#Lancaster Gothic AU

[heartofstanding]

Was thinking about the Lancaster gothic AU today as well as Lewis Gannett's The Living One, an absolutely balls-to-the-wall nuts 90s horror novel that's about a father trying to swap bodies with his son in order to be young and live forever... and I'm just Henry? Henry.

As @themidnightcircusshow and I have talked about (somewhere in this reblog chain), there's something Cronus-esque about the historical Henry IV, how he eats his young. And there's this idea of "heritable identity through the paternal line" seen in medieval families, per Angela Florschutetz:

The tendency of firstborn sons to be named after their fathers or paternal grandfathers abetted the illusion of patrilineal self-replication and the ideal of social and political stability the consistent reproduction of the bodies social and political promised. If paternity represented the promise, as Bildhauer suggests, of a man’s “continuation of himself into eternity,” family naming practices encouraged this idea by making it easy for fathers and first sons to be conflated with each other generation after generation.

Just. The horror of being made into your father being made real when he tries to steal your body and put you in his.

[themidnightcircusshow]

Just saw A Haunting In Venice and seeing as it's about a giant haunted house and cursed families it really isn't helping the Lancaster Gothic au vibes get any less.

But also (massive spoilers btw. As in the who in the whodunnit spoilers)

Extremely codependent parent-child relationship ending in the parent continuously drugging the child because they've grown up and want to leave is so Henry and Hal. But also kind of in reverse. Like the dagger incident is Henry wanting to leave and Hal basically declaring you will not leave I will haunt you foreverand if it means forcing you to kill me then so be it

[socialshakespeare]

Reading 2: Saturday, August 19

The second read-through of Henry IV, Part 1!

(Most of you are double or triple cast, so double check which lines you have to read.) You can look up the lines of the characters here. The names listed below all go with the Folger Edition.

Please submit your confirmation or any request to understudy here. If you’re in any doubt, please ask.

Times and time zones:

EDT (US): 12:00 PM CDT (US): 11:00 AM MDT (US): 10:00 AM PDT (US): 9:00 AM BST (UK): 5:00 PM AEST (AU): 2:00 AM (Sunday, August 20)

Leader: @astrangergivingthestrangewelcome

Cast:

Falstaff: @dramamath Prince Hal: @wildechild Hotspur, Sheriff, Ostler: @gothic-chicanery Henry IV, Francis, Servant: @sirenofthetimes Worcester, Chamberlain, Peto: @tuttocenere Poins, Westmoreland, Sir Michael, Northumberland: @the-lincyclopedia Bardolph, Glendower, Archbishop, Lancaster: @purplemuskrat Hostess, Douglas, Gadshill, 2nd Messenger: @sayyestothejess Lady Percy, Vernon, 2nd Carrier, Vintner: @astrangergivingthestrangewelcome Blunt, Mortimer, (1st) Carrier, (1st) Traveler, Messenger: @enbymoomin

Please submit your confirmation here. - liking/reblogging this post does not count!

Read the Guidelines. To avoid the differences between editions that make for confusion and missed cues, please use the Folger edition of Henry IV, Part 1 during the read-through.

Be on time, be prepared, and make sure you know which lines to read. Good luck!

[themidnightcircusshow]

