#the intial vibe: comedy

[woonderfullie]

Look the thought of nearly every adult that knew the Phantomhive twins pre-terrible month knowing that O!Ciel was an imposter from the beginning but just not saying anything is just a vibe to me.

[found--family]

So I have a few weeks until my new job starts and I want to work on something in that time. I'm not sure what I feel like writing (I'm kinda in hibernation bc it's winter rn and the last time I felt motivated to write was on-the-job in summer). I have dozens of wips and outlines to choose from but these ones are top of the pile bc they're fun..

[1] Nursery AU: Paradise Nursery

Dean is grieving his recently deceased mother. He's in his early 30s and was her carer for the better part of a decade; he has no friends and no life to turn to for comfort or distraction. He needs a new job and to learn to navigate his loneliness. He ends up working at the garden nursery where his mom worked decades ago. Dean meets Cas and falls for him but also makes new friends in Charlie and Jo and Bobby and others.

Cas is the newly appointed manager of Paradise Nursery™ and he's not enjoying it; he misses the small minutia of everyday plantcare and loathes the pressure, office-based and people-interactive duties, and trying to find a buyer for the business his father left him in charge of. Cas is a single parent to Jack and guardian to Claire and gave up on finding love long ago, instead focusing on his children and the work he's passionate about. But then he meets their newest seasonal hire Dean who becomes a bright spot in Cas' workday.

As they become tentative friends and try to suss out whether their feelings are mutual and how to go about them, Dean is dealing with his problematic father while Cas is dealing with his arch nemesis - fresh-cut flower farm owner Crowley - who wants to purchase Paradise to eliminate Cas as a competitor while expanding his own empire.

Boss/Employee. Mutual Pining. Alternating POV. Misunderstandings. Familiar Faces and Friendship. Slow Burn (legit). Strangers to Friends to Lovers.

A/N: this one is close to my heart as it's inspired by my own experiences; every day I worked I was inspired to write something for these two. Still not sure whether to keep this one contained at the nursery or follow Dean as the season dies off and he finds work elsewhere? Endings are hard and I'm still living mine, so.

[2] Dan In Real Life AU: Here Comes The Sun

Based on the movie but with its own flavour. Dean is a late-30s widowed songwriter and single father to young Audrey. The whole extended family is spending two weeks at Grandma Mildred's lake house for some quality time together before Autumn settles in. On his solo drive to the house, Dean meets Cas. There's chemistry and Dean thinks maybe there's something between them.. but he arrives at the house to discover Cas is dating his oldest friend Benny. Things are rocky at first but during their time together Dean and Cas grow closer until they can't deny their feelings any longer.

This one has intial Cas/Benny with some open relationship vibes but also cheating. Still trying to decide whether to write some explicit Cas/Benny scenes. The plot is heavily inspired by the movie but goes its own way. The whole two weeks will be covered day and night with alternating POV but mostly Dean and Cas.

RomCom with Family Dynamics. Lots of Familiar Faces. Papa!Dean. Alternating POV. Mutual Pining. UST. Strangers to Lovers. Happy Ending (for everyone, I promise).

A/N: I started writing this in.. 2020? It was my comfort fic but life changed so much that year I just couldn't stick with it. I've tried going back to it multiple times but kept getting caught up on how to finish the next chapter. I've done a bunch of art for this and would love to get it finished, but there's a lot of plot to still figure out (sometimes filler stuff, sometimes main events of the day).

[3] Movie AUs: numerous!

I love subpar action comedies (and romcoms) because they're such easy fic fodder for Destiel. Simple, readymade, perfect practice for writers to work on our skills but don't have the time or brain capacity to work on plot.

I have outlines of a few I really want to Destielify: The Lost City (a fun little adventure with unique plot I'd love to give our guys), Knight and Day (made before algorithms it's overlong and full of secondary locations - better off as fic), Red Notice (terrible twists but it had some fun ideas so I'd tweak the plot in various ways), Ghosted (subpar with bare bones I'd like to put a bit of meat on), Quantum of Solace (the most straight-forward Bond flick, a filler in the franchise and easiest to create a standalone au with).

A/N: if you haven't checked out SPNMediaBigBang go do that now. I'm terrible at bangs but I'd love to write a few fun movie fics and post chapters every week.

[4] Gotham Knights AU: make it Destiel

(GK being cancelled is another blow for queer rep and spncast stans but I hope it motivates fans to create more fic for this awesome show!)

