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corpsebrigadierChocolate Box Letter for CorpseBrigadier on Ao3
Dear Chocolatier,
Thank you for taking the time to make something for me, and thank you for being willing to write or draw one of the weird things I happen to have requested. The 14th of February is a bleak, slush-filled miseryscape where I'm from, and I can think of no better way to brighten it up than through the magic of poetry, underground wrestling, ghostfucking, leg removal, and/or obscure JRPG characters. I hope you have as much fun with whatever you make as I anticipate I will have in receiving it.
[Note: This letter is finalized, and since it was first posted it underwent some changes in DNWs and was adjusted to provide clarification regarding a number of things, primarily issues of consent in some scenarios. It will not be edited in the future save to correct formatting/typos. --01/08]
DNWs: ageplay, AUs other than canon divergence for fiction (art is fine), non-con where a woman is the victim (female aggressors fine; some exceptions for FFT), emeto, scat, omegaverse, pregnancy-based kink, soulmarks/soulbonds
Opt Ins: all archive warnings, gender/sexuality headcanons that aren't the central point of the work, pretty much any atypical format you like (drabble sequences, epistolary, IF, poetry, whatever person/tense is your jam)
General Likes:* angst; bittersweetness (I honestly am a fan of a lot of sweet and lighthearted stuff, but I like it even more when it's framed by a dark past or future); black humor; character death (particularly examinations of canonical character death); complex family relationships; hurt/comfort; illness and injury; found families; non-kinky explorations of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood; religious, mythological, and/or plant-based symbolism; whump
Ship Likes: awkwardity; dysfunctionality where appropriate; enemies to lovers; otherwise cool/chill characters letting down their guard when in love; vulnerability; witty/absurd banter
Smut Likes: awkward, bad, or inept sex that's still enthusiastic; blasphemy and religious kink; hate sex; dub-con/non-con**; lingering focus on scars or injuries; non-penetrative sex
Art Likes: I like things with dynamic poses; things that are cute/cartoonish; things that do something offbeat and a little bit exaggerated/surreal; and things that are a little over-stylized and dripping with symbolic imagery. Limited palettes and starkly inked black and white pieces are close to my heart as I am a rotten colorist and have an affinity for styles I could conceivably emulate. I also tend to like things that are de-saturated or a washed out looking. As with my general likes, I'm a sucker for anything that has cool symbolism with plants and religion in it.
I'm down for explicit works for Wiegraf/Zalbag and Romeo/Juliet. If you have an inspired idea for ghost, flea, and/or skeleton porn as a treat, I'm also okay with explicit versions of all pairings for which art is not formally requested.
*Note on General Likes: I went with a lot of pairings and concepts that are a little more on the goofy and playful side of things for this exchange, and a lot of my darker likes aren't really applicable to every request. Don't feel you have to incorporate a lot of tragic pathos if the prompt lends itself to humor and levity (although if you're very taken with some sort of dark take on a humorous prompt, by all means, go for it.)
**Note on Non-Con: Most of the time I’m really enthusiastically into dub-con/non-con and the resultant trauma and aftermath of it, but there's a number of requests for this exchange where I'd rather it not be a thing (mostly I'm not a huge fan of sketchy misogynist poets taking their beloveds by force or most instances of women initially in some position of power--as witches, mediums, or sexy wrestling nuns--having those dynamics violently reversed).
In an earlier version of this letter, I had canon-specific DNWs indicating that I wasn't up for dub-con/non-con in a number of ships. I've changed this to "DNW: non-con where a woman is the victim" as this is generally the common factor. Upon further consideration, I've also concluded dub-con is honestly fine in almost all scenarios despite it also being lumped together with non-con as a DNW in an earlier version of this letter. I've tried to add clarification where necessary as a lot of these scenarios are pretty bizarre.
Don't hesitate to contact a mod if you feel something is unclear; I know there's a lot of weird stuff here that results in weird consent dynamics. Also... don't feel any obligation to write anything other than wholly consensual couplings, as that is what I envisioned with most of these prompts.
Gnome Tricking Men into Cutting Off Legs With a Magic Axe/Lake Witch Sick of Axes in Her Lake
It’s that guy. It’s the little dickweed who lives in a tree stump and asks if this golden axe he happened to find is the one you just lost in a lake. He obviously doesn’t really comprehend that you’re an impoverished woodcutter and that a golden axe would probably enable you to live a decent life without any famished children or consumptive wives or whatever other fairytale woes you have. As such, this complete turd laughs as you pick it up, chop off your own legs with it, and stump hop your way home to explain that everyone in your wretched cottage will probably starve in the coming winter. What a prick!
The whole thing isn’t about you though--or even him. It’s about the strange and ethereal lake witch who lives beneath the grey waters of this remote forested lake and how she’s so fucking sick of people just “happening” to drop axes in her domain. As you bleed to death in the midst of the wilderness and are eaten by coyotes, you probably have no idea as to how very irritated she is about all this, and about how she is about to confront her inconsiderate neighbor about his weird hobbies and how they are driving down the value of her property.
How do they get together? Perhaps all those axes (and possibly legs) in the lake are the equivalent of a schoolboy pull of the pigtails? Perhaps the whole axe routine is to keep hot woodsman away from the lake witch’s lair lest they attract her attention? Perhaps he genuinely got the idea that this eldritch lake woman really appreciates a nice axe and wanted to provide her with some? There’s a lot of ways to make this work, and I’m very interested in all of them.
Further Note: This prompt is obviously inspired by this general folktale category, but the Mercury figure and the lake spirit are separated into different entities. I'm familiar with faint childhood memories of the Mercury figure being some gnome in a tree stump (was that from you, Andrew Lang?), but feel free to use whatever quirky fairy-tale tropes you like. There is no actual canon here.
Victorian Widows Cohabiting For “Companionship”/Ghost Husbands Channeled During Sex
So it’s the nineteenth century and your sainted husband has died after a long feverish illness or he’s perished in some tragic freak accident abroad or he’s been trampled to death by a derby horse. That’s it. You’re finally single, and you do what any respectful Victorian widow does. You don a bunch of completely metal mourning gear and find yourself another widow to move into your empty, ghost-plagued home to keep you company--and by “keep you company,” I mean “eat you out five times a day as you lie sprawled on your William Morris inspired rug.”
But maybe you both miss your departed menfolk. They were probably decent men with jaunty hats and charming burnsides. So, you buy a subscription to the Society for Psychical Research’s newsletter, don your former husbands’ swank waistcoats, and proceed to try to get old Archibald or Algernon or Hector or whatever his stupid name was to possess you during your hot bouts of widow on widow action. Somehow, it works! It works and you now have to manage whatever the fallout is of having hot bouts of ghost on widow on widow on ghost action, where it becomes very complex to navigate who is actually fucking who.
