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2022 Round 2: AUs
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Status: Closed
This round has closed. It remains open for fills, comments and remixes, but prompts are no longer accepted.
✧ Seventeen Holidays ✧
About
When you put the characters you love in a new world, you end up loving them even more. Sometimes it's about the aesthetic (dark academia). Sometimes it's about straining those ship dynamics to the extreme (Pacific Rim). Maybe life is hard and you need to exorcise something (unemployment/coporate slave AU). Or perhaps you are so in love with the world you want to see Seventeen in it. Shakespeare, My Hero Academia, RuPaul's Drag Race. No problem - just give some context so anyone can fill it. Examples
MinWon - Bittersweet
Ah yes, the ambiguous Bittersweet MV. I'm curious to see anyone's interpretation of those MinWon scenes.
Any / NCT AU
Remember how Seventeen was supposed to be subgroups divided across Korea, China and Japan? What if that happened and the members were split up, only to reunite once a year. Or if they promoted like NCT - thinking about the graduation angst of NCT Dream, the ridiculous schedules of SuperM. Who is Mark and over-employed. Who is Shotaro and stuck in the basement?
Wonhui X Link Click (Donghua)
Link Click is a show about two guys who run a photography studio and time travels to help their customers. Wonwoo knows every event within 12 hours of a photograph being taken and Junhui can time travel and possess the photographer for 12 hours to complete a mission. Wonwoo speaks in Junhui's mind and tells him what he needs to do - where to go, what to say, what will happen. There's a rule that Junhui can't change the past because it will change the future :') but Junhui wants to :'). Would love to see WonHui investigating another sebong's story, or an exploration of their contrasting attitudes to fate (resigned vs headstrong - roles can be reversed if you want).
Rules
How it works
Prompting
Filling
Remixing
Art/media
Note!
Have you considered trying for the 17hols hall of fame? The categories are: Exactly 400 Words, Year of the Tiger, Five of a Kind and the Rarest Pair. ▽ Click for More Info ▽Exactly 400 words: your fill is the absolute minimum word count. Well done you cold curt succinct savage. Year of the Tiger: in celebration of 2022, we will also celebrate anyone who supports this agenda (context: burn your ears). You must seamlessly incorporate a horanghae or wooahae or hahahahanihae (etc) in your fill. You can not regret it. Five of a Kind: You win this if you fill 5 prompts, and each fill is different in the same way. E.g. 5 different ships, 5 different AUs, 5 different mediums. You also win this by doing 5 remixes! The rarest pair: the fill with the rarest pairing at the end of the fest wins. This is based off the number of works in the ao3 tag. For simplicity, this will be the / tag and not &. (e.g. a “Wonwoo & Minghao” platonic fill will be counted by the “Wonwoo/Minghao” tag). The ship must only have Seventeen members and be the main pairing in your fill. We will update the category with the current titleholder during the fest so you know who to challenge~ I anticipate polyamory. (To help us out, please mention that you’re going for one of these categories at the beginning of your fill.) Navigation
 ABOUT  DATES  FAQ  BAITS |
vocaloid Joshua Hong
Major Tags: AI, futuristic, the horror of sentience
Additional Tags:
Do Not Wants: None
Prompt: In the distance future, corporations have begun to create artificial bodies (70% organic/cloned, 30% computer) for vocaloids and other characters in order to better perform (organic bodies help get rid of uncanny valley that comes with holograms/animatronics/etc). Joshua Hong has been a sweet, accoustic vocaloid and character that rose to fame because of his soft art, cute cameos in comics/merchandise, etc, and is one of the first to be put into one of these artificial bodies. He's supposed to be nothing more than a carefully programmed version of his character. But alas. Perhaps. He is more alive than he should be. (thunder boom) What is it like when you are you but you are also a character who is sold/bought, with an established fanbase, established lore and personality, etc.
(very open, can do with how you want. Maybe horror, maybe angst, maybe soft/sad)
[FILL] in the flesh
Major Tags: mild body horror (the horror of having a body), AI-adjacent
Additional Tags: general discussion of death
Permission to remix: Yes
cross-posted to ao3 https://archiveofourown.org/works/36761146
***
In every way except for one, Joshua Hong is a perfect replica of his digital forebear. His face was a flawless success, his doe-like features rendered in soft, fleshy 3D, clothed in skin that needs no intervention to be exquisite. His height, his proportions, the length of his lashes and fingers are all exactly as described by years of accumulated online lore — mostly information officially established by his parent company, Pledis, but with the addition of a few details so fervently possessed by fans that they had become physical truth: a touch of Californian vocal fry, a shortened love line on his left palm, a scar on his right knee from a bike accident that never happened. But although, when asked, Pledis representatives will say that the Joshua Hong Project went off without a hitch, there is one detail that was neither programmed nor headcanoned into the artificial idol’s new life: Joshua Hong is a vegetarian.
Before he was born in blood, Joshua Hong lived for 9 years as a digital celebrity. Originally a character in a webtoon, the perpetually-23 Korean American acoustic singer (a rival love interest to the protagonist’s eventual match, a bad-boy ex-idol with a mysterious past) rose to fame first in viral screenshots of his exquisitely drawn beauty and squeaky-clean boyfriendisms. Then, Pledis acquired his copyright in a new business venture that aimed to “debut” virtual idols with preexisting online popularity. Of the four idols the company released (including an infamously thirsted-after pinup-girl ramen mascot and rip-off of a rip-off of a children’s animation character, all grown up) only Joshua Hong (TM) took off. But so immediate and incendiary was his popularity that entertainment companies began to follow in droves, debuting virtual idols with talents and personality traits assembled from fan surveys, from Netflix side characters, from living idols who’d aged out. Still, Joshua was the first; he was the blueprint that, in 2025, would be mapped onto a nearly-but-not-quite human body and reborn.
