Status: Closed
This round has closed. It remains open for fills, comments and remixes, but prompts are no longer accepted.
About
"Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time."
"How inconvenient to be made of desire."
"It's me, hi, I'm the problem its me."
Calling all readers, lovers of poetry and music, screen and stage. Quote collecters and lyric hoarders, unleash your archive. For this round, every prompt must contain a quote - you can combine them, add commentary, link to articles, do whatever. Steal from a literary classic, or copy WeVerse drama.
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no subject
Major Tags: N/A
Additional Tags: idolverse
Do Not Wants: None
Prompt:
—Erin Slaughter, The Sorrow Festival
[FILL] hollow
Major Tags: Implied eating disorder, body image issues
Additional Tags: idolverse
Permission to remix: Yes
***
“Just be yourself,” Jeonghan advises when Mingyu seeks him out early in the morning before a solo schedule, nervous about appearing alone. “What more could they ask for?”
“A lot, I think,” Mingyu grumbles. His hair sticks out to one side and his eyes are swollen from sleep, but Jeonghan thinks he still looks good enough for the cover of a magazine.
“Don’t think so much about yourself,” Jeonghan teases, poking him in the cheek. “You’re more than enough just as you are!”
He means it, and Mingyu leaves a little less shaky than before.
In the silence, Jeonghan watches frost form on his window, the orange glow of sunrise outside. He stays in bed until the afternoon.
—
The idol industry is, inherently, built on comparison.
At eighteen Jeonghan was made to stand in many lines, usually hovering somewhere near the end. He was bad at dancing, bad at singing, bad at talking, bad at composing, bad at acting, and everyone could see based on where he stood. The only time he ever got moved to the front was when they were assessed for appearance. Good-looking, someone would say. We can make something out of that face.
At the front of the line, Jeonghan could feel all eyes fall on him. He stared at his shoes until someone moved Vernon or Mingyu ahead of him, and then he finally dared to look up.
In the mirror on the other side of the room, he found that he still looked the same as he always had.
—
“It must be nice,” Seungkwan says out of the blue, drawing Jeonghan’s attention from his tray of unappetizing airplane food, “to be so naturally thin.”
Jeonghan pokes his spoon at the soggy rice. “Seungkwannie, it’s only the cameras that make you worry about it.”
“Yeah, well, I’m always on camera, aren’t I?” Seungkwan purses his lips and stabs his plastic fork into a slimy cube of chicken. “And unlike you, I have to worry about it.”
It’s possibly Jeonghan’s least favorite part of the job. He sees the members every day, he knows what they look like, and yet the cameras lie and a million people comment and then later the members pull up photos and complain about nonexistent flaws that need to be dieted or exercised or injected away.
“The cameras lie, you know,” Jeonghan sighs, taking his fruit cup and depositing it on Seungkwan’s tray. “It’s all a distortion.”
Seungkwan doesn’t seem convinced, but he eats the fruit.
When the flight attendant comes by, Jeonghan smiles as he hands her his tray, still heavy with soggy rice and uneaten chicken. The flight attendant blushes, and ducks away.
Jeonghan leans back. His empty body feels light, free.
—
An idol is nothing more than a hollow figure of gold or silver, or perhaps a rough image hewn from stone.
Jeonghan steps onto his pedestal and smiles for the camera. The set lights blind his vision. The shadows carve his body into shards.
—
“You look so good with long hair,” Seungcheol says into a hot microphone, twirling a strand of Jeonghan’s hair between his fingers.
Jeonghan pinches a clump between his pointer finger and thumb. When they write articles about him in the future, if they do at all, it will be about one of two things: he was maniacal on Going Seventeen, and he looked so pretty when they debuted.
He twists around to look at Seungcheol. “Grow your hair out with me,” he teases. “We’ll match.”
Seungcheol laughs. So Jeonghan laughs, too.
The camera crew moves away. Jeonghan deflates, and pushes Seungcheol’s hand away.
—
The truth is, no idol is ever good enough. If they were, what would be the point? The idol exists for the pursuit of perfection, but it always remains just out of reach.
—
On a team, every person must contribute something to the whole. Jihoon contributes songs, Soonyoung contributes choreography, and Jeonghan contributes nice cheekbones. The funny thing is, he doesn’t even have a corner on that.
