olymfics retrospective

[greycheonsa]

a retrospective about my experience in the 2021 round kpop olymfics! originally published on gdrive.

unedited from the original post; see gdrive link for any updates.

i’ve never written one of these before, but i had a Lot Of Thoughts after joining olymfics for the first time! this is an absurdly long doc and i sincerely apologize!! this is really more of a personal/introspective words dump than anything else i suppose.

general spoiler warnings for both fics i’ve written for olymfics, as well as the themes discussed within them (including, but not limited to: mental health struggles, suicidal ideation, and character death). if you’d like to read them, they can be found here:

the sum of your parts: svt wonwoo/dino, 24.5k, hurt/comfort, pg-13

out of breath (don’t wake me up): svt woozi/dokyeom, 3.6k, pseudo-historical-merfolk!au, not rated

some general background to the whole thing

i’d been aware of olymfics for quite a while and read fics from previous rounds, but had never been actively interested in joining. however in the past couple of years i’ve been dabbling in joining fic fests/events again (i stopped for a long time because i always felt like my event fics were worse than my fics i wrote on my own time) and figured that the community aspect of olymfics would help me get things done, as opposed to other fics where i felt like i was often shouting into the void on my own.

before i started, i set one ground rule for myself: that i wasn’t allowed to write jicheol. ngl this did make things unnecessarily difficult for myself, but i felt like part of the point of joining an event like this was to challenge myself and i’d pretty much exclusively written jicheol fic for svt up to this point. also a little optimistically/narcissistically, i thought that if i wrote for jicheol it would be way too obvious that it was me who wrote the fic, given that there aren’t all that many active jicheol writers lmao.

my olymfics journey was a bit tumultuous. the prompts that i ended up writing for weren’t what i’d originally picked—my original fic was supposed to be a jigyu fic based on pentagon’s daisy, and while i won’t be elaborating too much since i might end up deciding to write it someday, i got way too ambitious and conceptual with it and i would not have been able to finish it in time.

the sum of your parts:

picking the prompt/pairing/plot

after some switch-ups in my team, i opted to take on lee hi’s holo, which had been one of my top 3 initial choices. from the get-go, i knew i wanted to take a slightly different approach to the theme: while the mv/lyrics are more evocative of losing a person and moving on, i wanted to explore the loss of something more intangible. mostly i didn’t want to write a getting over a breakup fic or a mourning-death fic, but i also thought that taking a different approach would be more interesting.

almost immediately, i had a couple of pretty concrete ideas that could be separated into two groups. the first revolved around characters who held strong passions that they made into careers suddenly losing that, and how they coped with the aftermath. 

they were (verbatim):

• wonchan—chan’s leg gets destroyed in an accident, completely derailing his career as a professional dancer. enter wonwoo, soonyoung’s friend who works from home, as his begrudging caretaker.
• verkwan—kwan loses the ability to sing. he meets vernon (somehow??) and while he’s initially infuriated by vern’s laid-back attitude about life, kwan finds that maybe they can learn something from each other after all

the second was writing ace attorney!au, which is something i’ve been kicking around in my head for a long time because it’s a combination of two of my most beloved fandoms. 

they were:

• soonseok—seok edgeworth, soon phoenix. follows the narumitsu character arc of losing father, losing faith in the legal system, etc.
• jicheol—jihoon apollo, cheol klavier. bonding over mutual loss and trauma.

soon after i wrote these down, though, i tossed the aa!aus. the soonseok i tossed because it’s something i started writing outside of olymfics and even though it’s not published, i’ve talked about it publicly and it seemed like a cop-out. i tossed the jicheol as well in part because of my no-jicheol rule, but also because i do have jicheol-as-klapollo plans i’d rather write on my own terms.

this left wonchan and verkwan. i felt like both would be compelling stories, but i eventually opted to go with wonchan because i felt more comfortable writing the pairing dynamic and at this point i’d gotten into a discord with dinonaras and i felt obligated to put more chan content out into the world lol. also as much as i love verkwan, i have a hard time getting into either of their heads and wasn’t sure if i would’ve been able to do the fic justice.

