staygame | olymfics commentary

hello i wrote run with you (nine.i, vahn/joohyoung) for team canon/future 1 and the prompt play by lucy.

i feel the need to get some disclaimers out of the way: joohyoung doesn't even drink coffee (he only likes sweet things) and he does not have any tattoos but i assume by 2027 he will be doing both of these. someone in the comments said my fact checking made their i.enin heart happy and i had a moment of distress like "but commenter i forgot that joohyoung doesn't drink coffee!!!" also 1. i do not think it is conceivable that vahn would've been cut from this specific debut team and 2. i did not fact check the timing of eden and jewon's enlistment at all do not think too hard.

i don't even know if i was getting into nine.i when i signed up for olymfics, so i was pretty sure i was going to write dkz when i ranked my prompt choices. i thought play was a nice connection to the guys who know how to play. but then i kept thinking about some of the things that came up when my team brainstormed and thinking about idol trauma and it pushed me hard in the direction of vahn and music. when i started my outline, i wrote down these two themes: post-failed idol depression and music-related trauma. i wanted to show vahn learning to love music again without all of the baggage, and have him get over the idea that becoming an adult means giving up on failed dreams.

some key lyrics for inspiration: "like the afterimage of a faded dream, "i'll find it again, the days we left behind", "please tell me, 'let's meet again'"

i also tried to incorporate the supplemental prompts through the references to the restrictions of idoldom and vahn's general unhappiness. i was less inspired by the mv itself but i did want to include a party scene and vahn's mother specifically asking him to come home in reference to the last bit of the mv.

i think even if joohyoung/vahn weren't already producer buddies and my main ship, joohyoung would've been a good character to help vahn out of the funk in the fic because he is both energetic and unflinching. i wanted to have a longer conversation at some point about why joohyoung was so invested in helping vahn, but in my mind the main reason was just that he'd put his mind to it and wasn't going to be stopped. i went back and forth over whether or not joohyoung should have had a crush on vahn back when they were trainees and whether or not that would matter, so in the end it just became kind of a throwaway line.

there were more scenes i wanted to write (namely eden/joohyoung/vahn meeting up while eden is on leave from the military, which is where i was originally planning on having that conversation i mentioned) but time got the best of me. still, as someone for whom it took years and 30+ fics to write something approaching 10k, to produce a fic this length under a time crunch felt pretty impressive.

honestly the reception to this fic was SO FLATTERING because i genuinely did not expect anyone but really dedicated olymfics participants to read it, let alone for my fic to resonate with so many people. i am kind of used to writing in fandoms of one so i forgot how good it feels to get feedback, man. wow it's so sexy when people tell you what worked about a fic for them. (but really, this was a nice reminder to tell people to their faces that you liked their fics! i will finally go comment on the semantic error idol au now i've had open in a tab for months now...)