#wall fic

[your--isgayrights]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/28099398/chapters/221984336

I forgot how to make link posts on mobile but this is the wall fic update

[shadoedseptmbr]

doodle doodle

She comes back to the Normandy and the temperature of the command deck drops. Something about the not actually quiet quietude in her wake makes him glance up and... Her skin is cracked along the jaw and those cool eyes are not exactly...grey, anymore, as they catch the light while she signs off on the 'pad Traynor just held out to her with both hands like an offering. She was only gone for an hour; what the hell happened in an *hour* since he left her at lunch on the Citadel. She was only supposed to help follow up on a thing a contact in CSEC had pinged her with.

[your--isgayrights]

I kept putting off working on my wall fic draft to finish chapter 4 because I thought I had to completely rewrite the last scene... But after reading it again I think it's actually fine? I was being really hard on myself before, I think. Going to try to post it tonight.

[your--isgayrights]

ive bern such a big fan of your orv ff since the first chapter, and reread it a lot because i really related to KDJ’s perspective in your writing. but I just found out you’re 23 and your writing is genuinely so good?!? you have a really great ability of writing characters distinctly yet grounded and your ability to navigate the flow of storytelling is seriously amazing?!?

<33!! Yeah, I started writing wall fic when I was 18 I guess? To be honest, because I started reading fan fiction when I was a younger teenager I had this kind of subconscious feeling that all fanfic authors were people in highschool and I only had a limited amount of time to start writing myself before I 'became an adult' and had to let go of my interests or something like that. After updating recently and getting comments from different people who read wall fic, I realized that the people who were writing the fics I was reading at 13 are still older than me and still writing and now the people who started reading my fic in high school are in college and writing their own fics... Which is pretty cool to think about and helps me when i see I'm rushing myself a bit too much haha.

I appreciate your ask because during that time I was first writing the initial chapters, I was fairly worried about how it would be interpreted because I felt I was writing a Kim Dokja who was 'in-character' as opposed to being someone writing from personal experiences. Now, in retrospect, I actually realize my concept of his 'character' was very much coming from a part of 'self' and probably will continue to be as I try to keep writing. I suppose it's the reason that Han Sooyoung as the writer has the 'avatar' skill, that when we write we actually have many selves who become characters, even if those 'selves' are reflections of how we understand others in our life. My hope with wall fic is still that when we relate to Kim Dokja who can't see anything good about himself and his life, we can also be someone who looks at Kim Dokja and sees all the love that exists for him in the world that lies just beyond his point of view.

[your--isgayrights]

wall fic is so faithful to orvs theme of "reading again" and thats one of the reasons i love it so much. im rereading the chapter with different character narrations in mind and it makes for a different story on every reread it's amazing☺️ yoo joonghyuks shady supervisor is a pain in the ass but he cant look away from someone in trouble. not again. yoo sangah is finally starting to crack her favorite coworkers defenses and it's the highlight of her week. han sooyoung has no idea gamers are hammering at hr's office door to get her fired shes just trying to do right by her friend/bastard lackey ♥️😭 and kim dokjas long winded monologues to convince the reader he is not a kind person... his self perception is so out of wack when just beyond it it's stark that these people care about him. just beyond that wall. i hope their messages reach him♥️

<33 thanks so much for your ask and taking the time to re-read. It's a big point of humor for me to think about how different the story each of the different characters is experiencing is, haha.

Since you bring up the wall, I might take the opportunity to discuss it a bit... Part of the reason I wanted to keep the most recent chapter within the previous chapter is that to me a lot of the interactions focus on the theme in the title of the chapter "what can we say when there is a wall." The way that KDJ and YJH are communicating with one another about deeper feelings changes between chapters. For instance, at the end of chapter 3 KDJ talks to SYS about how she need not feel guilty for not being able to take care of Biyoo all the time, because the words she shared with him about her care will be used by him every time he takes care of the kitten, and each time she will have saved the kitten's life again. In truth, the words KDJ shares with SYS are very similar to words he might say to the person who saved his own life, but in that chapter these words were only possibly 'heard' by Yoo Joonghyuk, thus the title being "even if it isn’t heard by the person beyond the wall." That's why I wanted the chapter "what can we say when there is a wall" to end with this conversation where Kim Dokja is attempting to share his feelings of gratitude and care with Yoo Joonghyuk by saying something directly to him, while still maintaining that Wall between them that may cause some misinterpretations, haha. The idea being that each chapter marks a milestone in how the communication between KDJ and YJH, or the 'wall,' has changed.

[your--isgayrights]

i was trying to find notes i have about like a different project and ran into some comics? notes? from before the recentest update of wall fic lmao. Idk if i posted them before? so :

^ YSA and KDJ on break at the start of 4.3

^ then I think I had to draw this to psych myself up to write the scene at the end of 4.3

[your--isgayrights]

I want you to know that I think about Kim Dokja being kept awake at night by the idea of YJH using raw meat on his face to treat bruises (as seen in cartoons) every time ORV comes up on my page. Genuinely hysterical.

