#e.e.c. fic ideas

[driftbending]

“María, I’m afraid of ghosts, aren’t you? Sometimes I get terrible nightmares.”

“Those are just bad spirits trying to mess with you when you’re asleep,” María said. “Don’t you know any good spirits?”

“Spirits?”

“Like someone you were close to when they were alive; your grandfather maybe.”

“My abuelito?”

“He’s a spirit. Next time you have a bad dream call your abuelito. Whenever you’re afraid, just call him. He’ll protect you.”

I hadn’t thought about my grandfather being someone whose strength I could summon the way I called my family when I needed a loan. The idea of a ghost being familia, someone who loved you and would never hurt you, was new to me.

A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, by Sandra Cisneros

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taecyeonokay: #어사와조이 #밤씬 #누가누구게?

[driftbending]

Erikson links the capacity of trust in others with confidence in the ability to control one's own urges to hurt beloved objects.

Betrayal: Developmental, Literary and Clinical Realms by Salman Akhtar

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hmmm, this is going to need more work than my other fic, but the satisfaction i have writing myunghee is impossible to quantify.

She wasn't like Seunghyeok, who made measly mouthed pleas to be spared, to be let in. She never had the luxury of begging. And now she wasn't going to give Hanseo the satisfaction that would come if she begged to keep Babel's business.

[driftbending]

i keep writing and rewriting my reaction to vincenzo because there are a lot but also i'm not certain i articulate everything i hated about the ending.

i will say that i knew no matter what that i wouldn't like the ending because murdering a character as punishment for their misdeeds is not something that appeals to me. i grew up watching kirikou et la sorcière, avatar: the last airbender, lilo and stitch, and (more recently) moana. all of these are stories that say "here is an evil character that we'll stop in a way that doesn't involve jail/murder," and the only exception i make for this is light yagami's death in death note and that's because ryuk killed him as a way to end their relationship, not as a punishment for his crimes. (and gothic lit is exempt bc they have to be resolved with murder.) so, whatever happened, regardless of how much violence the babel four did, none of their deaths would have held any emotional satisfaction for me. yet i prepared myself to be unimpressed by the finale since this is what the set up has always been: vincenzo will kill hanseok, and maybe myunghee, seunghyeok, and hanseo.

i knew this from the beginning. the narrative repeated it so often i got annoyed. there were so many close calls with vincenzo pulling a gun on hanseok that that got boring. by the time ep. 20 rolled around i was just fed up and wanted someone to die because this show had already failed me so many other times with their set ups that i wanted at least one good payoff.

lo and behold, they did end up killing the four characters i thought would die. hanseo died, and though he was my favorite character, and though i felt sad he didn't get any funeral scene or help while he was fending off his brother and that his death served as a sacrifice for vincenzo instead of literally anything else, i didn't cry or even get mad about it. he died and i felt free to stop caring about the rest of the story. yay me! i do understand the fans who hated that he was killed and that he should've survived bc abuse victims don't deserve the storyline hanseo got, but this is not a show i expected to actually care about victims. despite what it says, i knew i wouldn't get this for hanseo waaaaay back in ep 8 when they brought up the victims of that gay banker and just used it as a way for us to root against the banker. they didn't treat those victims with any respect at all and so i was already prepared for them to do it all over again. and they did and it sucks, but again for me i couldn’t get as angry as i normally would about this bc i always knew that the deaths from this show would never mean anything to me bc there was just so much of it it became meaningless.

another thing i knew that was going to let me down about this show is that it didn’t have a single “good” character for me to root for. mr. hong existed, but he was murdered early on. every other character on the show is too corrupt to be the ones i would want handling a reconstruction project for a more ethical world. yes, they made hanseo go through a redemption arc, but they didn’t let him stay did they? they focused so much on deconstruction they never cared about reconstruction. so when they got to the ending where vincenzo just leaves, chayoung and the tenants are thrown into a familiar cycle of court cases and defending their plaza from it being redeveloped, vincenzo just goes on to be a mafia boss again, and the guillotine file is back in the hands of the corrupt intelligence agency that created it on the orders of their president. the only thing that changed was babel group was destroyed bc their two ceos were murdered and the lawyers of their legal rep. were also murdered.

and yet, despite my expectations being so low they were basically non-existent, i was still disappointed. they didn't let chayoung do anything (which i knew would happen because i knew something about her characterization never felt fully fledged to me the way it did to fandom, so i wasn't surprised when they delegated her as a damsel-in-distress/love interest.), they killed myunghee the way we used to burn witches (which how fitting for a female character that is cunning and cruel), and the way they killed hanseok literally made me feel faint and nauseous (i wish this was an exaggeration; the second i saw the drill pointed at him i started feeling this way and i couldn't listen/watch his death scene because it was so brutal).

so, the ending satisfied nothing for me. if people who shipped the main characters were satisfied, whatever. i was never interested in them as a ship (i tend to ship vincenzo and chayoung with other characters), so the ending was even more disappointing bc it really held nothing that mattered to me.

i was also not a person that liked the way each character idolized vincenzo because i preferred his relationships with other characters to be filled with more tension* and the narrative just told me that the writers didn't, that vincenzo's word was what mattered, that the other character's conflicting needs were meant to be eclipsed by vincenzo's needs. so when the characters were all looking into the horizon hoping that vincenzo would some day come back (for what, i ask you?) i was just like :|