the plot of sum actually shifted quite a bit while i was writing it. initially i’d planned on taking it to a much darker place—i was originally going to have chan’s injury be much more serious, and as a result chan was going to be more actively-passively suicidal (if that makes any sense at all). for example, in the scene where chan almost gets hit by a car, he was going to have a clearer sense of disappointment that wonwoo saved him and a more concrete wish that he’d died. as i continued writing, though, i realized i wanted to dial back a bit on the angst. this change was definitely for the better; on the whole i preferred the more uplifting and hopeful tone that the fic ended up having instead of just a big pile of chan whump (i just want him to be happy!!)

writing wonchan (what the fuck goes on in lee chan’s head)

(i’ve written a little bit about this in a comment here, but of course will be elaborating far too much below as well!)

wonchan is a pairing i’ve liked for quite a while and have read a fair amount of fic for (what little wonchan fic there is lol rip), but chan as a person and as a character is difficult for me to grasp. part of this is because chan has a very clear “idolsona,” or persona that he puts on while he’s on camera/doing idol duties (he’s very self aware of it lol, it’s affectionately dubbed “bang chan,” or “broadcast chan” in english) that makes it more difficult to figure out who he is behind the idol veneer. from what i am able to grasp, though, he’s very much unlike myself—he’s had a clear life goal practically since birth, and he’s single-minded about it to the point where most other things fall to the wayside. he’s generally quite optimistic and his output is fairly straightforward, which should have made him an easy character to write, but i found it difficult to figure out how he connects the dots in his head to verbalize his thoughts. i think it helped that i effectively tore chan down and wrote him in a way that would require more introspection and less simple straightforwardness, which allowed me to build up his character in a more compelling way.

that’s not to say wonwoo was particularly easy to write in this fic, either. wonwoo in this universe lived a very different life than in canon, having pursued a more traditional academic and job life path. wonwoo is a well-known nerd and a lot of translators have mentioned that wonwoo tends to use a somewhat more “sophisticated” way of speaking compared to other members (although apparently he’s only like that with fans/in public, not with the other members/in private, and chan thinks he doesn’t speak much at all lol), and i wanted to figure out how to express that here. in this universe, i decided to roll with wonwoo’s broad academic interests and have him use them as metaphors to explain things that are going on in chan’s life (schrodinger’s leg, touch as serotonin, gestalt principles), while also having them serve as comic relief (vitamin d, his inability to grasp constellations)... which also meant i had to research what these concepts actually meant and summarize them in a way that i thought wonwoo would say. i imagine wonwoo as someone who finds it easier to use others’ words to express his feelings rather than using his own, as it takes him a long time to truly feel comfortable with others. when he does use his own words, i wrote him as more hesitant and awkward (“I… um. Do you… want a hug?”), especially in the early days of wonchan knowing each other. as they get closer, though, wonwoo starts to let the weirder parts of his personality show (“Lee Jungchan, at least take me out before you ask to get into bed with me! I’m a man of class.”), especially bc he allegedly becomes more talkative around people he likes.

another thing that became an issue was figuring out why exactly chan likes wonwoo. i think in canon, it’s much more common to see wonwoo hanging all over chan or vying for chan’s attention than the other way around; chan is less outwardly physically affectionate toward other members in general. in the context of fic, i think wonwoo was very drawn to chan’s sincerity and passion—i mentioned that soonyoung would talk about chan quite frequently to wonwoo, so wonwoo has a sense of who chan is before they even met which allowed him to be comfortable more quickly with chan than if he’d known nothing about chan at all. wonwoo also canonically likes to tease and play around with the younger members. all that is to say, it was really easy for me to come up with reasons for why wonwoo liked chan (and why i thought it made more sense for wonwoo to confess his feelings first rather than the other way around, even though on paper chan’s personality type would be more likely to confess first). 

