Dear Yuletide Author (2020)

[scioscribe]

Thank you so much for writing for me! I'd be delighted to get anything for these fandom/character combinations. I've added prompts and additional details, but please feel free to go your own way!

I'm scioscribe on AO3 and scioscribe on Tumblr.

And thank you again! I hope you have a great exchange.

Likes

enemies-to-lovers, enemies-to-friends, opposites attract, conflicting worldviews and priorities, emotional vulnerability, hurt/comfort, emotional hurt/comfort, ensembles, fix-its, crack played straight, sympathetic bad guys/terrible people with moments of goodness or vulnerability, redemption, pining, obvious feelings that don’t quite get admitted to, unconventional gestures of affection, partnerships, power dynamics, ambiguously intense relationships, found family, friendships, first-time stories, betrayal with reconciliation, character death, amnesia, characters forced to cooperate, forced proximity, bedsharing, huddling/cuddling for warmth, 5 + 1 fics, slow-burns, fake/pretend relationship, arranged marriage/marriage of convenience, sex pollen, power couples, age gaps, worldbuilding, magical realism, undercover work, loyalty, tenderness, identity porn, complicated relationships, codependency, morally gray characters, moral complexity, long relationships that go through a lot of changes, werewolves with pack dynamics, canon-divergence AUs

Historical- and canon-typical language, violence, attitudes, and darkness-levels all okay to include.

General Sex Likes/Kinks

BDSM, spanking (including breasts, thighs, and pussy), clothed sex, wall-sex, rough sex, dubcon/consent play/ambiguous consent, teasing, anal play/sex, oral sex, frottage, fingering, gags, dirty talk, hand and finger kink, hair-touching, nipple play, characters giving orders/instructions, roleplay, talking during sex, emotional sex, sleepy/lazy sex, humorous sex scenes, enthusiastic sex, tenderness, loss of virginity, bad/awkward sex (either charmingly funny or depressing), coming untouched, coming in pants, exhibitionism, collaring, people getting mussed, orgasm delay/denial, overstimulation, edging, begging, historical period- or location-specific sex, sex toys, praise kink, marking/bruising/biting

DNW

ageplay, mommy/daddy kink, explicit sex for characters under sixteen, knotting, scat, bestiality, vore

Request DNWs are listed in the individual fandom sections.

Dogtooth

Older Daughter | Bruce

This movie is so intensely strange. I really love its complicated and uneasy mix of creative weirdness, pitch-black comedy, and agonizingly emotionally realistic abuse. The way the parents have so thoroughly gaslit their children to make them not only terrified of the outside world (and believe they're ritualistically incapable of entering it) but totally unprepared to deal with it (because they've deliberately messed with everything from their vocabulary to their perception of how airplanes and cats work) is terrifying. I'm fascinated by how we see their three children exist in this artificial, claustrophobic little world and, in particular, by the way the Older Daughter's unexpected exposure to a couple of movies--and some coerced sex she can't even fully understand--sets her off on this weird journey towards breaking away. I love how brave and smart she is, how she fiercely clings to the bits of outside culture she picks up even after she's so brutally punished, how she seeks to both use and leverage her new knowledge, how she works out a way around what she thinks is the inviolable dogtooth-growing-back-in rule by sneaking out in the trunk. She's an amazing, vulnerable, and cunning character trapped in a pocket-sized dystopia, and I adore her. Anything you write with her will make me happy.

I really love that she picks the name Bruce, so if it's post-movie fic, I'd prefer she stick with that. If it's an AU or something set before she names herself, another name (or no name at all) is fine.

