rix
rpf writer • ao3 gremlin
22 • she/her
about me
dope as hell
A Reflection
Why I am writing this
This is a personal piece about my thoughts on my fics. This reflection is not about BTS or Taekook so much as it is about me and my relationship to them as a fan, writer, fanfiction enjoyer, and human being. I guess I’m mainly writing this for myself—a piece as self-indulgent as all the other works I’ve published to AO3—but given how many people have told me about how my works have impacted them, how they’ve grown with them and with me throughout the years, there may be at least one person who might find value in what I have to say here.Fanfiction has played a huge part in my life, both reading and writing it. It has made me so, so happy when the rest of my life was pushing back and making me so, so unhappy. Fanfiction was my escape. It meant so much to younger me, when I and my problems and my anger and my misery felt so big because I had no perspective on how big the world outside my bubble was.Now, I am an adult and my world is massive and I have seen and learned so much. I have, for better or for worse, become the person that my younger self dreamt of being, and I am so proud of myself. I am also proud my younger self for sticking it through, for surviving, for not giving up, because now I get to be here, living my life, BEING, so wholly and completely in a way I had thought would always be a pipe dream for me.I am writing this because I know I don’t need fanfiction the way that I used to. My world and dreams have grown so big, and I have so many other things I want to do. But I still value what fanfiction meant to me in my past, and I want to reflect on this.I have a busy mind. Words used to dance in my mind. Not just words—ideas. Characters. Taehyung and Jungkook, who became, through my fanfictions, extensions of myself and what I dreamt I could be and have. The person I could be and the kind of relationships I could experience and the lives I could live. I daydreamt scenes all the time—at work, at school, on the bus, everywhere.One time, I was at work, standing at the counter and spacing out, thinking about an idea for a fic I might write. I had so many ideas like this back then, but for some reason, this one sticks. The idea was this: set in 1960s America, high-school dropout greaser Taehyung (leather jacket, slicked back hair, absolutely gnarly whip, the whole shebang) meets nerdy prep Jungkook who works the concession stand at a drive-in movie theater, and an enemies-to-lovers fic unfolds. I didn’t have much beyond that other than a few quippy bits of dialogue, but I didn’t need more. I had the vibe, the aesthetic, the atmosphere nailed in my head, and that was enough. I must have been imagining some funny banter between Taehyung and Jungkook, planning out dialogue in my head as I so often did at work, and some old guy asked me why I was smiling. I was mortified. Looking back, I shouldn’t have been embarrassed. Smiling is incredible. I wish I smiled more throughout my life. If anything, that man should have been pleased I was smiling, considering how often men like him request a smile from me.I had dozens of other ideas like that one while I was at work. My mind would drift to Taekook at any moment it could. My refuge, my safe place, away from the misery and agitation of my life, the fog and the deep-seated pain that I had known all my life to be a truth of existence, not just of my circumstances, and something that other people somehow managed to deal with better than I did.I started reading fanfiction before I can even remember. I started writing BTS fanfiction in 2015. It was the first time I’d gotten so deep into a fanfiction subculture that I felt compelled to write my own. Back then, AO3’s repertoire of BTS fanfiction was weak, to say the least. Probably less than 2000 works posted. For those who don’t know, this was my first ever BTS fic, now orphaned:
I remember how eye-opening it was to realize the work it took to write just 1000 words. As a reader, I would breeze through 50 000 words like nothing. The first time I sat down to write, it took me hours to produce 300 words. Of course, now I can write faster and better (let’s hope), but at the time, it shocked me to realize the sheer amount of work it took to write a number of words I could read and toss away in just a few minutes.I don’t exactly know why I started writing BTS fanfiction. I mainly remember reading so many works that failed to fulfill my specific fantasies of how I wanted the relationship to take shape or how I wanted the characterizations to be written or how I wanted the fic’s vibe to feel. So I started writing them myself. There was also this feeling in me—I could be good at this.I was so profoundly a capital-L Loser at the time that I had consumed so much fanfiction to the point that I understood what made good and bad fanfiction. I knew what got people to open the fic, what got people hooked, what kept people reading. I knew what people liked—or, more accurately, I knew what I liked, and I wrote for people who wanted what I wanted. Then I found my niche: bottom Jungkook. If you were around in 2015/16, you know. There was a dearth of bottom Jungkook fics. I made it my mission to provide other bottom Jungkook fans like me with the fics I’d always dreamed of.If I have not made it clear—I loved this shit.This was my life.And then I moved on.Life goes on, as it does. We all know that. But then, last summer, I found myself at a peaceful point where I didn’t have much going on—a stable job, stable finances, stable