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girlsfest2025-02-03 05:59 pm
Round 1: Quotes
Each prompt should be centered around words that have already been said.
Possibilities include a quote of any kind:
- Existing works (books, poetry, TV shows, movie scripts, video game scripts, song lyrics, articles)
- Speech (celebrity, netizen, anonymous)
- Anything else that fits!
Click here to view the fest rules.
RULES
- You are not required to have a Dreamwidth account to participate. There are no signups necessary. You may post anonymously if you want.
- There will be 3 rounds of this fest, and 1 round will be opened each week of the fest. Rounds will be left open for fills and comments, so there is no deadline for participating.
- Prompts do not have to be claimed before you write them, and they can be filled by more than one person.
- Once a round is open, you can continue submitting prompts for it until the end of the fest moderation period. (Ex: On February 17 after Round 3 opens, you’re still allowed to submit prompts to Round 1 and 2.)
- There is no minimum or maximum word count for fills. In the spirit of the fest, we encourage you to write shorter works, but any length is welcome and appreciated!
- Users are allowed to crosspost their fic on any other site, such as AO3. However, we ask that when possible, writers post the text of their fills as a reply to the prompt and include a link to an AO3 post if they choose to do so, instead of just linking to an AO3 post in their comment. This helps keep discussion in our community!
- Feel free to subscribe and join the comm to keep track of updates and view them on your reading page.
CONTENT
Prompts and fills have to center around K-pop girl group member(s). This includes:
- All active and former girl group members
- Female soloists
- Female members in co-ed groups
- Any female idol or trainee affiliated with K-pop (e.g., GP999 contestants, AKB48 members who featured in Produce48)
- Slash, gen, het, and trans works are all accepted as long as they involve at least one girl group member
PROMPTING
To prompt, reply to a round post and copy the following template in.
It will look like this when empty:
Tags:
Prompt:
Fill out the form with your prompt. You can also write in "Any" to give the writer freedom to choose their own. For example:
Tags: sports au
Prompt:
Though, I do admit, it came on fast
Still, I do believe that it can last
And I will be loathing
For forever
Loathing
Truly, deeply loathing you
My whole life long
— What is this Feeling, Wicked
FILLING
To post a fill, post a comment reply to the prompt you wrote for and copy the following template in. Title your comment with [FILL] followed by the title of your ficlet.
It will look like this once filled out:
Characters/Ship: lesserafim sakura/lee chaeyeon
Tags: post-produce48, canon compliant
Permission to Remix: Please ask
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Content of fill here...
Please provide content warnings for Graphic Depictions of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, and Underage as well as NSFW/explicit content.
Fills with NSFW/explicit content should have (NSFW) at the end of the comment title.
Example: [FILL] love hangover (NSFW)
REMIXES
You are welcome to remix fics that the original author has approved for remixing. A remix is a work directly or indirectly inspired by another work.
To post a remix, post a comment reply to the comment you remixed and copy the following template in with your info. Title your comment with [REMIX] followed by the title of your remix.
[FILL] normalizing sequence
Tags: COWORKERS
Permission to Remix: Yes
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“Huh.” Yunjin is squinting at them, some vodka concoction sloshing in her plastic cup. “How do you guys know each other again?”
Chaeryeong’s flushed all the way to her neck already. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Ryujin glancing at her, probably trying to assess the likelihood of Chaeryeong climbing out a window if only to escape this very conversation. “We know each other from work,” she says politely. Then, as to change the topic for Chaeryeong’s sake, “You have a very nice apartment.”
It doesn’t work. Yunjin’s eyes widen. “Ohhhhhhh. This is that coworker? Chaeryeong. Oh my god, you didn’t tell me she was hot.”
Chaeryeong rolls her eyes. Still not looking at Ryujin, she tugs the cup out of Yunjin’s hand and places it on a bookshelf. “Enough of that. I’m no longer legally responsible for cleaning up after you if you throw up on your bedsheets again.”
“I only did that once,” Yunjin complains. “And then you made me do half of your problem sets for the rest of the semester.”
