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YULETIDE 2020
It's that time of year again, and what a year it has been.
Yuletide season is always my favorite time of year, and I am so excited for this exchange. And!, I am so excited to see what you write and I want to preemptively thank you. I love all the below requested canons and characters and I am sure I will love anything you come up with. I am open to receiving fic of any rating, from G to E, and the same goes for gen or ship fic. For ship fic, I have included any ships I would be interested in receiving for the characters requested.
This, definitely, is a bonkers long letter, but it's mainly because I've never understood the concept of brevity when talking about the things I love. Pick and choose from any and everything here, likes or prompts alike, and if you have ideas beyond anything I've rambled about here, please, run with them! I want you to have as much fun with this as I am sure I'll have reading what you create.
I can be found as arbitrarily on AO3 and widespindriftgaze on Tumblr.
GENERAL LIKES
• unreliable narrators and/or characters who lie to themselves
• nonlinear storytelling, playing around with timelines, parallel storylines, anything wonky with structure
• character study
• morally gray characters and moral complexity and/or ambiguity
• backstory and pre-canon
• missing scenes
• outsider POV
• scene-setting and details from canon, especially if a historical or period piece, i.e., fashion, food, lush description
• epistolary fic, including emails, letters, fake articles, etc.
• super messy, complicated, and difficult to categorize relationships between characters, made all the better if/when they share a history and maybe probably repressed feelings
• friends or enemies or colleagues to lovers, or any other scrambled version of this, i.e., friends to enemies to lovers or enemies to lovers to friends
• intimacy in all forms, emotional and/or physical, from domestic and lived-in to unexpected, fraught, and inappropriate
• sexual tension, resolved or unresolved
• characters who have to reap what they sow and deal with the consequences of their actions, or alternatively, the desperate ends a character will go to in order to avoid said consequences
• aftermaths—guilt, PTSD, reactions to trauma, coping mechanisms both healthy and unhealthy
• secret relationships and secret affections (even better when that secret is kept even from themselves)
• dysfunctional families and dysfunctional relationships
• mentor/protege relationships
• blurring the line between professional and personal relationships
• codependency, both healthy and unhealthy
• loyalty and/or loyalty kink
• infidelity, as well as any guilt or shame associated with it
• power play and power struggles
• mind games, mindfuckery, manipulation
• betrayal or fear of betrayal
• identity porn, identity issues, undercover casefic
• on the road, travel, road trips, and the entire aesthetic/vibe that goes with it
• AUs*
*I am always all for canon-divergent AUs or AUs that turn on one detail in canon going differently and how the story could have unfolded as a result. I have also noted additional AU ideas I would be interested in receiving down below in the requests and prompts where they apply. For this exchange, however, I am not interested in receiving mundane AUs, i.e., coffeeshop AUs, high school/university AUs, or modern AUs for historical canons, unless otherwise specified.
SMUT LIKES
• casual sex, or sex before/as feelings develop
• first time
• overstimulation
• mutual masturbation
• choking and breathplay
• fingering, fingering after fucking
• oral sex, including rimming
• wet and messy, comeplay
• switching; I have no top or bottom preferences
• size kink
• size difference
• orgasm delay or denial
• dirty talk, both the good and the hilariously bad
• dub-con of the sex pollen/fuck or die/villains made us do it variety
• dub-con due to power imbalance, mutual antagonism, or ulterior motive
• marking via bruising or biting
• sex as ill-advised attempt at communication between characters
• sex as unhealthy coping mechanism
• drunk sex
• hate sex and/or rough sex and/or manhandling and/or fighting/arguing leads to sex
• voyeurism
• friends or enemies or colleagues (or, somehow, all of the above!) with benefits
• character study via porn
• intimacy and/or trust demonstrated via sex acts
• under-negotiated kink or D/s
DNWs: rape/non-con (dub-con is fine; see likes above for details); A/B/O or omegaverse; scat or watersports; formal or lifestyle BDSM; asexual or trans headcanons (unless requested); kid fic, either via de-ageing requested characters or focus on parenthood/raising kids (mention of canon children is fine); pregnancy/mpreg; poly relationships (unless requested); soulmates or soul marks or soul bonds; poetry
As a side note, any content typically found in the requested canons below—i.e., graphic violence—I am completely fine with receiving.
Last! Spoilers abound, in particular for the currently airing season of Fargo and for the most recent installment in The Locked Tomb Trilogy, Harrow the Ninth.
FARGO (TV)
Constant Calamita; Rabbi Milligan
Fargo easily ranks as one of my favorite TV shows, and to say I’m excited that it’s finally back for a fourth season is a total understatement. And, I know it’s always a gamble to request a fandom that’s ongoing during sign-ups or an exchange (we’re only at, what? Episode 4 out of 11?), especially a show like Fargo where no character is ever safe, but I’m rolling the dice! So this is me saying, feel free to deviate from canon if canon throws a wrench in your plans! (Or, y’know, kills one or both of them.) If you’d rather write parallel to canon, I will be watching week-to-week and I will try to update these prompts to fit any new events, so I will be all caught-up if you want the fic to follow the show.
And these two! Per FX’s website, Constant Calamita is described as the head enforcer for the Fadda family: “If the devil had a cousin, this would be him.” And then Rabbi Milligan, the twice-traded son of an Irish mobster and head of the Milligan Concern, who was first traded to and then betrayed the Moskowitz Syndicate and then as a teenager traded to the Fadda family, for whom he triple-crossed his father, ultimately killing him. IT’S A WHOLE LOT. I am fascinated by the both of them, whether it's Calamita's dandyish take on the grim reaper or Rabbi's incredibly complicated sense of self and how, this far into the season, he seems the sort to do any and everything to stay alive, creating his own complex system of morality.
• I am very into the setting for this season––the 1950s, Kansas City, the old-time-y mob aesthetic, the genre really played up to the hilt. In light of this, I ask that you maintain the canonical time period and the setting and would prefer not to receive any AUs beyond the canon-divergence or for-what-of-a-nail variety.
• That said, I am all about some pre-canon fic. I am so interested in the 1930s and Rabbi's teenage years living with the Fadda family. He spent three years with them before he made the decision to betray his father and kill him. I want to know how he got to that decision! Canon has made it explicitly clear that Rabbi is very much so not considered a member of the Fadda family, yet he still chose to throw his lot in with them. I would gobble up fic that detailed how Rabbi came to that decision, how the Faddas convinced him to flip, and how maybe it was Calamita's job to bring Rabbi over to them. Is it harder or easier than Calamita thought it would be? What, exactly, does it require of him?
• And in addition to specifically Rabbi's betrayal of his family, I'd love to see Rabbi learning the ropes, Calamita more or less inducting him into the family or at least the ranks of Don Fadda's enforcers. Calamita taking Rabbi out on shakedowns, hits, gun runs––you know, all that gangster shit lol. And, in addition to that, my id is always pinged at any sort of "welcome to the family, now prove yourself" ritual, as fucked-up as your own id or imagination might want.
• I'd also love for those early years fic that focused on language, namely Calamita (begrudgingly, I'd imagine) teaching Rabbi Italian (or, not teaching him but deliberately speaking it in front of Rabbi and Rabbi struggling to interpret it) and/or Rabbi helping to improve Calamita's English.
• Identity! I love a story that plays around with the concept of identity, and maybe even gives us an unreliable narrator. Rabbi has made it clear to Satchel that "you play the hand you're dealt," and for Rabbi that meant assimilating into not just one but two families and heritages over the course of his life. I read a recent interview from the cast, where Ben Whishaw said of Rabbi that "there's no place for him, really." If you want to do a character study of that, playing around with the concept of both personal and cultural identity in that era and with those stakes, the violence inherent to it, the sort of person it's made him, I would love that.
