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kisoapUGLY SEASON | seventeen (seungcheol-centric, seungcheol/joshua) | 3,480 words
a remix of in your shadow i worship. by lushwang (theangryblob)
BEHIND THE SCENES
a series of disparate inspirations
ok, here's the actual commentary
general overview
this fic suffers from thematically-ambitious-but-i-have-one-brain-cell disease 💔 i think i was grappling with a lot of thoughts1 at the time i was writing this fic, and as a result the fic is a hodgepodge of all that chaos. there's an ultimate lack of cinematic cohesion that really bothers me!! as in, i don't think the scenes stack up to cement the overall theme in the best way possible. moral of the story is: don't stay up writing your ficmix all in one night after the incomplete version of it was published :_) it's no one's fault but my own, i know.
1my every-other-month oscillation of being completely disillusioned about kpop/kpop fandom // what does it mean to be understood by another person? how much of that understanding is lost in the translation of being able to externalize your thoughts/feelings/etc and in the consequent entropy of it being digested into someone else's comprehension? // what drives the conscience, the voice that keeps saying "you should..."? does it make us better or worse when we give into this voice vs. if we actively disobey it? and if we disobey it, then what does that make us, in isolation vs. in society?
also -
me: [starts talking about dostoevsky and foucault]
you: sapphy, it's a kpop fic
the ficmix part of it
some things stuck out to me from the original fic that helped me build the foundation of ugly season:
the whole setting of gods and power struggles and how much humanity is prescribed to them also spiraled into a number of different ideas that i had jotted down (not all made their way into the fic but i'm just amazed that i made the attempt to take notes for once. well my notes are ridiculous so i kind of understand why i normally don't want to leave record of these):
sapphy's cheolsoo thesis
i think ugly season is very much a continuation of uncanny valley, not necessarily directly (i.e. i wouldn't call it a sequel) but similar in its portrayal of cheolsoo. the point of both fics is that seungcheol and joshua don't understand each other, but where uncanny valley ends with joshua accepting that difference as an inherent and unchangeable factor in their relationship, ugly season ends with seungcheol being resigned to it. joshua accepts the reality as it is but seungcheol hungers for an intimacy that he becomes convinced cannot be fulfilled (at least not by joshua).
grossly oversimplified: i see seungcheol as someone who strives for depth and intimacy with others, to the point where that honesty and rawness to be yourself can reveal really ugly parts of your person. the optimistic viewing of this would be that those ugly parts of yourself are still parts of you, and we all are privy to the blanket forgiveness that we are only human after all (to an extent). the pessimistic: no one wants to see your rawness, and to function in society you have to compress yourself into the most palatable version of yourself to get anywhere close to "intimacy." joshua leans more to someone on the pessimistic side. i think joshua (and also jeonghan) struggles with what it means to be vulnerable and raw because they don't want to contend with the ugly parts of themselves -> and thus don't want to contend with the ugly parts of others. or, if shown vulnerability, they can't reciprocate because they're not willing to "get their hands dirty" by dishing out the same level of rawness.
this is what fascinates me about cheolsoo! they don't speak the same language, per se, in relationships and also in actuality (korean vs. english). like how you have to insinuate the meaning of words you don't know via the rest of the sentence that you don't understand (context), the same happens with actions and intentions of other people. you understand others who may be incredibly different from you through the lens of how you understand the world, all these images superimposed on top of each other distorts the original intention of the other person. there's a lot of metaphorical heat lost in the entropy of understanding another person.
this is what plagues the cheolsoo dynamic in my eyes: there's always some kind of distance between them that they don't know how to approach or breach. in order to compromise - either by joshua trying to act in accordance to seungcheol's displays of rawness or by seungcheol trying to lock his vulnerability up to conform to joshua's standards - both have to operate in a way that goes against their intrinsic nature, and the scale will always end up imbalanced one way or the other because it's literally all or nothing.
THE PLAYLIST
listen here ☆
1. I'm Not Formed of Things That Are of Myself Alone - Mia Wasikowska (Stoker Soundtrack)
These senses are the fruits of a lifetime of longing
[...]
