[fic reflection] your eyes tell

[permutative]

(gif source)

where do i even begin with this one…

what’s weird about this fic is that although i’ve written things that are longer (can you feel the rush, venn diagram, to name a couple recent ones) this felt more difficult? or, idk, i just feel like there’s a lot going on even if it’s 16k as opposed to 23k. i’m pretty happy with that because, as i mentioned in my 2021 goals post, i wanted to write more fics that were in the ideal 5k - 15k range TT

another thing that stands out to me is just how much my perception of enhypen and their dynamics have changed ever since i started tinhatting beomseung. like back in mid-december i still was a heehoon enthusiast and didn’t know much about enhypen at all… even after the first draft i hadn’t watched enhypen&hi yet so i didn’t understand the dorming situation (namely how ALL SEVEN OF THEM SLEEP IN THE SAME ROOM) and there were a lot of inconsistencies with general logistics stuff (aka the when/where of beomseung’s conversations). honestly even my enhypen dynamix post is outdated which is crazy to me?? i’m so glad i made the decision to just Not Look at draft #1 for like a week and a half because i watched a lot of enhypen videos during that time and when i returned to the fic i was able to insert so much of my favorite heeseung/enhypen interactions <3 even if retyping the entire fic (ie i printed out draft 1, opened up a new doc, and then typed it based on the printed version) kind of krilled me it was definitely worth it in the end…

draft 2, i ended up doing my usual line by line read through and that turned into draft 3, which i sent to my beta rose. the thing about rose is that she’s one of my ncteen friends and barely knows anything about txt or enhypen, which was honestly really helpful for this fic? as someone who relied pretty heavily on video content for these characterizations it was nice to have the perspective of someone who doesn’t really know about these canon “details.” i was especially reflecting on this after reading crys’s cc answer on characterization, because i didn’t want my writing to come off as stilted or awkward even if sometimes i’m like [it’s SIGNIFICANT that jake was willing to WAIT ON THE COUCH for heeseung because it's CANON that usually he tries to stay STANDING UP until the moment he GOES TO BED] umm. anyways <3

i struggled a bit with like… uhh romance. it was a little rushed at first until i remembered that i had forgotten to mention heeseung being hatseung and inserted a scene of beomgyu clowning heeseung’s style choices… one of my other fics that has the same one-sided rivalry and is kind of the “blueprint” for this fic—your empty gift-box eyes—doesn’t really have romance and ends at what i’d consider the half-way point of your eyes tell? so yeah part 2 was just rough going for me SGDJDJSJ which is why i had to re-edit that whole section even after fixing my beta’s comments. cannot believe that i went up to DRAFT FIVE on this cursed thing ❤️❤️

anyways. there’s really not much going on with the symbolism besides the most obvious #burning #fire aspect of heeseung and also (more vaguely) the #water #flooding parts of beomgyu… this fic is not about setting or imagery it’s literally just about heeseung and his many conversational partners. i guess this would be a good time to point out the agendas i was trying to seed LOL

ao3 user permutative’s agendas

• heejaywon triangulation: jay as heeseung's oldest friend vs. jungwon as heeseung's closest friend
• taehyun shows up a lot in this fic mostly because i ship taegyu and also taehyun’s my txt bias and well. the tyunseung selfies speak for themselves
• taehoon: 2pick shipping your faves is valid ❤️
• jake/kai: references the one of the first times i ever tweeted about jake "writing kai character study out of spite and then shipping him with spiderman jake. just out of rage"
• beomgyu’s backstory: the guy he confessed to was jaeyun of too
• heeseung’s backstory: he knew he was bisexual as soon as he saw choi yeonjun sing for the first time
• sunoo #mlmsolidarity vs jay reluctant ally #jongseongapologistsusa

and of course because this is a canonverse introspective fic… we have the bbb tropes.

