Dear Yuletide Author 2022
Oct. 17th, 2022 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scioscribeThank you so much for writing for me! This is always one of my favorite times of year, and I'd be delighted to get anything for these fandom/character combinations. I've added prompts and additional details if those are helpful, but please feel free to go your own way.
I have gifts enabled on my account and am (very) open to treats!
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Likes
hurt/comfort, emotional hurt/comfort, ensembles, enemies-to-lovers (or friends), friendships, friends-to-lovers, opposites attract, conflicting worldviews and priorities, emotional vulnerability, fix-its, casefic, canon-style adventures, crack played straight, moral complexity, nuanced 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, complicated relationships, partnerships, power dynamics, shippy gen and ambiguously intense relationships, intimacy, found family, first-time stories, established relationships, character death, amnesia, characters forced to cooperate, forced proximity, bedsharing, huddling/cuddling for warmth, 5 + 1 fics, slow-burns, fake/pretend relationships, arranged marriage/marriage of convenience, sex pollen, made them do it, noncon-related hurt/comfort, rape recovery, power couples, age gaps, worldbuilding, undercover work, loyalty, tenderness, acts of kindness, trying to do the right thing, identity porn, canon-divergence AUs, added supernatural/fantasy/sci-fi elements
Historical- and canon-typical language, violence, attitudes, and darkness-levels all okay to include unless otherwise noted.
General Sex Likes/Kinks
clothed sex, wall-sex, rough sex, teasing, anal play/sex, oral sex, rimming, frottage, fingering, gags, dirty talk, hand and finger kink, hair-touching, nipple play, characters giving orders/instructions, roleplay, casual D/s, spanking (including breasts, thighs, and pussy), talking during sex, emotional sex, sleepy/lazy sex, humorous sex scenes, enthusiastic sex, tenderness, loss of virginity, bad/awkward sex (either charmingly funny or downbeat), coming untouched, coming in pants, voyeurism, exhibitionism, collaring, people getting mussed, orgasm delay/denial, overstimulation, edging, begging, historical period- or location-specific sex, sex toys, praise kink, possessiveness, marking/bruising/biting
DNW
ageplay, mommy/daddy kink, explicit sex for characters under sixteen, scat, bestiality, necrophilia
The Long Walk - Stephen King
Ray Garraty, Peter McVries
This book has been a favorite of mine for years. I really love how the boys on the Walk have every incentive to close themselves off from each other (or actively root for everyone else to fall), but they develop these weird, tender connections in spite of it. Garraty and McVries have such an intense, deeply felt relationship with such an amazing blend of doom and denial and friendship and self-destructive urges and loyalty and longing—and they're not necessarily good at deciphering what they feel and what they want, especially in a situation where they're so thoroughly out of options. I also love the dystopian retro-future setting and would love to see more of it.
I ship Garraty/McVries but am also completely happy with gen or pre-slash—mostly I just want them to have the same kind of intense emotional involvement with each other that they do in canon.
* Garraty wins and gets the Prize—and he asks to have McVries brought back to life. There is some institutional-but-eldritch process that leads to an eerily revived McVries, but being brought back by a dystopian police state is non-ideal, and McVries Comes Back Wrong. I love this both for h/c and milder angst—maybe McVries sleepwalks every night or has memory gaps or trouble feeling any physical sensation—and darker and more tragic possibilities—he's back, but he needs fresh blood to live (either Garraty's or someone else's), or he's actually still decaying and only back for a short time. Maybe he has destructive murder blackouts. Maybe the Major uses him as a weapon. Whatever poignant, dark, or tragic thing you want to do with this, I'm here for it. (Don't worry about this touching on the necrophilia DNW; as long as McVries is not just a corpse without consciousness, we're good.)
* The Walk gets interrupted in some way (protests or an uprising, a weather event, chaos when the Major has a sudden aneurysm, whatever) and Garraty and McVries manage to get away. I'd love to see them fleeing, hiding out, and trying to stay off the grid. Do they find people who can help them, or do they have to go it alone? If it's some kind of massive upheaval and the whole country changes, are they unwilling celebrities in the aftermath? How does that affect them? If it's Garraty/McVries, what is it like for them to try to work out their feelings with all this going on?
* Garraty says yes to that handjob offer. I feel like this could slot in perfectly with canon, and I'm fine with getting bittersweet porn with their book ending still intact. Just give them an awkward, fraught, sweet, and/or painful chance to do something about their feelings for each other.
* What if only Garraty had done the Walk? What happens if he and McVries only meet up later in life, with Garraty as an incredibly damaged, traumatized Long Walk winner? What would their connection look like under these very different circumstances? (If you want to do a very tropey scenario where Long Walk winner Garraty falls in love with sex worker McVries, I am totally into it.) Can this McVries help Garraty heal at all?
