fic commentary: swan lake (reimagined)

[dayflies]

i want to get into the habit of writing fic commentaries and including that as part of my writing process – they’re a good way to reflect on my process and a good future reference that i could probably benefit from reading back! so without further ado [phillip defranco voice] let's just jump right into it

title: SWAN LAKE (REIMAGINED)
fandom: ENHYPEN
pairing: heeseung/sunghoon
words: 3,465

writing process:

this fic obviously!! sprang from heeseung’s swan lake (reimagined) performance, paired with sunghoon’s black swan performance, but it also stemmed from the realization that HS | SH are literal mirrors of each other, which is incredibly cool to me — and accurate! which makes it even better.

i originally wanted to write something more reminiscent of black swan (aranofsky), but evidently that did not happen lol. all of my attempts at toxic yaoi has been repeatedly foiled by my own desire to make people be nice to each other....

i think i started with the ending, and then i wrote the beginning, and then i filled in everything in between. the point with writing it was partly to practice writing something short, within a short span of time. the idea had been marinating in my head ever since i first saw heeseung’s dance performance, but i didn’t sit down to write it until writers4p hit their fifth milestone, which was a good opportunity to write and post it. i wrote it across two days and a lot of it was spent “researching” swan lake and ballet lol. but i think i’m very satisfied with how quickly i wrote it! not everything has to take several months (stares at [redacted]).

i was initially very unsure of whether i wanted anything romantic to actually happen between sunghoon and heeseung. because i wrote the bare bones of the ending as one of the first things — particularly:

(And if they had kissed again, while watching TV. If Heeseung’s gentle smile had made Sunghoon’s heart crack open. If Heeseung had gathered the heart-liquid in a glass bottle to return it. If Sunghoon had said: Keep it. It’s yours. If, eventually, Heeseung had pulled Sunghoon up to slow dance in the living room. If the trajectories of their bodies had been heading straight for each other all along, meeting in a soft collide. If they had climbed into Sunghoon's loft bed and tried to make their bodies fit against each other in the tight space, if their bodies had learned to remember each other, if they had locked into orbit. If both of them had meant it all. Wishful thinking. That’s all. Sunghoon lets himself think it.

Lets himself feel it all.

Just this once.)

the idea of sunghoon imagining and yearning for something that has never happened hovered over the entire fic as i filled in the gaps. but i did end up making them kiss because i felt like it would make sunghoon’s feelings for heeseung more convincing lol (since the fic takes place over a pretty short span of time)

structure:

some background:

the plot for swan lake goes as follows:

act i: at the castle

• prince siegfried turns 21
• he feels crushed by the weight of his responsibilities — particularly marriage
• he goes hunting and comes across a flock of swans

act ii: at the lake

• the lead swan, odette/white swan, transforms into a girl
• odette reveals she and the swans were cursed by a sorcerer to be swans by day, and human by night (but only when they are by the enchanted swan lake). the curse can be broken by The Power of True, Eternal Love
• love duet → siegfried and odette fall in love

act iii: at the castle

• the prince’s suitor ball
• the black swan/odile (sent by the sorcerer) attends the ball to trick the prince into falling in love with her to curse the swans forever
• black swan duet → the prince, thinking odile is odette, promises to marry her (betrayal)

act iv: at the lake

• realizing his mistake, the prince hurries back to the lake but it’s too late!!
• the swans die
• variation of ending. there are lots of alternate endings but common to almost all of them are the fact that they are unhappy lol.

overall, the entire ballet can be split into opening, falling in love, betrayal, ending.

matthew bourne’s swan lake is a reinterpretation where the female roles are all played by men, including the swan. in it, the white swan and the black swan are the same, which shifts the story thematically to one about homosexuality, repression and self-acceptance. there is still a betrayal but in bourne’s swan lake, the swan betrays the prince, and returns to him in act four. like swan lake, it ends tragically with both the prince and the swan dying (but they’re reunited in death, which also happens in some alternate endings of swan lake).