(*what do i mean by tension? i mean my favorite version of chayoung/vincenzo was the early eps when she hated him for being liked so much by her father that her flaws as a daughter were highlighted more and chayoung's own hesitancy with murder bumping up against vincenzo’s lack of hesitancy. mr. cho/vincenzo were most interesting when mr. cho wanted the guillotine file to use for his own purposes. the tenants/vincenzo were the most interesting when the tenants wanted to take the gold and vincenzo was trying to stop them. even hanseo/vincenzo was the most interesting when they had the "will you kill me? will you betray me?" tension as they worked together to get rid of hanseok. these dynamics added layers to the characters and reminded us they had their own motivations that were as equally important as vincenzo’s, but not enough of these tensions lasted past a few episodes and almost always would vincenzo's needs prevail with most of the other characters going along with his plans in the end.)

and this is all without mentioning how fandom sort of ruined a lot of the show for me, too. they took the characteristics that made the myunghee/hanseok dynamic one of my favorites and gave it to chayoung/vincenzo to the point where i was always left baffled and feeling like i was watching a different show. (a good point about the end for me is that i feel vindicated watching the scene where chayoung was basically like "i don't like your methods, vincenzo, but i needed to use them as the lesser of two evils to destroy hanseok," bc it did sort of reinforce for me my own reading of chayoung which was that she doesn't mind being corrupt and blackmailing people or scaring them into compliance, but that she was not going to get her hands covered in blood or dance over the corpses of her enemy. those traits belong to myunghee who accepts her role as a villain in a way that is as cool and collected as vincenzo. and lord, imagine what a show it would've been if the writers had made the kings chayoung/hanseok, the last ones that should ever be taken, while the queens were vincenzo/myunghee who would be the ones that would make all the moves, kill all their enemies pieces, and try to destroy one another first as the two most powerful players in the game? imagine if fandom had been able to read chayoung and myunghee accurately enough that i wouldn’t have to read post after post talking about how they needed to see myunghee brutally murdered/tortured by chayoung because they would understand chayoung’s character isn’t going to do that, posts which i hated seeing bc, as i said before, violence for violence’s sake means nothing to me? imagine if the writers cared enough about chayoung/myunghee to develop them more fully? sigh.)

i feel like i'm going nowhere with this and that i'm repeating myself a lot or not making much sense. but i'll end with this: i knew the last two episodes were going to be garbage when they all gathered at toto's restaurant post-fight in ep 19 and all they were talking about was vincenzo this and vincenzo that instead of worrying after the ones that were momentarily kidnapped/injured. like thanks show, for instead of pushing the narrative along we get a vincenzo fan club meeting and another round of "i never had anything to fight for until you came along" which is a convo we've had plenty of times before.

(footnote: i edited this on may 6, 2021 for clarity.)

[driftbending]

reading about redemption arcs. again. and learned something fascinating about the difference culture makes wrt the path a character would have to take to be redeemed. again. and it’s making me think about the almost-abandoned fic i’ve been ignoring. again.

[driftbending]

today i wrote:

2440 words of fanfic. i needed to not only go and outline what i had written already, but i also needed to keep track of each pov i had switched to because i felt the story was skewed (rightfully but too heavily skewed) toward HK/HS/DG, and i needed another character to break it up. so after i kept track of who i wrote for, i was able to figure out which would be a good character to follow and i was able to write for SH/MH and write something more lighthearted. which this entire arc is going to be. it’s the lighthearted bonded sequence that will join the characters together for a good cause, before their newly forged bonds are tested again by things that are far, far, far worse than they can handle (emotionally). so i’m really going to have as much fun as i can writing this arc bc what comes up next is just going to be a lot of dark and bitter emotions and i had so much of that already. lol

0 words of my original story. just had no desire to write for this today.

additional observations: i’m starting to really accept the fact that i can’t write two different stories at once unless i know exactly what i’m going to write with both of them and i’m starting to realize that no, i don’t always know what’s going to connect one section with another clearly enough to write it. i am glad, however, that i have two projects going on at the same time because even though there are days when i have no motivation to continue writing for one story, i can easily write for another. it really helps stave off my own boredom with one single world/set of characters. anyway, my last day of these projects is tomorrow and i’m nowhere near the end for either of them, so i’m going to double the word count and extend the deadline to see if i can’t hit that mark, or at least make more progress with both.

[driftbending]

keep making and deleting posts about a dilemma i’m having over a fic bc i feel overly whiny and i think i should just give in and write my damn fic again and start re-writing my original story (which i’ve made enough major changes to that i think i should just rewrite it already and try again from the beginning).

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today i wrote:

4111 words of fanfic. i wrote this much only because i was really ready to move on with this part of the story. the chapter turned out to be so, so, so, so damn long and i was getting tired of writing the same thing for several days straight. so i told myself i’d get it done today and i did and now i’m on to the next part of the story and i get to start weaving in what i’ve been wanting to introduce since this story first popped into my head. the biggest joke? i haven’t figured out what that is exactly. but since i wrote so much already, i think i’ll be able to live with myself if i don’t write remotely as much tomorrow.

32 words of my original story. today i really just decided to focus on my fic and let this go off by the wayside. i only wrote what little i wrote for this story bc i was momentarily stuck on what to write for my fanfic that i just wrote a little bit of this to see if i would spark something. but tomorrow i’ll focus on my original story.

additional observations: today i spent a lot more time character building and figuring out what i need to do to make my characters feel real to me. i finally picked a new writing journal to use bc even tho i use notion and have pics for inspiration and tags and soundtracks for each story, i realize that it’s extremely important to have a journal to jot down all my stuff in. i was just having that “which journal do i use” dance for a few days bc my new notebooks are just so damn pretty i couldn’t choose one. but now that i have one i’m all !!! about it.

[driftbending]

lions don't exist, at least that's what his mother tells him each night she puts him to sleep. yet he keeps asking because there's a lion with blue eyes and a soft mane that shines like gold under the sun. a lion that can smile and say his name. and kili wants to know do lions exist? are they named fili?