Yuletide 2018 letter

[minebyrights]

Happy Yuletide! Whoever you are and whatever canon(s) brought you here, I hope you find this pleasing, rewarding, and low on stress.

The following skirts the lines of TL;DR, but I want to emphasize up front that I am genuinely in love with all of these fandoms, as well as desperate for content for them, so anything you produce that doesn't hit my squicks will be A++. Prompts are mostly me throwing wild ideas at the walls and seeing what sticks; if you have something roiling around in your brain you really want to do that doesn’t hit squicks/DNWs, go for it! In general, all ratings from gen to depraved NC-17 porn are good, and all gender combos are fine for background ships or whatnot.

Any differences in length of section below are mostly due to writing this piecemeal over a couple days and not because I'm more excited for some canons over others.

If you want to find me in the wild, I'm:
theoldgods
theoldgods
minebyrights
minebyrights

And with that, on to the letter itself!

Likes and Dislikes | All Souls Trilogy - Deborah Harkness | The Americans (TV 2013) | Harlots (TV) | Les liaisons dangereuses | Dangerous Liaisons - Choderlos de Laclos | Mum (TV 2016) | Phantom Thread (2017)

LIKES AND DISLIKES

Likes: worldbuilding, Holmes/Watson dynamics, undercover work and casefic, bedsharing, huddling for warmth, fake relationships/fake married, bickering and bantering like old marrieds, clothing descriptions (especially period clothing, suits, kilts, tall boots), hands and feet, bathing and cleaning one another, adrenaline junkies and partners in crime, found families, snow/winter/autumn settings, 5+1s/vignettes with some thematic growth/resonance, daemons, clothed sex, frottage/intercrural/nonpenetrative sex, dubcon (sex pollen etc), light/casual BDSM (especially with subby men), topping from the bottom, oral sex, dirty talk, threesomes, masturbation, outdoor sex, voyeurism/exhibitionism

Please no: first or second person POV (with exceptions noted below), pregnancy/childfic, deathfic, angst without some light at the end of the tunnel, horror/gore, character bashing, AUs (except canon divergence, future fic, and daemon AUs), tentacles, body horror/extreme body modification, omegaverse, rape/noncon, bodily fluids/watersports, sexual degradation of women for kink (exception is some femslash--see below where relevant)

[return to menu]

ALL SOULS TRILOGY - DEBORAH HARKNESS
Ysabeau de Clermont

Sign-Up Details:

I discovered All Souls somewhat by accident and was surprised by how, despite my various misgivings with the clunky writing at times and meandering plots and some of the character and relationship beats, I found myself unable to stop thinking about it and its various implications afterward. I’m particularly interested here in Ysabeau as the intersection of so many of these ideas (women over the millennia, ancient vs. modern, politicking and competence porn, creating large found families that persist over centuries, changing ethics of how vampires and vampire families behave, etc.), and she’s always fascinated me as such a potentially powerful vampire, even if we rarely see her in explicitly vampiric hunting/killing action in the books. I’m also watching the show, so if you want to draw on Lindsay Duncan’s appearance/portrayal I’m fine with that (I’m also fine with young-appearing Ysabeau in book canon, of course), and I’ve read and generally enjoyed Time’s Convert, so if you want to pull from there, feel free.

What I Love: I love the various creatures hiding in plain sight, the blend of science and history and the detail into which Harkness goes into the past in SoN, the inclusion (even if the execution isn’t always great) of queer witches and humans and daemons and vampires, the politicking and the depth and complexity of relationships that spring up amongst thousand-year-old vampires, the strong sense of found family across gender and race and species lines that develops in addition to the odd, not-biological-but-intensely-important vampire families. I really love the underlying worldbuilding of the AST, even if I think it’s not always used to its full potential, and the emphasis put on how very long vampires like Ysabeau have lived and how time moves so differently when there’s an apparently unlimited amount of it. I love the global scope of it all. I love Ysabeau’s eternalness, her ability to be both unimpressed with various levels of bullshit (because she’s seen so much of everything at least a hundred times before) and yet also the fierce love she has for her children and those she deems worthy. I love the bizarre contradictions in Ysabeau and her relationship to modern women (she’s protofeminist in many ways but often doesn’t quite make the transition to modern feminism herself?) and would love to see more of her in the modern world, spending time away from Sept-Tours again postcanon.

