rhodochrosite | Recent Entries

answers are generally indexed in chronological order per subheading, my views may have shifted quite significantly over time so please take older responses (as in, literally anything prior to 2021) and anything relating to mbti or synastry with a grain of salt, and feel free to send me an ask if there's anything you'd like me to discuss further!!

last updated: 16/08/23

( ✨ )

watched gqx twice in the last week. i liked it (⬅️ extreme understatement). don't have time to get into the specifics but here are my predictions for the anime, in order from most to least likely. we will see how much of my bingo card i can cross off by the end. heavy spoilers below, obviously.

( from the other side )

wow it has been a while... here's one last bookpost before the end of the year. spoilers for priory of the orange tree - samantha shannon, immortal longings - chloe gong, the radiant emperor duology - shelley parker-chan, murtagh - christopher paolini, fire & blood - george r r martin, eragon & eldest - christopher paolini.

currently reading: brisingr – christopher paolini, sword catcher – cassandra clare, a game of thrones – george r r martin

to read: exordia – seth dickinson, inheritance – christopher paolini, a song to drown rivers - ann liang, queen of nothing – holly black, long live evil - sarah rees brennan

( There was no such thing as a connection with only one end. There was no such thing as love, alone. )

been doing a lot of staring blankly at walls to cope with the eofy work horrors lately which hasn't given me a lot of spare time or energy to do basically anything else let alone read but here's a couple of reviews from may I think. spoilers for the cruel prince and the wicked king – holly black; sound the gong – joan he:

( why did they have to make a you when there was already a me? )

literacy kinda fell off for me again ngl, I'm trying to get back into reading but work and college have me deep in the trenches ):

I did read dungeon meshi (2/10 To Me Personally I think it's objectively a beautiful thoughtful funny and well-crafted story that I wouldn't hesitate to rec to people who don't have pathetic guy haterism like I do but it has basically zero appeal to me in terms of characters/thematic conceits/dynamix and I came out of it really only caring about a tinhet so blasphemous I literally could not find anyone else posting about it no matter what I termsearched) and reread dorohedoro (10/10 still one of my all time manga and the jokes/terror story everrr even though my delicate constitution struggles to withstand the extreme gore) by reading dunmesh until I got bored and then switching to dorohedoro until I got too landmined and then switching back to dunmesh and so on. they're actually pretty similar in terms of their focus on food and death but dorohedoro has the cool slayers and crazy dynamix I need to live 😔

top of my tbr list: sofia samatar's new novella, sound the gong (strike the zither sequel) when it comes out at the end of the month, alecto the ninth if it comes out this year(/ever), and i will ofc be tuning in to hateread rfk's new book. kinda considering rereading asoiaf since it's been more than a decade since i first read and i do have the books in my house but I also don't really have capacity to read anything more taxing than a romcom sooooo.

this post contains spoilers for: foul heart huntsman – chloe gong, the truly devious trilogy – maureen johnson, i hope this doesn't find you – ann liang.

( He’s my enemy. My equal. My point of comparison. He’s the one I’m constantly trying to outrun, to outsmart, to impress. He’s the ever-moving target in my peripheral vision, the person I’ve mapped all my plans around, the start and finish line and everything in between. All my dreams and nightmares are about him and only him. )

STATS

total number of completed stories: 4 (=)
pyrophane [3] (▲1):

nct dream [2] (=)
aespa [1] (▲1)

sulfate [0] (▼2)

rhodochrosite [1] (▲1):

prince of tennis [1] (=)

total wordcount: 50,197

ao3: 44,522
dw: 5,675

most used tag: alternate universe - superheroes/superpowers [2], ambiguous relationships [2]
most used rating: had exactly one for each of g / t / m / e
most tagged character: huang renjun [2] (although he cameo'd in the other 2 fics too so he really was my Guy Of The Year once again)

FIC MASTERLIST & COMMENTARY

to perfectly perform in reverse | prince of tennis, yagyuu/niou

Yukimura is unreadable to Niou because she is so fundamentally different she might as well be an entirely alien being; Niou has accepted that she will never be able to place herself in Yukimura’s shoes and thus Yukimura will forever remain miles out of reach. Yagyuu occupies the precise opposite extreme in terms of distance from Niou and yet she is just as unreadable. The gap between an object and its reflection in a mirror is no less a gap for its asymptotic approach to zero. We’ve been together for a really long time, Renjun had said, but hadn’t Rikkai, too? Invincible Rikkai, infinite immutable Rikkai, and none of that had helped them to know the difference.

notes:

the most ridiculously self-indulgent thing i wrote all year and maybe ever, like this is up there with the oikawa/hana yugioh au i wrote back in the haikyuu days but idc i had soooo much fun. why SHOULDN'T i put dream into a tennis fic it's myyyyy fic. i loved setting dream free in a room full of absolute megafreaks and i loved writing jaemin's creacherisms from an outsider pov who nonetheless is smart enough to see the deliberateness underneath. and i loved making renjun a yukimura stan #YUKIRENJ_REAL
this is the 82 sequel to a nyotayuri 3b futurefic i wrote in 2020 about marui and niou reuniting just before kirihara and an's wedding. and there's literally nothing i love better than writing tense ambiguous highranker femslash that cracks open at the end to reveal a crazy and desperate depth of feeling. niou suits my writing preoccupations pretty well after all, i think i complained about having trouble with niou pov in 2021 but this fic came out so seamlessly... it may be simply a parade of headcanon-fuelled highranker interactions but at the very least it made me smile and i represented my views accurately. niou who cares so deeply under the nonchalant attitude and runs away from things she loves because it's easier than facing the idea of staying with them...
in my future visions 82's path comes to a crossroads at the kirian wedding, i love my ship too much to entertain the possibility that they simply part ways again so i haven't thought too much about that option but i do think they either enter World Of Light where they rekindle their connection except in a genuine and sustainable not-too-toxic way this time premised on them being different people who acknowledge that they are different people and move into long-term endgame territory, or World Of Dark where they hurtle headfirst back into their old bad habits and folie a deux their way into mutual destruction (which is also endgame! in a way), or even worse only niou's doom because imo yagyuu has always been the one getting more out of the 82 identity switch/overlap thing. obviously i don't think toxicity or power imbalance is any barrier to true love and in fact could even be a prerequisite, but endgameness is about stability and i think the iteration in 82 can't keep going indefinitely into the future. anyway this fic is the World Of Light route, because i am ultimately a romantic optimist and i want my ship to win. so it's yagyuu making the overtures to niou this time and niou picking up on the ways in which they are not alike And That Is Ok.
overall i think this is a solid fic with a good jokes/terror balance and some really nice moments of prose and i enjoyed writing it a lot... the standout parts to me are yanagi / renjun / yukimura. i wasn't sure how to end it though so the ending is a bit abrupt but it's passable i guess. the real point was the cameos anyway.

best lines:
“Higa’s old captain. I remember,” Niou says. Marui’s one-time triple-crossing doubles partner turned penpal, of course she remembers Kiteretsu. Of course she remembers the deal Marui cut lengthways across Kite, Marui’s integrity mortgaged away for Yukimura’s future. She wonders, again, if Kite knows. If Jackal knows. If this is a secret Marui has shared only with Niou, because Niou is the only other person in the world who understands what it means to slice out some vital part of yourself, knowingly and willingly, for the sake of a very specific type of love.

it's probably obvious i am so obsessed with 3byuki in the context of marui's conscious betrayal of her own (and yukimura's!) ethics in order to save yukimura + how niou would have done the same for yukimura, although it wouldn't register as a betrayal to anyone other than herself because she's been so good at concealing the fact that she does actually also have a sense of ethics... this is drawing a parallel to niou's attitude towards the 82 switch, which i read as niou getting in over her head in that yagyuu is basically The Killer which means niou has to match that despite any discomfort she has about yagyuu's lack of ethics.

Idols are easy for her to mimic because they are by definition larger than life; Niou could probably do someone like Psycho Pinkette right off the bat without any further preparation. Marui always shone in the spotlight, soaked it up until she was radiating light herself and then it was nothing for Niou to skim off a little bit of that brightness to coat herself in, Marui’s candy colour scheme, Marui’s sunny catchphrases, Marui’s smile. Niou’s an entertainer, too, but she’s a magician, not an idol. Marui’s trick is herself. Niou’s trick is everything but herself.

really i just wanted to use pinkette in a fic, ironically unironically yk. also i love a dichotomy and i'm happy with the one i set up here - the way the spotlight is on different things for marui and niou.

“Kabaji not at court today?” Niou says.

“She’s on Juri duty,” Oshitari drawls; seems she’s still physically unable to speak in anything other than a drawl.

made myself laugh so much with this one ngl best joke i pulled off all year... shoutout to 2020 me deciding to make nyota jirou's name juri and creating theee perfect joke setup 3 years later.

She wishes she’d gone with Marui to meet more of the people who took her place, all of Rikkai’s places, this new context Marui’s transplanted herself into. But what remains of the old context? She’d dislocated herself from it, time and time again. It isn’t over, it didn’t end, Niou knows it too. Better than Marui, even. The process of severance is a fresh and unhealing wound.

i think these are nice lines :) i used them for the cut tag text.

The expression on Yukimura’s face is inscrutable. Niou remembers the brittle flash of fury in Marui’s eyes back at her hotel room when she’d said, aren’t you tired of letting Seika-chan down? and all Niou could think about was being fourteen and standing alone on the court in a body that was not her own, nauseous to the borrowed marrow with exhaustion, Fuji’s open eyes across the net exactly the same shade of sizzling blue as the cloudless sky overhead and with all that attendant inevitability. For a moment Niou is struck by the inexplicable terror that Yukimura might actually start crying, which would mean Niou would have to kill herself on the spot, even if just to deprive Sanada of the opportunity to snap Niou’s neck with her giant cleaver hands first; Niou figures Marui is too far away to beat Sanada to the punch. To the… manual guillotine.

probably obvious my other obsession is niou vs fuji at nats finals and the idea that niou pushed herself so far even though it was harder for her than anyone else due to delicate constitution + added illusion energy consumption 2x combo to deal with, all for YUKIMURA, and then it amounted to nothing because she lost and rikkai lost, and then it turned out that yukimura wanted her to lose anyway, and [yukiniou essay ver 4833894 redacted for length]
but i think this is a nice balance of jokes and terror just in this one paragraph.

Unfazed, Yagyuu continues. “But you are the one who holds onto the past most tightly, I think. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have kept track of us, all this time.”

The unasked question coalesces as clearly as if Yagyuu had spoken it aloud; Niou could easily substitute her own voice, or her voice as Yagyuu. She could still run. She is very aware that Yagyuu has left her this escape route on purpose, courtesy or test or both. But she’s out of breath from the lap around the grounds, already. She does not think she could do another.

“I had to leave,” Niou says, “because if I didn’t leave, then I would be staying. Obviously.”

“I don’t see anything wrong with staying.”

“It’s just not what I do.”

