2025 Fests (pt. 1)

[kkulecru]

Q1-Q2 2025 Fest Roundup

Wow... half of the year has basically already passed and I've done fics for like. 6 fests already. Because I'm really normal and sane and use my time wisely to plan out very long and intricate fics (I am still a tiny fic writer what can I say).

As always I definitely don't have much to say about most/all of these? Maybe? (actually I should have known I'd have a lot to blurt out for rare pair) But for the sake of making this into a good habit I'll run through all my fest fics so far and see what I can squeeze out of my head to comment on (read: ramble messily about. sorry.)

mvfest

so mvfest - I thought it'd be a good opportunity to find inspo to diversify my kpop fic writing a bit so I was very eager to sign up...and then I found that after contemplating my MV list for a bit I really could find two to draw inspiration from, not just one... so why not?!

small but dangerous

I fell in love with a Pineapple Kiss inspired concept pretty easily, but it took me a while to decide on which fandom to do it for – until I finally recalled my previous (and still latent) enamour with Irene & Seulgi’s first EP (and I’m now writing this at a time where they have a comeback not too far away… life is so good… I love women…) and the whole concept around Monster. It’s just too good!!

And once I had them in mind the words really flowed from there without too much difficulty (although I spent an awful lot of time continuously editing the same few lines to try and find the perfect synonyms for the right vibes), and I had some fun thinking of little possibilities for the wider setting/their past etc. that had little-to-no visibility in the ficlet itself...
The reception was really heartening so I might see if my mind is inclined towards doing other connected works in the future!!

Days Long Gone

I did go into it hoping to also find an excuse to write something bangtan/HYYH-related and this, thankfully, worked out in a way that I’m also happy with! It only just scrapes past the word requirement I think but I got the vibe/vision down that I could see in my mind’s eye so.... I’m really happy about this one too....

dkfest

Ah, yes, this is where I started my spree of Minghao-featuring works because I did truly resign to my Hao favouritism over the past few months....

thicker than water

Gotta be perfectly honest I saw the prompt, claimed it, felt my mind blackout as the specific visual of post-attack dk staggering back home on instinct(?) filled my senses and then I blinked my dry eyes and saw about 1.2k of words on the doc.

Which is, more or less, exactly how the bulk of it got written.

It was a bit of a shame but while I do love a great vampire bite/bloodsucking scene I couldn't really focus on it too hard in the end? Because my initial paragraph stubs just didn't fit the flow I was going for... one day I might fix that...whether or not it is with this specific seokhao instance is another question altogether...

soonwoo fest

my snapshot for snapshoot, two for one!

beaming at you

When I signed up for a self-prompt I was totally thinking of doing an explicit follow-up to my existing soonwoo fic but. I think I was thinking of ways to use some unassigned Snapshot squares, and then HxW concept pics came out, and they magically combined into a vision of my beloved alien Hoshy trying to court Wonwoo.

And so I wrote it! Definitely had to try very hard to keep it within the 1.5k Snapshot limit, so it was a good exercise in streamlining things even if I had to discard some tiny scenes... but the key moments in my brain (tendril emotions + meowbeast + tigers + bouquet) all downloaded themselves onto the page without too much trouble yay!

(as of writing this I have still procrastinated responding to quite a few comments on this one which. I'll get to. I'm so very glad everyone also loves alien Hoshy)

mingyufest

Aka beginning and end (round 3)...

saved by the bell

Ok. Look. I'm a simple soul. I see a Minghao shibari prompt, I try my hardest to grab it because at this point I need to stick to my solid guns...

I was very excited to have an excuse to rewatch that one live and pull in some details for Mingyu's initial observations, and then after that it was a question of how patient I could be before they jumped to the actual rope-typing and all. Answer being...not very....

I did do a little bit of research to be. Vaguely accurate on where they might be for the nightlife club dancing bit? And I remember spending quite a lot of time agonising over outfits so I could find a way to shoe-horn in some kinda diy harness for Minghao that (importantly!!) Mingyu could grab onto a knot or two of with his hand and spark Thoughts in him.

And of course... I wanted a third party to incite him into making a move or something so. Why not give beloved Yoongi a cameo here? I did actually spend far too much time thinking about what kind of scenes he might be doing with Hao (and for that matter how frequently they might be taking place, and who else might be making use of his services LMAO) but of course Mingyu doesn't really have time to think about or investigate any of that beyond a brief reference to JK's oversharing. Oh well!

For the actual rope-tying, I did do my classic reference searching and watching-while-writing but tried to pull back on my. Too-detailed step-by-step rope descriptions from past scenes because it would be soo excessive. I think I did ok at that!

