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2025 in fic
i wrote a post like this last year where i opened with “i’m pretty sure i’m never going to write this much fic in a year ever again.”
so. that was a lie. (turns out getting abruptly laid off will do wonders to your writing productivity. who knew?) last year i wrote a little over 44k words. this year i wrote over 100k. what. what! i didn’t even realize until i added it all up just now. i know some people can whip that up in a single fic, but that’s seriously a ridiculous number of words to me, especially as someone who couldn’t even muster up 5k two years ago. but i can say with certainty this time that there’s no way i’m going to be able to write nearly as much next year - i’m sooo slow when i have competing priorities, and my ideas are scattered and strange. i suppose we’ll see.
this year, i wrote 10 fics:
→ 2.21.25 - edge of the ocean, ncej, e, 5.1k
→ 3.30.25 - backstitch, ncej, m, 28.2k
→ 5.14.25 - my runner, my man, shse, e, 9.2k
→ 5.31.25 - hurricane chaser, shse, e, 8k
→ 6.11.25 - rainwater, ncej, t, 11.1k
→ 7.13.25 - undertow, humjju, m, 7.8k
→ 8.13.25 - [redacted], 9k
→ 9.07.25 - island of my head, ncej, m, 11.7k
→ 11.14.25 - seesaw, haepdojae, m, 11k
→ 12.25.25 - to love a red moon, humjju, e, 14.4k
why did i write all of this i’m genuinely shaking my head irl right now. ok let’s answer some of these questions.
1. favorite fic you wrote this year
this is a little difficult considering the sheer volume so i’m going to pick three. [1] backstitch, because it was my first (and likely only) attempt at a “longfic” (not even that long) and i’m mostly just proud of myself for finishing it, [2] undertow, because it’s my favorite to reread and i think i was successful in portraying a complicated relationship & pov, plus i spent a really long time tweaking it despite its relatively short length, [3] seesaw, because it was the culmination of a year’s Pondering on tws dynamics and was my first time truly trying to write an ot3, and i was surprised by how much i liked the final product once i finally figured it out. also a special shout out to island of my head - that fic gave me so much grief that i could never actually pick it as a favorite & the sheer fact that it got posted is frankly a miracle, but it’s close to my heart.
2. least favorite fic you wrote this year
i don’t know if this is just whatever the opposite of recency bias is but my secret santa humjju gave me horrible grief (like island of my head, but in a different, more frustrating way) and i’m still not in love with the final product but i had to let her go. let’s just say if it wasn’t for a fic fest it would have been abandoned. i also think ‘edge of the ocean’ isn’t particularly interesting or revolutionary but i haven’t reread it in forever, so, i don’t know.
3. favorite fandom/character you wrote for this year
other than [redacted] i actually really loved writing my shse fics - that obsession came and went quite violently but i had an absolute blast when i was #init. i actually started writing island of my head in… april? ish? (and it got posted in september, so that should tell you something about my struggle) and i kept abandoning it, so getting into weak hero class in may and then getting so inspired was like a breath of fresh air. i LOVED writing suho’s pov, it’s probably my favorite this year along with han jihoon - there were like, no barriers at all re: what he would say or think. it was so much fun.
4. a fic you didn’t expect to write
i said the same thing last year, but seriously all of them. but if i had to pick my answer would probably be the same as the prev question. there’s something kinda scary but also really freeing about writing for a new fandom!
5. fics you wanted to write but didn’t
i still have harulas visions knocking around my head but they’ve lowkey already been written by scholars in that tag so i’m cool with not writing them. and a weird harumaki idea. i also want to write sad shinyu/youngjae fic, i’d like to figure that out at some point.
6. something you learned this year
last year i said maybe next year i’d learn to stop overusing colons & i’m sad to report that that hasn’t happened. i’m honestly not sure if my writing has gotten any better in the past year - if anything i think i’ve just gotten more long-winded, which isn’t great. maybe i “learned” more about writing a proper narrative, though i’m not sure it was an issue of learning but rather of my being unwilling to put in the effort. and that’s still pretty much the case. oh well. if anyone’s reading this and has noticed a change, i’d be curious to hear about it.
7. favorite lines/scenes you wrote this year
last year i went through and chose one from each fic, which might be a bit much, but it was fun so hey let’s do it again.
i'll put it under this cut:
edge of the ocean. dear lord this fic is earnest. i couldn’t bear even skimming through the whole thing, but other than the summary which i think is probably the best thing in there, i liked this part:
He sees: dark eyes, catlike, twin spots of pink high up on his cheeks, a mouth red and bitten. A face wholly affected, someone fully present, someone who’s taking this—him—seriously. Someone who really wants to do it right. Someone who, maybe, is just as in love as Euijoo is.
what do i even pick from backstitch! that fic is kind of my baby and was sort of an excuse to put in a lot of my favorite tropes. the scene at the end of ch2 where euijoo teaches nico how to pitch a baseball & they play catch & then euijoo breaks both of their hearts was especially self-indulgent. while that was probably my favorite scene overall, i weirdly love this bit at the end of the following scene, after euijoo’s three-cigarette-spiral:
And then everything with his dad, just another cherry on top of the entire thing, one more piece to worry about. The questions about settling down, about how nice it’ll be to have a daughter-in-law to take care of him, his mom too, as they get older and more frail. Euijoo having to stammer through his answers, already sick with preemptive grief, made again worse by the questioning.