Just as a flower does not choose its color, we are not responsible for what we have come to be
Only once you realize this do you become free
And to become adult is to become free
2. Hit & Run - Francis Novotny
Who could love me
If they knew everything that I did
Through my eyes, all the wrong
That I've done
3. Jasper's Song - Flume
4. Mr. Morale - Kendrick Lamar, Tanna Leone
People get taken over by this pain-body
Because its energy field that almost has a life of its own
It needs to, periodically, feed on more unhappiness
5. Hyperballad - Björk
I go through all this
Before you wake up
So I can feel happier
To be safe up here with you
6. God Turn Me Into A Flower - Weyes Blood
As long as I stand to face the crowd
To know my name, to know its sound
It's good to be soft when they push you down
7. mary magdalene - FKA twigs
I'm fever for the fire
[...]
Come just a little bit closer 'til we collide
8. Leave - Perfume Genius
Chain me to the dream forever
Turn the camera on and leave
Begging like a dog, ignore me
Ninety minutes long, keep rolling
Barely holding on, now I'm singing
9. Ayahuasca - Vancouver Sleep Clinic
I wish we could be closer, but we're speaking different tongues
[...]
Everything I wanted became nothing real at all
And I don't know what I'm chasing
Maybe I'll never know
SOMETIMES I CAN WRITE A BANGER OF A LINE
ENDING NOTES
is this a good fic? no 💖 but i wanted to leave behind a record of all the convoluted thoughts that went into the writing of it so future me can view my past try-hard with some fondness... it's actually so depressing that this was the only fic i wrote this year!! that said, it's getting increasingly difficult for me to write anything i find meaningful so i think this level of output is not surprising :_)
if you made it this far, here's a gold star!! ⭐
a remix of in your shadow i worship. by lushwang (theangryblob)
BEHIND THE SCENES
a series of disparate inspirations
Hadreas refuses to manufacture such pills for his fans. His sprawling post-pop draws our attention to the many ways in which changing ourselves can never resolve our memories of the past, posing an implicit question: Can we truly leave behind the people we’ve been, or have we merely learned to keep our eyes fixed on the promise of self-reinvention?
-- Pitchfork review, Perfume Genius: Ugly Season
It is clear to me now that, owing to my unbounded vanity and to the high standard I set for myself, I often looked at myself with furious discontent, which verged on loathing, and so I inwardly attributed the same feeling to everyone...
It was from feeling oneself that one had reached the last barrier, that it was horrible, but that it could not be otherwise; that there was no escape for you; that you never could become a different man; that even if time and faith were still left you to change into something different you would most likely not wish to change; or if you did wish to, even then you would do nothing; because perhaps in reality there was nothing for you to change into.
-- "Notes from Underground", Fyodor Dostoevsky
The panopticon was the ultimate realization of a modern disciplinary institution. It allowed for constant observation characterized by an "unequal gaze"; the constant possibility of observation. Perhaps the most important feature of the panopticon was that it was specifically designed so that the prisoner could never be sure whether they were being observed at any moment. The unequal gaze caused the internalization of disciplinary individuality, and the docile body required of its inmates. This means one is less likely to break rules or laws if they believe they are being watched, even if they are not...
That is, the ground of the game of power is not won by "liberation", because liberation already exists as a facet of subjection. "The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself."
-- "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison", Michel Foucault
These relations are called "extinguishment" because partners extinguish each other's initiatives - sometimes by highlighting their shortcomings, other times by their inability to further and support such initiatives... It is as if they talk in different languages. Communication thus becomes rather superficial. It is very difficult to do something together and coordinate actions because attention is lacking even in details. Partners often feel attracted to one another, mainly due to sense of mystery which fuels their mutual curiosity.
-- Relations of extinguishment in Socionics
ok, here's the actual commentary
general overview
this fic suffers from thematically-ambitious-but-i-have-one-brain-cell disease 💔 i think i was grappling with a lot of thoughts1 at the time i was writing this fic, and as a result the fic is a hodgepodge of all that chaos. there's an ultimate lack of cinematic cohesion that really bothers me!! as in, i don't think the scenes stack up to cement the overall theme in the best way possible. moral of the story is: don't stay up writing your ficmix all in one night after the incomplete version of it was published :_) it's no one's fault but my own, i know.
