Dear Yuletide Writer (2021)
Oct. 17th, 2021 10:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scioscribeThank you so much for writing for me! This is always one of my favorite times of year, and I'd be delighted to get anything for these fandom/character combinations. I've added prompts and additional details, but please feel free to go your own way!
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Likes
hurt/comfort, emotional hurt/comfort, ensembles, enemies-to-lovers (or friends), friendships, friends-to-lovers, opposites attract, conflicting worldviews and priorities, emotional vulnerability, fix-its, casefic, canon-style adventures, crack played straight, moral complexity, nuanced bad guys/terrible people with moments of goodness or vulnerability, redemption, pining, obvious feelings that don’t quite get admitted to, unconventional gestures of affection, complicated relationships, partnerships, power dynamics, shippy gen and ambiguously intense relationships, intimacy, found family, first-time stories, established relationships, character death, amnesia, characters forced to cooperate, forced proximity, bedsharing, huddling/cuddling for warmth, 5 + 1 fics, slow-burns, fake/pretend relationships, arranged marriage/marriage of convenience, sex pollen, made them do it, noncon-related hurt/comfort, rape recovery, power couples, age gaps, worldbuilding, undercover work, loyalty, tenderness, acts of kindness, trying to do the right thing, identity porn, canon-divergence AUs, added supernatural/fantasy/sci-fi elements
Historical- and canon-typical language, violence, attitudes, and darkness-levels all okay to include.
General Sex Likes/Kinks
clothed sex, wall-sex, rough sex, dubcon/ambiguous consent, teasing, anal play/sex, oral sex, rimming, frottage, fingering, gags, dirty talk, hand and finger kink, hair-touching, nipple play, characters giving orders/instructions, roleplay, casual D/s, spanking (including breasts, thighs, and pussy), talking during sex, emotional sex, sleepy/lazy sex, humorous sex scenes, enthusiastic sex, tenderness, loss of virginity, bad/awkward sex (either charmingly funny or downbeat), coming untouched, coming in pants, voyeurism, exhibitionism, collaring, people getting mussed, orgasm delay/denial, overstimulation, edging, begging, historical period- or location-specific sex, sex toys, praise kink, possessiveness, marking/bruising/biting
DNW
ageplay, mommy/daddy kink, explicit sex for characters under sixteen, scat, bestiality, necrophilia, any actual eternal fire-and-brimstone hell
Miss Mack - Michael McDowell
Miss Mack, Janice Faulk
I love this story so much. The intensely femslashy vibes between Janice and Miss Mack are so excellent, and it's delightful to see them swept up in a whirlwind of fun and the sheer enjoyment of each other's company. I really love that the traditionally adorable Janice is so into the fat, badly dressed, incredibly charismatic Miss Mack, whom no one was really considering in a romantic light. Then when the story takes its turn towards horror, it's so bleak and unnerving. I love the evocative rural Southern Gothicness of it all and how it stays grounded in these mundane domestic details--the radio broadcast, the depleting supply of food, the lamp oil, the car battery--even as the hopelessness of it builds. So basically, this story combines some terrific shippiness with some supremely dark and effective horror, and both sides of that are completely my jam.
This story was hard to find for a long time, but now it's available online in text and podcast form.
I ship Miss Mack/Janice like burning, but I'm also happy with their canonical level of interaction. I'd just prefer that neither one of them end up having romantic/sexual feelings for someone else. References to past relationships/attractions are fine, and I'm also good with Mr. Hill/Janice in a coercive, manipulative sense--I just don't want her to actually love him.
Prompts
+ Janice thwarts the Hills' witchcraft in some way: fix-it edition. Maybe she decides to come to the pond on Halloween night because she doesn't want to wait until the morning, and she sees some evidence of the spell and is able to interrupt, overthrow, or redirect it somehow? If she can't cancel it but can only change it, what are the new effects? Vengeful? Magical in a cool sense, by giving them the ability to stop and start time as they want, or to time travel? Or maybe Janice enters the spell without realizing what's going on and winds up trapped there herself--can the two of them figure it out from the inside?
+ Janice thwarts (or attempts to thwart) the Hills' witchcraft: break-it-further edition. Janice enters the spell and winds up also stuck in endless Halloween night at Gavin Pond? (I don't want her and Miss Mack to turn on each other, but I'm okay with them dying together--talking and making love and scraping together what joy they can before the end.) She comes on the morning of November 1 and finds Miss Mack dead … and throws a wrench into the Hills' plans by, say, burying her in a Pet Sematary-esque burial ground where she Comes Back Wrong. (Subtly or otherwise.)
+ All the Miss Mack/Janice courtship or relationship-building stories. I'd love to see some more of their time together in detail--their adventures out at the airstrip, the drag-racing, the lazy days at the pond, etc. Do they start realizing their attraction to each other? How does the flirtation go? Their first time in bed? I'm good with any romance stories either having a bittersweet canon-compliant ending where we know what's coming or with them diverging from canon to save Miss Mack/get them out of Babylon before it's too late.
+ Janice finds Miss Mack on November 1 and goes through the next few months in a grief-induced state of shock and despair, and she even winds up marrying Mr. Hill because it feels like everything is meaningless anyway--only to learn the truth and find a way to go back in time and save Miss Mack or otherwise bring her back? (And possibly to kill the Hills?)
+ Alternate Miss Mack/Janice relationships. Maybe one of them takes up photography, and so they hit the road together, resuming Miss Mack's old profession? Maybe Miss Mack is still the traveling photographer's assistant when she and Janice meet, and the two wind up seeing each other sporadically and falling in love that way? Epistolary elements are completely welcome here.
+ Still horror, but in a completely different way (and possibly with completely different outcomes). They slowly realize that the woods around Gavin Pond are cursed, uncanny, or filled with ancient monsters or eldritch horrors? They're out at the cabin together when a killer attacks? They venture out to the tenant-farmer shacks and wind up awakening something? One or both of them is haunted, or they get trapped in a haunted location? (Or maybe one of their adventurous hobbies involves investigating haunted houses, but they run into something that's more than they bargained for.)
+ Miss Mack's ghost stays in Babylon to protect Janice and get revenge on the Hills. Totally here for ghost/human sex and romance, too. How do they communicate? Can Janice always see her and hear her, or do they have to figure something else out? Does she only see her in dreams?
Cam
Any (Alice Ackerman, Fake Lola)
I love all the layers of thoughtful unease in this movie, from the trippy horror of having your own online identity stripped away from you--to the point where you're watching yourself on-screen, doing things you've never done and saying things you've never said--to the intense creepiness of being stalked to the science fictional deepfake digital clones that don't recognize their original models to the fear of having your secrets publicly revealed to sexual anxieties and the awfulness of having people dismiss your concerns and fears. I also just really like detailed portraits of different professions, so I love seeing how Alice managed her performances and career--what kind of shows she did, her ambitions, her professional connections, her boundary-pushing branding, etc. And Alice is such a terrific protagonist: resourceful, intuitive, weird, brave, vulnerable, and fiercely devoted to her own principles and boundaries. I'm also really intrigued by Fake Lola, especially with the possibility of her developing a kind of sentience.
