YES I just finished the new Franny Choi and it was soooo good - part cultural criticism and part memoir, framing anti-Asian racism and misogyny in the context of our current moment in tech. I think the question they grappled with the most - who is allowed the dignity of humanity, and why is racialized violence enacted on cyborgs with Asian femme faces - was such an interesting angle. I think that the way Franny Choi talks about race and gender through feeling non-human is just. Really gutting but visceral stuff. Def look into the TWs for this.

I didn’t love the new Olivie Blake but I do think that she does really interesting things with narrative style in approaching a gothic set in Hollywood. I also really liked The Manor of Dreams by Christina Li, We Hexed the Moon, Best Offer Wins, and Into the Blue… though I think the last one does some stuff character-wise that I thought was incredibly corny. Hanif Abdurraqib just formally announced his forthcoming poetry book and there’s new Lauren Milici on the horizon, and those are my go-tos for writing inspo.

Honestly, I’ve DNFed or 2 starred so many books this year and I need a win

thank you??? ㅠㅠ Characterization is something that I stress out about all the time. I’ve said something like this before but I think it’s more productive to care about whether or not ANYONE would say that rather than if that particular POV would approach a thing in this way. Real people are messy and do fucked up stuff and turn around and do something kind to the same person. An outwardly kind person can be a menace at home. What conditions does it take for a person to get, for example, DK to hold someone at knifepoint when he’s literally too pure for this earth?

When I was writing time slip fic, I was so nervous that my Jeonghan POV was bad. (Admittedly, I still don’t love it.) But going into it, my thoughts were if you put this person in this situation, how do they react to it? What throws them off guard? What from their personality that you understand or have latched onto is being used as a baseline here? Then I kept writing.

okay so like this is funny because i’m writing my “why i love jeonghan” essay rn so this is well timed.

when i first got into svt in 2019 i had severe 97z blinders (and jun.) that only started to change once i experienced my first comeback (fear/hit era…. sigh) and one of my friends at the time was jeonghan biased so it rubbed off on me. that moment at the end of year awards show where he pretended he was watching at home and svt carried him onto stage? that was It for me. that’s my best friend in the whole world (said delusionally). at the time i was laser focused on seokhan and gyuhan (friend influenced! but also gyuhan is so………. they’re so.) and didn’t really…. see it for seungcheol? i remember sitting at my friend’s house before oty newark and them making us watch un haeng il chi and i felt nothing. and like, listen. it’s not that i didn’t appreciate what seungcheol does for the members, he just didn’t jump out to me as much as the others—until he went on hiatus.

around the same time scoups went on hiatus, i was going through a burnout period and was unraveling at the seams. his statement addressing the burnout, the panic attacks, and the anxiety was in the back of my mind when i made my first psych appointment and i have him to thank for my medication that quite literally has saved my life. it was such a brave and honest thing to say, and it hit me in a way that i didn’t expect it to. so he moved up a bit in the member rankings.

when scoups came off hiatus, i was about 1 month into therapy and medicine treatment for my (diagnosed!!!) generalized depression and anxiety, and i burst into tears when he went live. this was also around the time hit the road was releasing and jeonghan’s episode also made me cry, so it was pretty much a done deal. i felt seen by these two strangers and how they felt about the people around them, and their honesty about shame and anxiety.

(there’s also the fact that the fear mv transed my gender so hard that i watched jeonghan smear that lipstick across his face and changed my pronouns in bio immediately. i’m only kind of kidding about this.)

at the same time, i had started to write svt fic and was very much solely into rare pairs (i still am 🫩) and wanted to challenge myself to write other ships. the thing that landmined me was the halloween fansign photos where scoups is cupping jeonghan’s face and jeonghan is looking down shyly. it’s… a lot to take in. and that, paired with jeonghan singing view to him uhhhh got my ass real bad. then there was the l&r era parking garage photos and that was a wrap for me. it was over.

the very first jeongcheol “fic” i ever wrote was heartbeat on the high line, a spider-man au. it was supposed to be a one and done, but it wasn’t. the world that i’ve created is so present in my mind in my day to day that i have fanart of both jeonghan and scoups as spider-man on my wall. (DK too, but this ain’t about him.)

i consider october to be my jeongcheolversary (happy 6 years of yaoi tar pit hell to me) because that’s when i started writing a fic that still has never seen the light of day—and won’t because i only saved one paragraph from it and that’s enough. it’s also my jeongcheolversary because it’s when my friend babyvillanelle started posting where it’s headed, which is like. “for me” (i’m mentioned in the extended author’s note by name that it’s FOR ME!!!!) but not For Me, you know? she wrote it, i just got to be a sicko with my nose pressed to the glass about it. (she’s literally one of my most beloved friends to this day!!!!)

since then, i’ve written ~40 fics for them (EEK) and i have at least 3-4 more presently in the works. i’ve converted at least 10 people to jeongcheolism in the last 6 years that i know of, and i have so many friends! because i’m deeply insane! about them!

i started a dreamwidth community that i planned on making an official “timeline” and using as a home for people to write “why i ship them” essays like we used to do in the 2000s blogrings, but unfortunately i have can’t finish a project disease. one day, i’ll get it off the ground!!

tl;dr mentally ill they/them and the jeongcheol they depend on for sanity

......technically i have already given scoups this affliction many times over, but i will continue to do so until big dick can't fuck catches on because:

exhibit A: the snapshoot video. if you think that is sexy, i regret to inform you, and i am going to hold your hand when i say this, that you are having terrible sex and you deserve so much better than a dude who thinks ramming your cervix arrhythmically is what fucking should be. also my #theory is that he's constantly exercising in lieu of taking medication, because i know many people with various mental ailments who have taken up kickboxing or pole dancing or lagree because they hated the way SSRIs made them feel (and SSRIs do in fact cause sexual dysfunction)

in my head tho he is someone's #1 eater.....so it evens out.