Trope ideas that I would love to see more of.
[please feel free to use these ideas if you would like, and, tag me if you do!]
- artist! reader x museum curator!
You’re a freelance artist who accidentally becomes locally famous after posting paintings inspired by dreams you keep having about a strange museum that doesn’t exist. Then one day a quiet, exhausted museum curator messages you asking where you saw those rooms because they absolutely do exist and have been locked to the public for decades.
- tattoo artist! reader x florist
The tattoo shop next door keeps stealing your customers because apparently everyone finds the heavily tattooed florist with dirt on their cheeks “mysterious and attractive.” Unfortunately for you, they also keep bringing you coffee during long shifts and remembering tiny details about your life.
- light house keeper! reader x marine biologist!
You live alone on a tiny island maintaining a lighthouse nobody visits anymore. Then a marine biologist arrives to study unusual whale songs in the area and slowly realizes the strange lights offshore every night are not boats.
- bassist! reader x washed-up indie rockstar!
You join a tiny opening act for a reunion tour and immediately realize the lead singer of the headlining band is emotionally unavailable, is catastrophically divorced from his own feelings, still writing songs about someone from fifteen years ago, and unfortunately very pretty.
- horror podcast host! reader x local cryptid expert!
Your paranormal podcast was supposed to be ironic until listeners became obsessed with one recurring guest: a sleep-deprived park ranger who keeps insisting the forest is “mostly safe if you don’t antagonize it.”
- bookstore owner! reader x romance author!
A famous romance author secretly moves into your tiny coastal town after a brutal public divorce and hides in your bookstore writing under a fake name. Unfortunately your elderly customers immediately figure out who they are and begin aggressively matchmaking.
- barista! reader x regular customer who keeps writing in the margins of books
Every morning the same customer orders the same drink and leaves behind annotated poetry books filled with devastatingly personal notes. One day they stop showing up and you realize you never even learned their real name.
- paranormal investigator! reader x haunted victorian heir!
You were hired to debunk ghost sightings at a decaying coastal manor. The problem is:
1. the house is absolutely haunted
2. the owner has not slept in weeks
3. the ghosts only seem violent when anyone gets too close to him.
- ghost hunter! reader x ghost pretending to be human!
You’ve spent years searching for proof of the supernatural online. Then your new roommate casually says things like: “when I died…”, ‘sorry, force of habit’, and ‘that mirror is hungry after midnight.’”
- knight! reader x royal advisor!
The kingdom thinks the terrifying royal advisor is cruel, manipulative, and impossible to read. You think they’re sleep deprived and surviving entirely out of spite.
- monster hunter! reader x local cryptid who’s trying SO hard to act human!
You arrive in a strange town investigating disappearances only to meet the world’s most suspicious “human” who blinks too slowly, doesn’t understand soup, and asks if bones are “emotionally important.”
