Dear Yuletide Personage
Nov. 2nd, 2019 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
melmilloHi, dear writer!
It's Yuletide time again! Hooray! I have a busy couple of months ahead of me so I went back and forth about signing up this year, but in the end the lure of holiday joy was too strong. :D I want you to have a lovely holiday as well, so please be assured I'll love whatever you end up writing for me.
I do not have much of a text-blogging presence in fandom namespace any longer, but my AO3 name is melmillo, and I quietly tumblr under the name smallmonday (though that hasn't been very actively recently).
Below is some basic blab about my reading preferences, and reposts of my official requests plus some specific thoughts on each request/canon.
General thoughts:
--I have no real preferences in terms of POV or tense, as long as it's consistent and clear. First-, second-, and third-person POVs are all fine. I love character studies and meditative pieces just as much as plottier stories, and I'm also happy with various forms of stories like five-times fics and document/epistolary fics and so on.
--I'm okay with stories that deal with unpleasant or depressing themes, or don't have 100% happy endings. However, I'd appreciate it if you'd steer away from all-out wallowing in complete darkness or bleakness, or ending a story with everyone miserable and/or dead. Or, to put it another way--I'm totally fine with a dark fic, but I'm not fine with a grimdark fic.
- I'm fine (sometimes more than fine!) with things like uneven power dynamics, creepy imagery, gore that isn't extreme, etc. My general DNWs and squicks are:
- blatant character-bashing
- mundane/modern AUs
- A/B/O of any kind
- body fluids besides blood, sweat, and tears
- damage to eyes, teeth, fingernails, and inner ears
- incredibly detailed descriptions of insects and arachnids (general mentions are fine!)
- graphic violence to/torture of animals (again, not a problem if it's mentioned or described generally--I just don't want the gory details)
If you want more guidance about some other squick (or like/kink), please feel free to get in touch with me through the mods!
--If you're writing something shippy or involving a romantic/sexual relationship, actual sex scenes are great but absolutely not required! If your writing preference is for UST or fade-to-black then please don't make yourself go bonkers trying to churn out something explicit--I would much rather you not make yourself miserable trying to write something that's beyond your comfort level. Unless otherwise specified in a request itself, consent of all levels, dub-con, and non-con are all fine. (Given the choice between dub- or non-con my preference leans more toward the former, but non-con is also okay and won't squick me.)
--Remember, optional details are optional! I want this to be a good Yuletide for you, and that means writing something you're excited about. If you think you have a great idea that fits the fandom/characters I've asked for but isn't mentioned in my babble, go for it!
Fandom: The Wolf of Winter - Paula Volsky
Characters: Varis, Shalindra
What it is and where to find it: A single-volume fantasy novel by Paula Volsky, centered on a Russian-esque kingdom with a tradition of dangerous and forbidden necromantic magic and told from the points of view of the villain-protagonist-turned-antagonist Varis and his niece (and more straightforward protagonist) Shalindra. Much of the book has them entirely separate as Varis intrigues and necromances his way to the top of the political heap while Shalindra and her brother flee to other lands for safety, but the last quarter of the book brings them together as captor and captive--by which time Shalindra's just happened to learn a little necromancy herself....
Out of print, alas, but many used copies are available on Amazon and elsewhere.
Official request and further thoughts:
I'm requesting both Varis and Shalindra as characters, but I don't need them both to appear on-screen or in POV--what I'm really just dying to get is some kind of fic that gives me another taste of their interactions with and impact on each other. Their time together is one of the most interesting parts of the book for me, but necessity of pacing means that the weeks of time Shalindra spends as Varis's hostage/'guest' gets swept past rather quickly, so a fic expanding on that time period is one thing I'd love to see. A couple of sentences, for examples, mention that once Shalindra is being kept in better conditions she and Varis usually dine together, so what did that look like? What did they talk about? (Dinner scenes that are tense or emotionally charged in some way are one of my favorite things to read, so this is one of those skimmed-over details that I desperately wish we had an actual example of in the book!) I have to admit I'm also darkly tempted by the thought of an AU where the proposed marriage went through for whatever reason--how in the world would both of them have navigated that relationship?--or where Shalindra didn't quite have the strength to ask Varis to take her out of the crypt, and gave in to the unspoken offer of further instruction in necromancy.
Varis's POV scene during some point of Shalindra's captivity could be fertile ground to explore, too. We only get a few scenes from his perspective in the latter part of the novel, but the couple of times we do his thoughts about Shalindra are very striking--particularly that scene were he's in a post-necromancy waking nightmare and thinks of her face and her voice as a point of light and sanity in the madness. Something about his first impressions of her once she's been captured, maybe, or his thoughts after the crypt scene?
Or I'd love to see some kind of Shalindra fic set post-canon, as the conclusion is a pretty much a happy-yet-not ending--Shalindra's been too changed to celebrate her brother's victory and Varis's defeat the way she once would have, and certain elements of her world are already starting to feel grating, unsatisfying, or dull to her. So I always wonder: what is she going to do from now on? Is she truly going to manage to resist the lure of necromancy for the rest of her life? Or would she take advantage of her new position and resources--a titled noble, with time and money and the research skills that come from her years as an enforced scholar at Fruce--and begin exploring the forbidden art again?