Yesssss ok thanks for reminding me about this anon it is like such a specific situation for them to me because like. My concept of YJH is so like 'guy literally raised by video games.'

When I was younger I knew a guy who learned how to read from playing animal crossing and YJH has something of that in him to me. like his copy of cooking mama was his first recipe book to me. I think his gamer brain is also behind his double/triple-text thread behaviors because obviously in rpgs response to player choice is always instantaneous so if someones leaving him on read he just hasn't triggered the right response sequence yet better keep trying.

Oh ok I have another friend who read a lot of fantasy as a kid and thought that like, a lot of fruits were not real fruits but instead made up for the novels they appeared in, like mango and papaya and such. but yes ok this is just the kind of energy that is part of the inspiration for some of my thoughts about 'character who is a videogame character/raised by videogames'. Like ok so you're telling me dragon fruit is real but raw steak healing bruises isn't?

[your--isgayrights]

Probably a bit silly and you’ve likely answered this before, but do you think you’re going to come back to “at the Very least, the Wall will change?” I’m just getting into ORV and I want to read some fanfic! I promise I am patient but I’m hesitant to start reading something that’s abandoned. I hope this doesn’t come off as disrespectful! I completely understand burnout (med student here hehe) and there’s no shame is shelving a project for a time if it no longer speaks to you. I just wanted to check

You're right that I've answered this before but like it's totally fair to ask me again after how long it's been lol. Bc like I think about this a lot too and thus the answer/feelings I have about it kind of changes?

Like my journey with this fic has kind of been tumultuous because I started it before I had access to ADHD medication and a lot of my life can be divided into the Before times and the like Now Times where my baseline happiness/standard of care of myself is vastly improved. I outlined all of wall fic before publishing the first chapter and then the scenes I wanted to include took up a lot more time to create than I initially thought they would and that like frustration was really harmful to like my sense of being a "writer," I guess?

Sorry, getting into this bc I'm trying to articulate my own feelings to myself, but I'll tldr; it at the end probably.

Like when I first started wall fic it had like a strangle hold on my imagination and was a way I was able to articulate feelings about things in life. Truth is, I'm someone who has called 911 for suicide/self-harm of friends/classmates like 4-5 times before turning 18. There is this feeling of helplessness I always had as a minor that the world was always ending around me but even when I was up till 5 am making sure my friend got to the hospital ok without any way of really knowing except waiting for a text back, I still had to just buck up and go to school the next day. The emotions I have towards these times in my life really latched onto omniscient reader, because the way it discusses suicidal ideation and what can help with it rang really true to me. I love KDJ a lot, part of that is, in my interactions with suicidal ideation, his sense of narrative inevitability really describes the emotions behind it well, the feeling of "this is the only Solution that will Actually work" is sewn into the fabric of the universe as "probability." And I've actually been thinking about that term "probability" a lot lately, and how it relates to ideas about Narratives. We're always estimating the likelihood of future events based on past experiences, calling things "realistic" or not. But the function of this system in my own life has often been to convince myself to 'give up' on certain things, conserve the energy it would take to try them. Sure that has helped me when Ive not had any free time/energy in crunch times or big projects, but when something is actually important, giving up feels like shit to be honest. Which is part of why I really love and kind of idealize this character of Yoo Joonghyuk, someone who 'never gives up.' To me KDJ and yjh in wall fic represent these two radical sides of a spectrum where someone becomes unhappy by giving up caring about everything and someone becomes unhappy by never giving up on anything. KDJ is then sort of this love letter to people who give up on themselves, people who could never imagine living past a certain age and yet somehow implausibly remain. YJH is a love letter to people who have been left behind and are So aware of their choices and their power over situations that they blame themselves for things that were actually out of their control in the first place. It's these two different ways of interacting with helplessness and grief and fear, giving up knowing you never could have made a difference in the first place or being convinced you could always have done Something and blaming yourself for failing, constantly stressing about what you could have done and what you ought to do the next time it happens.

Codifying these themes into Characters is originally this fun way of exploring emotions I have about them and sharing the experience of feeling them with others without having to tear too much of my self a part. I feel like when we're young it feels like a sense of self is something like a wall, an image of ourself that we have Built and must put in work to Maintain from erosion. This sense of self and protection makes us feel distinct from other people, the line we draw where we begin and end in the universe, and they become rules dictating How we will Act and Appear towards others. Drawing these walls and lines is pretty important to KDJ's perspective in wall fic, but i now realize I had sort of started doing to myself? Towards the middle of writing it?