1
also -
me: [starts talking about dostoevsky and foucault]
you: sapphy, it's a kpop fic
the ficmix part of it
some things stuck out to me from the original fic that helped me build the foundation of ugly season:
- seungcheol as hades, isolated from the rest of the gods in olympus, and only gets visited by joshua in the winter - i directly paralleled these circumstances in a vague canonverse
- (implied) imbalance in relationship as perceived by seungcheol - seungcheol is miserable and joshua is aware of this but never meets him at the depth of it. joshua is regal and composed while seungcheol is the one who "falls at his feet" and constantly surrenders his vulnerability.
the whole setting of gods and power struggles and how much humanity is prescribed to them also spiraled into a number of different ideas that i had jotted down (not all made their way into the fic but i'm just amazed that i made the attempt to take notes for once. well my notes are ridiculous so i kind of understand why i normally don't want to leave record of these):
- can gods too have existential crises? or do they exist in the realm of the unconscious, symbols tied, forced to be interpreted with no true answer of their own creation? are they, too, idols only to be projected upon - a tool for man to find their own psyche more palatable?
- the subject of deity creation
- the desperation to be seen wholly as your own internal subject by an external/third party, but the hypocritical/ironic nature that this can never occur in its entirety, or at its purest form
- the cyclical nature of worship - rituals vs. inherent belief
- power and force. on one knee and subordination. willingly allowing another to hold power over you, knowing that it will forever alter you from the you in this moment
- the celebration of mercy vs. mercilessness
sapphy's cheolsoo thesis
i think ugly season is very much a continuation of uncanny valley, not necessarily directly (i.e. i wouldn't call it a sequel) but similar in its portrayal of cheolsoo. the point of both fics is that seungcheol and joshua don't understand each other, but where uncanny valley ends with joshua accepting that difference as an inherent and unchangeable factor in their relationship, ugly season ends with seungcheol being resigned to it. joshua accepts the reality as it is but seungcheol hungers for an intimacy that he becomes convinced cannot be fulfilled (at least not by joshua).
grossly oversimplified: i see seungcheol as someone who strives for depth and intimacy with others, to the point where that honesty and rawness to be yourself can reveal really ugly parts of your person. the optimistic viewing of this would be that those ugly parts of yourself are still parts of you, and we all are privy to the blanket forgiveness that we are only human after all (to an extent). the pessimistic: no one wants to see your rawness, and to function in society you have to compress yourself into the most palatable version of yourself to get anywhere close to "intimacy." joshua leans more to someone on the pessimistic side. i think joshua (and also jeonghan) struggles with what it means to be vulnerable and raw because they don't want to contend with the ugly parts of themselves -> and thus don't want to contend with the ugly parts of others. or, if shown vulnerability, they can't reciprocate because they're not willing to "get their hands dirty" by dishing out the same level of rawness.
this is what fascinates me about cheolsoo! they don't speak the same language, per se, in relationships and also in actuality (korean vs. english). like how you have to insinuate the meaning of words you don't know via the rest of the sentence that you don't understand (context), the same happens with actions and intentions of other people. you understand others who may be incredibly different from you through the lens of how you understand the world, all these images superimposed on top of each other distorts the original intention of the other person. there's a lot of metaphorical heat lost in the entropy of understanding another person.
this is what plagues the cheolsoo dynamic in my eyes: there's always some kind of distance between them that they don't know how to approach or breach. in order to compromise - either by joshua trying to act in accordance to seungcheol's displays of rawness or by seungcheol trying to lock his vulnerability up to conform to joshua's standards - both have to operate in a way that goes against their intrinsic nature, and the scale will always end up imbalanced one way or the other because it's literally all or nothing.
THE PLAYLIST
listen here ☆
1. I'm Not Formed of Things That Are of Myself Alone - Mia Wasikowska (Stoker Soundtrack)
These senses are the fruits of a lifetime of longing
[...]