* AU where their world takes a different approach to its distracting-the-populace death competitions. Maybe the boys all get stranded in an isolated location with few-to-no resources and the last man standing wins? Maybe it's gladiatorial combat, with awkward amounts of time to tragically get to know each other between fights or melees? I would also be good with a Walk in a different kind of setting or in different weather—subject them to snowstorms or heat waves or having to walk through a bunch of fire ants, if you like. Just do bad things to them and let them care about each other throughout.
* AU where they meet before canon and things have a chance to go differently. Maybe they meet right before the deadline for dropping out, and they wind up both deciding to do that? Maybe because something shippy or otherwise intimate happens between them? What's it like to build a relationship or friendship in the shadow of the fact that the two of you both almost made a horrible, deadly choice? I'm also good with sadder, more canon-compliant versions of this—they have a positive encounter with each other but go on the Walk anyway? They meet each other but don't talk about the Walk, so each is surprised to see the other there? The encounter makes one of them choose to drop out, but the other still goes ahead? How does the Walk go if that happens?
* Post-canon encounters where McVries is either a ghost or a hallucination. (Maybe even Garraty doesn't know for sure.) Conversations, ghostly assistance, dream sex, company, uncertainty about what's real and what's not ….
Joyeux Noël
Lt. Audebert, Lt. Horstmayer
Surprising connections between characters who are supposed to be enemies, mutual recognition of honor and decency, characters taking huge risks for each other, coming together across the lines, historical context, a wintry landscape, the potential for some amazing pining … this movie is total catnip for me. The movie has a tight time-span, and I definitely don't need the story set within that! I also love canon-divergence AUs, setups where they meet earlier during the war (including under wildly different circumstances), AUs where for some reason they're able to continue in an odd status quo truce for at least a few days longer, post-canon stories, and big-picture AUs like "an alien invasion during WWI forces all the countries to work together" or "their countries have a mutual enemy in Ruritania." I'm happy to hand-wave logistics here.
I like both gen and Audebert/Horstmayer (and all potential shades of ambiguity in between). For Audebert/Horstmayer, I would prefer they not have unhappy marriages, but not-married AUs, companionable marriages, lavender marriages, or any kind of poly are all fine. I'm good with their wives appearing and being part of the story, if you like.
* An accidental soulbond forms between the two of them over the course of the movie, and it makes it difficult and painful for the two of them to be apart. Are they able to meet up again during the war to take the edge off? Can they talk to each other or exchange feelings/visions through the bond, so that they're connected even over vast distances, and they can comfort each other through the horrors of war? Dream-sharing? Are soulbonds a known quantity, and their countries desperately want to break theirs because it doesn't fit with wartime enmity? Are they distrusted because of it? Imprisoned?
* Sex pollen in the trenches! Maybe it's a natural phenomenon, maybe it's an experimental weapon, but either way, it leaves them frantically in need of sex and skin contact, and they're only willing to be that vulnerable with each other? Repression, fumbling, touch starvation, sensory overload? Is this how they meet, or is this an AU where they have more time with each other at the front after they get to know each other?
* Meeting up again after the war, striking up a long-term friendship or romance? I would love to see their relationship deepen and evolve over the years. (Mentioning growing antisemitism in Germany around this time is fine, but I prefer the Horstmayers get out unscathed before that point in the timeline.) These two deserve plenty of cozy, slice-of-life comfort and interactions, with or without pining and quiet romance. Does one of them unexpectedly need the other's help with something post-canon? Maybe one or both of them wind up with old war wounds that continue to pain them and require comfort?
* A monster is stalking the trenches, and it doesn't care what uniforms people are wearing, so the men have to band together across the lines to fight it off or hunt it down? Tense stakeouts in the snowy darkness, bonding while waiting to see if they'll be attacked; hurt/comfort after monster attacks; separated from their armies because one of them gets dragged off by the monster and the other follows; "Saving you is a dangerous mission but I'm going to do it anyway." Ice monsters, monsters made of mustard gas, monsters made of the bodies of the dead, monsters embodying the pointlessness of the war?
* These two are great for hurt/comfort, and I'm good with either of them as the hurt character (or both!). I'd love anything in that vein, but some specific tropes/prompts I like for them include fever, character not realizing how badly they're hurt until they collapse, injured or ill while stranded with the enemy, one of them begging for mercy for the other, bargaining themselves to their captor for medicine/bandages for the other character, protectiveness, presumed dead, refusing to leave someone's side, and tender sex because of some kind of injury.
