Shhh

stursia + romance tropes

bonus:

I mean, is it weird that all of the live-action characters are white, and all of the non-white actors are CG? And so then, the only actual human faces we see on camera are white faces.

I desperately need Carol and Zosia in a Traitors AU, obviously with Carol as a Faithful and Zosia as a Traitor.

I have the whole plot lined up but since I literlly can't write fics I am going to leave it here just in case anyone wants to do something about it.

Carol is a newly widowed romance-fantasy author who is still grieving her wife and regretting never coming out publicly. They signed her up for the game low-key as a joke when Helen was still alive, but also because Helen thought it would be a good marketing strategy for her book sales. When Carol receives the call from the production a few days after Helen’s accident, she doesn’t have it in her to refuse, because in some way it feels like she owes it to her late wife.

Carol is not exactly a good team player, mostly because she doesn’t trust anyone, her attitude paints her as suspicious in the eyes of the other contestants. This is why she comes close to banishment in the first two rounds of voting. She soon proves that she is actually great at catching clues and noticing details that could help the Faithfuls catch the Traitors.

Zosia is picked by the production basically because she looks exactly like a gender-swapped version of Raban - the male love interest from Carol's books - but when they actually get to know her, they see how charismatic she can be and how her sweet façade makes her the perfect Traitor.

She is the first (and only) person Carol bonds with in the game. At first, it’s mostly a trauma bond because they end up together in a very stressful and scary situation during one of the missions, it's dark, claustrophobic, Carol feels like she can't breathe but Zosia is there to help her get through it. By the end of the mission Carol instinctively hugs her. And as the game goes on, they start getting closer, in a way that feels like something beyond the game, to the point that Carol ends up trusting Zosia, blindly, never even thinking to question her gameplay.

The day Zosia gets banished, Carol is one of the very few who doesn’t write down her name, and the moment Zosia gets up and reveals her role as a Traitor, Carol feels betrayed, as if everything they shared was nothing but an act to manipulate her and win the game.

Hurt and betrayed, Carol is determined to win, and she teams up with the only other contestant who had been playing individually, Manusos. They make it to the end, but they lose to Kusimayu, who had been flying under the radar since the beginning and was recruited after Zosia’s elimination as a last-minute Traitor.

After they leave the castle, Zosia tries to reach out to Carol and explain her reasons, how it wasn’t just a game for her, and as much as Carol tries to avoid her, they are eventually forced to meet up when the show finally airs and the cast has to attend events to promote it.

Week by week, Carol watches her interactions with Zosia on TV, trying to see what went wrong, how she missed that she was being played by a Traitor. She feels naïve, but the more she watches the show the more question herself, especially when she sees Zosia shielding her from murder multiple times in the turret, or when she hears her talk about her in the confessionals, and how their interactions, when they thought no one was watching, actually seem genuine. And she starts missing her.

It’s the end of the world As we know it And I feel f…

What did Helen think of my Wycaro books? She thought they were…harmless. Harmless? "Cotton candy" was the phrase she used in her mind. Mostly.