Optional ships: Alice/Fake Lola, Alice/OFC or any of her colleagues, Fake Lola/anybody (including digital constructs). I'm totally good with you depicting any amount of the canon-typical sex work, so Alice/guys in that context is also totally fine.
Prompts
+ I'm totally here for Fake Lola's POV on her part of the movie and everything going on behind the scenes, with either a seemingly human perspective--that sometimes feels a weird dissonance about everything--or a fascinatingly alien AI one. She's an extremely sophisticated deepfake, so I'd love any looks at her developing some kind of self-awareness and making emotional connections. Maybe even a canon-divergence AU where she and Alice manage to form some kind of bond/alliance/relationship and things go differently?
+ I'd love a look at how Alice got started as Lola. Did she come up with her rules before she ever opened her account, or did she work them out over time? How did she develop her penchant/brand for weird, extreme shows with simulated violence? And I love how we see her keeping a record of gimmicks she's used for individual shows, judging whether or not they've been successful, so I'd love to see more of that, too: her brainstorming, her successes and failures, her adjustments. How does she start forming connections (and rivalries, in Princess's case) with the other women working on FreeGirlsLive?
+ AU where there's a different explanation for what's going on with the theft of Alice's account? The part where "Lola" is taking her audience on a tour of her house is so chilling in how it just eviscerates Alice's sense of privacy and really emphasizes how wrong all this is--it feels so sinister. What if the Fake Lola were some kind of supernatural force targeting her, instead of a digital clone? Is she a ghost of some sort? A suppressed manifestation of Alice herself? Some kind of totally inhuman force that just chooses to embody itself this way for some reason?
+ Is Fake Lola the same "person" as, say, the Baby digital construct, or does she have a unique experience of the world? It could be really cool to see her either interacting with the other simulations--maybe in one of those joint shows--or otherwise being all of these constructs simultaneously.
+ Missing scene possibilities when Alice is searching for answers--I just love the unsettling nature of this part of the film and all the justified paranoia of it, so if you want to give me Alice just encountering other people who possibly know what's going on and/or possibly have something to do with it, that would be awesome. Just all the tense confrontations and seemingly ordinary conversations where she's not sure if she's imagining the implications/undertones or not.
+ Fake Lola lives on as a kind of digital ghost post-deletion. Does she develop an obsession with Alice after all that, and manage to find her new account and become an avid client? And what kind of ghost is she--malevolent, sexually intrigued, neutral, friendly, all of the above simultaneously or at different stages?
+ Alice rebuilds her career, refusing to be knocked down for good--but she's still working with FreeGirlsLive, and the same problem could easily happen again. What's it like trying to work her way up the ratings ladder again with that shadow always hanging over her? Does she stay focused on her shows, or does she make it part of her mission to track down and enact (possibly murderous) revenge on whoever was responsible for all this?
Re-Animator
Herbert West, Daniel Cain
Re-Animator is such a goofy, gory delight, and it hit me with so many unexpected feelings, especially in the first movie. It's so funny and frequently, delightfully over-the-top while still taking its characters' emotions seriously, and I love the intensity and weirdness of the Herbert-Dan relationship and would be happy with anything that gave me more of that. I really like them being mutually emotionally tied up with each other and having this bizarre loyalty kink and sense of teamwork.
I ship them--Herbert seems so immediately smitten with him! In the deleted scenes, he breaks out of Hill's hypnosis only after Hill threatens Dan!--but I'm happy with gen, too; I basically just want them to have a lot of strong feelings about each other and lots of weird caring.
Fandom-specific DNW: Beyond Re-Animator canon.
Prompts
+ More horror is enthusiastically welcome. They awaken or otherwise attract the attention of some kind of eldritch entity? They're snowbound in a haunted hotel? Quietly tragic horror where Dan slowly realizes that he's Herbert's most successful resurrection because Herbert couldn't stand to let him go even though he's come back slightly wrong? Herbert dies at the end of the first movie but sporadically makes ghostly appearances in Dan's life to protect him, bug him about working on the reagent, and just generally be in love with him? Chased and hurt by monsters and/or zombies or trying to survive in a zombie apocalypse?
+ Straight-up stolen from the Jump Scare tag-set: "24-hour convenience store in a really weird neighborhood AU." Dan keeps going to get cheap coffee and snacks at a convenience store across from the hospital, and both it and the Herbert West guy who works there are really weird. So sort of like a coffee shop AU, but grimy and with flickering lights and eldritch happenings and possibly zombies lurching out of the closet and knocking over Slurpee machines.
+ I love the idea that Herbert succumbs to Hill's hypnosis with particular ease, which of course would disconcert him. Maybe he asks Dan to hypnotize him a few times so he can get become more adept at breaking free of that kind of control, and they wind up getting really into it was a kind of unconventional (and deeply ill-advised) D/s and/or consensual somnophilia-adjacent thing? I just really like the idea of Herbert finding that he inexplicably likes being temporarily under Dan's control and trying to justify this in very scientific terms while Dan is also grappling with it from his side, liking the protectiveness but sort of being afraid of all the power? Relatedly, I am also 100% down for this as a kind of weird trauma recovery with Hill having previously nonconned a hypnotized Herbert. I am in general very fond of non-Dan dudes sexually menacing Herbert West.
+ Mpreg! The first movie mentions that it's possible Dan could get expelled for violating university morals if anyone knew he was sleeping with Megan. AU where they're still students and Dan--possibly in the aftermath of some break-up with Megan--has a one-night stand and gets pregnant. He knows an unwed pregnancy would get him booted out of school, but he still wants to keep it--and him leaving is totally unacceptable to Herbert, who therefore will simply have to marry him for propriety's sake so they can keep up the work. Feelings, of course, gradually emerge.
+ Sex pollen-like reagent fumes: a natural hazard of scientific work. I am so here for these two hooking up under a chemical influence and then having to decide what to do about it, possibly with the twist that this really does happen pretty regularly and, say, Dan catches himself being disappointed that it happened once while he was gone and Herbert just wound up jerking off the whole time.