Just as a flower does not choose its color, we are not responsible for what we have come to be
Only once you realize this do you become free
And to become adult is to become free
2. Hit & Run - Francis Novotny
Who could love me
If they knew everything that I did
Through my eyes, all the wrong
That I've done
3. Jasper's Song - Flume
4. Mr. Morale - Kendrick Lamar, Tanna Leone
People get taken over by this pain-body
Because its energy field that almost has a life of its own
It needs to, periodically, feed on more unhappiness
5. Hyperballad - Björk
I go through all this
Before you wake up
So I can feel happier
To be safe up here with you
6. God Turn Me Into A Flower - Weyes Blood
As long as I stand to face the crowd
To know my name, to know its sound
It's good to be soft when they push you down
7. mary magdalene - FKA twigs
I'm fever for the fire
[...]
Come just a little bit closer 'til we collide
8. Leave - Perfume Genius
Chain me to the dream forever
Turn the camera on and leave
Begging like a dog, ignore me
Ninety minutes long, keep rolling
Barely holding on, now I'm singing
9. Ayahuasca - Vancouver Sleep Clinic
I wish we could be closer, but we're speaking different tongues
[...]
Everything I wanted became nothing real at all
And I don't know what I'm chasing
Maybe I'll never know
SOMETIMES I CAN WRITE A BANGER OF A LINE
But Jeonghan was self-referential with a startling sense of impersonality in that way. No matter how much Seungcheol obsessively closed the distance between them over the years, there would always be this tangible, immovable part of Jeonghan that he’d never see, death bed or not, hinged on a forgiveness that Jeonghan couldn’t corporeally grant him even though he’d long done so rationally.
There were multitudes to this truth. You could say that Seungcheol was predisposed to love, but that didn’t necessarily equate to a predisposition for generosity. You could say that Seungcheol loved with all his being, but that only made his devotion hard to swallow, a stone lodged in the throat, impossible to digest but, simultaneously, unable to be exhumed. Theoretically, these were phrases that carried societal currency and engendered coddled vulnerability but, in practice, were forceful and unforgiving in their contestation for space. It sounded so unlike the love they sang about in songs that you could almost pretend that they were two completely separate things.
He didn't say anything either, unaware of what monster long-starved compulsion had transformed Seungcheol into. Perhaps he wasn't actually afraid of this likeness at all. He could just as easily close the door from where he'd been peering in and leave Seungcheol to his own self-destruction, only coming back when the whimpering stopped. And wasn't that a sort of domestication in its own way, too?
The thing was, Seungcheol had to learn how to want. He'd borne this corrosive shame in private, in that emergency room where his parents learned of his existence. Like the polyethylene tarp could hide the ugliest of his deficiencies as he practiced how to transfigure his appetite into something consumable, the depth of it so ineffable that it felt futile to even attempt.
ENDING NOTES
is this a good fic? no 💖 but i wanted to leave behind a record of all the convoluted thoughts that went into the writing of it so future me can view my past try-hard with some fondness... it's actually so depressing that this was the only fic i wrote this year!! that said, it's getting increasingly difficult for me to write anything i find meaningful so i think this level of output is not surprising :_)
if you made it this far, here's a gold star!! ⭐
no subject
Date: 2022-12-19 07:00 pm (UTC)I think it makes sense that you are drawn towards these complex, philosophical themes in kpop fic because (particularly for canon) I think the appeal of the fandom itself is the dissonance between the performed self and the underlying self (the inaccessible self?). It's like you say above, "what does it mean to be understood by another person?" but sort of... magnified? Obscured? Anyway I loved how those questions combined with your take on cheolsoo! One of my favorite things about your fic is that you consistently have these really nuanced, unique takes on dynamics between people, and I think that skill really shines in the cheolsoo dynamic.
I always love your prose as well and how you can craft these sharp, mind-bending sentences. I love your fic always <3
no subject
Date: 2022-12-19 07:24 pm (UTC)also I'm sorry that you're feeling...disillusioned? by fic and stuff? I kinda went through a similar thing at the start of 2022 and I thought I'd never get my mojo back but I did and now I'm really enjoying ficdom. I hope you find that same joy again - whether it's in kpop rpf or another fandom or something else entirely. love and appreciate you <3