#mingjjong

initially, i had slated this out to be a gyuhan fic, but the more i thought about it—and the more gyucheol posted pics from their hawaiian honeymoon—i couldn't help but consider that gyucheol would be better suited to the kind of story i wanted to tell. that isn't to say that this story is free of gyuhan—i fear everything i write is tinged with gyuhancheol in some way or the other—but the focal point was facing that fear that chases cheol throughout the narrative.

the one we all have, about something in us not matching well with something in someone we love, whether we admit it to ourselves or to someone else.

see what i mean about it suiting gyuhan? they've made no secret of how much they fought with each other and how they're opposites, to the point where it feels too obvious to be a genuine concern they'd have about each other. with gyuhan, it would be easy for either of them to say, so what if we don't match? we're opposites, and we'll choose each other anyway.

but with gyucheol, they aren't opposites. they're quite similar, the same person in different fonts but not quite too. no two people will ever be the same and cheol's fears stem from this particular insecurity. how far can your love bend before it twists into something else?

a few scenes and things to note:

when seungcheol tells soonhui to make it back in one piece, that's a deliberate parallel to jeonghan wishing the same of gyucheol. it's an intentional distinction in their relationships too—that mingyu isn't chasing seungcheol's ghost in jeonghan any longer nor is jeonghan pining after seungcheol either.

mingyu catching seungcheol was fully inspired by the way cheol just throws himself into mingyu's arms whenever they hug. it's cute.

the jacket. i feel like i have to talk about this because it was going to be a bigger deal and i wanted to expand on cheol's jealousy over seeing jeonghan in the jacket but it didn't fit the direction the narrative took me. which is probably a much healthier direction than making them all jealous over each other, even if it's not realistic. is it? i wouldn't know. either way, the jacket quickly became a kind of symbolism for gyuhan's relationship. they've closed that friends-with-benefits chapter but there's no love lost there. cheol sees this from the outside—that's why he never wears mingyu's jacket.

i tend to drift (haha) between who is more avoidant/pushes addressing things first, and while mingyu bulldozes through it as the king of positivity, i think seungcheol's underrated in his own stubbornness when it comes to mingyu specifically. a few examples come to mind: mingyu saying he's growing his hair out and cheol jumping in to say he looks handsome, even if it wasn't the point of the question at all; jeonghan teasing mingyu by saying he doesn't think mingyu looks handsome only for cheol to nearly cut him off in a rush to say no, mingyu is; etc. there's an oblivious on mingyu's end to this too, like he doesn't want to see it or he just simply doesn't. i'm inclined towards the latter, but i wouldn't call it total unawareness either. so maybe this reflects the dynamic they have throughout the narrative?

ironically enough, i don't think i have anything to say about the gyuhan scene in the medbay. i think they hijacked every scene they were in and wrote it themselves because the scenes truly do speak for themselves.

a huge part of my love for pacific rim comes from my love of hong kong as this city where so many narratives take place. i continue to dream of the day i can witness my own unfolding there. until then, i liked the idea of venturing out of the shatterdome to remind gyucheol that even when the world ends, it keeps spinning.

of course, i couldn't ignore the marshall's speech from the film. 10 year old me would still like to fight the hurricane!

the bo staff scene!! this one was also very important because i wanted to get the timing right. traditionally, the bo staff fight would be before the drift sim, but i wanted to mention it later because neither of them were ready for it before. mingyu still lingered in the ghost drift and seungcheol couldn't let go of his ghosts either. actually sparring together required them to both be on the same page, despite their own worries.

and the follow up—it didn't make sense to have that one conversation and sparring session be the answer to their problem. evoking realism in fic will forever plague me and the line always blurs on what's too much realism and what is necessary. still, i wanted to emphasize the central theme of both pacific rim and what keeps seventeen going, i think—who else, if not you? it's a choice, and they keep choosing each other. (you may be wondering, isn't that marriage? yeah, i'm also wondering. svt even have the rings for it. get in the jaeger. kinda like getting hitched?)

i almost don't want to talk about the ending because of how much it pissed me off but i think it's because it pissed me off that i need to talk about it: i initially thought about ending it right there, having them choose each other and the world continuing to end around them, hinting at things improving. but after writing this whole journey, it was too unbalanced to end things there. they're able to make things work here because it's life or death—the world depends on them choosing each other, whatever that means. baggage and all. years apart and twisted history and all. therefore, having them complete the exact mission that caused gyuhan's drift to fail was like passing on the torch. kind of like saying that mingyu had finally moved on. and in order to do so, he ends up piloting the jaeger alone, however briefly, just as jeonghan had to save him, so he can save seungcheol. but the beauty of it is that he wouldn't be able to do it if not for seungcheol.

in hindsight, this is as much of a story about gyuhan as it is gyucheol. i'm not even surprised.