Given the situation Varis is in at the book's conclusion (spifflicated in that shack in the woods and so ragged and dishelved that the few patrols who've come across him haven't recognized him), it's very unlikely that Shalindra will encounter him again after the book's end--but if she did turn back to necromancy and let a sufficient number of years pass, might she able to summon his ghost? Would she try to do it, if only to assuage her own curiosity about him and why he'd let her go? I don't know how lucid a ghost!Varis would be--I can't remember if we see any ghosts of spifflicates in the book--but the two of them having one last conversation and their previous power dynamic of captor/captive being so completely reversed into necromancer/ghost is an idea I can't get out of my brain.
If I've got my dates right I would have read The Wolf of Winter when I was about 11 or 12, and it left a huge number of chilly skeletal bone-prints all over my impressionable young mind. I think it was one of the first'grown-up' fantasy novels I read that wasn't drawing solely on Standard Medieval Western Europe for its setting, and also probably the first one that centered so heavily on necromantic magic as a plot element. And it was peppered with certain narrative devices and tropes that I'd later come to love wholeheartedly: a cold but somewhat sympathetic protagonist growing into an antagonist; stretches of affiability/understanding between the protagonist and the antagonist even if they're working at cross-purposes; a good character being truly, truly tempted by something the antagonist offers them. Looking back at it these days it has its flaws, but it's a book that's always stuck with me and is a frequent reread--I still have the original paperback copy that I first read ages ago.
And Shalindra and Varis and their interaction left such an impression that I always find it surprising that their actual time together comes so late in the book, and is barely more than 100 pages of content. The impact the two of them have on each other feels so strongly drawn in that small amount of space! In spite of their antagonism they have points of similarity and common aspects in their histories/personalities/experiences that they've never found echoed in another person. You understand why Shalindra is uneasily drawn to Varis and finds him easy to talk to about personal and painful things even though she knows better; why Varis, who goes through the entire book manipulating everyone with an ice-cool lack of emotion, feels an unspoken--affinity? affection?--for Shalindra, enough to let her go at the end even though it dooms him. And you understand why the memory of her and that moment can still break through his madness at the end, just a little, and why Shalindra feels somehow bereft once he's gone. It's a short but potent portrayal of two semi-kindred spirits getting pulled into each other's orbit for a little bit before fate and their own actions yank them apart again, and I wish there'd been just a tiny bit more of it.
So, yes, any story that draws on this stuff that I can't stop blabbing about would make me a happy reader. :D
Fandom: Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)
Characters: Any (Ann Lake, Bunny Lake, Steven Lake)
What it is and where to find it: a 1965 psychological mystery/thriller film, available on DVD and for streaming rental on Amazon, iTunes, Google, etc. (The general concept of the story was based on a novel, but it and the movie are quite different.) Single mother Ann has just moved herself and her daughter Bunny to London to live with her brother Steven. Ann drops Bunny off for her first day of pre-school, but when she returns later to collect her Bunny is nowhere to be found. When the police arrive and question the school employees they learn that none of them ever saw Bunny--and when they search Ann and Steven's apartment, none of Bunny's clothes or other possessions are there. Is Bunny really missing? Or does she even exist at all...?
Official request and further thoughts:
For this movie, any kind of pre-canon or post-canon fic would make me happy!
In terms of pre-canon, an exploration or even just a snapshot or two of Ann and Steven at some earlier point in their lives from either point of view would be amazing. In the movie they both mention their childhood a little--Steven talks about their deceased father and ‘peculiar’ religious mother and how he got used to taking care of both Ann and himself, while Ann says they’ve been close all their lives--but what did that really look like for either one of them as they were living it? What was their relationship like as they grew out of childhood into adolescence and became adults? When Ann was dating Bunny's father? When Ann had Bunny, and they apparently spent four years as a family unit of mother, daughter, and uncle? How did Steven's attachment to Ann develop and change as they grew, and what was it like for him keeping up a mask of sanity for years and years? Did Ann ever pick up on something strange in Steven's behavior but explain away or dismiss it, or did it really always seem completely normal to her?
Post-canon, I’d happily read anything set from just a few minutes after the film finishes to years afterwards. Ann’s just been through a hell of an ordeal and she’s got one just as awful ahead of her--how is she going to deal with it emotionally and psychologically? How do you begin to process that your beloved sibling is 1) totally insane and 2) so devotedly possessive of you that he kidnapped and tried to murder your daughter so he could have you all to himself? Would she visit Steven in whatever institution the court sends him to, or does she try to blot him out of her life entirely? On a larger scale, she's now alone with her daughter in an unfamiliar city and country--how is she going to build a life for herself?
