Chocolate Box 2021 Letter

[skazka]

Dear Chocolatier,

Every single year I go way overboard on letter-writing, so feel free to mix and match any of the points below. This year I'm focusing mostly on shippy prompts for these fandoms, but a wide range of stories will satisfy my shippy heart. Have fun and follow your bliss.

Likes:
- hookups coming before feelings
- one-night stands and anonymous sex turned not-so-anonymous
- loving but deeply weird relationships
- pining, whether requited or unrequited, especially mutual pining or pining between characters who are sexually intimate but for whatever reason not "together"
- ghosts, monsters, the supernatural
- loyalty kink, either big gestures or low-key loyal doting
- Pining and characters doing deeply strange things due to pining
- Complicated feelings -- characters who can't say or even think the truth about how they feel, tongue-tied lovers, pining, love/hate, enemies-to-lovers, enemies-to-friends-to-lovers, lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers-again, etc.
- Film noir tropes and AUs (hardboiled narration, doom and double-crosses, femmes fatales, a gunsel or two…)
- any other kind of genre fusion -- campy 80s slasher horror? Summer camp romp? 90s YA novel? Gothic horror?
- Fucked-up courtships -- mind games, fighting as foreplay, surveillance and obsessions from afar, villains in love with heroes and vice versa. This can be silly (think Kate Beaton's Nemesis comics) or more serious.
- Noncon and dubcon -- power plays, trying to bargain for advantages or escape worse consequences using sex, trying to defuse a dangerous situation using sex, fights and captivity scenarios that take a bad turn, villain-on-hero noncon.
- shady pasts and dark backstories piercing into the characters' present-day experiences
- parental hangups
- religion as a complex and positive/limiting/ambivalent presence in characters' lives; religious traditions; religious identity
- secret meetings and trysts; urgent and exhilarating relationships
- road trips
- partners in crime
- hurt/comfort and whump (especially bad guys needing to accept comfort/assistance)
- murder
- fuckups in love; doing your beloved's dirty work; cruel kindnesses; collaborating on schemes
- always-a-girl genderswap (especially when leading to butch characters and f/f pairings -- I'd especially love this for Shoshanna/Marcel, Hap/Leonard, and Mink/the Dane)

I'm down for crossovers/fusions, AUs of all kinds (especially high-concept/fanciful/historical AUs), and unusual formats, whatever that may mean to you. There's no specific art prompts in this letter because I've never figured out how to do that, but I'd love art treats if something sparks your imagination! I am open for aAny art style and any format: I'd love to see horror art, smutty drawings, or domestic snapshots if you're down for that, and historical AUs/historical outfits will always delight me -- Regency! medieval! ancient Rome! 1940s! -- and any kind of genre pastiche mentioned above.

I love fic with trans characters, especially if characters retain their canon genders as trans people (trans dude Marcel, trans woman Shoshanna). This as well as traditional genderswaps can be total freebies on top of any other AUs or plots too.

Kinks: size differences, age differences, partially-clothed or mostly-clothed sex, oral sex, handjobs, frottage, intercrural, breast worship, rough sex, characters who kink on violence (gunplay, face-slapping, beating the hell out of each other or getting beaten up, etc.), hatesex, casual fuckbuddies, sex for comfort and solace, funny goofy fail!sex, dramatic dysfunctional fail!sex, historical sexual practices and meeting places, fancy clothes and dressing/undressing, one-night stands and one-night stands that turn into something more, and for more antagonistic ships, noncon/dubcon. (For less antagonistic ships, I like "bad guys made them do it" scenarios and rape trauma aftermath, as well as a character expecting the other party to exploit them for sex only to be surprised when they treat them decently.)


DNWs:

High school AUs; post-apocalyptic AUs; omegaverse/BDSMverse-type AUs; urban fantasy werewolf tropes (mates, alphas, etc.); RL crises and current events; self-harm; eating disorders; child sexual abuse; unrequested incest; fic with a central focus on gender dysphoria, misgendering, or coming-out; feminization as a kink; mpreg; PIV sex with transmasculine characters receiving. I'd rather not read explicit sex with characters under 16. General teen romance and allusions to teens having sex, masturbating, or otherwise being sexually aware is fine.

