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bluerthanbluets) wrote2021-08-15 02:29 pm
bluerthanbluets) wrote2021-08-15 02:29 pm
extended a/n: ENTROPY
an extended author's note to ENTROPY on ao3 [read here]
My SVT bias is Choi Seungcheol, but other than an 800 word drabble from 17hols, I have never done a SC-centric fic. He did appear every now and then in my other stories [as one of the marine researchers in big blue, with an indulgent little detail that he had gone off to live in quiet in the Philippines, and as the implied gang leader in to let you], but that's pretty much it.
As cliche as it is, I was honestly genuinely plagued by the whole, If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more quote.
And then the idea came to me earlier this year and I started sitting down on this around March. At first, it was just an excuse to mash together as many SC-centric scenarios as I can but me being me, a fictionist obsessed with order and process, I somehow found myself building a SC cinematic universe.
REWRITING THE AU
I looked up other 25 lives AUs on ao3 and was dismayed that most of the works I found and read were literally vignettes one after the other, life 1, life 2, life 3 etc. I thought that if I were to write my own take on this classic -- that I remember reading when I was still hot and active on tumblr and LJ around 2011-2012 -- it better make sense as a grand narrative.
And then it turns out I was roped in to watch Hotel Del Luna around this time, as well. And then there was this scene in this drama where the departed were driven to this bridge they have to cross, signifying they're done with the limbo part of life and then can proceed with what lies ahead. I looked up the bridge, and although I can't find the reddit/wiki link now, I was sure that I found it online and saw that it really existed.
Hence, the connecting arc across the lives: the bridges. I thought that this was the best innovation of this fic, lol. All the coordinates of the bridges used in the story are real, sort of functioning as a means to pin the story to a specific place, and also to a specific time. As in one chapter, in the SC/Verkwan triangulation, the collapse of the bridge truly happened in real life. And the Seongsan Bridge leading to the SC/MG chapter, the one loosely based off a scene from John Wick 2, it's a callback to my other fic, to let you, which is more of a Jihoon/Chan story.
The most incredible part in the research for the bridges here is how it all kinda just fell into place. I had the order down in my head, but knew this was gonna change in the middle of the writing, but it didn't. It just sort of made sense that after the SC/DK chapter it would go to China next for the SC/JN, because the bridge I wrote there was the one of the oldest bridges built there, and then also timeline wise, it coincides nicely with the end of the Joseon period in the DK chapter. And I also always tried to find a bridge that is located near wherever the story is happening. I thought this would be a cool way to give better coherence to its multistoriedness, since each chapter is a new pairing, kinda like to keep the thread going.
RESEARCHING
I did a lot of research and asking around for this fic, for the most minor details (what kind of set-up would necessitate a rebellion among the KR nationals against each other in this specific timeline, what kind of person would be able to make a sword, would be able to make it to the state militia, what honorifics were used during the Joseon period, what kind of public schools had programs specific to these team sports, what buses used to run around this area, what bus line would it have to be to cross this bridge heading to Gangnam, what region in Seoul would be most likely to be affected or to be put under the influence of underground gangs, what's the quietest, farthest region from Seoul, what's an island on Earth that has the fewest population while still being completely livable, is there a bridge going to this island: THERE IS) that probably would fly past the reader, but going into this rigorous work made me realize, this was just necessary for me as the writer.
I needed my worlds to make sense to me so I can see it and move things around. Never mind if the reader figures out these little pieces of information are real and as factual as they can be. It only needed to make sense to me so I can make the reader believe everything else.
VERISIMILITUDE
I've always had a complicated relationship with the context of verisimilitude in fiction (especially for writers of color whose first language isn't English, but that's another story), which is doubly complicated in the context of RPF, where the characters are Korean and you have to set them off to their own little universes.
In entropy, it's only the very first chapter that's explicitly made clear this is happening on the other side of the world, an ocean away from where the og characters are from: Korea. However, the nitty gritty of building the surrounding for this one doesn't heavily call for any other cultural/social cues as it's just the three of them moving around and the setting only served mostly for the emotional charge. If any, the cues would still go unnoticed: the name of the street, the detail about the narrator/SC referring to the neighbors as "Asian moms".
I simply needed to establish that in my take on reincarnation, you could go anywhere. You could live anywhere, in any slice of time, there is no such thing as onwards or backwards or home.
