phantomtomato

Dear author, I’m so excited for this year’s RMSE! Each one of my requested ships is something I would be delighted to see, so I’m so grateful that you’ve offered it or taken up my pinch hit. :) Please have fun!

Likes:

First and second person POV, Slice of life, Domesticity, Older characters, Romance, Realism, Complicated feelings, Bed-sharing/forced proximity, Kissing, Smut, Body-part kinks (hand, foot, armpit, etc.), Impotence/sexual dysfunction, Frottage, Rimming, Manual/oral/anal sex, Coming too soon, Awkwardness and embarrassment during sex (especially first time), Cuddling, Crossdressing, Lush descriptions of bodies and clothing, Body hair, Loyalty, Strong and deeply-felt relationships, Bad characters shown as both bad and mundane/regular people, Introspection, Time and place as important to the characters and story, Sex before love or as a path to love, Reunions

DNW:

Noncon, Dubcon, Major Character Death, BDSM, Mpreg, Omegaverse, Setting change AUs, Sexual relationships for pre-pubescent characters, Non-canonical permanent injury, Body horror, Sexual humiliation or degradation, Unrequested pairings, Unrequested identity headcanons, Epistolary, Outsider POV, Script format, Threesomes/moresomes, Teacher-student

Bartimaeus - Jonathan Stroud

Ship: Bartimaeus/Nathaniel

The Bartimaeus trilogy (Amulet of Samarkand, Golem’s Eye, Ptolemy’s Gate) is such a fun middle-grade series, and although I only read it as an adult, I love it now. I appreciate how it shows Nathaniel, the human boy protagonist, as deeply flawed and shaped by the prejudices of the terrible society he was raised into. It’s not a take that I remember from most of the children’s book series that I read when I actually was a child! The allowance for Nathaniel to be morally grey, and to have setbacks throughout his journey, make this series stand out.

I’m so interested in the relationship Bartimaeus and Nathaniel have. I love the canon banter, the frustration, and the various near-misses on mutual respect as Nathaniel struggles to be a decent person (until the tragic end!). I’d enjoy a canon divergence—does Nathaniel take the hint and become a cabin boy instead of defeating Lovelace in AoS? Does Nathaniel get demoted after GE, so he’s not a minister during PG? Or perhaps a romantic take on a missing scene, like the night spent in the library in AoS or the hotel in Prague during GE. Post-canon fix-it also extremely welcome!

A note on age and explicit content: I would be happy to receive smut for Bartimaeus and Nathaniel at any point in the series, as long as Nathaniel isn’t written as prepubescent. Bartimaeus’ situation is a little complicated given the nature of his shapeshifting, so for him, I ask that he be wearing either an adolescent or adult human guise if they fuck, or you can write him as looking nonhuman (mythical creature, animal, gelatinous blob, whatever).

Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis

Ships: Jewel/Tirian, Bacchus/Edmund Pevensie
Read Online: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Last Battle at Faded Page

I think of these pairings as “interspecies weirdness in Narnia” ships. In a land where sentience belongs to trees and animals and mythical creatures as well as humans, where literal gods walk among them, romance and sex between species must exist. I would love to see it explored!

Edmund is an outsider, coming from our world and with our notions of relationships. How does he react when he becomes the object of fascination for a god? Especially a nonhuman one—I’m open to Bacchus shapeshifting into e.g. a satyr for this!

Tirian is a born and raised Narnian. In a novel where Jewel was a human, their story would be a clear-as-day case of childhood friends to lovers. Jewel is a unicorn, though: how does that work?

I’m very open to smut! From kinky PWP about creature-fucking to contemplative fics about negotiating the logistics of interspecies sex, give it to me.

Ritual sex for Edmund’s redemption is always cool. Bacchus makes a deal with the witch instead of Aslan? Bacchus takes Edmund on the stone table in some sort of virginity-loss-as-rebirth metaphor?

I would prefer a fic that either ends before the conclusion of The Last Battle or ignores/fixes it. My MCD DNW applies here: ‘further up and further in’ is not the direction I’m hoping for with this request!

Crossover Fandom

Ship: Clive Durham (Maurice - Forster)/Freddy Honeychurch (A Room With a View - Forster)
Read Online: ARWAV at Project Gutenberg, Maurice at Faded Page

I’ve spent the past year working my way through Forster’s novels and falling in love with his queer male side characters. (Well, Clive gets POV chapters, but he’s not the main show in Maurice!) Maurice is a beautiful queer Edwardian love story—but it leaves Clive, my favorite, in a sad straight marriage with him telling himself he’s totally normal now. Freddy, the younger brother in A Room With a View, is arguably queer-coded but not a main player in the plot or any romance. They’re both delightful, so why not put them together?

