thank you for asking ;u; the exos on the just some guy spectrum:

just some guy-est of the bunch: kyungsoo—but i think it's partly on purpose while also for both impostor-ish syndrome and privacy reasons (see him regularly denying that he sings, acts, cooks etc. despite doing it all extremely well). he is an actor after all, you cannot trust them! (evidence: kyungsoo having the just some guy vibes down to perfection.) it's similar for jongdae! though i think it's more of a carefully constructed and meticulously upheld exterior for him (he is such a private person!) than for kyungsoo whose vibes are half-intended, half by accident. the funny thing about jongdae is that he might very much be just some guy beneath that exterior (idk if that makes sense but... yeah).

yearns to be and/or thinks of himself as just some guy (in a negative way) but hindered by his inherent cuteness: minseok. he's both very self-assured and to a degree self-sufficient (see him often enjoying himself in the company of the exos while literally sitting at the side, it feels like he's often in conversation with himself? remember all those ladder scenes of him making noises while eating, they're not meant for anyone else! it's a monologue, he enjoys the role of a more or less distant spectator. i'm so bad at explaining this, forgive me) but often seems to seek approval to an extent that negates this? okay i feel like i lost the thread here, i cannot explain it! but minseok is decidedly Not just some guy.

look like just some guy but the second they move/emote/speak it all falls apart: sehun (he's so weird, it's wonderful), yixing (strives too hard for the exceptional and undoable, plus also very weird).

would be considered and perfect at being just some guy if he never left his house or showed up to social functions: baekhyun.

isn't just some guy and very upfront about it: jongin (once you get past the shyness, he's this strange mix of incredibly silly and just as incredibly mature, and his matureness makes him exempt from being just some guy in my opinion).

too tall (and impulsive) to ever be considered just some guy: chanyeol.

the opposite of kyungsoo (and to some extent similar to minseok), as in, could never be just some guy even if he tried: junmyeon.

🙈

hi! this is such an interesting and difficult topic. as a reader, i think it depends a lot on your ability/willingness to ignore certain things? we probably all have certain pet peeves, depending on what we're knowledgable about and familiar with! and of course the delivery of a story matters, as do the expectations we have for them. someone writing fantasy is different from writing fic set in a realistic world. but even then it's fiction... with fanfic especially i don't expect anyone to do the kind of research someone might do for a traditionally published book!

the question probably is: does that truly take away from your enjoyment of the fic? you have a lot more power as a reader to ignore certain things than you might think! and still it makes me anxious when e.g. someone writes about a characer being bitten by a cat and it's treated as a regular non-threatening injury that doesn't require medical attention. (cat bites are dangerous, please see a doctor if you can.)
then--are they perpetuating actual harm? also depends on how popular their fic is.
in how far unconsciously do and consciously should we let fiction inform our opinions and actions? this is a highly debated topic, and i think you should find your own answer to this. the one thing i find worrisome at times is that fanfic is most often inspired by other fanfic... it's a weird circle, and we repeat things we have seen in others' writing to a great extent. sometimes it's a matter of wanting/needing to fit in and it being how things are done. think about a lot of tropes playing out a certain way in the majority of works. think about smut--there definitely is one "official", or maybe more like... traditional way to go about it, like it's some kind of secret code or language you are supposed to pick up on and that readers expect you to speak. and in this case it again is mostly a matter of--do you have expertise in this? do you see your experiences reflected? is it fun anyway, and what do you want from smut, and in how far do you want it to deviate from (your bodily, experienced) reality? and not to mention the writer's intent. and all these can coexist with the fact that most people do not bother to learn where prostates are located and that they're in finger's reach (and even without penetration!). is this annoying? oh yeah! does it do any harm? not so sure tbh lmao but probably also yeah. would it hurt writers or their fics to not write prostates as if they're deep inside someone's body? absolutely not. but again, what you make of this is your decision! what worries me personally more than people getting stuff wrong is--when someone "violates" this traditional "code" by adhering to biological realities that also align with their own experiences... and then getting harassed over it--for writing it the "wrong" way.
i picked this example because it also is something that few people receive adequate education on--for people who (want to) have certain kinds of sex, fanfic might actually be the one source, next to porn. idk about you but my sex ed was firmly concentrating on basically pregnancy 101 for cishet m/f couples (and even that's a Lot of sex ed for some people). it's of course not a singular fanfic writer's responsibility to provide sex ed for anyone! my issue lies more with the fanfic smut culture itself i guess that is unquestioningly reproduced--and does sometimes also feed into (cis)heterosexist stereotypes about men who have sex with men (e.g. the absurd focus on penetrative anal sex). i am a gay man with a fundamentally different lived reality from this, so this is something that--while i don't see it as overly harmful in the grand scheme of things--does annoy me and distress me at times, mostly because nearly all smut shows me that there's no room for gay men like me? as you can see this dips into the lack of having one's existence acknowledged, so somewhat existential questions now. it's a very complicated topic for sure!! so yeah sure i sometimes wish people who dedicate a lot of their time to writing smut would at least type some things into google once and look at the first two or three reddit threads on it, if they don't want to waste a lot of time.

all that said--i'm probably on the same page as you. if i bring up medical conditions, i will at least do the minimum research (skim one or two articles from professional resources) unless it is a lived reality of mine (and even then i might do it). i wouldn't think of this as a reflection of someone's skills or dedication or anything--and i wouldn't judge anyone for skipping this, time is precious, fanfic is for fun--but more of my personal level of comfort to make sure i don't have glaringly huge issues in my fic. i'm probably more on the overly cautious side of things here! i once looked up statistics for the most sold cooking oils in sk for a throwaway mention, and i'm like navel-deep into researching seals for a selkie (= fantasy!!) fic. i think being both a slice of life writer and someone who recognises that it is fiction but also can't and doesn't want to separate their politics from their writing informs how i feel about research. i do feel a sense of responsibility to do my best not to write things that could cause harm or perpetrate certain -isms, and also try to write things as close to life as i can, although no one would come and bug me about the details of my slice of life vs. something with an effect on actual people that i would definitely need and want to un- and relearn.