• In canon, at the time of writing this letter, they have clearly set up the divide in the Fadda family between Josto's loyal soldiers and Gaetano's defectors, Rabbi and Calamita on opposing sides, respectively. And the most recent episode gave us Calamita's threatening throat-slitting gesture at Rabbi (specifically after the showdown between the brothers and Josto made it clear Calamita was only alive because Rabbi botched Gaetano's ordered hit). Which leads to me requesting: more weird menace between them, please! Take it as far and to any outcome you want. And I would include in that one of my favorite fiction tropes: attempted murder as foreplay. Intimidation and threats channeling into some darkly weird (and kinky?) sex stuff? I live for it.
• And speaking of sex, let's get into it. Please, lend as much gnarliness and nastiness to them as you want. Fucking as yet another power play between them? Calamita trying to assert power over Rabbi or Rabbi seeing sex as just another card for him to play? Absolutely. Or, alternatively and much less calculated, touch-starved and desperate Rabbi, unloved and never belonging anywhere or to anyone in his life, plenty aware that whatever this is isn't love or affection as it should be or as he should want it, but he'll take it. Or, maybe with Calamita affection manifests only through violence? Or, sex as demonstration of perverse loyalty? Why not! Hate sex? Obviously; I am all in for that. In addition to all that, I would totally be super into fic that explored a secret relationship between the both of them over the last roughly twenty years. Nothing structured to it, nothing they would ever acknowledge to anyone else, let alone each other or themselves. A "colleagues" with benefits scenario that has played out inconsistently since Rabbi was taken in to the Fadda household. Give me the inherent danger of that (which, speaking of, considering the time period and the all but oozing machismo with the Fadda family, I would totally invite internalized homophobia as an aspect of the story) coupled with trust issues and betrayal and Rabbi's very obvious loneliness.
• One of my all-time favorite tropes is amateur wound care. Roughly twenty years of the both of them with the Fadda family, and with Constant as the enforcer and Milligan as another foot soldier for the family, you know they’ve had their rough scrapes before. Give me some of that weird antagonism and tension between them as one is forced to bandage up or care for the other, and I’ll love it all the more. Tangential to that, scars! Scarification, scar worship, the both of them leaving scars on each other—I’d eat either up with a spoon. Add to that Calamita’s canonical branding, and you have my attention.
• And have another trope: trapped together! You've got those Midwest winters on your side––give me a blizzard and strand these two somewhere together, either alone or with enemies, unable to trust each other yet forced to try. Or, in canon it's been established that the Fadda family has ties to/answers to the New York syndicate, so ahead and give me the world's most intense road trip!
• Last, if you want to pay homage to any Coen Brothers' movie much as the show does, go all out. Borrow plots, motifs, whatever you want. Similarly, if you want to connect the new season/these characters to all three seasons that came before, please go ahead!
SPOILER-Y PROMPTS BELOW, from episode 5 on:
• First of all, not sure where the rest of the season is going, but if you want to write Rabbi and Satchel on the run, PLEASE DO. Post-episode 6 update: APPARENTLY THIS IS WHERE THE SEASON IS GOING! Which is me inviting you to play around with that, maybe with some bonus (canon-divergent, if necessary) Calamita chasing them down content.
And tied to that? The promo for episode 7? With Calamita saying that he always knew he was a rat? (I'm assuming he's talking about Rabbi here; it tracks.) If you wanted to play around with that loyalty, especially considering how slippery Calamita's own is, or go back to pre-canon and the past and all the times Calamita has tested Rabbi's loyalty and found it wanting, I would 100% love that.
Post-episode 7 thoughts: “Hunt him down. You alone.” We really have canon-compliant Calamita chasing down Rabbi content?!?! I’m blessed. (And further blessings, here's me, your favorite neighborhood hawk-eyed conspiracy theorist of the shipping variety electing to read way too much into Calamita's face journey after Josto tells him to kill Rabbi.) But, uhhh, we also have Josto telling Loy that Calamita killed Satchel, so if you want to run with that (and who knows where canon is going with it), I will happily take Calamita, realizing he’s been sold out by Josto and by extension the Faddas, making him as much an outsider as Rabbi.
• Calamita's entire backstory that he told Doctor Senator? About how he came to America as "a baby in a box," his fifteen year-old mother dead from tuberculosis in the hold of the ship? How, "you need to know, there ain't a monster on earth tougher than an orphan in a box." I AM FASCINATED. Give me a ~stranger in a strange land story, the way he and Rabbi's "orphan" stories differ, how separately they have either assimilated or refused to assimilate, how their histories made killers of them both yet entirely different ones.
• Post-episode 9 (and most likely my final update to this letter): RIP, DUDES. Not only did we get Calamita shooting Rabbi, but we also got both of them (after Omie shot Calamita) getting sucked up into an unseasonable tornado at a Kansas gas station. Only on Fargo. Rather than writing a treatise on how much I loved this episode (I am still thinking about the Goldilocks conversation at the dinner table), this is just me saying: feel free to fill in their history any which way you want, feel free to run the AU route and totally ignore death-by-tornado, or just write me a million more words of Rabbi at the Barton Arms with Satchel and all the ways he has spent his life feeling like an outsider and how, through his best intentions, he has foisted that reality onto Satchel, too.
Or, if you wanted to run in the vein of the fantastic: TIME LOOP TORNADO. Rabbi is stuck repeating the same miserable mistakes of his life, “The Future is Now!” INDEED, as his future is now caught, like a tornado, running in circles with him trying to find some peace at the eye of a storm. Maybe each iteration involves Rabbi and Calamita killing each other, who knows. I have no idea how any of this would work, but if this pings anything in your mind, BY ALL MEANS, RUN WITH IT.
GENERATION KILL RPF
James Ransone (Generation Kill RPF); Alexander Skarsgård (Generation Kill RPF)
First, have some quality journalism courtesy of E! News:
Yeah. I ship it.
And in the spirit of that, from the deep and deranged deep dive I took earlier this year, have a whole gross cornucopia of fodder For Your Consideration™ on this front:
» Their joint commentary for episode four of Generation Kill, aka the holy grail and probably what pushed me overboard into requesting this for Yuletide this year;
» A very vital audio snippet from that commentary;
» Another choice audio snippet from that commentary;
» An excerpt from a different episode commentary;
» A couple of quotes [1, 2];
» An interview with Stark Sands about what filming Generation Kill was like;
» An interview with PJ Ransone with all sorts of tidbits about shooting Generation Kill (and not wearing pants while driving the humvee);
» PJ being PJ [1, 2];
» And, y'know, sightings of the both of them out and about together [1, 2, 3, 4].
2020 was the year I revisited my past self and rewatched Generation Kill and found myself drilling down deep into this particular rabbit hole. Needless to say, I found myself endlessly entertained by their episode commentary track and the very easy (uh, flirtatious?) camaraderie between the both of them. So here I am, asking for more of that. As a brief side note: I am all for leaning hard into the fictional aspect of RPF and would prefer that Yuletide RPF nominating rules apply here: no depiction of anyone who isn't famous in their own right. Co-stars and invented OC's are fine if you want to include additional "characters."
