Dear Yuletide Writer (2023)

[scioscribe]

Thank 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'm scioscribe on AO3 and scioscribe on Tumblr.

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

Cam
Alice Ackerman, Fake Lola

I love all the layers of thoughtful unease in this movie, from the trippy horror of having your own online identity stripped away from you--to the point where you're watching yourself on-screen, doing things you've never done and saying things you've never said--to the intense creepiness of being stalked to the science fictional deepfake digital clones that don't recognize their original models to the fear of having your secrets publicly revealed to sexual anxieties and the awfulness of having people dismiss your concerns and fears. I also just really like detailed portraits of different professions, so I love seeing how Alice managed her performances and career--what kind of shows she did, her ambitions, her professional connections, her boundary-pushing branding, etc. And Alice is such a terrific protagonist: resourceful, intuitive, weird, brave, vulnerable, and fiercely devoted to her own principles and boundaries. I'm also really intrigued by Fake Lola, especially with the possibility of her developing a kind of sentience.

Optional ships: Alice/Fake Lola or any other f/f or AI/AI ship. I'm good with seeing professional interactions between Lola and "her guys," anywhere on a spectrum from sleazy to genuinely supportive.

* I'd love a look at how Alice got started as Lola. Did she come up with her rules before she ever opened her account, or did she work them out over time? How did she develop her penchant/brand for weird, extreme shows with simulated violence? And I love how we see her keeping a record of gimmicks she's used for individual shows, judging whether or not they've been successful, so I'd love to see more of that, too: her brainstorming, her successes and failures, her adjustments. How does she start forming connections (and rivalries, in Princess's case) with the other women working on FreeGirlsLive?

* AU where there's a different explanation for what's going on with the theft of Alice's account? The part where "Lola" is taking her audience on a tour of her house is so chilling in how it just eviscerates Alice's sense of privacy and really emphasizes how wrong all this is--it feels so sinister. What if the Fake Lola were some kind of supernatural force targeting her, instead of a digital clone? Is she a ghost of some sort? A suppressed manifestation of Alice herself? Some kind of totally inhuman force that just chooses to embody itself this way for some reason?

* AU where Alice and Fake Lola manage to form some kind of alliance to take on the people behind the deepfakes or to take on abusive clients?

* Is Fake Lola the same "person" as, say, the Baby digital construct, or does she have a unique experience of the world? It could be really cool to see her either interacting with the other simulations--maybe in one of those joint shows--or otherwise being all of these constructs simultaneously.

* Fake Lola lives on as a kind of digital ghost post-deletion. Does she develop an obsession with Alice after all that, and manage to find her new account and become an avid client? And what kind of ghost is she--malevolent, sexually intrigued, neutral, friendly, all of the above simultaneously or at different stages?

* Alice rebuilds her career, refusing to be knocked down for good--but she's still working with FreeGirlsLive, and the same problem could easily happen again. What's it like trying to work her way up the ratings ladder again with that shadow always hanging over her? Does she stay focused on her shows, or does she make it part of her mission to track down and enact (possibly murderous) revenge on whoever was responsible for all this?

* The deepfake digital clones become a common, pernicious part of the internet, eventually becoming a kind of online folklore that Alice or Lola has to contend with (obviously from very different perspectives). What kind of additional spring up around or about these true tales of stolen identity? Does it get hard for even Alice and Lola to tell the difference between fake accounts and real ones, and what does that mean?

* I'm totally here for Fake Lola's POV on her part of the movie and everything going on behind the scenes, with either a seemingly human perspective--that sometimes feels a weird dissonance about everything--or a fascinatingly alien AI one. How does she start gaining awareness? What is her perspective like? Does she develop emotions and preferences? From her perspective, is Alice/Teapot horrifying for deleting her? How does she feel about her interactions with her viewers?

* Alice gets a smart house/Alexa/whatever. This is a bad idea, especially when Fake Lola gets involved (maybe Demon Seed-style). Or maybe the deepfake originators hack her house in revenge for her getting one over on them, and Lola actually manages to help her in some way?

* Reddit formats would be fantastic for post-movie fic where Alice is, say, considering suing FreeGirlsLive or volunteering to take questions about her cam-work. Or maybe Fake Lola starts out with "I'm a cam girl, AMA" and it slowly turns into "I'm fledgling AI, AMA."



The Descent
Sarah Carter, Juno Kaplan

This is such a fantastic horror movie: gripping, terrifying, and agonizingly tense even before the official horror actually shows up. I love the whole ensemble and the different relationships within it, but I'm especially fond of the intense, complicated, secret-filled Sarah-Juno bond and all its intermingled loyalty and betrayal. They both have such ferocity to them, especially when they're pressed to their limits, and I love how brave and daring they both are. I'd love to see more of either of them, or of both of them together, and to see them confronting all different kinds of horror together.

