. Antony can discover, as Pullo did in the sewers, that Octavian is unsquickable.
• Really, he’s been missing out. BDSM with Livia is all very well, but Cicero is a sadist’s wet dream: he’s so reactive and he tries so hard to hide it and he’s terrible at it. There is nobody so fun to torment in the entire show. And Octavian is twisted enough to come up with something truly inhumane, like forcing him to give a speech with no nested clauses in it.
• Cicero can be… flexible, but there is probably a limit to what he can be pushed to endorse, even faced with the imminent threat of torture or death. It would be interesting to know what that limit was.
• Fix-it fic! To be honest, I’m not sure this situation is fixable. Even if Cicero and Octavian were to team up and put their combined intellect towards saving the Republic – which they won’t, because Octavian doesn’t value democracy and Cicero doesn’t value actually fixing anything – there are deep-seated structural problems which are probably beyond their ability to solve. A system of government designed for a city-state can’t function for an empire spanning three continents, and the Roman electorate are unwilling to give up the benefits of empire to save their democracy. Cicero would be miserable in exile, and he won’t be any happier sitting around Italy watching his country slide irrevocably into authoritarianism. Being politely murdered by Pullo is probably as good as this gets for him.
Still. Might be nice.
• Reversing the outcome of the Battle of Philippi won’t solve anything either – at best it buys them another thirty years until the next general decides to march on Rome – but it’s easy enough to arrange from a military standpoint. Brutus can return to Rome afterwards to rescue Cicero from durance vile.
• Easier still to kill off Octavian. A timeline where they fight to a draw with Antony and Brutus as the two survivors could be interesting.
• The Liberators return to Rome, rescue Cicero… and then start proscribing people. Oops.
• Octavian has reached a point where he can’t tolerate anyone who isn’t wholly his creature – even Agrippa and Maecenas won’t be blindly loyal enough for him in the end – which is a tragedy for everyone around him, including him. But if he succeeds in breaking Cicero then Cicero sort of will be his creature, and they’re both good governance guys. Cicero is staunchly republican because he understands that this goal is fundamentally incompatible with dictatorship, but it’s also incompatible with the Republic as it has existed for his entire lifetime. Whereas Octavian has actual fixes that will kind of work for two hundred years. Maybe they can help each other.
• Conscript dad-friend! Cicero has things to offer the golden trio that they can’t get from each other – boring law and philosophy talk for Octavian, catty gossip for Maecenas, not being a total sociopath for Agrippa. Maybe this relationship can help everyone.
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 (I'm requesting Cicero; you might have seen this coming) and I haven't said much about these fandoms elsewhere, which means my letter is the sole guide to my preferences for an author who wants one. If you're not someone who likes getting a lot of additional detail, feel free to skip it entirely.
Beneath the cut you will find my likes and dislikes and more detailed thoughts on yaoi, the characters, the fandoms, and possible directions you may want to take your story in, if you find yourself in need of inspiration.
Contents
General Info
La Comédie Humaine - Honoré de Balzac – Corentin
Enemy at the Door (TV) - Klaus Reinicke, Dieter Richter
Engrenages | Spiral (TV) – Laure Berthaud, Joséphine Karlsson
Rome (TV 2005) – Marcus Tullius Cicero
All about me:
AO3 name:
Triggers: None
DNWs:
• Anything combining sex and digestion. Hand-feeding, licking chocolate off a lover, scat, watersports... none of this please. Anal and oral sex are fine, and so is swallowing come. Using a cucumber for a dildo or sex on the dining room table are okay too. But no sexy games with fondue.
• Guro, maiming, mutilation, scarification, branding, knifeplay, needle play. I’m totally up for the characters getting a thorough pummeling or getting stabbed in duels or battles or cut up during torture – 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.
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.
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 (TV)
Characters: Laure Berthaud, Joséphine Karlsson
A very dark French criminal justice procedural in the vein of Law & Order ("In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two incestuously entangled groups: the police judiciaire who investigate crime, and the magistrates who give them their orders. These are their stories.") with a female lead. For a few seasons the show centered on police detective Laure Berthaud, prosecutor Pierre Clément, and investigating judge François Roban, but Pierre flounced out of the magistrature and later got stabbed to death, leaving a former antagonist, defense attorney Joséphine Karlsson, to prop up the lawyerly side of the triangle. The show is big on police brutality, corruption within the magistrature and burnt corpses in cars, and pretty much everyone is dodgy except Roban who is only dodgy in the cause of justice. The French say it's realistic.