Prompts

+ Post-canon stories where she successfully gets out of the trunk. There are so many possibilities here, and I love all of them. How does she interact with the outside world at first? Does she eventually wind up telling her story to someone in authority who is able to expose everything at the family compound? Anything that looks at her trying to learn more about the real world would be incredible, especially if it deals with her trauma and the various idiosyncrasies and terrors that have been programmed into her. Does she have someone assigned to her, like a social worker, to help her acclimate? Outsider POV on the sheer horrible strangeness of it all would be terrific, and I'd love to see someone constantly running up against all these walls of incomprehension and having to grapple with how fucking weird and awful her parents were. Further-future stories here would also be incredibly welcome, because it would be really intriguing to see her several years down the line and see what she's doing with her life. Unconventional formats welcome: maybe there's a retrospective piece of journalism on the case and her life?

+ Also post-canon, but with a family focus: How does she relate long-term to her brother and sister? Does she even want to relate long-term to her brother, under any circumstances? (I'm fine with everything from "she eventually forgives him" to "she murders him," for the record.) Do they have trouble breaking away from some kind of claustrophobic codependency and wind up all living together? Do they fight over the various difficulties of recovery/adjusting to the world? I especially like Bruce's relationship with her sister--they seem particularly close--and would adore seeing anything with the two of them together. Sistercest is definitely an option here--I really like that scene where Bruce proposes licking her sister as a gesture of affection, having picked up the idea of cunnilingus from Christina and then generalized it.

+ Um, the expanded sistercest prompt: I just really love their relationship. She only tells her new name to her sister! Her sister seems the most upset that she's missing! What if they'd escaped together? Want to have some uncomfortably sexy, intimate tooth-extraction? Go for it. Or what if they'd started having a sexual relationship after Bruce's encounters with Christina, and that had been part of what prompted Bruce's growing determination to go outside? What might have changed if they'd watched the movies together?

+ Anything set in canon would also be great. I'd love to see some kind of fucked-up "day in the life" approach, especially where it's clear that she thinks this is a particularly good or particularly normal day when we can tell it's horrific and strange. Invent or expand on the parents' lies! Put Bruce through the wringer and let her sister comfort her! Let Bruce be heroic on her siblings' behalf! I really like the sense in the Flashdance scene that she's starting to unnerve her parents, and it would be really cool to expand on that and see her becoming a more threatening or challenging figure.

+ A messed-up, weirdly happy horror AU where the whole family suddenly wakes up in a world where all the parents' lies are true and their kids are now much better-equipped to navigate everything than they are. Fill their sky with tiny planes and their world with monster-cats and change the meaning of words on them. I'd love to see their roles all suddenly flipped to where Bruce is the competent and informed one who is able to be heroic in a flipped-around world. Have her adventure across an alternate Greece where she's fully in control while her parents are falling apart at the seams and possibly giving birth to dogs. What would a total power fantasy for her look like in that kind of universe? What kind of victories could she have?

+ Totally optional Lanthimos canons crossover: if you want to have Bruce escape into a real world that's still the world from The Lobster, where she's expected to find a superficially compatible match or else be turned into an animal of her choice, that would be awesome.



Everworld - K.A. Applegate

April O'Brien, Jalil Sherman

I’ve always loved this series. It has such a vivid world full of wonder and horror and sheer ridiculousness--I love the patchwork nature of Everworld and the way the characters can join up with the Vikings to fight the Aztecs and then go off to strike bargains with leprechauns. And I love that the characters are often called upon to make hard choices with no guarantee that they’re going to make the right ones. Everything has a genuine moral weight to it and all the character conflicts feel real--and I especially like that with Jalil and April, who come at the world from such different perspectives but who have a common stability because they’re both so grounded in those perspectives. (I really like Jalil continuing to believe in the usefulness of science and logic even in Everworld and April working all this into her understanding of the world while still keeping her faith.) They all have such a fire-forged friendship by the last book, and I’m really drawn to the thought of all the adventures--grim and fantastic--that they could have.

I’m requesting just April and Jalil because I would be happy with a story centered on just them, but I do love the whole foursome and everyone’s complicated relationships with each other, so if you want to include them, I’d totally love it.

