#fic commentary

I come from an East Asian household and in that culture there's a specific kind of person who carries everything, for the family and for the team and for everyone around them, and they do it quietly without complaint because that's what's expected. We all know someone like that: the stoic father/eldest child who never breaks down, the leader who shows up first and leaves last, the person everyone relies on precisely because they never ask for help.

In real life Yeji practices every single day of the year except Lunar New Year and Chuseok, she arrives at photo shoots before the staff, she told Cosmopolitan "I must do well. I must do better." When she makes a mistake on stage she fumes at herself, she says the small things are harder to maintain than the big ones, and she is by her own admission someone who cannot tell herself "it's okay" because she needs her members to say it for her.

That person, the one who holds everything together through sheer discipline and then crumbles alone at 2 AM when no one's watching, is the foundation of Jeju Heat's Yeji, and everything she does in the story radiates from understanding that core.

But I think what makes her such a complex character to dissect is that the person behind all that armor is not cold at all. She's not stoic or brooding or any of the things the "strong leader" archetype usually codes as, because real Yeji is goofy and bright, the kind of person who lights up a room when she stops performing composure, whose laugh comes out before she can catch it, who dances to cheer her mom up for pocket money and never actually went through a rebellious phase because she was too busy being genuinely sweet. In the fic Minho sees this version of her constantly and it's the version he fell in love with, the Yeji who steals his shirts and does impressions and smiles like the sun came out specifically for her, and that contrast is key. The walls aren't protecting someone fragile, they're protecting someone warm, and the tragedy is that warmth is exactly what she's afraid to show because warmth can be disappointed and disappointment is the one thing she's never learned to survive.

Let's talk about Kung Fu Panda for a second, because Master Tigress maps onto Yeji's emotional architecture in a way that's almost unsettling once you see it. Think about her being raised by someone who trained her to be the absolute best and never once told her she was enough, so she internalized that perfection is love. Discipline became her entire identity because she learned early on that vulnerability gets you nowhere, and that right there is Yeji's core wound in a nutshell. She isn't just disciplined because she wants to be great, she actually believes that delivering a flawless performance and carrying the weight for everyone else is the only way she's allowed to earn affection.

It's the exact Tigress dynamic - the fierce, untouchable exterior protecting a soft center she was never given permission to hold onto. When Tigress melts around the baby pandas or finally drops her stance it's this massive emotional event, and for Yeji the equivalent is stealing Minho's shirts and doing goofy impressions where the warmth leaks out before she can catch it and put the leader mask back on.

And the reason Minho is the one who breaks through to her is the exact same reason Po breaks through to Tigress, because he does it by being disarmingly unheroic. Po was a clumsy, sincere guy who kept showing up without any armor of his own, which makes the armor of the people around him feel completely ridiculous by proximity, and Minho operates the same way. His superpower in this fic is seeing people instead of personas, so in Practice Room B he's just present and offers absolutely no pretense. That total lack of guard is the master key to a girl who spends her entire life manufacturing composure, because he doesn't impress her into falling in love with him so much as he just makes the performance feel unnecessary.

The D-grade moment is where it all starts. In real life Yeji received a C+ on her first monthly vocal evaluation as a trainee and then it got worse, so she practiced alone at home on school days and sang into a recorder over and over and came out to practice when everyone else was on break. In the fic this becomes Practice Room B at 2:47 AM, a girl sobbing on the floor after a D-grade evaluation convinced she's going to fail, and the boy who finds her and stays. That's the night they lose their virginity to each other, fumbling and trembling and driven entirely by emotion, and she whispers "stay" when he tries to pull out, and afterward she says "Thank you. For making me feel like I'm worth something."

Every single wall Yeji builds in this story traces back to that floor and the logic is brutally simple. If I admit I want something I become accountable to it, if I become accountable I can fail, and I already know what failing feels like, so she shows love through everything except the word. Stolen shirts and 2 AM phone calls and forehead-to-forehead silence and her body pressed against his in sleep claiming territory her conscious mind won't acknowledge, five years of this, five years of "not her boyfriend" while being physically and emotionally and sexually monogamous in every way that matters.