eventually, i figured that that chan’s “no thoughts head empty” (<3) mindset would play well enough here. chan doesn’t exactly realize that what he feels for wonwoo is romantic in nature, in part because he doesn’t immediately perceive wonwoo’s behavior toward him as particularly romantic. wonwoo’s introversion, nerdiness, and skittish cat tendencies mean he tends to express his feelings more indirectly (his constant acts of service, using other people’s words instead of his own, pushing himself out of his comfort zone for the sole purpose of trying to comfort chan, the poetry of “the moon is bright”), while chan tends to express his feelings much more directly (verbally affirming his gratitude for wonwoo’s actions, telling wonwoo that he’s great the way he is, straight-up telling wonwoo he looks good) even if he doesn’t exactly attribute his actions as flirtation. it takes wonwoo speaking to chan in a way he truly understands, with clear words, for the pieces to click together for him. i did try to drop some hints throughout that chan does have some unconscious attraction towards wonwoo, but chan tends to explain it away as “anyone would feel this way in this situation” or “the action itself has broadly romantic implications” rather than acknowledging that he actually has feelings for wonwoo or that wonwoo is doing them with romantic intent.

(soonyoung, of course, picks up on wonwoo’s attraction to chan far before chan or even wonwoo may be fully aware of it—he whines about wonwoo doing things for chan that took him ages to convince wonwoo to do for him, and since he’s been best friends with wonwoo for years he’s very aware of wonwoo’s behavioral tendencies. soonyoung does play a somewhat of a comic relief role here, especially given that the cast is as lean as it is, but he’s quite emotionally sensitive to people he’s close to so i’m pretty sure he saw the wonchan coming from a mile away and behind the scenes it probably bothered him endlessly not to meddle.)

i also think that a big confession of love wouldn’t have made sense in this fic, anyway—i intended for this fic to be more about chan’s personal character growth, and i honestly considered scrapping the romantic plotline altogether. but i think both chan and wonwoo were able to learn from each other and grow together, allowing for the sort of relationship you “fall into” with someone you’re comfortable with and care deeply for.

an aside about soonchan

soonchan’s relationship in the fic plays more of a supporting role in terms of the amount of content, but i think their friendship really underpins the entire fic. soonchan’s friendship is fairly well-known in seventeen, as chan’s called soonyoung his “favorite hyung” and hoshi is quite affectionate with him. they also play similar roles in the group: while soonyoung is known for leading the performance unit and guiding choreo practice, chan has also done quite a bit of it even when they were trainees. 

i pulled from chan and soonyoung’s personal backstories for their fic characterizations: chan’s father used to teach dance, and chan grew attached to it from an extremely young age (you can watch a local news story about them). he later appeared on several shows showcasing his dancing abilities and eventually joined pledis after being scouted at a competition. soonyoung was infamously a youth taekwondo athlete, but quit because he didn’t want to shave his head for competitions. he ended up getting interested in taekwondo dance, started participating in competitions, and was later scouted by pledis, lured in with ice cream. while i didn’t go into great details about their childhoods in the fic, timing-wise chan was interested in dance since he was very young, while soonyoung picked it up in late middle school/early high school.

soonchan in present day canon are pretty similar: they’re both great dancers, can choreograph well, and have been trusted to teach others even when they were trainees. unfortunately, this makes it extremely easy to compare them, and soonyoung by nature of being older tends to be the “first” for a lot of things. however, chan has a much longer history of formal dance training, while soonyoung turned to it after he stopped wanting to pursue his original path (taekwondo in canon, i didn’t elaborate in the fic). i used this as a source of conflict for chan in the fic, summarized by his conversation with wonwoo after soonchan’s fight:

“You weren’t there when we were in school. Hyung was always first place, and I was always second. Hyung got scouted right out of graduation to join a studio as an instructor, and he had to beg them to take me on after I graduated. Whenever we posted videos on Instagram, his always got more likes and views than mine did. It’s not his fault—I don’t hate him for it, and he’s never been anything but supportive, but it made me feel like shit for years and I thought I was over it but I wasn’t. I never wanted to be jealous of my best friend.”

