The Reluctant Family Butter

Emily in Paris Butter, Post 3

Aw, family! As we established in the Universal Fantasy Book, Found and Work Families are some of the best butters to work with when crafting irresistible stories.

What’s better than falling into the arms of the family you’ve always wanted or didn’t know you needed?

Actually, there’s another kind of Family Butter, and I wouldn’t call it better, necessarily. But it almost never fails to compel story consumers. And that’s….

🧈 Reluctant Family Butter

Butter Comps: Virgin River, Ted Lasso, and my second favorite book of all time: Anne of Green Gables.

One could call this trope Enemies to Beloved Family.

Emily, the darling of her Chicago PR firm, arrives in Paris to find an openly hostile work family. They go out of their way to exclude her from work lunches, dismiss her ideas as too American, and pin her with a French office nickname that translates to “the hick.”

This is pretty much a perfect set-up for a good Win Them Over tale, and in this post, we’ll cover how to use butter to pull off that storyline.