kficanon | PART FORTY ONE

is it just me or do kpop fics these days have a westernized feel to them from the setting right down to the dialogue? i'm guessing this probably has to do with majority of international fans coming from the us, but as someone who isn't from america i sometimes fail to catch the jokes or references in some fics that other people immensely enjoy. it also makes me feel :/ about posting fic because all the "westernized" elements i put in are either vague or taken off internet research.

i feel very similarly. i think my dialogue comes off as stilted because i'm trying to match the speaking patterns i see in most fics.

are there any particular examples that stand out to you? for me it's the majority of college AUs (and they're never called american college AUs, just college AUs)

da what examples in dialogue? i've only ever noticed americanisation in settings

in dialogue i think the main things are the use of american slang, or phrases/names for things specific to american english, and ways of speaking (grammar/sentence structure) that strike me as very american. by extension this means that writers who speak a different variant of english or learn english as a second language in a non-english speaking country don't use their own area's slang or common phrases and manners of speech because those would be seen as somehow "regional" while american ones wouldn't.

i guess a way to illustrate the american-default view would be to picture typical teenagers/people in their early 20s speaking on an american tv show, then picture how the same age group would speak on a british show, a singaporean show (in english), a show from a non-english speaking country with characters speaking in english, etc. which one sounds more like the way characters usually speak in kpop fics? i assume the majority of the time, it will be the american one.

(even in this comment i find myself doing this u___u and i may have accidentally answered a different question than you were asking?)

sa and yes, definitely college AUs, especially when it comes to fraternities/sororities and ~dorm life~ since they aren't something common from where i'm from. or at least not as similar as to how it is in america lol

it's been like that for years. i did it too for a long time because that's the way everybody did it and i didn't think about it, but lately it has started to annoy me more and more, especially when people get simple details wrong, like when you graduate, that doesn't require a lot of research. it's really weird trying to emulate the "american" style when i'm not american myself and the people i'm writing about are koreans in korea?? lol, but in a way us-flavored fics are so praxis that you stand out if you do something else.

i've never been to korea myself and research only goes so far, and i'm not aiming for 100% cultural accuracy anyway but i'm trying to be more mindful of the setting these days and at least make it feel like it's set in korea. if i need or want to include westernized elements i rather take them from my own culture in that case, because it feels more natural to me, but i still don't want them to be obvious and out of place. i've ended up thinking of my fics as taking place in a korea-esque universe lol, because that's the best i can and want to do. but i still want to try to keep the cultural flavor as accurate as possible within that frame.

i'd say fuck trying to make your fics fit into the westernized style and write in a way that feels true to you.

god i hate the super westernized fics, even if it's well-written, it feels like the writer just didn't bother and it makes it so hard for me to stay in the fic u__u i remember when frat fics were a huge thing and characterizing male idols as frat boys came hand in hand with it and it was just so obnoxious? and for some reason fucking chipotle came up in a lot of fics

don't worry about adding western elements honestly

like all the taekook college aus which are incredibly memey come off as zero effort to me

ah yes. i love those fics (american here heh), but because of the dialogue/slang/memes i read the characters as being korean american in america. the locations nominally take place in korea, but realistically sound nothing like korea. yeah

i think that combined with poor characterization doesn't rly help for me as a reader haha

da same lmao if i come across a fic like that i just ignore the author saying it's in korea and mentally replace it with american places because they likely wrote that fic with an american place in mind anyway then just slapped "korea" on it

bts ficdom seem to have a lot of frat boys/college au fics that are poorly executed in terms of humor and characterization. also why is there a sudden influx of using snapchat i don't get it.

da one or two people must've mentioned it and it became a trend from there because... lmao, snapchat has been around for like 3 or 4 years, this is really is a weird time to start

frat boys i'm loling

i remember seeing a... not quite argument, but something like it where a bnf kept insisting that frat boy characterization for every one of their favs was perfectly fine because that's how real life boys act but it was just everyone having snappy dialogue, drinking and doing drugs, and being assholes and trolls to each other or shit without actually adding any depth to their characters

drove me fucking nuts

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yeah don't worry about adding westernized elements in your fic tbh...

though, i tend to have the opposite problem because i'm from the states but i also hate being wrong about things (like fics that have supposedly asian things but that don't actually exist) so i tend to stick closely to my own experience u__u

right, i'm also from north america and when i see a brand/store name that i know is not in korea in a fic that supposedly takes place in korea i wince, like if you don't want to do the research then don't set your fic there? just be honest and set it in your own country?

oh yeah i'm not saying to hell with it lol i mean i just ??? in general when i see brand names in things, unless it's universe-specific or something like "bandaid" where it's basically the name of the thing...idk maybe it's my personal literary experience talking but i just feel weird about seeing brand names in general. i know what you mean though

it can feel weird to set it outside of korea though, like especially if you're striving for canon? (which incidentally is part of the reason i want to but hate writing canon...) i understand this thread's anons and agree with them for the most part (especially just some super-westernized fic...grits teeth), but also like at the end of the day fic reading/writing is supposed to be fun and i try to keep that in mind

lol this whole thread reminds me of roadtrip aus that take place in korea and those bother me soooo much. like the distance they use to go from one town to the next makes it seem like they're driving for days. like korea is tiny it doesnt take five hours to drive from jeonju to seoul

and just do you anon. dont try and force western elements into your fics

the only one i've found acceptable was a vintage baekyeol where the drove the perimeter of korea in order to stretch it out but like...can y'all look at a map

(also my biggest pet peeve which is getting the school calendar and the fact that they don't change classrooms with classes)

da the classroom change is like the one thing i will never forgive if only because there is 15+ years of kpop rpf and kdramas to draw from and i kinda expect it to be understood by at least osmosis or something

da omg whenever school starts in the fall...bye

exo fics really have it bad with roadtrips. they always read like they're taking place in some huge country where it takes a while to get from town to town and when i read it's in korea i'm just "....." like dont fans ever wonder why its possible for a daegu trainee to travel to seoul every weekend. lol i feel like nearly every fic writer needs a map of korea stappled to their computer when writing

that also bothers me!! lol you can really tell that a writer is from the us (or just lazy) when the school year starts in autumn. it's not even hard to google a korean acedemic calendar. it confuses me when the characters are living in korea yet they're graduating hs in april/may

actually thinking about hs/uni aus there's usually a lot wrorng with them when getting small facts right lol

i'm so glad for this thread because now i know that other anons feel the same. i hate road trip aus and hs/college aus the most in kfic but i don't say it out loud, because no one else in my old circles (mostly comprising of americans) had any problems reading or writing these sort of settings. i feel like, in some circumstances, this goes beyond laziness, and that it's the lack of cultural awareness talking :/ at least, that's how i feel about my previous group of writing friends, hence the "previous". they just assume that what happens in america happens everywhere else, and if they find out that it doesn't, those people are "missing out" and "they don't know how to have fun". as a non-american, it gets really stressful to be told that one way is the right way, and apparently i'm not "living correctly".

i'm speaking from a few specific experiences in my life, and this is just me expressing my personal thoughts on these specific examples. i hope this comment doesn't start a shitstorm.

i always wondered how people could just not care? or try? or even bother? maybe it's because i was always in a more international friend group that didn't really have americans other than myself and we were always talking about our cultural difference because it was so cool to learn. but it's so weird to me that like these fans are basically just grabbing pretty korean faces and then just transposing their views and their ideas on them and like we see that in how ifans will react to cultural dissonance regarding korean stuff too so ig this is just an extension of it but it's so annoying