I particularly love Clive’s repression and his terrible attempt to persuade himself that he’s no longer gay. It comes at a moment in his life where he’s faced with what he thinks of as a critical choice: does he take the role expected of him and marry/raise a family, or does he commit to Maurice and his queerness? He is cowardly in that moment and chooses repression. But he never seems happy in his marriage, and doesn’t persuade me that he’s attracted to women at all—I read all of his talk of normalcy as self-denial (and perhaps just a natural falling out of attraction with his college boyfriend Maurice).

What if, instead of marrying Anne, Clive took his trip to Greece and met Freddy Honeychurch on a year abroad after finishing university? Or perhaps Clive and Freddy had always known one another (school, university, society, etc.), and one is a few years older or younger than the other so they weren’t close. But with Clive having broken up with Maurice, Freddy finds his way in instead? Perhaps he’s always admired Clive, or been attracted to him. Perhaps Clive has been attracted to Freddy! We know that Clive has a thing for straightforward, athletic middle-class boys, after all.

Henry Henry - Allen Bratton

Ship: Hal Lancaster/Harry Percy

This retelling of Shakespeare worked amazingly for me on its own merits. I love how the book lives in the details of Hal’s life—his wealth and how it manifests, yes, but also the consistency of his broken phone screen or his trips to the corner shop and the pub. The context is a character as much as Hal or Percy.

And speaking of the ship! Hal/Percy delighted me, but I want so much more of them. I would be thrilled with another sex scene, especially one with their characteristic awkwardness and discomfort. I would also love other views of their relationship: maybe something from Percy’s POV when they were younger (at school, or in uni) and he had a crush on Hal—or Hal on Percy, and hating himself about it. And I would enjoy a reunion fic set after the end of the book: Percy comes back from abroad and wants to give it another go, or Hal reaches out sometime (days? years?) after his father dies.

What I love about their relationship is how much they inherently understand about each other, due to their shared history and similar circumstances, even though they both have terrible communication and Hal, especially, draws strict boundaries around parts of himself. There’s a tension wherein I get that they are their own barrier to making the relationship work, rather than outside circumstances. And I would love to see that played with—ten years on, it’s 2024, and they’re past their twenties. Can it work then, finally?

The Hill - Horace Annesley Vachell

Reginald Scaife/John Verney
Read Online: Project Gutenberg

The Hill is a public school novel with flaws, and I desperately want to see those interrogated. Vachell does not want us to like Reginald Scaife, his villain, because Scaife is from a nouveau riche family with (gasp, horror) a tradesman as a grandfather. John Verney, the protagonist, is a Christian moral paragon who deftly dodges the Demon (Scaife’s actual in-universe nickname), unlike his sad friend Henry Desmond. Unfortunately, Vachell put some very horny descriptions of Scaife in Verney’s mouth, and that alone creates a powerful sexual tension for our not-so-pure moral hero.

Scaife smiled cynically. He looked about a year older than John, but he had the air and manners of a man of the world—so John thought. Also, he was very good-looking, handsomer than Desmond.

I would be overjoyed to get a John Verney overcoming his disgust at his own attraction for Scaife. Perhaps after the war, Scaife returns home as a decorated member of the military and Verney, in some ministerial office following his training with Desmond’s father, finds that they are once again in the same social circle? Or Verney might proactively reach out to Scaife, attempting some priggish moralistic conversion thing, and it’s Scaife who sucks him into the opposite. Or perhaps their mutual devastation over Desmond’s death is what draws them together and the old attraction is rekindled.

The Longest Journey - E. M. Forster

Stewart Ansell/Rickie Elliot
Read Online: Project Gutenberg

A novel about a young man finding his way in the world as an orphan with a congenital disability, The Longest Journey gives us a picture of Rickie Elliot’s life from university on through marriage and scandal. The stakes are that of a personal drama, and it’s told beautifully. Rickie defines himself by the challenges that he faces and how well he overcomes them to meet the standards of normality; Stewart, his friend, pushes him to consider otherwise. The novel gives Rickie only the briefest fulfillment of this and so offers a chance for fruitful canon divergence!

I’d enjoy seeing Rickie and Stewart reunited earlier—perhaps they never truly split their friendship and Rickie doesn’t marry Agnes, or the shock of learning about his half-brother drives Rickie to seek counsel from his old friend, or Rickie leaves instead of marrying and taking the teaching post at Sawston, or the death of Rickie’s daughter spurs him to leave, or Stewart is moved to answer one of Rickie’s letters. Perhaps Rickie sends a more honest letter, one of the versions that he burned! I would also be more than happy to receive fix-it fic wherein Rickie’s daughter survives and he and Stewart have some highly-improbable family arrangement of raising her together—I am a sucker for that sort of thing. But really, give me a Stewart who rejects conventionality and loves his friend, and a Rickie who finds the confidence to do the same, and I will be delighted.