* Any kind of apocalypse—extreme weather, zombies, alien invasion, whatever: anything that can get Horstmayer and Audebert on the run together, fighting to survive, sleeping close, and encountering extreme situations. I love the idea of them realizing that normalcy has slipped away and that this sort of gives them permission to be close with each other in a way they weren't allowed to be before.
* Covert sex at the front, during the small amount of time they have before they're all separated? (Maybe it lasts a little longer, and they all get to have New Year's together?) Huddling/cuddling for warmth? Reunion sex? Sharing clothing or keeping small tokens of each other, like Audebert giving Horstmayer something out of his wallet? Their first kiss happening right before they have to be separated, and they have to spend a lot of time wondering what it meant? Fraught pining and subtle touches? Ambiguous, vaguely smarmy moments where they're maintaining plausible deniability (even to themselves) about whether or not this is outright romantic or sexual, but it's all very emotionally intense and full of mysterious longing?
* Different kinds of mediums: An academic paper about the Christmas truce explores some historical record of the Horstmayer-Audebert relationship, romantic or platonic? I'd love to see people trying to interpret their relationship and whatever way it might extend after the course of the movie. The two of them somehow manage to write letters to each other during the war, or—more plausibly—write to each other after the war, winding up in a regular correspondence? One of them keeps a journal, so we see his impression of their meeting and of the aftermath and maybe how much he thinks about the other while they're apart, as well as how he deals with his own situation?
The Perfection
Charlotte Willmore, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Wells
I love how unpredictable this movie is. It starts off feeling like a slightly on-edge romantic f/f drama and then teeters on the verge of becoming a virus movie and then becomes its own weird, Gothic, distinctive thing. Lizzie and Charlotte have incredible, scorching chemistry, and I love how their relationship has such a weird blend of genuine loyalty and care… and for-your-own-good gaslighting and forced amputation and obsession and identity blurring. Charlotte feels like an escaped Brontë character, with this vibe of simultaneous fragility and danger, and Lizzie starts off seeming more normal only to wind up becoming stranger and more brutal. I've got some specific prompts, but it basically boils down to: I'd love anything that digs into that fucked-up, promising complexity and charts where it might go from the end of the movie, and I'd love anything that builds on the horror of "the Perfection" and Anton and Paloma's legacy.
* I'm so curious about what happens post-canon. Do Charlotte and Lizzie become dark, off-kilter vigilantes, seeking out rapists and abusers and brutally murdering them? Do they somehow manage to take over the school and start running it together, becoming the new faces of Bachoff? Does that just mean trying to deprogram some of the top students?
* An alternate, darker version of them taking control of the school, with the two of them falling into their own kind of worship of the Perfection even in Anton's absence? Can they fully shake what they were taught, or do they find themselves repeating bits of that behavior even when they don't want to?
* I'd love full-on supernatural horror, too. I spent a lot of time thinking there might turn out to actually be some kind of cosmic force they were worshiping (and sacrificing to) that embodied a kind of musical/artistic perfection, and I'd be very happy to see this as a literal Lovecraftian cult that Charlotte and Lizzie wind up inheriting. Do they know how to deal with the force they might have just offended? Does it require them to do anything? Do they give the bodies to it as an offering? What does any of this look like--how they serve it, how they move forward, how they potentially try to defeat or contain it, etc.?
* What if that threatened virus/zombie outbreak from the beginning was real, and Charlotte's plans go awry because she and Lizzie are stuck in the middle of an apocalypse? Are they still in China, or do they have to take an uncomfortable, destined-to-explode refuge at Bachoff?
* More Gothic horror, just because the house is so perfect for it. The lingering ghosts of Anton, Paloma, Theis, and Geoffrey? A murderous student who's already been indoctrinated into the previous way of doing things? (I always welcome creepy children.) Past students seeking revenge for Anton? Alternately, I'll take other kinds of horror, too--what if that threatened virus/zombie outbreak from the beginning turns out to be real?
* I could also see some canon-divergences. What if Charlotte's mom hadn't gotten sick until after she'd had some time to get to know Lizzie, and she'd wound up running away and taking Lizzie with her? What if her mom had died sooner and she'd come back earlier on to wage a different kind of war on the school? Or a role-reversal, maybe, where Charlotte is the one who stayed with Anton and Paloma, and Lizzie wound up having to leave the school for some reason, only to come back years later--I'd love to see her starting off with the same motives (revenge, desire to save Charlotte, growing love) but playing them out in very different ways. Or I could also totally just go for a long-game road-trip through China, with the two of them deepening their relationship and Charlotte trying to change Lizzie's mind in more subtle ways.