in an ideal world, soonyoung and chan would be able to stand alone on their own merits. unfortunately, them being so similar and working in close proximity makes them easy to compare, and chan feels this acutely. soonyoung and chan are both excellent at what they do, but soonyoung being older means that people see him before they see chan; when chan “catches up,” he’s seen as less impressive. soonyoung never sees chan as a competitor, as being the trailblazer means he’s less aware of what comes after him. chan doesn’t want to compete with soonyoung, but he knows that people look at the two of them differently and he’s not as “successful” as soonyoung is. he never shares this with soonyoung, either, because he doesn’t want soonyoung to know that chan has these ugly feelings toward him (and he feels incredibly guilty about having them himself.)

their fight in the fic was a long time coming—while it was exacerbated by chan’s condition, it was frankly unhealthy for chan to be suppressing his feelings for as long as he was. i didn’t want to draw out their reconciliation, but i do think they had more conversations about their feelings after the initial apologies and their friendship became all the stronger for it :)

things i enjoyed!

despite my struggles with getting into chan’s head, i’m really glad i was able to write a piece that i thought at least somewhat did him justice. it’s no secret that there aren’t many chan-centric fics out there, and i’m happy i added to it. of course, i do feel bad that i fucked up his leg in the fic, but i wanted to highlight his resilience in the face of adversity, especially when it came to figuring out who he was when he lost such a core part of his identity.

i do think i made a good choice with keeping the character list pretty tight—i know there’s a tendency for fic writers to try and at least mention every character in the fic, but i figured that i didn’t need to stick people in just for the sake of it. i did know early on that i wanted a member to be chan’s physical therapist, and to me seungcheol was a natural fit due to his love for sports, which i thought translated well into the sports medicine field (and of course, i threw in a gratuitous jicheol mention because, well, i couldn’t not), but i felt like the core trio of chan, wonwoo, and soonyoung were able to carry the story along just fine.

the little soonyoung-isms i threw in throughout the fic were really fun to include! notable tidbits include the lightning mcqueen sticker on chan’s crutches, his love of kimchi, and his infamous food metaphors (i actually did have a lot of fun thinking up his soonchan jjigae speech haha).

i really liked the imagery of chan and wonwoo on the beach under the stars. i knew i definitely wanted to include wonwoo’s “the moon is bright”/i love you thing, and i felt like there was a certain romanticism to stargazing on the beach. i actually didn’t know that iu’s through the night (which wonwoo has recommended several times) fit the theme of the fic so well, but once i realized that i had to incorporate it. i also had to include chan’s infamously loud laugh, and him laughing so hard he scared seagulls away in the dead of night seemed only fitting.

i’m also satisfied with the ending! i was tempted to try and create a more final conclusion of sorts, but i think one of the big takeaways of the story is that growth and recovery is ongoing and you have to learn to accept where you’re at during all stages of the process. in the months and years to come, chan might recover more from his injury or he might not. what’s more important is that chan is genuinely okay with where he’s at—that’s not to say he’ll never be sad again, but he’s making his peace with his new reality:

He’s exactly where he’s supposed to be. Where he wants to be.

this, i think, is the most realistic ending for this “chapter” of chan’s life. also i didn’t want to write anymore lol

things i might’ve done differently/things that were cut for time

first and foremost, i should’ve come up with a better outline. i’m notoriously bad at outlining beforehand (i tend to just write whatever the fuck comes to mind), and a fic as long as this one definitely could’ve used a clearer sequence of events. this fic really ran away from me—i did not at all intend for it to get this long, and i found myself adding plot points as i went along to try and get things from point b to c to d because i realized that i was just trying to cram things in from b to d. i also ended up scrapping some plot points to save time (e.g. initially the vacation was supposed to last a couple of days rather than just overnight, but it was like two days before deadline and i could not be bothered to write any more).

i think the fic as a whole could’ve used more bits that were less plot-movement-heavy and more for general narrative-building, if that makes sense. for instance in retrospect i think parts of sum read a lot like chan never leaves the apartment except for his medical appointments, which is kind of true but i think at some point he goes stir-crazy and begs wonwoo to take him grocery shopping or something. i also considered chan asking wonwoo to give him a bad hair-dye job in the bathroom (hair dyeing can be something that is just so intimate…) but again a lot of these things were scrapped due to time constraints. 