• What I would love is some sort of fic that charts their relationship, platonic or romantic and/or sexual (or lack of a relationship or whatever word or non-word they would use to describe they very-much-so-not-a-relationship relationship and whatever is happening or not happening between them) over the better part of a decade. Or, basically that one wonderful scene from Frances Ha in fic form; it remains to me the perfect description of love and friendship and is the ultimate in romantic and I basically think about it all the goddamn time.
• Tied to that very general idea: epistolary fic! Emails and texts, social media if you want, transcripts of voicemails, of video chats, or transcripts of videos sent to each other, descriptions of photos or selfies sent, all sorts of found footage-esque material sent and received over the last decade demonstrating the ebb and flow of their friendship/relationship/what-the-fuck-ever.
• Generation Kill-era fic! First meeting each other, the months they spent in southern Africa shooting the series more or less cut off from the rest of the world, that frat house environment, the close daily proximity in the humvee, shooting the shit in between takes––I live for all of it.
• Reunions! I love little more than an unexpected reunion between two people with unfinished business. If you want to write literally a thousand words (or, y'know, thousands of words) of just the two of them running into each other at random and the conversation that results from that, the both of them easily slipping into their old easy banter, I am all for it, no complaints here. You decide how much time has passed since they saw each other last, and you can decide what happens between them next.
• And speaking of reunions––I would love nothing more than fic where they work together again, for the first time in well over a decade. Maybe they fall back into old habits, or maybe older and not really all that wiser, they develop new ones; maybe it's easy to go right back to the way things had been between the two of them the first time around, or maybe it's that much harder. Furthermore, I am all for the bleed between the fictional and the real (hello, my perpetual interest in RPF lol), especially as it informs performance which in turn informs reality. Which is just a longwinded way of me saying, if you wanted to go the, "does art reflect life, or does life reflect art" chicken-or-the-egg route, by all means, please do!
• And speaking of art imitating life or vice versa: road trip fic! You pick the period in time, you choose the destination, I just know I would definitely love fic of the two of them stuck in the same car as they drive cross-country for whatever reason.
• If you are inclined to go the sex route, I am always a sucker for the friends with benefits who then realize oops they have feelings plot. I also love a good burgeoning sexual relationship that is essentially built on a series of escalating self-proclaimed non-events: drunken hook-ups, accidental sexts leading to intentional sexting, mutual masturbation, the both of them promising themselves, and each other, that nothing is really happening. Alternatively/similarly, I 100% love the idea of a game of sexual/gay chicken that goes wildly further than intended when it comes to these two.
• And a final, and supremely self-indulgent, request: rock band/Almost Famous!AU. Need I say more? (I'm going to say more.) For this particular AU, I am all for some outsider POV. Maybe, epistolary-style, it's a journalist documenting their band's rise and fall, traveling on tour with them, the recording of their most famous album, a retrospective on the band or the both of them a decade after their most famous album—however you want to play it! (uh, no pun intended?) Give me all the minutiae of this very much so invented AU band: the track list off their albums, their tours, fake interviews, fake controversies and scandals, all that business.
THE LOCKED TOMB TRILOGY | GIDEON THE NINTH SERIES – TAMSYN MUIR
Augustine the First (Locked Tomb Trilogy); Mercymorn the First (Locked Tomb Trilogy)
First of all?:
“Bury me next to you in that unmarked grave, Joy. We knew that was the only hope we ever had—that we could live to see it through…and pray for our own cessation. Oh, we’ll still hate each other, my dear, we have hated each other too long and too passionately to stop…but my bones will rest easy next to your bones.”
I have been unable to stop thinking about this since I read the book!
• There is ten thousand years of shit to get into here! An entire myriad of their mutual antagonism and their scheming (both independently and jointly.) One of my favorite things about Harrow the Ninth (and there are a great many favorite things), was how everything we got to see of both Augustine and Mercymorn was via outsider POV. I loved how we got to see them through Harrow's POV, how she took note of their easy and wordless communication. If you want to write more of them via outsider POV (and from a different POV than Harrow's), I would absolutely love that.
• I would also love more than anything if you wanted to write how their plot to kill God took shape. In heist stories, my favorite part is always the getting the team together/plotting each step to come. So how did this plan come about? What was the impetus? Their suspicions that killing a necromancer's cavalier was unnecessary? But beyond that, what I really want to know is how Augustine and Mercy came to be on the same page––when did they share their own notes and suspicions? How did they reach a place of trust where they were comfortable with each another enough not to assume the other would betray them or the plan?
• Speaking of Scheming™, what other schemes and plots did these two get up to over the thousands of years, y'know, unrelated to killing God. Sabotage? Attempts at destruction (that, had those attempts been successful, most like would've been of the mutually-assured variety?)? Childish and petty attempts at undermining each other? I'm for any and all of it. And similarly, I am also all in for an accounting of each and every temporary truce and detente achieved between them over a myriad of mutual hatred.
• Early Canaan House days! I would love to read about the early days of Lyctorhood, the abject horror of it all, what they did to achieve it, having to live for millennia with it. Include the whole gang, especially Cytherea! Or go further back, tell me more about the days or years leading up to their Lyctorhood. I would love to see more of the both of them with Cristabel and Alfred. Or John, before he achieves godhead!
• DIOS APATE, MAJOR. "We needed your, ahem, genetic material, and it was the only way. It was the first time Joy and I had been in the same place for ten years." For the love of god (pun fully intended!), their (heavily stage-managed, heavily-plotted, deceptive-as-all-hell) threesome with John! The before, the during, the after––I'll take it all, please!
• And speaking of sex: hate sex, fight sex, sex as negotiation, sex as unhealthy coping mechanism, sex as penance. You name the dark motivation behind why they're fucking, and I guarantee, I am going to love it. And to go one further: they're Lyctors! Let the body horror reign! Go wild, run amok, get gory and weird and disgusting (but hot), and I will love you all the more for it. (And if you want to inject some unexpected––and unwanted––tenderness amidst all that, intimacy as an almost unbearable and inexplicable surprise for two people who have known and hated each other for as long as they have, then I will find a way to love you even more than I have already declared.)
• AUs! All the fix-it(-but-make-it-worse) AUs! Maybe when Mercy "kills" John he stays dead and her and Augustine get to ride out the end of the world together. Maybe the world doesn't end, and the greatest punishment is that they have to keep on living. Maybe John does kill Mercy, but Augustine succeeds in sending John down through the stoma into hell––and it's Augustine who commits the next resurrection, bringing Mercy back (for whatever reason you might decide.) Or, maybe, no resurrection, just some real fun revenant shit and Mercy is going to haunt (and taunt) the fuck out of Augustine for the next myriad, if he can make it even a fraction that long in the power vacuum they've created.
SUCCESSION (TV 2018)
Kendall Roy
My favorite character, my hothouse flower, MY NUMBER ONE BOY. I love every messy thing about this dude, from his cringey business frat boy jargon to his desperation to prove himself to his propensity to fall flat on his face Charlie Brown and the football-style over and over again. I'm fascinated by his relationships with literally every member of his family, as well as how Season 2 showed how guilt and shame ate at him.
• I would truly love to read anything and everything where Kendall is concerned. Pre-canon (private school days, college, his time working for Waystar in Shanghai, his marriage before it fell apart), mid-canon (I LIVE for missing scenes! Flesh out the days in between the failed vote of no confidence and the trip out to Austerlitz, or add more to the DC hearings either before or after his appearance before the Congressional committee, etc., etc.), or post-season two (I AM DYING TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT! Splintering family factions, distrust, betrayal, whose side is who on, etc., etc.)
