tongues on the sockets of electric dreams: notes on the emofic
Thursday, December 24th, 2020 09:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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feversendIt’s taken me four months since writing these are the lives you love to lead, my entry for the emobts fest, to write this and put it out there, away from where my hands can fiddle with it further. This fic was three times longer than the longest fic I had written before it, will probablybe the longest piece of fiction I write for a long, long time and that partly explains why explaining the process behind it also feels quite daunting.
The prompt that I had chosen for the fest was simple: Seokmin has a voice too good for the scene and Jungkook just pines. I was drawn to it instantly because it was a 97 line crossover, an affliction I unfortunately haven’t yet found a cure for, but also because it was Jungkook and Seokmin (as opposed to Mingyu or Yugyeom), a pair which I had casually thrown together multiple times for fun and now was being given the opportunity to explore the potential of.
In hindsight, I was lucky to have already written the Jinkook fic beforehand; that had needed some rough pointers and framework to be made before I started writing it and that was more or less the same way I started this. I won’t go into the nitty gritties of writing every section given there was no process as such. I wrote the whole thing in five days, barely making the submission deadline. But that was more than a month after I first got the prompt and thought about it.
The thing is: I liked my fair share of pop punk bands and songs as a teenager and the idea of the fest excited me but having not grown up in America or having experienced Warped tours— because I knew right from the get-go I wanted it to be a tour fic— I had no idea how to transpose that cultural scene into a fic that would be obviously be set in Korea. I haven’t read any tour fics set in Korea that talked about the experience how I was thinking about it. The closest thing that I have read was fridaysblues’ chansoo tour fic but that too is set in the U.S. Perhaps a simple love story between a bassist and a vocalist would have to suffice. Why overthink this, I thought to myself. The fic is a simple love story, or the beginnings of one but there was no way I could give the characters in the story a solid foundation or justify to myself how it qualified for the emofest until I decided to look for Korea’s own emo culture— in whatever shape or form it may exist.
So, I discovered Joseon punk, the underground punk rock movement that built with the rise of Crying Nut (1995) and No Brain (1997)— there was also Rux (1996), one of Korea’s first street punk bands though it found no mention in my fic. YB, or the Yoon Do-hyun Band, is what tied it all together for me. Yoon Do-hyun debuted as a soloist with ballads that many a Kpop idol loves to cover now but it is with the formation of the rock band that he became a big deal both in Korea and outside— YB was the first Korean act at Warped, back in 2009. When I remembered that the 97 line special stage at the KBS Song Festival had been YB’s Flying Butterfly, I knew I had found something to tie together my flimsy ideas of a Jungkook torn between two musical leanings and a second coming-of-age of the emo scene itself.
I can’t possibly do a bibliography of everything I read and referred to for this as so much of it was soompi forums and old threads on reddit and quora and not all of it was about emo, I found myself reading about K-pop agencies, the independent music scene at Hongdae, even something about math rock band Cotoba. But I do have a few collected reads for an overview of Korean emo. I’m not formatting them into proper citations out of sheer belligerence!
The subplot I really wish I could have developed further was the question of musical purity in punk and what selling out as an independent artist really means. It’s the reason why I wrote Namjoon’s character in the first place and Chanyeol’s role in the story was also important enough to warrant the conversation. Ultimately, I didn’t delve into it too deeply given Jungkook’s own indifference/distractedness over the summer. As far as the state of the scene at large and these questions paralleled Jungkook’s own concerns over going solo as a balladist or a vocalist in a genre that wasn’t rock, they were relevant but it would have been a far longer fic with a perhaps a different approach to the resolution if I expanded on that.
I have to say though I had *so much fun* building this universe. Pulling all your groups into a fic is addictive but I have never gone ham like this and it was ridiculously fun to do. I did have a justification for putting just about everyone into it: to build a tour with a decade-long existence I had to create at least four to five bands and bands have people! Why should I make up names for 20 odd people when I have so many just waiting to be used?! And the possibilities for hinting at crossover pairs was just too good to pass up. I have, in the time past since I wrote this, realised that writing this as a “multi”’s fic has meant it is probably read and/or enjoyed even less than most crossover fics are especially if my characterisations of the many, many people in this story haven’t really been coherent or cohesive. But that’s partly a lesson for next time and partly just the flipside of writing something that I wanted to read.