More Prompts/Ideas:

• I’d love Ysabeau’s origin story, back in the mists of time. (I assume she was made back in Bronze Age Greek/Mycenaean times or thereabouts?) I think Deb has mentioned before that she sees Ysabeau as an inspiration for human myths like those of Helen of Troy (just as Philippe is implied to have been an inspiration for Hercules), so seeing what Ysabeau’s exploits were like to inspire such stories would be great. What was her human life like before her forced turning? (How much does she remember of it now?)
  
• Philippe, of course. I adore their long, long, long power-couple relationship, them as the ultimate kings and queens and (for a while) gods of their own small world that endures from age to age, and how relatively open they are, allowing one another a great deal of space and separation from time to time so that they can still adore one another after over two thousand years. (Open relationships are a huge thing of mine, so if you want to explore that aspect explicitly, go for it.) I’d love to see them politicking at pretty much any time in history, but especially in ancient Rome, or during the Crusades. I’d love to see more of their notes in various languages and various books over the centuries, what they do while separated from one another and how they behave once they’re brought back together. What was building Sept-Tours like at first? How was their first bonding/mating experience? When has Ysabeau physically saved Philippe? What was their relationship like after 1590, when Philippe knew he would die but apparently never told Ysabeau? (Does Ysabeau look back after the events of the series and see moments where he, in retrospect, was hiding from her?) Does Ysabeau eventually get to see Philippe’s ghost, or at least some sense of him? Does she timewalk somehow to be with him again (in his own timeline after 1590, so he knows he’s going to die eventually) way down the line, maybe shortly before her own death? (Does Diana help grant them that last moment?)
  
• Relatedly to that last bit, Ysabeau’s simultaneous fascination with and disdain for witches before she meets Diana is a great character beat, and I love their relationship and its growth in the books. What does she think of Diana’s first days at Sept-Tours? Does she have any bizarre flashbacks to things Philippe could have done in the past that she now sees as connected to Diana somehow? Does Diana later tell her about how she relieves Philippe’s last days alive? Does Ysabeau teach Diana more hunting, later? Does Diana show Ysabeau more magic and craftwork?
  
• I’d love Ysabeau’s rescue and care of by Marthe, or them together at various points in later history, or them comforting and raging together after Philippe’s death. I’d especially love to see Marthe in action as a vampire, so to speak, maybe acting to protect Ysabeau while she’s particularly weak at one moment, and to explore potential f/f vampire sex, even dealing with the mate bond of Philippe—would it be possible after his death? As a casual thing (can/do vampires do casual vampire-vampire sex?) while he’s still alive?
  
• Sire bonds and the complicated families of choice in vampire fiction are always great to me, and I love Ysabeau’s bond with Matthew. Ysabeau has told the story of Matthew’s changing, and her fondness for him even before he was a vampire, but I’d love to see more of her with a young vampire Matthew, teaching him to hunt, dealing with his blood rage over the years, bonding with him at various points in history. I’d love to see her putting him in his place as well during a particularly bad period in his life—after Cecilia, maybe, or another one of his disasters—and using her vampire strength against his, a la Philippe in the barn in SoN, or them together in the aftermath of Philippe’s death.
  
• I love the idea that back before the Congregation was implemented the world was a far more savage place for creatures, and there even may have been more free mingling amongst species that the Congregation felt they had to crack down upon. Did Ysabeau ever get involved with this herself—spending time with daemons or even the hated witches at all? Her experiences with other supernatural species in general would be fantastic.
  
• In general, I’d love seeing Ysabeau in pretty much any time period of your choosing. I’m especially fond of/familiar with late Republican and early imperial Rome and also Renaissance Europe (Ysabeau implied she was at the court of Catherine de Medici, which, holy shit, the drama possibilities), but we know she’s been so many other places (including a long stint in the French Revolution if we go by Time’s Convert), so really, go wild and do supernatural historical tourism as much as you want.