• Some of my favorite episodes from the series are when the entire family is forced into one location together (Austerlitz, the wedding episodes, Tern Haven, Argestes, the yacht, etc.) Add to that this line from Shiv that is always echoing around in my head––"This is in no way our worst Thanksgiving."––I would love fic set over a truly disastrous Roy family holiday.
• I would love any sort of epistolary fic that shows how the greater world at-large views Kendall. Social media! The actual media! Twitter threads and memes that make fun of him (but most specifically his rap performance in Dundee), Page Six articles full of gossip about him at the height of his addiction, speculation about who he might be dating (either true or hilariously false), reddit threads theorizing about his potential involvement in Waystar Royco's laundry list of crimes or conspiracy theories about WHATEVER, public sightings of him out and about in New York or LA or Dubai, and so on and so forth. Or, if you want to embrace more professional media, I'd love fake magazine profiles of him, both before and after his press conference at the end of Season 2, interviews he has done or will do, media appearances, cable news. I love outsider POV, and if you want to write from the POV of some journalist tasked with following Kendall around for the day and the fic is their notes or their actual article, I'd absolutely love that.
• And speaking of outsider POV and a day in the life, I would be all about fic from Jess's POV about Kendall. She is with him 24/7, she is his shadow and his right hand, she fields interference, anticipates what he needs, gets him his coke, she loops Gerri in when needed, she's the one saddled with all his tedious grunt work. I'd love fic that follows her through her day, that is essentially her following Kendall through his day, and I would love a view of his character as afforded through her lens. (Bonus points if you want to include Stewy in any capacity, as she clearly hates him, and I love that for her.)
• An AU where Kendall is the prodigal son who returns for his father's birthday after years of absence, intending to take the family business out from under him and his siblings only for Logan to suffer from a stroke. I think it's such a fun thought exercise to consider what sort of man Kendall might've been able to become had he been able to escape out from under Logan's boot heel. Who would Kendall be if he could "be his own man"? You could also go a different route with this AU, and instead Kendall took the advice he gave Naomi at Tern Haven: he got out. He took the money and he walked, he went on to live a life of dumb leisure, the poster child for idle wealth. Go all Sliding Doors and show that other life Kendall might've led! And maybe, if you want, how even this does not bring him any happiness as he's still without Logan's respect.
• And one more wildcard AU request: Southern Gothic!AU, with Logan Roy as the corrupt leader of a megachurch and the Roy children are his unruly flock. Is this just me asking for The Righteous Gemstones played straight? Yes, probably. (Sidebar: I totally recommend watching The Righteous Gemstones; it's hilarious.)
Ship-wise! I've listed out below various ships I would be interested in receiving involving Kendall. Feel free to take any of the ideas above and plug in any of the suggested ships if you wish. And, while I am fine if you want to include any unlisted/unrequested ships in the background, I do request that they not be the focus of the fic.
Kendall Roy/Stewy Hosseini
» Oh, how I love a good friends-to-lovers (or, well, friends-to-lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers) dynamic. Backstory, college days, early business days, Kendall and Stewy traveling the world, Stewy visiting Kendall in Shanghai––I'll take all of it. Alternatively, I am always here for fallout from Kendall's betrayal; I am always thinking about these lines of dialogue. Basically, what I am saying is, I will happily and greedily read the long and winding tale of Kendall and Stewy's relationship over the years, marked by repeated betrayal and distrust.
» I would deeply love an alternate Season 2 where even though Kendall completely fucked Stewy over with the takeover, the two of them enter into a (initially, maybe) hate-fueled offscreen affair that is very much so different from their history as friends with benefits, thanks largely to the events Kendall put into motion (and because all the fucking is serving as an unhealthy coping mechanism for Kendall, and also, because, maybe Feelings™ develop.) Is Stewy trying to punish Kendall? Does Kendall want to be punished? Does it all culminate in Greece before Kendall takes down his father? Play around with canon events as you'd like!
» Post-Season 2! How does Stewy react to Kendall's big move against Logan? Do they reconcile? Partner up? Are either willing to trust the other?
Kendall Roy/Greg Hirsch
» He sees you, Greg, you Machiavellian fuck! I would truly love fic that covers their travel from the yacht in the Season 2 finale through Kendall's big press conference. I would love to see that team-up as it reached fruition and Greg's agreement to provide Kendall the documents he needs. And tied to that, give me the imaginary Season 3 where the both of them are a team! I would love some post-S2 exploration of their newfound partnership, for lack of a better term, as they take on the rest of the family (which you just know Greg is totally punching above his weight here).
» Greg and Kendall and all their hangouts lol. And speaking of, I would also love any fic set during S2 when Greg is basically in Kendall Caretaker mode, or even, if you want to get darker and uglier with it, how Greg feels as if he owes Kendall for the apartment and Kendall is so deep in his own fucked headspace he doesn’t read all the escalating favors from Greg as anything worthy of concern.
» If you want to get weirdly epistolary about it, I’d love all sorts of bonkers internet speculation about who the hell Greg even is. Go ahead and give me social media fic or Reddit fic where Greg is constantly spotted out with Kendall (well before the DC hearings), and no one has any idea who the hell he is. All sorts of speculation abounds about "the tall dude" always with Kendall. Is he the world's lamest looking bodyguard? Is he an awkward, yet famous, basketball player? Does he do his taxes? Which Silicon Valley start-up is his? Was he the guy who did the movie that went to Sundance? Who is this guy!
Kendall Roy/Lawrence Yee
» I am fascinated by their business relationship and fascinated by how much Lawrence hates Kendall and all the business-y, jargon-y smack talk between the two of them. Hate sex to end all hate sex after Kendall guts Vaulter? I'd live for it.
» Or, I would love anything set after Kendall kills Vaulter, whether it’s Lawrence attempting to exact revenge on Kendall or a strange detente they enter into (maybe at Argestes?).
Kendall Roy/Rava Roy
» Give me their version of Marriage Story or Kramer vs. Kramer, aka the messy dissolution of their marriage! Bonus points if you want to throw in Kendall/Stewy or Kendall/anyone else as one of the contributing factors leading to the end of their marriage. Infidelity, particular as an element of Kendall’s self-destruction and self-sabotage, is a feature not a bug for me!
Kendall Roy/Rhea Jarrell
» These two had...................the weirdest chemistry. So this is me inviting you, should you have also taken note of that chemistry, to get wild. AU of the Dundee episode? Where instead of that actress Kendall is obsessed with it's Rhea he briefly attaches his attention to? A greater AU than that, and it’s not Logan that Rhea chooses to hitch her wagon to but Kendall (and if, like with Logan, that included a weird sexual element, I ENCOURAGE IT).
Kendall Roy & Frank Vernon or Kendall Roy/Frank Vernon
» I find myself endlessly interested in the relationship that we see between them as portrayed in canon, particularly the way that Frank fills that paternal void in Kendall’s life. Whether you want to explore that mentor/mentee relationship they have platonically, or if you want to take it to a dirtybadwrong place (Kendall's self-sabotage of his interpersonal relationships rearing its ugly head), I would be happy to read it.
And, in the sibling incest corner of the ship requests:
I am more than happy to receive any permutation of Kendall/Shiv, Kendall/Roman, or Kendall/Roman/Shiv. A canon line I think about every goddamn day of my life is when Kendall is trying to defend his father to Naomi on the yacht and he says, “He loves me. He does. I think it’s just a wrong kind of love expression.” THE WRONG KIND OF LOVE EXPRESSION, aka the fulcrum on which any of my interest in incest ships for this canon rests on.