* Random assortment of mini-prompts: music metaphors/musical structures for stories, Lizzie and Charlotte's relationship to music, their duets, consensual stump insertion, sex games that edge into being deeply unhealthy therapy, joyous sex all about emotion and experience/inexperience and tenderness and maybe kink discovery, porn in general, becoming composers, Charlotte having trouble dealing with the world after spending years as a virtual shut-in.
Evil
Kristen Bouchard, David Acosta, Ben Shakir
This show's gift for combining absolutely batshit, over-the-top elements with unnerving horror and character development and interaction makes me so happy. I love how often their cases are a complex mishmash of logical explanations, unresolvable ambiguities, and hard-to-dismiss but unprovable personal experiences. Kristen, David, and Ben have such excellent rapport and chemistry; their relationship feels both lived-in and comfortable and sometimes crackling with tension. I love their different worldviews and beliefs (religious and otherwise) and how they keep on having respect and affection for each other throughout a lot of tense disagreements about what approach to take.
I like Kristen/David/Ben and gen (or gen with background Kristen/Andy and/or Kristen/David elements). The whole ensemble is terrific, so any other significant platonic character relationships are also great.
* Casefic (or a snippet of casefic) in general would be excellent, whether the resolution is supernatural, human, or a mixture of both (or people making things look supernatural). I especially like their weirder cases and incidents that aren't demon-related, like the Haunted Girl VR game, the "Pudsy's Christmas" video, Brenda at the girl's Halloween party, David and Kristen at David's father's party, the Elevator Game, the totally-not-Amazon zombies, the "weight of the soul" experiment, the seemingly haunted road, the cursed stock tip, etc.. I'd love to see them investigating a new incident, whether the focus is on the trio, just one of them, or on Ben and Karima.
* Going off the above—there's really no kind of horror I wouldn't love to see them encountering or exploring: Haunted houses and hotels. Creepy small towns with peculiar rituals where everyone is friendly but strangers tend to disappear. Viral videos and creepypasta with suspicious origins. Past cases come back in a horrible fashion, like a return of the nurse from Room 320. Nightmares and nightmare-sharing. Dark prophetic dreams. Character Has the Creeping Sensation Things Are No Longer Real. Techno-horror. Possessed technology. The fabric of reality is thinner than we thought, and there are strange things underneath. Terrifying time loops. Creepy forests and deserts. Creepy submarines. Isolated settings: snowbound, stuck in a torrential downpour, etc. Haunted dolls. Haunted ventriloquist dummies.
* The three of them wind up soulbonded, either accidentally or intentionally. Maybe soulbonds are the weird thing in one of their cases, and they wind up "testing" whether or not they're real and getting very surprised by the results … and potentially even more surprised when they don't want to get rid of the connection once they've gotten used to it? I'd love to see them sharing each other's emotions and being really in-tune with each other and maybe needing proximity/touch/sex.
* Zombie apocalypse or any other huge, world-shattering event that leaves the characters clinging to each other as all they have left in a terrifying and risky world. Maybe they're traveling around, protecting each other and their families, and trying to do good where they can? (Post-apocalyptic work for assessors?)
* In addition to regular gen and regular ship, I also really love weird, smarm-like, boundary-blurring stories for the three of them, where none of them are completely clear on exactly how they'd define their relationship and they have plausible deniability that lets Kristen slip into this while she's still married and lets David have this kind of closeness without technically breaking his vows.
* Sex pollen! Just have them all bang in an induced haze and feel weird about it but also basically happy. Maybe this is what gets them all to consider a real relationship with each other, when they'd maybe never gotten that far before. Is it a one-off, or do Kristen and Ben persuade David that he can keep his faith, his assessor job, and his role in combating capital-E Evil without becoming/staying a priest, so he can still be with them?
* One of them stumbles into horror in their off-hours, and they have to do a private investigation of some weird phenomena that one of them has to be vulnerable enough to open up to the others about, or one of them starts remembering some repressed past horror from their years before and needs help exploring and processing it.
* Any kind of hurt/comfort, either for canonical hurts or invented ones. All three of them face such great physical and emotional whump in the episodes, and I love it, but I'd also love to see the comfort in the aftermath of some of the things they've had to deal with. I also love things like two of them thinking the third is dead (or one of them alone and thinking the other two are dead), "hurt/sick character isn't quite lucid," them risking themselves for each other, stranded in the wilderness or an isolated and hopeless setting/situation, washing hurt character's hair/helping them bathe, co-sleeping and dealing with nightmares and night terrors, and having tender sex because of injuries.
* S3 spoilers: I'd love to see some plotty exploration of where things could go from the end of season three, so I am 100% here for stories dealing with things like Leland fathering a child through a surrogate and Kristen's stolen egg, Andy's amnesia/brainwashing and new gift for seeing demons, Kurt's descent into darkness, etc. It would be great to watch the characters tackle these kinds of huge, intense issues and try to investigate and cope with them. If you have a version of season four in mind, I would love to see it.