“It was only fair.” She and Yunjin had been roommates their freshman year, back when they were both undeclared and stumbling blindly towards a future so vast and expansive it was almost frightening. Chaeryeong took classes in economics, then history, then settled on communications. Yunjin fell quickly into the student theater scene, her bright and lovely voice unfurling on stage, the shell she’d arrived on campus with now only a vestige of her move from America to Korea as an angsty seventeen year old.
They remained friends even as their social circles diverged completely, and then the trajectory of their lives. Chaeryeong graduated with a bachelor’s, a return offer for a job that she felt dispassionate about but had good benefits, and a handful of friends scattered across the city, whom she sees occasionally during a birthday party or a run-in at a restaurant downtown. Two years out of college and she simultaneously feels more self-assured and just as lost as she’s ever been.
Yunjin, having missed three months of updates from Chaeryeong, blurts out, “Wait, are you guys dating now?”
Chaeryeong wants to die on the spot. She mentally smacks herself for not texting Yunjin a heads-up before arriving, though it wasn’t like she was aware that Ryujin knew Yunjin’s roommate Chaewon and that she would be there, and maybe it wouldn’t even have mattered considering how all of Yunjin’s social cues have been washed out by the alcohol. But it should’ve occurred to her that all the gay twenty-somethings in the city are only one or two degrees removed from each other, so.
“We’re not,” Ryujin answers, sounding a touch amused. “We just went on, like, five dates.”
“Four and a half,” Chaeryeong cuts in. If it makes her seem neurotic, whatever, five just sounds like a big deal.
“Oookay.” Yunjin looks back and forth between the two of them. “So…you’re not dating. But you went on five dates? And you still work together? Isn’t that, like, super awkward?”
“Four and a half!”
“We work on different floors,” Ryujin says evenly. “I’m an analyst, so our work doesn’t overlap that much. It’s fine, honestly. It was just a thing that happened.”
It feels odd to hear Ryujin describe it like that, the casual and dismissive nature of her words, though neither untrue nor unkind. Just a thing that happened. Chaeryeong was the one who ended it, anyway, retreating to her immature sensibilities instead of facing her feelings like an adult. She’d balked at the idea of getting together with someone she’d have to see on a regular basis; the sort of commitment it implied, the lack of an exit that would entrap her if something went wrong down the line. It was too intense, too quick, too real.
Chaeyeon, with a scalpel-like meanness that could only come from a sibling, had called her a coward. Maybe that’s what Ryujin had recognized in her, in the end.
“We just weren’t that compatible,” Chaeryeong says, with a half-shrug and a half-smile, like she was telling an old joke. “There’s not that much to the story.”
On their third date Ryujin took them out to a dance class she had pre-paid for as a surprise. It was a sweet gesture, and it wasn’t like they knew everything about each other at that point. In the face of Ryujin’s excitement Chaeryeong elected not to tell her how much she hated being surprised. She felt compelled to get out of her comfort zone, for Ryujin. She wanted to try.
“I don’t know the moves,” Chaeryeong said, feeling awfully, almost debilitatingly embarrassed and awkward at the thought of being perceived so physically.
“It’s okay. Here.” Ryujin switched the movement of her arms, now mirroring the original choreography. “Just follow me.”
“What’s the song?” Chaeryeong asked, to distract them both from how stiffly her body was responding.
Ryujin’s eyes brightened. She started going on and on about the band, some modern jazz group that was getting a lot of recognition overseas. I was in a band, in college, Ryujin told her on one of their earlier dates. Sometimes I think about quitting my job to play music again. I loved being on stage. Chaeryeong believed her, in the conviction of her dreams and desires, laid open like a book on its spine.
Ryujin had random and varied interests that Chaeryeong had to start a page on her notes app to track. Things like: making mocktails and inventing absurd names for them, watching skateboarding videos, buying paint-by-numbers sets and mixing up the numbers, collecting hats, and keeping a photo album of all the stray cats she encountered. She was the sort of person who wanted to share everything with you, every bit of food she found delicious or information she found interesting, all the books and movies she would obsessively consume on her phone during her commute to work. She loved so openly, and was good at it too.
