Chocolate Box Exchange Letter

[thrillingdetectivetales]

Howdy, hi, and hello fellow Chocolatier!

Thank you for participating in Chocolate Box! It's my first year participating and I'm very looking forward to it. I hope you are too! To make your life a little easier, I’ve compiled a couple of general lists of my favorite tropes and my DNW’s for easy perusal, with fandom-specific requests underneath. (If all of this sounds familiar, it's because I've found it's most effective to recycle the letters I've written for other challenges rather than writing new ones every time I sign up for a thing.)

YES-PLEASES

• friends-to-lovers
• getting together fic
• didn’t know they were dating
• fake/pretend relationships
• werewolves/shapeshifter AUs
• soulmate AUs
• person questioning/figuring out their sexuality (whether vanilla “I never thought I wasn’t straight until now” all the way to “turns out I’m really into being sexually submissive in a very kinky way, who knew?”)
• building queer communities
• experienced characters showing inexperienced characters the ropes (metaphorically, or literally if you want to go the bondage route ;) )
• character wrestling with their sexuality/religion
• praise kink
• d/s dynamics (not TPE)

DO-NOT-WANTS

• major focus on character death
• non-canon/unrequested character death in general
• graphic depictions of torture/injury
• A/B/O
• pregnancy/mpreg
• non-canon child characters/kidfic
• scat/watersports
• slave!fic
• infidelity
• treating female characters as villains/ malicious hindrances to queer male romance
• infantilazation (including daddy kink)
• pedophilia
• explicit non-con/rape*
• vore
• fat-shaming
• degrading dirty talk (i.e.: "You're a filthy little slut" etc.)
• somnophilia/paralysis
• necrophilia
• modern AUs of period media
• gay bashing
• human furniture
• leather kink

Most other stuff is fair game. If you have a question about a particular trope/kink/topic, I’m always open to answering questions.

*Dub-con, of the flavor where a character is unsure but willing to go with it, or like, sex-pollen/drunk/etc. variety is fine, so long as there's not explicit focus on someone feeling taken advantage of.

Alright! Now let’s get on the fandom specific requests, shall we? (I’m pretty open to whatever at the end of the day, so long as enough legwork/worldbuilding/character development has been done to make me believe that a certain scenario would actually happen, so feel free to use the below as guidelines more than strict rules.)

GRIMM: Juliette Silverton/Rosalee Calvert, Monroe/Nick Burkhardt/Rosalee Calvert

For Juliette/Rosalee: Instead of pushing Juliette to recover her memories of him, Nick gives her space, and in her efforts to figure stuff out Juliette meets Rosalee, who's just arrived to town, and they fall in love. Complete AU where Juliette and Rosalee meet when Juliette comes looking for a holistic solution for a veterinary patient. Nick breaks up with Juliette like his aunt told him to well before Magique poisons her and Juliette goes to Seattle to clear her head, where she meets Rosalee and, as you may have, guessed, they fall in love!

For Monroe/Nick/Rosalee: Juliette doesn't remember Nick so he lets her move on with her life, and Monroe and Rosalee (who are dating and very happy) hang out with him a lot and do their best to help him not be depressed forever and eventually realize that they're definitely dating him. Five times Nick was mistaken for Monroe and/or Rosalee's boyfriend before they realized they were all dating. Just general polyamory negotiations. Monroe loves Rosalee but he also loves Nick, and while Rosalee and Nick don't love each other that way, they're more than happy to do the "this is my boyfriend's girlfriend/boyfriend" thing and bro down in the meantime. Really, honestly, whatever, this OT3 is just so underrated and I love it so much.

LETTERKENNY: Betty-Anne/Mary-Anne, Bonnie McMurray/Katy, Daryl/Wayne, Jonesy/Reilly

For Betty-Anne/Mary-Anne: They claim it's just hate-fucking but everybody else can see that they're totally in love. Betty-Anne (or Mary-Anne) starts dating some girl and doesn't understand why her dynamic with Mary-Anne (or Betty-Anne), which has always been playfully antagonistic, suddenly feels legitimately hurtful (hint: it's good old fashioned gay jealousy). One of them plays on a different team and they have a fun sort of sexy on-ice rivalry that eventually becomes an actual relationship. The first Valentine's Day they spend together is a matter of circumstance (away game, just got broken up with, etc.) but by the fourth or fifth they realize they've been dating for years.

