2021 fanfic retrospective!

[greycheonsa]

hello all and welcome to my 2021 fanfic retrospective/year in review! it's my first time doing one of these and i'm incapable of shutting up so it's quite long, sorry </3

please be aware that fics discussed within may include topics including, but not limited to: nsfw/smut, character injury/death, domestic violence/fighting, and alcohol consumption.

click on the title of this post to read the entire thing, or you can click on the arrow for the cut next to each question! 

total number of completed stories (published on ao3, not co-written): 

1. things that change, and things that don't - svt | woozi-centric | 1.6k
2. 밥 뭇나? (the dialect dilemma) - svt | woozi-centric, platonic scoups/woozi | 1.6k
3. hate that i saw you again last night - svt | wonwoo/hoshi | 2.6k
4. choke me like you hate me but you love me - svt | wonwoo/dino | 3.7k
5. the sum of your parts - svt | wonwoo/dino | 24.5k
6. out of breath (don't wake me up) - svt | dk-centric, woozi/dk | 3.5k
7. show me there's a future here - svt | scoups/woozi | 1.7k
8. good is a point of view - svt | jeonghan/dino | 2k
9. things that knock in the night (or any time of day, really) - svt, got7, ikon | wonwoo-centric | 3.8k
10. can we put the blame on the changing times? - svt | scoups/woozi-ish | 1.6k
11. if i said i loved you - svt | scoups/woozi-ish, scoups/female oc | 2k 

total word count: 48.6k on ao3! for complete fics posted during the entire year in general, i’d probably bump it up another few k or so based on the number of random drabble bits strewn around on twitter dot com.

fandoms written in: seventeen

wips: i have a LOT, so here are some that are existing chaptered fics, or i’ve publicly discussed them several times!

• wonwoo/dino chanfest: chan adopts a cat that may not be so much of a cat.
• scoups/woozi stripper au: seungcheol is a stripper and jihoon takes him home.
• scoups/wonwoo/dino idol/manager/fan au: established woncheol, wonwoo is a huge fan of dino, and seungcheol becomes dino’s temporary manager. 
• scoups/woozi snk/mecha au: jihoon’s unit gets a new transfer, and who else could it be besides the guy he literally ran away from 5+ years ago? feat. monster killing in mecha suits, immortality with conditions, and a lot of complicated feelings involving the guy who may or may not have killed you all those years ago.
• scoups/wonwoo/dino star trek au: chan gets hit with mysterious sex pollen. woncheol have to help him. feat. captain cheol and half-vulcan wonwoo.
• scoups/wonwoo/dino cabin trip: inspired by the river frolicking in in the soop. may or may not ever be finished? idk.
• scoups/woozi sk8r boi au: existing chaptered wip loosely following the events of avril lavigne’s sk8r boi.
• scoups/woozi college au: i kind of want to delete this one tbh… i think i will since i have no desire to finish it anymore.

looking back, did you expect to write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d expected?

i think i expected to write less fic. like i’ve really gone through ebbs and flows in my fic output in the past 10-ish(???!?!!??!) years i’ve been writing fic, but i think being unemployed for almost the entire year gave me the time and mental space to think creatively. i can already feel my writing mojo bleeding out from my soul since i got a job in october.

what pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?

did not anticipate writing wonchan despite enjoying reading it, and did not expect to get thoroughly knocked over the head with wonchancheol thoughts LOL. i also think i allowed myself to write darker fics again, which i’ve mostly stayed away from since my high school teen angst days.

did you take any writing risks this year? what did you learn from them?

joining 4 fic fests in a year, modding a fic fest, and writing new pairings and povs! i learned many things, chiefly:

1. don’t join 4 fic fests in one year
2. modding fests, while rewarding, can sometimes be a pain in the ass
3. maybe writing new pairings/povs isn’t so scary after all. you are capable of writing things besides jicheol.

what’s your own favourite story of the year?

probably 밥 뭇나? (the dialect dilemma) or if i said i loved you. there’s something about quiet jicheol dynamics that i simply adore.

best story of the year?

i am the WORST at picking these… i guess i’m the most proud of the sum of your parts and i think it is the most “complete” story, as opposed to my other fics which tend to be more slice of life snippets.

most popular story of the year?