I built her so that her body is always three to five chapters ahead of her mouth. This isn't just a writerly choice because it's actually the defining behavioral trait of this specific character archetype. Tigress communicates entirely through physicality - the punch she doesn't throw, the stance that softens, the hand on a shoulder that says more than any dialogue ever could, and Yeji operates the exact same way. It's the possessive leg-lock during sex in Chapter 0, the accidental monogamy reveal where her body just stopped responding to other men six months before she admitted it in Chapter 17, the shower door she locks after sex in Chapter 0.5/1 keeping intimacy contained and post-sex vulnerability at arm's length. The way she grabs Minho at the Busan yacht party in Chapter 9.5 saying "You're mine" and then flinches when he reaches for her shoulder an hour later, snapping "go to sleep, Minho" with the leader mask already back in place.

That pattern of body confesses and mouth denies and walls rebuild is the engine of her entire arc, and it's such a deeply East Asian thing, loving someone through action and never saying the words out loud. Sometimes the relationship suffers both ways because of it and many of us have this exact dynamic with our own parents, the person who packed your lunch every day but never said "I love you," the parent who showed up to every performance but couldn't say "I'm proud of you" without the words catching in their throat. But I think we've all been in Yeji's shoes sometimes too, not just on the receiving end but actually being the person who has to hold it together for the people you love, because the alternative is breaking down in front of them and that would hurt you more than staying strong ever could. When you're the one everyone relies on, disappointing them feels worse than carrying the weight alone, and Yeji carries that energy for Minho and her group across eighteen chapters, which is why the "saranghae" at the end of Chapter 18 is what it is.

Five years of showing love in every language except Korean, and the first time she says saranghae, the heavy one, the real one, the one K-dramas build entire seasons around someone finally saying, she's asleep. Unconscious. Her waking mind has never allowed it and her defenses had to be completely down for the word to slip through, half-formed and mumbled into his collarbone. That's tragic but it's also beautiful because it shows the tension between what we feel and what we allow ourselves to feel, between who we are and who we've trained ourselves to be for the sake of survival.

And Minho opens his mouth to say it back and his throat closes and the words turn to ash. She hands him the most important thing she's ever said and she won't even remember saying it, and that moment is the entire fic in miniature. The person who can only be vulnerable when she's not aware of it, the person who loves her back but can't say it because guilt has eaten the air out of his lungs, two people who deserve each other separated by the things they can't bring themselves to articulate.

Chapter 18 is in some ways about the terror of disappointing the person who carries everyone else, and we've all felt that fear. The parent or eldest sibling who finally cries and you realize you've never seen them cry before and the ground shifts under you because if they're not okay then what the hell is holding everything together? Minho's nightmare is that realization played at horror-movie volume, amplified by guilt until it becomes something you can't wake up from.

***

And then there's the nightmare itself, and I think the most interesting choice in Chapter 18 is that the nightmare doesn't happen to Yeji at all. She sleeps through the entire chapter and it happens to Minho about Yeji, his guilt constructing a horror movie starring the woman he loves, and the horror isn't violence or murder or any conventional nightmare fuel, it's her face going blank. The idol mask settling into place and "Leader Yeji" appearing where real Yeji used to be. The nightmare weaponizes every mask she's ever worn, the professional shutdown and the "I'm fine" deflection and the camera-ready shell. Dream-Yeji's tears crawl backward up her face, healing themselves and reversing vulnerability and putting the armor back on, because that's Minho's real fear. Not that she'll leave him but that she'll stop being real with him, that the one person who puts all that weight down in his presence will pick it back up and carry it alone again, and it'll be his fault.

When I started thinking about this story I kept coming back to two films that ask the same question from opposite angles. Black Swan, where achieving your dream as a performer means losing yourself completely to the role until there's nothing left of the person underneath. And The Greatest Showman, where the protagonist realizes mid-triumph that he's chasing the wrong dream entirely, that the applause from strangers means nothing compared to the people who actually see him. Both films are about what it costs to achieve perfection as a performer, and both ask whether that cost is worth paying, but Black Swan is a tragedy about someone who can't stop performing and The Greatest Showman is about someone who chooses to walk away from the performance before it consumes him. That tension, that question of whether Yeji will disappear into Leader Yeji or find a way to be both the idol and the human, is the thematic spine of everything I wanted this story to be.