Yagyuu says, “Then let me do it for you.”

i think everything about the 82 part of this fic is sooooooo romantic but especially this exchange... the unasked question being why niou left if she still cared so much about them, yagyuu chivalrously offering to take on the burden for her but like in a way that's showing niou it's possible and that there's a genuine future there, the contrast between 82 switch vs niou illusioning marui in the prequel fic or jaemin earlier in the fic, niou being literally tired from physically running and also tired from emotionally running... real true being the same person but actually not being the same person at all LOVE.

soul weighed down by gravity | nct dream, haechan/renjun, jaemin/renjun

And yet. The entirety of space and the force of the blast had sent that helmet sailing right into Renjun’s hands. Surely it was some kind of serendipity.

notes:

i already did a lengthy dvd commentary <here> including my fave lines but basically i again had a fucking ball in this bitch. probably i had too much fun in 2023. this was an extremely ambitious and experimental project but i think i pulled it off and i'm glad i tested my abilities and i still like the final product... i did reread it recently (having forgotten everything about it) and kind of understood nothing but the vibes were good and this is a strong contender for my personal #1 fave fic of my own, perhaps finally unseating longtime rank holder rtfbt...

two-hour vacation | nct dream, mark/renjun

That’s when Mark understands the intent of the gesture: not to harm, after all. Only to search for a sign of life.

notes:

im gonna be honest this fic nearly killed me and it's kind of making me redevelop trenchitis thinking back on the writing process... i actually started a dvd commentary for it and then got too harrowed on reflection to keep going. like first of all the fact that i had to set an alarm for 2am so i could make sure i claimed the prompt i wanted. and then the way i wrote 6k in like the first week before all my inspiration died for the rest of the writing period right up until literally 2 weeks before the due date. AND THEN I DECIDED TO READ THE ENTIRETY OF ORV. i make such smart and wise decisions. i was staying up every night to write in that last week and also writing in court in order to get it done 😭 and yes that was including the porn scene as i always leave those until last, although it ended up being the fastest i've ever written a porn scene since it usually takes me a couple months. and then i still needed an extension after all that. probably the most stressed i've ever been about a deadline and this is including the time i was writing a sex scene to finish my yuletide assignment on my phone with the screen brightness turned down to minimum while sitting next to my parents on a plane on xmas eve.
but i do feel a great sense of accomplishment for managing to finish in the end, i don't think i'm thattt happy with the end result although on more recent reread it's not as terrible as i remember thinking it was when i posted it, but i am ultimately glad i pushed through with it. i'm already kind of historically revising my own memories to be like well it probably wasn't even that bad... i should do that again sometime... but i am seriously not built for longfic LOL.
for some reason i was severely in the characterisation struggle mines in this fic even though it's literally dream but i think it's just that mark is one of the hardest povs i've ever tried writing, i really don't do well with earnest types. what's a fire moon idk her. i did want to challenge myself but i think i pushed it too far lmfaoo four years after i vowed never to write mark pov again bc i struggled so hard in fractionation i decided to try again on the grounds of How Bad Could It Really Have Been and the answer is . so bad. but i lived bitch.
having to come up with new hero/villain aliases instead of using the ones from my other superpower au fics in order to not deanon myself was so hard lmao but i like the names i landed on for everyone except markren(hyuck who will always be full sun) better so in future superpower aus i'll probably combine the sets for maximum verse confusion.
speaking of deanoning it's so funny to me that my epigraph usage gave me away sorry for being unable to resist the siren call of pretentious poetry excerpt opener... i thought using emojis for scene breaks instead of my usual 7 empty lines would be enough to sow doubt 😔
time stopped at 5:27 because may 27 is the halfway point between renjun's birthday and mark's birthday btw. also renjun's friend who taught him how to use his powers is jun <3

best lines:
At first he thinks it must be Wraith, here to finish off the job. A pale smudge that might be a hand comes towards his neck. But the killing blow never lands. The figure only stays kneeling over him, backlit and glowing, fingers resting on his pulse point so lightly Mark can’t even feel the contact. That’s when he understands the intent of the gesture: not to harm, after all. Only to search for a sign of life.

Finally Mark’s vision begins to resolve, fragment by fragment. The eyes first, shockingly bright. Then the mouth, full and soft and unsteady. The rest of the face swims into focus, hovering over him like a small moon.

“Get up,” the hallucination says. The first sound Mark’s heard since he fell. Voice like the chime of a tuning fork, cleaving through the miasma. Clear and true. “This isn’t how it ends.”

something warm on Mark’s cheek. Hard to tell the pressure or shape of the contact beyond that: fingertips, maybe, or tears. Don’t cry, Mark wants to say, but his tongue is a dead unstirring weight. I’ve never wanted to make you cry.

longass section but actually started writing this part before i'd even claimed the prompt because i liked the prompt so much and i thought it was so fun not directly naming renjun even though mark (and the audience) knows it's renjun. i like the effect!

“If you’re sure…” Mark casts around for something polite to say since he’s involuntarily appropriated Renjun’s bed in a display of disgracefully unguestlike behaviour his mother would be horrified to hear about, and comes up with, “I mean, it’s a really… nice bed.”

“It was a recommendation from Wraith.” Renjun pauses. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that since you’re the one on the bed. But it’s true that it’s a nice bed. He knows a lot about… beds. Furniture.”

“Cool. I didn’t know that Wraith’s hobby was, um, homewares.”

made myself laugh with this conversation, jaemin giving renjun advice on bed choice is one of the funniest jmrn moments to me and i think of it fondly and often. i was originally setting up for a pre-get together bedsharing scene but i couldn't figure out how to do it lol.

This isn’t how it happened. Mark knows it isn’t. The whole thing was over in less than a minute, explosive burst of violence and then he was sun-blind and bleeding out on the ground. But he’s had a bit of firsthand experience with time taking up more time than it should lately and it’s like the moment might never end, Wraith with his hand plunged into Mark’s chest, the roiling orange light, the altitudinal wind that doesn’t seem to touch them at all. The total obliterating coldness radiating out from the centre of Mark’s heart.

obligatory dream scene... one of the first parts i wrote and it really made me be like damn why's the markmin hitting harder than the markren rn. fellas is it gay to stab your rival with your hand i mean part of your body is literally inside another man's body 🤔

“When I found you it was like fate.” Hardly more than a whisper. “I stopped time as soon as I arrived, but for a moment I was so scared I might have still been too late.” A flicker over Renjun’s face, too quickly gone for Mark to tell what the expression had been. “But then you got up.”

This isn’t how it ends, Renjun had said, the only living thing in a still and dead world. That harpoon of a voice and Mark had grasped the line with its fishhook lodged under his ribs in the empty space Jaemin’s fingers had left. Hauled himself hand over hand back to shore. This isn’t how it ends, and how could Mark not believe him?

“Of course I did,” Mark says. “I heard your voice.”

soooo romantic to me!! writing this part made me feel exactly like how markren makes me feel so i hope that came through.

you don't wanna be at peace with me | aespa, winter/ningning/karina

“I thought you were dead,” Jimin says. Her voice is a punched-out airless scrap of itself. She sways lightly in place. The look on her face could be terror or hope.

Yizhuo meets a girl who is and is not a ghost.

notes:

this was the first time i'd done yuletide in a few years (i used to be an annual participant until i fell into full-time kpop mainism) and i feel so lucky to have matched with a recip who was up for just about anything and expressed a preference for aespa's mv lore as you know i fucking love superpowers. i'm really happy with the one i came up with for ningning, which is just an extension of her canonical hacker powers in the sense that emotion-reading/mind-reading is basically hacking into humans... although now that i think about it maybe i should've given her mind control powers. but it meant i could do a lot of fun synaesthesia stuff with other people's emotions manifesting mainly as tastes to her and i liked coming up with flavour associations. original winter was an armamenter per canon hence karina saying she never misses, which included her shielding abilities, but winter soldier winter also has lie detection/teleportation/other stuff beyond the scope of this fic.
i repurposed an old wip which was a sequel to waiting for you to move on (hence giselle's mention of renjun dissolving his partnership with jaemin and becoming partners with haechan instead) but i took most of the parts with dream in them out and then wrote like 11k more.... originally i meant for this fic to be 3k 😭 accidentally doing 4x planned wordcount problem. this can only be the fault of the perfect visuals of DRAMA.
i had everything except for the actual emotional resolution of the winrina + Ethics Of Supervillainy storylines done by the deadline but i was furiously grinding out the scene where karina shows ningning her memories of winter during cafe writing date with mich in la on her laptop and editing on the plane to singapore... basically shoutout to mich for once again saving my ass lmao.
i was really struggling with character voicing for a while, i watched a bunch of aespa content for canon review but the problem is that my only other rpf fandom is dream who i've known for 6 years and i just felt so uncertain about my grasp on aespa in comparison. but i think and hope i did my girls justice... it was very hard to make winter recognisably herself when she's mostly just her hollowed-out stage persona in this fic and she's being seen from essentially an outsider pov since ningning never knew her as minjeong, but i tried to give little hints at winter's personality starting to show through as the fic progresses. towards the end i was also starting to get worried about not having any overarching motif/extended metaphor other than the sisterhood of the travelling snowflake necklace but it worked out as usual 🙏 genuinely i do not know what i'm writing until i'm writing it.
i seriously love writing superheroes/supervillains as a parallel to idolhood lmao, i love the bureaucracy of heroism/villainy being conducted through institutions and agencies and the networks of coworkers and rival-equivalent-of-coworkers and the public vs private divide of having a hero/villain persona and a civilian persona. i've been refining the concept over quite a few fics and i think the iteration here is the one i'm happiest with so far. i think i ended the year on a high note so i'm pretty pleased with my performance overall.

best lines:
Then, just as abruptly as she’d raised it, Winter lowers the gun. Stows it back on her utility belt. A light wind picks up around them, tangles in the ends of Winter’s hair, sends fitful flurries of leaves skittering across the courtyard and into the fountain. The whisper of dead things rasping against dead things.

Yizhuo watches her watch Jimin. All three of them empty-handed. Around them the smell of decay stirred up by the wind, afterimage of aliveness.

i had such a vivid image in my mind of this scene and i was really careful about word choice when constructing it and i think i achieved the effect that i was aiming for so i'm happy with this part.

One or both of them jostles the table and the metal table number stand keels over like a body that’s had its throat slit; Aeri scream-gasps and harpoons a hand out to right it.

i love bringing random violent imagery into mundane actions in general but i think it really works as a characterisation enhancer here too.

“I’ve never even seen Frankenstein,” Yizhuo confesses. “Or read it. I think it was a book?”

“Yeah, neither have I.” Aeri purses her lips contemplatively. “Maybe if I ever took a job that involved graverobbing… that’s pretty gross, though. I probably wouldn’t. Why would someone hire me to rob a grave, anyway? My fees aren’t cheap and that kind of grunt work is so low-level it’s—I mean, it's underground. Like the graves I won't be robbing. What were we talking about?”

i was mainlining the skulduggery pleasant series when i was writing this part and the whole frankenstein convo is sooo skulpleas inspired lol. i think it's funny!

Jimin flings one final desperate glance like a net out towards Winter, a last-ditch trawl. “Why didn’t you kill me.” Her voice fissures down the middle.

Winter doesn’t respond. Just looks at Jimin, even and inflectionless. The empty basin of her face gives nothing away.

The hand on Winter’s wrist falls back to Jimin’s side. Her defeat blooms on Yizhuo’s tongue, a stinging mouthful of saltwater. Yizhuo swallows it down like tears. All around them, on the far edge of perception, the sound of the sea.

i like the cadence of this section! and i chose the imagery carefully: net/trawl - callback to ningning trying to sense winter in the courtyard scene + ties in with shipping dock setting. empty basin - another callback to courtyard scene + identification of winter with the empty fountain ie a vessel for something dead. defeat tasting like tears - self-explanatory. distant sound of the sea - ties in with defeat=saltwater=tears + ningning's ever-sharpening senses + the way she can always perceive nature with her physical senses (sound of the wind, coolness/brightness of the rain, sound of the ocean), which is also the only way she can perceive winter and goes back to the natural/unnatural conflict that is winter's existence.