In general, however, I'm comfortable receiving fic that includes or touches on other heavy topics -- corruption, abuse, misogyny, homophobia, horrors of war, etc. You don't have to strive to include them out of obligation but you're not required to avoid them either.



Edward, Edward - Lolah Burford
Edward Clare Armstrong/Marion Alleyn

- Edward seeking out Marion to deflower him before his dad can; Marion finding out about that particular motivation and feeling weird about it.
- Edward accidentally runs away to sea in the process of trying to liberate Marion from the Royal Navy.
- More sexually fraught hazing at school -- "undergraduates made them do it" forced sex? Marion having sex with Edward, or Edward having sex with Marion, to save him from somebody else doing it instead?
- Marion and Edward vs. libertines! I know Marion canonically takes a rather blasé attitude toward [gestures at the Earl of Tyne] but every Georgian-Regency canon needs its characters to fuck over shitty rich thrill-seekers, however you choose to interpret that "versus".
- Hurt/comfort where Edward manages to save Marion from his canon doom but there's a lot of misery and brow-mopping and feverishness anyway.

Bonus smut prompts: flogging, caning, birching; hickeys and bruises; sexual possessiveness; sexual initiation; fingerfucking; object insertion; noncon/dubcon/consensual somnophilia; religious motifs in the bedroom; politics in the bedroom; Regency dudes in just their shirts. Canon levels of Edward/Holland are 100% requested and on the table here, as is canon Holland/Marion.

*

Hap & Leonard (TV)
- Hap Collins/Leonard Pine
- I'm an extremely simple soul, I would love them sharing a bed or any other kind of sleeping space. Wild emotionally complicated pining (especially from Hap, who does wildly emotionally complicated pining very prettily) a bonus.
- What's the first time like when the two of them cross the boundary from friends to lovers? Are the two of them capable of an encounter that doesn't involve a full-scale revamp of their relationship? With these two I'd be perfectly happy to read fic where sexual intimacy doesn't come into play as well as fic that acknowledges Hap isn't really Leonard's type, but I'd love anything that acknowledges they're getting older and they've experienced so much together that friendship is hardly an incomplete state for them.
- Accidental baby/child/surly teenager acquisition -- I loved the bits of s2 where the two of them are keeping track of Ivan, and anything with the two of them having to look after a young person and try their best in the process would thrill me.
- Soulmates of the "reincarnated across the centuries together" variety -- is it always tragedy that ties them together in whatever place and time they turn up next? Is Leonard always a soldier?
- Casefic of any neo-noir flavor; if you're not interested in or up to a whole fake case, just a glimpse at these two doing their impromptu off-the-grid investigation shit together would make me really happy.
- Futurefic with Hap and Leonard getting interviewed for a documentary/retrospective federal inquiry/true crime podcast about some of the shit they've seen. None of the listeners can tell what relationship these two old guys are supposed to have.

Fandom-specific DNW/caveat: I'm a huge fan of Florida, and I was really broken-hearted about the ending of s3, so please don't knock Florida or use her fate to get Hap and Leonard together. If you want to write a straight-up AU where she's fine, I'd love you for it, but it's not an obligation. I would also prefer no central plot focus on antiblack racism or police violence; dealing with its obvious presence in canon is fine, as is having it as the focus of the documentary/podcast/etc. in the last prompt, just nothing new in that vein happening to Leonard on the page.

Bonus smut prompts: First-time bottoming; desperate bad-idea clothes-coming-off-in-a-flash sex; sex in inconvenient/nostalgic/fraught/semi-public situations; glad-to-be-alive sex; sex when they're both pining for different people in addition to one another.

*

Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Shoshanna/Marcel
- Things go slightly differently off-kilter in the final theater showdown (still killing all those Nazis, though) and Marcel and Shoshanna get to ride off into the sunset together… and now what?
- Shoshanna and Marcel bonding over film -- the 1930s and 1940s film love in IB gives me a lot of joy and I'd love a little more of that for the two of them. Or bonding over the hard work of operating a cinema together; what makes Marcel so good at his job?
- Pre-canon moments of tenderness between them -- how did they first get together? How did Marcel learn Shoshanna's history? What's Marcel's own history with shitty regimes?
- Epistolary or historical-retrospective-style writing about their relationship set within the post-canon universe of the film where these two are integral to the downfall of Nazism.
- A post-fix-it reunion where both of them, having been fully prepared to die in the cinema plot, end up surviving and having emotionally complicated feelings about it all.