So it was really fun trying to see how far I can go with the verisimilitude of this world. This accounts for the variety of the set-ups: idolverse set in Seoul/Gwangju/Busan, historical au set in Goehang Village [TANGENT: chose this place specifically because in an earlier draft of this chapter, I wanted the first scene to be Seokmin and Seungcheol meeting each other discreetly during the nakhwa nori festival, which is this stunning, beautiful tradition of fireworks watching that began at the near end of Joseon period 1 / 2 / 3 / and I just thought it would make such perfect dramatic irony if it began with this scene --the fireworks are made of gun powder-- and if it ended with them being gunned down], fem/genderbending au in China (Riyuewan Bay, in some translations, means Sun and Moon bay, which I thought was perfect to put after the Seokmin chapter), highschool au in Seoul, running/marathon au set very vaguely somewhere close to the first chapter's area (hence the similar coordinates here), before sunrise au in Japan, john wick au in Gyeonggi, and then the last one in Heimaey.
When I was thinking about reincarnation, I just thought the idea of being reborn and relocated into a completely different place was breathtaking. Isn't it kinda brilliant, the way one could go anywhere, could exist elsewhere in another life? It minimizes AND highlights the veracity of life, how everything can actually be at your reach, and also still be so expansive. Because there's so much more you haven't been, there's so many other people you haven't met...
Writing about death or reincarnation is so challenging, but also so fucking fun, because nobody can prove you wrong. Nobody has gone through it to write about it and say, nah, that's not what happens. So anyone who tries their hand at it, like me, can just go bonkers. Go as far and as wide.
REPETITION
My favorite /craft/ thing I did in this fic is the repetition. In the first three chapters, it's very heavy handed, and it manifested --I hope-- via deja vu, like the scene where Jihoon says no, don't, that was a callback to Jeonghan saying don't in the previous chapter; or Seokmin saying, what do I do, that was also Jihoon in the previous life.
At first, I stuck with this because I was going into this with the idea of soulmates. But when I reached the SC/JN one, I just realized, you know what, fuck it. We don't ever know There is no way to know if the person you love is someone you've met in your former life, is your soulmate, is the one for you. What we only have are echoes, and what our heart reads of it.
But I thought it worked out nicely, because from what I learned in writing, you gotta prep your reader and let them get used to the framework of your world. So the repetition is very cheesy in the first few chapters, but it gets less and less apparent the next ones, and the repetition just shows up by way of style.
I think this was when I was talking to my friend, C, who said it would be interesting to see how many lives we've had in which we're thrown into the same world, the same situation, and how it could've been different. So that's where the chapters that repeated certain lines and scenes came from. I thought it would be pretty cool to put SC in the same scenarios, but he meets a different person, but he sees it differently. This happened in SC/JN, where they are at the beach, like how it was in the first life, or in the train opening in the Before Sunrise scenario, which is similar to the first life, and which repeats, the way he dreams, in the final chapter.
It was so fun playing around with it, because if one simplifies each chapter, they sort of follow the same arc. Especially the last three, how they are echoes of the first three chapters, too. Mingyu re-appears in the second to the last chapter and it's the same scenario in CH 3, when he chances upon Seokmin and Seungcheol and kills off SC. In the second to the last chapter, he doesn't. He lets SC go, but that costs both of their lives. And then in the last chapter, SC has to get out of a bond again, like how he had to in the previous one, that led to him having to do the final mission.
In the last life, however, Joshua just lets him go. And Jeonghan says, good, because he owes us.
In the desperate strike of hand by God in this chapter, it all falls into place easily. He doesn't struggle anymore, he doesn't nearly die, he doesn't get hurt or murdered or lost. He just finds Jeonghan.
I thought at first it might be an unsatisfactory ending, but... whatever. Call it my couprang hand if you will, but I only wanted it to be easy in the end. I had to stop myself from writing a whole wedding scene, but it's pretty close, I think.
THE COUPRANG MANIFESTO
Ah, where do I even begin.
When I looked up the concept of reincarnation, it said it's mostly stemming from the simple philosophy that we are reborn and reborn and reborn as long as we still have something to learn.
