questingly (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
questingly) wrote2017-09-23 10:08 am
questingly) wrote2017-09-23 10:08 am
Entry tags:
run with me extended notes
Hoo boy. This is long and weakly organised by order of appearance/relevance in the fic. Planning is Not My Strong Suit.
Setting: This was originally set in ~7th century Silla Kingdom in the Korean Peninsula (henceforth referred to as Korea) but ended up being set in Tang dynasty China (henceforth referred to as China). Some things remain, such as the shape of the jade pendant which was a kokkok (better known as a magatama. Incidentally, trying to describe a magatama shape without using the words magatama was an endeavour.) Because of the similarities during this era between Korea and China, especially as there was a lot of importation of Chinese culture to Korea during this period, if you squint, you could probably set it either way… While I tried to go back and smooth things over, I think some of the geography is still wonky.
The fic starts mid April—Wonsik’s father returns for Tomb Sweeping Day, similarly, it’s for this sake that Wonsik leaves towards the end of March (our March) every year. Tomb Sweeping Day occurs ~April 4/5th in the Gregorian calendar. It's the time when people pay respects to their ancestors, clean up graves, bring food etc (and is still a holiday today). If one can't make it on Tomb Sweeping Day, it's better to visit the graves prior to the date.
The examination system was a series of exams that elected people to office, and consisted of several areas. A lot of it was based on classical texts and involved essay answers, as well as poetry. While they were, in theory, open to most citizens, the extensive studying required meant that only super rich people could take them. The examination system didn't take proper hold in Korea until the Joseon dynasty (I think), partially because the Korean hereditary class system at the time was pretty damn rigid.
Riddle poem! Loosely based off 藏头诗/hidden poem, where a place/name/etc was 'hidden' using the first word of each line. Wiki tells me the English name is an acrostic poem.
Language/forms of address: good grief. I ended up greatly simplifying it for sake of my sanity, because English doesn't have the same sort of respect subtleties that East Asian cultures had. The use of direct transliteration of suffixes such as -hyung, -sunbae, -san, -dono, etc is an example of the lack of such categories(?) in English. While I briefly toyed with taking a friend's suggestion of writing all court language in Shakesperian… Yeah. No. I'll also briefly touch on names—while I believe that by this time period, the use of family names was fairly widespread among the common class, I chose to omit them for Hakyeon and Taekwoon, to further reinforce that boundary.
Hakyeon: SO MANY NOTES. I took out explicit names (because the setting changed from Korea to China partway through) but the instrument being played when Wonsik first sees Hakyeon is the haegeum. Hakyeon’s dance specialty(?) is jianwu. Later, the zither that Taekwoon plays is the guzheng. One intentional cultural anachronism is hair. Confucianism was fairly entrenched in law by this time, to the point that a criminal's hair was cut as punishment. This stems from the belief that because your body is given to you by your parents, to damage(?) your body is to disrespect your parents. Except I started with dowonkyung images in mind (haha Ravi's fan haha) so gave everyone haircuts. Hakyeon's hair came about because: WELL WHAT IF I GAVE HAKYEON LONG HAIR—I GAVE TAEKWOON A SCAR I'LL GIVE HAKYEON LONG HAIR IF I WANT!!! Yeah.