Nicholas would be good at it. It’s such a ridiculous thought to have; they’ve only known each other for a fraction of a year. But Euijoo is sure, sees Nicholas’s care in everything he does, knows with certainty that he would be kind. The image flashes—Nicholas with Euijoo’s family—and the edges of it are so bright and sharp that it hurts to breathe around it. He rests his head on his knees, feels ash from his still-lit cigarette fall onto his bare foot.
The day burns around him.
my runner my man! it’s still so strange to me that this fic got so much traction, i remember being really freaked out because i wasn’t expecting anything at all. anyway. this fic was an excuse to write more baseball!!! and i also loved writing freakier & meaner characters than i generally will allow myself to in kpop ficdom. definitely the filthiest thing i had written to date, too. but i liked writing their fights the most. i’m struggling to pick a particular excerpt but i think this one elaborates on my earlier comment re: suho just saying anything:
“Don’t what?” Suho asks. He makes a stupid, innocent face. “You told me to listen to you, during the game. So I listened. Didn’t I?”
Sieun breathes out, annoyed. “Suho, look—”
“Every single pitch, whatever you wanted. I was a good boy, wasn’t I?” Suho asks. He widens his eyes even further, letting his lower lip jut out.
“You’re unbearable,” Sieun says, shaking his head, clenching his jaw.
and speaking of GOOD BOYS. hurricane chaser was my shse follow-up where i got uhhh a little weirder in terms of the pet play thing. which is a trope/kink/whatever that i enjoy but rarely see written in a way that i actually, well, enjoy. there’s nuance. there’s a really fine line before it gets cringe. and more than anything it needs to be psychologically resonant for it to matter to me. weirdly i always seem to forget that i even wrote this one (this was when i was REALLY unemployed, and i wrote it within a week) but i actually kind of like it a lot:
Late, moonlit, sultry night. Suho’s head in Sieun’s lap. Sieun’s small, rough hands tracing heavenly lines through his scalp.
Sieun, saying, low, “We had a dog when I was a kid. Some terrier that my mom wanted and then abandoned. I used to feed him; I’d give him treats all the time. He would follow me everywhere. He hid in my room when my parents fought. He’d lay in my lap like this. When I pet him,” a particularly meaningful scritch of Sieun’s fingers at this, “that was the only time I’d feel him stop shaking.”
Suho breathes in, doesn’t try to hold on; just lets it out, one clear rush of air.
RAINWATER… i also tend to forget about this one, probably as it was written under similar circumstances to the above. i have fondness for it though, especially as it’s easily my least read ncej fic - tbf i don’t read much historical fic either so i don’t blame people for skipping it. but i was reading sooo much rilke (& poetry & epistolary stuff in general) at the time that i really wanted to try and emulate it - whether the end product was enjoyable at all or not is probably ultimately up to personal taste, and sometimes i cringe a little bit thinking about how childish my writing seems next to all of my inspiration, but i know even attempting to compare is foolish. alas:
In your letter, you asked me if I understood the relief of painful, knife-like words, because at least there is a presence - my presence - within them. Did you know that you were putting into words a feeling I have had for the past five years, since I first came to know you? Every tender thing you’ve said to me, whether with stumbling, childish passion, or later, mumbled into my skin with fervent heat, or at the end, hurt and surrounded by those red pine trees - a knife, Yixiang, they were all knives; but even when they were sweetly cutting me to pieces, I knew the deepest reason for the pain they caused, and it was this: that I felt them too, and that, still, despite all of it, you were always going to leave.
And - I can almost hear your protest - I know, the leaving is not your fault, nor maybe even your will, but that doesn’t make any of it less true. I know you tried to keep it from me as long as you could. Regardless, you have your duty and I have mine. This, maybe more than anything else, will always be the truth.
undertow! duck smoking gif. i tried to fit so much in these <8k words man. obviously i know rpf is not real but i was really trying to encapsulate how i saw the irl ej/fuma/nico/harua dynamics at the time (just, y’know, turning up the yaoi meter on it), and it was really funny to see these canon moments that kept happening afterwards that fit almost perfectly into that schema. these were some of the first paragraphs that i wrote for this fic, and they ended up almost halfway through the wc, but i think they’re pretty crucial to the doomed ncej thesis:
He has to think carefully about how to phrase what he wants to say. Euijoo puts up a good unaffected front—sometimes—but Fuma knows that, inside, he’s fragile like glass. Knows better than anyone, probably; even Kei, who’s known Euijoo for longer but never as intimately, and even Nicholas, who, for all of his strengths, for all the depth of their bond, has never once been able to look at Euijoo objectively.