[return to menu]

THE AMERICANS (TV 2013)
Elizabeth Jennings

Sign-Up Details:

I love Elizabeth so much—her brutal ideological devotion to the Soviet Union/the idea of communism, the subsumed angst as that devotion starts to crack, her deadliness, and yet the honest love she's capable of feeling for Philip, Gregory, her children, her mother, etc. As a result I'd be happy with just about any fic centered on her and her life story, as long as it's not too unrelentingly grimdark: What was her life like before her father's death? What about snippets from her and her mother's relationship? What about her first days in the US with Philip? What about meeting Gregory? What do she and Philip do postcanon? What about her with Young-hee or some other woman? Pretty much all ships, or none, and all ratings welcome, so long as it explores Elizabeth in some way.

What I Love: I love The Americans for so many reasons: the period piece setting, their flawless use of 70s and 80s music, the subtle pisstakes they do of Reagan, the gray morality/use of antiheroes, the deliberate blurring of lines and parallels between Americans and Soviets (both legal and illegal) and their relationships with their governments, the action, the black humor, the absurd wigs and costuming. I also love basically all characters, so feel free to use them as you see fit to fill out Elizabeth's story; I'm especially fond of her and Philip and the desperate need they have for one another even when the love itself isn't there, her and Gregory and the wild ideological passion they shared, her and Paige and what it’s like slowly unspooling her life for her daughter, her and her mother (Elizabeth on her knees for her!!!!), her and Young-hee (a friend!! With so many similarities they were never allowed to explore!), and her and their handlers (especially Claudia, whom she reviles half the time and yet is drawn to as another woman in the game, and Gabriel, especially her baring herself to him in s4). I also adore the Rezidentura group (especially Arkady/Nina/Oleg/Tatiana), so I'd love to see the illegal Soviets interact with the aboveboard Soviets, even if only for a minute. I also love Elizabeth in action, the question of her American family and children vs. her devotion to communism, those little moments of her coming close to or actually just breaking down and how she brutally picks herself up afterward, and wondering at how things were after their American arrival but before the series starts (was it less intense then, before Reagan?). A little bit of action and classic spy tropes? Some vignettes/5+1s tracking her relationship to something over the years? Honeypots? Go wild.

More Prompts/Ideas:

• What was Elizabeth and Philip's wedding night and/or earlier relationship like? Anything with them developing their relationship, either in one moment or across the years, would be great—it's okay, despite my general dislike of pregnancy/childfic mentioned above, to mention Paige and Henry and Elizabeth's canonical emotional confusion toward them (remember how she told Zhukov she was pregnant the second time before she told Philip? That's super interesting to me!), but please don't linger on that.
  
• How do Elizabeth's relationships with their various handlers differ? She is comfortable with Gabriel and was antagonistic toward Claudia, but how has that changed? Is Gabriel different toward them in S3/S4/S5 compared to how he was precanon? (Does she meet him again in Moscow postcanon?) Did Elizabeth's relationship with Claudia and the betrayal of trust that period involved change any of that/how she sees handlers and Moscow Centre in general? Does Elizabeth feel differently toward Gabriel after the glanders scare and his letting them "vacation" in S4? Does Elizabeth think about Claudia and the attempted coup after S6?
  
• What would Elizabeth meeting Arkady/Nina/Oleg in the flesh look like? What if they met and didn't realize until afterward what had happened? How are the relationships between Directorate S agents and the Rezidentura in general? Elizabeth called that one time, but beyond that they don't really seem to have contact. Does Elizabeth ever see Arkady again after their reunion in 6x10? Arkady helping her and Philip reintegrate into 1987/88 Russia would be fascinating.
  
• What was Elizabeth's relationship with her mother like through the years? We've seen bits of it, her mother's toughness and general unsentimentality, but more scenes are always welcome. When she gets the recording at the beginning of S3, is that the first time they've spoken since her departure, or have they communicated over the years? And how did her father fit into this before his untimely death?
  
• Elizabeth and Paige got to bond over beating people up in S4 and over Elizabeth’s rape in S5, even as Elizabeth (and Philip) low-key ran Paige into the ground by bringing her in on the double act. And the finale, lord. How often does Elizabeth think about Paige after the series ends? Do they ever manage to meet up again however many years down the line? (Does HENRY ever meet his parents again after the finale, now that He Knows?)
  