Yizhuo puts her free hand to Winter’s chest, just off-centre. Almost where the bullet had embedded itself into Jimin; her own shoulder twinges as though in belated visceral sympathy. Winter cups her hand back over Yizhuo’s on the compress. Life gifted, twicefold. First in warning. Now, perhaps, in overture.

“Until death do us part,” Yizhuo says, solemn as an undisturbed grave. Her side aches, the strain of flesh and gristle knitting itself back together. Heat like a nuclear reaction scalding her hand even through the layers of fabric; Winter must feel it too. Her pulse under Winter’s hand. Winter’s pulse under her hand.

most romantic declaration of rivalry i've ever written probably, not even for the jokes marriage vow slash graverobbing callback but because they're touching each other's pulses. life in each other's hands literally!! And The Ghost Of Karina's Presence Was There Too, And Even Giselle If You Think About It, I Love You Aespa.

Such a neat and compact movement, as if she’s only moving back and forth on a preset track, and yet by her side her palm is stained dark with Yizhuo’s blood. Afterimage of aliveness. The vivid proof of rescue. Her life in Winter’s hands, given back to her freely.

winter's personality (as in, quality of being A Person) breaking through... also there's nothing more satisfying than doing a bunch of phrase callbacks to bring things full circle :') afterimage of aliveness from the courtyard scene but now for something that continues to be alive + vivid proof of rescue vs karina's vivid proof of care.

Winter regards her with the deceptive unreadability of a one-way mirror.

the one-way mirror motif occurred to me at the very end of writing but i'm sooo happy with it and the connotations of expression vs performance vs truth it conjures up. isn't that what being an idol is all about!

Winter’s fingers had been shockingly warm where they kissed Yizhuo's palm. How counterintuitive, that heat. It lingers like Winter doesn’t.

came up with these ending lines very early on and then later went back and made sure i was always referring to karina's hands as cold for the thematic contrasts of it all. also i love a negative comparison.

DREAMWIDTH MASTERLIST

[fic] to perfectly perform in reverse
[commentary] soul weighed down by gravity
books i read in 2023 q1
book i read in 2023 q2
posting about company time on company time - judgment quote roundup
more recent skincare buys
no longer quarterly books i read may-aug 2023
[wip amnesty] an indispensable suggestion from afar - alice in borderland kuzuryu/mira wippost
books i read aug-sep 2023
even more beauty product reviews
books i read oct 2023
why is it called final fantasy when they keep making new ones though - ff7 fmv compilation

REFLECTIONS

looking back, did you expect to write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d expected?
honestly way more, i cleared 50k again this year!! unfortunately that 50k still did not include dreampuri. fortunately that 50k included aespafic finally!!

what pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
none, everything i wrote this year was exactly what i thought i would write lmfao all i know is superpowers, and pickshipping, and enemies, and people getting shoulder injuries and/or blown up, and ending on some observation about heartbeats which i didn't realise i was doing so much until i started writing up this retrospective lol.

did you take any writing risks this year? what did you learn from them?
maybe signing up for fests/exchanges with hard deadlines was a bit of a risk given my work schedules but it paid off, so the moral of the story is that sunk cost fallacy really works on me and externally-enforced deadlines are the only way i can guarantee finishing anything. the other risk was just soul weighed down by gravity in general i think, i've never tried to do so much complicated shit in a fic before but i think it worked. however i don't think i learned anything from that and i don't think i would be able to replicate it. sometimes you just get possessed.

best story of the year?
soul weighed down by gravity 🔥🔥🔥 maybe my best story of all time?

most fun story to write
also soul weighed down by gravity i just could not stop writing it. i really enjoyed writing to perfectly perform in reverse as well but i actually wrote most of it in 2022 so i don't think it counts.

hardest story to write
two-hour vacation, my god was i in the mines... as i said in the commentary section mark pov is really not a natural fit with my writing style at all and i was kind of bumbling around and periodically yelling MARK MY FUCKING WORDS!!! also it got so much longer than i wanted it to be which only added to my despair.

favourite opening lines:
from soul weighed down by gravity:

Miraculously, the helmet itself had remained totally intact without so much as a chip in the light red paint, but the faceplate had cracked right down the middle, fissure so clean it looked intentional. Only a coincidence of design. Renjun pressed a thumb to the edge of the broken polycarbonate and the fabric of his glove snagged. If he had been barehanded it would have broken the skin.

these came to me almost instantly it was like a miracle... i think it helped that this was actually the ending of the fic chronologically so it was like writing an ending which i always love doing.

favourite ending lines
ok honestly also the ending of soul weighed down by gravity but in the interests of having some variety i did really like the ending of you don't wanna be at peace with me:

Seconds until Jimin arrives, a supernova brightness Yizhuo could see even with her eyes shut. That roiling heart almost brilliant enough to taste now, a promise of acidic sweetness under her tongue like a strawberry. Until then, only until then, Yizhuo is alone. Winter’s fingers had been shockingly warm where they kissed Yizhuo's palm. How counterintuitive, that heat. It lingers like Winter doesn’t.

i pulled these out in the commentary section already but i really like these lines! kind of an unsatisfying/ambiguous conclusion but that is also basically my brand sooo...

writing goals
2023 goals:

finish dreampuri ❌ HELP GIRL...
write more akam ❌ sorry to my otp... i did pick away at some wips during the year but all my available time was being spent on 1) my coworkers 2) dream, in that order.
refine my style ✔️(?) i think i've gotten better at more consistently hitting the right balance of comedy and seriousness without compromising my prose style.
i did achieve my 2022 goal of writing aespa fic though! just one year late.

2024 goals:

finish dreampuri REAL NOT CLICKBAIT!!!
clear out current wip rotation before starting any new wips. although i'm kind of already failing step 1 of this because i've been vaguely rotating a few ideas in my mind (undercover as vip x bodyguard au although i don't know which ship i would do i've just been really into the idea lately, jisung-centric sungren sequel to future metropolis heart which i have like 5 lines written for in my notes app except they're somehow all about dongren and jmrn, ningning/lexie liu idolverse pwp set at the miumiu holiday event in a canon divergence au where ningning became a miumiu girl instead of a versace girl).
join another fest or exchange - maybe ggjukebox this year? i'm not familiar with sza's discography but i'll investigate to see if any of her songs work with my ningxie brainworms... i kind of want to get back in the ficmix mines too i miss remixing.

CURRENT WIPS

any way we are | nct dream, jaemin/renjun, 12.8k/15k

He lingers over his grip tape, keeping the tension perfectly even with each pass around the handle, lining up the overlaps in precise parallel diagonals. He drags a thumb over the ridges, sharp with the definition of newness. Not yet worn smooth by his palm. So many more hours of work, and then once he’s done with this one he’ll have to start the process all over again. By the time he finishes the task and looks back up, the room is empty.
//
“Huh?” Jeno glances up. “Oh, the logbook entries. Me and Renjun have been editing your self-evals after you do them so they actually have some useful data.”

All the 3s Jaemin circled have been mercilessly crossed out and the 0 in each row circled instead. Jaemin feels this is a little unwarranted.

“How cute,” Jaemin says. “I didn’t know you were watching me like that.” Jeno gives him a look. “I didn’t know Renjun was watching me like that,” Jaemin amends.

“Renjun is monitoring you. Kind of like how a national security agency monitors a flight risk,” Jeno says. “He thinks you’re going to leave.”

have a double excerpt to make up for my glacial progress, i'm literally running out of things to wippost from this omg if i don't finish this damn fic in 2024...

burned your bridges | detective conan, akai/amuro, 0.8k/3k

“Hello, Rye,” Bourbon says. He tilts his head and smiles, a closed-mouth expression that still communicates the baring of teeth. His gloved hands, ostentatiously white, rest folded over the gun in his lap with an exaggeratedly telegraphed casualness. “Long time no see. Though it’s FBI Special Agent Akai Shuichi now, isn’t it?”

“Bourbon,” Akai greets. “Here to kill me?"

“We’ll see,” Bourbon says. “You know, it was a little too easy to break in. Anyone could have done it. Put a bullet through your head you before you even noticed the trap.” Smugly: “You let your guard down.”

Since Bourbon is clearly here for a reason there probably isn’t any danger in turning his back. Akai heads over to the kitchenette, opens the cupboard over the never-used stove and takes out a couple of glasses. "Want a drink?"

this is specifically akai/bourbon fic set after akai's cover is blown and he leaves the black org but before canon starts, which is one of my favourite akam eras. i meant for it to be my virgo season project but i ended up spending all of virgo season recovering from two-hour vacation 😢 maybe 2024 virgo season. anyway it's bad coping mechanisms hatesex pwp in which bourbon goes to akai for comfort/masochistic self-punishment/who fucking knows what his feelings or reasons are certainly not bourbon after killing someone, the problem is that i decided to make it akai pov and i have zero grasp on akai's interiority so i have no idea how to write this.

sleepwalker | nct dream, jisung/chenle, 3.5k/5k

Beyond the doorframe there was only white. Snowstorm void that would envelop him as soon as he stepped outside. The wind was all he could hear. Under his hand the doorknob felt like ice. He wanted to twist his head back, check to see if Chenle was still looking at him, if there would be the same flash of understanding that passed between them on the stage. Something to reassure him that Chenle would be there on the other side in the moment when he reached out.

finally writing idolverse again after 5000000 years i swear i am a canon compliant main it's just ncity that brings out the au writer in me for some reason... this is a jichen lotus eater machine fic in which jisung wakes up in a world where he and chenle are an established couple and then the world gradually starts unravelling. combines three things i'm extremely passionate about: 1) lotus eater machine my #1 trope of all time 2) dreams 3) past tense, so i think this shouldn't be too difficult to finish. famous last words.

clear eye, see bright | nct dream, jaemin/renjun, 2k/10k

"How are Minion One and Minion Two?"

"I wish you wouldn’t call them that," Renjun says, "but they’re good. It’s just this new customer we have who’s kind of a problem."

Yizhuo’s voice hardens to steel. "Problem as in, Karina and Alexandra should pay them a visit?"

"No, no, not that kind of problem. Problem as in, we keep having to buy out pretty much the entire flower market to keep up with his orders.” Renjun hesitates. “Also problem as in, Full Sun can never find out about this if I want a single moment of peace for the rest of my life.”

"Oh," Yizhuo says knowingly. "A handsome young man problem. A rich handsome young man problem."

this may be one of the stupidest things i've ever written lmao it was inspired by a cc i answered some time ago but the premise is that renjun is a florist and jaemin is a ceo who keeps coming into the store to place huge orders and generally be a nuisance except renjun is also a superhero and take a wild guess as to who the supervillain who keeps causing trouble while renjun's on duty is. i think i will try to prioritise finishing this one over the summer since it's a pretty cruisy and unserious project that doesn't require too much thought.

through the smoke we saw the flame | the hunger games, snow/clemensia/livia, 3.1k/5k

“We’re not what?” Livia sets her glass down on the grazing table and puts a hand to Clemensia’s elbow, leaning forward into her space again. She smells like roses. In the tastefully dim light her eyes look more grey than blue. “Come on, Clemmie. I’m a Cardew. You’re a Dovecote. We get to have everything—why shouldn’t we? It’s practically our birthright.”

“What about Coryo?” Clemensia can barely flatten the tremor out of her voice.