I have gifts enabled on my account and am (very) open to treats!
I'm
Likes
hurt/comfort, emotional hurt/comfort, ensembles, enemies-to-lovers (or friends), friendships, friends-to-lovers, opposites attract, conflicting worldviews and priorities, emotional vulnerability, fix-its, casefic, canon-style adventures, crack played straight, moral complexity, nuanced 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, complicated relationships, partnerships, power dynamics, shippy gen and ambiguously intense relationships, intimacy, found family, first-time stories, established relationships, character death, amnesia, characters forced to cooperate, forced proximity, bedsharing, huddling/cuddling for warmth, 5 + 1 fics, slow-burns, fake/pretend relationships, arranged marriage/marriage of convenience, sex pollen, made them do it, noncon-related hurt/comfort, rape recovery, power couples, age gaps, worldbuilding, undercover work, loyalty, tenderness, acts of kindness, trying to do the right thing, identity porn, canon-divergence AUs, added supernatural/fantasy/sci-fi elements
Historical- and canon-typical language, violence, attitudes, and darkness-levels all okay to include unless otherwise noted.
General Sex Likes/Kinks
clothed sex, wall-sex, rough sex, teasing, anal play/sex, oral sex, rimming, frottage, fingering, gags, dirty talk, hand and finger kink, hair-touching, nipple play, characters giving orders/instructions, roleplay, casual D/s, spanking (including breasts, thighs, and pussy), talking during sex, emotional sex, sleepy/lazy sex, humorous sex scenes, enthusiastic sex, tenderness, loss of virginity, bad/awkward sex (either charmingly funny or downbeat), coming untouched, coming in pants, voyeurism, exhibitionism, collaring, people getting mussed, orgasm delay/denial, overstimulation, edging, begging, historical period- or location-specific sex, sex toys, praise kink, possessiveness, marking/bruising/biting
DNW
ageplay, mommy/daddy kink, explicit sex for characters under sixteen, scat, bestiality, necrophilia
The Long Walk - Stephen King
Ray Garraty, Peter McVries
This book has been a favorite of mine for years. I really love how the boys on the Walk have every incentive to close themselves off from each other (or actively root for everyone else to fall), but they develop these weird, tender connections in spite of it. Garraty and McVries have such an intense, deeply felt relationship with such an amazing blend of doom and denial and friendship and self-destructive urges and loyalty and longing—and they're not necessarily good at deciphering what they feel and what they want, especially in a situation where they're so thoroughly out of options. I also love the dystopian retro-future setting and would love to see more of it.
I ship Garraty/McVries but am also completely happy with gen or pre-slash—mostly I just want them to have the same kind of intense emotional involvement with each other that they do in canon.
* Garraty wins and gets the Prize—and he asks to have McVries brought back to life. There is some institutional-but-eldritch process that leads to an eerily revived McVries, but being brought back by a dystopian police state is non-ideal, and McVries Comes Back Wrong. I love this both for h/c and milder angst—maybe McVries sleepwalks every night or has memory gaps or trouble feeling any physical sensation—and darker and more tragic possibilities—he's back, but he needs fresh blood to live (either Garraty's or someone else's), or he's actually still decaying and only back for a short time. Maybe he has destructive murder blackouts. Maybe the Major uses him as a weapon. Whatever poignant, dark, or tragic thing you want to do with this, I'm here for it. (Don't worry about this touching on the necrophilia DNW; as long as McVries is not just a corpse without consciousness, we're good.)
* The Walk gets interrupted in some way (protests or an uprising, a weather event, chaos when the Major has a sudden aneurysm, whatever) and Garraty and McVries manage to get away. I'd love to see them fleeing, hiding out, and trying to stay off the grid. Do they find people who can help them, or do they have to go it alone? If it's some kind of massive upheaval and the whole country changes, are they unwilling celebrities in the aftermath? How does that affect them? If it's Garraty/McVries, what is it like for them to try to work out their feelings with all this going on?
* Garraty says yes to that handjob offer. I feel like this could slot in perfectly with canon, and I'm fine with getting bittersweet porn with their book ending still intact. Just give them an awkward, fraught, sweet, and/or painful chance to do something about their feelings for each other.
* What if only Garraty had done the Walk? What happens if he and McVries only meet up later in life, with Garraty as an incredibly damaged, traumatized Long Walk winner? What would their connection look like under these very different circumstances? (If you want to do a very tropey scenario where Long Walk winner Garraty falls in love with sex worker McVries, I am totally into it.) Can this McVries help Garraty heal at all?