» As a general note, one aspect of incest that always holds my interest is the guilt, the shame, and the secrecy of it. I’d love if you could fold that in, and most likely the unhealthy ways any of these three would react, to that shame.
» I am especially interested in anything pre-canon. There is nothing more appealing to me than bored rich kids Kendall, Roman, and Shiv, whether it’s spending the summer wasting away at their father’s Summer Palace in the Hamptons or stuck at their mother’s in the dead of winter. That competition between them for their father’s love spilling over into how they each deal with one another and any affection they feel towards each other? Delicious. I would love more scenes like the boathouse scene before Shiv’s wedding, the three of them getting stoned and goofing around. On a completely different end of the spectrum, I would love fic set on the yacht after Kendall has offered himself up as "the blood sacrifice." Give me that last night before the gallows energy! Or, expand on this (cruelly!) cut scene from that episode!
» For Kendall/Roman, all I have to say is: dog cage. Run with that dynamic, that history, any which direction you wish to travel, dear author. Or, I am never not thinking about how Kendall immediately, and ferociously, stepped in when Logan hit Roman in the Argestes episode. If you want to unspool that dynamic and that history between them, I would love that.
» Cliff notes here, but idk, somehow Kendall/Shiv has became my OTP for the show and I have numerous preexisting prompts for you to pick from in last year's letter, and if any of these trigger your imagination, please! Run with it. Additionally, I have been staring at this photo like I am staring into the sun, so if you want to work that into any sort of fic or have it serve as inspiration, I will love both you and it forever.
I want to thank you again, mystery writer, and I hope you have an excellent and incredibly fun Yuletide season!
• dub-con due to power imbalance, mutual antagonism, or ulterior motive
• marking via bruising or biting
• sex as ill-advised attempt at communication between characters
• sex as unhealthy coping mechanism
• drunk sex
• hate sex and/or rough sex and/or manhandling and/or fighting/arguing leads to sex
• voyeurism
• friends or enemies or colleagues (or, somehow, all of the above!) with benefits
• character study via porn
• intimacy and/or trust demonstrated via sex acts
• under-negotiated kink or D/s
DNWs: rape/non-con (dub-con is fine; see likes above for details); A/B/O or omegaverse; scat or watersports; formal or lifestyle BDSM; asexual or trans headcanons (unless requested); kid fic, either via de-ageing requested characters or focus on parenthood/raising kids (mention of canon children is fine); pregnancy/mpreg; poly relationships (unless requested); soulmates or soul marks or soul bonds; poetry
As a side note, any content typically found in the requested canons below—i.e., graphic violence—I am completely fine with receiving.
Last! Spoilers abound, in particular for the currently airing season of Fargo and for the most recent installment in The Locked Tomb Trilogy, Harrow the Ninth.
FARGO (TV)
Constant Calamita; Rabbi Milligan
Fargo easily ranks as one of my favorite TV shows, and to say I’m excited that it’s finally back for a fourth season is a total understatement. And, I know it’s always a gamble to request a fandom that’s ongoing during sign-ups or an exchange (we’re only at, what? Episode 4 out of 11?), especially a show like Fargo where no character is ever safe, but I’m rolling the dice! So this is me saying, feel free to deviate from canon if canon throws a wrench in your plans! (Or, y’know, kills one or both of them.) If you’d rather write parallel to canon, I will be watching week-to-week and I will try to update these prompts to fit any new events, so I will be all caught-up if you want the fic to follow the show.
And these two! Per FX’s website, Constant Calamita is described as the head enforcer for the Fadda family: “If the devil had a cousin, this would be him.” And then Rabbi Milligan, the twice-traded son of an Irish mobster and head of the Milligan Concern, who was first traded to and then betrayed the Moskowitz Syndicate and then as a teenager traded to the Fadda family, for whom he triple-crossed his father, ultimately killing him. IT’S A WHOLE LOT. I am fascinated by the both of them, whether it's Calamita's dandyish take on the grim reaper or Rabbi's incredibly complicated sense of self and how, this far into the season, he seems the sort to do any and everything to stay alive, creating his own complex system of morality.
• I am very into the setting for this season––the 1950s, Kansas City, the old-time-y mob aesthetic, the genre really played up to the hilt. In light of this, I ask that you maintain the canonical time period and the setting and would prefer not to receive any AUs beyond the canon-divergence or for-what-of-a-nail variety.
• That said, I am all about some pre-canon fic. I am so interested in the 1930s and Rabbi's teenage years living with the Fadda family. He spent three years with them before he made the decision to betray his father and kill him. I want to know how he got to that decision! Canon has made it explicitly clear that Rabbi is very much so not considered a member of the Fadda family, yet he still chose to throw his lot in with them. I would gobble up fic that detailed how Rabbi came to that decision, how the Faddas convinced him to flip, and how maybe it was Calamita's job to bring Rabbi over to them. Is it harder or easier than Calamita thought it would be? What, exactly, does it require of him?
• And in addition to specifically Rabbi's betrayal of his family, I'd love to see Rabbi learning the ropes, Calamita more or less inducting him into the family or at least the ranks of Don Fadda's enforcers. Calamita taking Rabbi out on shakedowns, hits, gun runs––you know, all that gangster shit lol. And, in addition to that, my id is always pinged at any sort of "welcome to the family, now prove yourself" ritual, as fucked-up as your own id or imagination might want.
• I'd also love for those early years fic that focused on language, namely Calamita (begrudgingly, I'd imagine) teaching Rabbi Italian (or, not teaching him but deliberately speaking it in front of Rabbi and Rabbi struggling to interpret it) and/or Rabbi helping to improve Calamita's English.
• Identity! I love a story that plays around with the concept of identity, and maybe even gives us an unreliable narrator. Rabbi has made it clear to Satchel that "you play the hand you're dealt," and for Rabbi that meant assimilating into not just one but two families and heritages over the course of his life. I read a recent interview from the cast, where Ben Whishaw said of Rabbi that "there's no place for him, really." If you want to do a character study of that, playing around with the concept of both personal and cultural identity in that era and with those stakes, the violence inherent to it, the sort of person it's made him, I would love that.
• In canon, at the time of writing this letter, they have clearly set up the divide in the Fadda family between Josto's loyal soldiers and Gaetano's defectors, Rabbi and Calamita on opposing sides, respectively. And the most recent episode gave us Calamita's threatening throat-slitting gesture at Rabbi (specifically after the showdown between the brothers and Josto made it clear Calamita was only alive because Rabbi botched Gaetano's ordered hit). Which leads to me requesting: more weird menace between them, please! Take it as far and to any outcome you want. And I would include in that one of my favorite fiction tropes: attempted murder as foreplay. Intimidation and threats channeling into some darkly weird (and kinky?) sex stuff? I live for it.
• And speaking of sex, let's get into it. Please, lend as much gnarliness and nastiness to them as you want. Fucking as yet another power play between them? Calamita trying to assert power over Rabbi or Rabbi seeing sex as just another card for him to play? Absolutely. Or, alternatively and much less calculated, touch-starved and desperate Rabbi, unloved and never belonging anywhere or to anyone in his life, plenty aware that whatever this is isn't love or affection as it should be or as he should want it, but he'll take it. Or, maybe with Calamita affection manifests only through violence? Or, sex as demonstration of perverse loyalty? Why not! Hate sex? Obviously; I am all in for that. In addition to all that, I would totally be super into fic that explored a secret relationship between the both of them over the last roughly twenty years. Nothing structured to it, nothing they would ever acknowledge to anyone else, let alone each other or themselves. A "colleagues" with benefits scenario that has played out inconsistently since Rabbi was taken in to the Fadda household. Give me the inherent danger of that (which, speaking of, considering the time period and the all but oozing machismo with the Fadda family, I would totally invite internalized homophobia as an aspect of the story) coupled with trust issues and betrayal and Rabbi's very obvious loneliness.