I didn't stick with this too much, because I really had no life lesson or agenda to portray here, I just really wanted to write as many SC scenarios as my heart could possibly take. But I suppose, looking back... the lesson is lost in each of the lives because Seungcheol is a stubborn man.
But he is also a man of perseverance. And I suppose that's one characteristic of him that shines through, even without any deep analysis of his interviews or sns presence/persona or what not. It just becomes apparent when you pay attention, and once you do, once you pay attention and really see him, it never really goes away. You don't ever unsee it, because it is always there, and it's always such a big presence in him, in his character within the group, and as himself. Matigas ang ulo, malambot ang puso.
I really don't wanna wax poetic over him anymore, I think 26k words of fiction is enough for that, but I think it's just so lovely how, in this fic's world, he always ends up loving so hard, and giving too much, and the idiot that he is just doesn't care if it costs him far too much than what he's getting. He just gives, he just loves, he just chooses perseverance every day.
And that is why, I think, he deserves to meet Jeonghan again at the end. And that they both get to live in this slice of world where nothing bad can ever touch them.
(+ personal/about the author: When I was coping with the death of my father, I kept coming back to this part in the novel Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer where they devised this concept of a nothing place: places within the apartment marked by way of tapes, chalk, etc. or otherwise, places that absolutely look like nothing, such as the cramped space under the bed. Once someone is “there”, they cannot be seen, cannot be talked to, they cease to exist.
I like to think there is a place in grieving that is exactly that. In an old Tinyletter, I wrote: Perhaps when I think about where he’s gone, I simply believe he is in a nothing place, too, where he sits patiently, with the book he hasn’t finished reading yet. I am holding the ropes around this piece of fiction by myself, that there exists a place I can go to where he will be there, and it will just be the two of us.
I like to think that this last chapter is the nothing place of this fic, where nothing bad will happen, where it's safe and it will never end, and nothing can ever touch them.)
MUSIC, POEMS, ETC.
I made a little playlist, if anyone is into sad, moving songs that make you feel a lot.
And here are some poems and texts that helped me stay in the heartspace of this story:
25 lives by tongari
One Love Story, Eight Takes by Brenda Shaughnessy
Asparagus by Margaret Atwood
You Must Recall Your Past Lives by Christian Benitez
The world has need of you by Ellen Bass
This litkpop tweet:
As always, thank you so much for reading and for letting me share this story with you!
My SVT bias is Choi Seungcheol, but other than an 800 word drabble from 17hols, I have never done a SC-centric fic. He did appear every now and then in my other stories [as one of the marine researchers in big blue, with an indulgent little detail that he had gone off to live in quiet in the Philippines, and as the implied gang leader in to let you], but that's pretty much it.
As cliche as it is, I was honestly genuinely plagued by the whole, If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more quote.
And then the idea came to me earlier this year and I started sitting down on this around March. At first, it was just an excuse to mash together as many SC-centric scenarios as I can but me being me, a fictionist obsessed with order and process, I somehow found myself building a SC cinematic universe.
REWRITING THE AU
I looked up other 25 lives AUs on ao3 and was dismayed that most of the works I found and read were literally vignettes one after the other, life 1, life 2, life 3 etc. I thought that if I were to write my own take on this classic -- that I remember reading when I was still hot and active on tumblr and LJ around 2011-2012 -- it better make sense as a grand narrative.
And then it turns out I was roped in to watch Hotel Del Luna around this time, as well. And then there was this scene in this drama where the departed were driven to this bridge they have to cross, signifying they're done with the limbo part of life and then can proceed with what lies ahead. I looked up the bridge, and although I can't find the reddit/wiki link now, I was sure that I found it online and saw that it really existed.
Hence, the connecting arc across the lives: the bridges. I thought that this was the best innovation of this fic, lol. All the coordinates of the bridges used in the story are real, sort of functioning as a means to pin the story to a specific place, and also to a specific time. As in one chapter, in the SC/Verkwan triangulation, the collapse of the bridge truly happened in real life. And the Seongsan Bridge leading to the SC/MG chapter, the one loosely based off a scene from John Wick 2, it's a callback to my other fic, to let you, which is more of a Jihoon/Chan story.