Richard's portrait used to be in the dining room, a grand display of his wealth and power. When Henry took the house from him, he made a declaration that he would burn the painting and reject all that it stood for. Except before they could, he ended up stealing the painting away. Now it doesn't matter what he does, how strongly he acts: he knows he's too weak. The painting tells him every night. When he's a teenager, Hal grows his hair a little longer. From a distance, he even tricks himself into believing he's Richard. Up close, he can see every one of his mother's features, more clear than any picture of her in his memory. And the worst thing is that it's the only time Henry looks at Hal with something that resembles love. They've all had death hovering over them since the day they were born. Hal, so sick and feeble, meant to die a baby free from sin. But that day he chose to spite God and keep on breathing-- he's known nothing but sin since. Thomas, named after a murdered man, refuses to die smothered in his bed. He'd rather a hail of bullets than that. A hero's death is better than a martyr's (but it's a fool's death in the end). John, so silent that sometimes he doubts people remember he was born at all. He meets a girl one day claiming to be God's chosen-- he's terrified that she may be right. Humphrey, born when his father was at war, with no head for it himself. He doesn't need it. His brother's will keep him safe. Blanche tries to get out as soon as she can, but finds that the curse followed her, and can only hope her son (too small, growing on the few nutrients she could give) will live long enough to succeed his father. And Philippa, so brave and so wise, unable to ask the one question that her scares her the most: would her family have things the same again, her living and their mother dead, if given the choice? Hal doesn't know how to love, so he thinks he chooses not to love at all. Sex weighs on him, more than it does Thomas or Humphrey or even John. He likes to imagine he doesn't have a body at all, until he learns how pain traps and frees you from a body all at once. So he kisses Courtenay beneath an old willow tree, where three lovebirds had carved their initials only weeks before one was beaten to death by Hal's forefathers. It's funny how sin repeats. When Margaret moves in, she doesn't believe her husband's stories about his house being haunted. All orphans believe such stories. It's not until she's kneeling on the floor next to her husband who sees nothing and hears only what it isn't there, heavily pregnant with a baby she thought she would never have, that she begins to see the emaciated woman herself. The Witch of Lancaster-- one of many-- whispered promises in her ear and listened while Margaret spat curses she had never before dreamed herself capable of. Maybe, she thinks while cutting off a man's head, being a witch isn't such a bad thing. They say it's the Lancasters who damned themselves. And then that the Plantagenets are a cursed family. But even when the plaque on the front gate is turned to 'Tudor', the lady of the house knows better. She knows her little brothers are buried somewhere in the walls. She hopes they will take care of her son.

You make one joke and suddenly you can't stop thinking of a gothic retelling of the Lancasters

[themidnightcircusshow]

*character kills self in the baptism pool*

...right adding to the Lancaster Gothic au

[themidnightcircusshow]

I'm always partial to ghost stories where there's a narrative connection between haunter and hauntee, even if the person being haunted is the only one who doesn't want to be. So Hal and Owen are stuck together, Eleanor is always lurking in the corner of Margaret's eye, and Richard is the only person who understands what young Henry is going through, and that makes his inability to help so much worse.

#got to respect having a torrid affair with your first husband's initials literally all around you

i'm... going to slide this into the stack of fic ideas I want to write right now 🤣

It's a threesome in spirit

[heartofstanding]

#you know it's bad when the ghost haunting you thinks you've lost it

Richard's ghost: HENRY. WHAT THE FUCK. SERIOUSLY. WHAT THE FUCK. HENRY.

#also I wrote a thing last year where Henry thinks Hal is possessed by Richard#and cuts up Hal's face trying to prove it

YOU CAN'T JUST SAY THESE THINGS TO ME AND EXPECT ME TO BE NORMAL ABOUT IT

[heartofstanding]

I'm still taking these if anyone wants to send one in. I thought it might help to give a bit more detail:

she's not coming home tonight; Philippa of England leaving England

shall the water not remember; Catherine learns about the dead that Hal loved

the face destroyed; Lancaster gothic AU, Henry and Hal's wound

missing scene from "in the beginning there was everything" (Hal/Courtenay and the missing sex scene)

nothing (slide down to the sea); Hal's sexuality crisis in historical times

the end of love - Courtenay's death, asked about already

this single knife in my heart; Hal's POV of the dagger incident

untitled sequel to the coronation sex fic; Catherine slowly getting to rule Hal

fly trap; Joan of Navarre meets Henry at Richard II and Isabelle de Valois's wedding

the chambers of the sea; gothic modern AU feat. Margaret of Anjou/Eleanor Cobham (some chapters are up on AO3)

vespers; Richard Courtenay deals with one of his old lovers and solves a murder.

the bargain; Eleanor's POV of 'some hope'

WIP Titles Meme

@shredsandpatches tagged me in this meme where I list the working titles of my WIPs and, if anyone asks, post snippets or answer any questions. I'm going to try and limit myself to things I feel like poking at or have poked at recently because otherwise this list would be incredibly unmanageable than it is.

she's not coming home tonight

shall the water not remember

the face destroyed

missing scene from "in the beginning there was everything"

nothing (slide down to the sea)

the end of love

this single knife in my heart

untitled sequel to the coronation sex fic

fly trap

the chambers of the sea

vespers

the bargain

All of these are my usual late medieval/Lancastrian brand of fic.