+ Any and all hurt/comfort, blended with any of the above prompts or on their own. I love whumped Herbert, and I also love his sporadic attempts to take care of Dan--swooping in with a trauma blanket and, in a deleted scene from the first movie, making him a picture-perfect sandwich to get him to eat something!--so both variations are perfect. Maybe one of them gets hypnotized/mind-controlled into hurting the other, resulting in a heaping helping of angst with the h/c? Maybe one of them has to perform emergency surgery on the other without any anesthesia? Herbert gets shaky and exhausted from reagent withdrawal, or, alternately, he has to take a lot more of it than usual to, say, try to fight their way out of a zombie apocalypse situation, and then he crashes? One of them hurt protecting the other?
+ Co-sleeping: I have a lot of feelings about the deleted scene from the first movie where Herbert has been shooting up small doses of the reagent in order to go without sleep, and Dan is alarmed by it but has to wind up administering it to him anyway because Herbert's shaking too badly to do it himself. I'd love to see them developing weird co-sleeping habits because Dan just wants to get him to go to bed and being in it with him is as good a way as any. Sex can definitely ensue, but I'm also happy with just weirdly intense, boundary-blurring bed-sharing. This can also totally be blended with weirdly sensual and morally dubious reagent injection or tender sedative administration.
The Woman
Peggy Cleek, The Woman, Darlin' Cleek, Socket Cleek
The darkness of this movie--especially with it hiding under a thin and skin-crawlingly evoked veneer of suburban normalcy--really stays with me. It's such a bizarre but effective combination of "realistic and horrifying domestic and sexual abuse and this asshole's tyranny over his household" and "there's a feral cannibal woman imprisoned in our shed," with a satisfying and bloody dose of cathartic revenge fantasy. And I really like how the Woman genuinely does feel like she exists totally outside of social norms: she's (understandably) not interested in recognizing Belle's victimhood or in sympathizing with her, she's matter-of-factly brutal with Socket, etc. She's far from a traditionally good person. But Peggy still chooses her as the better option, because her life has been so messed-up that she might as well stick with her sisters and the strongest woman she knows and go live in the woods and eat people.
You don't have to focus on all four characters; I'd just like them all to be alive, even if some of them are off-screen. Also, references to Off Season/Offspring canon are fine if you want to include them, but I'm also 100% fine treating this as a standalone, if you want a different history for the Woman.
Fandom-specific DNW: Darlin' canon specifically related to Peggy's death. I'm fine with references to Peggy's canonical sexual abuse from her father, but I don't want any graphic, blow-by-blow flashbacks to it.
Prompts
+ What's it like for Peggy, in particular, to transition to living in the wilderness? She's finally free of her father and is maybe even discovering a sense of power, but she's also probably going to spend a lot of time cold and uncomfortable and scared and bored, and she'll have to deal with the Woman at least sometimes expecting her to eat raw game. Does Peggy try to tentatively establish some kind of home base for them? How does she start forming a bond with the Woman? What's it like for her to suddenly be spending real time with her feral sister who was forced to live in the barn (and who ate her favorite teacher)? How protective is she of Darlin' in the midst of all this?
+ Socket's POV on all this would be great, especially since she's bound to think in a very different way than her sisters (and even in a different way from the Woman). Does she miss the dogs she used to live with? Does she understand that Peggy and Darlin' are her sisters? How quickly does she develop a loyal attachment to the Woman, and how much does she understand about how their lives have changed? How does she change, as she spends more time socializing with other people, even under the weirdest of circumstances?
+ Continuing with the ongoing POV focus, I'd also love to see how Darlin' takes to living in the wild and how quickly she accepts this being her new normal. Her child's eye view of it all would be really fascinating. Does she really grasp that her parents and brother are gone, and if she does, does she mind? What kind of bond does she form with the Woman?
+ And one more general POV prompt: I'd also love to see the Woman's version of their transition to living in the woods, and how she relishes being back in a familiar environment but has to get used to suddenly having all these charges to take care of and teach in her own way. I love her offering the blood to Darlin' and Peggy, complete with the sense that it has some practical and symbolic weight to her, and I'd be fascinated by any weird cannibal family rituals and traditions you want to invent.
+ Horrifying (and maybe intermittently heartwarming) post-canon adventures of any kind. Feel free to lean into the weirdness and brutality here and basically write a cannibal horror story from the cannibals' point-of-view. Have them attack and eat people, complete with the Woman lovingly guiding the girls through murdre and butchery. Have Darlin' learning how to hunt both humans and animals with her hands and teeth. Lean into some of the Darlin' canon and have them kidnap and rape male hikers for the sake of conitnuing their cannibal family bloodline. Emphasize how far they've gone, mentally and emotionally, from civilization, and what it's like to feel like you can't go home again--but maybe the real home was the roving cannibal band you made along the way.
+ Canon-divergence AU where Ms. Raton somehow lives and takes in Peggy, but Socket and Darlin' still go off with the Woman. I'd be really curious to see Peggy sometimes going into the woods to keep up an emotional connection with her increasingly more alien sisters, plus trying in her own way to protect them even when she knows that they're dangerous. Does she bring them food and tools and medicine? If she has her baby, does she have nightmares--plausible ones, to be fair--that the Woman may turn up and take it? How does she weigh her new life with Ms. Raton (and Ms. Raton's girlfriend?) and her baby vs. her surviving but more and more feral biological family?
The Twilight Zone: The After Hours
Any (Marsha White, Saleswoman, Worldbuilding)
This is one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes. I love the uncanniness of the first act, with Marsha's growing realization that everything is subtly (and not-so-subtly) off, and then the dread and terror of her stumbling around the top floor after hours, and then, as a cherry on top, the transition into bittersweet fantasy with a ton of worldbuilding potential. I really like how the episode first treats the concept of living mannequins with pitch-perfect horror and then reframes it as just "these people are alive in a different way." The sense of community the mannequins all have with each other is great, too, and I love them scrupulously taking turns with their chance to spend time in the outside world.
I'm requesting Any. I'd be happy to see worldbuilding with either the characters from the episode or original characters--any deeper exploration of the mannequin life would just be fantastic. And I really adore Marsha's snappy toughness and the pathos of her having forgotten who she was--to the point of imagining a mother!--and the Saleswoman's gift of being alternately unsettling and briskly comforting. She just comes across so vividly, and her question about Marsha's happiness has such an unexpected poignancy once you know what's going on.
Feel free to give the Saleswoman a name. I ship Saleswoman/Marsha and am also happy with mannequin OCs in any and all possible combinations.
Prompts
+ Please give me any and all mannequin rumspringas. Is Marsha the first mannequin who has forgotten herself in the outside world, or does that happen often enough that it's a recognized hazard? Where do they go while they're living outside the department store? Do they all use the same rotating apartment? What are some pleasures they especially enjoy as humans that they don't get to have as mannequins?