That’s the problem. Nicholas likes—liked?—no, Fuma thinks, likes—Euijoo too much to see him for who he truly is. That’s why Nicholas let himself get hurt, over and over again. Until, maybe, now, the thing with Harua, someone who has adored him openly and fervently from the start. Fuma thinks that’s probably what Euijoo’s seeing, and what’s hurting him so badly: the bright shock of what he could have had with Nicholas if he was…
Fuma isn’t sure how to end the sentence. Freer? Braver? Stupider? A different person entirely, maybe.
island of my head… i already talked about how suicidal this fic made me so i won’t belabor the point but i spent fucking Forever on the last two scenes (mainly the buildup - sex scene - aftermath) because i felt like i needed to get the nuance exactly right, but also obviously it’s nico pov and euijoo isn’t going to explain himself perfectly (he doesn’t even understand himself perfectly) so, you know. i really really tried. it’s hard to pick a favorite bit because i think the whole is greater than the sum of its parts with this one, but i do like how this reads & builds:
He feels like his brain is completely detached from his body—which is ironic because, in a way, it literally is—when he presses a still-sticky hand into the space between Euijoo’s shoulder blades, the straight line of his spine. He pushes Euijoo further into the mattress, and then says, in Euijoo’s borrowed voice, feeling suddenly totally batshit insane: “Does it feel good?”
my seesaw :’) i got such lovely feedback on this fic, i was so grateful that anyone read it at all! it’s rare that i actually have a Good Time writing a scene, but there were a couple in here where i was actually honest-to-god smiling - that realization of OH, what i’m imagining is actually coming through in the text. i was reading this john banville interview in the paris review the other day where he’s asked if he really hates his own novels, and he replies, “Yes! I hate them. I mean that. Nobody believes me, but it’s true. They’re an embarrassment and a deep source of shame. They’re better than everybody else’s, of course, but not good enough for me.” which i found really funny, and then he goes on to say, “When I read the proofs of a new novel—which is the last time I will read or even glance at it—I approach it with one eye closed, so to speak, thinking, God, what am I going to find here? And I find horrors, horrors that can’t be fixed. Everything in the text now seems hopelessly flat and deadened.” which unfortunately i really relate to. but my point is that there was less of that than usual in this fic, which was nice. as for favorite parts, i don’t think this section will hit as much out of context, but it was one of those sections where, after writing it, i found myself smiling and thinking, yes!:
Jihoon swallows against something huge surging in his chest. He goes to close the box again, realizes he missed a sticky note on the top; it’s one of those little ones that Youngjae likes to use to organize his things, almost the same blue as the box.
It reads: I saw these and thought of you. I hope you and Dohoon can eat them well together.
Jihoon reads the two sentences over and over, eyes blurring. The sharp edge of the box cuts into his palm. He hears a noise from somewhere in the dorm: a shoe, he thinks, dropping.
i can’t look at my new humjju anymore so i’m not going to pick anything from it ❤️ i’ve had enough ❤️
8. favorite fics you read this year?
if you’re still here after all that, here’s some of my favorites in miscellaneous fandoms:
&team: [x], [x], [x], [x], [x], [x], [x], and so many others - we’d be here all day if i were to list them all.
sports rpf: [mcdrai], [willmack], [landoscar]
weak hero class: [x], [x], just everything by exclusionzone
band of brothers: [webgott], [more webgott], [winnix], [more winnix]
masters of the air: if you’re going to read any of the fics in this whole list, make it [this one], [but clegan], [was definitely], [my favorite], [tag i discovered], [this year], [!!!!!]
karaiko: [x], [x], [x]
various life-altering misc: [nct], [thoroughbreds], [succession], [ancient rome rpf], [iwtv], [word of honor], [true detective], [raven cycle], [revenged love], [IT]
thanks for reading if you got this far! let’s all continue to read and write things that challenge us in 2026!
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anyway this post has left me with a TBR longer than the emails i have to answer at work tonight, but if i had to choose anything mentioned here i simply HAVE to read your fic that you wrote while you were up rilking yourself. the excerpt alone... i have to dig into that.
happy to have met you this year and i was pleasantly surprised to see my fic in your recs... did you know i only posted the link to it on my other account as a trap to ensnare you and get you to talk to me? well it's true and it worked and here we are. yay! whatever we both get up to in this new year, let's stay ummm... serious, together. serious about what we do. but let's have some fun too. ok byeeeee
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i hope you enjoy my rilke cosplay but i could never be him... or her (iykyk)... and i'm very happy to have met you too! thanks for ensnaring me with your very cool fic and also reading my super random manga rec when i popped into your dms that one day i genuinely appreciated it a lot. let's stay serious and silly too <3