by hits, choke me like you hate me but you love me - this one saw a huge bump in views after it got remixed (shoutout to ao3 user notspring for making me famous). second place goes to hate that i saw you again last night which i’m pretty sure is because it’s soonwoo porn and let’s not kid ourselves the people love soonwoo porn. 

by bookmarks, the sum of your parts, which makes sense bc it’s a longfic that ends in kiss kiss fall in love.

story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion:

any of my fics that aren’t porn tbh. but 밥 뭇나? (the dialect dilemma) has 0 comments on ao3, which i think is the only fic of mine with 0 comments, which kinda :/ (there are comments on the 17hols dw fill lol not the xpost). canon-not-dating jicheol is something that i write too much of that i don’t think a lot of people are into haha.

other than that, i guess out of breath (don’t wake me up) has some of the lowest reception for the amount of work (history and folktale research) i put into it, but it’s also a rarepair (dk/woozi) that doesn’t end in romance + it’s choose not to warn so i totally get why that one didn’t really take off.

most fun story to write:

choke me like you hate me but you love me was fun in the sense that i have a love-hate relationship with depraved/repressed pervert man jeon wonwoo. if i said i love you was fun because the concept of the fic seemed to come to me really easily. 

story with the single sexiest moment:

ngl both the smut fics i wrote this year are on the more depraved side, but i think hate that i saw you again last night wins for fucking in a club bathroom.

in terms of emotionally sexy, i think something about wonwoo caring for chan in the sum of your parts could be pretty sexy.

most sweet story:

the sum of your parts! it ticks off a lot of boxes, like hurt/comfort, the power of friendship, and slowly falling in love without realizing you’re falling in love. actually i think it’s the only fic i wrote this year that really ended in a pretty cleanly happy ending.

honorable mention to things that change, and things that don’t and can we put the blame on the changing times? for being the most bittersweet, i think.

“holy crap, that’s wrong, even for you!” story:

good is a point of view maybe, but mostly because of the backstory that i didn’t really incorporate into the fic itself. basically chan is semi-anakin + i gave him more tragic backstory which is mentioned at the end of the fic, and if you know anything about star wars you know how dark things could get.

story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:

the sum of your parts! not to belabor points again but i definitely had many thoughts during the process of considering my chan meta and putting it into fic. (if you want to read an extended rambling session, please see my olymfics retrospective.)

i don’t think i had any fics where i was like “wow! this characterization totally came out of left field but also i get it” though.

most unintentionally telling story:

more than a single story, i think it’s the fact that i keep writing canon scoups/woozi/jicheol fics for 17hols while also telling myself i don’t want to write canon jicheol.

hardest story to write:

밥 뭇나? (the dialect dilemma) and out of breath (don’t wake me up) were the most difficult to write from a research perspective since there’s just so much stuff. the sum of your parts and things that knock in the night (or any time of day, really) were the most difficult in terms of the actual writing process. sum because i wrote 20k in two weeks and the whole time i kept wondering when i’d finish the damn story, and things that knock because i was having the WORST time figuring out the best way to remix the original fic.

biggest disappointment:

not finishing chanfest or strippercoups this year :/ i definitely ran out of steam with chanfest because i got my job like 2 weeks before posting started and between that and modding the fest everything sort of fell through. strippercoups is annoying because i basically have the entire fic finished except for the actual ~sensual and sexual~ parts but those are also kinda the key parts of the fic LOL.

biggest surprise:

writing 24k, especially of chan pov, for olymfics (i know i’ve talked about this a lot but it’s SURPRISING to me!!) i was also incredibly surprised that someone made a playlist for it.

favourite opening line(s):

When Wonwoo first moved into his new place, he thought that he’d be able to live a relatively peaceful life. No more dealing with a pesky roommate stealing his food, no more dealing with a pesky roommate waking him up at weird hours, no more dealing with a pesky roommate who always seemed to need help with the weirdest things (Wonwoo never wants to see another tiger-themed object again if he can help it)…

Okay, so maybe his problems mostly stem from living with Kwon Soonyoung. He loves Soonyoung, in a thoroughly we are best bros I would die for you but please stop lounging naked on our shared sofa kind of way, but some friendships do better with a little more breathing room.