Fandom-specific DNW: I don't want any retcons/fix-its of the film's ending that involve Hitler et al. surviving. Feel free to save the Basterds, Bridget, Shoshanna, Marcel, etc. but the Nazi characters need to stay dead.

Bonus smut prompts: fully-clothed or partly-clothed sex; having sex in the projection room/theater (or would they never dare?); oral sex; long lazy rounds of sex; fervent urgent hurried sex.

*

The King (2019)
Henry V/Falstaff
- Once Henry's king, Falstaff becomes his favorite in the medieval-monarch sense -- meaning other people can't be too happy about it. Does Hal ever reflect on the bleak recent history for medieval monarchs' particular friends?
- Mutual crazy pining! Hard mode: mutual crazy pining for each other despite the fact that they're actively having sex the whole time, they just assume it means something different to each of them.
- Falstaff is always a daddy bear, but this Falstaff is especially a daddy bear, and I would love any fic that relishes attention on those size and age differences.
- Prince Hal-era daddy issues all over the place -- what does Falstaff understand about Hal's relationship with his father? How does it impact their relationship?
- Hal suffering beautifully: whump, emotional anguish, hurt/comfort, fever, needing to accept care from Falstaff or wanting Falstaff with him when he's hurting.

Fandom-specific DNWs: demonization of Richard II; unrequested Richard II/Hal; Henry IV/Hal taking place or initiating when Hal is younger than 16. (If you otherwise want to add bonus tragic dysfunctional father-son incest, latent or otherwise, to any of the above prompts, feel free and consider this requested.)

Bonus smut prompts: sexual crying; medieval bathhouse sex; three-ways turning into the two of them boning while the third party watches and gets off; sexual fantasies; furtive quiet sex.

*

Miller's Crossing (1990)
Eddie Dane/Mink Larouie
- Themes of jealousy -- has Mink always known that the Dane's jealousy is potentially dangerous? Is jealousy an element of their relationship before Bernie enters into it?
- How did these two find each other? I would love any kind of noir-inflected get-together for the two of them. Is Mink an outsider to this milieu, or did he and the Dane have a previous acquaintance?
- What if the Dane gets to Mink before Bernie can bump him off? What kind of confrontation or reconciliation might result?
- Their relationship seems to be something of an open secret among the higher ranks of organized crime -- what are their interactions like in public settings, or when they know they're being observed?

Bonus smut prompts: The capacity for physical violence as a turn-on; Mink running his mouth during sex or alternately shutting up for the first time; high sex; semi-public sex; hand and finger kink.

*

Pilgrimage (2017)
Brother Diarmuid/Raymond de Merville
- Raymond makes Diarmuid his concubine and takes him back to England (or France) by force.
- Conversely, Raymond makes Darmuid his """"""personal chaplain"""" and takes him back to England (or France) by force.
- Something with the scene between the two of them in the woods going further in a rapey direction.
- Any kind of weird hostage situation where Raymond begins to feel grudging affection/protectiveness for Diarmuid and hates it. (Whether or not Diarmuid starts to feel a reciprocal obligation toward his captor, and especially if not.)
- Hurt-comfort with Raymond giving Diarmuid medical attention, or vice versa. (I love Diarmaid and Ciaran's interest in herbalism in canon, so feel free to draw that out.)


Brother Diarmuid/The Mute
- First-time road trip sex on the way back to the monastery! Classic for a reason. These two are absolutely aching with loyalty kink and I am fine with any kind of fix-it for the Mute's canon doom or just a lot of moody foreshadowing on the way out of the monastery.
- Role-reversal where the Mute is the established presence at the monastery and Diarmuid is the newcomer.
- Diarmuid and the Mute bonding over monastic tasks -- I love the scene of them collecting seaweed and shellfish together in canon and would love anything that deals with the ubiquity of really hard work in monastic life.
- What are some of the dangerous things the Mute has agreed to do for the monks? What are some of the difficult things? How does Diarmuid feel about these things?
- A number of medieval penitentials aimed at a religious audience treat virginity as a state that can be reclaimed through abstinence and repentance, maybe more like a modern writer would use "chastity" as a state that can be broken and then returned to through hard work over the course of years; so what I'm saying is, the Mute's been revirginated, and I want fic about that. Either in a silly vein -- it's been so long and he's striven so hard to put his past life from his mind that he's sort of forgotten what sex can be like -- or in a serious vein, where his past sexual behaviors have been genuinely pretty horrible, but he has to build a new pattern that strikes a balance between total lack of restraint and total enforced celibacy.