I'd also love to see anything that touches on how Bunny's life might be affected by all this going forward, whether from Ann or Bunny's point of view. Ann probably won’t LITERALLY stick to that promise about never taking her eyes off Bunny again, but how does this incident affect Ann’s mothering of Bunny? What explanation is Ann going to give to Bunny for why Bunny's uncle is suddenly no longer in their lives? What does Bunny actually remember of the movie’s events? Does she know ‘my uncle took me away from school and then later that night he and mommy and I played hide-and-seek and skipping games’ is a real thing that happened to her, or does it become an incident she has faded or confused impressions of but nothing else, or even something she dismisses as a dream/nightmare or something she imagined? Whether it's clear or muddled, how does it affect her as she grows up, and how does Ann handle it? If an older Bunny asks Ann what happened on that night, what would Ann tell her? Would an older Bunny ever visit Steven on her own, out of curiosity or for confrontation or emotional closure?
This strange little thriller is one of my favorite movies to come out of the 1960s! I love how it's so obviously a slice of its time, from the plot setup to Preminger roping in the Zombies to do songs for the soundtrack. And I love how the world it takes place is one that's always slightly unnerving, in way that's very fitting for a story focusing on a single mother at a time when that was highly stigmatized--almost everyone Ann encounters is strange or unhelpful or threatening in some way, and the environments she moves through are confusing, forboding, and/or eerie.
Both Ann and Steven really intrigue me as characters. Ann appears to be a little fragile and high-strung, but as the movie rolls on its obvious there's also a definite strength and resoluteness buried in her as well--when Newhouse asks where her husband is she simply says "I’m not married and never was" while Steven is still fumbling for a polite explanation, she talks very matter-of-factly about choosing not to have an abortion and not marrying Bunny’s father because she wasn’t in love with him, and at the climax she's incredibly nervy and quick on her feet in thinking of ways to distract Steven to keep him from hurting Bunny. I wonder if she even realized she had those resources before the movie's incidents. Meanwhile Steven is, well, a fascinating nightmare or a person. His obsessive fixation on Ann seems to have cemented in childhood, which means he's managed to maintain a facade of sanity for a couple of decades--and not just maintain it, but become a reasonably successful young man, and one who at first seems to be a little more stable than Ann. What is it like in his head? How has he managed to build his persona and compartmentalize the darker and crazier parts of himself well enough to keep that facade going?
The view we get of their relationship as siblings is really interesting to me as well. Even before the reveal their emotional and physical closeness reads as increasingly strange both in the story (as Newhouse and Mrs. Ford both pick up on it) and out of the story--not blatantly wrong, but off in some slight way. Of course Steven's attachment to Ann is at the level of Extremely Unhealthy, but I think there’s more than a touch of too-strong attachment and dependency on Ann’s side, too, though to a much lesser extent and in ways she’s not really cognizant of--Steven still ‘takes care of her’ by paying bills and handling forms and dealing with those sorts of things for her, and she has no significant relationships aside from him and Bunny (at least, she apparently has no one in the States she can call to confirm that, yes, she does have a real live daughter). It seems like in spite of being an adult she hasn't fully broken out of the patterns and dynamics of their youth--or maybe she's slipped back into them due to the difficulties and isolation that would have come with being an unmarried mother? Anyway, clueless psychoanalysis on my part aside, it all makes me want to see how the slightly twisty oddness of their relationship looked and played out in other surroundings and circumstances. Other than their brief cheerful exchange by phone at the very beginning we only get to see how they interact in the movie's highly stressful and unusual situation--what whether they were mundane (growing up and going to school; Ann dating; what their home life was like after their mother died and they were really on their own; one or both of them interacting with Bunny) or their own kind of stressful (Ann finding out she's pregnant and having Bunny; adjusting to the difficult parts of having a baby/child around; the hecticness of the move to London). If you do want to write something in this vein, feel free to lean on Steven's unhealthy devotion to Ann and the implications/undertones/overtones/whatever-tones of incestuous feelings to give it a sinister edge!
Bunny herself is pretty much a blank slate as a character as far as the movie goes, but that means you’ve got free rein if you’d like to use her as an avenue write something about Ann and/or Bunny’s life post-movie! It could be interesting to take the movie’s theme and motif of childhood, and all its conversations and little touches about things children think and do—their habits and reactions, dreams and nightmares, games they play and stories they make up, and even the words they use describe things—and run with it for a post-canon fic. What kinds of play and make-believe would Bunny develop after this incident, and how would Ann react to them, and how would they inform Bunny as a person as she grows? Would Bunny end up having her own imaginary friend?
Fandom:A Yank at Oxford (1938)
Characters: Lee Sheridan, Paul Beaumont
What it is and where to find it: a 1938 comedy-drama film, available on DVD and on Youtube here (for the moment). Brash American Lee Sheridan gets a scholarship to study at Oxford, but his initial arrogant behavior clashes with the standards of the unversity and results in his forming a fierce rivalry with fellow student Paul Beaumont. Lee eventually wins the respect of other students (and the heart of Molly, Paul's sister), but will he and Paul ever patch up their feud and be friends? (The answer to that question will...not shock you at all! :D )
Official request and further thoughts:
I wish I could be the good kind of requester and give you all kinds of prompts for character explorations and interesting plots I'm dying to see for this canon, but I must be honest and admit that what my heart most wants is tropey Lee/Paul or Lee + Paul fic of some kind. (Of course, if that happens to come along with character exploration or plotty shenanigans that would be lovely, too!)