* AU where their world takes a different approach to its distracting-the-populace death competitions. Maybe the boys all get stranded in an isolated location with few-to-no resources and the last man standing wins? Maybe it's gladiatorial combat, with awkward amounts of time to tragically get to know each other between fights or melees? I would also be good with a Walk in a different kind of setting or in different weather—subject them to snowstorms or heat waves or having to walk through a bunch of fire ants, if you like. Just do bad things to them and let them care about each other throughout.
* AU where they meet before canon and things have a chance to go differently. Maybe they meet right before the deadline for dropping out, and they wind up both deciding to do that? Maybe because something shippy or otherwise intimate happens between them? What's it like to build a relationship or friendship in the shadow of the fact that the two of you both almost made a horrible, deadly choice? I'm also good with sadder, more canon-compliant versions of this—they have a positive encounter with each other but go on the Walk anyway? They meet each other but don't talk about the Walk, so each is surprised to see the other there? The encounter makes one of them choose to drop out, but the other still goes ahead? How does the Walk go if that happens?
* Post-canon encounters where McVries is either a ghost or a hallucination. (Maybe even Garraty doesn't know for sure.) Conversations, ghostly assistance, dream sex, company, uncertainty about what's real and what's not ….
Joyeux Noël
Lt. Audebert, Lt. Horstmayer
Surprising connections between characters who are supposed to be enemies, mutual recognition of honor and decency, characters taking huge risks for each other, coming together across the lines, historical context, a wintry landscape, the potential for some amazing pining … this movie is total catnip for me. The movie has a tight time-span, and I definitely don't need the story set within that! I also love canon-divergence AUs, setups where they meet earlier during the war (including under wildly different circumstances), AUs where for some reason they're able to continue in an odd status quo truce for at least a few days longer, post-canon stories, and big-picture AUs like "an alien invasion during WWI forces all the countries to work together" or "their countries have a mutual enemy in Ruritania." I'm happy to hand-wave logistics here.
I like both gen and Audebert/Horstmayer (and all potential shades of ambiguity in between). For Audebert/Horstmayer, I would prefer they not have unhappy marriages, but not-married AUs, companionable marriages, lavender marriages, or any kind of poly are all fine. I'm good with their wives appearing and being part of the story, if you like.
* An accidental soulbond forms between the two of them over the course of the movie, and it makes it difficult and painful for the two of them to be apart. Are they able to meet up again during the war to take the edge off? Can they talk to each other or exchange feelings/visions through the bond, so that they're connected even over vast distances, and they can comfort each other through the horrors of war? Dream-sharing? Are soulbonds a known quantity, and their countries desperately want to break theirs because it doesn't fit with wartime enmity? Are they distrusted because of it? Imprisoned?
* Sex pollen in the trenches! Maybe it's a natural phenomenon, maybe it's an experimental weapon, but either way, it leaves them frantically in need of sex and skin contact, and they're only willing to be that vulnerable with each other? Repression, fumbling, touch starvation, sensory overload? Is this how they meet, or is this an AU where they have more time with each other at the front after they get to know each other?
* Meeting up again after the war, striking up a long-term friendship or romance? I would love to see their relationship deepen and evolve over the years. (Mentioning growing antisemitism in Germany around this time is fine, but I prefer the Horstmayers get out unscathed before that point in the timeline.) These two deserve plenty of cozy, slice-of-life comfort and interactions, with or without pining and quiet romance. Does one of them unexpectedly need the other's help with something post-canon? Maybe one or both of them wind up with old war wounds that continue to pain them and require comfort?
* A monster is stalking the trenches, and it doesn't care what uniforms people are wearing, so the men have to band together across the lines to fight it off or hunt it down? Tense stakeouts in the snowy darkness, bonding while waiting to see if they'll be attacked; hurt/comfort after monster attacks; separated from their armies because one of them gets dragged off by the monster and the other follows; "Saving you is a dangerous mission but I'm going to do it anyway." Ice monsters, monsters made of mustard gas, monsters made of the bodies of the dead, monsters embodying the pointlessness of the war?
* These two are great for hurt/comfort, and I'm good with either of them as the hurt character (or both!). I'd love anything in that vein, but some specific tropes/prompts I like for them include fever, character not realizing how badly they're hurt until they collapse, injured or ill while stranded with the enemy, one of them begging for mercy for the other, bargaining themselves to their captor for medicine/bandages for the other character, protectiveness, presumed dead, refusing to leave someone's side, and tender sex because of some kind of injury.
* Any kind of apocalypse—extreme weather, zombies, alien invasion, whatever: anything that can get Horstmayer and Audebert on the run together, fighting to survive, sleeping close, and encountering extreme situations. I love the idea of them realizing that normalcy has slipped away and that this sort of gives them permission to be close with each other in a way they weren't allowed to be before.