Fandom-specific DNW: Jewish!Mute except in AUs that take him out of the Crusades-era Christian monastic backdrop. If the Mute is Jewish in an early 13th century setting, but not a Crusader/not with a cross tattoo/not working for a Catholic monastery, that's fine. I understand Diarmuid to be roughly as old as his actor at the time of filming, and so over 18, but I'm fine with any age depiction where he's post-pubescent and not explicitly described as under 16. Mentions of the specter of inappropriate sexual conduct between older and younger monks are ok as a fact of monastic life and something against which the Rule of St. Benedict hedges, but I would prefer no mentions of institutional abuse of younger monastic characters, including Diarmuid.

Bonus smut prompts: Size kink; clothed/mostly-clothed sex; intercrural sex; handjobs; casual homosocial bed-sharing (or forbidden, taboo bed-sharing) as a prelude to sex; all kinds of medieval sodomy hangups; surprisingly rough sex; surprisingly gentle sex; kissing and embracing as plausible-deniability foreplay; for Diarmuid/the Mute, nonverbal enthusiastic consent; for Raymond/Diarmuid, language kink and verbal humiliation.

*

HBO Rome (TV)
Mark Antony/Julius Caesar
- Ritual sex for whatever purpose. (Secret Lupercalia ritual sex?) Even if the purpose is "Antony thinks it's funny and Caesar thinks it's good optics".
- Caesar topping from the bottom and scaring the bejeesus out of Antony in the process.
- One-sided or mutual sex pollen -- Caesar helping Antony through it with absolute efficiency? Antony having way too much fun at his boss' expense?
- Cock and ball torture! Just do terrible things to Antony's dick and have him enjoy every second of it.
- Incredible fucked-up but tender pining where Antony wants Caesar so damn bad but has to play it cool and isn't certain if Caesar is remotely interested? Incredible fucked-up but vaguely benevolent pining where Caesar wants to fuck Antony incredibly bad but wants him to make the first move for whatever reason? You decide!

Bonus smut prompts: facefucking; intercrural sex; Antony being a cheerful pig for various kinds of degradation and punishment; Antony being a joyfully nasty top; Caesar being authoritative no matter what role he's in; cock and ball torture; ancient Roman sex hangups.

*

Sweet Smell Of Success (1957)
J.J. Hunsecker/Sidney Falco

- What favor did Sidney do for J.J. that was too far, even for him? (I'd rather it weren't just Falco having sex with Hunsecker in exchange for tips; that can be part of it, but I'd rather the line being crossed be something more)
- J.J. takes Sidney under his wing, maybe in an AU where the gambit to separate Susie and Dallas succeeds uncommonly well or at some earlier point of divergence in their relationship; Sidney feels like a kept boy and hates it, even as he benefits from it
- Does Hunsecker have a background in show business, if he's nominally writing about the arts? Does Falco ever needle him about it?
- Falco survives the film's ending and the two of them end up in a deeply bitter relationship full of dependence and jealousy.
- What does Falco make of Hunsecker's attachment to his sister? Is he ever bold enough to float the word "incest"? (Consider J.J./Susie's weird vibes firmly requested in this case.)

Bonus smut prompts: J.J. making Falco crawl to him, metaphorically or literally; anonymous and faux-anonymous meetings; closetedness; tearooms and cottaging; face-slapping; rough body play; verbal humiliation; sexual humiliation.

