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Sunlight Crew - a commentary
tw mentions of covid
I usually stick to google doc annotations when it comes to commentary on my fics, but I think Sunlight Crew is a little deserving of a whimsical dreamwidth post. I'll still have an annotated gdoc for Sunlight Crew but here's some of my musings about it.
Of course there are spoilers! I wouldn't recommend reading this commentary until you've read the fic itself. I may or may not be ruining a lot of the experience with all these unnecessary words, but for those who have, welcome!.
What's a Found Family?
This question plagued me from the moment I got my Moonlight Party Fest exchange gift assignment. My giftee's exact words were "found family perhaps? nothing specific comes to mind at the moment" and at first it felt like an easy and flexible prompt, something I can go ham on.
But what is a found family? I had a bunch of prompts i tried to bring to life, but nothing seemed to capture its essence. Its essence being: long, involving multiple significant relationships with fleshed out characters, and born accidentally but kept on purpose. It's a hard prompt, and especially hard to cram when life throws things your way.
When CoViD Strikes
Now the worst thing life could've thrown at me 6 days from the fest deadline was the Omicron variant.
The Philippines has just experienced its highest surge of cases yet, and as of this writing there's still no end in sight. I don't know where I got it, but I ended up spending the first week of January isolated in my room and stuck in bed. And I still had work deadlines and fic deadlines to think about and I really wanted to deliver something good.
What happened with Sunlight Crew isn't a "when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade" anecdote. It's more "desperation is the key to innovation."
Maybe weakness was exactly what I needed to lose my inhibitions and just write. Write without the eloquence and method. Without the energy and its accompanying wit. Without metaphor and deep characterization.
Write with just my heart.
The Elevator Pitch
Surreal, but real. Vivid.
Sunlight Crew is: Found family except it's six girls in an institution that's bottling their life force as an elixir of youth and they're usually trapped in pods but sometimes people's pods are unlocked and sometimes they find each other.
Sunlight Crew is: The Matrix meets Elmer (chickens gain sentience) and is written by someone half awake.
Sunlight Crew is: surprisingly, something my beta liked.
For the unacquainted, my IRL beta isbeautiful widely read, a scifi fan, and a clinical critic. If writingexcuses.com is responsible for 70% of my writing knowledge, she is responsible for 20%. She has no tolerance for pretentiousness and cuts to the heart of what my stories need to breathe life.
When even I didn't know what exactly Sunlight Crew needed to make sense, she did. She understood the emotions of the rises and falls and knew what Hyunjin was looking for when I was too sick to figure it out.
Rises and Falls
In a different time and place, maybe it was called dreaming and waking up.
I will now talk about the story.
Hyunjin's world is cyclical: Rising from their pod-induced slumber, and falling into pod-induced dreams. There's a line in the fic that goes "see darkness and feel coldness and call it a nightmare" and this used to be all Hyunjin knew about rising. Falling was the "reality" but a difficult one - a hodgepodge of unrelated images and bizarre experiences, no true continuity.
Something compels Hyunjin to push against the limits of her nightmare and she discovers an opening - a literal one, brought to her by Heejin. This completely changes what it meant to rise - real sensations and real people, the true warmth of touch and sunlight on skin.
Now falling, no matter how bizarre, pales in comparison to real lived experience. Even with frail bodies and fear of the uncertain, Hyunjin takes to rising like a fish to water. Like she was built for it.
Something interesting to note for the Sunlight Crew is that, even in these rises, all they know comes from the pod falls. Music, trees, vocabulary - they talk among themselves of these bizarre things because it's all they have, aside from each other and the rooftop. They all have distinct ideas about themselves and the world, and form unique relationships to each other. Human nature that can't be sucked away.
Living
“Do you ever wonder about why we’re here?”
The girls live fragments of lifetimes in their falls. There's no clear distinction between imagination and memory, but there are snippets of reality. Trees, like Hyunjin sees from the railing of their rooftop. An engine. Rain.
Yet there's clearly something missing. Hyunjin sees the dullness of the pod falls and the limits of their rises and asks the question: What did it mean, to be living?
Is there something to taste, feel? Is there truth in the falls that she can find in the rises? She knows the six of them are real, but the rooftop can't be all there is. Can it?
Withering
It stings, everywhere. Even here it hurts.
Hyunjin's cyclical routine is shaken when Yerim disappears.
The story hints to threats from the very beginning: frail bodies and thin frames, streaks of gray in the hair, followed by fear of engines and being caught. But it's in Yerim's disappearance that Hyunjin confronts the dread of loss. This is best captured by her conversation with the fake doctor in the falls -- something my beta liked when I didn't.
When Yerim returns there's urgency: full head of gray, bony hands and frail bodies. Hyunjin tastes loss for the first time, and while Yerim was found, Hyunjin now feels the need for something more. There has to be more to living than being trapped and afraid.
Beyond
“Living,” Hyunjin tells her. “Living with you.”
Now: Every opportunity i get to talk about Gotta Run Soon by Suntheater, I take. One of my favorite lines in the story is at the very climax, where Chaewon is words away from making or breaking her plan to stop Hyeju from leaving. The author makes a lovely distinction: Tries to focus on Hyejoo, not losing her, but having her.
I usually stick to google doc annotations when it comes to commentary on my fics, but I think Sunlight Crew is a little deserving of a whimsical dreamwidth post. I'll still have an annotated gdoc for Sunlight Crew but here's some of my musings about it.
Of course there are spoilers! I wouldn't recommend reading this commentary until you've read the fic itself. I may or may not be ruining a lot of the experience with all these unnecessary words, but for those who have, welcome!.
What's a Found Family?