I’d decided on Hakyeon signing his name with 'fate' fairly early on, because ’N' obviously would have been out of the question, and I recalled that he’d chosen it because of it being pronounced 'en' in Japanese. I toyed with using just the idea of ’inyeon' (which! i didn’t know until after finishing this fic is actually part of where hakyeon got his stage name!), or incorporating the idea of 'yuanfen'. At some point I went 'eff it' and did the latter. These are difficult concepts/words to translate into English because they stem from Buddhism so here’s wiki: inyeon, yuanfen. Because it has a set translation of fate in fandom, I had to be a bit careful about word usage, since the english word 'fate' doesn’t translate to inyeon/yuan. Hence awkward usage of fortune -_-
Even though I say 'dancer', in some ways I mean 'courtesan'. Not all courtesans were slaves, but many were. Free citizens could not be enslaved against their will, but everyone else was pretty much free game, alluded to when Hakyeon notes that he thankfully lived on their side of the border. Of course, since a man owned his children and women, he could sell them as he wished. Many slaves were foreign and traded, eg present day Iran, alluded to by the courtesan that had once caught Jaehwan's eye. Generally, slaves were considered in the criminal class. Boys in pleasure houses(?) tended to be, well, boys. My "call a [history] friend" tells me that they were typically 9-15 years old in age, after which they'd be pretty much let go unless they were really good at something or were pretty and stuck around as actors(?) playing the female roles. Generally, one could purchase a courtesan from the brothel if they're rich enough. (Honestly, if you're rich enough, you could do pretty much whatever you want.) Courtesans were also highly trained in music and other artistic-y things (think geishas), but behind all the pretty things, this was still the sex trade. Of course there were also brothels for ordinary people, which is where Hakyeon took Hyuk from.
In addition to the main Imperial Palace there were other 'Palaces' around the country. A more familiar example may be the Summer Palace. Also, gardens were A Thing. Residences also had gardens. Smaller ones of course. Mountains and water is important. They're really A Thing.
Taekwoon's sword is a tantou. Also I really like peonies! Peonies symoblise honour and integrity and balance and wealth etc etc etc.
While searching up the name of a particular toy (bamboo dragonfly, attempted google image search 'chinese wooden toy') I was made aware of bronze dildos. They did not, unfortunately, make an appearance in this fic.
The concept of a 'couplet' is brought up a few times; duilian/对联, or in English, antithetical couplet. Whiiiiiich was an unintentional anachronism because I didn’t know until searching up the English term that they didn’t come about until the 10th century. The wiki goes into it a bit but it’s a pair of lines that have certain set 'opposites' but also keep parallels, and come together to tell an idea.
Fox bride's rain! Also, Goemon. Side note: the walking in the sun rain scene was supposed to be cute and happy and then ants made me cry. But also I had the 'hanging and beheading are much cleaner ways of execution, don't you think' line I wanted to write, and it/the Goemon reference ended up slotting in neatly in this scene. 'Every soldier [thinks of death]' is actually from Under Heaven in a very different context, but that exchange stuck in my mind.
Like mentioned in the notes, the whole 'poison my minions so they have to come back to me or they die a painful death' was from the drama Young Sherlock/少年神探狄仁杰/Young Amazing Detective Di Renjie. Although what horrendous poison it was, was never specified (and were possibly of magical origins?) The drama also solidified Taekwoon's role, as assistant and doctor and corpse examiner (but not love interest.) which slotted in nicely because I already knew I wanted Hakyeon as Jaehwan's dancer, and ofc Wonsik was the detective, and Taekwoon being some sort of magical super doctor (IDK MAN) helped along the plot/allowed me to pull that whole Sungjae/Sanghyuk thread. (Sorry Sungjae. You existed to die.) The timed poison came up in another drama I watched more recently, Nirvana In Fire/琅琊榜, amusingly also with a time scale of a week, and used for interrogation purposes. Great minds think alike I guess.
While the seven day week may have been used during the Tang dynasty, I decided to use the ten day week. The lunar calendar was used, although I was surprised to find that Tomb Sweeping Day was marked using the lunisolar calendar and not just nice, simple moon phases. The calendar system made my head spin. I debated how to count 'hours' but for sake of simplicity, went with our time keeping system. Another time 'unit' was the amount of time it takes for a stick of incense to burn down. But not a candle.