I do ship April/Jalil, if you want to incorporate shippiness into any prompts, and I generally love the us-against-the-world April & Jalil & Christopher & David vibe generally--ride-or-die loyalty complete with free-floating sexual tension.

Prompts

+ Any kind of post-canon adventure. I love their travels through Everworld, and if you wanted to set them down in the middle of an unexplored mythology or in any one of the settings we already saw in the series, I would just love to see them dealing with that even just on the practical level of working out how to get food and board and transportation. Stick them into the middle of what’s basically a video game side-quest and I promise I’ll enjoy it. As far as more purposeful adventuring goes, I’d love to see them recruiting for soldiers or acting as spies--and maybe in way over their heads on the latter front. Or do they become heroes-for-hire and get paid by villages to deal with various monsters or rampaging Sennites?

+ Horror! One of them dies in Everworld and has to be rescued from one of the underworlds? April winds up as a Persephone parallel, or April and Jalil wind up paralleling Orpheus and Eurydice, at least partly? Cosmic horror-inspired non-Euclidean geometry and landscapes, which are particularly hard on Jalil, and which have to be escaped? Nightmarish encounters with mythological creatures or figures or with fickle gods and goddesses who casually transform humans into stags or trees?

+ Anything that has them stuck in a preexisting mythic story or scenario. I already mentioned Orpheus/Eurydice and Persephone, but I would also kill for them being stuck in a labyrinth as gifts to placate a minotaur or in a situation where someone wants to kill one or both of them for a fair wind or victory in battle. Cassandra curses, curses of the mummy, the Furies.

+ Any dubcon cooperation with a creepy sex ritual--they get sex pollened into it? They’re fully alert but have to cooperate to save their friends? If the ritual is religious as well as magical, how does April deal with having participated, even through coercion, in something that goes against her own beliefs? And how awkward is it for them afterwards, and how does it affect their relationship?

+ Science in Everworld! I’d be totally down for just “five experiments Jalil tried to do in Everworld, and one that actually worked the way it was supposed to,” or something along those lines--I just want to see more of the group grappling with Everworld and deducing the rules that control it. Maybe those experiments draw the wrong kind of attention and get the team into trouble--or maybe they make them famous. Do they ever have unpredictable side effects, and are those scary, funny, or both?

+ Life in wartime. I really like hurt/comfort and stolen moments of peace and quiet, so one of them fixing the other up after a hard battle or the two of them finding a little oasis to themselves in the middle of all the dirt and blood would be great. What would pass for a romantic gesture under those circumstances? How would they reunite if they’d been separated a long time?

+ Everworld future-fic, in any scenario where the Hetwan and the Sennites don’t wind up winning. I really want to see how these characters would grow up under these circumstances, and what their lives in Everworld would look like once the immediate threat was gone. Do they ever regret leaving Earth behind for good? Do they settle in one part of Everworld, or keep traveling? Do they ever improvise a marriage ceremony--maybe after first accidentally getting married according to one of Everworld’s cultures? What are their connections like with the Everworld natives around them? And while I’m not usually into pregnancy fic, I would absolutely make an exception here, because it could be fascinating to see how these two would react to pregnancy and parenthood under these circumstances.



The People Under the Stairs

Poindexter "Fool" Williams, Alice Robeson

This movie's blend of on-point satire and effective horror with over-the-top modern suburban/urban gothic works so well for me. I love how it feels like an off-kilter modern fairy tale--aided by the archetypes from Ruby's Tarot cards--where everything is painted in broad strokes and bold, cartoonish colors, and where our hero's bravery and his rescue of the girl in the tower is rewarded with a fortune. (I saw this described as "hid[ing] genuinely revolutionary content behind stereotypes, behind a grimly droll EC Comics horrorshow" and was immediately like: yep.) And Fool and Alice just work so well as both icons and real, vulnerable kids in a horrible situation, and they make the stakes so real. Essentially, I'd just love to see more of them in any capacity.