the fic is split into 4 acts and is unsubtly meant to reflect swan lake lol. the prince is sunghoon, the swan is heeseung. i ended up changing the structure mid-writing this commentary, because mapping it out while writing this commentary made me Realize four acts would work better:

act i: the prince

• heehoon are both cast in swan lake; sunghoon as prince siegfried, hee as his understudy

act ii: the duet

• sunghoon helps hee practice his role
• friendship blossoms — heehoon’s enchanted lake cameo (At the end of the day, after rehearsals are over, Sunghoon takes the long way home around the lake, so he can walk Heeseung to his bus stop. Sometimes they watch the two swans on the lake, the ones who come back each spring to have little baby swans.)
• sunghoon learns about the existence of “gay swan lake” (bourne)
• heehoon’s version of the love duet → heehoon kiss (falling in love)

act iii: the understudy

• sunghoon gets injured, hee takes his place
• heehoon’s version of the black swan duet
• hoon goes on a break
• hoon returns to the studio, hee gets a spot in paris (betrayal)

act iv: the swan

• hoon learns about hee’s casting in bourne’s swan lake
• hoon imagines himself with hee
• sunghoon takes the lake-walk home → ending

all the major beats in the story follow the structure of swan lake: meeting/falling in love/betrayal/ending. in this sense it’s a swan lake onion lol, where the characters perform swan lake, while the frame of their story, i.e. the overarching narrative, is also swan lake.

also fyi i did not map this out while i wrote it lol, it was all based on vibes and these really vague ideas, and somehow it all lined up in hindsight. as i mentioned earlier, i just wrote the beginning and ending and then i filled in a giant gap in the middle lol. the way things just line up almost perfectly… i’m just reaping the benefits of barely doing anything (actively at least. i think my subconscious was hard at work tbh).

ACT I 

in act 1, rather than meeting him for the first time, sunghoon simply becomes more aware of heeseung’s existence. he’s so focused on his own purpose and so unyielding in his discipline that he doesn’t really notice the things that are happening around him, until they become relevant to him lol. sunghoon knows of heeseung’s existence (particularly that he’s very talented): but where everyone else has had them pitted as rivals (“Better stay on your toes,” jokes Wonyoung as she dabs her glistening, sweaty forehead with a napkin. “Your main rival’s coming for your spot.”), sunghoon doesn’t even know “they were rivals in the first place.”

only when heeseung is announced as sunghoon’s understudy, does sunghoon begin to think about heeseung. this is where the mirror imagery comes in:

In rehearsal, when Heeseung isn’t practicing with the company, Heeseung is either observing Sunghoon’s movements, or marking Sunghoon’s steps by the side. When Sunghoon leaps, Heeseung leaps. Again and again and again.

(At night, before Sunghoon falls asleep, legs and feet tingling with a familiar ache, he gets to thinking: wasn’t there something about that? That the first letters of the syllables that made up their names were mirrors of each other. Sung-Hoon. Hee-Seung.)

i borrow a lot of this from aronofsky’s black swan where the main character and their understudy is depicted through mirrors, almost as an extension of each other. but as i also ramble on and on about in the endnotes lol, heehoon’s dynamic, to me, is more about the potential of their intense rivalry, and the fact that this rivalry will never develop, because that kind of intensity isn’t innate to them. they want to be kind to each other. yes, they are each other’s mirrors and each other’s competitors, but where the people around them might see that as a bad thing, they don’t.
 

