To continue on from my previous thought: one of the great beauties in creating things is knowing that you no longer claim ownership of that thing or its meaning once you gift it to the world to consume. Pixar and Ghibli are such wonderful examples of this. Spirited Away is ostensibly a story about a girl finding her way home from a spirit world, but underneath it's about the quiet violence of growing up, about what we lose when we stop being children and start to see the world in all its ugliness. Ponyo is a sweet little fish-girl fairytale on the surface, and then you sit with it and realize it's about the terror and wonder of loving someone so much you'd upend the natural order for them. Wall-E opens as a lonely robot love story but it's really asking what's even left of us when we've outsourced every inconvenience of being alive. The Incredibles pretends to be a superhero romp and ends up being about the ache of mediocrity, of being extraordinary in a world that needs you to be small. And Toy Story is just about watching the people you love grow up and out of needing you, dressed up as talking toys so we can actually bear to feel it. See the thing is, none of those movies ever sit you down and say any of that out loud. They just let the story be the story, and trust that whatever you bring to it will meet them somewhere in the middle. That’s the reason I fell in love with stories in the first place, regardless of the medium it's told in - putting ideas and themes out there and gifting the reader agency to make of them what they will through their own lived experience and emotional vocabulary. (For my own work, for example - one's own understanding of what it means to be human, messy and trying especially when the world tries to jam us into boxes.) Even with kpop fanfiction. Especially with kpop fanfiction, because I really believe there's no subject matter that's inherently too crude or too frivolous for real artistic ambition if you care enough to try!