The nightmare is basically Black Swan compressed into ten minutes, watching someone achieve their dream while being consumed by the role, except in this version there's someone who could theoretically pull her back if she'd let him. And there's something darkly ironic about calling her "Dream Yeji" in that nightmare sequence, because she achieved her actual dream of becoming an idol, but that dream threatens to erase the real person underneath if she doesn't have someone to ground her. Dream Yeji in the nightmare is what happens if the performance wins completely, if she disappears into the persona because it's safer than being vulnerable, and Minho is the only person who's been around long enough to see the difference between the mask and the woman wearing it, which means he's also the only person who can see what's being lost. That's his Black Swan nightmare, that he'll watch her transform into perfection and lose her entirely in the process.

In her Cosmopolitan interview Yeji says "ITZY is a corpse if you take out confidence." The nightmare strips her confidence away and shows you what's underneath, or worse, shows you nothing underneath at all, just the performance running on autopilot without a person left inside it. The blankness, the factory-reset expression, the leader voice without the leader, that's Dream Yeji as the death of real Yeji.

***

Another thing that inspired this story is something Vision says at the end of Avengers: Age of Ultron, about how humans are odd and flawed because they choose connection even when it costs them, and how that's what makes them beautiful rather than broken. That idea, that our emotions drive us to override our survival instincts in ways that purely logical systems never would, became one of the key pillars of what Jeju Heat is truly meant to be about. The idol industry trains people to suppress exactly that humanity, to perform perfection instead of feeling authentically, and I wanted to write about what happens when someone tries to access those dangerous human emotions anyway.

With that in mind, what I'd like you guys to hold onto going forward is that Yeji is not fragile, she is the strongest character in this story, and I'm not ashamed to admit that every character in Jeju Heat is modeled after some trope or combination of tropes from my smut headcanon before I started writing this, and Yeji is absolutely the "strong woman" archetype. But she's not the kind of strong woman you see in Disney or Marvel movies these days, because her strength isn't about being physically powerful or never needing help or being better than everyone around her. Yes both real Yeji and fic Yeji can be bossy sometimes but it doesn't come from a place of "I'm better than you," it comes from genuinely caring so much and having such high demands of herself that those expectations naturally extend to the people around her, because when you're the kind of person who can't tell yourself "it's okay" you also can't watch the people you love settle for less than their best.

Yeji's real strength, the thing that makes her the protagonist of this story, is her courage. There's this quote from Game of Thrones where someone asks "Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?" and the answer is "That is the only time a man can be brave," and that's more or less her whole character in a nutshell. Her strength isn't the walls she builds, it's the fact that she keeps choosing to lower them even when every survival instinct in her body is screaming at her not to. Every time she locks a door she eventually opens it, and that opening is an act of courage because she knows exactly how much it could cost her. Locking Minho out of the shower in Chapter 1, asking "what are we?" on a beach in Chapter 13, telling him "thank you for being mine, even when I'm too scared to say it out loud" under the stars in Chapter 17, each of those moments is her choosing vulnerability over safety even when she didn't need to, choosing to be seen over staying protected.

And that choice, that specific kind of courage, is what makes us human in a way that I think is worth celebrating. Vision put this idea in my head that humanity is special and unique because we have emotions - emotions give us feelings, feelings gives things meaning, and things that are meaningful drive us to muster the courage to sacrifice ourselves to protect them even when the odds are overwhelmingly against us.

Jeju Heat at its core is a fic about peeling back the idol mask, stripping away that layer of performance to expose the humanity underneath, and for Yeji to choose again and again to love fiercely and protect fiercely even when it could cost her everything, that's the true strength and beauty of both her real-life character and the fictional version I've built from it. The path is always toward vulnerability and it just takes her longer than most people because the stakes feel higher when you've spent your whole life being the person who can't afford to break, but the fact that she keeps choosing it anyway, that's what makes her amazing.

Her arc isn't finished and there are walls left to come down and doors left to open, some of those moments haven't been written yet, but the saranghae was real. The KFP movies hint at a romantic arc for Tigress and never actually pull the trigger because her story was always meant to be about finding self-worth independent of a relationship, but in Jeju Heat Yeji gets to take that character archetype all the way to the end of the line. The girl who forced herself to be a weapon actually lets someone in, and the vulnerability of the lotus position, the whispered confessions in the dark, the unguarded saranghae - that's Yeji doing what Tigress never got to do and finally surrendering the discipline for a person instead of a principle. Even if she doesn't remember it and even if he couldn't answer, it was real.