This question plagued me from the moment I got my Moonlight Party Fest exchange gift assignment. My giftee's exact words were "found family perhaps? nothing specific comes to mind at the moment" and at first it felt like an easy and flexible prompt, something I can go ham on.
But what is a found family? I had a bunch of prompts i tried to bring to life, but nothing seemed to capture its essence. Its essence being: long, involving multiple significant relationships with fleshed out characters, and born accidentally but kept on purpose. It's a hard prompt, and especially hard to cram when life throws things your way.
When CoViD Strikes
Now the worst thing life could've thrown at me 6 days from the fest deadline was the Omicron variant.
The Philippines has just experienced its highest surge of cases yet, and as of this writing there's still no end in sight. I don't know where I got it, but I ended up spending the first week of January isolated in my room and stuck in bed. And I still had work deadlines and fic deadlines to think about and I really wanted to deliver something good.
What happened with Sunlight Crew isn't a "when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade" anecdote. It's more "desperation is the key to innovation."
Maybe weakness was exactly what I needed to lose my inhibitions and just write. Write without the eloquence and method. Without the energy and its accompanying wit. Without metaphor and deep characterization.
Write with just my heart.
The Elevator Pitch
Surreal, but real. Vivid.
Sunlight Crew is: Found family except it's six girls in an institution that's bottling their life force as an elixir of youth and they're usually trapped in pods but sometimes people's pods are unlocked and sometimes they find each other.
Sunlight Crew is: The Matrix meets Elmer (chickens gain sentience) and is written by someone half awake.
Sunlight Crew is: surprisingly, something my beta liked.
For the unacquainted, my IRL beta is
When even I didn't know what exactly Sunlight Crew needed to make sense, she did. She understood the emotions of the rises and falls and knew what Hyunjin was looking for when I was too sick to figure it out.
Rises and Falls
In a different time and place, maybe it was called dreaming and waking up.
I will now talk about the story.
Hyunjin's world is cyclical: Rising from their pod-induced slumber, and falling into pod-induced dreams. There's a line in the fic that goes "see darkness and feel coldness and call it a nightmare" and this used to be all Hyunjin knew about rising. Falling was the "reality" but a difficult one - a hodgepodge of unrelated images and bizarre experiences, no true continuity.
Something compels Hyunjin to push against the limits of her nightmare and she discovers an opening - a literal one, brought to her by Heejin. This completely changes what it meant to rise - real sensations and real people, the true warmth of touch and sunlight on skin.
Now falling, no matter how bizarre, pales in comparison to real lived experience. Even with frail bodies and fear of the uncertain, Hyunjin takes to rising like a fish to water. Like she was built for it.
Something interesting to note for the Sunlight Crew is that, even in these rises, all they know comes from the pod falls. Music, trees, vocabulary - they talk among themselves of these bizarre things because it's all they have, aside from each other and the rooftop. They all have distinct ideas about themselves and the world, and form unique relationships to each other. Human nature that can't be sucked away.
Living
“Do you ever wonder about why we’re here?”
The girls live fragments of lifetimes in their falls. There's no clear distinction between imagination and memory, but there are snippets of reality. Trees, like Hyunjin sees from the railing of their rooftop. An engine. Rain.
Yet there's clearly something missing. Hyunjin sees the dullness of the pod falls and the limits of their rises and asks the question: What did it mean, to be living?
Is there something to taste, feel? Is there truth in the falls that she can find in the rises? She knows the six of them are real, but the rooftop can't be all there is. Can it?
Withering
It stings, everywhere. Even here it hurts.
Hyunjin's cyclical routine is shaken when Yerim disappears.
The story hints to threats from the very beginning: frail bodies and thin frames, streaks of gray in the hair, followed by fear of engines and being caught. But it's in Yerim's disappearance that Hyunjin confronts the dread of loss. This is best captured by her conversation with the fake doctor in the falls -- something my beta liked when I didn't.
When Yerim returns there's urgency: full head of gray, bony hands and frail bodies. Hyunjin tastes loss for the first time, and while Yerim was found, Hyunjin now feels the need for something more. There has to be more to living than being trapped and afraid.
Beyond
“Living,” Hyunjin tells her. “Living with you.”
Now: Every opportunity i get to talk about Gotta Run Soon by Suntheater, I take. One of my favorite lines in the story is at the very climax, where Chaewon is words away from making or breaking her plan to stop Hyeju from leaving. The author makes a lovely distinction: Tries to focus on Hyejoo, not losing her, but having her.
For Hyunjin, this is what Living ultimately becomes. To have Heejin, to have the Sunlight Crew. To have more than frail bodies and boundaries and glimpses of beyond. This is what my IRL beta pointed out to me, and finally the story made sense.
What is found family if not choosing to have each other?
In the end Hyunjin is propelled by love to reach for what's beyond falls and rises, and Heejin helps her both in dreams and reality.
Ending Thoughts
If they’ll have a good life beyond it. A real one.
I leave it up to the reader if they make it in the end. Sometimes it feels like cheating, sometimes it feels perfect. I think it's also an opportunity for readers to ask themselves the question: What does it mean, to be living?
Stripped of creative energy and confined to my own room for days, I asked myself this question too. My answer is this fic. Whatever that answer is.
What is found family if not choosing to have each other?
In the end Hyunjin is propelled by love to reach for what's beyond falls and rises, and Heejin helps her both in dreams and reality.
Ending Thoughts
If they’ll have a good life beyond it. A real one.
I leave it up to the reader if they make it in the end. Sometimes it feels like cheating, sometimes it feels perfect. I think it's also an opportunity for readers to ask themselves the question: What does it mean, to be living?
Stripped of creative energy and confined to my own room for days, I asked myself this question too. My answer is this fic. Whatever that answer is.