The most incredible part in the research for the bridges here is how it all kinda just fell into place. I had the order down in my head, but knew this was gonna change in the middle of the writing, but it didn't. It just sort of made sense that after the SC/DK chapter it would go to China next for the SC/JN, because the bridge I wrote there was the one of the oldest bridges built there, and then also timeline wise, it coincides nicely with the end of the Joseon period in the DK chapter. And I also always tried to find a bridge that is located near wherever the story is happening. I thought this would be a cool way to give better coherence to its multistoriedness, since each chapter is a new pairing, kinda like to keep the thread going.
RESEARCHING
I did a lot of research and asking around for this fic, for the most minor details (what kind of set-up would necessitate a rebellion among the KR nationals against each other in this specific timeline, what kind of person would be able to make a sword, would be able to make it to the state militia, what honorifics were used during the Joseon period, what kind of public schools had programs specific to these team sports, what buses used to run around this area, what bus line would it have to be to cross this bridge heading to Gangnam, what region in Seoul would be most likely to be affected or to be put under the influence of underground gangs, what's the quietest, farthest region from Seoul, what's an island on Earth that has the fewest population while still being completely livable, is there a bridge going to this island: THERE IS) that probably would fly past the reader, but going into this rigorous work made me realize, this was just necessary for me as the writer.
I needed my worlds to make sense to me so I can see it and move things around. Never mind if the reader figures out these little pieces of information are real and as factual as they can be. It only needed to make sense to me so I can make the reader believe everything else.
VERISIMILITUDE
I've always had a complicated relationship with the context of verisimilitude in fiction (especially for writers of color whose first language isn't English, but that's another story), which is doubly complicated in the context of RPF, where the characters are Korean and you have to set them off to their own little universes.
In entropy, it's only the very first chapter that's explicitly made clear this is happening on the other side of the world, an ocean away from where the og characters are from: Korea. However, the nitty gritty of building the surrounding for this one doesn't heavily call for any other cultural/social cues as it's just the three of them moving around and the setting only served mostly for the emotional charge. If any, the cues would still go unnoticed: the name of the street, the detail about the narrator/SC referring to the neighbors as "Asian moms".
I simply needed to establish that in my take on reincarnation, you could go anywhere. You could live anywhere, in any slice of time, there is no such thing as onwards or backwards or home.
So it was really fun trying to see how far I can go with the verisimilitude of this world. This accounts for the variety of the set-ups: idolverse set in Seoul/Gwangju/Busan, historical au set in Goehang Village [TANGENT: chose this place specifically because in an earlier draft of this chapter, I wanted the first scene to be Seokmin and Seungcheol meeting each other discreetly during the nakhwa nori festival, which is this stunning, beautiful tradition of fireworks watching that began at the near end of Joseon period 1 / 2 / 3 / and I just thought it would make such perfect dramatic irony if it began with this scene --the fireworks are made of gun powder-- and if it ended with them being gunned down], fem/genderbending au in China (Riyuewan Bay, in some translations, means Sun and Moon bay, which I thought was perfect to put after the Seokmin chapter), highschool au in Seoul, running/marathon au set very vaguely somewhere close to the first chapter's area (hence the similar coordinates here), before sunrise au in Japan, john wick au in Gyeonggi, and then the last one in Heimaey.
When I was thinking about reincarnation, I just thought the idea of being reborn and relocated into a completely different place was breathtaking. Isn't it kinda brilliant, the way one could go anywhere, could exist elsewhere in another life? It minimizes AND highlights the veracity of life, how everything can actually be at your reach, and also still be so expansive. Because there's so much more you haven't been, there's so many other people you haven't met...
Writing about death or reincarnation is so challenging, but also so fucking fun, because nobody can prove you wrong. Nobody has gone through it to write about it and say, nah, that's not what happens. So anyone who tries their hand at it, like me, can just go bonkers. Go as far and as wide.
REPETITION
My favorite /craft/ thing I did in this fic is the repetition. In the first three chapters, it's very heavy handed, and it manifested --I hope-- via deja vu, like the scene where Jihoon says no, don't, that was a callback to Jeonghan saying don't in the previous chapter; or Seokmin saying, what do I do, that was also Jihoon in the previous life.
At first, I stuck with this because I was going into this with the idea of soulmates. But when I reached the SC/JN one, I just realized, you know what, fuck it. We don't ever know There is no way to know if the person you love is someone you've met in your former life, is your soulmate, is the one for you. What we only have are echoes, and what our heart reads of it.