“I hardly think Coryo would mind.”

“I mind.”

Livia scoffs. “When did you get so boring?” But she snatches her glass back up and whirls away into the glittering crowd.

Barely thirty seconds later Coriolanus appears. He hands Clemensia a glass of wine and slings an arm over her shoulders, easy and familiar. She accepts the wine. She allows the arm to rest there for the span of three breaths. Then she shrugs it off and turns to face him. If he’s upset by the dismissal it doesn’t show in a single relaxed line of his posture.

He looks devastating, in the sense of capacity for destruction. The sapphires at his cuffs gleam the same deep blue as Livia’s dress. As Clemensia's earrings.

“Look at that,” he says. He raises his glass to her. “We match.”

got insanely repossessed by my old thg stannery after watching tbosas and then feeling extremely indignant on my girl clemensia's behalf over her storyline getting cut and then getting smad about how snow liked her too much to politically marry her even though they were perfect slayer classmates dynamic the world and then the world's most toxic triangulation was born in my mind. the vision of toxic yuri summer fling that came to me... livia agreeing to marry snow not just for the status boost but also to hurt/win over clemensia who she knew liked snow... livia liking clemensia but liking power more... clemensia having terrible taste in people and generally going tf through it... snow being snow... i don't think i'll finish this but it was fun trying to exorcise it from my system lmao, i was on edge dodging infidelity landmines because the premise is essentially clemensia's crushes getting together and then separately trying to seduce her and/or fuck around with her while ostensibly dating each other. thank god none of them have heard of polyamory because they would truly be the worst throuple ever conceptualised.

++ a couple of secret projects hanging over from last year that hopefully i will also be able to finish.

this is not a post about final fantasy in general, this is very specifically a compilation post of ff7 fmvs i have recently enjoyed(?) as a guy who has never played a single second of any final fantasy in my life (although my question still stands). i have read about a million words of ff7 yaoi though! all over a couple weeks back in october! i don't know what came over me either. and then i watched advent children and understood nothing <3 i don't know who half the cast is and i couldn't tell you anything about the plot except for the parts that involve cloud getting impaled by huge swords, but one thing about me is that i love elite military academies and superpowers and fucked up enemies and people dying when killed and people not dying when killed and DOOM. so i will now proceed to make bold assertions about ship dynamics in a canon i don't actually know while reviewing another set of moving images.

( who else up never being a memory )

in this month's issue of solo book club report: untethered sky, a marvellous light, a restless truth, divine rivals, skulduggery pleasant books #1-#6. not in this month's issue of solo book club report: the no joke approximately 1 million words of ff7 fic i decided to read for reasons unknown to even myself (i have never interacted with ff7 in my life).

currently reading: this is how you lose the time war, the secret history, the archive undying, kingdom of the wicked, she who became the sun. YES all at the same time NO I am not making progress in any of them.

( I loved her with the gravity of a stone sinking into a pool. )

recently purchased skincare makeup and perfume products roundup:

( almost no misses )

welcome back to my solo book club. spoilers for this time it’s real, six crimson cranes, jade city and strike the zither:

( First lesson a strategist learns is to keep their enemies close, and there’s no greater enemy than a rival. )

another few months another books roundup drafted in outlook on company time, literacy win... this ended up quite long i think because i had so many opinions about things these books could have done better but honestly overall not a bad crop this time. spoilers for violet made of thorns, daughter of the moon goddess, fourth wing, and omniscient reader's viewpoint:

( a hand of someone who had been writing stories for a very long time )

quick round of skincare product reviews 👇

( some good some bad )

all i read is judgments nowadays so i thought i would round up some recent rhetorical highlights i have seen on caselaw:

( unrelated but i just had a chocolate cupcake at work it was pretty good )

yes i am aware we are not even halfway through q2 but i do not really foresee myself reading anything else over the next 2 months or so, i'm in an illiteracy mood again. not really sure what has been happening to my spare time as I haven’t been reading but I also haven’t been watching anything other than magical girl lyrical nanoha over the past couple days or cultivating any hobbies so I guess I must have just spent all that time staring at walls or something.

anyway i only read one (1) book but it was good and i liked it so i wanted to post about it now:

( het high school au akam i love youuuu )

usually i do a yearly books review because my ass is not reading but my ass actually is reading these days since i don’t have to do 34857394859385934853 pages of academic reading anymore. i never said it was good though. but here is a roundup of everything i’ve read this year so far, will probably contain spoilers, also i typed this out into an email draft at work so apologies for any strange autocaps:

( what happened to all our books that have good vibes and are pleasant to be around )

[fic] soul weighed down by gravity
haechan/renjun + jaemin/renjun | t | 16k | gundam au

dvd commentary below 👇

( who could say if gravity is good or bad )

to perfectly perform in reverse
fandom: prince of tennis

ship: r63 yagyuu/niou, like 500 background ships including: niou/marui, yukimura/niou, kirihara/an, jackal/marui, inui/yanagi, sanada/yukimura, jaemin/jeno
rating: g
word count: 5.7k

( But what remains of the old context? She’d dislocated herself from it, time and time again. It isn’t over, it didn’t end, Niou knows it too. Better than Marui, even. The process of severance is a fresh and unhealing wound. )

STATS

total number of completed stories: 4 (▼8)
pyrophane [2] (▲1):

nct dream [2] (▲1)

sulfate [2] (▼4):

detective conan [1] (=)
prince of tennis [1] (▼4)

rhodochrosite [0] (▼11)

total wordcount: 17 239

most used tag: ambiguous relationships [3]
most used rating: t [2]
most tagged character: huang renjun [2]

FIC MASTERLIST + COMMENTARY

eye to eye | detective conan, kir & bourbon

And this is another test in the long series she’s had to undergo ever since her codename came to an uneasy rest on her neck, more a guillotine than a title. The men Vermouth associates with closely enough to allow access to her private quarters is a vanishingly short list, even before the additional filter of Rena’s limited recognition. She knows Gin. Calvados is dead. Cognac is in Switzerland, the last Rena heard. That leaves—

“Bourbon,” she responds. Wary now.

Rena is always meeting Bourbon at thresholds.

notes:

i think this is a really solid fic that achieves what it intended to do, which was #JUSTICE_FOR_KIR, and i'm happy with how it turned out!! i love kir a lot and i really enjoyed doing a deepdive into her interiority and her conceptually hilarious multi-level coworkers without benefits relationship with bourbon. like kir's entire cover and thus life hinges on akai being dead because she killed him, which is the very thing bourbon is devoting his entire life to disproving, so their aims are fundamentally opposed and totally incompatible... and yet they barely seem to know each other, bourbon doesn't even appear to register that his pursuit of akai is directly endangering kir's life, it's like they're operating on adjacent parallel tracks bridged by the people they have in common--vermouth, akai, and in this fic scotch (TO MEEEEEE. scotchkir my beloved tragedy tinhet.....)--and if there's one thing i love it's highrankers ranking highly next to each other without actually interacting.
also kir is like at ground 0 of the corrosively toxic fallout caused by akam being around each other, which is really funny but also my poor kir... i tweeted this already but akam are like the inverse of the post that's like the guys in this ship may make each other worse but at least being together quarantines them away from inflicting their problems on everyone else. akam are literally totally capable of having nontoxic relationships with others individually but as soon as they're together they become so obsessively violently hyperfocused on each other that everything and everyone around them gets blown up as collateral damage. and kir is first in the firing line 😭 i hope they both send her some nice and expensive flowers and fruit baskets for all the agonies they have put her through.
anyway i don't really think this fic has any standout lines but overall it's a story of decent quality with just enough thematic cohesion to tie the whole thing together, and there aren't any parts that jump out at me as being lazily or poorly written, and i had fun seeding my fave agendas (i kinda wish i could have snuck a bit more akam in there but it just wasn't directly relevant... but it very much is the driving force behind the entire situation lmao).

best lines:
Navigating the minefield of interacting with another reconnaissance specialist is always a headache, but the first step of any reconnaissance mission is discerning the parameters of the social territory. This litmus test is simple enough to administer: “It’s good to finally meet you. Scotch spoke highly of you.”

i took care with the word choice here and i'm super happy with the result... and the ghost of scotch was there!!! i think both kir and bourbon loved him (SCOTCHKIR REAL IN MY MIND) but neither of them know the other felt the same way

Signals of attraction were some of the first things Vermouth ever taught her to look for and to imitate. Rena isn’t sure if it’s the performance itself Vermouth enjoys, or the knowledge that it’s a performance.

verkir sexy recon/honeypot mentorship is sooo important to me i think vermouth specifically does enjoy self sabotage by fixating on + helping out traitors

Light like glass, floor like glass, herself just as brittle and Bourbon facing her like a warped reflection.

literally the entire thesis of this fic... it's about being the same but not the same... it's about viewing and being viewed... it's about the crushing weight of the many griefs both kir and bourbon are separately secretly bearing...

She dismantles the rose-scented cloud of tissue paper and out into her cupped palm tumble five delicate hairpins. The practical kind, not ornamental, designed for invisible functionality. She lifts one up, pries the halves apart with a thumbnail, testing the tensile strength: surprisingly sturdy. Enough to, say, pick a lock. It pulls a laugh out of her, despite herself. So this is the code of honour that Bourbon operates on. A man who leaves no business unfinished, no matter how trivial.

idk i really like the rhythm of this paragraph and i think i chose good verbs

late but it was light | prince of tennis, yukimura/niou

The unseen steel of diligence, masked by that deliberate inconstancy. Or: Yukimura tries to pin down a mirage in the garden.

notes:

this is the final part in my 3byuki series which was originally two unrelated dw fics i decided to collect together when crossposting to ao3, which meant i had to reverse engineer a narrative throughline, which meant i needed to write yukiniou to complete the triangle. this one taking place in the future after the u17 world cup gave me a bit of trouble because i severely hate the actual canon surrounding this particular point in time for rikkai so i didn't want to canon review even though i obviously was just going to ignore the parts i didn't want to acknowledge in my personal version of tenipuri canon.
ummm anyway yukiniou is my favourite dynamic within 3byuki because it's the most difficult for me to pin down and i think they have a lot of trouble understanding each other even though yukimura really really wants to know niou better and niou is one of yukimura's most loyal followers even if it doesn't seem that way at first. and on top of that they also have to deal with the godzilla of niou knowing that yukimura purposefully let him lose/die at nationals finals but not being able to help forgiving yukimura for it even if he wanted to hold a grudge. like i think niou is the only rikkai member who has a complex about his yukimura complex, everyone else has either consciously accepted it (yanagi, marui), doesn't actually have one (jackal, yagyuu), or simply doesn't even realise that what they feel about yukimura is in complex territory (sanada, kirihara), so the levels of Awareness and resentment that never actually becomes fully-fledged resentment because niou literally cannot hold that kind of feeling towards yukimura make yukiniou So Fucking Complicated... but in the end it is LOVE. terror and incomprehensibility and all.
i always struggle a lot with yukimura's voicing, i have terminal CannotWriteOnepickitis and i find it really hard to strike the right balance of polite society lady / viewpoint that doesn't quiiite align with a normal human moral outlook / the terrifying yawning chasm of yukimura's feelings about tennis. but i think i did pretty well here and also with yukimura's somewhat unreliable narration in that he thinks he is understanding niou but he seriously isn't. yukimura's main problem when it comes to rikkai is that he has these very strongly held assumptions about everyone, and because they love him so much they do their absolute best to fulfil those assumptions even if it's causing them intense psychological damage, but since those assumptions are not always entirely correct they will ultimately fail to be what yukimura wants from them. that's the tragedy at the heart of rikkai. and even though this is a hopeful fic about Growth and Future i think that's the bittersweet element underlying everything that yukimura doesn't quite clock, but niou maybe does.
i do like this fic a lot!! i think it's the strongest out of the trilogy on a technical level and represents my views well and has good dialogue and strong atmosphere and includes some lines i'm super proud of, and i think i did a good job of tying the "plot"/things that are actually concretely happening to the metaphorical/narrative aspects of yukiniou's relationship i wanted to explore. probably my favourite thing i wrote this year :')

fave lines:
Yukimura says, “It was probably an error of judgement.”