I like both shippy and gen takes here. For Fool/Alice, I'd prefer any on-page physical stuff to stop at kisses unless they're aged up to sixteen or over. References to any previous sexual abuse Alice suffered from the Robesons is fine, I just don't want a blow-by-blow of it.

I love Ruby and Roach too and would be delighted to have them appear. I know Roach is dead, but look at his name. He could survive anything.

Prompts

+ Let's hand-wave all the logistics and assume that Fool's family is able to take Alice in after the events of the movie. I'd love to see the two of them helping each other deal with their various traumas. How does Alice handle being part of a real family? How do the Williamses deal with the influx of the treasure? How do Fool and Alice help each other heal? Or do they stay permanently rough around the edges after what they've lived through and protect each other fiercely? Does Alice slowly get acclimated to the outside world, or does she become a kind of semi-delicate, semi-feral figure?

+ Do Fool and Alice ever encounter the people under the stairs again? I really like the way the people under the stairs are both terrifying cannibals and fellow victims of the Robesons, ones who have just been there even longer and in even worse circumstances: depending on the moment, they could be either a threat or a help. Do Fool and Alice have trouble with them? Do they try to track them down to help them? Do the people under the stairs become attached to them and start trying to help them, with potentially mixed results? Do they become a kind of local urban legend, and do Fool and Alice get folded into that story? What is that like for them?

+ All the horror tropes, including supernatural ones. These two make a great team, and I feel that they should use those skills to fight vampires. Or an invasion of body snatchers. Or a Freddy Krueger-like killer who attacks in dreams. They could investigate a haunted house--maybe even a haunting taking place in a new house built on the lot where the Robesons once lived. I'd absolutely welcome any horror scenario blended with satire or symbolic weight--are the vampires also leaching off the neighborhood, gorging themselves while sucking others dry?--but straightforward scares and adventures are also amazing. I just really like the idea that either Alice and Fool might wind up somehow permanently attracting the uncanny or might deliberately seek it out, especially once they're adults. So whether they just have the bad luck to run into yet another horror movie premise or whether they grow up and become supernatural detectives, I'm all over it.

+ Delving further into horror, I also love the idea of the Robesons hanging around as horrible, vengeful spirits determined to make Fool and Alice's victory very short-lived. Maybe these kids are just trying to move on with their lives when their fledgling sense of peace starts getting broken into by the malicious ghosts of "Mommy" and "Daddy." What are the ghosts capable of? Is it a little easier to deal with them in this form or even harder? How do Fool and Alice manage to defeat or exorcise them? What do the ghosts want: possession, revenge, control? Are they bound to a location or to a person--and if to a person, to both of them or just to Alice? Do they believe what's happening right away, or do they think they're just having nightmares or hallucinations?

+ I love that they live and are triumphant and safe, but I also really love fucked-up aftermaths where people can't quite get back to their old version of normal. So it would also be great to see long-term trauma effects that they don't deal with in the healthiest possible ways. Maybe they become vigilantes against people who, like the Robesons, are protected by money and whiteness and seeming normalcy; maybe, years later, one of them has to help the other cover up a crime. I can see Alice being much more substantially damaged than Fool, given how long she was with the Robesons, so I'm totally good with, say, emotional hurt/comfort where Alice is having PTSD problems years later and Fool is trying to help her. Or weirdly tender murder cover-ups where she sees someone who looks like one of the Robesons, snaps and kills them, and now Fool has to help her get rid of the body.

+ This isn't much of a prompt in its own right, admittedly, but I'd also adore anything playing with the film's OTT fairy tale mode. I welcome stylistic touches like bringing in echoes of particular fairy tales or Tarot cards, telling the story at least partly in fairy tale language/style, etc. If that's your thing, go wild.