Jade is a symbol of protection. In Korea, it was worn in tubes threaded together or as amulets, such as in the form of gogok. i'M SURE THERE'S IMAGE REFERENCES IN A DRAMA SOMEWHERE but I do not have any on hand :( I'm not entirely sure if this was true in the time period, but having the jade amulet break in place of the person is A Thing (although in this story, it literally broke when saving Sanghyuk's knife because he wore it inside his robes--because Hakyeon is embarrassing okay--and shattered but blocked the blade. But. Still.). Also the number four is bad. It sounds like death. Four = bad. I don't know why people don't like thirteen. But four is bad. Really bad.
ALSO I LOVE NEO. SURE, THERE WAS NO WAY I COULD EVER HAVE WORKED NEO INTO THIS FIC BUT I SURE AS HECK TRIED. But I also love keo so here we are.
'Reading pulses' is one of the primary diagnostics, and can tell information about more than just a person's heartrate.
Poems:
late spring by han yu (晚春－韩愈): Even the poplars and elms in their unremarkableness, refuse to be overlooked and fill the sky as snow.. The second line of the full poem 草树知春不久归 百般红紫斗芳。杨花榆荚无才 惟解漫天作雪. Roughly, the contents are that the plants know that spring will arrive soon, the flowers bloom in lots of colours and scents, and even the unremarkable poplars and elms spread their seeds. The poem symbolises the idea that people, like the plants, need to take the opportunity at the right time to act.
moon night by liu fangping (月夜－刘方平): The moon in deep evening lights half the house, the North Star slants across the South Star’s cross. Tonight we find the onset of spring’s warmth, as the sound of insects first slip through windows’ blinds. (更深月色半人家 北斗阑干南斗斜。今夜偏知春气暖，虫声新透绿窗纱) This poem expresses the poet's feelings about a spring evening, combines the two favoured topics of poetry of the era, the spring and the moon. Chinese speakers will probably notice that I let most of my translations be fairly loose.
eve by bai juyi (除夜－白居易): There are three of this, this one is 病眼少眠非守岁，老心多感又临春。火销灯尽天明后，便是平头六十人。Even old eyes must lose sleep to see in the New Year, and old hearts are touched to greet another spring. Once the dawn comes after the lamps have been exhausted, we’ve grown even older than old as we were.
Some other references to poetry (shush I'm a geek with dumb hobbies)
-- a mountain outside the city, the lone boat by the bridge, the bells in the night－ 月落乌啼霜满天，江枫渔火对愁眠。姑苏城外寒山寺，夜半钟声到客船。| 枫桥夜泊 - 张继. Written by Zhang Li when he and other scholars were fleeing the rebellion, describing the scene as they pass by this bridge on an autumn night. The moon sets, the crows cry, frost fills the sky. The maples on the shore and the lights on the fishing boat face me who cannot sleep. Outside of the city is the Hanshan temple. The midnight bells reach the boat.
-- fallen flowers and visitors from the east, dew on their clothes adapted from 1) [...] 夜来风雨声 花落知多少 | 春晓-孟浩然 and 2) 客从东方来 衣上灞陵雨 [...] | 长安遇冯著-韦应物
-- Every reference to moonlight like silver frost stems from 床头明月光 疑是地上霜 举头望明月 低头思故乡. BECAUSE I THINK IT'S A PRETTY IMAGE SO SUE ME.
-- poison in a jeweled cup is from Under Heaven: The world could bring you poison in a jewelled cup, or surprising gifts. Sometimes you didn't know which of them it was. (Actually, reading Under Heaven was a real trip because of how many echoes I felt in it from my own writing style. But his earlier books were a big influence on me, if not my writing, so I suppose it makes sense that my writing style gravitated towards the one he employed for Under Heaven…)
I had a couple other notes to add that I may come back to do, but I will note this was over 150 hours of writing because I have no life. ALSO! Nirvana in Fire is an amazing drama everyone should watch it Hu Ge is so good all the acting is so good and I have two more historical AU fics planned and after that I'm going to be like Hu Ge and never do anything historical again.