Seriously, dig into the bag of Ye Olde Slash Tropes and pull out a well-worn rival ship or friend ship setup for these two, and I will almost certainly read it with joy. When they are still at odds: one of their sneering arguments, almost-fights, or actual fights somehow turns into angry makeouts! Both of them are wound up and in each other's space after track/rowing practice and their pent-up physical energy turns into hatesex! Lee decides the best revenge for being debagged by Paul and his friends would be to do the same to Paul, on his own, but the situation turns into something else! Once they are friends: one of them is too edgy and anxious before examinations or a race and the other offers a helping hand for stress relief! They get too companionably drunk one night, or stay up so late revising for exams that they get a little wobbly-headed from lack of sleep, and then somehow there is kissing! On Boat Race night they are so overwhelmed with victory and happy with each other that their revels take an unexpected turn! Molly and Paul ask Lee to stay with their family for the Christmas vacation and feelings happen! Lee asks Molly and Paul to come visit him in the U.S. during the long summer vacation and feelings happen!
If you aren't feeling a spark for making the actual ship happen on-page, I will be just as happy if you pluck one of scenarios above (or come up with any other one you can think of) and dial it down to something less overt--buried feelings, or one of them suffering through one-sided pining and trying to deal with it during the movie ("Oh no, I hate him but I kind of want him" or "Oh no, I've come around to liking him and kind of want him but he still hates me") or post-movie ("Oh no, I kind of want him but he's my friend and he's dating my sister/I'm dating his sister"), or mutual clueless pining, or mutual recognized pining that they decide not to pursue for whatever reason.
I have two specific DNWs for this request:
The first: if you do write something with smut on the antagonistic side, I would prefer it not be complete and outright non-con. Dub-con or initial non-con that turns into dub-con is fine!
The second: please DON'T employ Ye Olde Slash Trope of turning the het love interest awful. I don't mind too much how you choose to handle Molly and her canonical romantic relationship with Lee--you can have her as a complicating factor that has to be addressed, break up them temporarily or permanently, write the story at a point or in a way that she doesn't need to be mentioned, whatever. Infidelity is not a squick of mine, so if you want to go for the extreme angst option of Lee/Paul going on at the same time as Lee/Molly while Molly doesn't know (or they think she doesn't know), that's fine as well! Just please don't be nasty to her or demonize her or do something terrible to her to create a way for the story happen. (The same goes for Elsa, if she's still relevant within the setting of the fic.)
Oh, this movie! It's fun and effervescent and I've loved it ever since I first caught it on TCM years and years ago, and I've wanted some sort of slashy fic about Lee and Paul for exactly the same amount of time. It feels to me a bit like someone took a bunch American college-spirit movies and English boy’s school stories and smushed their standard elements and themes together--honor! loyalty! pranks and shenanigans! grudging respect! intense rivalries! intense friendships! the dire importance of sporting events! conflicts between young men worked out through the time-honored method of punching each other!--and added the extremely pleasant bonus of getting stare at Robert Taylor's and Griffith Jones's handsome faces while they go through all those story beats.
(Seriously, look at this. Or this. Or this (ignore poor Robert Coote as Wavertree in the middle trying to pull them apart--the two of them certainly are).)
This movie cheers me up every time I watch it. Lightweight as it is I love how neatly it runs through its by-the-numbers plot, and how so many of the interactions between Lee and Paul seem like they need just one little push to move them from their rival/friend roles into something else. They stare mega-intensely at each other as they strip off their coats so they can fight! Lee tries to apologize for his bad behavior and makes and offer of friendship, but Paul coldly rejects him! Lee nobly takes the blame for something that could get Paul expelled because he knows an Oxford degree is too important to Paul! They gleefully collapse onto and clutch at each other when they make up and win the boat race against Cambridge! Can you tell from all the exclamation points in the request and babble for this one that it somehow just hits me in a terribly iddy place? :D It all makes me want some kind of fic that gives an interaction of that sort the nudge of a few centimeters further it needs to be m/m of some kind, whether the story is a happy one or an angsty one.
(I also admit that part of me gets a bit of a giggle out of asking for slash fic for a movie that was partially, according to Robert Taylor's biography, the result of some studio machinations meant to make Taylor seem like an appropriately manly guy since he'd recently been playing too many sappy romantic roles. I see your attempts at public image manipulation and reject them, Louis B. Mayer! :P)
In terms of Oxford-specific issues, as long as no one talks about semesters or letter grades and grade point averages it's fine. :D I leave it up to you to decide how much or how little detail you want to include about Oxford itself, and how strenuously you feel like making any physical aspects of the college itself conform exactly to real life. While the college in the movie is based on Christ Church in its layout and design elements, it is still a fictional college, so don’t worry about referencing an east-facing window that doesn’t exist or putting a stairway in the wrong place in a building or anything like that.
I don't think I have any more words to spill, so I'll wish you happy writing and lovely winter holidays!
