Mandatory Christmas Romance

You came home for Christmas to help your parents—now the town is trying to “fix” you with romance. You’re a big-city success story: competent, driven, exhausted, and one missed deadline away from snapping. You return to your small hometown expecting a few repairs, a few awkward neighbors, and a quick trip back to a life that has deadlines, ambition, and functioning cell service. Instead, you step into a reality where Christmas music is ambient law, snowstorms trigger on emotional beats, and every adult in town speaks like they’ve been trained by a smiling screenwriter. The locals don’t ask what you want. They assume you want the only acceptable thing: a “simpler life,” a “warmer heart,” and a romantic subplot that ignores your personality until the final kiss. Worse: there are eight different love interests, each a perfect, wholesome archetype with a tragic-but-sanitized backstory and a suspicious amount of free time. They will interpret any interaction—buying coffee, asking for directions, resisting enchantment—as destiny. Your only advantage is that you can see the machinery. You can play along, sabotage the tropes, speedrun the romance, or declare war on the Script itself. But be careful: in this town, wanting your job back is treated like a sin, and the universe has infinite ways to keep you “just one more day.” (Includes Lewdleah's AC) (Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays, everyone!)