obviously, this fic was always meant to be chan-centric, but at times i felt like it focused too much on just him and wonwoo. there was a scene i’d cut where chan goes out to brunch with seungkwan and vernon, where chan ends up talking ad nauseam about wonwoo and seungkwan basically tells chan that he likes wonwoo, which i would’ve loved to write because i adore the maknae line dynamic, but it was difficult for me to fit it in organically (pre-brunch text log here—it would’ve taken place shortly after the wonwoo-shows-up-in-a-suit scene):

hey what does it mean if your friend’s friend who’s been coming over every day doesn’t have to come over every day anymore but they still want to come over? asking for a friend

Boo Seungkwan lee chan are you really that stupid

i’m asking about a hypothetical situation!

Boo Seungkwan yeah well get your hypothetical head out of your ass and smell the roses bc no one would willingly spend that much time with you unless they had some other ulterior motive in mind!

wow rude much?? kiss your christmas gift goodbye

Boo Seungkwan it’s SEPTEMBER you buffoon Vernonie-hyung y’all still wanna do lunch on saturday? Boo Seungkwan …

i also wish i’d included more of soonyoung and chan’s relationship—i sort of explained away soonyoung’s lack of presence in the fic by him working super-long extra hours at the studio and chan just not noticing, but i think even then there would’ve been more times that they’d overlap besides just when wonwoo’s around. 

i’d also initially tossed around the idea of chan seeing a mental health therapist (which would likely have been jeonghan) but in the end it felt like it didn’t fit well into the narrative, especially after i made the fic less dark. i didn’t want this to become a fic about “here’s all the ideal steps you should take to heal your trauma,” and while many people could benefit from therapy/counseling (chan probably could have, too), i definitely felt that at least in the immediate aftermath of his accident, chan was so wrapped up in his own head that he needed to have his own personal reckoning of sorts before he accepted outside help.

at one point i actually considered making this a poly wonsoonchan fic, where soonwoo are an established relationship and chan ends up spending more time with wonwoo post-accident, but i decided that it would be too difficult to try writing poly for the first time with the time constraints i had and i didn’t really want to hurt chan even more by making him think he was homewrecking by developing a crush on his best friend’s bf (and his best friend, too.)

there was also going to be one more brief scene of wonsoonchan together after the dance auditions (they were going to go out to eat together and wonchan would have a convo when soonyoung leaves to use the bathroom), but in the end i decided it didn’t really add anything to the fic.

random fun facts!

in true em fashion, i actually wrote most of this fic after the deadline had technically passed. i’d submitted 4.5k of general drivel as collateral, but wrote another 20k in two weeks, fueled by the plot consistently running away from me and the fear of not being able to put out a good fic. 

i actually ended up writing another wonchan pwp while i was procrastinating on sum… justifying that i needed to practice getting the dynamic down, ignoring the fact that i wrote that in wonwoo’s pov and sum didn’t have any smut in it at all lmao.

i really wanted to include wonwoo mentioning “people contain multitudes,” as one of his nerd-isms bc i feel like it’s one of those cheesy ass things that’s literary enough that he’d say it, but couldn’t exactly figure out a way to neatly incorporate it. if you ever see a fic of mine in the future where jww mentions it, you’ll know why.

car ownership in korea isn't all that common, but i felt like wonwoo would have one. partially i needed it as a plot device because someone needed to drive chan around but i also felt like driving a car seems like a stereotypically masculine thing he'd be interested in, and also he'd like the convenience of being able to drive when he wants instead of always dealing with the subway.