I’m here for any number of permutations on this scenario. I’d love fic where the four of these weirdos form a pleasant, happy polycule where everyone is in love with everyone else. I’d love fic where ghost husband A is very glad to be back together with his wife but is weirded out by having to possess wife B or having to fuck his wife when she is possessed by ghost husband B. I’d love the ghost husbands gradually growing closer as they realize they’re into one another as well or having to navigate how they feel about their wife having a flesh lover in addition to a ghost spouse. I’d love the widows to focus on their own relationship and how they feel about reintroducing men--albeit men as ghosts--into it. I’d love psychical researchers to show up to ask about all this successful mediumship and for Arthur Conan Doyle to pen an article about the absolute legitimate proof in the world that there is ghost fucking. (If you're into epistolary writing, I'd be open to this scenario being discussed via commentators and interviewers in a special edition of the Journal of the SPR--where a lively debate about the propriety and metaphysics of ghost sex can occur.) You can go in pretty much any direction you like with this saving the DNW discussed below, and I’ll be pretty happy.
Further Note on Consent (and Prompt Origin): Feel free to write possessed sex however you want, but assume consent on the part of the widows. I'd envisioned this initially as "possession is an experience where both ghost and medium share some consciousness of their surroundings and consent/participation is ongoing at least on the part of the medium and probably on the part of the ghost" but I am also open to "possession is an experience in which one consciousness is supplanted by another but widow A agrees to channel husband B for widow B in advance or both widows indicate they are okay with both ghosts using their bodies to hook up." I generally consider ghost sex consensual on the part of the medium for the purposes of this prompt. Just so long as a ghost isn't violently hijacking a widow to do something sexual over which she will later weep in dolorous abandon, you should be good. Widows channeling ghosts to do things they are not 100% chill with is fine, even if I initially envisioned everyone as being pretty happy with the arrangement.
Also, an earlier version of this prompt appeared on an anon meme. I'd prefer you only take into consideration information about the prompt that appears here and in my sign up if you choose to write it.
I really love John Donne. I love him, and I love Sextus Propertius, and then I am just bad at all other poetry I might appreciate. Despite his groddy misogyny and his general groddy groddiness, Donne’s just so damn good at what he does, which is writing horny poetry in which the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together. I would love to read some horny re-yokings of those ideas this winter.
Feel free for any of these to yoke in some more Donne poetry if you wish to. I realized only after my noms were approved that I had skipped out on some good ships like “Flavia in ‘The Anagram’/her collection of recoiling dildos,” and I will never say no to more Donne. I might have to double check something, but I have read or skimmed every Donne poem at least once.
Poetic Speaker in “The Flea”/Flea OR Poetic Speaker in “The Flea”/Beloved/Flea
It’s the Donne poem that everyone knows and loves: “The Flea.” If you don’t love it yet, read it here and feast your eyes on this petition in verse that a lady sleep with you because your bodily fluids are already mingled in the same flea and that’s sort of like sex anyway. This is the height of Early Modern romantic poetry and that Shakespeare loser cannot hope to attain this brilliance no matter how many Will/will/willy puns he slides into his dumb sonnets that actually adhere to a regular poetic form.
In any event, the great tragedy of “The Flea” is that the speaker’s beloved murders the poor flea serving as the metaphor for her union with the poet. This flea deserved better. I don’t care if you resurrect the flea, look towards some pre-canon flea times here, write a canon divergence Flea Lives AU, or write about a ghost flea, but I would very much like for this poetic injustice to be righted and this flea to be part of a loving relationship. I’m looking for something where either the poet succeeds in his suit but the flea continues to be a necessary component of the relationship or for something in which the poet does not succeed in his suit, but he still has this cute and endearing flea for company.
Further Note on Consent: I know fleas (and ghost fleas) aren't capable of consent. This is a metaphysical poetry flea, however, and I will assume it is. Non-consensual biting of the beloved by the flea is also fine and I will not consider this non-con, even if the speaker is awkwardly getting off on it in some weird metaphorical way.
Poetic Speaker in “To His Mistress Going to Bed”/Mistress
This is what must have been the iconic striptease poem of 1633, and it is very goofy. The first thing I am very down for is some play on the following lines:
“In such white robes, heaven’s Angels used to be
Received by men; Thou Angel bringst with thee
A heaven like Mahomet’s Paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know,
By this these Angels from an evil sprite,
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.”
I don’t know about you, but there is nothing quite so endearing as a man who tells you that you look like a sexy Islamic angel, gets sidetracked into thinking you might also sort of look like an unsexy ghost, and then brings things back around to his own boner. As is probably evident in the Propertius and Original Works sections, I am always here for ghost sex, and I would love some explanation as to why this complete muppet of a human being has randomly decided to bring up ghosts in his orientalist fantasy about houri. There is obviously a pretty big pronouncement on the supernatural going on here. Donne is claiming that angels give you erections and ghosts don’t, and given everything else that John Donne can wring an erection out of, I don’t know if I completely buy it.
The really big thing I’m interested in with regards to this poem, however, is the question as to when the speaker’s penis is out. The final lines clearly indicate that he is naked by the time the mistress is done stripping. Has he been stripping alongside her? Has he been naked the whole time, his bouncily playful metaphors given a different inflection by the vulnerability of his own bouncily playful dick? Is he wearing some sort of Early Modern stripper pants, which he rips off during the final couplet? I really want to know. It is important to me that we understand how naked this guy is as he assures us that ghosts do not give him hard ons and compares his lover to the exploitable lands of the Americas.
Kinky Dom Jesus/Poetic Speaker in “Batter My Heart, Three Person’d God”
This is definitely the one ship where I am most on board with you interpreting “Poetic Speaker” as literal historical John Donne. Please read this poem, pull up a picture of my boy Jack and imagine what he wants Jesus to do to him once he’s Doctor Donne.
I feel this request is pretty straightforward; it is really not hard to extract some hot Jesus on Donne BDSM from this poem. I want to suggest, however, that you might want to play around with the dynamics here beyond “Jesus please batter me!” The Speaker/Donne here seems like an awfully demanding/whiny bottom, and maybe Jesus isn’t down for that and wants to withhold some battering for the sake of putting this guy in his place. Maybe he’s honestly a little creeped out by his enthusiasm, and would like things to slow down a little? Maybe he is egged on by his zeal for punishment and wants to get the Speaker/Donne to a point where he has to safeword out and stop begging for it so goddamn much? Maybe he’s not all into this cuckoldry with the Speaker/Donne being “betroth'd unto [his] enemy” and wants to set some damn boundaries?