relationship, stable mental state (I know, crazy). So I got bored, and I drifted back to BTS fanfiction. One hot summer night, at 3 a.m., with a glass of beer on my desk, I found myself opening a document and writing the first words to my next fic.I can’t tell you how much joy it brought me to write these characters again last summer in Lick, Fill, Chop. (As an aside, I’m not a huge fan of the title, partly because it reads like a ripoff of Eat, Pray, Love (the writer of which would probably be horrified by some of the things in my fic) and partly because I feel like the clever (to me) double entendre of the title was probably lost on most people, making the title seem more crass than I intended, if that is even possible, considering how crass I often get). I was no longer using fanfiction as an escape from pain, as I had in my past, but as something fun, and I’m thankful for that summer and the way I got to be creative in this way once again.I think it was that summer that I got to thinking about my time in the BTS fandom as an era of my life. Someone left a comment on my work that said something along the lines of how my characters were not kind. That got me reflecting on my work.Because yes, that commenter was right. Many of my fics were about people who were generally unpleasant and unkind. Comeback Kids—rude, crass jocks. Hickory—cold, down-on-their-luck underground boxers. Warehouse Kings—a high school dropout, underground fighter, depressed motherfucker who’s stopped chasing his dreams and believing in himself. Headed to Hell for the Company—it may have been a PWP, but don’t even get me started on the 50k words of unpleasantness I had written for both of the characters. (Don’t get me wrong; I still cherish these works, despite the characters being assholes half the time.)But then came Feel it Kicking in.This fic was different.I consider it one of rix’s best works, if not the best. I do not consider it my best work, because I of course hope that my works in the future will be better than what I could produce as a teenager, but I’ve gotta admit that sometimes I doubt myself. There’s just something so ferocious and bloodthirsty about the creativity of a mentally ill teenager that makes me think I may not ever be able to overcome what I had done back then.Looking back, the fics before this were not just about unkind people. They were about people like me. These fics often reflected my worldviews or attitudes in bits and pieces. Little morsels of my sadness and rage seeped in between the lines. But amid all the unkindness, there was still love. No matter what. Sad, angry, lonely teenage me wrote about sad, angry, lonely characters who found acceptance and love despite not being the best person they could be.I give my younger self credit. That’s a pretty healthy way of dealing with things. I managed to take misery, make art out of it, and stitch love and acceptance between the seams. I feel an overwhelming sense of compassion and pride toward the person I used to be, as much of an asshole as I was.But back to the hippie surfer fic.
On Feel it Kicking In
One thing that stands out to me is the spaceless and timeless nature of the fic. I never specified where they lived—something vaguely west coast North America, implied California or Sunshine Coast, something like that. And there is no reference to the passing of time—or if there is, it’s vague at best. Time doesn't really matter in the fic. We can’t tell if the events happen over the course of a few weeks or a few months or a year. It could be one summer. I guess that’s implied. But it could also be forever.You could look at the vagueness of setting as a result of my amateur writing—which, okay, it is—but I love the effect it produces. What had it meant to me to write these characters at that time in my life? These characters who were unquestionably there for each other, who existed in a timeless space. Forever summer, forever young. In their world, there is no stress. No responsibilities. No worries about money and the future. It was just about Taehyung and Jungkook and the endless love they had for each other, not just as lovers but as friends. The kind of love that you know will always be there. The kind with no judgment or doubt. It wasn’t a laser-focused type of love. The type that overwhelms, that stabs, that feels like jealousy and obsession. It was a good, strong love. Deeper than romance and passion. It was the love that forms through a profound human connection over many years of coming to understand one another.Back then, I had never felt that kind of love.This fic was different from my previous fics not just because the characters were kind. They loved each other, so deeply and earnestly. It was my first time writing love like that.I keep a list of quotes from Feel it Kicking in. I am still proud of my work. Even as an adult, I sometimes look at these quotes, and at the piece as a whole, at the floaty feeling it evokes and the warm world it drags the reader into, and wonder whether I could do something like that now. I feel like it has an aura that was distinctly born from the time of my life when I wrote it. It glows with the desire I had back then for that kind of stable, nonjudgmental, powerful love, and the relaxed life the characters lived that seemed to transcend the requirements of day-to-day life in the modern world.I loved that fic, and I still do, and I wanted to share what it meant to me, because maybe there’s at least one person in the world who cherishes it like I do. And maybe you find my thoughts on it interesting.
