#tysm i hope you enjoy this ESSAY dear god

[freeuselandonorris]

omg please director’s commentary on oscar’s thoughts/feelings/vibes/happy valley rewatch for is it cold in the water? please? 🙏

EXCELLENT QUESTION omg. is it cold in the water? is my fetid little kidnap kink fic and probably the most 'personal' kink fic i've ever written but i don't often think about CNC from the other side!

okay, under the cut for length and also cw for discussion of CNC and kidnap kink.

so i think the only way oscar would be able to easily conceptualise being the 'aggressor' in a CNC scene is to essentially create a sort of character for himself, not in the sense that he's acting exactly (i think he'd be far too self-conscious to do any sort of dramatic roleplay) but more that he'd sort of have to externalise it and figure out the motivations and behaviours of this other, fictional Bad Oscar because he wouldn't quite be able to picture himself doing it.

i think i've mentioned before that i imagine lando figures out what kinks he wants to try out by going absolutely kamikaze in the pornhub tags, whereas oscar reads the wikipedia page list of paraphilias in his spare time. he likes to research!

but with CNC, because he kind of feels like he needs that external character self, just reading about it isn't really helping him. and maybe lando mentioned something vague like "yeah it's hot in films and that innit, getting tied to a chair and your mouth taped up and that" and that triggers oscar to think about the kidnap scene in the first episode of happy valley.

(side note: the happy valley thing is maybe the most egregious bit of personal fanservice i've ever put into one of my own fics because the kidnap and torture/threat scenes at the beginning of the first series make me FERAL. so glad other people enjoyed it lmao)

anyway so oscar would basically have watched those episodes back and studied up, both to get ideas of what he could do and how he could translate that into safer stuff to do to lando (hence the pillowcase over the head instead of just duct taping his actual skin/hair) but also to get ideas of how tommy lee royce acts and why it's threatening but also kind of attractive. which is why the persona he adopts is very cold and cruel and almost mocking (that bit in HV where TLR asks "are you a virgin?" in that sly way was VERY influential on oscar's dialogue).

i think when it's actually happening in the moment, he surprises himself with how much he gets into it, in a similar way to how lando is shocked by how difficult it is to remember that the threat isn't real. he's always in control of himself and there's a bit of him that's constantly watching lando to make sure he's safe and isn't getting genuinely hurt, but he likes seeing lando so helpless and scared, and it means that by the end of it he's acting more on instinct (i don't think coming on the pillowcase across his face would have been planned in advance, for instance). that's partly why he gets a bit of top drop himself afterwards, because he'd sort of imagined that he'd have more emotional distance from it all than he has in reality.

final tidbit: the most stressful part of the entire thing for him is stealing the zipties from the garage. it's done on the spur of the moment, but he's petrified someone's going to see him and ask what he's doing because he can't think of any plausible excuse why he might need a handful of big zip ties and also they're really hard to hide about his person and he's sure everyone can see them tucked inside his hoodie.

FANX i love thinking about this 'verse so very much. need to go and rewatch the first two episodes of happy valley now for personal reasons.