If you go the “Speaker as historical Donne” route, this is the ship for which I’m most open to the introduction of biographical material or stuff from other Donne poetry. Jesus knows everything, and perhaps he wants John/Speaker to do some of that weird stuff with fleas and compasses and whatever he was into in his youth.
Canon-Specific DNWs: In this canon, I do not want dub-con for Alma/Ovelia. I am also suspending my "non-con with female victim" DNW for Dycedarg/Ruvelia (if you are interested in doing any flavor of something messed up with them, it's fine; again though, this is not required/expected).
I really really really like this game, and I have oh so very very many feelings about all the vaguely sepia-toned, noseless pixel people who are doomed to die within it. I love its fakey JRPG Catholic church horror. I love that its filled with biological and found families with a variety of complicated relationship issues. I love how labyrinthine and full of details the plot and character interactions are. I love that the whole thing is generally a big downer, and that the resolution is, even at its happiest, still more bittersweet than joyous.
If you have matched with me and one of my completely weird rarepairs, it is possibly because you--like me--enjoy really niche characters in this game and probably read all those little biographical entries in the codex several times. This is good, because none of the people in any pairing here are ever visually present on the same screen at once, and everything below caters to the sort of person who delights in obscure in-game lore. If you want a chance to do cool worldbuilding or character exploration with this game, that is what all of these ships are ideal for.
Note: I mix and match the PSP and PSX names like a crazy person; feel free to use whichever names you dig most.
Canon Review Resources: I have no idea what ports of the game are/are not garbage these days, but you can check out scripts of the dialogue here (PSX translation) and here (PSP translation). There's also a very comprehensive Let's Play here (PSX translations).
Alma Beoulve/Ovelia Atkascha
Alma and Ovelia grew up in an isolated monastery together, and I feel that this often gets overlooked as the game largely doesn’t have the decency to remind us of the fact that there’s this other story of two close childhood friends who end up on opposite sides of Ivalice’s civil war. Alma, in fact, never mentions Ovelia, and her only childhood relationship we get a glimpse of is her interaction with Tietra (who then promptly dies).
I love Alma/Tietra, and I love Agrias/Ovelia, but I think there’s honestly more basis for Alma/Ovelia to have grown particularly close than there is for either of the aforementioned pairings. Like Ramza/Delita, these two have a perfect set up for a story of childhood love growing into the complicated, messy affinity of two people who find themselves on opposing sides of a conflict. Given that they’re separated prior to the game beginning and do not meet again, this is perfect for pining or an epistolary relationship, and I’d love something that leans into the bittersweet nature of both of their fates. In particular, I’d really love for the two of them, as they grow older, to have more and more of a sobering realization as to how much their place in the world changes once they move from being monastical oblates to young women whose significance in society will likely be tied to a marital union. I’d also love something that looks at how Ovelia ends up the sacrificial victim of the political plot whereas Alma ends up the (somewhat more literal) sacrificial victim of the religious plot.
Adding in lots of feelings about other characters close to these two (Delita, Agrias, Tietra) is a-okay and recommended, and I’m open to exploring this ship in relation to another one featuring either of the two women.
Art Prompts: I’d love anything with the two of them sharing a childhood/youth at Orbonne, and obviously stuff employing grass whistle or flowers would be fantastic. Alternatively, it might be cool to do one of those before/after pictures showing them as girls and then showing them as a queen/demonic host.
Dycedarg Beoulve/Ruvelia Atkascha
Dycedarg is Orinus Atkascha’s father and I will not be convinced otherwise unless Yasumi Matsuno personally comes to my house and bests me in mortal combat. I know that the game probably wants you to assume that if Larg did, in fact, arrange for somebody to impregnate his sister as Vormav suggests, it was a nameless mook who is even more insignificant to the plot than Ruvelia and Orinus themselves, but let’s be real. If you are Bestrald Larg and you need somebody to bang the queen on short notice to secure a line of succession before her sickly husband dies, you call Dycedarg Beoulve. That man and his douchetastic hair and his oversized bottle of wine all scream “I will gladly and probably have already fucked your sister for political gain.”
The thing about this proposed scenario is, while it’s safe to assume that Dycedarg and Ruvelia would probably not be anything other than pragmatic as lovers, they actually make for a pretty interesting match. In a game where virtually every female character is either a pure-hearted lady knight or a doomed teenage girl, Ruvelia stands out as the lone female baddie within the realm of the political plot. Despite her sparse characterization, she seems like she’d honestly get along with everyone’s favorite patricidal goat boy. They both rather evidently come from some fucked to hell familial dynamics (The sibling spacing and lack of marriages in Dycedarg’s family is super weird for a renowned family line that really really needs heirs, and Ruvelia has spent most of her married life trying to bear kids to a chronically ill husband only to have them be assassinated). They both seem to enjoy poisoning meddlesome members of the older generation (Ruvelia is rumored to have done away with her mother-in-law upon becoming a widow). They both probably grew up in Igros and had some shared experiences there.
I’m interested villain on villain action as regards this request. I love villains engaging in nonchalant villainous banter; I love their self-justification as to why they aren’t really the villains; I just love them having awkward moments of self-reflection and multidimensionality before they get back to cackling upon their schemes. I’m also interested in using this pairing as a means to explore how the Ivalician aristocracy, the duchy of Gallione, and/or House Beoulve all got to be the dysfunctional dumpster fires they appear to be in the actual game.
Art Prompts: I am really stupidly into plants and poisons these days, and both of these characters are poisoners (or at least alleged poisoners). I would love them doing anything involving cool poisonous plants. I am also all about using dumb goat imagery in connection to Dycedarg because I am a massive dork.
Simon Penn-Lasich & Zalmour Lucianda
Religion and religious horror in FFT is one of my favorite elements of the game, as exploring the weirdness of JRPG faux Catholicism is a great way to get the vibes I love without any feeling of real world investment. I’m interested in these two characters as they were both members of the Inquisition and both seem to be the only clergymen not involved in any massive political or demonic conspiracy, and I would really love to see somebody worldbuild through their interactions as inquisitors. In particular, there’s obviously a lot of cool stuff that one could do with whatever the “incident” was that led to Simon’s retirement to Orbonne.
Zalmour is a zealot who never understands the church is corrupt and dies cursing sinners. Simon is a complicated man who lost his faith but persisted with a corrupt institution because he was too devoted to his love of knowledge to abandon his library. I’d love to see what Simon’s faith was like before he read the Germonique scriptures or if Zalmour every had a less fanatical type of devotion to his faith. I’d also--as I pretty much always do--love to see how both men reacted to the ongoing Fifty Years War that shaped so much of their lives.
Art Prompts: Seriously, pour on the religious imagery and dump those little T-shaped Glabados icons everywhere if you see fit. I'd love to see something with young versions of these guys as active inquisitors. If you're up for it, I'd also enjoy some sort of abstract iconographic illustrations with halos and weird medieval symbolism and such.