+ Building off that, I'd love to see more of Marsha's time in the outside world. How did she start sliding towards forgetting who she was and accepting her cover story as the truth? Was it a deliberate fantasy she was living out at first, or did she just sort of slip into it? What happens with the life she left behind? (I could totally go for an outside POV where one of her unsuspecting human friends comes looking for only to discover that someone else is now living in her apartment--and that one of the mannequins in the department store looks weirdly familiar.) I'm also really interested in the Saleswoman's month outside, especially since there's the feeling that she's done this before. What does she do? What does she look forward to? Is she tempted by the same forgetfulness as Marsha, or does she have a firmer hold on her true identity than that?
+ Someone forms a relationship with a mannequin while the mannequin is taking their turn outside. Do they find out the truth? Does it become a kind of weird long-distance relationship where the other person just waits, year after year, for their mannequin's visit? Is it a bittersweet, star-crossed love where the human eventually gets married to someone else, or is it a kind of touching "well, they're making it work" relationship?
+ What is their life like in the department store(s)? Can any of the employees or customers ever see them move? Do they have more freedom and mobility on the ninth floor, or is it just that they have more privacy? Is that floor technically real but just for storage, or is everyone being 100% literal when they say it doesn't exist, and only the mannequins can actually access it? Do the mannequins have opinions about the clothes they model or where they stand in the store?
+ Marsha has trouble adjusting to being a mannequin again, so she keeps temporarily taking on a more human appearance and walking around on the lower levels of the store? Does the clerk ever recognize her? Does this gradually turn into a weird urban legend or ghost story? I'd love to see some 1960s parapsychologists or ghost hunters diligently investigating these reports only to uncover something far stranger than they ever expected.
+ Mannequin POV, just to capture the uncanniness of it. One of my favorite details is how they reflexively fall back into stationary poses when they're not actively interacting with each other, and I'd love to see more distinctly alien details like that from their perspective.
+ Mannequin sex, either for Marsha/Saleswoman or for any original mannequins. I just want to know if the mannequins fuck, and if so, how. (Especially if they have a Barbie doll-like lack of run-of-the-mill genitalia but can still get off.)
The Alienist
Laszlo Kreizler
This show is so tailored to my interests--the Gilded Age, grittiness but also high society, crime, complicated relationships, flawed and traumatized characters, developing understanding of psychology, hurt/comfort, character growth--and it has so many great performances and such empathy for everybody. I love it. And I love Laszlo in all his high-handed, compassionate, sometimes-brittle glory, and I adore the effort he makes over the course of the two seasons to tamp down his worst instincts and stop lashing out at the people who care about him. Also, his combination of startled-deer-in-the-headlights looks when he gets actual physical intimacy combined with his intellectual-but-incomplete understanding of kink and reflexive sheer adorable weirdness is all very intriguing for shippy purposes.
I love Laszlo & Everybody and Laszlo/Most People, but a probably incomplete list of favorite relationships would include Laszlo & Sara & John, Laszlo/Sara/John, Laszlo/Karen, Laszlo/Mary, Laszlo & Sara, Laszlo & John, Laszlo/John, Laszlo & the Isaacsons, Laszlo & Cyrus, Laszlo & Violet, and Laszlo & traumatized or troubled children.
Fandom-specific DNW: Please don't mention Marcus's death. I'm fine with him not coming up in futurefic, but I'd just like to pretend that he's off being alive somewhere. (Mary's death is important enough in the narrative that I'm fine with treating it as part of the story, but I'm also 100% happy with "Mary Lives" fics.)
Prompts
+ Laszlo and Karen's Kinky Sex Adventures in Vienna. I feel like there's no way these two aren't going to have a lot of terrific, tender, boundary-pushing sex while they're off in Vienna together, and I'd love to read about it. What has Karen done on her own? What would she be trying for the first time too? How does Laszlo react to having first-hand experience of things he's only known about academically? What works for them, and what winds up being a bust?
+ I'd love to see more of Laszlo at the Institute, working with children who either have nowhere else to go or whose fashionable parents don't want to deal with their problems. One of the things I really liked in the first season is that even when Laszlo was being difficult with everyone else, he was always good with the kids, so I'd also be interested in seeing him having to take urgent psychological care of one of the children while he's going through something major himself and has to fight to keep it together. Or what if one of the kids had gone through abuse that reminded him all too much of his own father?
+ Laszlo clearly wants John to be happy, but he seems tepid at best about Violet (who also barely knows him and probably can't understand him at this point), and I'd be really curious to see what their relationship might become once John and Violet are married and he might wind up spending more time with her. I'd love to watch their relationship evolve as they start to accept that they both really care about John. Maybe Laszlo's interest in the baby plays a role? Or, for the dramatic and h/c-filled version, the two of them get kidnapped and held together For Reasons, and they have to try to protect each other and have no choice but to bond in some desperate circumstances.
+ Supernatural casefic! Maybe they start out investigating an apparently normal case but then slowly uncover that something uncanny is going on? Maybe Laszlo gets hired to judge someone's sanity re: their claims of a haunted house, and they all investigate it? Or Sara reluctantly takes on a case purportedly involving the supernatural, expecting it to be a hoax, only for them all to learn differently? They investigate spiritualists? They're a kind of Gilded Age X-Files team who deal with everything from aliens to cryptids to ghosts?
+ Shipfic for any of the ships I mentioned--get-togethers, romantic interludes or moments of intense pining, tender hurt/comfort, sex, working out relationship complications (including "this isn't acceptable in our society"), etc.
+ Also, friendship fic for anything I mentioned--hurt/comfort, bonding, learning things about each other (trivial or deep and painful), going on trips together, trying new things together or one trying something new for the other's sake, emotionally supporting each other, etc.
+ Someone Laszlo cares about gets framed for murder, and his position that anyone can kill suddenly takes a hard turn into "NOT THEM, THOUGH," as he and everyone else work to prove the person's innocence.
+ There's so much darkness in this show that I'm especially drawn to seeing them all have a little bit of (possibly still complex or bittersweet) holiday happiness. Five Christmases Laszlo celebrated, from his difficult childhood to his college years to his brittle pre-canon days to happier post-S1 and/or -S2? Gift-giving with his friends? Slightly awkward but warm household gatherings with him, Mary, Cyrus, and Stevie? Christmas traditions he has reluctantly endured for John's sake, because John persisted in dragging his lonely college friend home with him for holiday gatherings?
+ Anything with Laszlo and John's grandmother interacting. I love how the end of S1 completely turned her around on him because this weird and semi-disreputable friend of John's suddenly became her true crime buddy. I'm totally up for him coming over and regularly chatting with John's grandmother and telling her scandalous details of about psychopathy and murder and her totally relishing it.
+ Futurefic that looks at how the cast might be reunited again, since they've temporarily gone their separate ways. What brings them all back together--possibly even before Laszlo's supposed to return? Is there a major case? Does Laszlo request their assistance in Vienna? Does something terrible happen, necessitating that everyone rush together to try to help whoever's affected?