But I thought it worked out nicely, because from what I learned in writing, you gotta prep your reader and let them get used to the framework of your world. So the repetition is very cheesy in the first few chapters, but it gets less and less apparent the next ones, and the repetition just shows up by way of style.
I think this was when I was talking to my friend, C, who said it would be interesting to see how many lives we've had in which we're thrown into the same world, the same situation, and how it could've been different. So that's where the chapters that repeated certain lines and scenes came from. I thought it would be pretty cool to put SC in the same scenarios, but he meets a different person, but he sees it differently. This happened in SC/JN, where they are at the beach, like how it was in the first life, or in the train opening in the Before Sunrise scenario, which is similar to the first life, and which repeats, the way he dreams, in the final chapter.
It was so fun playing around with it, because if one simplifies each chapter, they sort of follow the same arc. Especially the last three, how they are echoes of the first three chapters, too. Mingyu re-appears in the second to the last chapter and it's the same scenario in CH 3, when he chances upon Seokmin and Seungcheol and kills off SC. In the second to the last chapter, he doesn't. He lets SC go, but that costs both of their lives. And then in the last chapter, SC has to get out of a bond again, like how he had to in the previous one, that led to him having to do the final mission.
In the last life, however, Joshua just lets him go. And Jeonghan says, good, because he owes us.
In the desperate strike of hand by God in this chapter, it all falls into place easily. He doesn't struggle anymore, he doesn't nearly die, he doesn't get hurt or murdered or lost. He just finds Jeonghan.
I thought at first it might be an unsatisfactory ending, but... whatever. Call it my couprang hand if you will, but I only wanted it to be easy in the end. I had to stop myself from writing a whole wedding scene, but it's pretty close, I think.
THE COUPRANG MANIFESTO
Ah, where do I even begin.
When I looked up the concept of reincarnation, it said it's mostly stemming from the simple philosophy that we are reborn and reborn and reborn as long as we still have something to learn.
I didn't stick with this too much, because I really had no life lesson or agenda to portray here, I just really wanted to write as many SC scenarios as my heart could possibly take. But I suppose, looking back... the lesson is lost in each of the lives because Seungcheol is a stubborn man.
But he is also a man of perseverance. And I suppose that's one characteristic of him that shines through, even without any deep analysis of his interviews or sns presence/persona or what not. It just becomes apparent when you pay attention, and once you do, once you pay attention and really see him, it never really goes away. You don't ever unsee it, because it is always there, and it's always such a big presence in him, in his character within the group, and as himself. Matigas ang ulo, malambot ang puso.
I really don't wanna wax poetic over him anymore, I think 26k words of fiction is enough for that, but I think it's just so lovely how, in this fic's world, he always ends up loving so hard, and giving too much, and the idiot that he is just doesn't care if it costs him far too much than what he's getting. He just gives, he just loves, he just chooses perseverance every day.
And that is why, I think, he deserves to meet Jeonghan again at the end. And that they both get to live in this slice of world where nothing bad can ever touch them.
(+ personal/about the author: When I was coping with the death of my father, I kept coming back to this part in the novel Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer where they devised this concept of a nothing place: places within the apartment marked by way of tapes, chalk, etc. or otherwise, places that absolutely look like nothing, such as the cramped space under the bed. Once someone is “there”, they cannot be seen, cannot be talked to, they cease to exist.
I like to think there is a place in grieving that is exactly that. In an old Tinyletter, I wrote: Perhaps when I think about where he’s gone, I simply believe he is in a nothing place, too, where he sits patiently, with the book he hasn’t finished reading yet. I am holding the ropes around this piece of fiction by myself, that there exists a place I can go to where he will be there, and it will just be the two of us.
I like to think that this last chapter is the nothing place of this fic, where nothing bad will happen, where it's safe and it will never end, and nothing can ever touch them.)
MUSIC, POEMS, ETC.
I made a little playlist, if anyone is into sad, moving songs that make you feel a lot.
And here are some poems and texts that helped me stay in the heartspace of this story:
25 lives by tongari
One Love Story, Eight Takes by Brenda Shaughnessy
Asparagus by Margaret Atwood
You Must Recall Your Past Lives by Christian Benitez
The world has need of you by Ellen Bass
This litkpop tweet:
As always, thank you so much for reading and for letting me share this story with you!