Wiegraf Folles/Zalbag Beoulve
This is my completely batshit OTP, and it has next to no canon support for the characters having any meaningful interaction, let alone getting together to fuck. The only time that these two guys conceivably have anything to do with one another in game is when Zalbag takes a break from ordering his foster siblings shot to go massacre Wiegraf’s friends: which is… not the basis for a great relationship.
I don’t care, though. These guys both have excellent tragic story arcs, look very hot for tiny duplo man sprites, and are great at giving ineffectual speeches about justice before being screwed over by a major villain and transformed into an inhuman monstrosity/emotionally devastating boss battle. They are also roughly the same age, both from Gallione, and both fought in the same war for god knows how long, so it’s relatively easy to imagine them having some non-hostile encounter at some point. Perhaps they were both caught in the same siege or foxhole or what have you? Perhaps there’s a chance for them to meet up after Wiegraf is allied with the church and Zalbag is managing half a civil war? Perhaps we can just make something up and diverge from canon because this is fanfiction?
I wrote a ship manifesto about these two losers for Unconventional Fanworks that you can find here, but it’s big and rambling and the TL;DR you should get from it is that what I want from this pairing is just taking the doomed, angsty, morally conflicted nature of both characters and smooshing them together to produce more of the same. Stuff that plays around with Zalbag’s religiosity, Wiegraf’s eventually lapsed idealism, their relationships with their siblings, their class difference, and/or their outlook on war and the military is all particularly my thing. However, seriously feel free to use your imagination pretty broadly here, though. I recognize that this is a seriously bizarre ship that requires some of it.
Art Prompts: I really really just would love anything with these guys, either pre-game as combatants in the Fifty Years War or mid game as a templar and general or just abstractly two cool guys hanging out. I am really A+ 110% all right with some injury and blood as it is applicable, and as always, I am up for dumb animal imagery in FFT art. Sheep are great. I will never get tired of Wiegraf being drawn in conjunction with or as sheep. If you're doing something appropriately cutesy and want to throw in a monkey too (Zalbag was jokingly referred to as "Monkey Bag" in the sound test menus for the game in Japanese), go for it. Explicit works okay.
This is a short by Masaaki Yuasa and it is the piece I blatantly chose to either convince people to watch something cool or to get the pleasant surprise of meeting a creator who likes watching the same sort of cool stuff I do. It’s a visually striking 12 minute animation about a masochistic underground wrestler getting stomped on by a nun who is another underground wrestler, and it is cute and vivid and grotesque (You can see a grainy YouTube version of it here).
Romeo Maki/Sister Juliet
Given how quirky and experimental the art style is, I would love pretty much any take on this canon so long as you try for some form of vibrancy and exaggeration. I don’t need you to match the artistic style exactly, but I’d love to see you try to match how over the top that style is. I’d love images of Romeo (M) and Juliet (S) wrestling out of their wrestling identities or potentially just interacting with the orphanage children with some awkward, emotionally charged and possibly sweaty glances between them. Anything that shows them doing stuff a la the final fight, though, is perfect. If you’ve ever thought to yourself “Gee, self, I’d really like to draw a Random Internet Stranger a rainbow-hued surrealist valentine of a man being violently stomped on by a sadistic wrestling nun” just lean into every impulse you had regarding that and do it. Explicit works okay.
I was technically maybe a Classics major at some point in my life, so I have a lot of warm fuzzies for Classics fandoms despite having forgotten almost everything useful about the degree I allegedly earned. Sextus Propertius was absolutely my favorite dude from back when I could read Latin, and despite having only read these two poems and no longer being able to conjugate my way out of a moist paper bag, I have the warmest fuzzies for this guy--moreso than Catullus and Ovid, who are the standard issue slutty Roman poets most people love.
I love that both of these poems are about the male speaker seemingly standing around like an idiot while his beloved tells him how much he sucks, as I feel that many poetic speakers in old timey love poetry could use this sort of treatment and kudos to Cynthia for telling off her dickbag lover. I love just how simultaneously wacky and moving the two scenarios are. As you have probably intuited by now, I like that there’s the promise of undead sex.
Poetic Speaker in “Propertius 1.3”/Cynthia
This is a poem about a drunken dude coming to his girlfriend’s house from a party and worshipfully piling food and flowers on her until she wakes up to yell at him, and I really like all of the goofy awkwardity of this scenario. The whole, dumbstruck notion that she looks like a goddess such that he tries to make her an offering is hilarious when juxtaposed with the fact that he’s just waking her up by stacking apples on her. This is totally the sort of brilliant boyfriend idea one has while very drunk.
I want to see either the prelude or the follow up to this: a snapshot of the party where the Speaker is drunkenly absconding with those garlands and apples and realizing he has to get back to his girl or a snapshot of the fallout of the spat (awkward make up sex somehow involving flowers and/or apples would be great).
Read the poem here: English | Latin
Further Note on Consent (and Apples): I know there is speculation about rape in this poem, and it is fine to bring it up so long as Cynthia is not actually the victim of violence. I should also note that translators vary on what is going on with the line "munera de prono saepe voluta sinu" and where apples end up on Cynthia's body. "Sinus," if I recall, means a gazillion different things in sexy poems (lap, breasts, fold of a garment, etc...), so feel free to locate apples where you will. I don't expect anyone to know Latin well (or even at all) for these prompts because I sure don't.
Poetic Speaker in “Propertius 4.7”/Cynthia’s Ghost
“Nunc te possideant aliae: mox sola tenebo: mecum eris, et mixtis ossibus ossa teram”
(Let others possess you now; soon I alone will hold you, and I will wear down your bones grinding against mine.)
This is absolutely the line I would love somebody to focus on here: a line promising what sounds like bomb ass skeleton sex in an eternal lover’s embrace. It’s oh so evocative but so damn frustrating for Cynthia to slip through his fingers after dropping that line.
While the Speaker/Propertius has obviously been a shitty shitty boyfriend (and feel free--on top of all his rancid behavior in this poem--to dredge up his apple stacking misdemeanors of poems past), I really want him to get some undead booty, either as a living man hooking up with his disgruntled ghost lover or as a skeleton having rad skeleton sex in the afterlife. If you, unlike me, have some fresh memories of studies in Classical history and want to include any neato Roman superstitions or necromancy or actual Latin, I promise I will adore you, look up your research facts with unmitigated delight, and painfully fidget my way through the Perseus Project until I know what you’re trying to do.