And of course I had to cap it all off with interrupting them before they got anywhere too good... and no small percentage of the motivation for that was that I just didn't feel like writing anything too explicit for this one haha (the other being that I did have stirrings of how under-negotiated kink they could get from there and it was about to spiral into several more K, all pure filth, that I didn't really have the brain space for rip)

rare pair fest

I have feasted greatly on rare pair fest rounds of yore so I was very very keen to sign up for this one. I admittedly spent a lot of time agonising over which prompt to go for so thank you ao3 user witchboyjm for your wise counsel (I am very indecisive).

streets alive with colour

My drafting documents for this were a complete mess and I did go through several iterations of dot-point draft plot beat/progressions, but the opening paragraphs were only scrapped once (this originally began with an introspective Vernon POV!) before I decided that the report had nailed what I wanted after all.

Actually I just checked and I had drafted about 630 words for the Vernon POV opening damn...And my brain-dump dot-point monologue with myself is around 834 words.......

But yeah I think once I decided yes it's all Hao POV the elements that got locked in the fastest were definitely the worldbuilding/hints/scene breaks/timeskips via the messaging/forum posts? And also Hansol having like. cyberware junk to work with because it was a very important detail to me. And of course the sorta contextual element of Minghao having this suppressed artsy side from his youth due to the combo of like.. societal/parental pressure etc and for various reasons he had to stifle it whether he’d like to or not yknow

What else can I say about this one umm;

• kaia cheapdate once again saved my life after I was really doubting whether this would read nicely to anyone else


• As soon as I read the prompt my mind immediately flashed to Fisheye Placebo which (as I mentioned on ao3) is where I drew Vernon's outfit from and. the vague feel of his escapades


• Minghao and Vernon's usernames aren't random keysmashes! When you switch to the Korean keyboard they spell out 슈명호8 and 최한솔 respectively.. with how anonymous/wild wild west that side of the 'net is I don't think there'd be 'usernames' as such so the uhh encrypted user ids or whatever were just a bit of an easter egg. for myself.



[ Especially if it went up in a blindspot. ]



[ yea good point ]

[ more things downtown mean higher chance of it hanging around to actually brighten up the neighbourhood right lol ]

[ big improvement on all those shitty tags ]



[ I couldn’t agree more. ]





[ btw ur pretty deep in the underground art scene right ]



• bracketed exchanges were private messages, and aside from verhao having slightly different typing styles the spaces between the messages are also indicative of how much time passed between them....


• Did briefly consider exploring the Drugs in the underground artsy gathering but didn't want that to get in the way of their night together


• It's a bit vague on Hao's part but they can basically be thought of as (scifi-flavoured) T4T imo

OH also. This of course features Choi bros in the background. AND of course Jeongcheol (and maybe some other familiar faces) are busy, unbeknownst to Minghao, being the so-called terrorists/disruptors that get referenced throughout... like in:

> Heard there was a disturbance at the terminal holding things up

>> Lol a disturbance u sound like a cop. It was a whole riot or smth

>>> ?? lol and this is the first im hearing of it?? as if

and are being unsucessfully hunted down in:

>> they must be checking if some1 unregistered is there

> u didnt hear it from me but they got a tipoff that there was a terrorist there. Would probs be more dramatic if they actually found one

and of course is why there's a bit of tension that Vernon references in his ramble to Minghao—Cheol being a bit of an overprotective brother at the very least, and knowing that he's going out there by himself to do (peaceful, albeit still very illegal!) protest graffiti/pieces which—yes, maybe that's not direct conflict compared to whatever the hell they're doing at midnight to incite riots and the like. but if they catch him and no one's there to help...
And then of course Seungcheol does get semi-IDed at the end at the very least, not that Minghao knows, but he does see something is up from Vernon's reactions....

Yeah I had some thoughts about the plot happening Elsewhere and this is the first time I've taken any of them outside of the wriitng doc lmao. Minghao isn't involved! He doesn't know what Vernon's personal stakes may or may not be there! I'm sure he finds out soon after the fic ended though! Everything will be fine for them!

olymfics

I tried to be very brave and signed up for K-pop Olymfics too! It was. A very good and also stressful experience. Love you Team AU2 we deserved that co-win!!

hear me sing

I knew that scoring-wise I was making things very difficult for myself by writing this in such a prosey flowery way, but... I couldn't help myself! Once I knew which song I was writing for I was almost immediately thinking about fae and Junhao, even if the actual progression of the fic took a lot longer to nut out, and... once I made the decision to switch POVs once and stick to fae Hao through to the end of the fic it just had to be written that way yknow.

Don't blame anyone who didn't like it in the scores though, it's a weird one!! But I'm very happy I wrote it hehe

I think that's all! If I think of anything else to comment on for one of these fest pieces I'll update this but otherwise yeah that's my Q1-Q2 ficfest output summarised. Not bad considering everything else I was writing crazily at the same time...