Intro | Masterlist

Which fanfic is your DVD commentary about?

an ever-evolving observance

Give us some stats - (when you wrote it, word count, how long it took to finish, is it a one-shot/multi-chapter, etc)

it's 13k words, canon compliant, and i wrote it in a little over a month and a half i think? it's a one-shot, but it's a series of interconnecting non-chronological vignettes. some of the scenes are more poetry-like and short, so it didn't make sense to split into chapters. plus, i wanted it to be read in one sitting.

What was the initial inspiration for your story?

i knew that i wanted to do an ian character study, and i knew that i wanted it to revolve around religion, love in the form of devotion, and bipolar disorder.

i chose to focus on ian and religion because one, he's somewhat spiritual throughout the entire series (i don't know if i can say confidently that he's devout. i think it's complicated esp given his mania, but he's something. catholicism is also one of those sects where even if you're not a Believer it comes with some deep rituals and cultural connections that never quite leave)

two, i see the gay jesus arc as the culmination of all of his past traumas. injustice, homophobia, predatory people, and service. like the kid he blows up the van for: is he a mentally ill teen who is on drugs and prostituting himself (ian season 4 in a manic state) , or is he a kid whose dad wants him to undergo conversion therapy (mickey season 3)? that's what tips ian finally over the edge after his grief over both monica (the literal and metaphorical root of his bipolar) and mickey finally catches up to him and he goes fully into psychosis.

when i'm looking for inspiration, i always re-ground myself in the world and characterization by re-watching the show and looking into things like set decoration or costume design. basically i just cornplate the shit out of it until it starts to feel like it writes itself... i wrote this out of order, and i started with the scene where fiona visits ian. in 907, she gets her cast put on and it's completely blank. by 908, an ambiguous amount of time's passed-- about a month?-- and her cast is full of signatures. by 910, she gets it off. so, i had been trying to piece together who all signed it and what they wrote. i was watching the deleted scenes for s9, and there's one alternate take of the scene in 908 where she spray-paints the nursing home sign and for a split-second you can see "miss you love you :( ian" on her palm. so that was where it started!

but in terms of connecting it to saint michael, i was midway through writing and, ironically enough, was on a trip to chicago. while in a taxi from the airport i was looking more into catholicism and parables. i was tossing around this idea of mickey as guardian angel/protector and so i was looking into all the saints to see if i could tie each scene to a different one. i looked into michael first bc of the obvious mikhailo/michael connection and once i read a source that named saint michael as the patron saint of grocers as well as the army and first responders, i knew i had it locked... i legit sent texts to my friends like "you will never believe this... either the writers wrote to this on purpose or its a crazy coincidence..." and the rest of it was easy to outline after that.

If the story is written from a character’s POV, why did you choose this character?

it's an ian character study, so i chose to write his third-person limited POV because i needed to reflect his state of mind accurately depending on if he's up, down, or neither.

What was your favourite scene to write?

oh god. ummm. some of them literally just exorcised themselves out of me and some of them took a lot of rewriting and fine tuning. i would say the final scene on the beach or the connection between ian's s5 deleted fantasy and mickey wearing a white suit to their wedding. they were the last two i wrote and they kinda just fell out of me.

How did you come up with the title?

typically i look to song lyrics to help title fics and i usually start with looking at whatever i'm listening to that helps me get in the writing headspace. but for this one, i just chose a line from the actual story that i felt encapsulated it well.

for posterity in case u gaf i was listening to a lot of arcade fire's funeral bc i was also working on this lip/ian joint neighborhoods 2 + 3 edit that i kinda want to remake now. also a lot of IDLES. also the actual soundtrack of the show.

Are there any little moments or references you hope readers will notice?

LIST OF CORNPLATING DETAILS THAT INSPIRED SCENES:

ian's signature on fiona's cast

ian's wearing lip's 8 ball shirt when mickey says he's just a warm mouth, bookending the ian in lips shadow s2 conflict SO awesomely

"thanks for coming back" in 601

the FAITH drawing that i assume mickey made for ian bc it's on his side of the prison cell (and also mickey's gangsters and neighborhood heroes poem but that was still a decoding WIP)

Was there anything you struggled to write? If so, how did you overcome this?

i can't particularly think of anything. once i figured out saint mikhailo it all sort of came together.

Favourite line in the story?