Read the poem here: English | Latin
Dear Chocolatier,
Thank you for taking the time to make something for me, and thank you for being willing to write or draw one of the weird things I happen to have requested. The 14th of February is a bleak, slush-filled miseryscape where I'm from, and I can think of no better way to brighten it up than through the magic of poetry, underground wrestling, ghostfucking, leg removal, and/or obscure JRPG characters. I hope you have as much fun with whatever you make as I anticipate I will have in receiving it.
[Note: This letter is finalized, and since it was first posted it underwent some changes in DNWs and was adjusted to provide clarification regarding a number of things, primarily issues of consent in some scenarios. It will not be edited in the future save to correct formatting/typos. --01/08]
DNWs: ageplay, AUs other than canon divergence for fiction (art is fine), non-con where a woman is the victim (female aggressors fine; some exceptions for FFT), emeto, scat, omegaverse, pregnancy-based kink, soulmarks/soulbonds
Opt Ins: all archive warnings, gender/sexuality headcanons that aren't the central point of the work, pretty much any atypical format you like (drabble sequences, epistolary, IF, poetry, whatever person/tense is your jam)
General Likes:* angst; bittersweetness (I honestly am a fan of a lot of sweet and lighthearted stuff, but I like it even more when it's framed by a dark past or future); black humor; character death (particularly examinations of canonical character death); complex family relationships; hurt/comfort; illness and injury; found families; non-kinky explorations of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood; religious, mythological, and/or plant-based symbolism; whump
Ship Likes: awkwardity; dysfunctionality where appropriate; enemies to lovers; otherwise cool/chill characters letting down their guard when in love; vulnerability; witty/absurd banter
Smut Likes: awkward, bad, or inept sex that's still enthusiastic; blasphemy and religious kink; hate sex; dub-con/non-con**; lingering focus on scars or injuries; non-penetrative sex
Art Likes: I like things with dynamic poses; things that are cute/cartoonish; things that do something offbeat and a little bit exaggerated/surreal; and things that are a little over-stylized and dripping with symbolic imagery. Limited palettes and starkly inked black and white pieces are close to my heart as I am a rotten colorist and have an affinity for styles I could conceivably emulate. I also tend to like things that are de-saturated or a washed out looking. As with my general likes, I'm a sucker for anything that has cool symbolism with plants and religion in it.
I'm down for explicit works for Wiegraf/Zalbag and Romeo/Juliet. If you have an inspired idea for ghost, flea, and/or skeleton porn as a treat, I'm also okay with explicit versions of all pairings for which art is not formally requested.
*Note on General Likes: I went with a lot of pairings and concepts that are a little more on the goofy and playful side of things for this exchange, and a lot of my darker likes aren't really applicable to every request. Don't feel you have to incorporate a lot of tragic pathos if the prompt lends itself to humor and levity (although if you're very taken with some sort of dark take on a humorous prompt, by all means, go for it.)
**Note on Non-Con: Most of the time I’m really enthusiastically into dub-con/non-con and the resultant trauma and aftermath of it, but there's a number of requests for this exchange where I'd rather it not be a thing (mostly I'm not a huge fan of sketchy misogynist poets taking their beloveds by force or most instances of women initially in some position of power--as witches, mediums, or sexy wrestling nuns--having those dynamics violently reversed).
In an earlier version of this letter, I had canon-specific DNWs indicating that I wasn't up for dub-con/non-con in a number of ships. I've changed this to "DNW: non-con where a woman is the victim" as this is generally the common factor. Upon further consideration, I've also concluded dub-con is honestly fine in almost all scenarios despite it also being lumped together with non-con as a DNW in an earlier version of this letter. I've tried to add clarification where necessary as a lot of these scenarios are pretty bizarre.
Don't hesitate to contact a mod if you feel something is unclear; I know there's a lot of weird stuff here that results in weird consent dynamics. Also... don't feel any obligation to write anything other than wholly consensual couplings, as that is what I envisioned with most of these prompts.
Original Works
(FIC only; you may ignore my fic/art preferences for treats)Gnome Tricking Men into Cutting Off Legs With a Magic Axe/Lake Witch Sick of Axes in Her Lake
It’s that guy. It’s the little dickweed who lives in a tree stump and asks if this golden axe he happened to find is the one you just lost in a lake. He obviously doesn’t really comprehend that you’re an impoverished woodcutter and that a golden axe would probably enable you to live a decent life without any famished children or consumptive wives or whatever other fairytale woes you have. As such, this complete turd laughs as you pick it up, chop off your own legs with it, and stump hop your way home to explain that everyone in your wretched cottage will probably starve in the coming winter. What a prick!
The whole thing isn’t about you though--or even him. It’s about the strange and ethereal lake witch who lives beneath the grey waters of this remote forested lake and how she’s so fucking sick of people just “happening” to drop axes in her domain. As you bleed to death in the midst of the wilderness and are eaten by coyotes, you probably have no idea as to how very irritated she is about all this, and about how she is about to confront her inconsiderate neighbor about his weird hobbies and how they are driving down the value of her property.
How do they get together? Perhaps all those axes (and possibly legs) in the lake are the equivalent of a schoolboy pull of the pigtails? Perhaps the whole axe routine is to keep hot woodsman away from the lake witch’s lair lest they attract her attention? Perhaps he genuinely got the idea that this eldritch lake woman really appreciates a nice axe and wanted to provide her with some? There’s a lot of ways to make this work, and I’m very interested in all of them.
Further Note: This prompt is obviously inspired by this general folktale category, but the Mercury figure and the lake spirit are separated into different entities. I'm familiar with faint childhood memories of the Mercury figure being some gnome in a tree stump (was that from you, Andrew Lang?), but feel free to use whatever quirky fairy-tale tropes you like. There is no actual canon here.
Victorian Widows Cohabiting For “Companionship”/Ghost Husbands Channeled During Sex
So it’s the nineteenth century and your sainted husband has died after a long feverish illness or he’s perished in some tragic freak accident abroad or he’s been trampled to death by a derby horse. That’s it. You’re finally single, and you do what any respectful Victorian widow does. You don a bunch of completely metal mourning gear and find yourself another widow to move into your empty, ghost-plagued home to keep you company--and by “keep you company,” I mean “eat you out five times a day as you lie sprawled on your William Morris inspired rug.”
But maybe you both miss your departed menfolk. They were probably decent men with jaunty hats and charming burnsides. So, you buy a subscription to the Society for Psychical Research’s newsletter, don your former husbands’ swank waistcoats, and proceed to try to get old Archibald or Algernon or Hector or whatever his stupid name was to possess you during your hot bouts of widow on widow action. Somehow, it works! It works and you now have to manage whatever the fallout is of having hot bouts of ghost on widow on widow on ghost action, where it becomes very complex to navigate who is actually fucking who.