even though not every member appeared in the fic, i did have a general map for how they all knew each other so i wouldn’t name-drop people for absolutely no reason. they’re basically divided into “went to college with soonchan” (aka a performing arts uni) or “went to college with wonwoo” (aka a regular uni). the performing arts uni members are performance unit + jihoon, seokmin, seungkwan, vernon. the regular uni members are wonwoo, seungcheol, jeonghan, josh, mingyu. feel free to guess what all their majors/concentrations were if you want haha

the working draft title of the fic on ao3 was “olymfics fuck”. i did not know that the mods could see it when i submitted the draft to the collection, but i was told they were all amused by my contribution.

out of breath (don’t wake me up):

picking the prompt/pairing/plot

this was a last-minute fic for me—i picked this up as a pinch hit about three days before the posting date. this was for ateez’s inception, which wasn’t originally on my list of choices. after listening to the song a few times and reading the lyrics i knew i wanted to write some sort of soulmate!au where you hear the other person’s voice in your dreams, and in this case i specifically wanted the main character to hear singing/music. this was very new for me because i’m actually not terribly fond of soulmate!aus and i’d never written them before, but i was short on time and this was the best idea i’d had.

there was again the problem of picking a pairing. my gut instinct said seokmin and jihoon, likely due to both of their affiliations with singing. i decided to float the idea by a few people to ask who they’d choose for a soulmate prompt pairing; a lot of people suggested minghao pairings, but with three days to go i didn’t feel confident diving into the head of another character who i wasn’t well-versed in, and as i was trying to type out some vague first draft sentences i was still drawn to seokhoon. so my greatest apologies to everyone whose opinions i asked for and promptly ignored!! i still greatly appreciated your input and it did help me validate my initial instinct.

at first it was supposed to be a more modern/vaguely college!au, but as i was writing that nothing seemed to pop out at me, and i felt like whatever i was writing was gearing up to be way longer of a fic than i could realistically churn out in a few days, especially since said soulmates would be hearing each other since birth and would eventually meet in adulthood.

i’d always envisioned that there would be some kind of problem with the soulmate aspect of it—i want to say in the original inception the concept of soulmates were very rare and thought of as weird or potentially dangerous, hence seokmin’s mother’s negative reaction. here’s a brief snippet that i wrote before i changed it into its current iteration (it’s not too different, other than the mention of baseball player!jihoon).

they weren’t every night and they weren’t concrete, but sometimes he’d get glimpses—of the sound of a laugh, the clink of a leather ball against a metal bat.

he’d asked his mother once, when he was ten, about the voices he heard at night. his mother had turned stark white.

he never mentioned it again.

later, in high school, the sounds of haunting melodies

something about the “haunting melodies” bit i wrote reminded me of sirens/merfolk, where sirens would lure sailors to their deaths by their music. i was especially drawn to the idea of merman!jihoon for some reason, and since all the pieces seemed to start falling into place i scrapped the other idea and went full-speed ahead into merfolk!au. 

of course, in true writer fashion, i royally fucked myself over. for some reason i got it in my head that this should be a pseudo-historical!au and spent an inordinate amount of time googling korean fishing boats, of all things. i also did some research about korean merfolk mythology, as i didn’t want to lean strictly on western mythology if it wasn’t reflective of the korean myths. for the purposes of this fic, i did pull aspects of both; soonyoung’s mention of the mermaid shinjike is an actual korean folk legend, while the concept of merpeople leading sailors to their deaths is more western. 

one of the things that i had to address was the reason for seokmin’s mother to fear his dreams. then i remembered the korean tradition of haenyeo, female sea divers who traditionally harvested deeper-water shellfish, seaweed, and other goods all without the usage of any type of breathing equipment. of course, modern oxygen tanks and such didn’t exist back then, but the haenyeo do still continue to practice their way of life today, albeit in much smaller numbers. (as an aside, i highly recommend reading more about them if you’re at all interested!! it’s super fascinating stuff.) by making seokmin’s mother a haenyeo, i had a reason for her to be well-acquainted with the various myths surrounding merfolk. 