Once I had most of the writing done, the one thing I struggled with was whether I had strayed too far from the prompt. Was there too little pining, too little Seokmin? Too much elaborate internalised angsting at the cost of..romance? My beta (@pixiepower) helped me a lot at this stage and through revisions and conversations I came realised that I was more or less happy with keeping the romantic plotline to where it was and letting this be a story about Jungkook’s self-discovery. It was inevitable really given that my bare bones for the story had been: old timer meets new guy— one is the blueprint, the other a sign of change and the old timer feels jaded, irrelevant in his own life. Jungkook’s relationship with Seokmin, romantically, may only figure at the very end of the story but what Seokmin represents in Jungkook’s life in that moment, in the duration of the present tour, is what Jungkook grapples with throughout the timeline.
I’m going to end with a list of random things that didn’t figure hugely in the actual story but were pieces of the world I made myself write down before I started writing, just so I knew, what these things were. Maybe somebody else will get as much of a kick out of these as me:
The prompt that I had chosen for the fest was simple: Seokmin has a voice too good for the scene and Jungkook just pines. I was drawn to it instantly because it was a 97 line crossover, an affliction I unfortunately haven’t yet found a cure for, but also because it was Jungkook and Seokmin (as opposed to Mingyu or Yugyeom), a pair which I had casually thrown together multiple times for fun and now was being given the opportunity to explore the potential of.
In hindsight, I was lucky to have already written the Jinkook fic beforehand; that had needed some rough pointers and framework to be made before I started writing it and that was more or less the same way I started this. I won’t go into the nitty gritties of writing every section given there was no process as such. I wrote the whole thing in five days, barely making the submission deadline. But that was more than a month after I first got the prompt and thought about it.
The thing is: I liked my fair share of pop punk bands and songs as a teenager and the idea of the fest excited me but having not grown up in America or having experienced Warped tours— because I knew right from the get-go I wanted it to be a tour fic— I had no idea how to transpose that cultural scene into a fic that would be obviously be set in Korea. I haven’t read any tour fics set in Korea that talked about the experience how I was thinking about it. The closest thing that I have read was fridaysblues’ chansoo tour fic but that too is set in the U.S. Perhaps a simple love story between a bassist and a vocalist would have to suffice. Why overthink this, I thought to myself. The fic is a simple love story, or the beginnings of one but there was no way I could give the characters in the story a solid foundation or justify to myself how it qualified for the emofest until I decided to look for Korea’s own emo culture— in whatever shape or form it may exist.
So, I discovered Joseon punk, the underground punk rock movement that built with the rise of Crying Nut (1995) and No Brain (1997)— there was also Rux (1996), one of Korea’s first street punk bands though it found no mention in my fic. YB, or the Yoon Do-hyun Band, is what tied it all together for me. Yoon Do-hyun debuted as a soloist with ballads that many a Kpop idol loves to cover now but it is with the formation of the rock band that he became a big deal both in Korea and outside— YB was the first Korean act at Warped, back in 2009. When I remembered that the 97 line special stage at the KBS Song Festival had been YB’s Flying Butterfly, I knew I had found something to tie together my flimsy ideas of a Jungkook torn between two musical leanings and a second coming-of-age of the emo scene itself.
I can’t possibly do a bibliography of everything I read and referred to for this as so much of it was soompi forums and old threads on reddit and quora and not all of it was about emo, I found myself reading about K-pop agencies, the independent music scene at Hongdae, even something about math rock band Cotoba. But I do have a few collected reads for an overview of Korean emo. I’m not formatting them into proper citations out of sheer belligerence!