• I really loved Young-hee in S4, and I felt so extremely bad for her (never knowing what would become of "Patty") and, yeah, bad for Elizabeth for having to do something she really, aggressively did not want to do there. I loved how you could tell that Elizabeth—Nadezhda—genuinely liked her as a person, not just within the Patty persona and how it got to tear Elizabeth up, emotionally, while also giving us such a good side character in Young-hee, how they could relate over being immigrants (even though only Elizabeth knew they were both immigrants). Any scenes of their evolving friendship and its duplicity would be fantastic, and if you want to Go There and have them make-out/fuck/whatever, I'm also completely on board.
  
• What does Elizabeth think of the sex work they must do? She canonically is abused by marks and takes it, to Philip's dawning horror, and she and Claudia speak of how things are harder for female agents in this respect, but I love honeypots as a trope and would love to see an exploration of it with regard to Elizabeth. Does she ever honeypot women? Does she ever feel sorry, even momentarily, for certain victims? How does it seep into her sex for pleasure with Philip or Gregory (or any others; I don't think I have any NOTPs for her)?

[return to menu]

HARLOTS (TV)
Lydia Quigley

Sign-Up Details:

I absolutely love the setting, the trappings of the clothing and stockings and ribbon garters and foolish jewelry and makeup and wigs. I love the focus on women and their relationships, the foolish and not so foolish games they must play with each other and with the men who are their clients and would-be rulers, the endless politicking all wrapped in sex. And while I love Margaret and her attempts at more ethical prostitution and solidarity with other sex workers, I also love Lydia as a wonderfully characterized antagonist/villain, her utter shamelessness as the series goes on, her competence at being as terrible as she must to keep and improve her social position, the rarefied society she runs in and the viciousness it induces in her (and vice versa). I’d absolutely love more of her, just more of her in pretty much whatever way, from her horrible childhood to the end of season 2 and beyond.

What I Love: Lydia is the worst, and it’s the best. Her emotional ties to the Wells women make her the most effective antagonist in the series, for my money, and the hints of her fucked-up childhood were intriguing as hell to me. (I’d love to know the explanations for why she is the way she is, even though explanations are of course not excuses for continuing the cycle of abuse.) I love her competence porn, of a sort, her ruthless efficiency and constant shenanigan-ing that’s always just a hair short of boiling over into insanity and that’s so fun to see onscreen, but I also like weaker Lydia and seeing her at the mercy of other women, particularly the victims of her nastiness. (I’m not so keen on seeing her brutalized by men, however, just other women.) I like her ridiculous costumes and jewelry and wigs, her generally dramatic ass, and her quick mind, even if she’s ultimately doomed by her own inability to form lasting bonds of any sort with other women. And yeah, as this letter in general makes clear, I love Lesley Manville and her face in all its instantiations.

More Prompts/Ideas:

• Backstory, of course. What on earth were Mrs. May and Lydia’s father up to? There’s tons of implied sexual assault and rape there, and I’m okay with mentioning and using it so long as it isn’t described in super lingering detail, as I know it’s pretty important to Lydia’s development as a person and character. I’d also just love more of young!Lydia, Lydia attempting to gain control over her own life and get her own brothel, and more earlier aventures.
  
• Canon never really explains how the hell Lydia knows Isabella’s secret, so please, help canon out with this. Does Isabella have friends who ran in Lydia’s circle somehow? Did Isabella herself run into Lydia often in her past for some reason or another? (Did Harcourt’s involvement in the Spartans or some similar earlier group inadvertently put Isabella in contact with Lydia back in the day?) I honestly don’t know, but I’d love to see more of how Lydia knows this and got her hands all over Isabella in the first place. (If you want to have her literally put her hands all over Isabella in a sexual fashion, please do so.)
  
• I love Lydia’s weird-ass relationship with Margaret. What did Margaret and Nancy say to get Lydia whipped back in the day? How controlling and terrible was Lydia over them? Why did Lydia love Margaret (and/or Charlotte), in particular, so much, considering all the women Lydia’s had and used before? Platonic pseudo-mother bullshit (“you always tell Mumma the truth in the end” I SCREAMED in delight) in line with canon is of course fine, but if you want to Go There and add in a sexual element at some point, I’m cool with that too. (Please have Margaret be at least 16 or so, and hatesex between canon-aged Lydia and Margaret would be just absolutely *chefkiss*, no matter how flimsy the set-up is.)
  