I’m here for any number of permutations on this scenario. I’d love fic where the four of these weirdos form a pleasant, happy polycule where everyone is in love with everyone else. I’d love fic where ghost husband A is very glad to be back together with his wife but is weirded out by having to possess wife B or having to fuck his wife when she is possessed by ghost husband B. I’d love the ghost husbands gradually growing closer as they realize they’re into one another as well or having to navigate how they feel about their wife having a flesh lover in addition to a ghost spouse. I’d love the widows to focus on their own relationship and how they feel about reintroducing men--albeit men as ghosts--into it. I’d love psychical researchers to show up to ask about all this successful mediumship and for Arthur Conan Doyle to pen an article about the absolute legitimate proof in the world that there is ghost fucking. (If you're into epistolary writing, I'd be open to this scenario being discussed via commentators and interviewers in a special edition of the Journal of the SPR--where a lively debate about the propriety and metaphysics of ghost sex can occur.) You can go in pretty much any direction you like with this saving the DNW discussed below, and I’ll be pretty happy.
Further Note on Consent (and Prompt Origin): Feel free to write possessed sex however you want, but assume consent on the part of the widows. I'd envisioned this initially as "possession is an experience where both ghost and medium share some consciousness of their surroundings and consent/participation is ongoing at least on the part of the medium and probably on the part of the ghost" but I am also open to "possession is an experience in which one consciousness is supplanted by another but widow A agrees to channel husband B for widow B in advance or both widows indicate they are okay with both ghosts using their bodies to hook up." I generally consider ghost sex consensual on the part of the medium for the purposes of this prompt. Just so long as a ghost isn't violently hijacking a widow to do something sexual over which she will later weep in dolorous abandon, you should be good. Widows channeling ghosts to do things they are not 100% chill with is fine, even if I initially envisioned everyone as being pretty happy with the arrangement.
Also, an earlier version of this prompt appeared on an anon meme. I'd prefer you only take into consideration information about the prompt that appears here and in my sign up if you choose to write it.
DONNE John - Works
(FIC only; you may ignore my fic/art preferences for treats)I really love John Donne. I love him, and I love Sextus Propertius, and then I am just bad at all other poetry I might appreciate. Despite his groddy misogyny and his general groddy groddiness, Donne’s just so damn good at what he does, which is writing horny poetry in which the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together. I would love to read some horny re-yokings of those ideas this winter.
Feel free for any of these to yoke in some more Donne poetry if you wish to. I realized only after my noms were approved that I had skipped out on some good ships like “Flavia in ‘The Anagram’/her collection of recoiling dildos,” and I will never say no to more Donne. I might have to double check something, but I have read or skimmed every Donne poem at least once.
Poetic Speaker in “The Flea”/Flea OR Poetic Speaker in “The Flea”/Beloved/Flea
It’s the Donne poem that everyone knows and loves: “The Flea.” If you don’t love it yet, read it here and feast your eyes on this petition in verse that a lady sleep with you because your bodily fluids are already mingled in the same flea and that’s sort of like sex anyway. This is the height of Early Modern romantic poetry and that Shakespeare loser cannot hope to attain this brilliance no matter how many Will/will/willy puns he slides into his dumb sonnets that actually adhere to a regular poetic form.
In any event, the great tragedy of “The Flea” is that the speaker’s beloved murders the poor flea serving as the metaphor for her union with the poet. This flea deserved better. I don’t care if you resurrect the flea, look towards some pre-canon flea times here, write a canon divergence Flea Lives AU, or write about a ghost flea, but I would very much like for this poetic injustice to be righted and this flea to be part of a loving relationship. I’m looking for something where either the poet succeeds in his suit but the flea continues to be a necessary component of the relationship or for something in which the poet does not succeed in his suit, but he still has this cute and endearing flea for company.
Further Note on Consent: I know fleas (and ghost fleas) aren't capable of consent. This is a metaphysical poetry flea, however, and I will assume it is. Non-consensual biting of the beloved by the flea is also fine and I will not consider this non-con, even if the speaker is awkwardly getting off on it in some weird metaphorical way.
Poetic Speaker in “To His Mistress Going to Bed”/Mistress
This is what must have been the iconic striptease poem of 1633, and it is very goofy. The first thing I am very down for is some play on the following lines:
“In such white robes, heaven’s Angels used to be
Received by men; Thou Angel bringst with thee
A heaven like Mahomet’s Paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know,
By this these Angels from an evil sprite,
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.”
I don’t know about you, but there is nothing quite so endearing as a man who tells you that you look like a sexy Islamic angel, gets sidetracked into thinking you might also sort of look like an unsexy ghost, and then brings things back around to his own boner. As is probably evident in the Propertius and Original Works sections, I am always here for ghost sex, and I would love some explanation as to why this complete muppet of a human being has randomly decided to bring up ghosts in his orientalist fantasy about houri. There is obviously a pretty big pronouncement on the supernatural going on here. Donne is claiming that angels give you erections and ghosts don’t, and given everything else that John Donne can wring an erection out of, I don’t know if I completely buy it.
The really big thing I’m interested in with regards to this poem, however, is the question as to when the speaker’s penis is out. The final lines clearly indicate that he is naked by the time the mistress is done stripping. Has he been stripping alongside her? Has he been naked the whole time, his bouncily playful metaphors given a different inflection by the vulnerability of his own bouncily playful dick? Is he wearing some sort of Early Modern stripper pants, which he rips off during the final couplet? I really want to know. It is important to me that we understand how naked this guy is as he assures us that ghosts do not give him hard ons and compares his lover to the exploitable lands of the Americas.
Kinky Dom Jesus/Poetic Speaker in “Batter My Heart, Three Person’d God”
This is definitely the one ship where I am most on board with you interpreting “Poetic Speaker” as literal historical John Donne. Please read this poem, pull up a picture of my boy Jack and imagine what he wants Jesus to do to him once he’s Doctor Donne.
I feel this request is pretty straightforward; it is really not hard to extract some hot Jesus on Donne BDSM from this poem. I want to suggest, however, that you might want to play around with the dynamics here beyond “Jesus please batter me!” The Speaker/Donne here seems like an awfully demanding/whiny bottom, and maybe Jesus isn’t down for that and wants to withhold some battering for the sake of putting this guy in his place. Maybe he’s honestly a little creeped out by his enthusiasm, and would like things to slow down a little? Maybe he is egged on by his zeal for punishment and wants to get the Speaker/Donne to a point where he has to safeword out and stop begging for it so goddamn much? Maybe he’s not all into this cuckoldry with the Speaker/Donne being “betroth'd unto [his] enemy” and wants to set some damn boundaries?
If you go the “Speaker as historical Donne” route, this is the ship for which I’m most open to the introduction of biographical material or stuff from other Donne poetry. Jesus knows everything, and perhaps he wants John/Speaker to do some of that weird stuff with fleas and compasses and whatever he was into in his youth.