* Covert sex at the front, during the small amount of time they have before they're all separated? (Maybe it lasts a little longer, and they all get to have New Year's together?) Huddling/cuddling for warmth? Reunion sex? Sharing clothing or keeping small tokens of each other, like Audebert giving Horstmayer something out of his wallet? Their first kiss happening right before they have to be separated, and they have to spend a lot of time wondering what it meant? Fraught pining and subtle touches? Ambiguous, vaguely smarmy moments where they're maintaining plausible deniability (even to themselves) about whether or not this is outright romantic or sexual, but it's all very emotionally intense and full of mysterious longing?
* Different kinds of mediums: An academic paper about the Christmas truce explores some historical record of the Horstmayer-Audebert relationship, romantic or platonic? I'd love to see people trying to interpret their relationship and whatever way it might extend after the course of the movie. The two of them somehow manage to write letters to each other during the war, or—more plausibly—write to each other after the war, winding up in a regular correspondence? One of them keeps a journal, so we see his impression of their meeting and of the aftermath and maybe how much he thinks about the other while they're apart, as well as how he deals with his own situation?
The Perfection
Charlotte Willmore, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Wells
I love how unpredictable this movie is. It starts off feeling like a slightly on-edge romantic f/f drama and then teeters on the verge of becoming a virus movie and then becomes its own weird, Gothic, distinctive thing. Lizzie and Charlotte have incredible, scorching chemistry, and I love how their relationship has such a weird blend of genuine loyalty and care… and for-your-own-good gaslighting and forced amputation and obsession and identity blurring. Charlotte feels like an escaped Brontë character, with this vibe of simultaneous fragility and danger, and Lizzie starts off seeming more normal only to wind up becoming stranger and more brutal. I've got some specific prompts, but it basically boils down to: I'd love anything that digs into that fucked-up, promising complexity and charts where it might go from the end of the movie, and I'd love anything that builds on the horror of "the Perfection" and Anton and Paloma's legacy.
* I'm so curious about what happens post-canon. Do Charlotte and Lizzie become dark, off-kilter vigilantes, seeking out rapists and abusers and brutally murdering them? Do they somehow manage to take over the school and start running it together, becoming the new faces of Bachoff? Does that just mean trying to deprogram some of the top students?
* An alternate, darker version of them taking control of the school, with the two of them falling into their own kind of worship of the Perfection even in Anton's absence? Can they fully shake what they were taught, or do they find themselves repeating bits of that behavior even when they don't want to?
* I'd love full-on supernatural horror, too. I spent a lot of time thinking there might turn out to actually be some kind of cosmic force they were worshiping (and sacrificing to) that embodied a kind of musical/artistic perfection, and I'd be very happy to see this as a literal Lovecraftian cult that Charlotte and Lizzie wind up inheriting. Do they know how to deal with the force they might have just offended? Does it require them to do anything? Do they give the bodies to it as an offering? What does any of this look like--how they serve it, how they move forward, how they potentially try to defeat or contain it, etc.?
* What if that threatened virus/zombie outbreak from the beginning was real, and Charlotte's plans go awry because she and Lizzie are stuck in the middle of an apocalypse? Are they still in China, or do they have to take an uncomfortable, destined-to-explode refuge at Bachoff?
* More Gothic horror, just because the house is so perfect for it. The lingering ghosts of Anton, Paloma, Theis, and Geoffrey? A murderous student who's already been indoctrinated into the previous way of doing things? (I always welcome creepy children.) Past students seeking revenge for Anton? Alternately, I'll take other kinds of horror, too--what if that threatened virus/zombie outbreak from the beginning turns out to be real?
* I could also see some canon-divergences. What if Charlotte's mom hadn't gotten sick until after she'd had some time to get to know Lizzie, and she'd wound up running away and taking Lizzie with her? What if her mom had died sooner and she'd come back earlier on to wage a different kind of war on the school? Or a role-reversal, maybe, where Charlotte is the one who stayed with Anton and Paloma, and Lizzie wound up having to leave the school for some reason, only to come back years later--I'd love to see her starting off with the same motives (revenge, desire to save Charlotte, growing love) but playing them out in very different ways. Or I could also totally just go for a long-game road-trip through China, with the two of them deepening their relationship and Charlotte trying to change Lizzie's mind in more subtle ways.
* Random assortment of mini-prompts: music metaphors/musical structures for stories, Lizzie and Charlotte's relationship to music, their duets, consensual stump insertion, sex games that edge into being deeply unhealthy therapy, joyous sex all about emotion and experience/inexperience and tenderness and maybe kink discovery, porn in general, becoming composers, Charlotte having trouble dealing with the world after spending years as a virtual shut-in.