I'm
Likes
hurt/comfort, emotional hurt/comfort, ensembles, enemies-to-lovers (or friends), friendships, friends-to-lovers, opposites attract, conflicting worldviews and priorities, emotional vulnerability, fix-its, casefic, canon-style adventures, crack played straight, moral complexity, nuanced bad guys/terrible people with moments of goodness or vulnerability, redemption, pining, obvious feelings that don’t quite get admitted to, unconventional gestures of affection, complicated relationships, partnerships, power dynamics, shippy gen and ambiguously intense relationships, intimacy, found family, first-time stories, established relationships, character death, amnesia, characters forced to cooperate, forced proximity, bedsharing, huddling/cuddling for warmth, 5 + 1 fics, slow-burns, fake/pretend relationships, arranged marriage/marriage of convenience, sex pollen, made them do it, noncon-related hurt/comfort, rape recovery, power couples, age gaps, worldbuilding, undercover work, loyalty, tenderness, acts of kindness, trying to do the right thing, identity porn, canon-divergence AUs, added supernatural/fantasy/sci-fi elements
Historical- and canon-typical language, violence, attitudes, and darkness-levels all okay to include.
General Sex Likes/Kinks
clothed sex, wall-sex, rough sex, dubcon/ambiguous consent, teasing, anal play/sex, oral sex, rimming, frottage, fingering, gags, dirty talk, hand and finger kink, hair-touching, nipple play, characters giving orders/instructions, roleplay, casual D/s, spanking (including breasts, thighs, and pussy), talking during sex, emotional sex, sleepy/lazy sex, humorous sex scenes, enthusiastic sex, tenderness, loss of virginity, bad/awkward sex (either charmingly funny or downbeat), coming untouched, coming in pants, voyeurism, exhibitionism, collaring, people getting mussed, orgasm delay/denial, overstimulation, edging, begging, historical period- or location-specific sex, sex toys, praise kink, possessiveness, marking/bruising/biting
DNW
ageplay, mommy/daddy kink, explicit sex for characters under sixteen, scat, bestiality, necrophilia, any actual eternal fire-and-brimstone hell
Miss Mack - Michael McDowell
Miss Mack, Janice Faulk
I love this story so much. The intensely femslashy vibes between Janice and Miss Mack are so excellent, and it's delightful to see them swept up in a whirlwind of fun and the sheer enjoyment of each other's company. I really love that the traditionally adorable Janice is so into the fat, badly dressed, incredibly charismatic Miss Mack, whom no one was really considering in a romantic light. Then when the story takes its turn towards horror, it's so bleak and unnerving. I love the evocative rural Southern Gothicness of it all and how it stays grounded in these mundane domestic details--the radio broadcast, the depleting supply of food, the lamp oil, the car battery--even as the hopelessness of it builds. So basically, this story combines some terrific shippiness with some supremely dark and effective horror, and both sides of that are completely my jam.
This story was hard to find for a long time, but now it's available online in text and podcast form.
I ship Miss Mack/Janice like burning, but I'm also happy with their canonical level of interaction. I'd just prefer that neither one of them end up having romantic/sexual feelings for someone else. References to past relationships/attractions are fine, and I'm also good with Mr. Hill/Janice in a coercive, manipulative sense--I just don't want her to actually love him.
Prompts
+ Janice thwarts the Hills' witchcraft in some way: fix-it edition. Maybe she decides to come to the pond on Halloween night because she doesn't want to wait until the morning, and she sees some evidence of the spell and is able to interrupt, overthrow, or redirect it somehow? If she can't cancel it but can only change it, what are the new effects? Vengeful? Magical in a cool sense, by giving them the ability to stop and start time as they want, or to time travel? Or maybe Janice enters the spell without realizing what's going on and winds up trapped there herself--can the two of them figure it out from the inside?
+ Janice thwarts (or attempts to thwart) the Hills' witchcraft: break-it-further edition. Janice enters the spell and winds up also stuck in endless Halloween night at Gavin Pond? (I don't want her and Miss Mack to turn on each other, but I'm okay with them dying together--talking and making love and scraping together what joy they can before the end.) She comes on the morning of November 1 and finds Miss Mack dead … and throws a wrench into the Hills' plans by, say, burying her in a Pet Sematary-esque burial ground where she Comes Back Wrong. (Subtly or otherwise.)
+ All the Miss Mack/Janice courtship or relationship-building stories. I'd love to see some more of their time together in detail--their adventures out at the airstrip, the drag-racing, the lazy days at the pond, etc. Do they start realizing their attraction to each other? How does the flirtation go? Their first time in bed? I'm good with any romance stories either having a bittersweet canon-compliant ending where we know what's coming or with them diverging from canon to save Miss Mack/get them out of Babylon before it's too late.
+ Janice finds Miss Mack on November 1 and goes through the next few months in a grief-induced state of shock and despair, and she even winds up marrying Mr. Hill because it feels like everything is meaningless anyway--only to learn the truth and find a way to go back in time and save Miss Mack or otherwise bring her back? (And possibly to kill the Hills?)
+ Alternate Miss Mack/Janice relationships. Maybe one of them takes up photography, and so they hit the road together, resuming Miss Mack's old profession? Maybe Miss Mack is still the traveling photographer's assistant when she and Janice meet, and the two wind up seeing each other sporadically and falling in love that way? Epistolary elements are completely welcome here.
+ Still horror, but in a completely different way (and possibly with completely different outcomes). They slowly realize that the woods around Gavin Pond are cursed, uncanny, or filled with ancient monsters or eldritch horrors? They're out at the cabin together when a killer attacks? They venture out to the tenant-farmer shacks and wind up awakening something? One or both of them is haunted, or they get trapped in a haunted location? (Or maybe one of their adventurous hobbies involves investigating haunted houses, but they run into something that's more than they bargained for.)
+ Miss Mack's ghost stays in Babylon to protect Janice and get revenge on the Hills. Totally here for ghost/human sex and romance, too. How do they communicate? Can Janice always see her and hear her, or do they have to figure something else out? Does she only see her in dreams?
Cam
Any (Alice Ackerman, Fake Lola)
I love all the layers of thoughtful unease in this movie, from the trippy horror of having your own online identity stripped away from you--to the point where you're watching yourself on-screen, doing things you've never done and saying things you've never said--to the intense creepiness of being stalked to the science fictional deepfake digital clones that don't recognize their original models to the fear of having your secrets publicly revealed to sexual anxieties and the awfulness of having people dismiss your concerns and fears. I also just really like detailed portraits of different professions, so I love seeing how Alice managed her performances and career--what kind of shows she did, her ambitions, her professional connections, her boundary-pushing branding, etc. And Alice is such a terrific protagonist: resourceful, intuitive, weird, brave, vulnerable, and fiercely devoted to her own principles and boundaries. I'm also really intrigued by Fake Lola, especially with the possibility of her developing a kind of sentience.
