racoon pile

.... on second thought that might not work as well in English, but alas.

I've unearthed my fic wip spreadsheet today—spreadsheets and notion came up in a conversation and I was shopping around for ideas in my docs anyway, which was as good an excuse as any to fill out the missing entries that had piled up on ao3 in the last few months. (If you're even a little bit into pretty databases with which to track your writing, I cannot recommend Notion enough.)

There are two big and one small fic ideas on my list, which is my biggest headache at the moment: I love both big ideas dearly, but I'm nervous about committing to either of them because historically, I'm not a very good longform writer. I have done it before and I think both fics (kissapocalypse [bangtan] and marginal, hereditary [skids]) are decent enough, but I have always done my best work in the 1k-5k range and I'm not feeling too good about Pushing my Boundaries at this moment. Keeping plot stuff in mind is hard! Pacing is harder! I can never figure out what to leave in the negative space when I have theoretically infinite amount of words to work with!

At the same time, my brain has completely been consumed by this minchan idea a twitter conversation had awakened in me. So:

Jane Eyre Minchan Woes (aka Attic Wife Fic)
Okay, it's not really Jane Eyre, or at least not a 1:1 borrowing of the premise. First of all I would never set a k-ent fic in Victorian England without a specific reason.* Second of all, it's obviously a 'what if Jane met Bertha and they fell in love' story, in which Chan Jane Eyre is a Joseon era woman scholar (immediately contradicting the findings of my historical research) and Minho is the attic wife.

The aesthetics of Joseon period Korea are probably pretty familiar to anybody who watches historical kdramas. The Joseon dynasty is the longest lasting Korean imperial dynasty which means it presents plenty of material for adaptation or setting (the drama that immediately comes to my mind is Rookie Historian Goo Hae-ryung, while My Country: The New Age covers the time between the end of the Goryeo-beginning of Joseon period. My favourite historical kdrama (Scarlet Heart Ryeo) is set in the Goryeo period which would have been fun as a setting, too, but I ultimately found the neo-confucianist Joseon 19th century more interesting as a sociopolitical backdrop.

...to a horny f/f minchan fic which doesn't need to be historically accurate at all. Sigh.)

There is one fun tidbit that surfaced as I was going deeper and deeper into wikipedia pages about yangban court and family structures. See, dear reader, I had to give Minho a husband. Obviously I wouldn't do that to any of the other kids—the only one of them who could conceivably suit the Evil Husband Trope would be Minho himself**, tbh, and he can't exactly be the husband to his attic wife alter ego, can he? (...Unless.......... ***) I also didn't want to use just Some Surname for the absentee husband. (Because of Historical Accuracy™, yes, but also the fear that I'll accidentally invoke an idol I don't know about and upset some people is real,,)

As it happens, wikipedia has a list of common Yangban surnames out there, ripe for the picking. And wouldn't you believe, one of those names is Moon after the Moon family of the East Tamna Dynasty, Jeju. Which is (kind of) the wrong historical period, yes, but listen—wouldn't it be hysterical if Minho's useless absentee husband was NCT Moon Taeil, attic wifing Minho because his mom thinks Minho is too nosy for her own good and Moon 'I know that women exist, conceptually' Taeil, minor minister at court, is too busy fucking an up-and-coming young scholar (Haechan because this is my house and I do what I want) to really internalise that he's married? Yes it would. It would be hysterical. Even if only I know about it, tbh.

Which sadly throws a wrench in my vague plans to have Chan eat Useless Husband's heart in the end (she's a kumiho, have I mentioned that before? No? Well, this is still my house, and giving Chan complexes about not belonging in any community (s)he is living in is one of my life's few joys). On the other hand the image is simply too funny to dismiss outright.

Which is not to say I will ever actually write this fic. My woes are alas still present: longficcing is a pain on a good day, and I haven't had one of those since, mumbles, like end of July this year? Maybe? Sitting in my dad's empty apartment in my home country waiting for phone calls is definitely not what I would call an environment conductive to creative challenges. I do however enjoy research, and thinking about women, and pondering the hilarity of casting Moon Taeil as pseudo-Mr Rochester. Out loud, as it were.


( Footnotes )