n! mixx! change! up!

fanfic: still water (rated M, 29k words)
fandom: TWICE
pairing: Minatozaki Sana/Hirai Momo

A few months ago I joined the kpop multimuses Discord server and got peer pressured into writing an overambitious epistolary fic (ok, 99% of the pressure came from myself, but still) (I love you all).

still water basically started as a dare to myself. The Discord server had put on a fic fest with the prompt:

"Character A is a celebrity that's left the big city for an extended stay away from their busy life. Character B runs the bed and breakfast they stay in."

And I decided to answer this with a constraint: could I write a fanfic using nothing but documents? No prose, no close third, just texts, journals, voice memos, etc. I've always been fascinated by books like The Lover's Dictionary or The Secret Astronomers (not to mention fics like Ernesto de la Cruz vs. The Court of Public Opinion) because I love the gap between what a document says and what actually happened. I love unreliable narrators, I love found media, and I love reading between the lines. So of course I wanted to try that, too. I wanted to write a story that existed entirely between the gaps between documents.

Or that was the plan. ( how it actually went )

fanfic: say something, say something (rated T, 24k words)
fandom: TWICE
pairing: gen fic, but includes some SaMo and JeongHyo (not focuses)

In college I studied playwriting, and the first play I ever wrote was what my mentor called an identity play. It was not a good play. It was a play about my Taiwanese father, and how he raised me, and to put it lightly I might as well have published my teenage blog posts because none of my American classmates felt they could critique the play without also critiquing my upbringing. They just read it, told me it was "good" and moved on.

The only person who said anything useful was my mentor, who was also East Asian and knew hackneyed rubbish when she saw it. She told me my play was clunky and trite, but also that she was glad I'd written it, because every storyteller has to write an identity story so they can get it out of their system. My mentor, who is pretty famous these days, had already written a play back then — one that had succeeded Off-Broadway and gotten its own Wikipedia page and everything — but she never talked about it in interviews, because she didn't want to be pigeonholed as an "identity play" writer.

Well, I have to apologize to that mentor, because once again I have written an identity story. "say something, say something" is my identity fic. I told myself I was writing a political AU — Jihyo as president, the rest of the members scattered across government and government-adjacent places. And that alone could have been a strong concept for a fic. In fact, I started brainstorming potential things for Jihyo to wrestle with, and started writing the fic with big dreams of anticapitalist President Park Jihyo.

But the longer I sat with it, the clearer it became that the gravitational center wasn't Jihyo at all. It was Tzuyu. And once it was Tzuyu, it was Taiwan, and once it was Taiwan, it was me.

( and then I wrote the thing )