His whole career, he supposes, has been defined by what he’s not. Jeonghan is not Vernon, charismatic and impressive, effortlessly handsome. He is not Mingyu, tall and earnest and ridiculous and statuesque. He is not Jun, lithe and ethereal, matching talent with a flat six-pack. He is not Joshua, with big doe eyes and a placid smile mean for music videos, once skinny but now muscular, carrying the weight of the team with ease. He is not, and he is not, and he is not, on and on down the line.
But then—what he is?
—
YOON JEONGHAN YOU ARE MY EVERYTHING
YOON JEONGHAN YOU ARE AN ANGEL
YOON JEONGHAN YOU SAVED ME
YOON JEONGHAN YOU—
Jeonghan forms a heart with his hands and points at a fan holding up a sign with his name on it, even though in the undulating crowd it is too blurry for him to see clearly.
A camera catches his movement. He turns, looks into its glass eye, and winks.
The screams of the crowd rattle his bones.
—
The truth is, you will never live up to the image of yourself.
Jeonghan surveys each photo of himself published in a magazine feature until he no longer remembers what he looks like in the mirror.
Re: [FILL] hollow
Re: [FILL] hollow
Re: [FILL] hollow
Re: [FILL] hollow
[FILL] and the end of the world would be so lovely
Major Tags: themes of depersonalisation/derealisation
Additional Tags: idolverse, do we let the intrusive thoughts win, emotionally this is 2019 Jeonghan
Permission to remix: Yes (always)
(1.4k)
***
He’s fighting with Mingyu about a ransom. Mingyu thinks ransoms should always be paid. Jeonghan thinks there is no guarantee criminals would cooperate. Jeonghan thinks paying would enable more crime. Mingyu thinks if there’s a chance of salvation, it’s worth it. Jeonghan thinks Mingyu is naive, Mingyu thinks Jeonghan is paranoid.
A hypothetical ransom. But he’s fighting with Mingyu about a hypothetical ransom in the living room and it’s been an hour and they’re still going. They stood up 15 minutes in, and are still standing now, yelling and snarling at each other’s throats. The others have retreated, cleared the living room and only venturing out in quiet desperation. Jeonghan had spied Seokmin slinking to the kitchen for water, knees bent and shoulder pressed to the wall.
Jeonghan is being rational about this. He tried to accept Mingyu’s points, work with his perspective. It’s Mingyu who refuses to concede. Refuses to see that he’s wrong but most importantly, how his well-wished intentions are causing more harm than good.
He gets moments of lucidity during this argument, like now, when Jeonghan thinks about how it must look to everyone else. How different he must look and sound, fingers jabbing, tongue sharp and praying for a wound.
All this noise over a hypothetical ransom.
Jeonghan will make up for it tomorrow. Fanservice as repentance.
They don’t reach a compromise. Halfway through a counter-argument, Jeonghan’s throat closes on him and Joshua takes the chance to swoop in and pull him away for dinner.
Tomorrow he tells Mingyu that he loves him, in front of a thousand people. He grins and leans a little too close, stretches his throat in a way that he knows Mingyu can not resist looking. And he knows, that moment will be captured by a fansite and uploaded to the internet by this evening.
Jeonghan can guess the story that they will tell. Extrapolating the proxemics, the gazes, their facial expressions.
Jeonghan doesn’t say sorry, but he does let the world know that he loves Mingyu.
Jeonghan gets moments of lucidity that feels like an intrusive thought. He’s doing an online fansign, answering nonsensical what-if questions about an imaginary date. His mouth knows the answer, he’s answered this before, is pretty sure that answer was recorded and circulating online — but as he says it and forces his mouth into a smile he is thinking — there’s a war in Ukraine — I don’t have a university degree — Wonwoo’s mother is in hospital.
“As long as my date is happy I’m happy, but good food is also important~”.
He does a buing-buing followed by hannie-hannie-hae! with rabbit ears. And he feels his soul leave his body.
Hah, not exactly. But one moment Jeonghan is doing aegyo at a phone on a tripod, and the next second he feels something detach, and he is looking down at himself doing aegyo.
He watches his mouth move and he hopes that whatever is left in his body knows what to say. He can guess the questions, he knows the best answers — and they often aren’t true.