If you have any other questions feel free to hit me up on my curiouscat or ask.fm! (And if you know how to get curiouscat to start giving me notifications again, please lmk T_T)
a. out.
Setting: This was originally set in ~7th century Silla Kingdom in the Korean Peninsula (henceforth referred to as Korea) but ended up being set in Tang dynasty China (henceforth referred to as China). Some things remain, such as the shape of the jade pendant which was a kokkok (better known as a magatama. Incidentally, trying to describe a magatama shape without using the words magatama was an endeavour.) Because of the similarities during this era between Korea and China, especially as there was a lot of importation of Chinese culture to Korea during this period, if you squint, you could probably set it either way… While I tried to go back and smooth things over, I think some of the geography is still wonky.
The fic starts mid April—Wonsik’s father returns for Tomb Sweeping Day, similarly, it’s for this sake that Wonsik leaves towards the end of March (our March) every year. Tomb Sweeping Day occurs ~April 4/5th in the Gregorian calendar. It's the time when people pay respects to their ancestors, clean up graves, bring food etc (and is still a holiday today). If one can't make it on Tomb Sweeping Day, it's better to visit the graves prior to the date.
The examination system was a series of exams that elected people to office, and consisted of several areas. A lot of it was based on classical texts and involved essay answers, as well as poetry. While they were, in theory, open to most citizens, the extensive studying required meant that only super rich people could take them. The examination system didn't take proper hold in Korea until the Joseon dynasty (I think), partially because the Korean hereditary class system at the time was pretty damn rigid.
Riddle poem! Loosely based off 藏头诗/hidden poem, where a place/name/etc was 'hidden' using the first word of each line. Wiki tells me the English name is an acrostic poem.
Language/forms of address: good grief. I ended up greatly simplifying it for sake of my sanity, because English doesn't have the same sort of respect subtleties that East Asian cultures had. The use of direct transliteration of suffixes such as -hyung, -sunbae, -san, -dono, etc is an example of the lack of such categories(?) in English. While I briefly toyed with taking a friend's suggestion of writing all court language in Shakesperian… Yeah. No. I'll also briefly touch on names—while I believe that by this time period, the use of family names was fairly widespread among the common class, I chose to omit them for Hakyeon and Taekwoon, to further reinforce that boundary.
Hakyeon: SO MANY NOTES. I took out explicit names (because the setting changed from Korea to China partway through) but the instrument being played when Wonsik first sees Hakyeon is the haegeum. Hakyeon’s dance specialty(?) is jianwu. Later, the zither that Taekwoon plays is the guzheng. One intentional cultural anachronism is hair. Confucianism was fairly entrenched in law by this time, to the point that a criminal's hair was cut as punishment. This stems from the belief that because your body is given to you by your parents, to damage(?) your body is to disrespect your parents. Except I started with dowonkyung images in mind (haha Ravi's fan haha) so gave everyone haircuts. Hakyeon's hair came about because: WELL WHAT IF I GAVE HAKYEON LONG HAIR—I GAVE TAEKWOON A SCAR I'LL GIVE HAKYEON LONG HAIR IF I WANT!!! Yeah.