*

The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
Dr. Henry Jekyll/Edward Hyde

- I'm obsessed with the weird interpersonal dynamics in wealthy respectable hypocrite Jekyll putting off his secret shameful pleasures into the person of young ruffian Hyde, and I'd love anything where the very Victorian ethical snarls and implicit perversities in that dynamic get unpacked.
- What kind of messes is Jekyll stuck cleaning up after before Hyde's misbehavior gets to the point of attempted murder -- or after? What might Hyde do to both spite and gratify his counterpart, and vice-versa?
- Jekyll succeeds in separating his baser impulses from his loftier ones and manifesting Hyde as an entirely separate physical entity in whose experiences he can share, but as things go downhill they're less and less capable of being physically separated from one another. Tl;dr, proximity soulbonds with your own evil double. (Though being soulbonded to Jekyll can be no great shakes for Hyde, either -- if you write Hyde POV, I will be eternally grateful.)
- I’m intrigued by the prospect of Edward Hyde taking on a bit of a consciousness of his own with a distinct chip on his shoulder about his more respectable counterpart — how do you fuck with (or fuck) somebody you can’t share the same space with?
- Jekyll transforms back and is faced with evidence of his counterpart’s sexual activity

Smut-specific prompts: Jekyll vicariously enjoying being fucked by men through Hyde; internalized homophobia/general sexual repression; fin de siecle cruising spots and sex scandals; apparent age/size/class differences; guilty masturbation.

Fandom-specific quibbles, not quite DNWs: My two big fandom-specific wonks here are that I'd prefer for Hyde's physical appearance to remain in line with the book's descriptions (small, young, knuckly, and inherently wrong somehow in a way that makes viewers profoundly uncomfortable -- does Jekyll see him that way?) rather than the visual shorthand of obvious monstrousness that enters in with later adaptations, and that I'd prefer no OC het love interests after the mold of later adaptations either, ex. a Bad Girl sex worker who's inevitably brutalized by Hyde and/or a virginal lady love for Jekyll. Feel free to include female OCs/liaisons and relationships with women or explore the canonical female characters, I'd just like to sidestep the conventional use of OFCs to prop up the personas' respective goodness/badness.


Wolf Hall Series - Hilary Mantel
Thomas Cromwell/Thomas Wolsey

- Pre-great-matter Cromwell/Wolsey where Cromwell expresses, or maybe more represses, his feelings through the medium of doing Wolsey's dirty work.
- Sexy Tudor murder mystery -- somebody gets bumped off (one of the Cardinal's other henchmen? someone involved with monastic dissolutions?) and Cromwell acts as Wolsey's agent to solve it.
- On the other end of the plottiness spectrum I would absolutely kill for any moment of unresolved tension between these two from any moment in their relationship, whether either of them is conscious that what they're feeling is romantic or not. Loyalty kink, general affection and concern,
- Dreams and ghosts -- especially if they fuck with Cromwell's developing Protestant theology, or toe the line between horny and surreal.
- I'm open to film noir AUs for any fandom this year but I'd especially love a film noir riff on these two, either the two of them entangled in a noir-inflected take on Wolsey's canon downfall or a 20th century (midcentury? post-Golden Age, neo-noir?) remix.

Henry VIII/Thomas Cromwell

- Queasy loyalty kink set during one of those times where Cromwell is riding high in Henry's favor -- this could take any form but I'd be especially interested in the kind of public gesture other people are bound to witness and scrutinize, or its aftermath.
- Cromwell having to navigate Henry's prudishness about sex yoked to Henry's debilitatingly intense experiences of sexual desire -- either third-wheeling Henry's desire for Anne or lawyering his way around sodomy. This is a pairing with a lot of baggage for both parties around sexuality and sodomy so I'd be happy with any level of explicitness here, down to just fraught sexual tension that never goes anywhere physically.
- Nocturnal visits getting weird -- another dream Cromwell does his best to interpret? Henry amusing himself by showing up unannounced?
- Anything incorporating the bonkers traditions around gift-giving, hospitality, and the semi-formalized exchanging of Valentines -- Cromwell doing Henry's bidding by acting as Mary's valentine, or Henry's gifts toward Cromwell taking on a possessive tinge?
- Anything with Henry's various ailments/disabilities and horror of disease, or conversely, anything with Cromwell's Italian fever making an inconvenient recurrence.

Bonus smut prompts: rules-lawyering your way through sodomy; fully-clothed or partially-clothed sex; erotically charged dressing and undressing; failing to undress from your massive Tudor outfit fast enough so you ruin your codpiece; men wearing just their shirts for sexual activity; sexually-repressed but sexually charged physical interactions with ostensibly innocent motivations; affection and horniness for scarred/hairy/burly/heavy/old bodies.