Amazon Prime has 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
• 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.
Rome (TV 2005)
Character: Marcus Tullius Cicero
Fandom specific DNW: My usual maiming and mutilation DNW still applies here, but if you need to posthumously dismember some people and post their body parts around the Forum, do what you gotta do.
A lavish HBO series about the fall of the Roman Republic, from the start of the civil wars to Octavian's ascension. The protagonists are a pair of common soldiers, Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo, but major players like Caesar, Pompey, Mark Antony, Brutus, Octavian and his mother Atia, Servilia, and Cicero also get prominent roles. It's a well-written show with a fantastic cast, and while it’s politics-as-soap-opera and its commitment to historical accuracy is loose at best, it does an excellent job of conveying vibes, both in terms of the politics and personalities and in terms of the general culture.
You can watch it on HBOMax, pay to watch it through other streaming services, or seek it on the high seas.
What I like about it:
Rome is a convincing portrayal of a society with values that are in some ways very different to our own, and the people who have to live in it. Despite the historical inaccuracies there are a lot of subtle touches scattered around to reward the classicist: translated Latin phrases in the dialogue, the spot-on curse tablets, the weird way in which both civil government and warfare are religious functions. The acting really is superb, and the show does all parties justice: while it’s broadly pro-republican, it makes it very clear why a victory for the optimates would not be an unambiguous win. And a story about a flawed democracy collapsing into despotism feels unfortunately relevant to our own era.
Optional details:
Cicero is charming, and he’s delightfully whumpable both personally and politically. Elegiac character studies, political maneuvering, canon divergence AUs, fluffy shipfic, fix-it fic, make-it-worse fic – there’s so much to explore here and I’d be happy with any of it!
If you’re inclined toward slash, he’s very cute with Brutus, and he’s so physically afraid of Mark Antony and Antony takes such pleasure in it that the dub-con or non-con practically writes itself.
If not, I’d love an AU where Cicero finally manages to wrangle a win for the Republic that doesn’t immediately get monkey’s pawed, or one where instead of proscribing him Antony and Octavian just abduct him and fight over who gets to torture and co-opt him like two dogs with a rope toy.
I suspect Rome was written by former Latin students exercising a grudge, because there’s a repeated theme where nobody will let Cicero talk. This is all very cathartic, but it has the perverse consequence of sanding off the more irritating elements of his personality to expose the earnest republicanism beneath. Instead of dragging you through a wasteland of subordinate clauses in search of a verb or banging on about Catiline for the fiftieth time, he spends most of the show running around frantically in a futile attempt to stop a bunch of megalomaniacs from making everything worse and prevent a democratic collapse. If he’s a bit more weaselly than his historical counterpart, he’s also tiny and adorable and a bit camp and Mark Antony keeps threatening to murder him, which makes his occasional lapses in courage fairly sympathetic.
He’s also an interesting component of the show’s construction of Roman masculinity/virtus. Most of the male leads lack a natural aptitude for it, but of the whole cast, Cicero is furthest from the mark: he has no military accomplishments, he’s squeamish around violence, he’s easily wearied by privation, physical bravery comes hard to him. And his strategy for handling this (95% of the time be wryly self-deprecating about your deficiencies, and the other 5%, when it really counts, try really, really hard to get it right) is one of the more appealing, especially when contrasted with Octavian’s (double down on the part you find easiest: policing your female relatives’ sexuality) and Antony’s (quadruple down on the part you’re getting wrong: being a total fuckboy).
It adds a potential layer to slash fic, too. Bottoming is incompatible with Roman citizenship: the censors will literally strike you from the electoral rolls. This isn’t a serious career risk for any politician willing to remain closeted, but their concept of civic virtue is so entangled with homophobia and Cicero in particular is so willing to weaponize it that I doubt he could be normal about it. In any consensual relationship I imagine he’d be acutely conscious of the disgrace in transgressing this norm, and it makes rape particularly vicious: not just a violation of the victim’s body but a direct attack on their civic identity. (I should emphasize that you don’t need to engage with any of this – if you’d rather just write a homophobia-free AU that’s totally fine! – but it’s there to explore if you want to.)