Evil
Kristen Bouchard, David Acosta, Ben Shakir
This show's gift for combining absolutely batshit, over-the-top elements with unnerving horror and character development and interaction makes me so happy. I love how often their cases are a complex mishmash of logical explanations, unresolvable ambiguities, and hard-to-dismiss but unprovable personal experiences. Kristen, David, and Ben have such excellent rapport and chemistry; their relationship feels both lived-in and comfortable and sometimes crackling with tension. I love their different worldviews and beliefs (religious and otherwise) and how they keep on having respect and affection for each other throughout a lot of tense disagreements about what approach to take.
I like Kristen/David/Ben and gen (or gen with background Kristen/Andy and/or Kristen/David elements). The whole ensemble is terrific, so any other significant platonic character relationships are also great.
* Casefic (or a snippet of casefic) in general would be excellent, whether the resolution is supernatural, human, or a mixture of both (or people making things look supernatural). I especially like their weirder cases and incidents that aren't demon-related, like the Haunted Girl VR game, the "Pudsy's Christmas" video, Brenda at the girl's Halloween party, David and Kristen at David's father's party, the Elevator Game, the totally-not-Amazon zombies, the "weight of the soul" experiment, the seemingly haunted road, the cursed stock tip, etc.. I'd love to see them investigating a new incident, whether the focus is on the trio, just one of them, or on Ben and Karima.
* Going off the above—there's really no kind of horror I wouldn't love to see them encountering or exploring: Haunted houses and hotels. Creepy small towns with peculiar rituals where everyone is friendly but strangers tend to disappear. Viral videos and creepypasta with suspicious origins. Past cases come back in a horrible fashion, like a return of the nurse from Room 320. Nightmares and nightmare-sharing. Dark prophetic dreams. Character Has the Creeping Sensation Things Are No Longer Real. Techno-horror. Possessed technology. The fabric of reality is thinner than we thought, and there are strange things underneath. Terrifying time loops. Creepy forests and deserts. Creepy submarines. Isolated settings: snowbound, stuck in a torrential downpour, etc. Haunted dolls. Haunted ventriloquist dummies.
* The three of them wind up soulbonded, either accidentally or intentionally. Maybe soulbonds are the weird thing in one of their cases, and they wind up "testing" whether or not they're real and getting very surprised by the results … and potentially even more surprised when they don't want to get rid of the connection once they've gotten used to it? I'd love to see them sharing each other's emotions and being really in-tune with each other and maybe needing proximity/touch/sex.
* Zombie apocalypse or any other huge, world-shattering event that leaves the characters clinging to each other as all they have left in a terrifying and risky world. Maybe they're traveling around, protecting each other and their families, and trying to do good where they can? (Post-apocalyptic work for assessors?)
* In addition to regular gen and regular ship, I also really love weird, smarm-like, boundary-blurring stories for the three of them, where none of them are completely clear on exactly how they'd define their relationship and they have plausible deniability that lets Kristen slip into this while she's still married and lets David have this kind of closeness without technically breaking his vows.
* Sex pollen! Just have them all bang in an induced haze and feel weird about it but also basically happy. Maybe this is what gets them all to consider a real relationship with each other, when they'd maybe never gotten that far before. Is it a one-off, or do Kristen and Ben persuade David that he can keep his faith, his assessor job, and his role in combating capital-E Evil without becoming/staying a priest, so he can still be with them?
* One of them stumbles into horror in their off-hours, and they have to do a private investigation of some weird phenomena that one of them has to be vulnerable enough to open up to the others about, or one of them starts remembering some repressed past horror from their years before and needs help exploring and processing it.
* Any kind of hurt/comfort, either for canonical hurts or invented ones. All three of them face such great physical and emotional whump in the episodes, and I love it, but I'd also love to see the comfort in the aftermath of some of the things they've had to deal with. I also love things like two of them thinking the third is dead (or one of them alone and thinking the other two are dead), "hurt/sick character isn't quite lucid," them risking themselves for each other, stranded in the wilderness or an isolated and hopeless setting/situation, washing hurt character's hair/helping them bathe, co-sleeping and dealing with nightmares and night terrors, and having tender sex because of injuries.
* S3 spoilers: I'd love to see some plotty exploration of where things could go from the end of season three, so I am 100% here for stories dealing with things like Leland fathering a child through a surrogate and Kristen's stolen egg, Andy's amnesia/brainwashing and new gift for seeing demons, Kurt's descent into darkness, etc. It would be great to watch the characters tackle these kinds of huge, intense issues and try to investigate and cope with them. If you have a version of season four in mind, I would love to see it.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-10-18 02:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-10-18 04:57 pm (UTC)