#however I have no idea where to get it bc bookstores here don't have it oops

[ashorterurl]

deadass I have no idea what dark academia or if we were villains is, but just from some quizzes and a couple of shitposts, if we were villains seems hella gay and I want to read it

[fruti2flutie]

pls do tell more about pacrim au, royalty au, volleyball au!! ( the way my brain defaulted to haikyuu bc that was my last obsession before kpop ( read: skz ) pulled me back ).

ALSO BC PACRIM AU WHEN CHAN WAS TALKING ABOUT watching edits in puppy interview about how synchronized they are my brain too was like pacrim… drift compatible…

welcome to the Likely Never Going to Write in Full Idea Bank (SKZ edition) by ao3 user fruti2flutie!!! here goes:

pacrim au (ot8, established minsung, past chanlix)

chan-centric!!! i was also inspired by those in-sync ot8 vids, and then more sadly by the daebak show ep where chan said he got real dark during his trainee years bc everyone was leaving him :( the background: chan gave up piloting bc he lost his closest companion during a mission, coupled with never properly coping while his friends dropping out of the training program as well. after the accident he wasn't drift compatible with anyone & his heart was heavier than every mech in the hangar. he returned to his hometown, quietly followed news of kaiju, prayed for every fallen pilot as he stayed in retirement. the story: he gets a visit from high school sweetheart felix who has enlisted in the pilot program & wants chan to accompany him to the training grounds. chan never stopped loving him but had bigger things to worry about: the kaiju, saving the world, etc. felix tells him he doesn't have to join the program again, but he knows chan loves humanity & can't stay away from a jaegar. chan, against his better judgment, follows felix & becomes a mechanic. some ppl remember him but most don't; it's been too long, almost a decade. so he goes about his things, meets other aspiring pilots in felix's program: seungmin, jeongin, and hyunjin; gets along well with changbin, another mechanic. but then the revered soulmate pilots have an incident, putting minho in an incapacited state while the next kaiju attack approaches. being the only person with experience in a jaegar it forces chan to attempt drifting with han jisung, someone he barely even knows. and when it works -- holy shit, what does that mean for chan? eventually this leads to skz finding out ot8 is drift compatible BUT YEAHHHHHhhhhhhh

royalty au (seungbin, minor hyunsung)

the princess & the pauper/secret identity inspired fic bc this is my DREAM!!!! MY DREAM AU I WILL NEVER WRITE!!! prince changbin just coasts along life cuz his first princess sister is going to take over the kingdom. he sneaks out of the castle one day avoiding punishment from minho, his guard, and encounters a bookstore owner's son. it's a meet-messy, where changbin ruins a shipment of books & seungmin wants to bring him to court for it. flustered, changbin lies & says he's a tradesman's son, but he can work off what he owes for however long seungmin needs. seungmin doesn't trust him, but the store could use help with manual labor; seungmin is a twig. they grow closer along the way, and eventually there's a ball hosted at the castle that seungmin shows interest in, which is where he ultimately discovers changbin's true identity. chan is seungmin's childhood friend who works as a royal guard & jisung is currently seungmin's bff who sells produce from his parents' farm. hyunjin is an artisan's apprentice, felix is in the king's kitchen, and jeongin is a maid's son & patters around breaking things in the castle. i've never written a long fic in this type of AU but seriously would love to some day :(

volleyball au (minchan, minor seungbin)

I LOVE VOLLEYBALL!! I LOVE HAIKYUU I LOVE!!! AHHHHHHHH this would be a high school au where chan's the vball team captain in his last year of high school. the team itself is extremely unpopular & only has seven players. he wants his team to win something before he graduates; these are his boys, and he wants them to remember him before he goes off to his Non-Volleyball future. enter: ambidextrous transfer student lee minho, who doesn't give a fuck about team competition but thinks chan's dream is kinda cute. the boys lack discipline, but they can put in the work to reach success. also, seungmin is the team's setter, changbin is the libero, and they're secretly dating bc they don't wanna mess up team dynamics even tho they mess them up anyway bc seungmin overly nitpicks on how changbin passes him the ball when they have lovers quarrels 😳 i've strayed away from hs au but the potential of an ambidextrous vball player........ lives in my brain.............