Stone into still water. It hardly feels like an admission at all, so far away from the brittle brutal delirium of that summer. They’ve already had another summer since, an ocean away, though not the right one. They will never be able to return to the right one. And yet. So much interpolated between then and now there are times Yukimura feels almost unrecognisable. Surely Niou must feel the same, a guess hazarded by that vague awareness at their threshold proximity, even if Yukimura is unable to discern the precise parameters of the difference in him.

“It wasn’t,” Niou says. “It wasn’t an error.”

this feels like an extremely Me section it makes me very happy to read back over... i think the prose has swag and the dialogue has yolo and the pacing and tone is exactly what i wanted to achieve and i loveee the technique of breaking up a conversation with an introspective paragraph in the middle. i'm not sure what my writing style is or if i even have a style but i think this is a good example of writing that i can recognise as typical of me, like if i had amnesia specifically about my fics and i had to pick my own writing out of a blind lineup

“I’m Rikkaidai’s Niou. It’s built in.”

i think that more than anyone else niou relies on structures and archetypes and titles to define the world and his sense of identity, even though he's meant to be the unpredictable trickster chameleon, so rikkai is even more synonymous with yukimura in niou's mind than it normally is. niou is yukimura's niou!!!

Three summers in a row, as though they have been preserved in the season of full bloom all this time. At the peak, the only vector of change possible is degradation and therefore something to be avoided at all costs. The wilt, the decay, the inevitable culling. Yukimura staved it off as long as he could and he’d almost managed to believe he had achieved that perfect stasis. But he’d been wrong about that, too. He’s a gardener. He should know this cycle well. You plant the seeds, water them, watch them grow and bloom and wither, and then you start everything all over again.

1) summer is theeeee most fucked up season of all time 2) yes i'm constantly writing garden metaphors about yukimura/rikkai but as if it's my fault it is right there in the text

desire path | nct dream, jaemin/renjun + haechan/renjun

Jaemin had thought, Renjun doesn’t look at me like that. But the expectation did not mirror itself into the material world.

notes:

i already wrote a massive dvd commentary post <here> so i won't go back over all of that but i'm glad i finallyyyy wrote idolverse for nct that properly reflects my current understanding of the meta. i love jaemdongren... i hate writing explicit fic so i will always feel negatively about the actual porn but i think the rest of it is a good jokes/terror balance and thematically tight and i also think this fic has the largest quantity of Good Prose both in absolute value terms and ratio of normal writing to writing i would consider special/pretty so i would say that this fic is probably 👍 overall.

fave lines:
Reams of sunlight falling down around them like rain. The kind of brightness that led to overexposure, everything washed out into indistinct shapes that if you squinted might resemble something you knew.

1800 i love writing light imagery...

“Renjun wants us both to be there,” Donghyuck clarifies.

"So why are we having this conversation without Renjun?” Not that Jaemin wants to have this conversation with Renjun.

“You don’t want to have this conversation with Renjun.”

“I might,” Jaemin says, frowning. “You don’t know that I don’t.”

“Liar,” Donghyuck says gleefully. “Like you care what Renjun has to say.”

“You don’t know anything about me and Renjun.”

“And neither do you. That’s literally your whole problem.”

sorry to c/p in this huge chunk but this conversation is really funny to me i love contrarian jaemin

The first time Jaemin kissed Renjun it had been nearly too dark to see his face. Only a soft and muted glow leaching in from the lit-up hallway outside, the bedroom door cracked open just a sliver. Time felt suspended, like they were ensconced in the space of a held breath. The gentle and cautious movement of Renjun’s mouth against his as the seconds slowed to standstill, and then Renjun tipped his head onto Jaemin’s shoulder and refused to look at him no matter how many times Jaemin said increasingly ridiculous variations of his name in increasingly ridiculous voices. When Jaemin finally coaxed Renjun’s head back up with a hand to his chin he glimpsed, for a moment, his own reflection in the irises of Renjun’s eyes. Haloed in the embarrassment of hope shining out of Renjun. Jaemin could almost believe it himself.

Before Renjun leaned in he’d been wearing an expression of uncertain and careful concentration, partway to a frown. Like he was looking for something in Jaemin’s face. He must have found it, because he’d kissed Jaemin back.

reading back over this made me bite lemons and die a bit from AGHHHH MY SHIP COULD HAVE BEEN REAL so i think it also warrants a multi paragraph c/p... this is the default image i have of jmrn in my mind, the two of them in a dark and quiet room where they can't see each other's faces, everyone is holding their breath, everything is very delicately paused so even though the contact is temporary in the moment it feels like it could last forever. i also think this section is a good representation of my """style""" insofar as it exists

An inventory of presences and absences. The three of them in the room, the four of them out of it. The uncomfortable silver stripe of his ring, the identical one banding Renjun’s finger and Donghyuck’s. And Jaemin’s hand braceleting Renjun’s bare wrists, proxy for an old gift.

i think this part is nice

Jaemin understands materiality because material objects don’t change. The intangible process by which they accrue or lose sentiment might be beyond his comprehension, but there is still a silver bracelet in his drawer whose gold twin is somewhere that lacks specificity but not, strictly speaking, definition.

i also think this part is nice

Donghyuck snorts, an incredulous sound, but Jaemin isn’t looking at him. The line of Renjun’s mouth trembles, and then it firms. Purposeful. The faith hasn’t run out just yet.

surely it is a privilege to approach the end still believing in something!!!

the time i'm seeing you | nct dream, mark/renjun

From the threshold, the superhero known to the public as Protagonist, and to his friends and also enemies as Mark Lee, blinks at Renjun. What’s another insane stroke of coincidence for the night? But of course probability always warps around Mark anyway.

notes:

literally just a silly meaningless storyless cute jokes fic but iiiiiii enjoyed myself :) i started this halfway through last year as a brief writing exercise to get past writer's block and indulge in one of my favourite tropes WOUND CARE which i literally haven't written since..... 2019? except i ended up getting severely blocked on this and approx 800 words in i decided i actually wanted to write jaemren emotional anguish porn instead of markren dorohedoro style gory romcom. so i cannibalised the fic premise into waiting for you to move on and made everything 500% more depressing. and then this year markren quiet down glass box simulated sex reignited my desire to create markren content so i dusted this wip off again... but as the slowest writer in the world it still took me another 4 months to finish lol.
i was especially struggling with the lighthearted tone + ending it's really out of my comfort zone... it does kill me a bit to write straight up romance without some kind of antipathy or anguish in the mix i find it soooo randomly embarrassing like yo look at this loser writing unabashedly about LOVE -_- but i got over it with the power of michsprints! i think i am still too close to this fic to tell if it's good or bad but i do think it's pretty funny, i had to cut some of the jokes because i wasn't sure they were in character but i was definitely prioritising comedy over like... accuracy and quality. but i also think jokes are the most important thing in the universe so like on god i hope this fic is funny to other people and not just myself.
i don't even think i like superheroes/supervillains that much, i'm most interested in the POWERS part but i Fucking Love bureaucracy and administration and institutions so i keep finding myself writing about professional superpower users lmao. anyway can you believe it's taken me four years to finally finish a fic for my second favourite nct ship........ my gdocs is a veritable graveyard of abandoned markren wips *pained smile* i have had my ups and downs with markren over the past year or so but the return to my preferred mark<-ren dynamic during candy promos feels so fortuitous :') it's all coming up MARKREN... except for the part where i literally could not stop bringing up jaemin. you can't blame me for being jaemin no onna though.

fave lines:

He’s read the field reports from other agents—done the recon work himself, even, tacked up the blown-up photographs and satellite imaging printouts onto the main meeting room’s serial killer corkboard, which had accrued the moniker thanks to Donghyuck staunchly refusing to call it anything else despite Renjun’s best efforts at arguing that being a serial killer was really a specific status separate from killing serially, and Renjun was willing to concede the latter but not the former. Jaemin, who never met a debate he didn’t find hysterically funny to play both sides, professed the stance that even if that were true, they all possessed both attributes anyway, so the distinction had no practical effect.

See, even Nana agrees with me, Donghyuck said smugly, to which Jaemin turned his most breathtakingly charming Top 10 Supervillains Too Sexy To Be Terrorists! photo op smile on Donghyuck and said, Don’t ever call me that again, and Renjun frowned and said, But we really aren’t serial killers, though. And we’re not going to kill Protagonist. Serially or otherwise.

this conversation is really funny to me (guy who loves laughing at their own jokes) and i do think it's the kind of stupid debate evil dream would get into heated arguments over and also ndr of light(?) with the jokes/terror meter firmly tuned to the jokes end makes me smile in contrast to the ndr of dark in my last fic... i kinda love bitchy supervillain coworker classmates trio ndr i feel like i keep writing them like this

“What about your,” Mark visibly struggles to think of an appropriate descriptor, “... henchman?”

henchman jokes are so funny to me personally and the idea of jaemin in particular being a henchman is even funnier, though i think jaemin would make a great starscream like he just needs to decide to commit to the bit

DREAMWIDTH MASTERLIST

sylvix crimson flower route paired ending - abandoned wip post
rating all of the night world novels
adventure (singular) in music arrangement - my piano arrangement of color by fuji syusuke & hirakoba rin
love isn't a word - favourite quotes with the word 'love' in them
skincare routine update again
thoughts on gundam seed
i love you miss mystery 🎶🎵 - top 10 detective conan ops/eds
i love scents and smells - my favourite perfumes
who said triangles had to be stable - discussing my favourite dream 3ps and triangulations
fave jokes tennis songs
fave terror tennis songs
fmv (fuck my vlife) - collection of my favourite fmvs
tropes are so good tho - favourite examples of my favourite fic tropes
desire path commentary
you will become a swallowtail butterfly - summary of my fave scenes in turn a gundam
ranking char clones by handsomeness
skincare routine update reup the reloaded
randomly heart touching quotes from my legal philosophy class readings
i could fix him (yugioh arc v) - rewriting the plot of my favourite and least favourite anime of all time yugioh arc v in an attempt to make it maybe not the worst story ever told in the history of humanity
and the lake was frozen in a lightning flash - gundam witch from mercury playlist for my otp 4sule
that guy, he is a JAEMIN - powerscaling various fictional jaemin clones
books i read in 2022
buying beauty products is my passion - review of various recently-trialled beauty products
cc archive (ongoing)

REFLECTIONS

looking back, did you expect to write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d expected?
more because i didn't expect to write any of the fics i wrote this year but less because i failed once again to finish dreampuri. i think 17k might be my lowest cumulative yearly wordcount since i started writing fic in like 2014 or something but on the upside i think the average quality of everything i wrote this year is ok! i don't hate any of my 2022 fics which is maybe a first for me but we'll see how i feel about the time i'm seeing you in a couple months when i've developed an opinion on it lmao.

what pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
i guess my New Fandom Of The Year was the gundam franchise even though technically i started getting into gundam in late december 2021 but i have no evidence of this as i never finished any fic lol. i have a handful of lines of 4sule fic in a sticky note and like 1/3 of a sayla character study (AND THREE GUNPLA!) but everything i actually posted was just Things I Already Like... genfic focusing on minor female character✅ complicated somewhat tense ambiguous relationships canon compliant pickshipping✅✅ superpowers✅

did you take any writing risks this year? what did you learn from them?
no.... maybe the writing risk i took was literally just writing fic at all during my final year of uni lmao. that makes me feel better about how little i wrote but considering i'm going to be even busier next year idk how that bodes for my writing career going forward </3

best story of the year?
late but it was light, i just think it's the strongest overall in terms of prose and pacing and characterisation and thematic coherence and representing my views... i think it's a good fic!!

most fun story to write:
actually it's my 82 wip that i'm working on rn but other than that maybe eye to eye? which also has ridiculously self-indulgent background agenda seeding, i think nothing makes me happier than writing in background shippy subtext and/or crossover cameos unrelated to the main point of the fic. but also actually the text i had the MOST fun writing was my jaeminclone powerscaling dw post <3 i love jokes <3

hardest story to write:
desire path for the reasons of porn (hardest thing in the universe to write fr) + gift for beloved friend + sequel/remix for a fic that i consider sacred text + favourite ship/s so obviously i really wanted to write something that was Actually Good and represented my views properly and wasn't lazily rushed to the finish line in the way my fics usually are because i'm sick of writing them and want to post them asap and ofc that niz would like, so i was under a considerable amount of self-imposed pressure that i think and hope paid off...

favourite opening lines:
i am not one of god's opening lines writers but i think i'm getting better at embracing the philosophy that an opening line is just a line that isn't the opening that is the opening. from desire path:

“So we were thinking,” Donghyuck says, offhand, as he drops into the seat beside Jaemin, even though there is plenty of unoccupied furniture real estate on the other side of the table where Jaemin would not be required to acknowledge his presence. There are only four out of seven of them present, which is actually quite the impressive ratio these days; meals involving more than half of them are a rarity, now that they’ve largely dispersed out of the Dream dorms.

favourite ending lines:
ok it must be said this was kind of a flop year for ending lines for me which is a little bit depressing since killer ending lines is something i usually pride myself on in my writing so it's like how are you not even good at the thing you are supposed to be good at. ANYWAY from late but it was light:

“So make sure you come back to us soon,” Yukimura says. “I’ll be waiting.”

And Niou smiles, that classically sly and opaque tilt to his mouth that could mean truth or mockery or both in the way only Niou can manage. “For you?” he says. “Anything.”

writing goals:
this year's goals:

finish dreampuri ❌
write itzy or aespa fic ❌
academy era hagimatsufuru 3p ❌ (but i did write a different detective conan fic!)
write something good that doesn't make me feel disappointed in myself ✔️

um............. my track record does not look good but arguably i achieved the most important goal, maybe quality over quantity is real...

next year's goals:

finish dreampuri 😭🙏
write more akam!! i still have a rye/bourbon a/b/o pwp without porn wip from last year but i'm not really feeling her, i kiinda want to write akai/bourbon in the handful of years after akai's cover got blown but before the start of canon, but obviously if i were writing akam it would have to be porn otherwise it's a waste of their crazy chemistry and i don't know if i have it in me to write any more explicit fic. i hope the fujobait critical mass in next year's detective conan movie since akai and amuro are both going to be in it will kick me into gear
refine my style, i think my writing has become a lot more boring and plain and dry recently and i feel a little bit sad reading back over my fic from like 2016 which was worse story-wise, sure, but my prose was so much more interesting and creative back then. i've been working mostly on improving my dialogue skills these past few years and while i think i've gotten a lot better on that front i feel like it's come at the cost of being able to write beautiful descriptive and introspective passages that Convey Emotion and i want that ability back!! like i truly think my writing is so clinical (comparatively) these days idk... some of it is down to pov choice but i'm pretty sure i used to be able to do emotional intensity with pov characters with outwardly controlled images... i think i forgot how to feel emotions myself. maybe i need to rephrase this goal as Re-Remember How To Have "Feelings"
i think i need to drastically lower my goals i'm honestly not even sure i will have enough spare time to write even one fic next year since i'm starting full time work with really long hours so i will legitimately be happy if i can just manage to do that. one thing about me is that i will never have a consistent output :''''')

CURRENT WIPS

any way we are (aka dreampuri) | nct dream, jaemin/renjun, 10.3k/15k

“Your concealer’s melting off,” Jaemin says. “I can see the moles on your neck.”

Donghyuck swears and shoves his hand into the outer pocket of Renjun's sports bag, fishing out a slim tube and a phone. Squinting at his reflection in the phone screen, he unscrews the top of the concealer and dabs at his neck with the applicator. “You know, Renjun usually does this bit for me,” Donghyuck says, closing the tube and tossing it back into the bag. He pats the pigment into his skin with the pad of his index finger. “You could make yourself more useful.”

“You have a perfectly good reflective surface right there,” Jaemin says.

“Come on, Jaemin, play along a little,” Donghyuck says, heaving a gusty sigh. “It won’t kill you.”

2023 is the year i WILL finish this fic i swear to god!!!! i made several important narrative and metaphor breakthroughs this year i just need to ummm.... fill in the rest of the story. haha.

like shadows in a stranger's dream | aespa, winter/ningning/karina, 1.7k/3k

Aeri flicks a tiny shard of light at Yizhuo. It bursts apart when it hits her skin, fizzing into the air with a gentle tickling sensation. "Hey!" Yizhuo protests. “Don’t attack me!”

“I’m not attacking you, I’m literally giving you free LED light therapy,” Aeri says. “People pay a lot of money for this, you know. I can do different colours and everything.”

Yizhuo laughs. “Is that your new business model?”

“Totally. I’m offering a murder-plus-spa-day combo. It’s my special self care package, like, getting rid of the stress in your life at every level.”

this excerpt is completely unrepresentative of the rest of the fic which is about winningrina contract supervillains triangulation tension but it's kind of the only readable part so far sooooo jokes time with giselle it is. it's set in the same universe as waiting for you to move on because i love reusing worldbuilding and i'm kind of obsessed with this au now. i hope aespa's new reality show will give me enough info and confidence about understanding their characters to finish writing this fic in 2023!!!

to perfectly perform in reverse | prince of tennis, yagyuu/niou, 4.2k/5k

Yukimura is unreadable to Niou because she is so fundamentally different from her she might as well be an entirely alien being; Niou has accepted that she will never be able to place herself in Yukimura’s shoes and thus Yukimura will forever remain miles out of reach. Yagyuu occupies the precise opposite extreme in terms of distance from Niou and yet she is just as unreadable. The gap between an object and its reflection in a mirror is no less a gap for its asymptotic approach to zero. We’ve been together for a really long time, Renjun had said, but hadn’t Rikkai, too? Invincible Rikkai, infinite immutable Rikkai, and none of that had helped them to know the difference.

this is an extremely self indulgent sequel to my nyota 3b futurefic from 2 years ago, it's technically about 82 reuniting at kirian's wedding but actually about parading niou through a series of highranker interactions including nct dream for my personal edification. it's almost done, i was hoping to finish it before the new year but i've just been too busy :') i expect i should be able to finish in jan 2023 though!!

if at the end of everything there is | gundam, sayla-centric, 0.8k/2k

She has not become a good woman like her brother hoped, but she can live with that. She is, after all, still living.

She does not return to medicine. She does not trust herself not to cut away more than is strictly necessary to heal.
//
In her mind’s eye her brother is always leaving and she is always reaching for him, pleading for him to stay, and this time he isn’t yielding to her like he used to. Again and again the pattern repeats itself. When she’d seen the Zaku for the first time, red and backlit from fire, and her legs gave out beneath her before she even registered the sight, her body understanding before her mind. In the sandstorm with her face bare and his still masked. Amidst the debris of A Baoa Qu when he’d held her and told her to become a good woman and she’d thought, flash of terror or precognition, this is the last time we will ever—

futurefic character study about sayla and her life on earth after the 1 year war and her career track shift from medicine to finance, you guys know i love a business major and sayla is already my universal century onepick. the main things i wanted to cover were 1) charsayla falling out of love 2) the thought process that led to sayla deciding to leave medicine for finance which is kind of a hysterically drastic slide from one end of the spectrum of ethical behaviour to the other 3) sayla justifying killing enemy soldiers / killing char specifically during the war as medically necessary 4) christina/sayla my leomercuryshipping rarepair tinhat yuri. anyway idk if i'll finish this but i'm kinda just playing around with melodramatic imagery and having fun because melodrama is my favourite wheelhouse <3

i don't want to make another skincare routine update post because i haven't really changed much since my last post except doing retinol every second day + FINALLY FOUND NON CLINIQUE MOISTURE SURGE MOISTURISER THAT WORKS FOR ME 🙏🙏🙏+ drinking 3-4L water every day + eating 2 vitamin c tablets a day. the last two i started doing this month to ward off illness but some combination of these factors is giving me the nicest clearest skin i've had for agesssss so hopefully it lasts... anyway here is a review of some recently trialled beauty products:

( who could say if holiday season sales are good or bad )

this year i managed to beat my 2021 record of 5.5 books in the negative direction by only reading 2.5 new books! once again i was in the readings for class mines so i just didn't want to read anything else in english. anyway this post will contain spoilers for babel by r. f. kuang and nona the ninth by tamsyn muir.

( i think i am just not one of god's book readers these days )

the funny thing about jaemin is that he is absolutely not Just Any Guy and yet it feels like every second guy in media reminds me of him. i think this is because he is the perfect inverse of Just Any Guy so he ends up being Every Specific Guy instead. this is not really a post describing jaemin's 5 million 2d clones, this is a power scaling post where i arbitrarily assign some stats i made up so i can discover the most jaemin jaeminclone.

here are the stats i'm assessing on:

Handsome Young Man - visual power
Fansign Boyfriend - charm, charisma, flirtatiousness
Stable Society - maintenance of control in all situations (delusionally or not), dislike of change and/or consequences
You Are Not Coming In - hidden "true" self, persona and authenticity issues
I'm Weird I'm A Weirdo - being a silly funny goofy jokesy guy
The Killer - what it says on the tin
Super Seme - also what it says on the tin
[WILD CARD] - bonus criteria

THE CANDIDATES

in no particular order:

OIKAWA TOORU (HAIKYUU)