• One of my all-time favorite tropes is amateur wound care. Roughly twenty years of the both of them with the Fadda family, and with Constant as the enforcer and Milligan as another foot soldier for the family, you know they’ve had their rough scrapes before. Give me some of that weird antagonism and tension between them as one is forced to bandage up or care for the other, and I’ll love it all the more. Tangential to that, scars! Scarification, scar worship, the both of them leaving scars on each other—I’d eat either up with a spoon. Add to that Calamita’s canonical branding, and you have my attention.
• And have another trope: trapped together! You've got those Midwest winters on your side––give me a blizzard and strand these two somewhere together, either alone or with enemies, unable to trust each other yet forced to try. Or, in canon it's been established that the Fadda family has ties to/answers to the New York syndicate, so ahead and give me the world's most intense road trip!
• Last, if you want to pay homage to any Coen Brothers' movie much as the show does, go all out. Borrow plots, motifs, whatever you want. Similarly, if you want to connect the new season/these characters to all three seasons that came before, please go ahead!
SPOILER-Y PROMPTS BELOW, from episode 5 on:
• First of all, not sure where the rest of the season is going, but if you want to write Rabbi and Satchel on the run, PLEASE DO. Post-episode 6 update: APPARENTLY THIS IS WHERE THE SEASON IS GOING! Which is me inviting you to play around with that, maybe with some bonus (canon-divergent, if necessary) Calamita chasing them down content.
And tied to that? The promo for episode 7? With Calamita saying that he always knew he was a rat? (I'm assuming he's talking about Rabbi here; it tracks.) If you wanted to play around with that loyalty, especially considering how slippery Calamita's own is, or go back to pre-canon and the past and all the times Calamita has tested Rabbi's loyalty and found it wanting, I would 100% love that.
Post-episode 7 thoughts: “Hunt him down. You alone.” We really have canon-compliant Calamita chasing down Rabbi content?!?! I’m blessed. (And further blessings, here's me, your favorite neighborhood hawk-eyed conspiracy theorist of the shipping variety electing to read way too much into Calamita's face journey after Josto tells him to kill Rabbi.) But, uhhh, we also have Josto telling Loy that Calamita killed Satchel, so if you want to run with that (and who knows where canon is going with it), I will happily take Calamita, realizing he’s been sold out by Josto and by extension the Faddas, making him as much an outsider as Rabbi.
• Calamita's entire backstory that he told Doctor Senator? About how he came to America as "a baby in a box," his fifteen year-old mother dead from tuberculosis in the hold of the ship? How, "you need to know, there ain't a monster on earth tougher than an orphan in a box." I AM FASCINATED. Give me a ~stranger in a strange land story, the way he and Rabbi's "orphan" stories differ, how separately they have either assimilated or refused to assimilate, how their histories made killers of them both yet entirely different ones.
• Post-episode 9 (and most likely my final update to this letter): RIP, DUDES. Not only did we get Calamita shooting Rabbi, but we also got both of them (after Omie shot Calamita) getting sucked up into an unseasonable tornado at a Kansas gas station. Only on Fargo. Rather than writing a treatise on how much I loved this episode (I am still thinking about the Goldilocks conversation at the dinner table), this is just me saying: feel free to fill in their history any which way you want, feel free to run the AU route and totally ignore death-by-tornado, or just write me a million more words of Rabbi at the Barton Arms with Satchel and all the ways he has spent his life feeling like an outsider and how, through his best intentions, he has foisted that reality onto Satchel, too.
Or, if you wanted to run in the vein of the fantastic: TIME LOOP TORNADO. Rabbi is stuck repeating the same miserable mistakes of his life, “The Future is Now!” INDEED, as his future is now caught, like a tornado, running in circles with him trying to find some peace at the eye of a storm. Maybe each iteration involves Rabbi and Calamita killing each other, who knows. I have no idea how any of this would work, but if this pings anything in your mind, BY ALL MEANS, RUN WITH IT.
GENERATION KILL RPF
James Ransone (Generation Kill RPF); Alexander Skarsgård (Generation Kill RPF)
First, have some quality journalism courtesy of E! News:
Yeah. I ship it.
And in the spirit of that, from the deep and deranged deep dive I took earlier this year, have a whole gross cornucopia of fodder For Your Consideration™ on this front:
» Their joint commentary for episode four of Generation Kill, aka the holy grail and probably what pushed me overboard into requesting this for Yuletide this year;
» A very vital audio snippet from that commentary;
» Another choice audio snippet from that commentary;
» An excerpt from a different episode commentary;
» A couple of quotes [1, 2];
» An interview with Stark Sands about what filming Generation Kill was like;
» An interview with PJ Ransone with all sorts of tidbits about shooting Generation Kill (and not wearing pants while driving the humvee);
» PJ being PJ [1, 2];
» And, y'know, sightings of the both of them out and about together [1, 2, 3, 4].
2020 was the year I revisited my past self and rewatched Generation Kill and found myself drilling down deep into this particular rabbit hole. Needless to say, I found myself endlessly entertained by their episode commentary track and the very easy (uh, flirtatious?) camaraderie between the both of them. So here I am, asking for more of that. As a brief side note: I am all for leaning hard into the fictional aspect of RPF and would prefer that Yuletide RPF nominating rules apply here: no depiction of anyone who isn't famous in their own right. Co-stars and invented OC's are fine if you want to include additional "characters."
• What I would love is some sort of fic that charts their relationship, platonic or romantic and/or sexual (or lack of a relationship or whatever word or non-word they would use to describe they very-much-so-not-a-relationship relationship and whatever is happening or not happening between them) over the better part of a decade. Or, basically that one wonderful scene from Frances Ha in fic form; it remains to me the perfect description of love and friendship and is the ultimate in romantic and I basically think about it all the goddamn time.
• Tied to that very general idea: epistolary fic! Emails and texts, social media if you want, transcripts of voicemails, of video chats, or transcripts of videos sent to each other, descriptions of photos or selfies sent, all sorts of found footage-esque material sent and received over the last decade demonstrating the ebb and flow of their friendship/relationship/what-the-fuck-ever.
• Generation Kill-era fic! First meeting each other, the months they spent in southern Africa shooting the series more or less cut off from the rest of the world, that frat house environment, the close daily proximity in the humvee, shooting the shit in between takes––I live for all of it.
• Reunions! I love little more than an unexpected reunion between two people with unfinished business. If you want to write literally a thousand words (or, y'know, thousands of words) of just the two of them running into each other at random and the conversation that results from that, the both of them easily slipping into their old easy banter, I am all for it, no complaints here. You decide how much time has passed since they saw each other last, and you can decide what happens between them next.
• And speaking of reunions––I would love nothing more than fic where they work together again, for the first time in well over a decade. Maybe they fall back into old habits, or maybe older and not really all that wiser, they develop new ones; maybe it's easy to go right back to the way things had been between the two of them the first time around, or maybe it's that much harder. Furthermore, I am all for the bleed between the fictional and the real (hello, my perpetual interest in RPF lol), especially as it informs performance which in turn informs reality. Which is just a longwinded way of me saying, if you wanted to go the, "does art reflect life, or does life reflect art" chicken-or-the-egg route, by all means, please do!