Final Fantasy Tactics
(FIC or ART)Canon-Specific DNWs: In this canon, I do not want dub-con for Alma/Ovelia. I am also suspending my "non-con with female victim" DNW for Dycedarg/Ruvelia (if you are interested in doing any flavor of something messed up with them, it's fine; again though, this is not required/expected).
I really really really like this game, and I have oh so very very many feelings about all the vaguely sepia-toned, noseless pixel people who are doomed to die within it. I love its fakey JRPG Catholic church horror. I love that its filled with biological and found families with a variety of complicated relationship issues. I love how labyrinthine and full of details the plot and character interactions are. I love that the whole thing is generally a big downer, and that the resolution is, even at its happiest, still more bittersweet than joyous.
If you have matched with me and one of my completely weird rarepairs, it is possibly because you--like me--enjoy really niche characters in this game and probably read all those little biographical entries in the codex several times. This is good, because none of the people in any pairing here are ever visually present on the same screen at once, and everything below caters to the sort of person who delights in obscure in-game lore. If you want a chance to do cool worldbuilding or character exploration with this game, that is what all of these ships are ideal for.
Note: I mix and match the PSP and PSX names like a crazy person; feel free to use whichever names you dig most.
Canon Review Resources: I have no idea what ports of the game are/are not garbage these days, but you can check out scripts of the dialogue here (PSX translation) and here (PSP translation). There's also a very comprehensive Let's Play here (PSX translations).
Alma Beoulve/Ovelia Atkascha
Alma and Ovelia grew up in an isolated monastery together, and I feel that this often gets overlooked as the game largely doesn’t have the decency to remind us of the fact that there’s this other story of two close childhood friends who end up on opposite sides of Ivalice’s civil war. Alma, in fact, never mentions Ovelia, and her only childhood relationship we get a glimpse of is her interaction with Tietra (who then promptly dies).
I love Alma/Tietra, and I love Agrias/Ovelia, but I think there’s honestly more basis for Alma/Ovelia to have grown particularly close than there is for either of the aforementioned pairings. Like Ramza/Delita, these two have a perfect set up for a story of childhood love growing into the complicated, messy affinity of two people who find themselves on opposing sides of a conflict. Given that they’re separated prior to the game beginning and do not meet again, this is perfect for pining or an epistolary relationship, and I’d love something that leans into the bittersweet nature of both of their fates. In particular, I’d really love for the two of them, as they grow older, to have more and more of a sobering realization as to how much their place in the world changes once they move from being monastical oblates to young women whose significance in society will likely be tied to a marital union. I’d also love something that looks at how Ovelia ends up the sacrificial victim of the political plot whereas Alma ends up the (somewhat more literal) sacrificial victim of the religious plot.
Adding in lots of feelings about other characters close to these two (Delita, Agrias, Tietra) is a-okay and recommended, and I’m open to exploring this ship in relation to another one featuring either of the two women.
Art Prompts: I’d love anything with the two of them sharing a childhood/youth at Orbonne, and obviously stuff employing grass whistle or flowers would be fantastic. Alternatively, it might be cool to do one of those before/after pictures showing them as girls and then showing them as a queen/demonic host.
Dycedarg Beoulve/Ruvelia Atkascha
Dycedarg is Orinus Atkascha’s father and I will not be convinced otherwise unless Yasumi Matsuno personally comes to my house and bests me in mortal combat. I know that the game probably wants you to assume that if Larg did, in fact, arrange for somebody to impregnate his sister as Vormav suggests, it was a nameless mook who is even more insignificant to the plot than Ruvelia and Orinus themselves, but let’s be real. If you are Bestrald Larg and you need somebody to bang the queen on short notice to secure a line of succession before her sickly husband dies, you call Dycedarg Beoulve. That man and his douchetastic hair and his oversized bottle of wine all scream “I will gladly and probably have already fucked your sister for political gain.”
The thing about this proposed scenario is, while it’s safe to assume that Dycedarg and Ruvelia would probably not be anything other than pragmatic as lovers, they actually make for a pretty interesting match. In a game where virtually every female character is either a pure-hearted lady knight or a doomed teenage girl, Ruvelia stands out as the lone female baddie within the realm of the political plot. Despite her sparse characterization, she seems like she’d honestly get along with everyone’s favorite patricidal goat boy. They both rather evidently come from some fucked to hell familial dynamics (The sibling spacing and lack of marriages in Dycedarg’s family is super weird for a renowned family line that really really needs heirs, and Ruvelia has spent most of her married life trying to bear kids to a chronically ill husband only to have them be assassinated). They both seem to enjoy poisoning meddlesome members of the older generation (Ruvelia is rumored to have done away with her mother-in-law upon becoming a widow). They both probably grew up in Igros and had some shared experiences there.
I’m interested villain on villain action as regards this request. I love villains engaging in nonchalant villainous banter; I love their self-justification as to why they aren’t really the villains; I just love them having awkward moments of self-reflection and multidimensionality before they get back to cackling upon their schemes. I’m also interested in using this pairing as a means to explore how the Ivalician aristocracy, the duchy of Gallione, and/or House Beoulve all got to be the dysfunctional dumpster fires they appear to be in the actual game.
Art Prompts: I am really stupidly into plants and poisons these days, and both of these characters are poisoners (or at least alleged poisoners). I would love them doing anything involving cool poisonous plants. I am also all about using dumb goat imagery in connection to Dycedarg because I am a massive dork.
Simon Penn-Lasich & Zalmour Lucianda
Religion and religious horror in FFT is one of my favorite elements of the game, as exploring the weirdness of JRPG faux Catholicism is a great way to get the vibes I love without any feeling of real world investment. I’m interested in these two characters as they were both members of the Inquisition and both seem to be the only clergymen not involved in any massive political or demonic conspiracy, and I would really love to see somebody worldbuild through their interactions as inquisitors. In particular, there’s obviously a lot of cool stuff that one could do with whatever the “incident” was that led to Simon’s retirement to Orbonne.
Zalmour is a zealot who never understands the church is corrupt and dies cursing sinners. Simon is a complicated man who lost his faith but persisted with a corrupt institution because he was too devoted to his love of knowledge to abandon his library. I’d love to see what Simon’s faith was like before he read the Germonique scriptures or if Zalmour every had a less fanatical type of devotion to his faith. I’d also--as I pretty much always do--love to see how both men reacted to the ongoing Fifty Years War that shaped so much of their lives.
Art Prompts: Seriously, pour on the religious imagery and dump those little T-shaped Glabados icons everywhere if you see fit. I'd love to see something with young versions of these guys as active inquisitors. If you're up for it, I'd also enjoy some sort of abstract iconographic illustrations with halos and weird medieval symbolism and such.