HANDSOME = 5: speaks for itself. special shoutout to oikawa's beautiful fluffy boyband hair.
BOYFRIEND = 5: insane charm and charisma are two of oikawa's most powerful weapons, i wouldn't necessarily call him flirty (i really think that's more of a fanon trait) but i think his ability to influence others shines mostly in the arena of leadership and performing his on-court role as setter via bringing the best out of others.
STABLE = 2: due to inferiority complex i think he does try to delusionally cling to the idea of being The Best, particularly through middle school and partly through high school. but the key thing about oikawa is that he understands that true growth means change and upheaval and not always winning but rather focusing on what you do and how to improve after you lose, and he does eventually embrace that and that's why he comes out the other end of his character arc so mature and settled. he likes to direct the flow of the situation so much it's his literal job as a setter, and he's obviously extremely deliberate about social interactions including deploying cutesy nicknames to either assert control over wildcard rivals or demonstrate friendly closeness or both, but he knows how to genuinely handle societal destabilisation and learn from it to get better. so in a way he transcends the need for stable society altogether by ultimately winning even when he loses.
NOT COMING IN = 5: king of carefully constructed persona that draws on elements of his "true" personality and emphasises them depending on what is most needed in the situation so that he's never really lying about who he is but you couldn't say that you really knew him. unless you were--
WEIRDO = 5: nerdy alien stanning spacecase... gets affectionately bullied by his friends esp matsuhana who will never fail to point out how strange and offputting he can be particularly his singlemindedness about volleyball... i think it's important that he does have his Fucking Weirdo moments alongside his polished charm because i believe he actually deliberately punctures his Ultimate Leader image by letting his friends theatrically make fun of him as a form of atmosphere management for his team.
KILLER = 0: while it's true that he has the kind of powerful persona control emblematic of The Killer, he isn't really using that for nefarious purposes. like the thing about oikawa is that even though he occupies an antagonistic narrative position he's really a good guy which sort of disqualifies him from killerism.
1+ = 1: for extremely inexplicable reasons i'm a chasteshipper in haikyuu, my sag moon monkey brain just politely averts its eyes and therefore i really don't have 1/0 opinions. like i guess i conceptually prefer oikawaright but i'm not mad about oikawaleft especially now that i'm in my Leaders Are Always Left era. i don't think he couldn't do it, i think oikawa can do anything. but it's definitely hinaoi to me though, haikyuu definitely abides by the rule of protagleft rivalright in this case TO MEEE. but anyway i mostly avoid thinking about it and call it a day but i wouldn't exactly call oikawa a super seme yk.
BONUS = 4: i feel like oikawa is like, the og jaeminclone who is generally known and accepted throughout the dream/haikyuu overlap community even though after assessing him on my invented criteria he isn't really that much of a jaemin but i will ofc be putting respect on the jaemkawa name with a generous bonus score. also oikawa is my haikyuu 1pick and honestly like top 5 characters of all time to me so i'm adding more points because it's myyyyyyy power scaling post.

TOTAL = 27/40

KUROBA KAITO (DETECTIVE CONAN)

HANDSOME = 5: and his phantom thief outfit slayed too!!! and i like his hair.
BOYFRIEND = 5: charmingly rogueish gentleman thief flirtatiousness meter maxed out, he will sweet-talk anyone. he is a very good performer and a very dashing young man.
STABLE = 2: i don't think kaito is super invested in societal stability, in fact as a magician he is kind of all about rapid change and reactiveness, his score here is just because if you think about it he always wins like he always gets away with his heists even when he "loses" to shinichi so he's having a pretty stable society without even trying.
NOT COMING IN = 3: secret identity involves, well, secrecy, and he literally has shapeshifter powers so he's very good at wearing other people's identities as persona. but again i don't think he's super invested in keeping people out due to hatred of showing vulnerability in the way that jaemin is. kaito is mostly performing himself, and that self is a performer, so he's really just doing it for fun.
WEIRDO = 5: his civilian identity is a class clown troublemaker and he's a super theatrical performer so definitely very weird on purpose.
KILLER = 0: like oikawa, kaito's only real killeristic trait is that he's very good at persona management, but kaito notably Does Not Kill so i feel like on principle he should have a 0 score here, he's been framed for murder enough times in canon.
1+ = 2: i personally don't have any bl ships where kaito is left (since i believe girls are always right i guess he's left for aoko and i suppose akako is actually the jaemin to kaito's mark) but i reckon he could do it.
BONUS = 5: jaemin kid is literally canon after all THANK YOU 2019 SMTOWN HALLOWEEN YOU'RE EVERYTHING.

TOTAL = 27/40

HAKUBA SAGURU (DETECTIVE CONAN)

HANDSOME = 5: look i'm just gonna be rating everyone 5/5 on visuals i don't think you can be a jaeminclone without being handsome in-universe.
BOYFRIEND = 5: he's got the british gentleman polite society manners thing going on.
STABLE = 3: i don't think he's really bothered about it but he's not really experiencing much societal destabilisation anyway, like he's on good terms with his rival at home kaito and they're really just tom and jerry style playacting their showdowns, and if anything he's the guy destabilising other people's societies for jokes (the people being heiji, though it really doesn't take that much to set heiji off LOL).
NOT COMING IN = 2: again i don't think he's really that interested in hiding things about himself, he presumably has healthy detective caution due to the nature of his job but he literally introduces himself via character profile including birthday and blood type.
WEIRDO = 3: i think being british automatically gives him weirdo points but also the sherlock cosplay and the pet hawk really complete the eccentricity picture. but i think this is more in a sincere way than purposeful image break so he's like unselfconsciously a weirdo.
KILLER = 3: the points are for being british and being voiced by mamo and having killeristic energy. i know he's a detective so he's supposed to be the anti-killer but like... he has the vibe. like if he weren't a detective he would be such a slayful serial killer.
1+ = 4: for bl shipping i think he's left with kaito and right with heiji but i do think he is generally a 1. he is british after all.
BONUS = 1: i can't really think of anything extra jaeminesque about hakuba but i think it's funny that both halves of the magic kaito rivalry are guys who are jaemin... jaemin truly does contain multitudes.

TOTAL = 25/40

YOO JUNG (CHEESE IN THE TRAP)

HANDSOME = 5: visually one of my favourite love interests everrrr literally ideal shoujo male lead looks.
BOYFRIEND = 5: cultivates aura of polite and generous charm so that people will like him and trust him and he will be able to leverage this to use them to carry out his own ends whenever he needs to enact some revenge plan without getting his own hands dirty.
STABLE = 5: jung is extremelyyyyyy concerned with maintaining a stable society with himself in the dominant position and hates change so much he will try to eliminate any threats to the status quo, he will retaliate 3x as hard in response to all perceived slights (and experience no guilt if he misjudged and harmed an innocent). cheese in the trap is basically a story about all the people who have to die for standing in jung and seol's way (killed on purpose by jung or semi-accidentally by seol) which is why it is the romance of all time <3
NOT COMING IN = 5: since jung is a capricorn sociopath who fundamentally does not understand human emotion, everything about his interaction with the world is constructed for maximum manipulativeness and control and shielding all potential vulnerabilities, absolutely nobody is coming in. even with seol one of the major problems they face is that jung wants to give seol what she wants, which he believes he can achieve by telling her the things he thinks she wants to hear, but seol is too genre-savvy/paranoid to believe him and really seol just wants him to be sincere with her. cried so violently it made me feel ill over the climax where jung finally demonstrates not just Real Human Boyness but genuine vulnerability in front of seol like what the fuck..... love is real.
WEIRDO = 1: i think this is basically the only category jung doesn't match up well with jaemin in because jung is very very attached to his perfect image. ofc he has his cute rich boy struggling to interface with society moments like pretending to know what a voucher is and failing at wrapping convenience store onigiri but those are private and more lowkey, he isn't actively presenting a silly goofy image even though he is a freak. but he does hide the freakness pretty well, he's never wanted to break image on purpose.
KILLER = 5: see my original killer post but jung is literally the sadistic manipulative remorseless sociopath in question. he is trying to be seol's pet sociopath except seol is unhappy about jung outsourcing his moral compass to her, this is truly one of my favourite worldview clashes in couples. not that that is related but i need everyone to know that jungseol is seriously perfect het of ever to me definitely top 5 hets of all time i love them so much.
1+ = 5: obviously i'm 左右相手固定 for jungseol so it doesn't matter but i think jung is objectively a 1 as well!!
BONUS = 5: jung is one of my favourite jaemclones i kind of want to give him more than 5/5 bonus points i truly do think he is the perfect jaemin fictional equivalent. rt myself:
- rich
- generous
- possessive over favourite people
- will sulk if favourite people display favouritism for people who arent him
- does not enjoy change
- literally the killer
- human cosplay sometimes slips up
- sooooo handsome
- watch guy
- mamas boy, daddy issues
- snake gijinka
- attached to material objects
- only likes the people he likes
- seriously so handsome beautiful perfect face did i mention handsome

TOTAL = 36/40

CHAR AZNABLE (GUNDAM)

HANDSOME = 5: char even underwent a handsomeness level up (to me) during his most Going Through It and deprived of presence of favourite people era like i really do think char's counterattack~=make a wish. now jaemin was not experiencing depression to the point of dropping an asteroid on the earth but if he had giant space war machine robot tech available to him who's to say that he wouldn't have...
BOYFRIEND = 4: so charismatic even his old enemies were trying to make him president of the world for some reason even though this is NOT cute, chars only take official leadership positions when they are SEVERELY distressed etc. i don't think he's necessarily actively a schmoozer or even enjoys it, it's just that he seems to have clocked that this is a good way to get other people to do what he wants, especially with girls. he's literally like sure peggle i'll kiss you if you go onto the battlefield for me. he does use fansign boyfriendism as a manipulation tactic, which lalah clocked but was willing to play her half of the couple cosplay for anyway because she loved char so much it was enough for her, and which i think nanai also clocked but is having to actively cognitively restructure herself out of clocking because she doesn't really want to confront it.
STABLE = 3: i'm gonna be honest i'm so invested in one-sidedly stabilising char's society that it does not matter to me that char actually does not really seem to want a stable society himself and kinda implodes it on purposeish. but arguably having such a world shaking impact on the legacy of gundam including having multiple archetypes of gundam characters all based on him is the realest stable society of all. he also loves to dodge and ignore consequences so that counts.
NOT COMING IN = 5: he is also a guy operating under several false identities, but even apart from that char's motives are not only incomprehensible to me but i legitimately think they are also incomprehensible to himself and he is just convincing himself that he has some form of ideology. he does not, he just says he does. char is sort of empty as fuck not even himself is coming in. even when he's trying to be his original identity casval rem deikun he doesn't know who that is or what that person believes in and he's just performing neo zeon cult leader while being totally miserable about it. i think it's notable that he is very uncomfortable playing the role of figurehead leader and describes himself multiple times as feeling like a clown even though he executes it flawlessly, like char doesn't really know who he is but at least he knows who he doesn't want to be but that doesn't help him very much.
WEIRDO = 4: not to be blatantly not following my own criteria but char is so funny to me it doesn't even matter that he isn't doing it on purpose because genuinely who could say what char intends or doesn't intend. like it's just so funny when he just straight up lies like when he said he'd never betrayed anyone in his life, i can't not give him a good score on the jokes axis. Ha Ha axis get it--
KILLER = 5: he did literally attempt genocide, to say nothing of the countless murders and war crimes he committed as a career soldier who finds fulfilment and joy in killing people, and origin straight up paints him as a sociopath initially reined in by sayla but then it got complicated.
1+ = 5: I DON'T CARE. DO NOT ARGUE WITH ME ON THIS ONE, I AM NOT TAKING CRITICISM AT THIS TIME.
BONUS = 5: rt myself: "yes i do think of char as a jaemin clone even though char was allegedly created 21 years before jaemin but as if it's my fault they have so many specific psychological problems in common eg: 1 million control issues, being male manipulators, never saying what they mean or committing to a stance so they can never be destabilised (in theory), being very good at clocking other people's desires and fulfilling these desires even if they don't understand where those desires come from, speaking vaguely so the people they're speaking to can project whatever they want onto it, having very small inner circles, only liking the people they already like, constantly trying to reconstruct the past and/or maintain the status quo, loving to lecture others, hating it when actions have consequences, enjoying power and attention but not the responsibility that comes with, having extremely constructed public-facing personas with no clear boundary between those and their internal selves........... etc." also they both have beloved kiiinda morality chain mentees. also there is the terror i will not name (moriguchi_hiroko_beyond_the_time.mp3). also i think it's really funny that char is also mostly a nevernude to the point of being famous for wearing a mask but when he shows skin it's by having his arms out, Just Like J

TOTAL = 36/40

GRAHAM AKER (GUNDAM 00)

HANDSOME = 5: the most handsome of all the handsome young men in gundam TO MEEEEE.
BOYFRIEND = 3: i think he's kinda more sanada-esque maybe, like he is less concerned with likeability and more concerned with honesty and honour which is what draws people to him over any kind of constructed or deliberate charm but he does also have a random talkative sentimental streak. i personally find that very charming though and this is my post so i'm being generous with the fansign boyfriend points.
STABLE = 3: i don't think he's bothered about trying to maintain societal stability, in fact he enjoys actively facing challenges and handling situations and testing his abilities. but he gets points for managing to be undestabilisable even in the face of a rival who doesn't rival him back, and also for not dying when killed multiple times.
NOT COMING IN = 1: despite the fake identity which he didn't even really bother with i think graham is kind of an open book but i'm giving him a just-in-case point because i was so entranced by his face every time he was onscreen that i don't actually remember much about him.
WEIRDO = 4: As A Sentimental Virgo... also his love interest is literally a gundam.
KILLER = 1: he's handsome enough to be a killer and he certainly has literally killed people as a career soldier but other than that i don't really think he fits the archetype.
1+ = 5: i think this is objective.
BONUS = 5: he literally ends up with jaemin's boom era blond hair with blue bangs after his resurrection as metal alien symbiote!!!