I’d decided on Hakyeon signing his name with 'fate' fairly early on, because ’N' obviously would have been out of the question, and I recalled that he’d chosen it because of it being pronounced 'en' in Japanese. I toyed with using just the idea of ’inyeon' (which! i didn’t know until after finishing this fic is actually part of where hakyeon got his stage name!), or incorporating the idea of 'yuanfen'. At some point I went 'eff it' and did the latter. These are difficult concepts/words to translate into English because they stem from Buddhism so here’s wiki: inyeon, yuanfen. Because it has a set translation of fate in fandom, I had to be a bit careful about word usage, since the english word 'fate' doesn’t translate to inyeon/yuan. Hence awkward usage of fortune -_-
Even though I say 'dancer', in some ways I mean 'courtesan'. Not all courtesans were slaves, but many were. Free citizens could not be enslaved against their will, but everyone else was pretty much free game, alluded to when Hakyeon notes that he thankfully lived on their side of the border. Of course, since a man owned his children and women, he could sell them as he wished. Many slaves were foreign and traded, eg present day Iran, alluded to by the courtesan that had once caught Jaehwan's eye. Generally, slaves were considered in the criminal class. Boys in pleasure houses(?) tended to be, well, boys. My "call a [history] friend" tells me that they were typically 9-15 years old in age, after which they'd be pretty much let go unless they were really good at something or were pretty and stuck around as actors(?) playing the female roles. Generally, one could purchase a courtesan from the brothel if they're rich enough. (Honestly, if you're rich enough, you could do pretty much whatever you want.) Courtesans were also highly trained in music and other artistic-y things (think geishas), but behind all the pretty things, this was still the sex trade. Of course there were also brothels for ordinary people, which is where Hakyeon took Hyuk from.
In addition to the main Imperial Palace there were other 'Palaces' around the country. A more familiar example may be the Summer Palace. Also, gardens were A Thing. Residences also had gardens. Smaller ones of course. Mountains and water is important. They're really A Thing.
Taekwoon's sword is a tantou. Also I really like peonies! Peonies symoblise honour and integrity and balance and wealth etc etc etc.
While searching up the name of a particular toy (bamboo dragonfly, attempted google image search 'chinese wooden toy') I was made aware of bronze dildos. They did not, unfortunately, make an appearance in this fic.
The concept of a 'couplet' is brought up a few times; duilian/对联, or in English, antithetical couplet. Whiiiiiich was an unintentional anachronism because I didn’t know until searching up the English term that they didn’t come about until the 10th century. The wiki goes into it a bit but it’s a pair of lines that have certain set 'opposites' but also keep parallels, and come together to tell an idea.
Fox bride's rain! Also, Goemon. Side note: the walking in the sun rain scene was supposed to be cute and happy and then ants made me cry. But also I had the 'hanging and beheading are much cleaner ways of execution, don't you think' line I wanted to write, and it/the Goemon reference ended up slotting in neatly in this scene. 'Every soldier [thinks of death]' is actually from Under Heaven in a very different context, but that exchange stuck in my mind.
Like mentioned in the notes, the whole 'poison my minions so they have to come back to me or they die a painful death' was from the drama Young Sherlock/少年神探狄仁杰/Young Amazing Detective Di Renjie. Although what horrendous poison it was, was never specified (and were possibly of magical origins?) The drama also solidified Taekwoon's role, as assistant and doctor and corpse examiner (but not love interest.) which slotted in nicely because I already knew I wanted Hakyeon as Jaehwan's dancer, and ofc Wonsik was the detective, and Taekwoon being some sort of magical super doctor (IDK MAN) helped along the plot/allowed me to pull that whole Sungjae/Sanghyuk thread. (Sorry Sungjae. You existed to die.) The timed poison came up in another drama I watched more recently, Nirvana In Fire/琅琊榜, amusingly also with a time scale of a week, and used for interrogation purposes. Great minds think alike I guess.
While the seven day week may have been used during the Tang dynasty, I decided to use the ten day week. The lunar calendar was used, although I was surprised to find that Tomb Sweeping Day was marked using the lunisolar calendar and not just nice, simple moon phases. The calendar system made my head spin. I debated how to count 'hours' but for sake of simplicity, went with our time keeping system. Another time 'unit' was the amount of time it takes for a stick of incense to burn down. But not a candle.
Jade is a symbol of protection. In Korea, it was worn in tubes threaded together or as amulets, such as in the form of gogok. i'M SURE THERE'S IMAGE REFERENCES IN A DRAMA SOMEWHERE but I do not have any on hand :( I'm not entirely sure if this was true in the time period, but having the jade amulet break in place of the person is A Thing (although in this story, it literally broke when saving Sanghyuk's knife because he wore it inside his robes--because Hakyeon is embarrassing okay--and shattered but blocked the blade. But. Still.). Also the number four is bad. It sounds like death. Four = bad. I don't know why people don't like thirteen. But four is bad. Really bad.