• And speaking of art imitating life or vice versa: road trip fic! You pick the period in time, you choose the destination, I just know I would definitely love fic of the two of them stuck in the same car as they drive cross-country for whatever reason.
• If you are inclined to go the sex route, I am always a sucker for the friends with benefits who then realize oops they have feelings plot. I also love a good burgeoning sexual relationship that is essentially built on a series of escalating self-proclaimed non-events: drunken hook-ups, accidental sexts leading to intentional sexting, mutual masturbation, the both of them promising themselves, and each other, that nothing is really happening. Alternatively/similarly, I 100% love the idea of a game of sexual/gay chicken that goes wildly further than intended when it comes to these two.
• And a final, and supremely self-indulgent, request: rock band/Almost Famous!AU. Need I say more? (I'm going to say more.) For this particular AU, I am all for some outsider POV. Maybe, epistolary-style, it's a journalist documenting their band's rise and fall, traveling on tour with them, the recording of their most famous album, a retrospective on the band or the both of them a decade after their most famous album—however you want to play it! (uh, no pun intended?) Give me all the minutiae of this very much so invented AU band: the track list off their albums, their tours, fake interviews, fake controversies and scandals, all that business.
THE LOCKED TOMB TRILOGY | GIDEON THE NINTH SERIES – TAMSYN MUIR
Augustine the First (Locked Tomb Trilogy); Mercymorn the First (Locked Tomb Trilogy)
First of all?:
“Bury me next to you in that unmarked grave, Joy. We knew that was the only hope we ever had—that we could live to see it through…and pray for our own cessation. Oh, we’ll still hate each other, my dear, we have hated each other too long and too passionately to stop…but my bones will rest easy next to your bones.”
I have been unable to stop thinking about this since I read the book!
• There is ten thousand years of shit to get into here! An entire myriad of their mutual antagonism and their scheming (both independently and jointly.) One of my favorite things about Harrow the Ninth (and there are a great many favorite things), was how everything we got to see of both Augustine and Mercymorn was via outsider POV. I loved how we got to see them through Harrow's POV, how she took note of their easy and wordless communication. If you want to write more of them via outsider POV (and from a different POV than Harrow's), I would absolutely love that.
• I would also love more than anything if you wanted to write how their plot to kill God took shape. In heist stories, my favorite part is always the getting the team together/plotting each step to come. So how did this plan come about? What was the impetus? Their suspicions that killing a necromancer's cavalier was unnecessary? But beyond that, what I really want to know is how Augustine and Mercy came to be on the same page––when did they share their own notes and suspicions? How did they reach a place of trust where they were comfortable with each another enough not to assume the other would betray them or the plan?
• Speaking of Scheming™, what other schemes and plots did these two get up to over the thousands of years, y'know, unrelated to killing God. Sabotage? Attempts at destruction (that, had those attempts been successful, most like would've been of the mutually-assured variety?)? Childish and petty attempts at undermining each other? I'm for any and all of it. And similarly, I am also all in for an accounting of each and every temporary truce and detente achieved between them over a myriad of mutual hatred.
• Early Canaan House days! I would love to read about the early days of Lyctorhood, the abject horror of it all, what they did to achieve it, having to live for millennia with it. Include the whole gang, especially Cytherea! Or go further back, tell me more about the days or years leading up to their Lyctorhood. I would love to see more of the both of them with Cristabel and Alfred. Or John, before he achieves godhead!
• DIOS APATE, MAJOR. "We needed your, ahem, genetic material, and it was the only way. It was the first time Joy and I had been in the same place for ten years." For the love of god (pun fully intended!), their (heavily stage-managed, heavily-plotted, deceptive-as-all-hell) threesome with John! The before, the during, the after––I'll take it all, please!
• And speaking of sex: hate sex, fight sex, sex as negotiation, sex as unhealthy coping mechanism, sex as penance. You name the dark motivation behind why they're fucking, and I guarantee, I am going to love it. And to go one further: they're Lyctors! Let the body horror reign! Go wild, run amok, get gory and weird and disgusting (but hot), and I will love you all the more for it. (And if you want to inject some unexpected––and unwanted––tenderness amidst all that, intimacy as an almost unbearable and inexplicable surprise for two people who have known and hated each other for as long as they have, then I will find a way to love you even more than I have already declared.)
• AUs! All the fix-it(-but-make-it-worse) AUs! Maybe when Mercy "kills" John he stays dead and her and Augustine get to ride out the end of the world together. Maybe the world doesn't end, and the greatest punishment is that they have to keep on living. Maybe John does kill Mercy, but Augustine succeeds in sending John down through the stoma into hell––and it's Augustine who commits the next resurrection, bringing Mercy back (for whatever reason you might decide.) Or, maybe, no resurrection, just some real fun revenant shit and Mercy is going to haunt (and taunt) the fuck out of Augustine for the next myriad, if he can make it even a fraction that long in the power vacuum they've created.
SUCCESSION (TV 2018)
Kendall Roy
My favorite character, my hothouse flower, MY NUMBER ONE BOY. I love every messy thing about this dude, from his cringey business frat boy jargon to his desperation to prove himself to his propensity to fall flat on his face Charlie Brown and the football-style over and over again. I'm fascinated by his relationships with literally every member of his family, as well as how Season 2 showed how guilt and shame ate at him.
• I would truly love to read anything and everything where Kendall is concerned. Pre-canon (private school days, college, his time working for Waystar in Shanghai, his marriage before it fell apart), mid-canon (I LIVE for missing scenes! Flesh out the days in between the failed vote of no confidence and the trip out to Austerlitz, or add more to the DC hearings either before or after his appearance before the Congressional committee, etc., etc.), or post-season two (I AM DYING TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS NEXT! Splintering family factions, distrust, betrayal, whose side is who on, etc., etc.)
• Some of my favorite episodes from the series are when the entire family is forced into one location together (Austerlitz, the wedding episodes, Tern Haven, Argestes, the yacht, etc.) Add to that this line from Shiv that is always echoing around in my head––"This is in no way our worst Thanksgiving."––I would love fic set over a truly disastrous Roy family holiday.
• I would love any sort of epistolary fic that shows how the greater world at-large views Kendall. Social media! The actual media! Twitter threads and memes that make fun of him (but most specifically his rap performance in Dundee), Page Six articles full of gossip about him at the height of his addiction, speculation about who he might be dating (either true or hilariously false), reddit threads theorizing about his potential involvement in Waystar Royco's laundry list of crimes or conspiracy theories about WHATEVER, public sightings of him out and about in New York or LA or Dubai, and so on and so forth. Or, if you want to embrace more professional media, I'd love fake magazine profiles of him, both before and after his press conference at the end of Season 2, interviews he has done or will do, media appearances, cable news. I love outsider POV, and if you want to write from the POV of some journalist tasked with following Kendall around for the day and the fic is their notes or their actual article, I'd absolutely love that.
• And speaking of outsider POV and a day in the life, I would be all about fic from Jess's POV about Kendall. She is with him 24/7, she is his shadow and his right hand, she fields interference, anticipates what he needs, gets him his coke, she loops Gerri in when needed, she's the one saddled with all his tedious grunt work. I'd love fic that follows her through her day, that is essentially her following Kendall through his day, and I would love a view of his character as afforded through her lens. (Bonus points if you want to include Stewy in any capacity, as she clearly hates him, and I love that for her.)