I'm now supposed to tag as many people as I have WIPs which, um, is a problem given how many WIPs I have so if I don't tag you and you're like, "this looks fun but no one's tagged me" please consider yourself tagged by me! Otherwise: @nebylitsa @kafkastan @richmond-rex @themidnightcircusshow (I think you write?).

[heartofstanding]

YES. I've been having the thought that in a stark tonal shift, when Owen dies, his ghost and Hal's kinda just get stuck together and it's this odd couple comedy. No more the wallpaper goes or I go, they're stuck with each other and have to learn how to, um, live? haunt the same abode? as each other.

Oh Catherine :(

#got to respect having a torrid affair with your first husband's initials literally all around you

i'm... going to slide this into the stack of fic ideas I want to write right now 🤣

It's a threesome in spirit

[heartofstanding]

Exactly. I've just been coming back to scribble notes because it's just... there.

Sometimes, when you're in a house full of ghosts, the most frightening thing is the absence of a ghost. Henry both wants and doesn't want to be haunted by Richard's ghost but what hurts is that Richard isn't interested in haunting him, except for the ways that sometimes Hal seems to look at him like Richard looked at him, how his mannerisms are sometimes so much like Richard's... it's why he ends up screaming at the portrait of Richard, he wants Richard to be there so he can hate him and kill all over again and he can't kill his son, who is so like Richard (or he can he?). But the portrait looks less and less like Richard now, sometimes it looks like Hal or Edward III or Aumerle/York or someone else entirely.

Mary haunts Henry at first as the nun she would've been had she not married him, then as herself before slowly fading and it feels like she's leaving because he's done something that she can't forgive him for but he can't work out what it is he's done to upset her. Hal looks so much like her, he's an unholy mix of the best and worst people Henry has ever loved.

And Hal feels haunted by both Richard and Mary; he's haunted by Henry. Sometimes he feels like his father would like to crack him open, become him, and it terrifies him. Sometimes he feels like he and his father are enacting the danse macabre but he's not sure who's Death and who is the dying. He's not sure who is object and who is abject, if he is even a person if his father is dead. He wants to know if his father murdered Richard but doesn't want to know. Sometimes he thinks he saved the portrait of Richard, that he saved it to drive his father mad with and that he succeeded. Then he thinks Henry did it to himself.

The girls. Blanche being given the crown of Anne of Bohemia, the beloved wife of the man her father deposed and murdered, being haunted by what she thinks is Anne's ghost but is just another manifestation of her father's guilt, her own guilt at her own complicity in it. Blanche being haunted by the image of her namesake, the white lady of Chaucer's Book of the Duchess, her fate mirroring her grandmother's but coming much sooner. Philippa feeling like she's been trailing blood she was born, haunted by the fates of her grandmother, mother and sister, trying to escape but falls victim in the end. There's no escape. Not for them.

(I wonder what it's like to be queer in this house. To have the fates of Edward II and Richard II hanging over Hal's head, the homophobic ghost (or supposed saint) Thomas, Earl of Lancaster ready to suppress and repress any hint of queerness. Is Hal spared so long as he is cleanly celibate?)

They need someone plucky to save them from themselves, from the house. But the house is like a fly-trap, it traps everyone who might save them. Joanna loved Henry, she wanted to save him from himself, but she got stuck in the house with him and found there's no escape. The things she lets Henry get away with... She wanted to help Eleanor, too, but only helped Eleanor damn herself. And Joan lives. She survives her husbands, she survives all but one of her stepchildren. She lives on, indomitable, deathless and alone...

Courtenay loved Hal. He wanted to save him from himself and from and the house, and maybe he could have succeeded. But the house killed him first. And before then, he was tall, beautiful and blondish - another Richard?

Catherine married in but she got to escape in the end. She had happy, if brief, life away from the house. But when she died, the house dragged her back and her second family took over when the first one died out.

The outsiders, the people looking in through the windows and gaps in the fences, have the sense they're looking at a mausoleum, the people inside cursed and hollow and dead. They shiver and want to get far away from the house. The wise ones do. Someone very old, old enough to remember Edward III and his sons when they were alive, once heard Hal talking and heard the same words and phrases that the Black Prince used coming out of Hal's mouth.