[ruegracieuse]

browsing a library (I don't have bookstore money! i do love to just browse a bookstore but i can't impulse buy a 20 dollar book rip i respect and admire those who do though) and reading pages at random is SO much fun. i have a lot of sympathy for people who struggle to read bc of disability issues because i also have that struggle but ITA that if you can read the Best of TikTok you can read anything!

[cont.] tacking onto this - i'm not immune to materialism and sigh over book "shelfies" full of gorgeous and often LE covers of social media popular books but there is something so sterile about well-organized bookshelves with perfectly chosen knickknacks populated solely by gorgeous, popular hardcover editions. i try to buy beautiful editions of books i love but inevitably if you love books you'll have some ugly books bc they didn't get a fancy cover or you haven't bought one or you cleaned out a 50 cent book sale.

First of all you're so right about libraries - I should've been more inclusive and mentioned them as well! Where I grew up our libraries were just okay but our secondhand bookshops were so great (we actually didn't have any full-price bookstores in town until I was well into high school) so I always underestimate the average price of shopping for books (and have been sorely hit by this since living in various big cities with big new bookstores). But everyone should support their libraries and you can definitely have the same (honestly, better) browsing experience in a library!

And speaking of inclusivity - I also deeply sympathise with people with disability or who for any reason struggle with reading. I actually read a really interesting post right after reblogging that bookshelf post talking about people who can't read a lot due to disability, and how alienating it can be when their experiences are used as an excuse for not reading in general, and not reading widely. It's not my place to comment on that, but definitely an interesting perspective.

I 100% agree with you - if you can read the best of tiktok, you can definitely read a book you've taken some time to discover yourself, in a library or at a store or by browsing a friend's bookshelf or even by enjoying a film that was based on it, or however else. These are such organic ways to discover a book that you're so much more likely to enjoy, that are going to resonate with you on a personal level, rather than through booktok or bookstagram or some other hashtag-driven social media niche that is designed to church as many people as possible through buying and reading and posting about the book and buying whatever else this publisher/author/influencer releases next. There's a post going around about the 'sigma grindset' approach to reading and I think it absolutely applies here, it's about consuming rather than experiencing or enjoying or being genuinely challenged or moved by a book. Really enjoying a piece of art (including nonfiction here because there's an art to it) takes time, and it doesn't necessarily leave you with an intense desire to go out and read/watch/see/consume something just like it right away. It sits with you. So while it's not antithetical to capitalism in that most people pay to read books or watch films or otherwise see art, it doesn't actively encourage and hasten the endless expenditure of money and social media attention and hype. I'm not saying that publishing companies that look after literary fiction or non-tiktok books aren't profit-driven world-swallowing monsters themselves, but there's a very specific flavour to this influencer-driven reading culture, which is all about getting you to spend money on what is usually pretty mediocre art. Boring ideas done boringly. It's like netflix, you're paying for 95% churned-out content most people would never want to watch without a gun to your head and maybe 5% of things you'll get something out of.

And all this is to say that I can absolutely also fall for pretty 'shelfies' (and, although it's a little unrelated, pretty study images - I'm such a sucker for that) and I am in general very fascinated by how people decorate themselves and their spaces and especially how they store and present their books. But recently even the trends around bookshelf pictures have become very flat and bland to me - everyone seems to have their books colour-coordinated in a hyper-curated spectrum, new white shelves, maybe one or two little plants... I like the pictures that show a little personality, and to have personality you may need to buy.... an ugly book (horror). If I actually walked into someone's house and they had the rainbow bookshelf out there I think I really would become the Goofy Damn Bitch You Live Like This? meme. I'm afraid if you really want to enjoy reading you must submit yourself to the mortifying ordeal of buying a secondhand 1992 copy of a book with the movie poster for the cover, or with the thick plastic cover on it because you got it from a library cleanout sale, or with a weird stock image or just a bland white and cracked spine. My local uni growing up does a huge sale of all the books they cleaned out from all their libraries once a year and they arealways such a great mix of old classics for really cheap with great weird old covers and theory/textbooks on geology and natural history illustration (two things the uni was famous for). They were so much fun, and the thought that you wouldn't go to something like that or the Lifeline Book Fair (or equivalent) or the library or a secondhand bookshop because the books wouldn't be pristine and designed according to a trend that will look dated in 2 years maximum is so sad... like you've got living life all wrong... but there's still hope...