Wiegraf Folles/Zalbag Beoulve
This is my completely batshit OTP, and it has next to no canon support for the characters having any meaningful interaction, let alone getting together to fuck. The only time that these two guys conceivably have anything to do with one another in game is when Zalbag takes a break from ordering his foster siblings shot to go massacre Wiegraf’s friends: which is… not the basis for a great relationship.
I don’t care, though. These guys both have excellent tragic story arcs, look very hot for tiny duplo man sprites, and are great at giving ineffectual speeches about justice before being screwed over by a major villain and transformed into an inhuman monstrosity/emotionally devastating boss battle. They are also roughly the same age, both from Gallione, and both fought in the same war for god knows how long, so it’s relatively easy to imagine them having some non-hostile encounter at some point. Perhaps they were both caught in the same siege or foxhole or what have you? Perhaps there’s a chance for them to meet up after Wiegraf is allied with the church and Zalbag is managing half a civil war? Perhaps we can just make something up and diverge from canon because this is fanfiction?
I wrote a ship manifesto about these two losers for Unconventional Fanworks that you can find here, but it’s big and rambling and the TL;DR you should get from it is that what I want from this pairing is just taking the doomed, angsty, morally conflicted nature of both characters and smooshing them together to produce more of the same. Stuff that plays around with Zalbag’s religiosity, Wiegraf’s eventually lapsed idealism, their relationships with their siblings, their class difference, and/or their outlook on war and the military is all particularly my thing. However, seriously feel free to use your imagination pretty broadly here, though. I recognize that this is a seriously bizarre ship that requires some of it.
Art Prompts: I really really just would love anything with these guys, either pre-game as combatants in the Fifty Years War or mid game as a templar and general or just abstractly two cool guys hanging out. I am really A+ 110% all right with some injury and blood as it is applicable, and as always, I am up for dumb animal imagery in FFT art. Sheep are great. I will never get tired of Wiegraf being drawn in conjunction with or as sheep. If you're doing something appropriately cutesy and want to throw in a monkey too (Zalbag was jokingly referred to as "Monkey Bag" in the sound test menus for the game in Japanese), go for it. Explicit works okay.
キックハート | Kick-Heart (2013)
(ART only; you may ignore my fic/art preferences for treats)This is a short by Masaaki Yuasa and it is the piece I blatantly chose to either convince people to watch something cool or to get the pleasant surprise of meeting a creator who likes watching the same sort of cool stuff I do. It’s a visually striking 12 minute animation about a masochistic underground wrestler getting stomped on by a nun who is another underground wrestler, and it is cute and vivid and grotesque (You can see a grainy YouTube version of it here).
Romeo Maki/Sister Juliet
Given how quirky and experimental the art style is, I would love pretty much any take on this canon so long as you try for some form of vibrancy and exaggeration. I don’t need you to match the artistic style exactly, but I’d love to see you try to match how over the top that style is. I’d love images of Romeo (M) and Juliet (S) wrestling out of their wrestling identities or potentially just interacting with the orphanage children with some awkward, emotionally charged and possibly sweaty glances between them. Anything that shows them doing stuff a la the final fight, though, is perfect. If you’ve ever thought to yourself “Gee, self, I’d really like to draw a Random Internet Stranger a rainbow-hued surrealist valentine of a man being violently stomped on by a sadistic wrestling nun” just lean into every impulse you had regarding that and do it. Explicit works okay.
PROPERTIUS Sextus - Works
(FIC only; you may ignore my fic/art preferences for treats)I was technically maybe a Classics major at some point in my life, so I have a lot of warm fuzzies for Classics fandoms despite having forgotten almost everything useful about the degree I allegedly earned. Sextus Propertius was absolutely my favorite dude from back when I could read Latin, and despite having only read these two poems and no longer being able to conjugate my way out of a moist paper bag, I have the warmest fuzzies for this guy--moreso than Catullus and Ovid, who are the standard issue slutty Roman poets most people love.
I love that both of these poems are about the male speaker seemingly standing around like an idiot while his beloved tells him how much he sucks, as I feel that many poetic speakers in old timey love poetry could use this sort of treatment and kudos to Cynthia for telling off her dickbag lover. I love just how simultaneously wacky and moving the two scenarios are. As you have probably intuited by now, I like that there’s the promise of undead sex.
Poetic Speaker in “Propertius 1.3”/Cynthia
This is a poem about a drunken dude coming to his girlfriend’s house from a party and worshipfully piling food and flowers on her until she wakes up to yell at him, and I really like all of the goofy awkwardity of this scenario. The whole, dumbstruck notion that she looks like a goddess such that he tries to make her an offering is hilarious when juxtaposed with the fact that he’s just waking her up by stacking apples on her. This is totally the sort of brilliant boyfriend idea one has while very drunk.
I want to see either the prelude or the follow up to this: a snapshot of the party where the Speaker is drunkenly absconding with those garlands and apples and realizing he has to get back to his girl or a snapshot of the fallout of the spat (awkward make up sex somehow involving flowers and/or apples would be great).
Read the poem here: English | Latin
Further Note on Consent (and Apples): I know there is speculation about rape in this poem, and it is fine to bring it up so long as Cynthia is not actually the victim of violence. I should also note that translators vary on what is going on with the line "munera de prono saepe voluta sinu" and where apples end up on Cynthia's body. "Sinus," if I recall, means a gazillion different things in sexy poems (lap, breasts, fold of a garment, etc...), so feel free to locate apples where you will. I don't expect anyone to know Latin well (or even at all) for these prompts because I sure don't.
Poetic Speaker in “Propertius 4.7”/Cynthia’s Ghost
“Nunc te possideant aliae: mox sola tenebo: mecum eris, et mixtis ossibus ossa teram”
(Let others possess you now; soon I alone will hold you, and I will wear down your bones grinding against mine.)
This is absolutely the line I would love somebody to focus on here: a line promising what sounds like bomb ass skeleton sex in an eternal lover’s embrace. It’s oh so evocative but so damn frustrating for Cynthia to slip through his fingers after dropping that line.
While the Speaker/Propertius has obviously been a shitty shitty boyfriend (and feel free--on top of all his rancid behavior in this poem--to dredge up his apple stacking misdemeanors of poems past), I really want him to get some undead booty, either as a living man hooking up with his disgruntled ghost lover or as a skeleton having rad skeleton sex in the afterlife. If you, unlike me, have some fresh memories of studies in Classical history and want to include any neato Roman superstitions or necromancy or actual Latin, I promise I will adore you, look up your research facts with unmitigated delight, and painfully fidget my way through the Perseus Project until I know what you’re trying to do.
Read the poem here: English | Latin