Optional ships: Sarah/Juno, Sarah/Beth, Juno/Holly, weird noncon or dubcon with anyone/crawlers. References to past Sarah/Sarah's husband and Juno/Sarah's husband are totally fine.

* I absolutely would have watched a version of this movie without the monsters: the trapped-in-a-cave suspense is so terrifying and grueling. I'd love to see more of that, so if you want to do a canon-divergence AU where they wind up trapped but don't run into any cave-dwelling monsters, I'm so here for it. Stick them in the dark, give them rope-burned hands and broken bones, make me feel excruciating secondhand claustrophobia, show me them scrounging for mushrooms or fungus or slugs or eyeless fish to stay alive, and just generally make it agonizing. They can all get out—I love clever problem-solving—or one/some of them can, but they don't have to.

* Either Sarah or Juno (or both) survives inside the cave and is slowly (and unwillingly?) dragged into crawler society, such as it is. What's it like to be surrounded by people you can only perceive as grotesque horrors? Do they have to struggle to be seen as crawlers rather than prey? How do they earn respect? Do they eventually wind up getting worshiped by the crawlers? Do they acclimate to life underground so well that they eventually don't want to escape, or so well that they become the monsters to future cavers?

* Instead of caving, the group of friends agrees to a different kind of risky, thrill-seeking trip that comes with its own dangers (and maybe even with its own monsters). Do they wind up stranded in a snowy wasteland? In the desert? Halfway up a mountain that's nearly sheer rock? Do they—for a different direction—decide in a tongue-in-cheek way to take on a challenge to spend the night in a haunted house, just on the way to their real destination, only to find that they picked the wrong house and landed themselves in a nightmare? Or do they wind up stuck in their once-cozy rental cabin, besieged by mysterious creatures?

* Sarah dies in the accident too, but on a future caving trip, Juno encounters her ghost: some kind of spirit that only exists in dark, forgotten places. Is her ghost leading Juno on to her doom, like a will-o'-the-wisp luring her down tunnels she can't get out of? Or is she wistful and just wanting to reconnect? Or does she want to kill Juno for company rather than revenge?

* Instead of having an affair with Sarah's husband, Juno was having an affair with Sarah. The two of them eventually go off on a trip by themselves, but Sarah's grief and guilt flare up when she and Juno start being haunted by the ghosts of her husband and daughter.

* The unmapped cave keeps leading down deeper and deeper, until the group gets to a terrifying underground world, a buried cosmic horror, some crack in reality, etc., and Go Mad From the Revelation. Can they deal with it at all, even if they escape, or are they forever haunted by the knowledge of how thin and flimsy reality really is? Are they driven to go back to the cave?

* The monsters down in the cave are different monsters: creepy plants/fungi, tentacles/worms, living shadows activated by their lamps and torches, the sense of something breathing in the darkness, living rock where the cave tries to tighten up around them to swallow them whole ….



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.

Optional ships: Garraty/McVries. Discussion of past relationships is totally fine.

* 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.

* 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 ….



Monstrous Regiment - Terry Pratchett
Jack Jackrum

I love this novel in general, but I especially adore Jackrum: he's so pragmatic, skilled, clever, and protective of "little lads," and I love both the shrewd, tough, hard-bitten parts of him and his not-so-secret softer side. I would be so happy to see more Jackrum adventures of any stripe—pre-canon, post-canon, AU, anything. I also love his mentor-protégé relationship with Polly and how she's able to help him figure out how to best come back into his son's life.

I prefer he/him pronouns for Jackrum if it's later in his life and career, but I'm fine with him using she/her and/or they/them in earlier periods and the narrative reflecting that.

Optional Ships: Jackrum/Willie, Jackrum/any original character(s) of any gender.

* Jackrum is officially retired, but when Polly—or one of his other former lads—needs his help and considerable experience with a problem, adventure, or mission, of course he's going to help out. I'd love to see any post-canon adventures along this line, or just an old soldiers' reunion where Jackrum gets to meet up with some or all of the former Cheesemongers and catch up. What's it like to meet on a more equal footing, if they've been apart for years? If Jackrum does go on some kind of journey/adventure, what's it like getting back into the game after a couple peaceful years and maybe after a few more accumulated aches and pains?

* What's Jackrum's reunion with his son like? We know it obviously goes well enough to have the family portrait of him with his very pleased son, but I'd love to see his actual first meeting with his son, daughter-in-law, and grandkids. What's the relationship arc with him getting to know them better? If he moves in with them, what's it like settling down in this comfortable, stable domestic life after years and years of rough military service and lots of people flowing in and out of his life?