ACT II 

in act 2, they “fall in love” (well more like they become good friends lol). they rehearse the black swan pas de deux – the duet where odile marriagetraps siegfried lol – which essentially becomes their own version of the love duet in swan lake.

also, in this act, sunghoon opens up a lot to heeseung, and starts structuring his routine around him (rehearsing with heeseung, taking the long way home so he can walk him to the bus stop etc). when i wrote this act, i imagined all of these things to be part of a larger, overarching duet between heehoon with the intent that their story, from act i to act iv could be performed as a dance in its own. which is super convoluted but that was the idea behind it. 

something else i kept in mind while writing act 2, was how i really wanted to play around with the idea of putting on roles and performing while pretending to be other people (like in a ballet or a play!). for example, as heehoon rehearse: Heeseung pretends he is Sunghoon. Sunghoon pretends he is Kazuha.

when they step into other roles, sunghoon feels more comfortable messing up and being less perfect: He hasn’t felt this way while dancing since he was a kid. Before the need for perfection began seeping into all the hollows and the cracks of his body.

and it also becomes an excuse for him to act on his own feelings, because it isn’t him kissing heeseung, it’s the swan kissing the prince:

When Sunghoon bends down again, he doesn’t do it with the intent of kissing him. But then Heeseung’s eyes go wide, a barely audible gasp leaving his lips as if he wants him to. So Sunghoon does. He gets on his knees, tangles his hands in Heeseung’s hair, as if he's still Odile and Heeseung is still Siegfried.

(there’s also another layer within that performance when taking into account the larger frame of the entire story, wherein sunghoon is the prince and heeseung is the swan. so there’s just a lot of stepping in and out of different roles. which i will talk more about later, but just for future reference)

and then, ofc, the performance motif ties directly into bourne’s swan lake, which heeseung tells sunghoon about: When Sunghoon tells Heeseung he’s his first male duet partner, Heeseung nods. “You’re my first too. But isn’t this kind of like Bourne’s version of Swan Lake, if you’ve seen that one?”. i will also return to this later lol
 

ACT III 

in act 3, they put on the ballet and technically two “betrayals” occur.

the first one occurs when sunghoon’s body betrays him, and heeseung has to step in as the understudy. a potential conflict could arise here when returning to the Epic heehoon Rivalry, but that rivalry just doesn’t exist. in fact, sunghoon takes his injury so well, because they are so similar in nature:

Heeseung tells him: “Don’t worry, Sunghoon-ah. Hyung’s got it. Go sit down, okay?”

Sunghoon knows what he says with that: that Sunghoon can put his trust in Heeseung because this is what they practiced for. That Sunghoon’s injury won’t affect the performance, because Heeseung has always aimed for perfection too.

which ties back to their mirror imagery. being each other’s mirrors also make them each other’s main confidants.

the other betrayal (which is the real betrayal imo) is when heeseung leaves sunghoon. it’s obviously not meant as a betrayal on heeseung’s part. i think it can be considered a betrayal on multiple levels: heeseung outruns sunghoon on a “skill level” meaning that they are no longer equals (which isn’t true, but that’s how sunghoon sees it), and on a more personal level, heeseung also leaves him behind. sunghoon sees these two levels as very inextricable, because his relationship with heeseung is so tied into dancing and them being each other’s equals. which ties directly back to the duet motif, where a duet can only be performed with two people. this is where their pas de deux ends. 

also it happens at the lake because i love a motif. will return to this later lol. 

like in swan lake, a pas de deux also occurs in this act:

Heeseung glides to the swell of the music. Like he’s the swan and not the prince. Sunghoon barely feels his ankle. By the sidelines, Sunghoon sits on a stool, his feet still marking Heeseung’s movements. Like a dance just with the two of them. Sunghoon, a shadow to Heeseung’s light. Sunghoon supposes he should be bitter. He can’t find it in himself to be. Not when he watches Heeseung take flight.

i originally wrote it to almost mirror this bit in the beginning:

In rehearsal, when Heeseung isn’t practicing with the company, Heeseung is either observing Sunghoon’s movements, or marking Sunghoon’s steps by the side. When Sunghoon leaps, Heeseung leaps. Again and again and again.

but then i thought it was weird that sunghoon would leap around on a fucked ankle lol. so i deleted it. there isn’t really much significance behind it, other than to mirror swan lake’s structure, and to hint at heeseung’s role as the swan — i will get back to that.
 