"Despite the pockets of wide open green spaces designed meticulously by urban planners, what Ian knows best are the cramped spaces of Chicago: alleyways, back rooms, bedrooms with more than one occupant, train cars.

Cement and gravel and dead grass. 

He’s been on camping trips for ROTC, short stints developing the skills but not the love of an outdoorsman, and Ian is, at his heart, a city rat. There’s too much wide open sprawl in Missouri. It’s suffocating."

Did the storyline change in any way as you wrote the story?

there were some ideas for scenes that were ultimately cut, but no. the awesome thing about these vignettes is that there isn't always an overall concrete story, it's more like a thematic thesis.

If you are writing a particular trope or genre, was it your first time writing this?

n/a though i will say i've only been writing Fic for a year or so (i've been writing forever and watched shameless live and was involved in its fandom from s5 on though) and i've never written something that's kinda more abstract like this.

What are you most proud about in the story? (plot, characterisation, dialogue, twist/cliffhanger, etc)

i've been told by people with bipolar that my depiction of ian's thought processes felt accurate to them, and that makes me really proud. i dunno... even though i'm not bipolar myself the story of ian and monica's relationship is something that hits close to home and i sort of used writing about monica as a way to process the feelings i was having and the things i was going through at the time. so i'm happy that people have felt seen. my intention was that it still keeps an empathetic depiction of both monica and ian without totally erasing the impact their actions had on others bc it really is complex!!

Are there any deleted scenes that didn’t make it to the final story?

yes! i don't have my notes document anymore but i believe there was one i had played around with that had caleb, and another that ultimately made its way into love is a battlefield (during their s10 breakup, ian tries and fails to get off by himself)

Are there any ‘behind the scenes’ info you’d like to share - e.g. what’s going on in a characters head in a certain scene or how you came to write a certain line?

ian going to the prison and talking out loud (and mickey being in the adjacent yard as evidenced by his use of "you've got it handled") is a callback in canon to lip and fiona's voicemails for karen and JS respectively. but mickey on the opposite side of the fence is supposed to invoke a priest on the opposite side of the mesh in a confessional booth, which is why the next scene is ian in the booth trying to seek guidance from shim and hearing nothing back. and then there's "confessional" sensory callbacks in the prison cell and the shower.

Reading back the story now, is there anything you’d change or add?

nothing about the plot. maybe i'd find a way to add more, but i'm channeling some of that into love is a battlefield rn. probably some of the wording/phrasing, but that's just how style develops over time!

Would you ever write a sequel to this story?

i would consider love is a battlefield to be an unofficial sequel. the prelude of that is a direct sequel to the ian/fiona scene in observance!

Are there any ‘easter eggs’ in your story - e.g. references to other stories you’ve written, a trope you often use etc?

the above^ and mickey's juvie buddy who gives them free concessions at games is something i made up but have used a few times. their love for listening to CDs and alt/indie rock music is also something that's seen in details like set dressing, ian naming himself curtis (ian curtis of joy division), and mickey's legit rare radiohead "in rainbows" tour shirt he wears in ep 107 (which also contains serious symbolism weight. my god..).

i did do extensive research on army base training camp and while ian probably wouldnt have gotten the day off from fort leonard to go into springfield, mo, i wanted to parallel the name when monica reports via text that she's in springfield, il. yay

more biblical references included were water as a symbol of baptism/rebirth and the cutting of hair (trying to reference samson). i played a lot with ian's identity crises as well. i don't know who i am from one day to the next i can't guarantee shit!!!

i also tend to use the term "ian/mickey bends" a lot in my other writing because i love the double entendre of compromising/bending to the other's will and how that's different from literally bending over for sexual pleasure. lol

If you’ve chosen your most popular story, are you surprised by the popularity?

n/a, it's not my most popular!

Were you nervous or excited to post this story?

ummm neither. i didn't actually expect anyone to read it!! but i love it very much and i'm so glad others do too.

Did you have a beta or a friend who helped you as you wrote?

the awesome smart amazing wizard by the username of @saintjock cheered me on and inspired me majorly and cornplated with me over imessage every step of the wayyyy

Ask your followers to pick a snippet (no more than 500 words) and share your thoughts about it.

epilogue:

"There’s a Bible, long shoved into the back of a jail library.