Perry Mason

Perry Mason, Della Street, Paul Drake

I love the historical backdrop of the show and the way all three of these characters are striving to do good in a world that can be indifferent or hostile to that. There's a lot of grime and tragedy and bittersweetness, but also people who are actively trying--and often at some cost--to help. I love Della's crusade on Emily Dodson's behalf and how fiercely she advocates for her, I love Paul's battle between his conscience (and his desire to do what he's good at) and his oppressive and threatening environment, and I love Perry's gradual transformation into someone who has pulled his life together enough to be fight and be rallied around. The scenes with the three of them setting up their new practice together were so great for me, and I can't wait to see where the show goes next.

It's fine to have the story be focused more on one or two of the characters as long as all three are there in some capacity.

I really like the whole ensemble, and I'd be happy to see any of the other characters appear in large or small roles. Basically, all these prompts go in the direction of "the continuing adventures of the law firm," which can encompass a lot. If you want to include shippy elements, I really like Perry/Hamilton, Perry/Paul, Perry/Lupe, Della/Hazel, and Della/any female character.

Prompts

+ CASEFIC. I'd be thrilled with anything along these lines, whether you want to come up with a new case or borrow one from previous Perry Mason incarnations. (Or do a homage to another crime story from the period! That would also be delightful.) This would be such a great way to explore how their relationships with each other develop and how they sharpen their skills. I love plotty fic, especially for ensembles, and they open up so many great opportunities for competence kink, team bonding, conflict, hurt/comfort, etc. I will even ruin Hamilton Burger's day by saying that you can have someone confess on the stand.

+ There are all kinds of transitional things I'm interested in here. How does Paul adapt to working as an investigator as opposed to a police officer? He has a lot more personal power--a lot more agency and the respect of the people he works with--but he's part of an institution with less collective power, which is an interesting contrast. Della's working on a law degree--how is that going? Is she having trouble juggling the studying with work? Is she getting more comfortable being relatively open about her relationship with Hazel when she's around Perry and Paul? Is Perry still running up against bits of courtroom procedure and legal tradition that he's totally unaware of? Does drink or cynicism or PTSD get the better of him sometimes, and how do Della and Paul help him and/or deal with it when that happens? I really like that he's basically trying to grow into someone who is worthy of trust. That's a lot of pressure, so I'd love seeing his triumphs and possible stumbles.

+ Team bonding! I would love to just see the three of them--plus others, if you like--having a meal together. Are they working on a case and eating in the office? Getting breakfast at a diner the morning before a trial? Drinks after a victory? Is Paul's wife hosting her husband's coworkers for the first time at a dinner at their house? Is it a holiday gathering? I love both warm, established relationships where everything is in a comfortable groove and awkward, tentative relationship-building where people don't quite know how to act with each other/in this setting yet.

+ I always love five-things fics, and that format would be great for this: five brief looks at cases, five wins, five losses, five times [Character] saved the day, five all-nighters in the office, five moments of silent understanding, five pieces of office furniture and how they were acquired, etc. This could also be a cool way to look at time passing and how the characters and firm evolve.

+ Hurt/comfort is one of my favorite tropes for team relationships. One of them gets roughed up in the course of their work? In an accident? Sick? I'll go all-out iddy here and say that this can be totally contrived and heightened and I'll eat it up with a spoon, so if you want to give one of them a slow-acting poison where the antidote has to be found in time, hold them hostage, torture them for information, torture one to get the others to provide information, and basically any other over-the-top tropey situation you can think of, I am totally here for it. I'd just love to see them rallying behind each other or, if they're all hurt, quietly comforting each other and struggling to carry on and get the job done. Maybe it's a beating that's supposed to incapacitate them to get them out of the way, but they grit their teeth and keep going anyway?