ACT IV 

in act 4 (probably my favorite act, but maybe that’s just because i wrote it first), sunghoon learns about heeseung’s spot in bourne’s swan lake. and as so many swan lake reiterations it ends unhappily lol. besides leaving it the way it was (heeseung pursuing bourne’s swan lake, versus sunghoon remaining where he is but allowing himself to dream about being with heeseung) felt right for the story.

in this act, sunghoon finally allows himself to imagine an “alternate universe” wherein he’d had the courage to invite heeseung inside (in act 3, when heeseung takes him home from the er, he almost does but decides against it). the paragraphs where sunghoon ponders the potential of their relationship (rather than the potential of their epic rivalry), is essentially him wondering what could happen, if he’d had the courage to act around heeseung without the pretense of another role. alas, as so many other swan lakes before sunghoon and heeseung’s, it is too late [roll curtain]
 

on heteronormativity, internalized homophobia, etc etc:

every time i mentioned bourne’s swan lake i was really worried that i was like. pointing a neon sign while going “THIS IS A METAPHOR!!1!!!1!” and. i kind of feel that way still. i think i still need to learn the art of subtlety >___> but no one has commented on it and went “it insists upon itself” so whatever, maybe its fine? idk. but yeah, obviously this entire fic is about…. Being Gay….

ballet is a really great medium for portraying what i wanted to portray because outside of the ballet sphere men who do ballet are widely regarded as being gay twinks lol, while inside the ballet sphere, it’s all surprisingly heteronormative. as so many other things. which is why bourne’s swan lake was so groundbreaking when it first came out. i’m copying this from my endnotes: matthew bourne’s swan lake is a reinterpretation where the female roles are all played by men, including the swan. so it was really groundbreaking in terms of 1) having male duets 2) subverting conventional gender roles 3) displaying male romance on stage in an otherwise very heteronormative discipline where duets/romance only really happen between men and women. it’s basically gay swan lake lol.

and sunghoon has the same realization when he looks it up after heeseung mentioned it to him:

Sunghoon hasn’t. When he gets home he looks it up: in this version of Swan Lake, the swans are more animalistic than they are elegant. There’s a thick black line down their forehead, black paint around their eyes. Their movements are fierce and harsh. All of them are played by men. When he looks up the Love Duet, the prince meets a male swan: they chase each other, they lift each other, they leap in circles around each other. It’s nothing like the Love Duet in the original Swan Lake, where Sunghoon is some poor imitation of a swan; in this, the role of the swan has been written for a man. Briefly, he imagines himself performing it with Heeseung, wondering what it would be like. If people would like it. If he would. If Heeseung would.

Then, he closes the tab.

when heeseung and sunghoon rehearse the black swan pas de deux, it never stops being clumsy because it wasn’t written for two men. they’re trying to fit themselves into roles that weren’t written for them, because it’s the only thing that exists — at least at their ballet studio. heeseung leaving to play the swan in bourne’s swan lake in paris, also represents heeseung coming to terms with his own sexuality (didn’t really think further than Not Straight, which is also sort of the point), or at least beginning to come to terms with it.

returning to the idea about roleplays, to quickly sum up from earlier: in the ballet their company puts on, sunghoon plays the prince, and heeseung is the prince’s understudy. when heehoon rehearse, sunghoon pretends to be the swan (kazuha) while heeseung pretends to be the prince (sunghoon). but in the overarching story between sunghoon and heeseung, heeseung’s real role is the swan.

heeseung being the swan of the overarching narrative is also referenced a few times:

1. Sunghoon can’t remember his name. Just knows he practices until the early hours. Has this image in his head of him gliding lightly across the floor, almost soundlessly. Then, a switch leap, followed by an effortless 540. As if his arms had feathers, and his bones were hollow enough for him to defy the laws of gravity.
2. Heeseung glides to the swell of the music. Like he’s the swan and not the prince.
3. Heeseung had always been meant for something bigger. His body carved a predestined trajectory across the sky, like the migratory path of a bird. Sunghoon was just a branch he’d perched at for a short window of time.
4. the whole thing with him having to walk around a big lake with other swans in it to get to his bus stop when he goes home LMAO which makes this the second fic wherein i’ve compared heeseung to a species of bird (seagulls in seabed eden). which isn’t a lot but its weird that it’s happened twice

in going to paris, he finally steps into his real role: (Who would want to be his understudy when they could go to Paris and be The Swan?) so heeseung is where he’s meant to be, although it meant leaving sunghoon behind. it ends unhappily for sunghoon who unfortunately is still 90% repression BUT. yk. i believe in him. he’ll figure it out eventually!! also the swan metaphor also ties into the idea of swans returning back home each year, which gives him some hope.