(And after. When you're in a house full of ghosts, the most frightening thing is the absence of a ghost. Hal's ghost is never there but John and Humphrey pretend it is.)

You make one joke and suddenly you can't stop thinking of a gothic retelling of the Lancasters

[themidnightcircusshow]

You don't have to do any work because it is literally all right there

Henry is the classic Gothic patriarch; slowly going mad from paranoia and guilt and turning that into a festering wound that he inflicts on his family. Smothering and demanding yet also distant and faint. The kind of man who would ban all paintings of Richard except for one that he kept in his room and you would hear him yelling at in the dead of night. And yes, in a way he's both ghost-like and vampiric, this almost parasitic undead figure feasting on his own children. Humphrey is basically his Renfield, forced to be a caregiver to a decrepit master to a point where he is almost prisoner in his own home. John on the other hand is cast aside and all but forbidden from returning home. Thomas is a figure of life and exuberance and his life ends all the more brutally because of it. And the sisters-- both with the shadow of their mother looming over them, and the expectation that will be their fate as well. Blanche who follows in her mother's footsteps, Philippa who tries to fight against it, but both end up suffering the same fate in the end. Then there's Henry and Hal, who see each other as the uncanny, who mirror each other as both object and abject. Their relationship already is gothic horror; both self and other, family and stranger, a father with a traitorous son and a son with a murderous father. Henry with rotting flesh and Hal who has literally been defaced. Even the sexual body vs the asexual one. Neither can live with the other but neither is willing to die. Even Joanna of Navarre: the stepmother who is a witch, sapping once beloved father of wisdom and vitality. Or, in reverse: you find love, and you think that's enough, but it will poison you from the inside out, and poison those around you even more. Eleanor, the woman who rises from (relative) poverty for the love of a wealthy man, only to become another woman in a proverbial attic (is that just what being a widow is?).

Then there's the eternal debate of a family cursed by God or one that just can't escape the events set into motion long before any of them were born. They were descended from the devil after all, how could anyone expect any different? (But the bodies keep piling higher, and there's nowhere to put them anymore. so some are just left in unfinished tombs because no one is left who cares to bury them).

And no matter what anyone does it just happens over and over and over again.

You make one joke and suddenly you can't stop thinking of a gothic retelling of the Lancasters

[heartofstanding]

I am OBSESSED.

Because maybe the Victorian puritans are right and my love of gothic fiction has rotted my brain but yes... ha ha ha YES!

There's so much there. As you say in your tags:

#but c'mon... Mary and Henry's wedding technically began with a kidnapping#Hal is basically a combination of the two people whose deaths haunt Henry the most#the crown is basically the precusor to the haunted house#add a little generational curse in there some hauntings maybe#even if the ghosts aren't seen they are Always There

But also: Henry IV as the cold, distant father pitting his sons against each other, repressing and controlling, maintaining his authority with an iron fist (or attempting to, at least). That he's eating his sons up, that he wants to become them or at least to steal their youth and health.

The sense that the Lancaster brothers are caught in a claustrophobic house. That they can check out but they can never leave (or even, if they do check out, they still can't leave). The sense that they're dead, that they've been dead the whole time or just waiting to die (I do headcanon Hal as seeing his accession the moment of his death). Hal and Henry as a patricidal and filicidal pair.

(I think, tragically, that Blanche is also a bit like a failed gothic heroine - she's the one who can't escape, a ghost, one of Bluebeard's dead wives.)

There's also a lot of macabre motifs in art and literature to play with, like the Three Living and Three Dead, the cadaver or transi tomb, the danse macabre...

(And of course, this isn't going into the Henry VI's reign - the "king that dead is", Hal, having such a strong presence in the governing of the country, almost like there's a ghost on the throne. The witchcraft accusations against Eleanor Cobham. The idea that Eleanor and Margaret of Anjou live beyond their end and so never completely die, haunting the edges of history.)

And there's the intergenerational trauma!