It's Yuletide time again! Hooray! I have a busy couple of months ahead of me so I went back and forth about signing up this year, but in the end the lure of holiday joy was too strong. :D I want you to have a lovely holiday as well, so please be assured I'll love whatever you end up writing for me.
I do not have much of a text-blogging presence in fandom namespace any longer, but my AO3 name is melmillo, and I quietly tumblr under the name smallmonday (though that hasn't been very actively recently).
Below is some basic blab about my reading preferences, and reposts of my official requests plus some specific thoughts on each request/canon.
General thoughts:
--I have no real preferences in terms of POV or tense, as long as it's consistent and clear. First-, second-, and third-person POVs are all fine. I love character studies and meditative pieces just as much as plottier stories, and I'm also happy with various forms of stories like five-times fics and document/epistolary fics and so on.
--I'm okay with stories that deal with unpleasant or depressing themes, or don't have 100% happy endings. However, I'd appreciate it if you'd steer away from all-out wallowing in complete darkness or bleakness, or ending a story with everyone miserable and/or dead. Or, to put it another way--I'm totally fine with a dark fic, but I'm not fine with a grimdark fic.
- I'm fine (sometimes more than fine!) with things like uneven power dynamics, creepy imagery, gore that isn't extreme, etc. My general DNWs and squicks are:
- blatant character-bashing
- mundane/modern AUs
- A/B/O of any kind
- body fluids besides blood, sweat, and tears
- damage to eyes, teeth, fingernails, and inner ears
- incredibly detailed descriptions of insects and arachnids (general mentions are fine!)
- graphic violence to/torture of animals (again, not a problem if it's mentioned or described generally--I just don't want the gory details)
If you want more guidance about some other squick (or like/kink), please feel free to get in touch with me through the mods!
--If you're writing something shippy or involving a romantic/sexual relationship, actual sex scenes are great but absolutely not required! If your writing preference is for UST or fade-to-black then please don't make yourself go bonkers trying to churn out something explicit--I would much rather you not make yourself miserable trying to write something that's beyond your comfort level. Unless otherwise specified in a request itself, consent of all levels, dub-con, and non-con are all fine. (Given the choice between dub- or non-con my preference leans more toward the former, but non-con is also okay and won't squick me.)
--Remember, optional details are optional! I want this to be a good Yuletide for you, and that means writing something you're excited about. If you think you have a great idea that fits the fandom/characters I've asked for but isn't mentioned in my babble, go for it!
Fandom: The Wolf of Winter - Paula Volsky
Characters: Varis, Shalindra
What it is and where to find it: A single-volume fantasy novel by Paula Volsky, centered on a Russian-esque kingdom with a tradition of dangerous and forbidden necromantic magic and told from the points of view of the villain-protagonist-turned-antagonist Varis and his niece (and more straightforward protagonist) Shalindra. Much of the book has them entirely separate as Varis intrigues and necromances his way to the top of the political heap while Shalindra and her brother flee to other lands for safety, but the last quarter of the book brings them together as captor and captive--by which time Shalindra's just happened to learn a little necromancy herself....
Out of print, alas, but many used copies are available on Amazon and elsewhere.
Official request and further thoughts:
I'm requesting both Varis and Shalindra as characters, but I don't need them both to appear on-screen or in POV--what I'm really just dying to get is some kind of fic that gives me another taste of their interactions with and impact on each other. Their time together is one of the most interesting parts of the book for me, but necessity of pacing means that the weeks of time Shalindra spends as Varis's hostage/'guest' gets swept past rather quickly, so a fic expanding on that time period is one thing I'd love to see. A couple of sentences, for examples, mention that once Shalindra is being kept in better conditions she and Varis usually dine together, so what did that look like? What did they talk about? (Dinner scenes that are tense or emotionally charged in some way are one of my favorite things to read, so this is one of those skimmed-over details that I desperately wish we had an actual example of in the book!) I have to admit I'm also darkly tempted by the thought of an AU where the proposed marriage went through for whatever reason--how in the world would both of them have navigated that relationship?--or where Shalindra didn't quite have the strength to ask Varis to take her out of the crypt, and gave in to the unspoken offer of further instruction in necromancy.
Varis's POV scene during some point of Shalindra's captivity could be fertile ground to explore, too. We only get a few scenes from his perspective in the latter part of the novel, but the couple of times we do his thoughts about Shalindra are very striking--particularly that scene were he's in a post-necromancy waking nightmare and thinks of her face and her voice as a point of light and sanity in the madness. Something about his first impressions of her once she's been captured, maybe, or his thoughts after the crypt scene?
Or I'd love to see some kind of Shalindra fic set post-canon, as the conclusion is a pretty much a happy-yet-not ending--Shalindra's been too changed to celebrate her brother's victory and Varis's defeat the way she once would have, and certain elements of her world are already starting to feel grating, unsatisfying, or dull to her. So I always wonder: what is she going to do from now on? Is she truly going to manage to resist the lure of necromancy for the rest of her life? Or would she take advantage of her new position and resources--a titled noble, with time and money and the research skills that come from her years as an enforced scholar at Fruce--and begin exploring the forbidden art again?