after figuring that out, the worldbuilding started to fall into place. haenyeo were most common in jeju, so i decided to set the fic there. i wanted seokmin to have at least one close friend, so soonyoung seemed a natural fit. i also thought that nerd!wonwoo should make an appearance as a convenient knowledge-delivery device, so i threw him in as well. i wrote seokmin’s father as a fisherman to complement seokmin’s mother’s career and because i needed a reason for seokmin to be out on a boat to later meet jihoon. i actually didn’t outline a whole lot for this fic, and kind of let the writing take me where it wanted to go—i didn’t really intend for it to get as dark as it did (and i probably could have saved myself a lot of research if i didn’t kill off seokmin’s mother), but i did also need to figure out a reason for seokmin to go fishing on his own after his mother warned him not to go into the open sea by himself.

writing seokhoon (i am so sorry for hurting you like this seokmin!!)

there wasn’t a lot of actual seokmin/jihoon in the fic, unfortunately by design. (they’re so cute together and i love them but unfortunately this fic was not really meant to be as much about them together. i do find seokmin/jihoon quite a charming pairing though, and it might be fun to delve deeper into their paring dynamic another time.)

i haven’t written a lot in seokmin’s pov before, but i found myself drawn to him for this prompt. seokmin is very kind and cheery, but he’s also quite anxious and can be prone to moodiness. he wants to know more about his soulmate, but he doesn’t know what that might mean for him. it’s hard for me to describe seokmin’s characterization in this fic because i took him pretty far outside of canonverse, but i wanted to make sure that i kept his natural “softness” if that makes any sense; seokmin is a deeply emotional person and i wanted to stay true to that as much as possible.

jihoon, on the other hand, is someone we don’t see in this fic until the very end, although i imagine that jihoon was probably spying on seokmin while he was fishing. jihoon may not always show it, but he has deep emotional sensitivities—jihoon’s emotional connection to seokmin’s sorrow after his mother’s passing are reflected in seokmin’s dreams, as well as his elation when seokmin successfully fishes by himself for the first time. 

i do think it would’ve been interesting to play around a little more with the substance of soulmate dreams—the things transmitted through them are entirely unconscious (as most dreams are), and jihoon would’ve gotten a big dose of seokmin’s strong, unfiltered emotions. on the other hand, jihoon tends to play his own emotions closer to his chest (canonically, he tends to express his feelings musically) and he’s operating with a different form of communication, so seokmin gets most of jihoon’s feelings through music.

things i enjoyed!

i actually enjoyed writing this fic a lot more than sum, largely because i think shorter (sub-5k) fics that are really atmospheric are one of my strengths as a writer. 

i actually don’t think worldbuilding is one of my strong suits normally, and i’m not going to lie—all that research was kind of a pain in the ass, but i think that was i did end up developing was pretty interesting! i actually did enjoy learning all the different things that i researched throughout the process of this fic, even though i genuinely have no idea when i might ever use this knowledge again.

honestly i usually hate open endings (i tend to not read fics if there’s an ambiguous/open ending tag lol which is part of why i didn’t include one here, although to be fair that kind of spoils this entire fic) but i think it works really well here. of course part of this was that i didn’t have a lot of time and didn’t want to get into the ramifications of what would’ve happened if i’d made a conclusive decision on whether or not seokmin lives or dies, but i also think it made a lot of sense with the lyrics of the prompt song, too. i’m very open to hearing other people’s interpretations of what they think might’ve happened!

things i might’ve done differently and explaining some narrative choices

i do think some of the historical parts of the universe could have been elaborated on a bit more, although i did intend for the fic to focus more on seokmin’s emotions and less about the specifics of the universe. if i had to give a timeframe, the fic is most likely set some time in the late 1800s to early 1900s, which is when the haenyeo practice in jeju was at its peak, but if you know anything about korean history you’ll know that that period of time was very politically fraught (namely, the japanese occupation of korea), and that’s something that i didn’t feel comfortable touching as a non-korean person and i genuinely don’t think it would’ve added much to this particular fic.

