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A FEW WORDS OF INTRODUCTION TO THE CLOUDS DYNASTY
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Good evening everyone, or maybe good morning, or afternoon. Okay, let's just say « Hi », it'll be easier. First of all, thank you very much for clicking on the title of this story, I'm very grateful for your interest and I do sincerely hope you will enjoy it !
But before I leave you to your reading, I would just like to maybe give you some informations about this story along with the warnings, if you don't mind. It won't be long, I promise. It's just to let you know what this is about and what you're going to find in it.
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So, first of all, this work is an Alternative Universe happening in our days, 2020, in Seoul, South Korea. To make it short, this is my second « Modern AU » idea, with Itsy Bitsy (on ) being the first. But while Itsy Bitsy is, if I may say, a completely new story and has nothing to do with the Warrior Baek Dong Soo original drama, « The Clouds Dynasty » is a bit different. It's a Modern AU which follows the canon until a certain point (aka, episode 29), and which after that goes full "canon divergent". I indeed tried, as much as I could, to recontextualize the drama and to see how it could fit into our modern days, with a similar storyline and characters keeping their names and everything. You'll know everything about it in details in the chapters, have no worries.
Therefore, I did the best I could to replace the characters and situations into a modern setting, and because of that, this story isn't a reincarnation story at all. It's just, broadly speaking, the same story as Warrior Baek Dong Soo, but with the question « what if it happened during our modern days ? » at the core of it. The story and its different episodes appears mostly under the form of flashbacks. I do admit I made some changes regarding the original plot (okay, mostly regarding episode 29 and its ending) for the purpose and consistency of the story, but I hope it won't be too disturbing.
Honestly, it was supposed to be a one-shot. I swear it was. It was supposed to be maybe 5k words long and just in one chapter. But then I felt I needed to add some details in order to explain some things, and three weeks and details and pages later, that thing came out. I...do not understand. I'm very sorry. And this AU was planned at first to be much longer (approximately the lenght, or maybe just a little bit shorter, of the Gwishins), so I'm quite happy I was able to condense it into just four chapters. Maybe I'll write little additional chapters or one-shots later, if I can find some ideas.
It is divided into two long chapters/acts (so a kind of « two-shots »), each one being made of two parts as well (because they were really too long otherwise, I was afraid a 40 pages chapter was going to be hard to swallow). The chapters are centered around a specific character's POV, and alternate between flashbacks and actual scene happening in the present time. It is happening ten years (I know, again) after the end of episode 29. The first chapter, or Act, « The King », is about Woon. The second act, « The Knight », is about Dong Soo. Unlike my other long stories such as Itsy Bitsy or The Gwishins, there are no OCs POVs in this, mostly because there are only two parts.
The title of this story is a reference to Woon's name, meaning « cloud », and to the fact that he is the leader of a mafia gang in this, therefore building a « dynasty » of his own. The chapters titles are references to chesspieces. I watched « The Queen's Gambit » and it set my brain on fire, so here we are for the homage. The titles of each part correspond with a step in the formation of clouds.
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I did my best as well to keep the personnalities of the characters as close as they were in the original drama, but since I'm absolutely not sure I didn't go OOC sometimes, because I had to do some adaptations and adjustments due to the modern setting, and since the perception of the characters is not quite the same for every reader, I let you be the judge of that. I hope nevertheless that you will like the way they are depicted !
This story is mostly about mafia (and romance). It will contains graphic depictions of violence, mentions of sexism, mild sexual content (for once), some swearing, morally ambigous characters and a pinch of dry/sarcastic/cynical humor. I did as many researchs as I could on mafias in south korea and in the world, the way they are organized and hierarchized, to keep the story as immersive as possible, but I'm not an expert and should you ever see a mistake, please do not hesitate to point it out to me ! Same thing about grammar/spelling mistakes : this work was translated from french (my native langage) to english, and any corrections about words or sentences are very much welcome (I translate myself, so...) !
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This story was inspired by, again, a lot of things, most of them being movies and TV series including : The K2 (k-drama with Ji Chang Wook, and a formidable female villain) and Healer (still with Ji Chang Wook), Kill Bill (O-Ren Ishii), Romeo + Juliet (Baz Luhrmann), The Goldfinch (the book by Donna Tartt), the serie Killing Eve (Villanelle is my new obsession), as well as Matrix (Trinity) and WandaVision.
I would also like to dedicate this story to two content creators :
1°) The tumblr owner LifeInBlack. Their tumblr was deleted like maybe four or three years ago, I can't really remember, but they were quite active between 2014 and 2016, if I'm not wrong. They were roleplaying as Yeo Woon, and they were the first to come up with the idea of him, as a assassin, in a modern setting. They used to write verses with other tumblrs and headcanons, and I liked them a lot, they were really interesting. For example, they are the one who wrote about Heuksa Chorong being a kind of mafia, and hiding behind a public face, as a firm. They also had added a lot of details and made their world very immersive and fitting for Woon. Their Woon was a cold, blood-thirsty, ruthless, ambitious and powerful CEO, avoiding any attachment or relationship other than for business and power because of his violent upbriging (it was in fact more complicated than just that, but that's for the main pitch). This story owns them like really big, and if you're interested in reading some of their verses/headcanons, I kept a bunch of them ;).
2°) The fanfiction author Pettey, on the BTS fandom, who introduced me to the expression « I'm chill if you're chill » which I still think to this day is the most romantic thing I've ever heard in my twenty-six years of existence. It's all hers/his/theirs. For the ones of you who are in the BTS fandom, their writing is both spectacular and incredibly funny, and their characterization remarkable.
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Okay, I think that's pretty much it. I wrote this introduction because I didn't want to submerge the chapters in notes (for once XD), and I thought it would be better this way and more pleasant to read. The chapters will only contains in the notes some songs I used as a soundrack while or for writing the story, and, at the end, some informations about details and things mentioned in this story.
Now that you know everything, I wish you a very good reading, and I really hope that this short AU will please you !