The AU I've been working on is 'inspired by' not straight copy. It features batman-inspired Dean and harvey dent-inspired Cas with turner-inspired Jack.

Cas goes from being Jack's uncle to his guardian after his father was killed by the city's vigilante saviour The Hunter - who Jack once idolised but now thinks is a villain; naive Jack is out for revenge, to reveal The Hunter as a badguy and see him taken down. And he's not the only one looking for The Hunter's true identity. Meanwhile, friends and longtime mutual piners Dean and Cas finally act on their feelings for each other - but then shit goes down.

Friends to Lovers. Guardian/Single Dad Cas. Vigilante Dean. Heroes & Villains. Mutual Pining.

A/N: I started drafting the outline for this halfway through s1 of GK. It utilizes the darker vibes we get from Jack in season 14, which I love. And no, it's not related to my Destiel AU gifset series, sorry!

⮑ with all that in mind..

[misscrawfords]

3 or 4 families in a seaside town...

I get big Emma vibes from Hometown Cha Cha Cha. Honestly, kdramas in general I feel have a lot in common with the plots of historical Western romantic comedies - it's something I find very interesting - but that's a tangent for now. But this show has a very particular vibe.

The thing that most strikes me is the setting. Both Hometown and Emma rely on the location of a small town to provide the basis of its characters and plots. Both Highbury and Gongjin are almost an extra character in their importance. The nature of the small town provides a reason for the characters to be there and gives them a strict hierarchy within village life. In Highbury, the relative class status between the Woodhouses, Westons, Knightleys, Coles, Goddards, Elliots etc. is key to the plot. In the same way, society in Gongjin is also highly structed from village chief to restaurant owners to landlords to grandmas and then to the incomers who are Hyejin and Miseon, the film crew, the actors, the pervert etc.

The other aspect of the small town location that is so similar between the two works is the aspect of a community knowing everything about each other, gossip, and care. In Gonjin, gossip forms the backbone of the community's life, including making things very awkward for Hyejin while also being used as a vehicle to hint at and resolve mysteries about characters' backstories. In the same way in Highbury, everyone knows everybody's business and one of the most clever aspects of the novel is the way in which Miss Bates' seemingly random gossip in fact contains all the crucial information needed to solve the mystery of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax. This same gossip and threat of it is also very hurtful in particular to Jane.

But both communities take care of each other and this is where parallels in characters start to emerge. In Gongjin, Dushik takes care of the whole village through his indiscriminate kindness and his many part time jobs and is consequently adopted as their child. In Highbury, Mr. Knightley as the richest and most significant landlord in the area also takes care of those in need, from sending food to the Bateses to offering his carriage to Jane. In return, he is respected above anyone else.

In both works the heroine is at least initially to some people entitled and dislikeable. Both Emma and Hyejin are snobs who believe themselves above the rest of the community and a major part of their character development is coming to terms with their mistaken thinking and reaching out to be a more worthy part of the community. Both make truly horrific public acts of prejudice and snobbery and must perform acts of genuine atonement before they can be accepted. (Insulting Oh Yoon's music in public for Hyejin and Emma's snub of Miss Bates.)

And yet both heroines have kindly intentions and are good, albeit complicated, people. Emma means well when she takes Harriet under her wing even if the outcomes are disastrous and her judgement of characters like Mr. and Mrs. Elton show her intelligence. Hyejin hides her kindness in acts she can be detached from such as giving charity from a distance. Both lack a mother in their life and have a complicated relationship with their father.

And crucially from the romance perspective, both are forced to confront their flaws by the hero who is the only person willing both to call them out and believe in their goodness underneath everything else. Dushik and Mr. Knightley have remarkably similar roles towards Hyejin and Emma despite their intial relationship being very different. Emma and Mr. Knightley have known each other all their life, after all.

There are various other parallels - the love triangle with the overly amiable rival, jealousy of whom helps the hero to understand his feelings; the way strange mysteries about the town and the characters' backstories are cleverly interwoven and revealed over the course of the plot... but I'd say these are the main ones.

I find it really cool to see such an Emma-esque narrative in a kdrama. Pride and Prejudice is such a straight forward type of inspiration (though tbh I rarely feel that things that people claim are obviously P&P inspired actually are - usually it's a short hand for "rich/poor enemies to lovers story" with little actual connection to the source material) but Emma is a bit different and whether there's any intentional connection or not, it's refreshing to see a story in this vein!