afflicted / bts

AUTHOR'S NOTE / Q&A.

hi
yall we did it!! we reached the end of afflicted & DAMN does it feel wack

afflicted is probably the lengthiest and most high maintenance fic i've ever written and completed. originally, i began writing it just for the hell of it with really no end-goal or expectations for it. i did have one goal in mind, however, and it was that i wanted afflicted to be a little more complex than a murder mystery—and that's why i focused so heavily on characterization, relationships (both the good and bad sides), and protagonist/antagonist imbalances (that's where wonchol kicked in; i'll explain more about him later). hopefully i reached it🤩

but the feedback and (hella entertaining) comments i've received seriously made afflicted the story it now is. basically, you readers are AMAZING and you helped me
complete this story with how involved you guys are. i've really got to thank you sincerely for sticking with afflicted and reading it out til the end :)
(also u guys are fkin hilarious like i'll read a comment on a paragraph where jimin's gettin beat up and it'll b like "u think ur safe and then ur protein shakes betray u" or smth and i'll hoLLER)

i'll jump into more of the sappy shit later but first onto the q&a!! be warned for long ass explanations🤧✊

1 ■ WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO WRITE AFFLICTED?

yall remember the gif in the very first chapter, the preface one
so funny story literally all it took for me to start writing this book was to look at that gif n be like "yo. wot if tae had wings like a demon hahaha" & then go "....shit that ain't half bad an idea" and so yeah, thus afflicted was born!

yeah it's kind of anticlimatic
but what inspired the themes of afflicted was mainly bts's wings concept—specifically boy meets evil, the short films, and blood sweat & tears—, and hesse's "demian" (the book that wings branches off of). i'll explain more of this in the next question.

2 ■ WHAT ARE THE PARALLELS BETWEEN THE DEMIAN/BS&T CONCEPTS AND AFFLICTED?

/cracks fingers alright SO

the most obvious parallel is the use of abraxas. in gnostic philosophy, abraxas has a pretty complex meaning/conceptual appearance, mostly being used to represent evil; in demian, hermann hesse expands on the concept of abraxas, which loosely inspired afflicted's version of abraxas and the other world. instead of using it as a symbol, however, i used abraxas as an easily hatable antagonist instead.

as for bts's wing concepts themselves, i focused somewhat on the whole "boy meets evil" concept (which is pretty self-explanatory), and the short films influenced many of the member's roles in the book specifically. for instance—yoongi's "first love" short film featured some sort of a store (and, guess what, a broken door!); on more thematic lines, taehyung's "stigma", jimin's "lie", and namjoon's "reflection" inspired a lot of the concepts and struggles i focused on through their respective characterizations in afflicted.

the mv for "blood sweat & tears" also played a role in the whole taehyung-as-a-demon concept, but it was only on a visual sense hrfnnfnf i just thought tae looked hella cool as a demon

(there's also a bit of a parallel from "the ones who walk away from the omelas" if you squint—for instance, taehyung being the one to sacrifice his life to keep the world in balance, aka the caged boy.)

3 ■ HOW MUCH PLANNING DID AFFLICTED TAKE TO WRITE?

uh
so another funny story
most of my planning was done at odd hours of the night on purple sticky notes. like i'd wake up randomly and be like "damn that's a good conflict trope" or smth and i'd jot it down and yeah!! 20+ sticky notes later here we are