matomon

soulmates in seoul | danharu & dankyung, terrace house au, G, wip
❀ themes of social media toxicity, surveillance and public/private persona
❀ love triangle, childhood friends, canon references

I'm hoping continuing to be excited about this little story will help me actually reach an end with it lmao. That being said, I am putting an extra amount of effort into the fake instagrams (case in point) and want to ramble about my thought process for all the choices I made with their usernames and such.

Eun Dan-oh/damdidan
Okay this is an unabashed LOONA reference LOL, and I wonder if anyone will catch it. It's from Why Not's di-dam-dam-di-dam refrain; but also, I felt like it suited Dan-oh to have a cutesy name like this.

Also, the profiles obviously aren't meant to mimic how real-time profiles work, but I wanted them to carry a sense of time, to get an idea of what the characters are going through personally, if that makes sense? Dan-oh's profile isn't super note-worthy for plot, but I had fun conveying the passage of time through her hair length. Dan-oh just looks like short hair Hye-yoon to me, but au Dan-oh has long hair (like the Dan-oh in the epilogue; there's that BTS photo from the show in the profile too lol. I like my little crumbs). The first/recent picture is Yeri though afdhjfkajf but it had the Vibe of au Dan-oh's personality to me, and she looks similar enough to pass, I think?!

Unrelated but Hye-yoon in that blue bucket hat is EVERYTHING!!!!!! gf vibes

Baek Kyung/bxxkxxng
This was just me copying Lee Jae-wook's instagram username. Personalitywise LJW is far apart from BKG, but his ig persona kind of fits what I think this au's Kyung would be like. BKG is professional and private, so his profile is a mix of model photos and staged "private" photos. The one concession is the last/oldest picture, with which I want to indicate a past relationship huhu... IDKY I'm giving so much dark backstory elements to BKG when Haru is supposed to be my male lead. THE B-HERO SYNDROME CURSE!

Lee Do-hwa/ehhdhj
I read somewhere that Korean users come up with their username by typing out the english keys equivalent to the korean keyboard to spell out their name. That's why most of them look like keysmashes to non-Koreans. It's a cool idea, so I used it for Do-hwa 도화

Yeo Ju-da/juda_1184
Typically, I had the most fun making her profile (and Dan-oh's). YEO JU-DA RIGHTS. Hunting for the right photos in Naeun's profile was pretty hard though, their personalities are so different. I want Ju-da to be professional & private like Kyung, but in a more newbie way. She's just starting to be aware of having a public persona; she's still used to being a no-name nobody from outside Seoul. So her pictures are a mix of normal "pretty girl" and modelling photos, with no thought to how to arrange those.

Ju-da having almost as many followers as Kyung is meant to be both a nod to how models generally have a lot of people thirst-following them, but also a reference to maybe antis following her.

Ha-ru/ha__ru
The New Guy <3 lol I also had fun making his profile; he was also another hard one to make. Rowoon is COMPLETELY different from Haru, it's crazy. In the end, I tried to strike a balance between clueless user & someone with a good eye/artist. I debated on making Haru a total professional artist profile, but tbh that doesn't fit him imo. He's just not that calculated (which you do need to be to maintain a portfolio ig).

The first/recent picture is a teaser lol, to the premise. I spent SO LONG editing that adfhkajf and now it's barely noticeable (which I like too, because it looks Authentic... but readers aint gonna squint, ya kno? sigh). It reads Soulmates in Seoul and Terrace House in Korean at the bottom... I hope someone notices one day, but I won't hold my breath ^^;