We know that the trauma of Edward II's deposition and murder was being revisited in Richard II's reign in lots of different ways. We could, I think, argue that the attempts to deal with this trauma lead to more trauma and that both these traumas lead to Richard II's deposition and murder, which becomes its own trauma that begets further traumas. The Battle of Shrewsbury, where Hal nearly dies, the execution of Archbishop Scrope which sees Henry excommunicated, the illness figured to be divine punishment for Henry's execution of Scrope, the lasting myth of Richard's survival and return...

You make one joke and suddenly you can't stop thinking of a gothic retelling of the Lancasters

[themidnightcircusshow]

Ngl, I kinda love the idea that Owen is the only one who can see Hal's ghost and both of them are very annoyed by that. Lots of "can you tell them--" "no who do you think I am your messenger". So obviously the reason Owen can see Hal is because Hal foretells his doom in some way. And he does, just not in the way Owen expected.

(So not only does Owen die brutally, he has to deal with a smarmy ghost giving him the told you so look while he does it)

There's also something about Catherine always thinking maybe this time she will have escaped, maybe this time things will be better. That every time she looks at her son's face and sees her father it's just a trick of the light. A family resemblence. Her sons are safe and well (except one's so sweet he's mad with it, and another she fears has a devil's heart. Maybe this last one, her youngest boy, will be unchained from the curses around him. Or he'll give himself to vengeance, to conquest, and help the cycle start all over again). She's safe, and happy, and if she smiles she can pretend she doesn't see the death coming for all of them.

#got to respect having a torrid affair with your first husband's initials literally all around you

i'm... going to slide this into the stack of fic ideas I want to write right now 🤣

It's a threesome in spirit

[heartofstanding]

Man, the fun gothic spin (for variable meanings of "fun") is that Owen's surprise at his execution by Yorkists isn't that he thought they wouldn't kill him, he just thought Hal's ghost would get to him first.

Catherine coming from her own sort of gothic house, with her dysfunctional family (and not for nothing is madness one a common theme in gothic fiction) to enter into Hal's gothic house, with its bloody history of usurpation. And Catherine's sister Isabelle as a link between the two - the sister she barely knew, the sister who was queen before her, the sister who lost her crown and died too young. And Hal is Catherins' Byronic love interest (who would be totally confused by the fact except he doesn't really know he is because he's being all dark and broody) but he dies and she's left alone with these echoing halls and her infant... and then she decides to leave, make a new life for herself but the ghosts won't let her go, she has to live them.

(actually, I'm kinda digging the idea of Catherine as a protagonist in a romantic suspense novel ala Mary Stewart (Nine Coaches Waiting, Touch Not The Cat). She'd be so good at it. Falling in love with bad boy Owen and getting wrapped up in a mystery).

#bb Henry sees ghosts everywhere and Catherine just frustatedly keeps shooing them away

🥺

#got to respect having a torrid affair with your first husband's initials literally all around you

i'm... going to slide this into the stack of fic ideas I want to write right now 🤣

It's a threesome in spirit

[themidnightcircusshow]

The Gothic au is always ready for more

i fully believe that owen tudor would probably feel like he's getting one over henry v and like it but also the wall hangings with hal's initials on it kinda... give him a sense of 'the dead husband is watching and he's bigger than me' 

Poor Owen. It's a fun and games knowing the ghosts of rich jerks have to watch you lounge around the house (until one of them chops his head off, that is)

(honestly I think we could make a case for catherine as a gothic heroine easily less traditional though and one who nopes out an the end. maybe a bit like edith in crimson peak?) 

Catherine just constantly moving from one haunted house to an entirely different haunted house.

#got to respect having a torrid affair with your first husband's initials literally all around you

i'm... going to slide this into the stack of fic ideas I want to write right now 🤣

It's a threesome in spirit

[heartofstanding]

#Alternatively ghost Hal would very much like to be excluded from this narrative

Catherine: 🥰 Owen: oscillating between 🥰 and 😎 and 🤨 Hal's ghost: ...right in front of my wall hangings

#Alternatively alternatively Owen's going to do an Oscar Wilde and start warring with the wallpaper

I know this isn't what you intended... but another one for the Lancaster gothic AU? Owen Tudor vs the wallpaper that represents the dead husband he's "replacing"?

#got to respect having a torrid affair with your first husband's initials literally all around you

i'm... going to slide this into the stack of fic ideas I want to write right now 🤣

It's a threesome in spirit