thank you soo much for the kind words <33 honestly though i don’t think what i have to offer is anything special or new, but i did my best to explain how i see it as well as i could.

i contended with how to answer this for a while tbh, bc i've seen these conversations come up before on twt and some people get very personally offended and outright nasty by strangers' individual perceptions of these guys when, at the end of the day, we don't know these idols. like as much insight as we have to them and how personal their vlogs and everything we're shown may seem, the surveilled self can never be authentic (even if they themselves aren't intentionally hiding anything) and no matter what, there's gonna be so much we just don't know abt them as individuals and their relationship.

and i think it’s bc of that that the main two ways people go abt writing minsung fic is to either a) treat them as face claims and write straight up ocs w different names and everything, or b) reduce the boys to one to two watered down stereotypes in order to assign premade tropes they already know they like onto them

the first is something i totally see the reason behind, but it’s definitely not why i’m invested in minsung fic (the delusions dictate everything….), and the second is just. hmm. will not get into that essay today!!

so while there are some traits i definitely feel are integral to minsung at their cores, i don’t like to have them as points existing on their own when i write. as in, don’t focus on it as a trope or trait or single word description but show how they can retain their personal qualities regardless of the situation they’ve been placed in..

it's no so much don'ts, but the easiest way i do this is reading something back and asking myself ‘but would he do this?’ like it’s very basic but that’s really how it goes, and not just for minsung either. eg. i think changb ends up w the shorter end of the stick a lot and gets boiled down to snarky mean gay friend life advisor (and felix too tbh) but if i read him calling minho a useless gay bitch or something my first and immediate thought is ‘he would NOTTT say that shit at all!!’ and i stop reading and the same principle applies to writing.

for me one of the biggest appeals of minsung fic (and rpf in general too) is how it relies entirely on their characters and dynamic, no matter what universe you throw them in bc that’s all you have. like if it isn’t canon compliant irl fic then there’s no other canon the way fiction fandoms have to follow, so you can have minsung be minsung in any scenario as long as you keep them themselves and don’t wipe away what makes them unique to fit the au you've placed them in. and i like to see how i can twist the tropes or aus themselves around into scenarios that minsung would find themselves in bc of the steps they’d take based on what we know of them.

minsung are genuinely so bonkers insane and weird abt each other that i don’t think anyone could come up w something that’s not as crazy as the shit they end up doing irl anyway, so for minsung as a unit i find it comes easier once i focus on characterizing them separately first. so then it’s like ok, jisung is charismatic and confident, loves to make the people he loves happy but is also so lazy and enjoyes being doted on, and minho is very self assured re: himself and his weirdness, assertive and loves to be annoying on purpose, but cute without even trying and soo quick to fluster when jisung’s babying him. and the way they play around w each other like that, on equal footing every time, comes from who they are and what they need and how they fill that for each other. and that can present itself through different actions based on the setting, but the fundamentals to their relationships will remain the same.

hope that all made sense!! and i highly suggest looking into tips and resources for writing in general as well bc it’s always helpful when you want to and enjoy working on the craft itself. tbf though, i do think there’s a difference between good writing and good fic, bc yes many times fics can be works of art on par w published literature, but they can fall flat as fic if characterization is skipped over by molding them to the point where they retain no original traits, but are able to fit into a compellingly written narrative. so good writing, but no longer the guys you’d want to be reading abt, which is what makes fic fun in the first place, and why i really try my best to capture the complexity of their personalities and dynamic as best as i can based on what we’re able to glean from minsung and what the kids have to say abt them themselves.