On My Writing (Or, self-indulgently analyzing my work in a way that only makes sense to me)
When I said I feel like I may never surpass my writing from some of my fics, I know it’s not true—I won’t let it be true—but the thought does get me thinking about writing as a craft and my relationship to it. So much of the work I published to ao3 has a “screenplay”-esque style (for lack of a better way to put it). This is so hard to put into words clearly, but I want to try. Let me just think out loud here.My writing thus far focuses on describing visuals in the present moment—like the scenery, the lighting, the characters’ attire or facial expressions—giving the reader a clear image in their head, but not going much deeper than that. I feel like for many years I’ve been failing to make full use of the advantages of prose fiction—the ability to describe emotions; to dip into the past, for a chapter, a paragraph, even a sentence, without throwing off the story; to explore a character’s philosophies on a topic or event; to say, quite literally, anything.Writing is so fucking powerful.I was recently reading The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood (I turn to her because she is so often my creative hero, my role model, my inspiration) and it really got me thinking of this concept, seeing the “screenplay” vibe in my writing that was limiting me. Sure, there are descriptions of the setting in Atwood’s work, of what the characters wear, of the expressions they make, but there’s so much more purpose to it than simply communicating what’s going on. The prose is alive. It has a mouth. It speaks in a way my writing doesn’t. It communicates insights into the story’s themes on a level that I’ve never been able to communicate through my fiction. I initially picked up the book because I came across a famous quote from it before I even knew of the book’s existence, the one about male fantasies (if you know, you know). I read the book not just to enjoy it but to try to investigate how Atwood could tell a story while weaving in such insights.For example, the quote below about jealousy stood out to me as I was reading.She’s just jealous, people say, as if jealousy is something minor. But it’s not, it’s the worst, it’s the worst feeling there is – incoherent and confused and shameful, and at the same time self-righteous and focused and hard as glass, like the view through a telescope. A feeling of total concentration, but total powerlessness. Which must be why it inspires so much murder: killing is the ultimate control.I love this about Atwood’s writing, and I want to emulate it. The way the story is not just for the story’s sake; it has something to say. It describes the character’s experiences to think through certain aspects of being human. It uses the characters as a way to reach out to the reader and say—I’ve felt this; have you?I think a lot of this stems from how I’ve been bogged down by the “show, don’t tell” adage without fully thinking through its purpose. Somewhere along the line, I started thinking that describing a character’s feelings was “telling.” I thought it was boring. And yeah, if you write something like “He felt jealous,” then obviously it’s boring. But my solution to this was to take the screenplay route, because I didn’t fully realize the potential of prose fiction. I tried to avoid “telling” by instead “showing” the character’s emotions through what you might see in a screenplay, something intended to be converted to a visual medium. I described the characters’ feelings through their facial expressions (e.g. “recognition flashed in his eyes” or “his lip curled” etc., you know the gist) or through describing the setting, the lighting, the way the air feels on the character’s skin, things like that. I feel like because of this, my writing suffers from vibey vagueness—as in, I communicate emotions and mood vaguely, and rely on the “vibe” to do the heavy lifting for me rather than clearly understanding and describing the emotions and themes I am trying to unpack in my story.For example: the fan.Let me talk about this fucking fan that’s been haunting my mind.I’m sorta joking. But this scene with a fan from Feel it Kicking in is a good example of what I’m talking about. Early in the fic, there’s a scene where Jungkook and Taehyung are chilling in the surf shop and shooting the shit. I won’t lie; it’s not a very exciting scene. I suppose the scene’s purpose is to lay out their friendship and let the reader get a sense for the characters and their relationship, and it also lays out a plot transition into the next scene. This scene is a good example of how I describe the setting to try to communicate an emotion, resulting in vibey vagueness.