For Bonnie/Katy: Bonnie is sick of all the dudes in town hitting on her so she enlists Katy as her fake girlfriend because she knows Katy is bi and while they’re pretending she figures out some stuff about herself. Katy just wants to have a little fun after the whole debacle with Dierks and she and Bonnie start up a friends-with-benefits thing that turns real. (I think it's becoming pretty clear that I have a thing for idiots who don't realize they're in love jumping into bed first and/or just not realizing that they're together and have been forever.) Alternately, Katy decides to be single for awhile after the Dierks thing and spends a lot of time with Bonnie that she thinks is platonic but turns out to be totally dating.

For Daryl/Wayne: After he learns some stuff from Dax and Ron at the Valentine's speed dating event, Daryl starts to wonder about some things, and when he goes out to explore them Wayne gets jealous (which basically everyone expected and nobody is surprised by except Wayne and Daryl themselves). After Marie-Fred, and with Rosie still in the city, Daryl is just sort of...there for Wayne in his depression. He doesn't mean to start basically doing couples things and basically dating him, but here they are and he can't bring himself to regret so he just does't say anything and neither does Wayne but damned if it ain't working out anyway. When Daryl gets really, really, really drunk he likes to rub his nipples on people and it probably shouldn't turn Wayne on as much as it does when he's the person in question.

For Jonesy/Reilly: Reilly and Jonesy get mistaken for a couple and then have to keep up the charade as LGBT hockey ambassadors (and fall in love for real/realize they've been doing this thing for real for a long time, as it turns out). The whole town thinks Reilly and Jonesy are dating and when one of them goes out on a date with someone else, everyone in Letterkenny comes to the other with veiled (or not-so-veiled) offers to take action on their behalf. Sick of watching these idiots not realize they're in love, someone (Katy, Ron & Dax, fuck even Coach) works to get 'em together, but it turns out Reilly and Jonesy are dumber about it than they expected. Reilly and Jonesy are in a bit of a rut with snipe-hunting so they decide to lend each other a hand because they're desperate, and then because it's convenient, and then because it turns out they like it.

SCHITT'S CREEK: Alexis Rose/Twyla Sands, Alexis Rose/Stevie Budd

For Alexis/Twyla: Alexis decides to seduce Twyla to get back at Mutt for something but it turns out she really likes her; Klair is Alexis's ex and when she comes to down Alexis claims that Twyla is her girlfriend to save face, cue fake-dating; canon divergence where the Roses didn't lose all their money but Alexis ends up in Schitt's Creek anyway because she needs a break from her life and she and Twyla have a Lifetime movie romance.

For Alexis/Stevie: Even though she stays in Schitt's Creek, Stevie winds up in New York all the time for Rosebud Motel Group business meetings and she and Alexis figure out after several visits that they've totally been dating; future!fic of a Rose family Christmas party (smaller affairs with people the Roses actually care about but no less extravagant) where Alexis and Stevie finally get together after their relationship has had time to develop; see the above Lifetime movie prompt for Alexis/Twyla and make it Alexis/Stevie instead; or turn it on its head and have Stevie leaving Schitt's Creek because she wants to see the world and running across Alexis Rose, who she turns out to have a startling connection with.

(Please no hating on Ted in any of these. Things didn't work out with him and Alexis, which sucks, but I'm super not here for ship bashing.)

Hopefully that gives you a pretty good idea of what I enjoy. I know I listed quite a few tropes and plots but honestly, totally mundane curtain fic is good too, so long as everyone is having a good time. If you'd like to check out past letters I've written for other exchanges, you can peruse my "letters to nonny" tag.

Thanks again and happy writing!
-Tec