• GodDAMN, but fuck me if Charlotte’s simultaneous working with/working against Lydia in season 2 wasn’t a treat from start to finish. Lydia begging Charlotte to work for her, her weird motherly affection for Charlotte that seems to threaten to overrun her business sense/her usual modes of practice, was fascinating to watch, and Charlotte’s own conflicting feelings/the seductive pull of Lydia’s luxury were perfect. More of them dressing each other? Lydia teaching Charlotte further lessons (business and/or sexual, whatever), before Charlotte finally breaks and leaves? Straight-up hatesex? Lydia escaping Bedlam and coming back for whatever she can, including Charlotte, in season 3?
  
• Her relationship with Charles is interesting, and though I wasn’t a big fan of Charles putting her in Bedlam and don’t care much about him in general, I’d love to see how she reacts to him in season 3 if/when she gets out of Bedlam somehow. And if you want to kill him off and use him as womanpain for her in some sense, I’m fine with that. (If you really want to go crazy and have her kill him herself, in a fit of rage or something, and deal with that, I’m also fine with that tbh.)
  

[return to menu]

LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES | DANGEROUS LIAISONS - CHODERLOS DE LACLOS
Marquise de Merteuil

Sign-Up Details:

I love the decadence of the underlying society, the grotesque riches involved, the constant social posturing and boredom that leads to the amoral insanity in the first place, the aesthetics of letter-writing and affairs and disgusting luxury and long hair on men and crazy balls and dresses. Everyone is an actor in an enormous play, with public vs. private personas and vicious stakes hidden underneath the laconic witticisms exchanged, and that is so fun to play with. I particularly love Merteuil, so richly characterized, protofeminist in a sense (her search for agency/respect/revenge) and yet self-serving and horribly wretched toward other women. I’m familiar with the book, the Frears movie, and the Hampton stage play and like all three, though I’m personally partial toward the Hampton ending when it comes to Merteuil’s specific fate (if you’re familiar with it and also enjoy it). Epistolary fic, as well as first-person fic, is welcome for this canon, though not at all required, and feel free to use Isabelle and the like as first names if you like, though overall I have no name preferences.

What I Love: I love the richness of the general #aesthetic, the wasteful luxury and ridiculous gowns and long hair tied back in ribbons and men challenging each other to pointless duels and the stench of ~~moral corruption~ and sexual licentiousness underneath it all. I love Merteuil, her self-made determination not to succumb to the societal horrors of womanhood as much as is possible within the restraints she’s given and yet the viciousness she has for other members of her own sex, her ability to survive like a snake even if she must do so in disgrace (depending on what version of canon you go with). Surviving by her beauty and her wits, making herself into an actor on stage constantly in order to survive in their super-performative society, is fascinating to me, and I’m very much into the power being the scenes/the unassuming being privately terrible and powerful in general, so she fits that archetype well. I love her vicious hate-love with Valmont and her attempts to avoid being pulled down by any sort of weakness she might hold for him, but I also love her fascination with Cecile even as Merteuil ruins her, her apparently blithe and easy use of Danceny, and the idea of her with other women in general.

More Prompts/Ideas:

• Merteuil’s childhood or her marriage to the Marquis—I’d love more scenes of her making herself, her first sexual encounters, learning how to pleasure herself and others, how she feels about her husband in general and how she begins weaving her web of attempted agency after his death. What were her parents like? What specifically did she read to learn more about the world and how to behave in it? Her self-harming slightly, as some versions imply, to learn to control her facial expressions is fine to include/explore if you like.
  
• I really love Merteuil and Valmont’s combined awfulness, the base level of amoral manipulation each has and how it combines into an enormous mess, the underlying emotions from their past that Merteuil successfully manages to leverage against Valmont while not remaining unaffected herself (IMO, anyway). Anything continuing in that canon vein is great, be it more friendly/based in camaraderie or more savage/vicious/jealous like at the end of canon when the wheels finally come off the carriage. Their first time meeting? Merteuil domming Valmont? Merteuil’s more private thoughts of Valmont when they’re not together? Other people they’ve teamed up to attempt to ruin over the years?
  