TOTAL = 27/40

MASHIMA TAICHI (CHIHAYAFURU)

HANDSOME = 5: noted popular handsome young man in-universe!!
BOYFRIEND = 4: polite and charming student president type, not actively magnetic or flirty i think. but i could be wrong as it's been a while since i read...
STABLE = 4: see now i kind of feel bad for skewing the scale with all the other insane supernaturally delusional society stability enthusiasts discussed in this post because i really do think taichi is quite invested in this due to his inferiority complex vs his golden boy image, but not quite to like, genocidal proportions.
NOT COMING IN = 4: the image manager in question whose inferiority complex causes him to construct a perfect outward facing persona to cover up his insecurities. i do think the focus for taichi is slightly different than for jaemin because i feel like jaemin is not necessarily image managing and keeping people out due to insecurity but more because he just doesn't like being perceived in ways he can't dictate. like it's not that jaemin fears rejection due to being not good enough if he lets people see who he really is, he just has severe control issues and wants everyone to exist in relation to him on his terms only. sorry tails if this sounds incomprehensible to the viewer, i may be reflexively stabilising jaemin's society here.
WEIRDO = 1: i don't think he's estranged enough from normal society like jung or atobe to be weird nor do i think he cultivates weirdness on purpose, i think he's just like normal guy levels of weirdness. or like, normal guy invested in niche sport levels... like after correcting for the baseline of being a karuta player.
KILLER = 1: point for image management and being rich and he's voiced by mamo so that's basically killerism in law.
1+ = 2: ummmmmm idk i don't even really ship him with anyone, like he's left by default with girls and he is probably capable of lefting with guys i just haven't thought about it. my l/r criteria are currently in an emergency upheaval state so i can't even try to objectively look at his character to determine my stance. like it's true that i think repression and inferiority complex are 0 traits but do i really? who could say ):
BONUS = 4: taichi is more on the oikawa end of the jaeminclone spectrum but he has really long eyelashes and every time i see jaemin's eyelashes i'm reminded of this one quote from transversely's seminal work a nice girl, slightly dilettanteish: "He’s actually sheltered, you know, his eyelashes, they’re like those plants that grow in the dark in the Amazon I think." also their second male lead energy lol

TOTAL = 25/40

AI (YUGIOH VRAINS)

HANDSOME = 5: when he finally gets a human form during his ai's counterattack maw equivalent era in s3 it is a very handsome human form.
BOYFRIEND = 2: it is admittedly harder for him to be charming and flirty when he spends the majority of the series as a little usb gijinka and then when he gets his cyborg android body he's suicidally/omnicidally depressed under the veneer of cheerful arrogance but i guess he's overall usually quite social and chatty and playful and likeable.
STABLE = 5: wrote a whole post about this without realising i was talking about societal stability but he is sooooo bad at handling change or any circumstances out of his control, like genocidally bad at handling things. he has the jaemin trait of wanting everything to go his way all the time and not knowing what to do when it doesn't. he also doesn't die when killed 🙏
NOT COMING IN = 3: i think ai is good at seeming pretty straightforward! and most of the time he really is sincere and feels no need to obscure parts of himself. but i think he could if he wanted to, like he did keep the backup copy of himself stored in roboppy a secret from everyone and he is ofc massively lying through s3, so i would say he is pretty good at lying and concealing and faking.
WEIRDO = 5: he is so annoying <3 he's jokes sidekick mascot mostly played for laughs (sentences typed moments before disaster) and it's really cute and funny contrasted with coolly stoic and laconic yusaku.
KILLER = 5: i actually didn't even clock this because ai is comic relief for most of the show before the grief and ptsd catches up to him and then i was too busy being tails_gets_trolled.png to do any dot connecting but ai is a textbook pet sociopath who would (and does) sacrifice the world to save one person. like s3 is literally him attempting to commit genocide to save the person he loves most so i think he definitely qualifies.
1+ = 5: i also think this is objective!! ai and takeru tied for leftest left in vrains imo.
BONUS = 5: has an eldritch tentacle monster form (this is a jaemin trait to me), cyborg android ai boyfriend who is a demon masquerading as a housecat, enjoys clocking out and engaging in a bit of slackerism, sometimes refers to himself in cutesy third-person diminutive form, selfishly selfless by sacrificing his life to save yusaku's but forcing yusaku to be the one to kill him because he wanted to be with yusaku until the end, na "i am love" jaemin == "it's ai as in to love people." i think ai is most like current meta jaemin, who is mostly embracing his weirdness and jokesiness, but then you remember the terror. but in the end... it was LOVE all along.

TOTAL = 35/40

ATOBE KEIGO (TENIPURI)

HANDSOME = 5: visual king, i'm grateful every day for nats ovas art level up that finally did depict him as handsome as i believe he is supposed to be and also for his tenirabi cards where he always looks slayeristic.
BOYFRIEND = 5: king of charismatic leadership that inspires undying loyalty even from the guys who hate his ass king of slaying yume rankings despite coming from a franchise 20+ years old king of having an in-universe fanclub king of generous fanservice and also generosity in general.
STABLE = 5: KING OF HANDLING SITUATIONS king of never being destabilised king of winning even when he loses and in fact being a really gracious loser and super cool about it king of installing a perfect schoolwide monarchy and maintaining iron but fair and meritocratic control over all things. honestly king of actually for real having a stable society that doesn't even need cognitive restructuring to stabilise, jaemin kind of wishes ngl.
NOT COMING IN = 5: king of image management, king of having a rock solid and undentable self image built on legitimate hard work and skill that is then projected outwards so powerfully it leaves no gaps in the armour. like i feel like atobe maxes out this criteria so hard by fully totally completely inhabiting his invincible king persona that it's really genuinely him and this criteria is not even applicable.
WEIRDO = 4: i don't think he's doing it as purposeful image management so i reluctantly have to dock one point but atobe is so like crazily exaggerated in every single character trait that it qualifies for weirdness by sheer force of personality. king of being fucking insane in such a self-assured way you just believe him and buy wholeheartedly into it. literally everyone is a freak in tennis but atobe is especially an unrepentant freak (extremely positive trait).
KILLER = 5: see also my original killers post king ofドS tendencies and torturing his opponents/love interests.
1+ = 5: objective!!!!!!!!!!! allegedly leftest left in tenipuri though this result came about from much bloodshed and misery but i think i agree. but that doesn't matter anyway because obviously he's a super1 no matter what. KING OF LEFTING.
BONUS = 5: ATOBE THEE GENEROUS i truly believe that atobe is literally jaemin at his best when he's fully clocked in and turning the effortfulness dial up to max. also jaemin is atobe in dreampuri so obviously i think atobe is really guy who is jaemin. i know this has been an even more gripless entry than the others but once again: IT'S MYYYY POST and i think the fact that i'm intensely delusional about atobe and jaemin in the exact same way is actually more evidence in support of jaemtobe.

TOTAL = 39/40

AND THE TOTALLY NOT RIGGED WINNER IS...

ATOBE KEIGO!!!! congratulations to the king of being jaemin in not real life!!!!!

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

ECHIZEN RYOGA (TENIPURI) - because i said so. for personal reasons. and also because i think the first time i ever used the phrase "handsome young man" was about ryoga. and also he's the killer. also i have personal reasons. also the way ryoga rapper girlfriendises himself around byodoin gives me intense flashbacks to how jaemin does like domesticated cat cosplay around mark. i think ryoga has the jaemin trait of liking the freedom to do whatever he wants but not wanting the responsibility that tends to be tied to that kind of power. anyway just trust me bro. i probably should have included him in the main list but i didn't want to for personal reasons as well and now i have to commit to my decision.

INUI SADAHARU (TENIPURI) - they are both nevernudes and super1s who are extremely fucking weird and ever since ciel said that jaemin would definitely wear long trackpants all the time even in summer matches which would piss everyone off just like inui i have been periodically cracking up at the mental image, when jaemin enters his making health juices era then we will realise...

YUKIMURA SEIICHI (TENIPURI) - i realised the other day that yukimura's 2pick is literally his dog (pronounced REAL TRUE LOVE ENDGAME SOULMATE) and his mini-me mentee and i know he is 2pickshipping them and crafting beautiful handmade jokes wedding invitations with pressed flowers from his own garden cordially inviting friends and rivals to the union of 💖Sanada Genichiro & Kirihara Akaya💖. but other than this very funny coincidence i don't think he has anything in common with jaemin (other than being 1-aligned but it's complicated to me i don't want to get into it rn) and i honestly feel like i need to apologise to yukimura for mentioning him in this list at all.

SENGOKU KIYOSUMI (TENIPURI) - yes i do think half the tenipuri cast is Whoops All Jaemins but ummm yeah guy who is handsome and 1+ and actually deeply unhinged and undestabilisable under the goofy charming veneer no problem.

AKAI SHUICHI (DETECTIVE CONAN) - because they are both ultra1 perfect bl tops to me and the left half of my fandom otps. they don't really have anything else in common because the narrative legitimately does bend over backwards to make sure akai always wins and always comes out on top (lol) and never dies even when he is killed and always has a stable society... akai is char wish fulfilment and therefore jaemin wish fulfilment in law.

HARUNA MOTOKI (OOFURI) - so handsome a rival team's coach brought his visuals up while talking about his various baseball powers and stats... i think he's kind of a cross between oikawa and kirihara so he's just a bit too far removed from the oikawa end of the jaeminclone archetype spectrum to really count.

TOM (TOM AND JERRY) - for some reason tom tomandjerry is one of the guys whose societies i am deeply intensely invested in stabilising for them, alongside fellow luminaries such as char and mark and jaemin himself, and i think he is a 1, also not taking criticism at this time.

thank you for reading!! i hope this post is taken in the loving and joking spirit in which it is intended, feel free to let me know if there are any other guys who are jaemin i'm unaware of <3

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