Given the situation Varis is in at the book's conclusion (spifflicated in that shack in the woods and so ragged and dishelved that the few patrols who've come across him haven't recognized him), it's very unlikely that Shalindra will encounter him again after the book's end--but if she did turn back to necromancy and let a sufficient number of years pass, might she able to summon his ghost? Would she try to do it, if only to assuage her own curiosity about him and why he'd let her go? I don't know how lucid a ghost!Varis would be--I can't remember if we see any ghosts of spifflicates in the book--but the two of them having one last conversation and their previous power dynamic of captor/captive being so completely reversed into necromancer/ghost is an idea I can't get out of my brain.
If I've got my dates right I would have read The Wolf of Winter when I was about 11 or 12, and it left a huge number of chilly skeletal bone-prints all over my impressionable young mind. I think it was one of the first'grown-up' fantasy novels I read that wasn't drawing solely on Standard Medieval Western Europe for its setting, and also probably the first one that centered so heavily on necromantic magic as a plot element. And it was peppered with certain narrative devices and tropes that I'd later come to love wholeheartedly: a cold but somewhat sympathetic protagonist growing into an antagonist; stretches of affiability/understanding between the protagonist and the antagonist even if they're working at cross-purposes; a good character being truly, truly tempted by something the antagonist offers them. Looking back at it these days it has its flaws, but it's a book that's always stuck with me and is a frequent reread--I still have the original paperback copy that I first read ages ago.
And Shalindra and Varis and their interaction left such an impression that I always find it surprising that their actual time together comes so late in the book, and is barely more than 100 pages of content. The impact the two of them have on each other feels so strongly drawn in that small amount of space! In spite of their antagonism they have points of similarity and common aspects in their histories/personalities/experiences that they've never found echoed in another person. You understand why Shalindra is uneasily drawn to Varis and finds him easy to talk to about personal and painful things even though she knows better; why Varis, who goes through the entire book manipulating everyone with an ice-cool lack of emotion, feels an unspoken--affinity? affection?--for Shalindra, enough to let her go at the end even though it dooms him. And you understand why the memory of her and that moment can still break through his madness at the end, just a little, and why Shalindra feels somehow bereft once he's gone. It's a short but potent portrayal of two semi-kindred spirits getting pulled into each other's orbit for a little bit before fate and their own actions yank them apart again, and I wish there'd been just a tiny bit more of it.
So, yes, any story that draws on this stuff that I can't stop blabbing about would make me a happy reader. :D
Fandom: Bunny Lake Is Missing (1965)
Characters: Any (Ann Lake, Bunny Lake, Steven Lake)
What it is and where to find it: a 1965 psychological mystery/thriller film, available on DVD and for streaming rental on Amazon, iTunes, Google, etc. (The general concept of the story was based on a novel, but it and the movie are quite different.) Single mother Ann has just moved herself and her daughter Bunny to London to live with her brother Steven. Ann drops Bunny off for her first day of pre-school, but when she returns later to collect her Bunny is nowhere to be found. When the police arrive and question the school employees they learn that none of them ever saw Bunny--and when they search Ann and Steven's apartment, none of Bunny's clothes or other possessions are there. Is Bunny really missing? Or does she even exist at all...?
Official request and further thoughts:
For this movie, any kind of pre-canon or post-canon fic would make me happy!
In terms of pre-canon, an exploration or even just a snapshot or two of Ann and Steven at some earlier point in their lives from either point of view would be amazing. In the movie they both mention their childhood a little--Steven talks about their deceased father and ‘peculiar’ religious mother and how he got used to taking care of both Ann and himself, while Ann says they’ve been close all their lives--but what did that really look like for either one of them as they were living it? What was their relationship like as they grew out of childhood into adolescence and became adults? When Ann was dating Bunny's father? When Ann had Bunny, and they apparently spent four years as a family unit of mother, daughter, and uncle? How did Steven's attachment to Ann develop and change as they grew, and what was it like for him keeping up a mask of sanity for years and years? Did Ann ever pick up on something strange in Steven's behavior but explain away or dismiss it, or did it really always seem completely normal to her?
Post-canon, I’d happily read anything set from just a few minutes after the film finishes to years afterwards. Ann’s just been through a hell of an ordeal and she’s got one just as awful ahead of her--how is she going to deal with it emotionally and psychologically? How do you begin to process that your beloved sibling is 1) totally insane and 2) so devotedly possessive of you that he kidnapped and tried to murder your daughter so he could have you all to himself? Would she visit Steven in whatever institution the court sends him to, or does she try to blot him out of her life entirely? On a larger scale, she's now alone with her daughter in an unfamiliar city and country--how is she going to build a life for herself?