• I really love the underlying affection, of a sort, she has for Cecile, though probably the more correct word is “fascination,” describing Merteuil’s amusement at Cecile’s antics until the spell finally breaks and she realizes how comparatively dull (read: moral after all) Cecile is. Any sort of look at Merteuil’s manipulation of her, and Cecile coming to recognize it for what it is or not, is welcome, playing with that pull of fascination and lust that come out at certain lines in Merteuil’s letters. More fun with them at the opera? Merteuil teaching Cecile sexual practices? Cecile managing to inartfully seduce Merteuil, in a way? Dubcon bordering on outright noncon is fine here, considering how brutal canon is on those points and how badly Merteuil mindfucks Cecile in canon, including Cecile being naive and/or overwhelmed by Merteuil’s experience.
  
• I find it interesting how Merteuil is able to use Danceny as a boytoy in a way she doesn’t with anyone else—there’s a certain comfort there, perhaps because Danceny means so little to Merteuil emotionally compared to Valmont or even to Cecile. What does she really think of him? Danceny sexually servicing her, and she teaching him further tricks of a sort, would be fascinating. And does Danceny really care at all about Merteuil, considering how his heart is with Cecile? What is he getting out of it—fascination? Education? Her initially seducing him would be great, as would his opinion of her behavior and how he sees her. (Does he know exactly how depraved she is? Does he come to know over time?)
  
• Surely Merteuil has had some sort of run in with other women before—another young girl she practiced with before they began seeing men? (Sharing beds with other young women?) AU where Merteuil is at a convent (before canon? Or she gets sent there as some sort of penance postcanon?) and becomes involved with another woman there in all sorts of fucked up ways? I’d also love to see a Merteuil (probably younger/precanon in this situation?) who is not as sure of herself yet and gets taken under some other powerful woman’s hand and/or is manipulated by another woman herself and how that might affect her self-development. Or even Merteuil having a relatively egalitarian (though still probably somewhat spiky/manipulative, Merteuil being Merteuil) relationship with another woman her own age during the canon timeline.
  
• Merteuil managing to seduce Tourvel instead of Valmont (or doing so while they’re both at Madame de Rosemonde’s?) would be fascinating. Some sort of hatesex? (Is Tourvel super guilty? Does she think of it differently from how cheating with a man would be due to societal interpretations/not being taught to take female sex desires seriously or something?) Merteuil having mentored Tourvel at some point like how she currently has Cecile? AU where Tourvel survives and comes to Merteuil to bitch her out for getting Valmont killed and then they have...angsty hatesex of some sort, or Tourvel manages to weaken Merteuil the way she appears to weaken Valmont?
  

[return to menu]

MUM (TV 2016)
Cathy Walker, Michael Roberts

Sign-Up Details:

My first impressions of Mum were kind of shock at some of the cringiest bits of secondhand embarrassment involved, and yet I’ve become so very fond of all the characters and their weird relationships with one another, and particularly about how, at the center of it all, is Cathy and her burgeoning life after her husband’s death. She and Michael are wonderful together as friends, and the intensity of their slow, slow burn into actual romantic/sexual relationship is delicious. I’m pretty much looking for allllllll the Cathy/Michael here, their friendship but most particularly their crashing into love with one another as Cathy gains a whole new lease on life after age 60.

What I Love: I love that awkward family comedy set-up and how perfectly it spirals into exploring actual issues of grief and growing older and taking responsibility for one’s life. I love Cathy’s fundamental goodness at heart, but I also love the wry aspects of her that so often go unnoticed by the others around her (except for Michael). I love Michael’s devotion to her (for so, so long! Perfect pining angst) and yet how willing he is to let her have her life as she wants it, even if it doesn’t involve him. (His pushing her to try going on dates if she wants to in season 1 is low-key adorable—he really just does want the best for her, even if it isn’t him, and his lack of possessiveness/presumptuousness is lovely.) I love how Cathy and Michael share the same vaguely stupid sense of humor and how they were friends for ages and ages before any of this even began. I just love late-in-life romances, and friends-to-lovers, and theirs is such a good example of that, of using grief and death as a springboard for new life, slow and tentative though it may be, and hopefully for Cathy continuing to grow to be less of a doormat to Jason and company (to continue to be the Mum of the title, but also, more than just a mother). I love Cathy taking the goddamn reins in 2x06 and just laying it out there and Michael cloistering himself in the bathroom in dazed disbelief that this could really happen after all, while simultaneously not wanting to force her into anything. I really love the image of them learning how to romantically and sexually please one another (and the potential comedy aspects, of course, as well as the more straightforward erotic bits).

