:)
hullo! i started this blog because i want to talk about my Taegi Joseon Era fic, but i ALSO want to talk about history - specifically Asian history - as well as writing, research, and outlining!
i love Asian history. if you’ve ever visited a museum on Asian history, you’ll be SHOCKED to see just how less the world knows about it. we’re all so conditioned to see the world from a more Western POV, and so much of Asian history has been erased through colonial occupation and western hegemony. if you went to school/worked in an Asian country you’ll know that even our history books are so tailored to a ‘global’ POV.
but there really is so much out there! there was just an astounding amount of importance for scholarship and learning in medieval and early modern Asia. there were printed books and identity cards and civil service examinations and a devotion to nature/family all leading to a level of organization in society so entirely different from the West. it really fascinates me.
as a student of early-modern Asian history, i wanted to write this story because i wanted to dabble in a few specific things:
> a mystery with a period setting
> a period fic where the characters are NOT royalty
> something intrinsically korean, because i want to learn more
it took me a lot of reading to find a place and a time i wanted to delve into. in the process, i read about the dynasties of korea, the spread of buddhism and confucianism and neo-confucianism, the wars and treaties with china/mongolia/japan, trade, and society. i started out wanting to write a supernatural mystery set during a war and then decided that it needed to be a quieter story. i started out planning for yoongi’s character as a scholar, and then read deeper and figured out that i wanted him removed from a position of power.
(this was kind of my first attempt to figure this story out)
that’s not at all what it is now.
this fic took a REALLY long time to gestate, went through multiple iterations, and is my first ever attempt at a historical setting. that’s why i want to talk about the making of it.
i found the idea of the podocheong as a footnote in one of the articles i read about the joseon era. i found it so incredibly fascinating! a police force, detectives, spies and lady helpers! you don’t think of that often when you think of asia’s past, do you? that’s how i started trying to learn more about them, and how my semi-historically-accurate detectives yoonjin came to be.
while this fic is historical fantasy and therefore by nature somewhat removed from actual history, there are a lot of things happening here that are tied to real events, mirror actual uprisings, and snapshots what is (hopefully) at least a semi-well-researched depiction of the era.
this last bit is kind of a disclaimer but i just want to get it out: i know that culture is hard to get right unless you are immersed in it. i can research every hour of every day but at the end of it all i’m still an outsider, limited by language and cultural memory, looking into and writing about a culture that is not mine. while my voice isn’t korean, i hope that i’ve done my research well enough that i don’t make callous mistakes. please hit me up if i’ve made a mistake or misinterpreted something. ask box on this blog is always open, or you can talk to me on twitter!