I'd also love to see anything that touches on how Bunny's life might be affected by all this going forward, whether from Ann or Bunny's point of view. Ann probably won’t LITERALLY stick to that promise about never taking her eyes off Bunny again, but how does this incident affect Ann’s mothering of Bunny? What explanation is Ann going to give to Bunny for why Bunny's uncle is suddenly no longer in their lives? What does Bunny actually remember of the movie’s events? Does she know ‘my uncle took me away from school and then later that night he and mommy and I played hide-and-seek and skipping games’ is a real thing that happened to her, or does it become an incident she has faded or confused impressions of but nothing else, or even something she dismisses as a dream/nightmare or something she imagined? Whether it's clear or muddled, how does it affect her as she grows up, and how does Ann handle it? If an older Bunny asks Ann what happened on that night, what would Ann tell her? Would an older Bunny ever visit Steven on her own, out of curiosity or for confrontation or emotional closure?
This strange little thriller is one of my favorite movies to come out of the 1960s! I love how it's so obviously a slice of its time, from the plot setup to Preminger roping in the Zombies to do songs for the soundtrack. And I love how the world it takes place is one that's always slightly unnerving, in way that's very fitting for a story focusing on a single mother at a time when that was highly stigmatized--almost everyone Ann encounters is strange or unhelpful or threatening in some way, and the environments she moves through are confusing, forboding, and/or eerie.
Both Ann and Steven really intrigue me as characters. Ann appears to be a little fragile and high-strung, but as the movie rolls on its obvious there's also a definite strength and resoluteness buried in her as well--when Newhouse asks where her husband is she simply says "I’m not married and never was" while Steven is still fumbling for a polite explanation, she talks very matter-of-factly about choosing not to have an abortion and not marrying Bunny’s father because she wasn’t in love with him, and at the climax she's incredibly nervy and quick on her feet in thinking of ways to distract Steven to keep him from hurting Bunny. I wonder if she even realized she had those resources before the movie's incidents. Meanwhile Steven is, well, a fascinating nightmare or a person. His obsessive fixation on Ann seems to have cemented in childhood, which means he's managed to maintain a facade of sanity for a couple of decades--and not just maintain it, but become a reasonably successful young man, and one who at first seems to be a little more stable than Ann. What is it like in his head? How has he managed to build his persona and compartmentalize the darker and crazier parts of himself well enough to keep that facade going?
The view we get of their relationship as siblings is really interesting to me as well. Even before the reveal their emotional and physical closeness reads as increasingly strange both in the story (as Newhouse and Mrs. Ford both pick up on it) and out of the story--not blatantly wrong, but off in some slight way. Of course Steven's attachment to Ann is at the level of Extremely Unhealthy, but I think there’s more than a touch of too-strong attachment and dependency on Ann’s side, too, though to a much lesser extent and in ways she’s not really cognizant of--Steven still ‘takes care of her’ by paying bills and handling forms and dealing with those sorts of things for her, and she has no significant relationships aside from him and Bunny (at least, she apparently has no one in the States she can call to confirm that, yes, she does have a real live daughter). It seems like in spite of being an adult she hasn't fully broken out of the patterns and dynamics of their youth--or maybe she's slipped back into them due to the difficulties and isolation that would have come with being an unmarried mother? Anyway, clueless psychoanalysis on my part aside, it all makes me want to see how the slightly twisty oddness of their relationship looked and played out in other surroundings and circumstances. Other than their brief cheerful exchange by phone at the very beginning we only get to see how they interact in the movie's highly stressful and unusual situation--what whether they were mundane (growing up and going to school; Ann dating; what their home life was like after their mother died and they were really on their own; one or both of them interacting with Bunny) or their own kind of stressful (Ann finding out she's pregnant and having Bunny; adjusting to the difficult parts of having a baby/child around; the hecticness of the move to London). If you do want to write something in this vein, feel free to lean on Steven's unhealthy devotion to Ann and the implications/undertones/overtones/whatever-tones of incestuous feelings to give it a sinister edge!
Bunny herself is pretty much a blank slate as a character as far as the movie goes, but that means you’ve got free rein if you’d like to use her as an avenue write something about Ann and/or Bunny’s life post-movie! It could be interesting to take the movie’s theme and motif of childhood, and all its conversations and little touches about things children think and do—their habits and reactions, dreams and nightmares, games they play and stories they make up, and even the words they use describe things—and run with it for a post-canon fic. What kinds of play and make-believe would Bunny develop after this incident, and how would Ann react to them, and how would they inform Bunny as a person as she grows? Would Bunny end up having her own imaginary friend?
Fandom:A Yank at Oxford (1938)
Characters: Lee Sheridan, Paul Beaumont
What it is and where to find it: a 1938 comedy-drama film, available on DVD and on Youtube here (for the moment). Brash American Lee Sheridan gets a scholarship to study at Oxford, but his initial arrogant behavior clashes with the standards of the unversity and results in his forming a fierce rivalry with fellow student Paul Beaumont. Lee eventually wins the respect of other students (and the heart of Molly, Paul's sister), but will he and Paul ever patch up their feud and be friends? (The answer to that question will...not shock you at all! :D )
Official request and further thoughts:
I wish I could be the good kind of requester and give you all kinds of prompts for character explorations and interesting plots I'm dying to see for this canon, but I must be honest and admit that what my heart most wants is tropey Lee/Paul or Lee + Paul fic of some kind. (Of course, if that happens to come along with character exploration or plotty shenanigans that would be lovely, too!)