bleak boyband tropes that fit the fic, kind of

• cross group dating
• refusing to drop the coworkersona
• hero worship [heeseung to yeonjun]
• bedsharing as coping mechanism [heeseung & jungwon]
• bedsharing as self-harm [heeseung & beomgyu]
• there are other gay ones and somehow they’re dealing with it infinitely better than you [sunoo]
• responsible persona martyr complex
• is there even a “you” amongst the funhouse mirrors
• what’s the facade and what’s you

random reflection on ~sources of inspiration~: i definitely wouldn’t have written this fic the way i did if i hadn’t read and thoroughly enjoyed ao3 user pulses’s and soobun’s canon compliant fics… they have a style of exploring group dynamix to an extent that i wasn’t used to seeing as much in other fics. also, while it is real that heeseung started trying to be more objective/less emotional during summer training, the listing of “facts” was inspired by bloom blue aka my favorite enhypen fic <3. one more thing: “such an obvious secret” was a phrase that i used but then realized that i accidentally took from the title of this fic, and apparently it was taken from an everglow song.

note on canon-compliant stuff: this entire fic includes details from a lot of different sources, and i've kept track of the enhypen content i've watched right here. but i think the most important heeseung details to me were the following:

• heeseung only being able to succeed at the things he has an interest in (music/english) and being mediocre at everything else
• jay saying that “when heeseung is hooked on something, he doesn’t know how to give it up”
• heeseung’s mbti change (infj —> infp)
• heeseung’s motto change from “let's live diligently as life passes by” to “let’s work hard as it goes like waves” as a reminder to himself to loosen up a little
• one of my friends pointed out to me that geonu was the reason behind heeseung crying two out of four times during i-land, so i extrapolated and was like HEESEUNG NEEDS SAME-AGED FRIENDS.
• heeseung: “i’d practice till dawn” vs beomgyu: “i’d practice till dawn then walk taehyun to school after” vs taehyun: "heeseung and i would together practice after the other trainees had left"
• see my initial beomseung tinhatting post here and the heeseung section of my txtha interactions post for more thonks

as for whether the details i added throughout the fic were “canon compliant,” the only thing that i remember Blatantly pulling out of nowhere was heeseung’s preference for choco heim. according to the amazon reviews of white heim (which claim that choco heim is way worse) this might not be too realistic, but i mostly just needed a natural trigger for heeseung to remember something that happened literally a year ago…

now we can get to the insane poem/lyrics tinhatting part, which is kind of just self-indulgent and For Me only but that's fine.

songs that inspired this fic: well first of all there are "songs that inspired this fic" and then there are "songs that i wouldn't have been able to write this fic without"... in the second category i have: cravity's "my turn," "break all the rules," "realize," and "call my name," cherry bullet's "love so sweet," and loona's "voice." in the first category, i initially was inspired by "walk the line" & "cross the line" from enhypen's first EP (hence why there's a slight title drop in one of my scenes) but then i stumbled across "your eyes tell" on twitter and it inspired a lot of draft 2... n__n i'm just going to blockquote the relevant lyrics (translation from here) and move on.

Even the darkness we see is so beautiful

Please believe me

Looking only directly at you

So you don't go away

Shadows of the past keep on chasing me

But the more I try to escape and struggle, the more it follows

But I still want to hold onto it, wherever you are I’ll find you

To a tomorrow of us

To face the past and the future

How much hope is needed to reach you

To be loved, to love someone, I’ll become your eye

For the adventure that lies ahead

random poem tinhatting: heeseung
umm i kind of went crazy during draft 3 and started digging up random quotes to assert my agendas <3 i don't read that much poetry in general outside of what's recommended by people on my tl/dw reading lists so i'm sorry if this is terrible. i'm really happy about my choice of epigraph for this fic though

And it occurs to me that what is crucial is to believe

in effort, to believe some good will come of simply trying,

a good completely untainted by the corrupt initiating impulse

to persuade or seduce—

— The Empty Glass, Louise Glück

 

Bravo! the door is shut.

Now nothing escapes, nothing enters—

— Afterword, Louise Glück

 

the ideal burns in you like a fever.

Or not like a fever, like a second heart.

— October, Louise Glück

 

I was walled inside a dream.

Its walls had no consistency,

no weight: its emptiness was its weight.

— A Waking, Octavio Paz (tr. Eliot Weinberger)

random poem tinhatting: beomseung

suppose the body did this to us,

made us afraid of love–

— Crater Lake, Louise Glück

Something was and wasn’t there between us,

something went on and went away.
— First Love, Wislawa Szymborska

Even when

I look away I am still looking. He is inside his body

and I am inside my body and it matters less and less.

— Portrait of Fryderyk in Shifting Light, Richard Siken