It was overwhelming to someone like Chaeryeong, who found it unthinkable to bare herself raw like that.
“I really like you,” Ryujin said, with ice cream on the corner of her lips. Under the streetlight, her whole face seemed to glow.
“I like you too,” Chaeryeong responded, her heart twisting into an ugly shape. It didn’t feel like a lie, but she still second-guessed every word as they left her mouth. She felt like a fraud looking at Ryujin’s open, honest face. What does it really mean to like someone, anyway? At twenty three, with plenty of unrealized crushes but zero actual dating experience, Chaeryeong found herself gaping for an answer.
“I feel like that was an unfair assessment of our former situationship,” Ryujin says, passing her a beer, the same brand Chaeryeong picks out during company happy hours because she can’t stomach more than 3%. “We like similar food. We both hate the morning stand-ups. We correctly clocked Kazuha as gay when she transferred from Japan.”
Chaeryeong takes the can from her, blushing. “Is this not weird to you? We don’t have to pretend…”
Ryujin shrugs. She leans against the kitchen counter, somehow looking picture-perfect casual in her afterwork button down and chinos. “I don’t know anyone here. Just Chaewon, and last I saw her she had her hand on a girl’s thigh on the couch.”
“You’re very good at making friends.” Ryujin could be effortlessly charming and socially effusive in a way that immediately endears herself to you. The full force of her attention, when Chaeryeong was on the receiving end of it, felt like sunlight on a warm spring day. “I think half the crowd here would fall over their feet to talk to you.”
Ryujin gives her a wry smile. “Would you like me to do that?”
The alcohol is starting to hit Chaeryeong square in the brain. “No. I don’t want you to leave.” She hiccups. “Is that selfish? I think I’m being selfish.”
“It’s okay that you didn’t like me,” Ryujin says gently. “You’re entitled to your feelings. I just wish you’d communicated them better with me.”
I do like you, Chaeryeong wants to cry out, somewhat indignantly. But what would come of it? It would be cruel to string Ryujin along like this, when her feelings were still opaque even to herself. Or maybe she’d already destroyed her chance completely by being so skittish and ambivalent the first time. What Ryujin saw in her, how she ever had the patience to deal with all these textbook symptoms of repression, Chaeryeong can’t understand.
Any trace of eloquence having escaped her, she can only say, “I’m sorry. It wasn’t—fair. Or nice. I think it scared me,” she admits, propelled by the bravery now surging from her warming chest. Or maybe that was the intoxicating effect of Ryujin’s presence. “I’m not used to being liked.”
Ryujin regards her, wide-eyed, some wondrous expression blooming on her face. “It’s very easy to like you, Lee Chaeryeong,” she says in that same open-book manner, so unafraid to be honest. “I’m saying this from experience.”
Re: [FILL] normalizing sequence
okay so i was not expecting this to make me emotional but the end just brought tears to my eyes. i want chaer to be able to sustainably match ryujin's bravery when sober </3 i want it so bad for them ;-;
Re: [FILL] normalizing sequence
actually i think it's really interesting how this goes from the polite small talk with tactless yunjin - that nevertheless chaeryeong finds to be cold - It feels odd to hear Ryujin describe it like that, the casual and dismissive nature of her words, though neither untrue nor unkind. Just a thing that happened. and the flashback exposition to what kind of person ryujin is and why that felt overwhelming for chaeryeong - Things like: making mocktails and inventing absurd names for them, watching skateboarding videos, buying paint-by-numbers sets and mixing up the numbers, collecting hats, and keeping a photo album of all the stray cats she encountered. i love the paint by numbers one the most... but they're such cute idiosyncracies in general
and THEN, chaeryeong in the present honest about her feelings when it's just ryujin and her and the alcohol.
Ryujin regards her, wide-eyed, some wondrous expression blooming on her face. “It’s very easy to like you, Lee Chaeryeong,” she says in that same open-book manner, so unafraid to be honest. “I’m saying this from experience.” i love it and that it's not Over yet!! i love my ryuryeong 😵💫 sooo good, thank you for filling!!