• An AU where Kendall is the prodigal son who returns for his father's birthday after years of absence, intending to take the family business out from under him and his siblings only for Logan to suffer from a stroke. I think it's such a fun thought exercise to consider what sort of man Kendall might've been able to become had he been able to escape out from under Logan's boot heel. Who would Kendall be if he could "be his own man"? You could also go a different route with this AU, and instead Kendall took the advice he gave Naomi at Tern Haven: he got out. He took the money and he walked, he went on to live a life of dumb leisure, the poster child for idle wealth. Go all Sliding Doors and show that other life Kendall might've led! And maybe, if you want, how even this does not bring him any happiness as he's still without Logan's respect.
• And one more wildcard AU request: Southern Gothic!AU, with Logan Roy as the corrupt leader of a megachurch and the Roy children are his unruly flock. Is this just me asking for The Righteous Gemstones played straight? Yes, probably. (Sidebar: I totally recommend watching The Righteous Gemstones; it's hilarious.)
Ship-wise! I've listed out below various ships I would be interested in receiving involving Kendall. Feel free to take any of the ideas above and plug in any of the suggested ships if you wish. And, while I am fine if you want to include any unlisted/unrequested ships in the background, I do request that they not be the focus of the fic.
Kendall Roy/Stewy Hosseini
» Oh, how I love a good friends-to-lovers (or, well, friends-to-lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers) dynamic. Backstory, college days, early business days, Kendall and Stewy traveling the world, Stewy visiting Kendall in Shanghai––I'll take all of it. Alternatively, I am always here for fallout from Kendall's betrayal; I am always thinking about these lines of dialogue. Basically, what I am saying is, I will happily and greedily read the long and winding tale of Kendall and Stewy's relationship over the years, marked by repeated betrayal and distrust.
» I would deeply love an alternate Season 2 where even though Kendall completely fucked Stewy over with the takeover, the two of them enter into a (initially, maybe) hate-fueled offscreen affair that is very much so different from their history as friends with benefits, thanks largely to the events Kendall put into motion (and because all the fucking is serving as an unhealthy coping mechanism for Kendall, and also, because, maybe Feelings™ develop.) Is Stewy trying to punish Kendall? Does Kendall want to be punished? Does it all culminate in Greece before Kendall takes down his father? Play around with canon events as you'd like!
» Post-Season 2! How does Stewy react to Kendall's big move against Logan? Do they reconcile? Partner up? Are either willing to trust the other?
Kendall Roy/Greg Hirsch
» He sees you, Greg, you Machiavellian fuck! I would truly love fic that covers their travel from the yacht in the Season 2 finale through Kendall's big press conference. I would love to see that team-up as it reached fruition and Greg's agreement to provide Kendall the documents he needs. And tied to that, give me the imaginary Season 3 where the both of them are a team! I would love some post-S2 exploration of their newfound partnership, for lack of a better term, as they take on the rest of the family (which you just know Greg is totally punching above his weight here).
» Greg and Kendall and all their hangouts lol. And speaking of, I would also love any fic set during S2 when Greg is basically in Kendall Caretaker mode, or even, if you want to get darker and uglier with it, how Greg feels as if he owes Kendall for the apartment and Kendall is so deep in his own fucked headspace he doesn’t read all the escalating favors from Greg as anything worthy of concern.
» If you want to get weirdly epistolary about it, I’d love all sorts of bonkers internet speculation about who the hell Greg even is. Go ahead and give me social media fic or Reddit fic where Greg is constantly spotted out with Kendall (well before the DC hearings), and no one has any idea who the hell he is. All sorts of speculation abounds about "the tall dude" always with Kendall. Is he the world's lamest looking bodyguard? Is he an awkward, yet famous, basketball player? Does he do his taxes? Which Silicon Valley start-up is his? Was he the guy who did the movie that went to Sundance? Who is this guy!
Kendall Roy/Lawrence Yee
» I am fascinated by their business relationship and fascinated by how much Lawrence hates Kendall and all the business-y, jargon-y smack talk between the two of them. Hate sex to end all hate sex after Kendall guts Vaulter? I'd live for it.
» Or, I would love anything set after Kendall kills Vaulter, whether it’s Lawrence attempting to exact revenge on Kendall or a strange detente they enter into (maybe at Argestes?).
Kendall Roy/Rava Roy
» Give me their version of Marriage Story or Kramer vs. Kramer, aka the messy dissolution of their marriage! Bonus points if you want to throw in Kendall/Stewy or Kendall/anyone else as one of the contributing factors leading to the end of their marriage. Infidelity, particular as an element of Kendall’s self-destruction and self-sabotage, is a feature not a bug for me!
Kendall Roy/Rhea Jarrell
» These two had...................the weirdest chemistry. So this is me inviting you, should you have also taken note of that chemistry, to get wild. AU of the Dundee episode? Where instead of that actress Kendall is obsessed with it's Rhea he briefly attaches his attention to? A greater AU than that, and it’s not Logan that Rhea chooses to hitch her wagon to but Kendall (and if, like with Logan, that included a weird sexual element, I ENCOURAGE IT).
Kendall Roy & Frank Vernon or Kendall Roy/Frank Vernon
» I find myself endlessly interested in the relationship that we see between them as portrayed in canon, particularly the way that Frank fills that paternal void in Kendall’s life. Whether you want to explore that mentor/mentee relationship they have platonically, or if you want to take it to a dirtybadwrong place (Kendall's self-sabotage of his interpersonal relationships rearing its ugly head), I would be happy to read it.
And, in the sibling incest corner of the ship requests:
I am more than happy to receive any permutation of Kendall/Shiv, Kendall/Roman, or Kendall/Roman/Shiv. A canon line I think about every goddamn day of my life is when Kendall is trying to defend his father to Naomi on the yacht and he says, “He loves me. He does. I think it’s just a wrong kind of love expression.” THE WRONG KIND OF LOVE EXPRESSION, aka the fulcrum on which any of my interest in incest ships for this canon rests on.
» As a general note, one aspect of incest that always holds my interest is the guilt, the shame, and the secrecy of it. I’d love if you could fold that in, and most likely the unhealthy ways any of these three would react, to that shame.
» I am especially interested in anything pre-canon. There is nothing more appealing to me than bored rich kids Kendall, Roman, and Shiv, whether it’s spending the summer wasting away at their father’s Summer Palace in the Hamptons or stuck at their mother’s in the dead of winter. That competition between them for their father’s love spilling over into how they each deal with one another and any affection they feel towards each other? Delicious. I would love more scenes like the boathouse scene before Shiv’s wedding, the three of them getting stoned and goofing around. On a completely different end of the spectrum, I would love fic set on the yacht after Kendall has offered himself up as "the blood sacrifice." Give me that last night before the gallows energy! Or, expand on this (cruelly!) cut scene from that episode!
» For Kendall/Roman, all I have to say is: dog cage. Run with that dynamic, that history, any which direction you wish to travel, dear author. Or, I am never not thinking about how Kendall immediately, and ferociously, stepped in when Logan hit Roman in the Argestes episode. If you want to unspool that dynamic and that history between them, I would love that.
» Cliff notes here, but idk, somehow Kendall/Shiv has became my OTP for the show and I have numerous preexisting prompts for you to pick from in last year's letter, and if any of these trigger your imagination, please! Run with it. Additionally, I have been staring at this photo like I am staring into the sun, so if you want to work that into any sort of fic or have it serve as inspiration, I will love both you and it forever.
I want to thank you again, mystery writer, and I hope you have an excellent and incredibly fun Yuletide season!