Spy Game

Tom Bishop, Nathan Muir

I love all the mucky moral ambiguity and spycraft details of the plot and setting, and I love the way Nathan's self-containment can't hide the fact that he burns down all his rules and his planned retirement when it comes down to saving Tom, even when they're estranged. They have such a great mix of some of my favorite ship tropes: the age difference, the loyalty kink, the moral conflicts, the intimacy, the power difference, the playfulness, the emotional restraint where they don't always talk about everything/show their true feelings to each other, and the sheer effort they put into each other. And, of course, the fact that they look like Robert Redford and Brad Pitt doesn't hurt. I ship it, but I'd also be happy with gen: I just really love the sense of history and loyalty and emotional intensity there, romantic/sexual or platonic.

Prompts

+ Honeypotting! I would really love anything dealing with this iddiest of spy tropes. Maybe Tom's sexual experience with men has been limited and situational, to the point where he's been able to tell himself that it doesn't really count, and Nathan needs to get him to be able to act relaxed and willing and experienced in bed if he has to honeypot another man, so--oh, no, they have to practice until Tom can seem more comfortable. I love the idea of this being couched in terms of it being just another part of the training, whether they try to stick to that or whether they eventually realize (and possibly also admit) that it's more. Or maybe Nathan has to watch Tom work through this kind of sting, and it stirs up jealousy and lust. (I know Tom seemed to be doing most of the fieldwork, but I'd also love the reverse of this, with Tom having to sit by and monitor the situation as Nathan was the one who had to make a seduction for the job.) Or, for a whumpy variation, things on a honeypot assignment go too far/too fast/too unpleasantly, but the one acting as honeypot has to go along with it for the sake of the job, and afterwards the other offers comfort and/or revenge.

+ I'd love any kind of slice-of-life look at their time working together. Missionfic would be excellent (I'm especially fond of grubby Cold War spycraft where they're moving pieces around on a board and not always sure how what they're doing affects the greater game; their stretch in Berlin, with the dilemma about sacrificing their questionable asset in order to get another piece of information, was one of my favorite parts of the film). Or they could do something more James Bond than John le Carré, something more lighthearted and tropey, like having to pose as a couple (with Nathan insinuating Tom is his sugar baby!) or go to black-tie events. But I don't have to actually see the work they're doing as a focus: I'm also perfectly happy to just see them in their stretches of downtime, in between assignments or in quiet patches of them. It could be really revealing to see them actually having the chance to do something more casual for a change, whether that's just watching a baseball game together or going to a movie or walking through a museum. How does Tom react to seeing Nathan with his guard comparatively down? What might have happened to them that they need to decompress via doing something completely unrelated to work?

+ There are some great canon-divergence possibilities here. Nathan seems to suggest the post-Beirut change of scenery almost as a kind of peace offering, and I wonder what would have happened if Tom had taken him up on it. How would the tension between them have dissipated or come to a head under different circumstances? Dramatically? Just as a slow simmer finally coming to a boil? I also love the possibility of a kind of role reversal where they're estranged but it's Tom who has to move heaven and earth to rescue Nathan from some terrible fate.

+ I would also love anything post-canon, where the two of them are reunited after everything. Nathan presumably can't go home again--do the two of them go on the run together? What's their reunion like? (Did Nathan actually expect to see him again after he got him out of China? What's Tom's reaction--beyond that beautiful extended reaction shot to hearing "Operation Dinner Out"--to the realization that Nathan broke all of his rules for his sake?) Are they still able to scrape up enough money for some quiet, relatively ordinary life together, or do they wind up acting as sort of freelance spies?

+ Hurt/comfort! This can be integrated into any of the above prompts or just used on its own: I just adore h/c and would be perfectly happy with it in whatever form you like, whichever one of them is hurt. Dealing with canon trauma, physical or emotional, like Tom's ordeal in prison, is excellent, as is making up a new situation--maybe one of them is hurt on a mission, or maybe they're hurt or sick unrelated to a mission, which might even make it more surprising/hit harder. What does the comforter do? How much tenderness would they allow themselves, and would their expression of that change over time? Would it act as a catalyst for any kinds of feelings?