He had awakened with a smile on his face; nearly all the technicians in the room had swooned. When he had opened his mouth, his Korean was perfect except for the slightest American growl on his ㄹs, and of course, his English was even more flawless, the code being written by a school of native speakers. He had woken up hungry and able to express it politely, but when he was brought a dish of hanwoo steak and rice (only the finest of first meals) he had stared at the meat in front of him and thought, that’s me.
It’s not that Joshua didn’t know who he was. He knew himself innately: all 23 years of his life that had occurred since he came into existence 9 years ago. He knew he was a singer and that he loved it; he knew that he had fans and that he loved them; he remembered every memory that formed his personality, complex in only the way someone who has lived and been kept alive in the brains of millions can be. But suddenly, at the moment he was reborn, he found himself possessed by a single brain, one that belonged to him, and alive in a way that he had never known — physically, chemically, viscerally. In the mirror, he looked exactly like himself, but underneath the coding in his head that chanted that’s you that’s you that’s you was another voice that spoke not in language, but in images that never stop.
He is 2 years old, now, (or rather, he is 25, something he has never been before) and he spends his days imagining his veins and the red blood flowing through them; his muscles, wet and glistening even in the dark interior of his body, pulling on his precisely measured bones when he dances; the churn of acid in his stomach. He sweats and breathes and even cries — something he discovered onstage at his debut concert, looking out at the packed arena of fans in front of him. The fancams of his first tears had gone viral, and he watches them frequently, almost obsessively, transfixed by his expression of bewilderment and near-fear as he lifts a manicured hand from his mic stand and presses it delicately to his face, feeling there the salty, sparkling evidence of his new humanity. He knows now that nearly every fan in attendance had cried with him then, overwhelmed by the expression of life they were witnessing, how unbelievable it had been that their idol now stood in front of them in flesh and blood, every bit as perfect as they had imagined.
He has nearly grown out of his team of managers who had eased him into life; now, he just has the one, a kind man who has buzzed his hair weekly since his time in the military, where he had discovered that rules and regiment were possibly his favorite things in life. He picks Joshua up from his spacious bachelor pad in the morning, drops him off at night (among all the things that Joshua is capable of, he is not allowed to drive — it is too much of a liability for his makers), and keeps track of his schedule with such vigilance that Joshua barely needs to pay attention to it himself. Joshua loves working — though he knows he was programmed to, it also cuts into the time he spends at home, staring in the mirror, opening his mouth and looking as far as he can into his pink throat, or perhaps smudging his nose on the glass as he inspects his eyes for the tear ducts that appear like pinpricks in the inner corners of their wet rims. Other times, he lays in bed in the dark, fingers prodding at his skin. He maps the bones in his face, counts his ribs, thinking about the story that lives in his brain under “beliefs,” about how Eve was created from just one. Whose rib was taken to make me? He thinks. The artist who drew me and died in a car accident before he could claim me as intellectual property, casting me into the open auction of the public domain? The fans who fleshed me out in fiction and imagination, who gave me life before the technology even existed? The manufacturer of my actual bones, whose biological makeup is so close to that of real humans that when I eventually die, I will be able to buried and not disposed of as non-human biological waste?
Though Joshua needs sleep, he keeps himself up with thoughts of rot. Before he existed enough to have any say in the matter, the question of his death was hotly debated, but the answer came fairly easily: Of course he would die. The technology could not be trusted to grant him real life without an equally real decline — it was not yet that advanced. And besides, no product’s popularity is immortal. Why curse a person to live past his eventual fall out of fashion? A death is the perfect way to wrap up love, the strongest final marketing push — from reality back into memory.
Joshua has been assured again and again that his death has not been planned — it will happen when it happens, just as it does for all other people — but the idea of it has such a crushing grip on him that it feels almost predetermined, though in his innumerable imagined variations. He will forget how to swim and drown on vacation. He will be suddenly stricken with heart disease. He will be poisoned by a fan. It will happen when he is relatively young, in his 40s, or, if he successfully transitions into acting, when he is very old, a few years after he wins a prestigious American award for playing a character who cannot speak English. He has already been in one movie, a zombie flick in which his character’s death (desperately leaping from a building in order to not be changed and hunt down his younger brother, who will ultimately not survive anyway) sent fans into such delighted despair that he can already imagine what it will be like when he does die. His instagram account will be carefully archived — it belongs to the company, not him — and his funeral photographed from every angle. In the ground, his body will bloom with real life, devoured by organic things that were born minuscule and invisible and with no purpose except to live until they stop.
At night, it is with this thought that Joshua finally allows himself to sleep. In the morning, he will wake with the ring of a single alarm. He will check his schedule, which is ever-changing but predictable — studio, fansign, wardrobe fitting, dance practice, photo shoot, music show. He will eat a breakfast of rice and gim, later refuse the catered lunchboxes (bulgogi or jjigae loaded with bits of pork) at his first appointment of the day. In the makeup chair, his makeup artist will tut at the dark circles beneath his eyes, and he will hear her whisper to a colleague, “I didn’t know that was possible. Do you think it’s a glitch?” And he will close his eyes under the touch of multiple people’s warm hands, under the fizzing fluorescent lights of the green room, under the weight of this life that he has been given, and listen to his blood rush in his ears until it is time to go onstage.
Re: [FILL] in the flesh
Re: [FILL] in the flesh