Optional ships: Alice/Fake Lola, Alice/OFC or any of her colleagues, Fake Lola/anybody (including digital constructs). I'm totally good with you depicting any amount of the canon-typical sex work, so Alice/guys in that context is also totally fine.
Prompts
+ I'm totally here for Fake Lola's POV on her part of the movie and everything going on behind the scenes, with either a seemingly human perspective--that sometimes feels a weird dissonance about everything--or a fascinatingly alien AI one. She's an extremely sophisticated deepfake, so I'd love any looks at her developing some kind of self-awareness and making emotional connections. Maybe even a canon-divergence AU where she and Alice manage to form some kind of bond/alliance/relationship and things go differently?
+ I'd love a look at how Alice got started as Lola. Did she come up with her rules before she ever opened her account, or did she work them out over time? How did she develop her penchant/brand for weird, extreme shows with simulated violence? And I love how we see her keeping a record of gimmicks she's used for individual shows, judging whether or not they've been successful, so I'd love to see more of that, too: her brainstorming, her successes and failures, her adjustments. How does she start forming connections (and rivalries, in Princess's case) with the other women working on FreeGirlsLive?
+ AU where there's a different explanation for what's going on with the theft of Alice's account? The part where "Lola" is taking her audience on a tour of her house is so chilling in how it just eviscerates Alice's sense of privacy and really emphasizes how wrong all this is--it feels so sinister. What if the Fake Lola were some kind of supernatural force targeting her, instead of a digital clone? Is she a ghost of some sort? A suppressed manifestation of Alice herself? Some kind of totally inhuman force that just chooses to embody itself this way for some reason?
+ Is Fake Lola the same "person" as, say, the Baby digital construct, or does she have a unique experience of the world? It could be really cool to see her either interacting with the other simulations--maybe in one of those joint shows--or otherwise being all of these constructs simultaneously.
+ Missing scene possibilities when Alice is searching for answers--I just love the unsettling nature of this part of the film and all the justified paranoia of it, so if you want to give me Alice just encountering other people who possibly know what's going on and/or possibly have something to do with it, that would be awesome. Just all the tense confrontations and seemingly ordinary conversations where she's not sure if she's imagining the implications/undertones or not.
+ Fake Lola lives on as a kind of digital ghost post-deletion. Does she develop an obsession with Alice after all that, and manage to find her new account and become an avid client? And what kind of ghost is she--malevolent, sexually intrigued, neutral, friendly, all of the above simultaneously or at different stages?
+ Alice rebuilds her career, refusing to be knocked down for good--but she's still working with FreeGirlsLive, and the same problem could easily happen again. What's it like trying to work her way up the ratings ladder again with that shadow always hanging over her? Does she stay focused on her shows, or does she make it part of her mission to track down and enact (possibly murderous) revenge on whoever was responsible for all this?
Re-Animator
Herbert West, Daniel Cain
Re-Animator is such a goofy, gory delight, and it hit me with so many unexpected feelings, especially in the first movie. It's so funny and frequently, delightfully over-the-top while still taking its characters' emotions seriously, and I love the intensity and weirdness of the Herbert-Dan relationship and would be happy with anything that gave me more of that. I really like them being mutually emotionally tied up with each other and having this bizarre loyalty kink and sense of teamwork.
I ship them--Herbert seems so immediately smitten with him! In the deleted scenes, he breaks out of Hill's hypnosis only after Hill threatens Dan!--but I'm happy with gen, too; I basically just want them to have a lot of strong feelings about each other and lots of weird caring.
Fandom-specific DNW: Beyond Re-Animator canon.
Prompts
+ More horror is enthusiastically welcome. They awaken or otherwise attract the attention of some kind of eldritch entity? They're snowbound in a haunted hotel? Quietly tragic horror where Dan slowly realizes that he's Herbert's most successful resurrection because Herbert couldn't stand to let him go even though he's come back slightly wrong? Herbert dies at the end of the first movie but sporadically makes ghostly appearances in Dan's life to protect him, bug him about working on the reagent, and just generally be in love with him? Chased and hurt by monsters and/or zombies or trying to survive in a zombie apocalypse?
+ Straight-up stolen from the Jump Scare tag-set: "24-hour convenience store in a really weird neighborhood AU." Dan keeps going to get cheap coffee and snacks at a convenience store across from the hospital, and both it and the Herbert West guy who works there are really weird. So sort of like a coffee shop AU, but grimy and with flickering lights and eldritch happenings and possibly zombies lurching out of the closet and knocking over Slurpee machines.
+ I love the idea that Herbert succumbs to Hill's hypnosis with particular ease, which of course would disconcert him. Maybe he asks Dan to hypnotize him a few times so he can get become more adept at breaking free of that kind of control, and they wind up getting really into it was a kind of unconventional (and deeply ill-advised) D/s and/or consensual somnophilia-adjacent thing? I just really like the idea of Herbert finding that he inexplicably likes being temporarily under Dan's control and trying to justify this in very scientific terms while Dan is also grappling with it from his side, liking the protectiveness but sort of being afraid of all the power? Relatedly, I am also 100% down for this as a kind of weird trauma recovery with Hill having previously nonconned a hypnotized Herbert. I am in general very fond of non-Dan dudes sexually menacing Herbert West.
+ Mpreg! The first movie mentions that it's possible Dan could get expelled for violating university morals if anyone knew he was sleeping with Megan. AU where they're still students and Dan--possibly in the aftermath of some break-up with Megan--has a one-night stand and gets pregnant. He knows an unwed pregnancy would get him booted out of school, but he still wants to keep it--and him leaving is totally unacceptable to Herbert, who therefore will simply have to marry him for propriety's sake so they can keep up the work. Feelings, of course, gradually emerge.
+ Sex pollen-like reagent fumes: a natural hazard of scientific work. I am so here for these two hooking up under a chemical influence and then having to decide what to do about it, possibly with the twist that this really does happen pretty regularly and, say, Dan catches himself being disappointed that it happened once while he was gone and Herbert just wound up jerking off the whole time.
+ Any and all hurt/comfort, blended with any of the above prompts or on their own. I love whumped Herbert, and I also love his sporadic attempts to take care of Dan--swooping in with a trauma blanket and, in a deleted scene from the first movie, making him a picture-perfect sandwich to get him to eat something!--so both variations are perfect. Maybe one of them gets hypnotized/mind-controlled into hurting the other, resulting in a heaping helping of angst with the h/c? Maybe one of them has to perform emergency surgery on the other without any anesthesia? Herbert gets shaky and exhausted from reagent withdrawal, or, alternately, he has to take a lot more of it than usual to, say, try to fight their way out of a zombie apocalypse situation, and then he crashes? One of them hurt protecting the other?