More Prompts/Ideas:

• When and how did they first meet? How instantaneously did Michael realize he was falling in love with Dave’s girlfriend? What was the Cathy/Dave wedding day like and the smoking in the car that Cathy mentions in the pilot? How was the Cathy/Dave/Michael friendship over the years? What were Cathy and Michael doing to support one another through Dave’s illness?
  
• Their first date (post s2, I guess). What do they do? How awkward is it to go out to dinner or something with your best friend, but it’s more than just friends at last? How fast do they decide they want to have sex? What is their first time together like? (I’d imagine it’s somewhat awkward but also intensely emotional, in a low-key way, and of course because I love Cathy and want only extremely good things for her, I want her to receive extremely detailed attention from Michael if that’s what you also want to write.)
  
• In general, what is their sex life like? (Hilarious comparisons to Jason/Kelly or Derek/Pauline allowed, even encouraged, if you want to hit hard on the comedy aspects of the series—part of me loves imagining that it’s the two old folks who are having extremely good sex while Jason and Kelly are just doing Jason’s bog-standard missionary he’s apparently so fond of and Derek’s lost in Pauline’s breasts.) If you want to go full NC-17, I love them having thoughtful and creative sex to get around the whole old dude/probable erectile dysfunction thing, and I love Cathy just getting to, like, get luxuriously eaten out for ages. But I also love the idea of her taking control, maybe without really noticing, and Michael being super into the normally quiet and reserved Cathy knowing what she wants and when.
  
• Spain. Perfect set-up for both glorious romance (frolicking on beaches! Exploring foreign countries! Traveling together!) and pining for when Michael is there and Cathy can’t be. (Long phone calls or Skype sessions? Phone sex? Amusing WhatsApp conversations and Cathy discovering the eggplant emoji’s many uses? Navigating post-Brexit bullshit with owning property in the EU? [That one’s a joke, but also, if you can work that into a Cathy/Michael fic, I’m impressed and all for it.])
  
• How soon do they actually tell other people they’re actually dating now? Do they try to hide it for a while until Kelly or similar inevitably finds out and blurts it out to all and sundry? How soon do they inevitably move in together (see: into Cathy’s house) when they realize they’re tired of even pretending to live separate lives? What do other people think? (What do Michael’s girls think about Cathy? Do they roll their eyes like the teenagers they are at their dad’s attempts at being a romantic lover?)
  
• Any sort of holiday fic, if you like, with them doing Christmas together or similar and having to deal with the shenanigans the rest of the cast inevitably brings in on their heads. Or them navigating some big event in other peoples’ lives as a couple: a Jason/Kelly wedding, Maureen and/or Reg passing away, one of Michael’s girls graduating….
  

[return to menu]

PHANTOM THREAD (2017)
Cyril Woodcock

Sign-Up Details:

I went to see Phantom Thread expecting it to be very male-focused, and though it is to an extent, I was surprised by how rich the women of this world are and how fascinating their relationships with Reynolds and one another are, so much so that I’ve now seen the film five times and counting. I love the rich texture of everything, the lush fabrics and settings, the grandiose House of Woodcock itself and the country house, the detail of the fashion and the intimacy of measuring and modeling, the soundtrack (I am a huge, huge mournful-piano-and-strings fiend), the insanely awkward meals and passive-aggressive eating and tea drinking, the black and dry humor that interlaces everything...and, yes, all the fuckery that unravels later on, the struggles for psychological control and female agency while still retaining membership in Reynolds’s sphere. Cyril ended up being my favorite—I am completely enthralled with her entire stoic elegant hard femme power broker aesthetic and with Lesley Manville’s face, and the ease with which she can be read as queer is a huge bonus—so she’s the focus here, but I do like all three of the triad with all their various issues.

What I Love: I love Cyril Woodcock. I love her Big Dick Energy, her sharp heels-clacking walk, the sheer competence porn she constantly creates, her sharp edges, her monochrome color palette, the age spots across one side of her forehead, her viciously red nails, her pearls. I love the way she pushes her hair back from her ears while preparing to listening to some piece of absurd bullshit from Alma and/or Reynolds, her silent smoking while she’s holed up working, pretty much every single facial expression Lesley Manville gives her (Cyril is queen of the reaction gif). I love how she comes to love Alma herself, love her codependent fuckery with Reynolds, love her ability to do the best she can to get some measure of agency in a profoundly cruel world. She’s just a competent boss bitch who’s both an inspiration and a complete “please beat me for my sins” sort of character for me.