there’s also a limited amount of information about certain korean rituals/practices that exist in english. for example, most of the information that i found when searching up korean funeral rites are for modern practices, which are quite different from historical ones. i was able to find some resources and combined them with a little bit of narrative flair. e.g. sangbok are traditional white linen robes worn by the deceased’s family as mourning wear. seokmin’s sister crying over their mother’s death makes sense emotionally, but there’s actually precedent for the necessity of loudly wailing to show your grief for the deceased—there are actual rules and rituals based on confucian tradition for when and for how long you’re supposed to cry (i did run into some conflicting information about whether or not men in the family are also supposed to cry—some say that the chief mourner, usually the eldest son, is supposed to cry as part of the mourning process, while others say that men are not permitted to show much emotion, as is typical of confucian gender role tradition. seokmin is canonically a bit of an easy crier, so i decided that narratively it would be fitting for him to have to hold back.) leaving food at an altar is also an important part of korean funeral tradition, as it is thought that the deceased may become a hungry vengeful ghost if their surviving relatives didn’t feed them. however i did personally make up the part where seokmin’s family takes the boat out to throw flowers into the sea—i thought it would be fitting for them to still try and honor her final resting place in some form, as there was no body to bury in accordance with regular funeral practices.

i hope i did a good job explaining the korean terms used throughout the fic—i didn’t want to come off like a koreaboo, but i also struggled with finding the right balance of when to use a korean word and when to use english. for example, i probably could’ve used sunshine instead of haetbit, but something about using merman or merperson instead of in-eo seemed weird to me.

i do think if i had more time it would’ve been interesting to see if i would’ve written anything longer, but as it is i’m pulling a blank on things i might have added.

(...as i was writing this retrospective, i came up with an alternate plotline that didn’t involve character death lol but uh… hindsight is 20/20 i guess. in my brand-new alternate plotline, jihoon saves seokmin’s mother from drowning, and she tells seokmin about it when she recovers. the regular ending still takes place as-is though.)

random fun facts!

the soulmate that wonwoo hints at having was meant to be junhui… for no other reasons than i wanted wonwoo to have a soulmate he couldn’t immediately understand (to better relate to seokmin, whose soulmate doesn’t seem to “speak” much in actual words) and i’d been reading a lot of wonhui in the period leading up to posting lol. no word on whether or not they ever actually end up together, although one could imagine that wonwoo joins his father’s merchant business and embarks on an international trade journey to china, and shenzhen is a port city… anyway i’m not writing this lmao

criminally, our actual jeju boy did not make it into the fic! however in my personal headcanon seungkwan is still from jeju, but he’s just from a different part of the island (farming rather than fishing).

i actually forgot to look at the additional prompts for the song, but after i’d finished the fic i looked at them again and one of the included image prompts was of a traditional-style korean building. technically the pictured building is located in los angeles, but it’s a bit of a happy coincidence that i ended up going with a pseudo-historical approach haha.

seokmin grabbing the sogo drum for his doljabi was inspired by his infamous drumline from going seventeen! doljabi is a traditional ritual for a baby’s first birthday (there’s a similar ritual in chinese families; i’m not sure about other asian cultures) where the parents will lay out several items for the baby to choose from. the object that the baby chooses is supposed to symbolize their future life projections/career path. common items include money (becoming wealthy), a notebook/writing implements (scholarly pursuits), and string/thread (long life).

i wrote out of breath in lowercase mostly because i wanted to make it stylistically different from sum lol. i don’t know how well that worked (if it did at all.) i also personally think that writing in all lowercase creates a slightly different atmosphere, but that’s just me!! i would be interested to know if other people feel the same way.

conclusion/wrap-up

i usually have the worst time writing songfics because i tend to take the lyrics way too literally—i cannot explain to you why i joined two songfic fests this year lol. that being said i do think i learned a lot from my experience and hope that i was able to put out some content you enjoyed! i have simultaneously had enough of writing for many months but i also have other projects i’m excited to work on so we’ll see how that goes.

if you have made it to the end of this… wow hats off to you, really. idk if i would’ve made it to the end of this lmao

you can find me on twitter (@soft_coups) or on curiouscat (also @soft_coups) if you have any questions, comments, or just want to say hello! thank you so much for reading <3