* I really like Jackrum's backstory with William, but I'd also love to see him having other romances or dalliances or just generally fucking around. (Porn is very welcome.) Is there a folk song—loaded with euphemisms—about what a legendary lover he is? Does he ever have another bittersweet romance that he has to end because he's not leaving the army? (With a civilian? With another soldier?) He's such a classic soldier archetype that I can totally buy him having a lot of admirers who hear "fat, gruff older man who's both protective and cunning" and are immediately and correctly here for it. Once he's settled down with his son and his son's family, does he ever eventually take a wife? I'm good with Jackrum's partner(s) being of any gender.

* I love when the Duchess comes into Wazzer and Jackrum immediately kneels to her, and she sees him so clearly and rewards him. Does she ever manifest herself to him again, in any other form? What if he'd had Froc's history with her, where they'd once shared a dance together? What if, at some point post-canon, the Duchess needs to co-share Jackrum's body briefly to get some task done?

* If you want to explore Jackrum's relationship to his own gender—to whatever extent he thinks about it—I'm very into that. How does his understanding of himself shift as time goes on? I feel like he wouldn't necessarily think about gender and transness in the exact ways and with the exact terms we use, and I'd love to see how he might understand himself and/or the various other AFAB soldiers he's known. (If you want to draw from RL history, I'd totally welcome that: I'm definitely interested in the various ways trans people in previous eras have thought and talked about their lives.)

* I'm totally here for seeing any of the various schemes, threats, and acts of blackmail Jackrum has to employ to stay in the army long after he officially "should have" retired. Obviously his knowledge of high command gives him useful leverage, but we also see him finesse Blouse with some very deliberate shaving, so he has plenty of other tricks up his sleeve. I'd love to see his problem-solving skills at work during a particularly close call where, for whatever reason, it's going to be hard for him to make use of anyone's secrets and he instead has to rely on clever and hot planning and/or violence.



Poirot - Agatha Christie
Jacqueline de Bellefort, Linnet Doyle

Jackie and Linnet only appear in Death on the Nile, a Poirot novel that can absolutely be read as an (excellent) standalone. This is one of my all-time favorite Agatha Christie novels—I love the setting, the incredibly clever murder plot, and the cast of characters. A big draw of the latter is the dark and complicated friends-to-enemies relationship between poorer Jackie and the fabulously wealthy Linnet. The love-hate vibes here are off the charts, and there are so many possibilities for backstory fic or AUs where their passions, obsessions, and decisions lead them in different directions. I love the sense of clear-headed fatalism, where they both deliberately make choices they can see will lead to real harm.

Optional ships: Linnet/Jackie. I'm fine with seeing either of them/Simon in the background.

* Anything darkly bittersweet and canon-compliant, where the shadow of Simon and accompanying doom hangs over everything. What were the earlier, happier days of their friendship like? Did their friendship sometimes include casual sex that they either minimized or didn't talk about? How might Jackie's passionate intensity and Linnet's selfishness and destructive "I know what's best" confidence have clashed before the novel even opened?

* AU where Linnet doesn't suddenly fall for Simon but for Jackie, and Simon wants Jackie to pursue her until Linnet remakes her will to leave Jackie everything? Maybe Jackie winds up genuinely loving Linnet more than Simon and scuppering the plan completely, and she and Linnet build a life together that may or may not ever involve mentioning the original murder idea. Maybe Jackie is prepared to go through with it, no matter how awful it is, but she has a hard time living with the aftermath. (I'll also take a No Homophobia AU where Linnet and Jackie can actually get married, and Simon has to pretend to be their stalker.) I don't even need a resolution—I would be just as happy with a dark snippet of Jackie/Linnet with Linnet not knowing the whole story and with Jackie herself uncertain of what's going to happen.

* AU where Jackie decides she can't go through with the plan after all, and she takes Poirot's warning and doesn't follow Simon and Linnet onto the boat. Maybe she sends an anonymous letter warning Linnet about her husband. Linnet might not believe it at the time, but then Simon dies trying to smuggle a cobra into a bed, paving the way for Jackie and Linnet to reunite as troubled friends or as a troubled couple with genuine feelings but the world's weirdest history.

* Jealous, bitter, guilty, fraught interactions during the stage where Linnet is slowly—she thinks—stealing Simon away from Jackie? Hatesex during this period?

* I like where Poirot points out to Linnet that there must have been a moment when she felt herself falling for Simon and first trying to attract him and she chose to give into it. What if there had been an earlier moment in her life when she'd felt that with Jackie, and—because it was the 1930s—she did stifle the urge? AU where she didn't, and they had a full-blown affair/relationship that actually worked out? Alternate version of the Nile cruise where they're just there on their own holiday, enjoying the scenery with no idea that things could have unfolded some other way?

* Peggy Sue fic! Jackie shoots herself at the end of the novel … and wakes up back when she first came to ask Linnet to do her a favor and hire Simon, and she decides to make things turn out differently this time ….

Comments

[radiantfracture]

The Long Walk - Stephen King

Love everything about this idea