- things that knock in the night (or any time of day, really)

seungcheol is forty-one. he has a girlfriend (it seems too juvenile to call her that when she's thirty-six and they've been together for four years, but he doesn't have anything else to call her yet. the ring box he'd bought eight months ago sits in the cup of his first place 2006 daegu youth taekwondo tournament trophy in the little awards cabinet where he stores the accolades he's been allowed to keep. he's still waiting for the right time to take it out.) jiae is an attorney who works with women affected by abuse and domestic violence. the pay is garbage for the amount of work she puts in and the stress he sees under her eyes every night, but she takes pride in the work she does. he takes pride in knowing that he can take care of her at the end of the day.

she's a better person than he will ever be.

he says as much to jihoon, who just laughs, taking another drink from his bottle of cola.

- if i said i loved you

favourite closing line(s):

(if seungcheol presses a kiss to jihoon’s hair, wraps his arms a little tighter around him, mouths i love you into the stillness of the night, neither of them acknowledge it.)

- show me there’s a future here

But when his knees hit the floor and he takes the tip of Jeonghan’s cock into his mouth, he realizes that Jeonghan’s voice is a Force of its own.

- good is a point of view

(now that i look at them like this… i don’t really love any of my opening/closing lines lol)

favourite 5 line(s) from anywhere:

there are a bunch here, but i’ll pull some more that i didn’t include!

to be honest, jihoon hadn't even thought about it, only realizing the change after seeing his mother's reaction. he'd noticed the differences between his and seungcheol's dialects when they'd first started using it more frequently around each other, but like most things when they become familiar, the details became less important—what did it matter if he said eudi galkkigo? or eodi galkkindae? when seungcheol understood that either way, jihoon was asking where he's going?

perhaps they'd become closer than he'd thought.

- 밥 뭇나? (the dialect dilemma)

Maybe that’s a little dramatic. But it’s too fresh seeing him like this now, mere weeks after a violent shouting match that culminated in wishing everything short of death on each other and Soonyoung slamming Wonwoo’s front door so hard that the framed picture of him and his friends at his twenty-second birthday fell off the wall, glass cracked neatly between Wonwoo's and Soonyoung's faces like some sort of flowery literary metaphor.

- hate that i saw you again last night

Chan shakes his head, eyes downcast. The Lightning McQueen sticker that Soonyoung insisted on affixing to Chan’s crutches mocks him. For a lightning fast recovery, Soonyoung had said. The guilt in his heart feels all the heavier, knowing that Soonyoung only ever wants what’s best for him and Chan’s selfish ass can’t even do the same. 

- the sum of your parts

“you know,” jihoon says, wiping at the corner of his kiss-swollen lips with the back of his hand as he crosses through the doorway, “there are ways to see me that are less destructive on your liver.”

there are a lot of things that seungcheol could say, each one a little more desperate than the last. i didn’t mean to text you. i didn’t think you’d want to see me if you knew i wanted to see you. i still love you. do you still love me, too?

“i didn’t drink that much this time,” he says instead.

jihoon stares at him, expression unreadable. seungcheol stares back.

“look—just.” jihoon rakes a hand through his sweat-damp hair. “just don’t go.”

reading between the lines is what got you two into this mess in the first place, the rational part of seungcheol’s brain says. this is the closest you might get for a while to jihoon actually saying he wants you, the lovedrunk part of seungcheol’s brain argues.

- show me there’s a future here

"you haven't been out here all night, have you?" seungcheol asks. he's pretty sure jihoon hasn't—one of the walls is fully paneled in glass, so someone probably would've noticed, but he doesn't know how else to start the conversation. doesn't know how to start a conversation with jihoon any more, evidently. funny how being with jihoon used to feel as natural as breathing, but now he's struggling for air.

- can we put the blame on the changing times?

top 5 scenes from anywhere you would choose to have illustrated:

 in no particular order:

• wonchan beach scene from the sum of your parts
• jeongchan in the garden at the jedi temple from good is a point of view
• jicheol on the train together in 밥 뭇나? (the dialect dilemma)
• seokhoon at the end of out of breath (don’t wake me up)
• honestly anything from show me there’s a future here

do you have any fanfic or profit goals for the new year?:

mostly just continue working on wips and finish some of them! i came up with a lot of new ideas this year but i still had a lot of old ones that i wanted to work on, too. i have gotten a bit better at writing longer fics, so hopefully I can keep that up.

if you got to the end of this, congrats! feel free to follow me on my fic twt, my personal twt, or drop a comment/question here or on my curiouscat if there's anything you're curious about. see you next year... hopefully lol.