“...his eyes trailing the slowly spinning fan, watching the specks of dust fall. The plastic blades creak….The fan stutters and it strikes an irrational fear in Jeongguk’s heart. Then it picks up speed again, as if the shitty thing is teasing him. And in a brain-decaying temperature like this? God, the audacity.”Okay, I know it’s not terrible. But I brought up the fan five times in this scene, on five separate occasions. I don’t know why I remember this so much, but I still think about that fucking fan. The way I used it as a crutch, the way I tried to communicate emotion through it. I suppose it vaguely communicates the way Jungkook’s feeling at the start of the story, but it really could mean anything. It was a crutch also because it served as filler between bits of dialogue. I remember being bored while writing this scene, and if you’re bored writing it, people will probably be bored reading it. I don’t know why I thought describing a fan five fucking times would make it more interesting, but here we are.Don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying elements of visual description aren’t needed in fiction. I love that shit! But there can be so much more. Take that earlier quote from Atwood. The way she so intricately describes the feeling of jealousy. The relatability of it. To me, that quote highlights one of the many strengths of prose fiction that I want to make better use of going forward with writing.I want to turn to a different example from my AO3 works where I made better use of the power of prose than the fan example.From Mileage May Vary: “The Jimin here is a different man than the one Taehyung had spoken to before—the pretty thing who’d leaned against the bar counter and batted his eyelashes, whose sharp eyes could tell a dime from a dollar in a man’s pocket just from the sway of his walk. Here, Jimin is a little cruder, a little more tactless, rougher around the edges and a lot more like Jeongguk than he’d initially seemed. // But at this point Taehyung knows to expect that. Part of this makes him wonder how many of the people he’s met in his life have been nothing more than personas.”I bolded the parts that stood out to me. I still remember this bit—“whose sharp eyes could tell a dime from a dollar in a man’s pocket just from the sway of his walk”—because I was just so damn proud of that phrase when I wrote it—and I still am!—and it came to me so effortlessly, as if it just appeared on the page. It communicates information about who Jimin is without explicitly “telling” the reader “Jimin knows the industry and culture well, he’s a seasoned stripper who can smell someone’s bullshit and knows who to target to make money, bla bla.”And then there’s the second bit—“Part of this makes [Taehyung] wonder how many of the people he’s met in his life have been nothing more than personas.” I like how it starts to go a bit deeper than merely describing the present, but it goes back to that problem of vibey vagueness that I mentioned. This sentence communicates Taehyung’s sorta-sad, lonely vibe, his disconnect from the people in his life, and alludes to his complicated past with personal relationships, but it could be a lot more clear. This sort of sentence could be an opportunity to break into a bit of character exploration, to describe past experiences, to flesh out the character in a deeper way than my fics did.Speaking of character depth—that’s another thing that stands out to me when I think about what I want to work on. I shied away from getting into the meat of what made the characters tick in my fics. A big part was because I didn’t really have anything to say. My characters weren’t a tool to explore a theme. I just wanted to write a fun romance fic. I suppose that difference in purpose is at the root of what I’ve talked about so far. My writing goals were different when I was younger. I didn’t spend time exploring themes and diving too deep into the human experience because my fics were more about romance and sex. And honestly—I respect it. Hats off to my younger self for having her priorities straight. But now my priorities are different, and it’s fun to think about how I want to work on my craft by analyzing how I used to write.Anyways, that was a fucking tangent and a half. Versions of these thoughts have been floating around in my head for the past year or so. It feels good to wrangle them down into words.
Conclusion
I wrote a whole section on the significance of BTS in my life, how they inspired me and brought me so much happiness in a time of darkness, and of course that also came with a discussion of the shame and guilt that comes with writing fanfiction about real people you respect and admire, but I decided to cut it out. It was superfluous and overly personal and I’m sure everyone has their own thoughts on that. I’m here simply to talk about my creative journey with BTS fanfic.I know I won't engage with fanfiction with the same obsessive fervor I did when I was younger, but I still see myself continuing forward with it as a consumer and creator in my down time. I guess it's still my calm place. I will always cherish what fanfiction did for me, the creative space it provided me and the people it connected me with. I made it through the worst times of my life because of this fandom. I love it here and I’ll always look back on this space fondly.If you want to thank me for my works, whatever they may have meant to you, send me a message on twitter or leave a comment on my fics. I read every single one, even if I don’t respond. They mean so much to me. So much of my life is built on words. Of course I read that shit man. I love you. I love BTS and I love fanfiction and I love you and the way we’ve been brought together by these things. The world is amazing and you are too, and if you are going through a tough time, I promise it will get better. You will get better. Thank you, whether you’ve been here for years or whether you just happened across my works recently. Thank you for engaging with me and for making me feel like the fanfiction I wrote served a purpose. There are few things more meaningful to me than bringing people joy in whatever small ways I can.I’ll still be around, and I’ll probably keep my twitter, or X, or fucking whatever. I still want to keep up with BTS. ARMY forever, BTS forever. You know how it is. I’m in this shit for life.