anyhow. tbh i kind of hate when fic attempts to do societal commentary because it’s fic. so the conclusion of this commentary is that now i’m just a hypocrite.

favorite bits:

well i kind of already said that i like the ending, particularly this part:

And if they had kissed again, while watching TV. If Heeseung’s gentle smile had made Sunghoon’s heart crack open. If Heeseung had gathered the heart-liquid in a glass bottle to return it. If Sunghoon had said: Keep it. It’s yours. If, eventually, Heeseung had pulled Sunghoon up to slow dance in the living room. If the trajectories of their bodies had been heading straight for each other all along, meeting in a soft collide. If they had climbed into Sunghoon's loft bed and tried to make their bodies fit against each other in the tight space, if their bodies had learned to remember each other, if they had locked into orbit. If both of them had meant it all.

i focused a lot on making every line (or most lines lol) seem intentional in the fic. particularly the bit about the bodies is a direct call back to this:

It takes a while for his brain to register what has happened; by that point, his body has moved on, still dancing. Where the inner organs always remember their function, even when the brain forgets — the lungs will breathe, the heart will pump blood — Sunghoon’s body remembers to dance. To his body, dancing, like breathing, is survival.

so what sunghoon says in that first paragraph, is essentially what he imagines would happen, if heeseung were to become more important to him than dancing.

i like this bit: in general, i think i read it as being more hopeful now, than i did when i first wrote it. particularly because of this line:

“Look.” Sunghoon's gaze follows Heeseung's finger as he points at the family of swans emerging from a cluster of trees. “While you were gone, the baby swans got really big.” Before Sunghoon’s injury, the three baby swans had still been small and grey. Now they’re white, and almost as big as their parents. As if to say: life will alway flourish around you — even while you stand completely still.

i think the last line can be understood in whichever way one chooses. when i first wrote it, i thought there was a certain comfort in knowing that all things would continue to move when you’re unable to, combined with the fear of everything moving on from you. which reflects sunghoon’s feelings about heeseung leaving from paris. it was a very bittersweet sentence. i think now (it’s been a few weeks since i wrote it), i also see an implicit “and you will flourish with it”, which i think stems from the knowledge that “you” could refer to anyone; and you will always be the life around another person. so even if sunghoon feels as if he is standing still, he will still be the life, flourishing around heeseung, and even if heeseung feels he is standing still, he is life, flourishing around sunghoon. idk if that makes sense. but yeah. i think this reading makes the ending a lot more hopeful, because when taken with the ending paragraph:

The swans have left the lake for the winter. But they’ll be back next spring, like clockwork. After all, the migratory trajectory of birds is non-linear. While you were gone, Sunghoon pictures himself say to Heeseung.

While you were gone, all the baby swans grew up and they left.

And then, come spring, they all returned home.

it all suggests, to me, that when heeseung does return home, both of them will have changed enough (for the better) that they’ll be ready to pick up from where they left off. i know i’m speaking as if i don’t know, and it’s because i don’t okay.

apart from that, i don’t really know. there are many things i really like about it tbh, and i think it works really well as a whole, even though there’s so much information (and i feel like it works, even if you don’t pick up on everything). and i’m proud i managed to pull it off within two days! kind of crazy for me tbh

 

this took way too long to format and here i am at 11 pm, on dreamwidth like a loser. but it was super fun, i will not lie to u. i miss when everyone were on dreamwidth >__>