Ian doesn’t really remember writing it on the end cover, a hundred cosmic connections firing through his head at any given moment. But it’s there, and some inmate who thumbs over it months after Ian’s bailed out won’t know what it means. 

ARCHANGEL MICHAEL, GUARDIAN OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

PATRON SAINT OF FIRST RESPONDERS, THE MILITARY, GROCERS. SERVITUDE. OBEDIENCE. RESCUES THE SOULS OF THE FAITHFUL, PASSES JUDGEMENT FOR ADMITTANCE INTO HEAVEN. ANGEL OF DEATH.

MIKHAILO DERIVED FROM MICHAEL “HE WHO IS LIKE GOD”

REVELATION 12:7-9 :

MICHAEL CAST SATAN TO HELL. SAMMI GOT LOCKED IN A BOX."

soooo okay. i knew i wanted to connect the dots at the end but i didn't want it to be totally shoehorned. the all-caps bit is verbatim my research notes page from my outline

i wanna go through the connections more concretely!

first responders and the military: ian's occupations obviously

grocers: ian's job again and specifically mickey working security at k+g

servitude, obedience: mickey's devoted to ian in both of these ways, but it's a swinging pendulum. so also ian being obedient to mickey and ian tending to mickey when kash shoots him in s1 despite not having any context in the moment for how it went down.

rescues the souls of the faithful: mickey showing up in prison for ian, and also picking him up when he passed out outside the club

passing judgement for admittance into heaven: mickey's insistence that fiona will be okay after she shows up totally fucked, and her subsequent move to her own personal "heaven" outside of chicago

angel of death: mickey's grim reaper "south side forever" tattoo, his mexico "death" on the same day as monica's actual death, frank dying on their wedding anniversary.

Anything else you’d like the readers to know about the story?

there's definitely a lot! like i said it was kinda cathartic for me to write. but other than that, i wanna promo the unofficial sequel ian (and mickey) character study love is a battlefield!! it's clocking in at 40k and i will be uploading the final three chapters this week!

this is a similar style of nonchronological vignettes. less poetry but revolves around the army and the idea that the line between love and hate is thin. a lot of drawing parallels between frank/monica and ian/mickey-- pinpointing places where i+m chose differently that allowed them to reject their destructive nature, or places where they didn't. also exploring sense-memory connection. ian has a scent kink. sue him! but also i have soooo many thoughts on ian and his ability to recall memories. tldr his memory recall might not be That great bc of the episodes and trauma. so sensory experiences help..

where aeeo explores ian's interiority, this one is more about how ian feels about mickey and love as an institution specifically.

Interlude: Reading Guidance Through Song – “Northern Lights” by Thrice

“And I can see a better way to build the world / Where every hand is held and holding on”

This could practically be Jon and Daenerys’s campaign slogan. They are sovereigns championing integration. And their hope isn’t naïve—it’s fragile, hard-won, and alive only because they keep choosing each other.

At the Wall, they’re in neutral territory, flexing power in an overlooked outpost built to test and break people. Readers of ASOIAF know: the Wall destroys resolve. But here, Jon and Dany are trying to make it hold.

Timelines and Interplay

Past (Dany’s flashback in Meereen): She grieves the fallout of Meeren's battle, takes stock of her choices at court, notes Barristan’s difficult position, and recognizes the limits of Daario’s flippant loyalty. His irreverence throws her deeper needs into sharp relief. The echo of her having fulfilled prophecy—Stallion Who Mounts the World—still chills her.

Present (Jon at the Wall): He and Dany talk through grief for Viserion, happiness with each other, and sexual intimacy (or lack thereof). The need to balance administrative oversight with strategic action weighs heavy, but so does the personal—Jon is hopeful for a pregnancy and haunted by what losing Dany to danger could do to him.

Together, these timelines keep the story expansive: past choices surface in present conflicts, while present decisions reinterpret what those past sacrifices meant.

My favorite part: Jon and Daario work as foils. Where Daario shrugs, Jon wrestles. Where Daario jokes, Jon aches. The flashback highlights exactly why Dany needs Jon at her side now. Because things will get difficult in following chapters. (Oh yeah, they will!)

Closing Beats: R'hllor's Will, Brotherhood Without Banners & Broader Political Stakes 🔥 🐉 🧊

The hinge of the chapter. The outlaw scene shifts us from intimacy to ideology. Gendry’s reveal grounds it in family — his loyalty to Arya refracts Jon’s own ties, making the political debate instantly personal.