Jeonghan watches himself blow kisses at the tiny screen. He watches Soonyoung do the same thing next to him. Behind the phone are rows of staff, laptops open, clipboards ready, earphones in. A voice in his head sings how many died in Itaewon — you missed your mother’s birthday — are you saving enough for retirement.
The Jeonghan below blurs out of focus and the noise squeezes down to a muffled whimper. A part of him wants to go back down, there’s an anxiety when he thinks about how his answers may not be perfect, with part of him floating up here. He worries that the fansign will be awkward, flat, insincere. A part of him needs to be in control, to make sure what is seen is beautiful.
A part of him says -
what does it matter.
Concerts feel like a lucid dream that he’s trying to wake from. From the moment thirteen hands separate, Jeonghan feels locked to his body and locked out of his mind. Songs meld together. He blinks and his costume has changed. He remembers singing but it feels like an imagining of someone else’s story.
Later, he’ll try to recall his performance but he can only see it in third perspective, from the angle of a fancam. He’ll see himself pour water on Seungcheol, slap Joshua, poke Seungkwan’s cheeks.
Later, there will be another camera and another microphone and someone asking him how he feels.
I’m happy that I was able to show our carats a lively performance - I hope you all had fun!
He’ll hop off before they catch him and later, later, he will come by again, and watch Wonwoo measure out his words and pour them onto the table like spring water. Jeonghan will watch Wonwoo pause and reflect (oh to think on camera, what a concept) and pull out the most honest words, the truest words, and Jeonghan will think:
How can you bare yourself, and not be destroyed.
His own feelings feel like coins at the bottom of a black pool. Jeonghan knows they are there, but he does not know what they look like or how heavy they are in his palm. He just knows that reaching them would mean drowning.
When you look up idol in the dictionary, the first definition is this:
Jeonghan thinks that’s about right. Idols are loved because they represent something better than themselves. They are worshiped not for their own merit, but for the image held by their worshippers.
Jeonghan imagines himself going to heaven, in the way Joshua describes: choir music, gentle ascension, pearly gates. An old white man will ask him, why do you deserve to get into heaven and Jeonghan would think I don’t but his mouth will point to all his good deeds and his infinite kindness and caring words.
Jeonghan could point at his life, almost every day on the public record, with some moments from a hundred angles. He could point at tweets that tell the world about how kind he is, how caring, how professional.
But the old white man, with his holy omniscience, will look down at Jeonghan, over his big book of human lives, over his snowy white beard and clean white robes, and say I know what you were really thinking and it’s your thoughts that matter.
There is no space in heaven for you
Jeonghan wants to be as stubborn as Junhui, he wants to say no sometimes, to stomp his feet and insist on his way. Sometimes he tries, pokes at Chan’s ego and fishes the maknae into an argument but then he hates the look in Minghao’s eyes that mean why don’t you just let it be, you’re the hyung.
He hates it when Seungcheol asks him out to beers. Because he will say yes, because Jeonghan knows that Seungcheol craves emotional connection, worships the intimacy between people when they are tipsy and touching. The only way he can say no is to let Seungcheol’s calls ring, not pick up, and pretend that he is not guessing the end of every conversation when they meet.
Jeonghan feels the safest in his own room, away from cameras, away from gazes, away from the need to perform.
But within the world, he feels the safest when Yoon Jeonghan takes over with his perfect answers and perfect faces, and just Jeonghan floats away to the back.
And when that happens, it feels like a state of grace, of purgatory on Earth and salvation in a camera. When he lets the thoughts and deeds of impulsive, gremlin Jeonghan wash away with the stage lights, and every dance is an act of worship, every touch an act of repentance for who he is.
Thank you for reading! Twig, you know you got me with this, I started writing immediately, paused, then spitefully started when ester posted that she was also looking at this, and stopped again. Because the phrase is so beautiful on first read but on consideration, it was such a challenge to imagine what it /meant/ to give your body to the world and then walk away from it - to want to walk away from it. (a la Siken quote, throw sadness into river but you're left with the river and your hands.
Jeonghan living for others was something I've explored elsewhere, but that Jeonghan was one who was painfully /within/ his own body. Thank you for stretching my brain so good, and happy 17hols!
Re: [FILL] and the end of the world would be so lovely
Re: [FILL] and the end of the world would be so lovely
Re: [FILL] and the end of the world would be so lovely