+ Co-sleeping: I have a lot of feelings about the deleted scene from the first movie where Herbert has been shooting up small doses of the reagent in order to go without sleep, and Dan is alarmed by it but has to wind up administering it to him anyway because Herbert's shaking too badly to do it himself. I'd love to see them developing weird co-sleeping habits because Dan just wants to get him to go to bed and being in it with him is as good a way as any. Sex can definitely ensue, but I'm also happy with just weirdly intense, boundary-blurring bed-sharing. This can also totally be blended with weirdly sensual and morally dubious reagent injection or tender sedative administration.
The Woman
Peggy Cleek, The Woman, Darlin' Cleek, Socket Cleek
The darkness of this movie--especially with it hiding under a thin and skin-crawlingly evoked veneer of suburban normalcy--really stays with me. It's such a bizarre but effective combination of "realistic and horrifying domestic and sexual abuse and this asshole's tyranny over his household" and "there's a feral cannibal woman imprisoned in our shed," with a satisfying and bloody dose of cathartic revenge fantasy. And I really like how the Woman genuinely does feel like she exists totally outside of social norms: she's (understandably) not interested in recognizing Belle's victimhood or in sympathizing with her, she's matter-of-factly brutal with Socket, etc. She's far from a traditionally good person. But Peggy still chooses her as the better option, because her life has been so messed-up that she might as well stick with her sisters and the strongest woman she knows and go live in the woods and eat people.
You don't have to focus on all four characters; I'd just like them all to be alive, even if some of them are off-screen. Also, references to Off Season/Offspring canon are fine if you want to include them, but I'm also 100% fine treating this as a standalone, if you want a different history for the Woman.
Fandom-specific DNW: Darlin' canon specifically related to Peggy's death. I'm fine with references to Peggy's canonical sexual abuse from her father, but I don't want any graphic, blow-by-blow flashbacks to it.
Prompts
+ What's it like for Peggy, in particular, to transition to living in the wilderness? She's finally free of her father and is maybe even discovering a sense of power, but she's also probably going to spend a lot of time cold and uncomfortable and scared and bored, and she'll have to deal with the Woman at least sometimes expecting her to eat raw game. Does Peggy try to tentatively establish some kind of home base for them? How does she start forming a bond with the Woman? What's it like for her to suddenly be spending real time with her feral sister who was forced to live in the barn (and who ate her favorite teacher)? How protective is she of Darlin' in the midst of all this?
+ Socket's POV on all this would be great, especially since she's bound to think in a very different way than her sisters (and even in a different way from the Woman). Does she miss the dogs she used to live with? Does she understand that Peggy and Darlin' are her sisters? How quickly does she develop a loyal attachment to the Woman, and how much does she understand about how their lives have changed? How does she change, as she spends more time socializing with other people, even under the weirdest of circumstances?
+ Continuing with the ongoing POV focus, I'd also love to see how Darlin' takes to living in the wild and how quickly she accepts this being her new normal. Her child's eye view of it all would be really fascinating. Does she really grasp that her parents and brother are gone, and if she does, does she mind? What kind of bond does she form with the Woman?
+ And one more general POV prompt: I'd also love to see the Woman's version of their transition to living in the woods, and how she relishes being back in a familiar environment but has to get used to suddenly having all these charges to take care of and teach in her own way. I love her offering the blood to Darlin' and Peggy, complete with the sense that it has some practical and symbolic weight to her, and I'd be fascinated by any weird cannibal family rituals and traditions you want to invent.
+ Horrifying (and maybe intermittently heartwarming) post-canon adventures of any kind. Feel free to lean into the weirdness and brutality here and basically write a cannibal horror story from the cannibals' point-of-view. Have them attack and eat people, complete with the Woman lovingly guiding the girls through murdre and butchery. Have Darlin' learning how to hunt both humans and animals with her hands and teeth. Lean into some of the Darlin' canon and have them kidnap and rape male hikers for the sake of conitnuing their cannibal family bloodline. Emphasize how far they've gone, mentally and emotionally, from civilization, and what it's like to feel like you can't go home again--but maybe the real home was the roving cannibal band you made along the way.
+ Canon-divergence AU where Ms. Raton somehow lives and takes in Peggy, but Socket and Darlin' still go off with the Woman. I'd be really curious to see Peggy sometimes going into the woods to keep up an emotional connection with her increasingly more alien sisters, plus trying in her own way to protect them even when she knows that they're dangerous. Does she bring them food and tools and medicine? If she has her baby, does she have nightmares--plausible ones, to be fair--that the Woman may turn up and take it? How does she weigh her new life with Ms. Raton (and Ms. Raton's girlfriend?) and her baby vs. her surviving but more and more feral biological family?
The Twilight Zone: The After Hours
Any (Marsha White, Saleswoman, Worldbuilding)
This is one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes. I love the uncanniness of the first act, with Marsha's growing realization that everything is subtly (and not-so-subtly) off, and then the dread and terror of her stumbling around the top floor after hours, and then, as a cherry on top, the transition into bittersweet fantasy with a ton of worldbuilding potential. I really like how the episode first treats the concept of living mannequins with pitch-perfect horror and then reframes it as just "these people are alive in a different way." The sense of community the mannequins all have with each other is great, too, and I love them scrupulously taking turns with their chance to spend time in the outside world.
I'm requesting Any. I'd be happy to see worldbuilding with either the characters from the episode or original characters--any deeper exploration of the mannequin life would just be fantastic. And I really adore Marsha's snappy toughness and the pathos of her having forgotten who she was--to the point of imagining a mother!--and the Saleswoman's gift of being alternately unsettling and briskly comforting. She just comes across so vividly, and her question about Marsha's happiness has such an unexpected poignancy once you know what's going on.
Feel free to give the Saleswoman a name. I ship Saleswoman/Marsha and am also happy with mannequin OCs in any and all possible combinations.
Prompts
+ Please give me any and all mannequin rumspringas. Is Marsha the first mannequin who has forgotten herself in the outside world, or does that happen often enough that it's a recognized hazard? Where do they go while they're living outside the department store? Do they all use the same rotating apartment? What are some pleasures they especially enjoy as humans that they don't get to have as mannequins?