Just because I've been on the Internet so long, I know the sort of "narratives" of being different "kinds of authors" online. Because of this, when I started posting wall fic, something that was of a lot of concern to me was how I appeared as an Author to people reading. I honestly think now that the performance of things I associated with like Being an Author were more sort of motivated by a fear of failure and disappointing others than anything else. It's kind of only been recently that I've realized that I have a choice to do things because I enjoy them instead of the fear of not doing them, which sounds a little crazy/obvious to be honest, but forcing myself to be an honor roll student for like more than a third of my adolescence while completely unmedicated kind of made that sort of intrinsic fear of disappointing others the ole'reliable of Task Motivation. Participating in ORV fandom has sort of been this emotional tight rope walk for me of like. Kind of really desperately desiring validation from others but also being afraid of receiving it bc of like the pressure it then puts on to Keep Doing the thing that Works and otherwise feeling like a Failure. But obviously like creative writing isn't going to have the same like Fear/Urgency factor as life stuff and it shouldn't feel that way, anyway, tbh. I'm kind of having to like. Re-invent the idea of writing being Fun and Relaxing for myself. And the idea that talking to other people on the internet (also like. People in general I still do this at uni even) does not actually have to have like any performative elements or factors of like? Disguise? Because like my sense of self doesn't actually have to be a wall I keep building and have to repatch whenever someone comes along with a pickaxe like my sense of self doesn't actually need a metaphor attached to it because it just is what it is lol. Like whatever I am RN is my "self" and that meaning would only suffer under the restraint of comparison, lol.

It's been easier to like feel normaler/better quicker in like my day to day stuff, but because a lot of the time I spent previously trying to write wall fic lies in that like that brain space where I felt afraid and stressed out etc I think I currently have like an aversion to sitting down with it out of like a fear of returning to that mindset. Because I'm like looking it in the face and such I do have like strategies of getting over it like doing warmups or taking time to make nice writing spaces and having a name to/strategies to access the creative part of my brain, but that stuff takes time and because it's a lot less likely I'll have writing on the brain than go through my every day life like the process of becoming normaler/feeling better goes a lot faster day to day than in my approach to writing.

Because in my brain the progress of wall fic is a sort of gentle curve I've been trying to shape the growth of upwards, I wouldn't say it's abandoned at all. But also like because the next "update" is not really guaranteed and I'm kind of hesitant to force myself to commit to a timeline for finishing/releasing it, I think it makes sense to like hesitate about starting it as a reader? In terms of a sense of completion, the chapters are organized in such a way that each one concerns a sort of complete Section of KDJ's life/relationships, tho. Like, Chapter 1 shows KDJ and YJH's first meeting as kids and establishes the "soulmate" setting. Chapter 2 shows the life KDJ carved himself to thereafter, how he and YJH's paths have diverged, established the stakes of KDJ's current "world" in a way parallel to the first few chapters of wos/orv. Chapter 3 focuses on how the soulmate worldview and KDJ + YJH's characters/past interact with the way they view children/the idea of "childhood/youth." Chapter 4 is meant to show how that worldview encounters adult life/ adult friendships/relationships, but the final part of it is something I'm still working on a bit. The structure is such that I tend to bring the end of the chapter back to a moment of peace/resolution/settling in the "new world" after the events of the chapter and then writing a one sentence cliff hanger about what the next chapter includes. So if you want to give some of it a read but don't want to be left feeling too incomplete, I'd read up till before the last sentence of Chapter 3, tho that's a bit silly, lol.

I will say again and have said before, I don't mind that much getting thoughtful comments/messages like yours at all. Thoughtful in the sense of like, desiring a response from me as a person, I suppose? Towards the start of writing online i really like needed the validation of little comments to feel good about myself/my work, but now I realize that the thing I like actually desire that ao3 comments aren't often a good format for is that I just like talking/discussing these things with other people. Sometimes comments will make me feel more like an unpaid customer service representative getting feedback or a student looking at a quick note on my report card. The kind I like most are messages where people want to ask me questions, argue with me about something, share something of their own interaction with the text that there's room for me to interact back with them as a person. The thing I hate most is feeling like I care too much about something/talk/think too much to the point that people are tired of hearing from me/form a bad opinion of me.

So like typing this all out has actually put myself in the brain space of remembering some of the things I like to write about and feel and how the current part of wall fic explores them. I'm kind of setting up my computer and such to start working on it like rn actually, hopefully the like feelings I'm having towards wall fic won't evaporate when i have to go to my class in 1/2 an hour or when i try to reread some of what I've written so far lol.

TLDR; Wall fic isn't abandoned or on hiatus or anything, but I am super slow about it lol. If you wanna give it a read I recommend stopping before the last sentence of Chapter 3 if you don't want any "cliff hangy" feelings. Questions like yours that ask me to interact with orv/wall fic/related themes do honestly help me start thinking about it again and I'll probably try to work on some of it tonight bc of you so thanks 👍