Seriously, dig into the bag of Ye Olde Slash Tropes and pull out a well-worn rival ship or friend ship setup for these two, and I will almost certainly read it with joy. When they are still at odds: one of their sneering arguments, almost-fights, or actual fights somehow turns into angry makeouts! Both of them are wound up and in each other's space after track/rowing practice and their pent-up physical energy turns into hatesex! Lee decides the best revenge for being debagged by Paul and his friends would be to do the same to Paul, on his own, but the situation turns into something else! Once they are friends: one of them is too edgy and anxious before examinations or a race and the other offers a helping hand for stress relief! They get too companionably drunk one night, or stay up so late revising for exams that they get a little wobbly-headed from lack of sleep, and then somehow there is kissing! On Boat Race night they are so overwhelmed with victory and happy with each other that their revels take an unexpected turn! Molly and Paul ask Lee to stay with their family for the Christmas vacation and feelings happen! Lee asks Molly and Paul to come visit him in the U.S. during the long summer vacation and feelings happen!
If you aren't feeling a spark for making the actual ship happen on-page, I will be just as happy if you pluck one of scenarios above (or come up with any other one you can think of) and dial it down to something less overt--buried feelings, or one of them suffering through one-sided pining and trying to deal with it during the movie ("Oh no, I hate him but I kind of want him" or "Oh no, I've come around to liking him and kind of want him but he still hates me") or post-movie ("Oh no, I kind of want him but he's my friend and he's dating my sister/I'm dating his sister"), or mutual clueless pining, or mutual recognized pining that they decide not to pursue for whatever reason.
I have two specific DNWs for this request:
The first: if you do write something with smut on the antagonistic side, I would prefer it not be complete and outright non-con. Dub-con or initial non-con that turns into dub-con is fine!
The second: please DON'T employ Ye Olde Slash Trope of turning the het love interest awful. I don't mind too much how you choose to handle Molly and her canonical romantic relationship with Lee--you can have her as a complicating factor that has to be addressed, break up them temporarily or permanently, write the story at a point or in a way that she doesn't need to be mentioned, whatever. Infidelity is not a squick of mine, so if you want to go for the extreme angst option of Lee/Paul going on at the same time as Lee/Molly while Molly doesn't know (or they think she doesn't know), that's fine as well! Just please don't be nasty to her or demonize her or do something terrible to her to create a way for the story happen. (The same goes for Elsa, if she's still relevant within the setting of the fic.)
Oh, this movie! It's fun and effervescent and I've loved it ever since I first caught it on TCM years and years ago, and I've wanted some sort of slashy fic about Lee and Paul for exactly the same amount of time. It feels to me a bit like someone took a bunch American college-spirit movies and English boy’s school stories and smushed their standard elements and themes together--honor! loyalty! pranks and shenanigans! grudging respect! intense rivalries! intense friendships! the dire importance of sporting events! conflicts between young men worked out through the time-honored method of punching each other!--and added the extremely pleasant bonus of getting stare at Robert Taylor's and Griffith Jones's handsome faces while they go through all those story beats.
(Seriously, look at this. Or this. Or this (ignore poor Robert Coote as Wavertree in the middle trying to pull them apart--the two of them certainly are).)
This movie cheers me up every time I watch it. Lightweight as it is I love how neatly it runs through its by-the-numbers plot, and how so many of the interactions between Lee and Paul seem like they need just one little push to move them from their rival/friend roles into something else. They stare mega-intensely at each other as they strip off their coats so they can fight! Lee tries to apologize for his bad behavior and makes and offer of friendship, but Paul coldly rejects him! Lee nobly takes the blame for something that could get Paul expelled because he knows an Oxford degree is too important to Paul! They gleefully collapse onto and clutch at each other when they make up and win the boat race against Cambridge! Can you tell from all the exclamation points in the request and babble for this one that it somehow just hits me in a terribly iddy place? :D It all makes me want some kind of fic that gives an interaction of that sort the nudge of a few centimeters further it needs to be m/m of some kind, whether the story is a happy one or an angsty one.
(I also admit that part of me gets a bit of a giggle out of asking for slash fic for a movie that was partially, according to Robert Taylor's biography, the result of some studio machinations meant to make Taylor seem like an appropriately manly guy since he'd recently been playing too many sappy romantic roles. I see your attempts at public image manipulation and reject them, Louis B. Mayer! :P)
In terms of Oxford-specific issues, as long as no one talks about semesters or letter grades and grade point averages it's fine. :D I leave it up to you to decide how much or how little detail you want to include about Oxford itself, and how strenuously you feel like making any physical aspects of the college itself conform exactly to real life. While the college in the movie is based on Christ Church in its layout and design elements, it is still a fictional college, so don’t worry about referencing an east-facing window that doesn’t exist or putting a stairway in the wrong place in a building or anything like that.
I don't think I have any more words to spill, so I'll wish you happy writing and lovely winter holidays!