+ Building off that, I'd love to see more of Marsha's time in the outside world. How did she start sliding towards forgetting who she was and accepting her cover story as the truth? Was it a deliberate fantasy she was living out at first, or did she just sort of slip into it? What happens with the life she left behind? (I could totally go for an outside POV where one of her unsuspecting human friends comes looking for only to discover that someone else is now living in her apartment--and that one of the mannequins in the department store looks weirdly familiar.) I'm also really interested in the Saleswoman's month outside, especially since there's the feeling that she's done this before. What does she do? What does she look forward to? Is she tempted by the same forgetfulness as Marsha, or does she have a firmer hold on her true identity than that?
+ Someone forms a relationship with a mannequin while the mannequin is taking their turn outside. Do they find out the truth? Does it become a kind of weird long-distance relationship where the other person just waits, year after year, for their mannequin's visit? Is it a bittersweet, star-crossed love where the human eventually gets married to someone else, or is it a kind of touching "well, they're making it work" relationship?
+ What is their life like in the department store(s)? Can any of the employees or customers ever see them move? Do they have more freedom and mobility on the ninth floor, or is it just that they have more privacy? Is that floor technically real but just for storage, or is everyone being 100% literal when they say it doesn't exist, and only the mannequins can actually access it? Do the mannequins have opinions about the clothes they model or where they stand in the store?
+ Marsha has trouble adjusting to being a mannequin again, so she keeps temporarily taking on a more human appearance and walking around on the lower levels of the store? Does the clerk ever recognize her? Does this gradually turn into a weird urban legend or ghost story? I'd love to see some 1960s parapsychologists or ghost hunters diligently investigating these reports only to uncover something far stranger than they ever expected.
+ Mannequin POV, just to capture the uncanniness of it. One of my favorite details is how they reflexively fall back into stationary poses when they're not actively interacting with each other, and I'd love to see more distinctly alien details like that from their perspective.
+ Mannequin sex, either for Marsha/Saleswoman or for any original mannequins. I just want to know if the mannequins fuck, and if so, how. (Especially if they have a Barbie doll-like lack of run-of-the-mill genitalia but can still get off.)
The Alienist
Laszlo Kreizler
This show is so tailored to my interests--the Gilded Age, grittiness but also high society, crime, complicated relationships, flawed and traumatized characters, developing understanding of psychology, hurt/comfort, character growth--and it has so many great performances and such empathy for everybody. I love it. And I love Laszlo in all his high-handed, compassionate, sometimes-brittle glory, and I adore the effort he makes over the course of the two seasons to tamp down his worst instincts and stop lashing out at the people who care about him. Also, his combination of startled-deer-in-the-headlights looks when he gets actual physical intimacy combined with his intellectual-but-incomplete understanding of kink and reflexive sheer adorable weirdness is all very intriguing for shippy purposes.
I love Laszlo & Everybody and Laszlo/Most People, but a probably incomplete list of favorite relationships would include Laszlo & Sara & John, Laszlo/Sara/John, Laszlo/Karen, Laszlo/Mary, Laszlo & Sara, Laszlo & John, Laszlo/John, Laszlo & the Isaacsons, Laszlo & Cyrus, Laszlo & Violet, and Laszlo & traumatized or troubled children.
Fandom-specific DNW: Please don't mention Marcus's death. I'm fine with him not coming up in futurefic, but I'd just like to pretend that he's off being alive somewhere. (Mary's death is important enough in the narrative that I'm fine with treating it as part of the story, but I'm also 100% happy with "Mary Lives" fics.)
Prompts
+ Laszlo and Karen's Kinky Sex Adventures in Vienna. I feel like there's no way these two aren't going to have a lot of terrific, tender, boundary-pushing sex while they're off in Vienna together, and I'd love to read about it. What has Karen done on her own? What would she be trying for the first time too? How does Laszlo react to having first-hand experience of things he's only known about academically? What works for them, and what winds up being a bust?
+ I'd love to see more of Laszlo at the Institute, working with children who either have nowhere else to go or whose fashionable parents don't want to deal with their problems. One of the things I really liked in the first season is that even when Laszlo was being difficult with everyone else, he was always good with the kids, so I'd also be interested in seeing him having to take urgent psychological care of one of the children while he's going through something major himself and has to fight to keep it together. Or what if one of the kids had gone through abuse that reminded him all too much of his own father?
+ Laszlo clearly wants John to be happy, but he seems tepid at best about Violet (who also barely knows him and probably can't understand him at this point), and I'd be really curious to see what their relationship might become once John and Violet are married and he might wind up spending more time with her. I'd love to watch their relationship evolve as they start to accept that they both really care about John. Maybe Laszlo's interest in the baby plays a role? Or, for the dramatic and h/c-filled version, the two of them get kidnapped and held together For Reasons, and they have to try to protect each other and have no choice but to bond in some desperate circumstances.
+ Supernatural casefic! Maybe they start out investigating an apparently normal case but then slowly uncover that something uncanny is going on? Maybe Laszlo gets hired to judge someone's sanity re: their claims of a haunted house, and they all investigate it? Or Sara reluctantly takes on a case purportedly involving the supernatural, expecting it to be a hoax, only for them all to learn differently? They investigate spiritualists? They're a kind of Gilded Age X-Files team who deal with everything from aliens to cryptids to ghosts?
+ Shipfic for any of the ships I mentioned--get-togethers, romantic interludes or moments of intense pining, tender hurt/comfort, sex, working out relationship complications (including "this isn't acceptable in our society"), etc.
+ Also, friendship fic for anything I mentioned--hurt/comfort, bonding, learning things about each other (trivial or deep and painful), going on trips together, trying new things together or one trying something new for the other's sake, emotionally supporting each other, etc.
+ Someone Laszlo cares about gets framed for murder, and his position that anyone can kill suddenly takes a hard turn into "NOT THEM, THOUGH," as he and everyone else work to prove the person's innocence.
+ There's so much darkness in this show that I'm especially drawn to seeing them all have a little bit of (possibly still complex or bittersweet) holiday happiness. Five Christmases Laszlo celebrated, from his difficult childhood to his college years to his brittle pre-canon days to happier post-S1 and/or -S2? Gift-giving with his friends? Slightly awkward but warm household gatherings with him, Mary, Cyrus, and Stevie? Christmas traditions he has reluctantly endured for John's sake, because John persisted in dragging his lonely college friend home with him for holiday gatherings?
+ Anything with Laszlo and John's grandmother interacting. I love how the end of S1 completely turned her around on him because this weird and semi-disreputable friend of John's suddenly became her true crime buddy. I'm totally up for him coming over and regularly chatting with John's grandmother and telling her scandalous details of about psychopathy and murder and her totally relishing it.
+ Futurefic that looks at how the cast might be reunited again, since they've temporarily gone their separate ways. What brings them all back together--possibly even before Laszlo's supposed to return? Is there a major case? Does Laszlo request their assistance in Vienna? Does something terrible happen, necessitating that everyone rush together to try to help whoever's affected?