- On Korean Emo, Danny Hwang
- I Can Hear Your Voice (Loud and Clear), Pilho Kim
- Us and Them: Korean Indie Rock in a K-pop World, Stephen Epstein
- A History of South Korean Metal and Hardcore Punk Part 2, Clint Stamatovich
The subplot I really wish I could have developed further was the question of musical purity in punk and what selling out as an independent artist really means. It’s the reason why I wrote Namjoon’s character in the first place and Chanyeol’s role in the story was also important enough to warrant the conversation. Ultimately, I didn’t delve into it too deeply given Jungkook’s own indifference/distractedness over the summer. As far as the state of the scene at large and these questions paralleled Jungkook’s own concerns over going solo as a balladist or a vocalist in a genre that wasn’t rock, they were relevant but it would have been a far longer fic with a perhaps a different approach to the resolution if I expanded on that.
I have to say though I had *so much fun* building this universe. Pulling all your groups into a fic is addictive but I have never gone ham like this and it was ridiculously fun to do. I did have a justification for putting just about everyone into it: to build a tour with a decade-long existence I had to create at least four to five bands and bands have people! Why should I make up names for 20 odd people when I have so many just waiting to be used?! And the possibilities for hinting at crossover pairs was just too good to pass up. I have, in the time past since I wrote this, realised that writing this as a “multi”’s fic has meant it is probably read and/or enjoyed even less than most crossover fics are especially if my characterisations of the many, many people in this story haven’t really been coherent or cohesive. But that’s partly a lesson for next time and partly just the flipside of writing something that I wanted to read.
Once I had most of the writing done, the one thing I struggled with was whether I had strayed too far from the prompt. Was there too little pining, too little Seokmin? Too much elaborate internalised angsting at the cost of..romance? My beta (@pixiepower) helped me a lot at this stage and through revisions and conversations I came realised that I was more or less happy with keeping the romantic plotline to where it was and letting this be a story about Jungkook’s self-discovery. It was inevitable really given that my bare bones for the story had been: old timer meets new guy— one is the blueprint, the other a sign of change and the old timer feels jaded, irrelevant in his own life. Jungkook’s relationship with Seokmin, romantically, may only figure at the very end of the story but what Seokmin represents in Jungkook’s life in that moment, in the duration of the present tour, is what Jungkook grapples with throughout the timeline.
I’m going to end with a list of random things that didn’t figure hugely in the actual story but were pieces of the world I made myself write down before I started writing, just so I knew, what these things were. Maybe somebody else will get as much of a kick out of these as me:
- The September tour takes place in August and rounds up right as it turns September, funnily enough. (It always ends on JK’s birthday.)
- The bands:
| Name | Lead vocals | Bass | Lead guitar | Keys | Drums | Manager | Techie |
| Bassline (Busan) | JK | JK | Jimin | Sungjn | Dowoon | Jihoon | Junhui |
| Purple Haze | DK | Jeonghan | Soonyoung | Wonpil | Taehyung | Seungkwan | Yixing |
| Nocturnals | Young K | Young K | Chanyeol | Yoongi | Sunmi | Baekhyun | Seulgi |
| White Catss (Daegu) | Kyungsoo | Kibum | Dahye | Kyungsoo | Jooheon | Irene | Cheol |
- Writers for KoreanIndie: Namjoon, Hoseok
- All band names taken from actual bands that have performed at Busan Rock Fest from the years 2000 to 20009 except Nocturnals which is from Nocturne, Tablo's word in Remapping the Human Soul (2007) and Bassline which is a fishing pun Sungjin and Jungkook came up with, as they’ve been fishing together since they were kids.
- The ‘playlist’ for this fic was copious amounts of old FOB and Panic music as well as as much of Korean emo as I could find on youtube music; among those I found, I mostly listened to and enjoyed YB. These lyrics from his Peppermint Candy stayed at the back of my mind as I wrote: I’m gonna go back to my childhood dreams/ All I see is myself in the tainted memories
- Chanyeol, Baekhyun and Jungkook meet while playing Legion.
- Special mention apart from the playlist goes to Shorty Cat also known as the first all-girl punk band in Korea, who were, I decided early on, going to be the catalyst for Jungkook’s gay awakening.
