I took the liberty of reading through Wattpad user @MTTAEV's three most popular works, 'PRANK CALL', 'COLD LIPS', and 'TEXT ME BITCH'. The latter being @MTTAEV's most popular, spanning 67 chapters. All three texts place BTS boy group members Jungkook and V in various scenarios, with their romance blossoming before the reader. The works are very very NSFW and re-imagine the members' as school students, both either in university or college - a popular setting, especially for YA novels (lots of YA inspiration in these fan-fictions). The titles 'TEXT ME BITCH' and 'PRANK CALL' bounces between two styles of writing, presenting the story through text messages sent between the ship or standard prose. 'COLD LIPS' is based on 'The Vampire Diaries'.
The concept of 'ships' - popularized by fan-fiction circles, used primarily to describe a romantic pairing between two fictional characters or two real-life people (1) - is nothing new, and at the hands of fans left to their own devices (and head canons), almost any pairing between any character across any franchise is possible. As such, the nature of 'ships' tend to get quite strange - think, SonicXMario - that aside, it's more usual to see characters from the same franchise or in this case, members' of K-Pop boy/girl groups paired together romantically, much to the presumed discomfort of real-life idols.
In 'TEXT ME BITCH' AND 'PRANK CALL' the ship establishes a relationship with one another despite not knowing each other's real identity, communicating only through text messages very early in the text. This dynamic is fun and ramps up the anticipation for the ship's eventual union. The texts' see these real-life idols warped into strange caricatures, the mysterious e-boy or Zaddy or flamboyant and frivolous homosexual, all of which prove instrumental to drumming up drama. The writing itself is, at least, coherent despite often being tonally inconsistent. I sometimes found myself confused by sudden shifts in the mood between what was supposed to be a sexy time or funny time or serious time. Especially in dialogue, some character interactions felt wildly inappropriate in context to their given scenarios. I understand that the writer was trying to be casual in way of these interactions, but it felt juvenile and silly.
'COLD LIPS', despite being a single chapter, felt more structurally sound and doesn't feel nearly as cringe-inducing. However, the grammatical errors and weird ways the writer would often describe a scenario really stopped me from being fully immersed. I would always have my pace stunted by a misspelling or sentences missing whole words. I understand that the author was probably writing these in their little stolen moments of time so I'm really just being nit picky.
With all that said, this definitely has become a guilty pleasure and I can totally understand how fans get sucked into these worlds. They're fun and silly and raunchy and sometimes heart-warming and sweet. I found its Riverdale-style writing really cute - the shipping is cute too (sort of). So, though these stories were sometimes hard to read, I want to try capturing the essence of its worlds in all the ways they're fluffy and dumb and indulgent. And though it'd be fun to, I won't be writing anything NSFW. My main focus will be playing with the school setting and some archetypal YA novel characters using the same V and Jungkook as a jumping pad.
Works' cited:
1). Romano, A. (2016, June 7). Canon, fanon, shipping and more: a glossary of the tricky terminology that makes up fandom. Retrieved March 10, 2020, from https://www.vox.com/2016/6/7/11858680/fandom-glossary-fanfiction-explained
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