I love the whole cast, so feel free to write about whoever you like and to pair off anyone with anyone. I’m prompting for the more obvious Cicero ships, but if the muse calls you to Cicero/Atia or something, follow your heart.
Prompts:
• Cicero and Brutus are very cute together on the military campaign/road trip from hell and later in Rome as guilty surrender-buddies. Fluff before everything goes (more) to shit? Taking some comfort from all the misery in each other?
• Poor Cicero spent the whole ride over to Caesar’s camp practicing his surrender speech only to discover that Caesar only has eyes for Brutus. It’s very funny, but it must be a terrible anti-climax for him. He should seek Caesar out later to get some closure.
• You know who else is not enjoying this surrender? Mark Antony. While Caesar is closeted with Brutus doing whatever those two do together, maybe Antony should take his feelings out on Cicero. They might both find it cathartic.
• Cicero is a more reliable political asset to Octavian as a dead martyr than a living orator, but at the end of the day he is Cicero – there’s a certain cachet to co-opting him that can’t be achieved by killing him. And if, hypothetically, one did not anticipate one’s alliance with Mark Antony lasting forever, a guy who can get him declared an enemy of the state with a single speech might be useful to keep around, provided he could be frightened into compliance. Lepidus doesn’t want to do any proscriptions at all, so Octavian has some room to maneuver here – Antony is potentially outvoted.
• It showed tremendous restraint on Antony’s part to just send his men to kill Cicero instead of wanting to be there in person to watch him squirm, but let’s be honest: restraint is not the quality we most value in him. And what a tragic missed opportunity to tell Cicero “Say a woman’s role suits me best to my cock.”
• Also a tragic missed opportunity to provide an object lesson for certain snotty brats getting too big for their praetexta. Antony can discover, as Pullo did in the sewers, that Octavian is unsquickable.
• Really, he’s been missing out. BDSM with Livia is all very well, but Cicero is a sadist’s wet dream: he’s so reactive and he tries so hard to hide it and he’s terrible at it. There is nobody so fun to torment in the entire show. And Octavian is twisted enough to come up with something truly inhumane, like forcing him to give a speech with no nested clauses in it.
• Cicero can be… flexible, but there is probably a limit to what he can be pushed to endorse, even faced with the imminent threat of torture or death. It would be interesting to know what that limit was.
• Fix-it fic! To be honest, I’m not sure this situation is fixable. Even if Cicero and Octavian were to team up and put their combined intellect towards saving the Republic – which they won’t, because Octavian doesn’t value democracy and Cicero doesn’t value actually fixing anything – there are deep-seated structural problems which are probably beyond their ability to solve. A system of government designed for a city-state can’t function for an empire spanning three continents, and the Roman electorate are unwilling to give up the benefits of empire to save their democracy. Cicero would be miserable in exile, and he won’t be any happier sitting around Italy watching his country slide irrevocably into authoritarianism. Being politely murdered by Pullo is probably as good as this gets for him.
Still. Might be nice.
• Reversing the outcome of the Battle of Philippi won’t solve anything either – at best it buys them another thirty years until the next general decides to march on Rome – but it’s easy enough to arrange from a military standpoint. Brutus can return to Rome afterwards to rescue Cicero from durance vile.
• Easier still to kill off Octavian. A timeline where they fight to a draw with Antony and Brutus as the two survivors could be interesting.
• The Liberators return to Rome, rescue Cicero… and then start proscribing people. Oops.
• Octavian has reached a point where he can’t tolerate anyone who isn’t wholly his creature – even Agrippa and Maecenas won’t be blindly loyal enough for him in the end – which is a tragedy for everyone around him, including him. But if he succeeds in breaking Cicero then Cicero sort of will be his creature, and they’re both good governance guys. Cicero is staunchly republican because he understands that this goal is fundamentally incompatible with dictatorship, but it’s also incompatible with the Republic as it has existed for his entire lifetime. Whereas Octavian has actual fixes that will kind of work for two hundred years. Maybe they can help each other.
• Conscript dad-friend! Cicero has things to offer the golden trio that they can’t get from each other – boring law and philosophy talk for Octavian, catty gossip for Maecenas, not being a total sociopath for Agrippa. Maybe this relationship can help everyone.