More Prompts/Ideas:

• Any and all Cyril backstory, tbh. What was she like as a child? What did she do during the various world wars she’s lived through? What did she think of their parents and nannies? How far did her formal schooling go? When did she start dressing like a slick, iron-clad, monochrome boss? When did she know she wouldn’t marry, and did she give a damn about it at all? What does she think about fashion and the creative side of the business—does she ever offer ideas to Reynolds in some subtle way? (Reynolds implies that “Cyril is always right” about matters of taste…) What did she think of the various muses before Alma? What does she think about the models and seamstresses in the house? (Does she ever have any, uh, sexual relationships with these women?)
  
• Cyril the happy, powerful spinster, willingly helping Reynolds with that first wedding dress despite the superstition of being forever a spinster. (Did she know even then she wouldn’t care to marry a man?) Cyril with a traditionally male name. She’s so easy to see as some flavor of queer, and I love to think she has a woman or multiple women on the outside. (Where does she go and what does she do offscreen, when she sends Reynolds on ahead to the country, when Alma asks her to leave for evening for the disastrous dinner, or during the Christmas-New Year’s stretch?) Maybe it’s just some casual flings she fucks for the release, maybe it’s the cost of doing business for the models and seamstresses who work for the House of Woodcock, maybe it’s visiting a queer club/bar/teahouse/however things worked in 1950s London, maybe it’s someone long-term. I want it all, anything with Cyril and other women, her domming them or even her being dommed by one, her just enjoying non-Woodcockian company, however it works out.
  
• Cyril and Reynolds hit my codependent siblings kink hard, especially with the older sister-younger brother dynamic, and the bits of their childhood we get—Cyril helping Reynolds with the first dress, in particular, so understatedly sweet as well as practical—really adds to it for me. They need each other and use each other bitterly for their positions and stability in society, and yet they do love each other in some twisted way and can sit in perfect contented silence for hours. I’d love to see them together more, their childhood, what the hell they do at night after work before Alma arrives, anything. This includes sexually, if you want to go there—I do not imagine it would be in any way romantic, just Cyril disciplining Reynolds after some particularly awful thing he does, or getting a sexual need slaked, or Reynolds begging her to allow him release when he has no muse nearby or his current muse won’t oblige, at any point in their lives. Just please make sure both are at least 16 or so first, please!
  
• So, I love putatively rival women who end up working together, which is essentially what happens with Alma and Cyril. Alma is truly a match in intelligence and fortitude for both Reynolds and Cyril—just the way she asks “what now?” before Reynolds even asks her to dinner that first time, this woman knows what she wants and will take it where society allows!—and Cyril’s slow, calm appreciation of that fact, the steady way with which she takes it onboard as a means to steady her brother and keep their shared livelihood running, is wonderful. Also, Cyril pulls so many hilarious basically sexual power moves on Alma—smelling her, trying to order Alma around while Reynolds is ill (“let me be unambiguous”), and more—and Alma takes them all with such strength and grace and an ability to give back as good as she gets, and I just love the idea of them together, either powering the House of Woodcock while Reynolds is off doing his designing or an AU where they kill off Reynolds and run away together or even just quietly fucking for stress relief off on the side while their lives run on as normal.
  
• And yeah, I love the weirdest threesome in London, and yet I’m so curiously invested in them as a stable and functional, if quietly fucked-up, triad, with the two women managing Reynolds and using him as their means of gaining their own hold in society while also trying to keep him from melting down/blowing up on them. I’m fine with Alma/Reynolds in all its absurd folie-a-deux abusive glory, but I’d love to see Cyril directly involved in this triad. How does Cyril interact with their child postcanon? Do Cyril and Alma eventually just take over the business and designing entirely from Reynolds, as there’s maybe a hint of in the ending montage with Alma taking a more active role in the process? And if there’s any sex that occurs to you for them, please go for it, be it Cyril watching and directing them, using Reynolds for her pleasure while Alma watches, forcing Reynolds to watch as she fucks his wife (Reynolds, of course, getting off on it), or even something slightly calmer and less immediately kinky and fraught with power struggle.
  

[return to menu]