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grainfall
the backstory: i told the director’s cut fest mods i was writing a pac rim au and fully intended to submit that. then a week before final submissions i did my monthly reread of OBSESSION by tonyang (kurusui) and my third eye opened to once again perceive wonhan + link it to the dreamer concept from the raven cycle (a formative book series in my early years) and i was like Hang On. and then i dropped 2.5k of my jihan pac rim au to write this. all that to say OBSESSION planted the mere idea of wonhan in my head. it’s such a good fic
anyway. can you tell i've never done this (a commentary) before
highlights
> He cocked his head to the side as a considering look crossed his face, followed swiftly by an easy, newfound delight. “Hyung,” he said, teasing, and Wonwoo flushed despite himself. It was practically a confirmation.
this scene was only written because i always write my fics from the ending/middle first and then when i had to write the start i was like god i haven’t established that wonwoo and mingyu actually know each other. people have said things before about jww acting like a maknae to hyungline and like a hyung to maknaeline…..also kmg calling jww without honorifics to tease him is a real thing. i like when wonwoo gets flustered. it’s so fun to write about
> The day after that Wonwoo had dreamt about Mingyu, because he was only human and he certainly wasn’t blind. He’d woken up the next day terrified that there would be a version of Mingyu that he’d dreamt up, standing at the foot of his bed. There wasn’t.
i mean…...kim mingyu….yeah. the reason why mingyu doesn’t appear after wonwoo dreams about him is because wonwoo has already dreamt him into existence way back then, but wonwoo hasn’t realised that yet and thus thinks that mingyu is safe to dream about. which is why all the dream scenes have mingyu and not jeonghan—wonwoo is afraid if he dreams about jeonghan he’ll bring him into reality. also for a wonhan fic jeonghan appears relatively little—he doesn’t appear in dreams + most of wonwoo’s real-life interactions rarely involve him. for someone who wants jeonghan wonwoo doesn’t try very hard to seek him out; i feel like he’s the kind to think about things a lot more than he actually does them.
> Junhui didn’t ask, so Wonwoo didn’t tell. / Wonwoo didn’t ask, either. It was nice, sometimes, to share the company of someone who wanted the same things you did, to exist without being perceived so keenly. To keep your own secrets.
JUN!! the reason why he specifically is in this fic is because i wanted to use the interpretation of wonhui where their dynamic is based on not knowing the other person completely + what you love is the mystery of them more than the actual person himself. wonhui in this fic fulfil each other’s surface-level want (to not be Perceived—jun doesn’t press), which is temporarily enjoyable, but jun does not fulfil wonwoo’s deeper want, which is to be known (uncomfortably, wholly so) and then loved.
> It was the allure of being known by someone that everyone else was so desperate to understand, as if volunteering his secrets would encourage Jeonghan to reveal his own, as if by offering himself up Jeonghan would be obligated to bare his own heart in return.
see above: wonwoo only wants to be loved by someone who knows him completely, which is why he shares this secret with jeonghan—in wonwoo’s mind jeonghan knowing that about wonwoo brings him closer and it’s like wonwoo’s way of saying i want you to love me.
> “I’m not trying to impress him,” Wonwoo said sharply. / “Aren’t you?” Mingyu’s smile was wry. “Aren’t we all?”
yes jww you are. the characterisation of jeonghan i went with here is one where he’s sort of a mythic campus crush untouchable figure and generally i feel like people Want to impress him in order to keep his attention/win his respect but that is not the way to go about earning yjh’s love or friendship. however this entire dream sequence is wonwoo trying so hard to impress yjh that it was so hard to write. i know the popular interpretation is kmg simp but i do think, occasionally, we should have some jww simp
> Behind them Mingyu wrapped Jeonghan in a back hug, hooked his chin over Jeonghan’s shoulder. Jeonghan let him. It should have looked ridiculous, given their height difference, but somehow it didn’t, and even from where he was sitting Wonwoo could see the pleased expression darting across Jeonghan’s face.
gyuhan backhugs are real and they CAN hurt you.
> Mingyu was sitting on the pavement in sweatpants and a too-big shirt, hair plastered to his forehead with sweat, his palms bleeding from where he’d presumably caught himself before he could fall face-first onto the concrete. He was laughing at the puppy, which was now running circles around him, barking excitedly and leaping in and out of his lap.
yes the dog is bobpul. also i just wanted to write about kmg here he is exactly the kind of person to be out on an early morning run and then trip over a dog and then coo at the dog instead of registering that he himself is injured.