Jon and Lady Stoneheart’s duel isn’t about swords but faith and survival. She clings to vengeance as divine purpose; he counters with service and unity. Her insults cut deeper than politics, dragging in Robb’s crown, his will, Jon's reluctant kingship — the machinery that has haunted him for two years. (And that's without his parentage in the mix!) When she says they are “too alike,” Jon sees the truth: if he loses Dany, he risks becoming her, half-dead and ruled by rage.

Thoros and Beric tie the bow, connecting Daenerys’s fire (Volantis, the Black Walls) and Jon’s resurrection and estrangement from Ghost as signs of R'hllor's will. Stoneheart concurs, bitterly claiming that in this vast world, they are surely fated. Jon refuses zealotry, offering respect for all faiths, winning her fealty but not her heart.

The victory is uneasy, and the weight of it follows him back to Edd — where cosmic prophecy drops into the mud of supply lines, Iron Bank loans, and a floated dragonglass trade-off. Rhaegal and Drogon flying overhead punctuate the moment in passersby's awe, fear, and fury.

Every wingbeat is a reminder that even here, their union is under watch, trial, and judgment.

Author’s Note 💌

Like A Long Way Home, these sequel chapters take some chewing on, and I can understand why feedback has been limited. This commentary is my way of unpacking the choices, stakes, and character arcs to help curious readers along. I hope it helps illuminate the inner workings, and the layers of Jon and Dany’s short stay at Castle Black.

Fun fact, a lot of my changes post-1x-lore-drops were to the flashback, but I also added a lot more adjectives that lower others ("mindless," "sinks," "ants"). Before the lore, I didn't expect superiority to be as important to 1x as it ended up being, but in case you couldn't tell I absolutely love it. I describe the killer lobby as a forest. I want to have my cake and eat it too so I picture killers as having both a limbo and a lobby outside rounds. The lobby is a less comfy survivor lobby (there are cabins as Slasher's description implies- or was it just Jason- but very few use them), and the Spectre alternates between personal limbo and lobby to keep them between bored and tormented/vengeful so they perform well in rounds. ...and i wanna write both interactions and dream sequences... what can i say

"no one else in this purgatory is willing to do a thing." TO BE CLEAR!! Slasher would totally do something. So for this perhaps assume Slasher is in a round or limbo or maybe especially caught up in his mother's voice rn and not super aware of his surroundings. as for everyone else: John is lobotomized Ik ppl love Noli & CK but I don't characterize, or even self-indulgent character, Noli as parental to CK fjwaoifj. I think Noli finds thrill in a fellow chaos-maker and perhaps may even try to teach C00lkidd to be like him, but he indulges in CK in a very egotistical manner where CK is a kindred spirit, an extension of his greatness. If CK is being weak, Noli doesn't have interest. This is a hc i've carried for very long and interests me GREATLY, but it's not something that'd make him help CK. Everyone else I see as having come into the realm after this, but in case you're curious: Nos is in a basement/his house instead. also he would not care. Sixer is incapable of communication and it's unclear how... present. Sixer really is. Perhaps they would snuggle up with CK though, who knows. Even 1x only comes back for CK because he struck a nerve with them :P and they're my favorite so i wrote them.

"The Spectre made the kid ridiculously strong, but so too are they- Spectre or not-" It'll become more apparent in later 1x works (if i get around to that) buuut... yea 1x does NOT like Mx. Spectre. "it’s like school" There is a common (and canon supported) hc that CK was bullied that I ABSOLUTELY subscribe to. It's probably part of why he was so open to causing some chaos once a group actually took kindly to him and encouraged it. I actually have a lot I could say on CK's character. I feel he is often overlooked bc his dad gets all the spotlight. "Feathers and bone in her hands" Yep, that's a winged shedletsky design you just read! Sue me. I shall not spell out the flashback sequence but since this is more hc specific I will say I hc 1x ripping out Shedletsky's wings in whatever big confrontation they had :) 1x themself once had wings. Maybe I'll talk about my 1x design one day.

"They breathe, a rasping and rattling sound" based off the actual idle sfx for 1x! that sound sortaaa like breaths? if they are he's having a very hard time doing it, which makes sense for someone who's in pain 24/7.