ALSO I LOVE NEO. SURE, THERE WAS NO WAY I COULD EVER HAVE WORKED NEO INTO THIS FIC BUT I SURE AS HECK TRIED. But I also love keo so here we are.
'Reading pulses' is one of the primary diagnostics, and can tell information about more than just a person's heartrate.
Poems:
late spring by han yu (晚春－韩愈): Even the poplars and elms in their unremarkableness, refuse to be overlooked and fill the sky as snow.. The second line of the full poem 草树知春不久归 百般红紫斗芳。杨花榆荚无才 惟解漫天作雪. Roughly, the contents are that the plants know that spring will arrive soon, the flowers bloom in lots of colours and scents, and even the unremarkable poplars and elms spread their seeds. The poem symbolises the idea that people, like the plants, need to take the opportunity at the right time to act.
moon night by liu fangping (月夜－刘方平): The moon in deep evening lights half the house, the North Star slants across the South Star’s cross. Tonight we find the onset of spring’s warmth, as the sound of insects first slip through windows’ blinds. (更深月色半人家 北斗阑干南斗斜。今夜偏知春气暖，虫声新透绿窗纱) This poem expresses the poet's feelings about a spring evening, combines the two favoured topics of poetry of the era, the spring and the moon. Chinese speakers will probably notice that I let most of my translations be fairly loose.
eve by bai juyi (除夜－白居易): There are three of this, this one is 病眼少眠非守岁，老心多感又临春。火销灯尽天明后，便是平头六十人。Even old eyes must lose sleep to see in the New Year, and old hearts are touched to greet another spring. Once the dawn comes after the lamps have been exhausted, we’ve grown even older than old as we were.
Some other references to poetry (shush I'm a geek with dumb hobbies)
-- a mountain outside the city, the lone boat by the bridge, the bells in the night－ 月落乌啼霜满天，江枫渔火对愁眠。姑苏城外寒山寺，夜半钟声到客船。| 枫桥夜泊 - 张继. Written by Zhang Li when he and other scholars were fleeing the rebellion, describing the scene as they pass by this bridge on an autumn night. The moon sets, the crows cry, frost fills the sky. The maples on the shore and the lights on the fishing boat face me who cannot sleep. Outside of the city is the Hanshan temple. The midnight bells reach the boat.
-- fallen flowers and visitors from the east, dew on their clothes adapted from 1) [...] 夜来风雨声 花落知多少 | 春晓-孟浩然 and 2) 客从东方来 衣上灞陵雨 [...] | 长安遇冯著-韦应物
-- Every reference to moonlight like silver frost stems from 床头明月光 疑是地上霜 举头望明月 低头思故乡. BECAUSE I THINK IT'S A PRETTY IMAGE SO SUE ME.
-- poison in a jeweled cup is from Under Heaven: The world could bring you poison in a jewelled cup, or surprising gifts. Sometimes you didn't know which of them it was. (Actually, reading Under Heaven was a real trip because of how many echoes I felt in it from my own writing style. But his earlier books were a big influence on me, if not my writing, so I suppose it makes sense that my writing style gravitated towards the one he employed for Under Heaven…)
I had a couple other notes to add that I may come back to do, but I will note this was over 150 hours of writing because I have no life. ALSO! Nirvana in Fire is an amazing drama everyone should watch it Hu Ge is so good all the acting is so good and I have two more historical AU fics planned and after that I'm going to be like Hu Ge and never do anything historical again.
If you have any other questions feel free to hit me up on my curiouscat or ask.fm! (And if you know how to get curiouscat to start giving me notifications again, please lmk T_T)
a. out.