> Again that flicker of recognition. An old friend, a neighbour Wonwoo had only ever seen in his peripheral vision disappearing around the corner as he opened the door. A dream and a dream.
this is where ww first begins to realise that mg might be a dream—to him mg and the puppy look so natural with each other and if he knows one of those is a dream object what about the oth— [i am sniped by jeon wonwoo]
> He turned his face away to compose his expression.
i didn’t describe what his expression had been before that on purpose but now that i think about it i genuinely don’t know if ww would have been able to control his knee-jerk expression upon finding out jeonghan clearly signaled romantic affections for kmg
> What do you want, Wonwoo?
i didn’t like that i used this at first because while it does Work it’s also a thing that i’ve fallen back on multiple times in the past to convey the message!!! i wish i’d done it in a more subtle way but at the time i remember being super pressed for time so i just fell back on this. still, i feel like the question of “What do you want?” never fails to gut-punch me
> Wonwoo rounded the front of it and got into the passenger seat, shut the door behind him.
the beginning and ending scenes are intentionally similar but the key difference is that in the beginning wonwoo’s driving and at the end mingyu’s driving. throughout the fic wonwoo is always in the driver’s seat in dream scenes (the dreamer is in control of where the dream goes) but in any real-life scenes in a car he’s never driving (doesn’t take action, generally more of a thinker than a doer.)
> Mostly this felt like a game he’d just realised he had set himself up to lose.
yeah…….ww can’t even be bitter at/jealous of/hate kmg for being the one that jeonghan wants more because he’s the one who dreamt kmg up in the first place. in the end the only one he has to blame, really, is himself
general thoughts
i based this off a book series so the lack of visual/audio reference (e.g if i’d based it off a film or something instead) really crippled me at first zzzz a lot of this was just scenes strung together on pure Vibes. i borrowed a couple of key motifs from trc to help (CAR…...flowers….) but other than that i think i fell back on a few recurring objects to help construct the vibes: the keys, the earth, sunlight, the piano. the sort of suburbia-elite-private-school-boys-in-cars atmosphere of it all (i had so much fun writing the tennis scene because i think tennis courts are such a liminal setting and are particularly surreal at high noon when the sun is just blindingly bright.)
i wish i had a playlist for this but i wrote the bulk of this in like 2 days and didn’t have time to pick out multiple songs that fit the fic enough—the only song i listened to while writing was hozier’s like real people do.
the relationships in this went through a lot of development. i knew i wanted it to be a jww/kmg/yjh triangulation no matter what but at first i was working off this siken quote (You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back) and then i realised that didn’t allow for much triangulation. so i scrapped that and then i had a version where the romantic feelings went jww → yjh → kmg → jww where wonwoo dreamt mingyu up, so it would have just been unrequited feelings on all sides. but then i scrapped that too and ended up with the final dynamic.
au-wise the trc concept that i used is that one of the characters (a dreamer) has a younger brother who is just universally adored and golden and beloved and kind. later on that character realises his brother is a dream and that as a child he brought his brother from his dream into reality. in this fic wonwoo does the same—and i don’t think i was able to convey it v clearly but i think somewhere in my notes for this fic i wrote “kmg is a manifestation of jww’s desire to be loved”. in the wake of the loss of his mother wonwoo wants desperately to be loved, and that manifests as mingyu, someone who (i took this from irl-mingyu) is very easy to love, and has so much love to give.
i ended up tagging this wonhan because wonwoo does want jeonghan but the gyuhan is also pretty much a thing, and requited at that. the mingyu/wonwoo side of this triangulation is a little trickier bc their relationship is complicated by 1) mingyu being wonwoo’s dream (even if neither of them knows it for much of the fic) and 2) both of them being in love with jeonghan. but frankly i don’t remember if i intended minwon to come across as romantic when writing + ambiguous relationships are half the fun + death of the author and all that, so interpret it any way you wish!
i’m going to hold off on judging this fic because i wrote it from 4-5 august and as of now it is 7 august…..i want to let it steep for a while more before i can look back on it with clearer eyes and determine its value to me. but it’s my first time writing a triangulation (which i’ve always wanted to do) and i think i pulled it off, so i’m happy i wrote this fic! i’m happy i finished it and put it out into the world. if dcf does happen again next year i'll probably participate again and sign up with something more narrative-driven to challenge myself.
thanks for reading :”)
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Date: 2021-08-08 06:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-08-09 01:43 pm (UTC)