that said--it sounds like you could use a reminder that it's just fanfic? if it gets to the point where you stop writing because of it, maybe you could just use a simple disclaimer at the start of your fic and address these things. just say you're not a medical professional and ask your readers for their suspension of disbelief! i value that kind of honesty, and i think it helps connect with readers. maybe you could also stick to simpler concepts, a lot of fiction glosses over the details of medical things and focuses on the effects and the emotions--that's usually what we're here for! like, don't overdo the research, it's probably not necessary, especially when you feel so cornered by your lack of accuracy (that very few people might even notice). you're not writing for a medically educated audience! people should not judge your work by that alone! your fanfic is probably about something else, at the core. maybe you're focusing more on achieving perfection (which is... not something you should be striving for, there are so many more things we get from writing fanfic imo and you will always disappoint yourself by not achieving it) than enjoying the writing process? sometimes, i take this as a sign that i should find a different way to achieve whatever i want characters to go through. depending on how you write, this could mean a lot of issues with a plotted out draft of course... but it's still worth considering. another solution would of course be to get a sensitivity reader whose personal experiences could also be worked into your fic, but idek if people really do that with fanfic, and it's a lot to ask from someone without compensating them for their time and labour.

it's really about where you personally draw the line--and whether your readers happen to be the kind of reader who knows more about the topic you're writing about than you do.
as readers, i personally think we should extend as much grace as possible towards writers, always, in most regards (really harmful or violent stereotypes aside), and concentrate on the things we like about a fic or someone's writing as well as keep criticism of this kind out of the comments (and generally everywhere fanfic writers would see it, unless explicitly asked for). and lastly simply move on to other writers if we find ourselves repeatedly uncomfortable with someone's writing!

i am SO sorry this answer turned out to be this long (i should probably pay you for reading this...). hope you found at least one thing to take away from it ;;; and tysm for asking!!

hi! i'm somewhat sure that they're active on other accounts in other fandoms too... but i'm not going to chase them down. ty for this message and your suggestion, i was actually considering it last night! but i think most if not all of these services are geared towards students/academic writing, and the free version shows that it found Something but not what (very much suspect it's the "original" fic). from what i gathered they also have a 150k limit per month which isn't very helpful. and lastly (that's not what you suggested, i know!) i am not paying money for this, on principle, especially not when the chances are so slim any service would actually find something.

hi, thank you so much for this, i appreciate it!! let me take the opportunity to say this here but simply talking about these things really helps me work through them and i'm mostly undisturbed by them unless directly confronted with them--the upside of a patchy memory!! plus i'm already cutting back on the time i'm sinking into this (at least the trying to look for sources part, but i also hope the need to talk about it will go away soon). it's also very frustrating work and thus not as appealing anymore to the jumping down the rabbit hole part of me as the first few discoveries were, so that's kind of a natural limit that i'm not going to fight! it's actually more likely i'll drop this entirely soon, it's too unrewarding on a lot of levels.

so first off i'm not one of those people who noticed the varying writing styles despite reading most of their works, and also didn't give any thought to--as a friend pointed out--the many fics with very intense themes and high word counts they published within a very short span of time. that's also because i'm a very slow writer and honestly cannot tell what's doable for other writers!

what tipped me off was that i recognised one of the books they plagiarised, i've read it several years ago and found it very strange that they didn't mention the book in the author's notes at all. since this was one of the more heavily edited fics, written from a different pov than the original and i didn't have the book around for comparison, it just left a very bitter taste in my mouth. couldn't let it go though so i tried searching for some of their fics by basically googling keywords? that was not successful at all but i did find the folktale in creature of ash and twilight that was copied off a website with only minor edits and again no mention of the source in the author's note. when vargavinter posted their fic i knew it was theirs from just the pairing/theme (they often had these deeply traumatised main characters...) and i read some of it for curiosity's sake? and honestly i cannot tell you why but i pasted a line of the throwback into google and found that several paragraphs of an atlantic article about war photographers were copied&pasted, again only minorly edited, into the fic. to be honest this was as far as i thought this went! just a bunch of aus without mentioning what inspired them, and a folktale and article pasted into their work. i kept talking to some friends about this though (sorry for annoying you all, and thank you for not telling me to shut up ;;) and then somehow pasted the first few lines of their vargavinter fic into google... and found the website of the translator i linked in the doc.
and that's basically it! i kept pulling up fics and pasting lines into google and for most of their recent ones, i found the actual sources. some were (and are) hard to find due to very heavy editing and rewriting--but it's still plagiarism if you rewrite most of a book just to suit your fanfic needs instead of writing an au inspired by something that also mentions it as the inspiration, like everyone else does :(

really the only tip i have is read books? and listen to your gut feeling! also maybe to not treat fanfics like something that only exists for consumption but honour the work behind them. i now think that it's very strange they never (if i remember correctly) talked about the fic in the author's notes; you'd think someone had things to say when they're repeatedly writing characters working through traumas as deep as the ones in the original works they liked to plagiarise? like my friend pointed out: that takes a lot out of someone to write. there's frankly no need to be afraid of every fanfic being plagiarised since there were so, so many warning signs here! i think the trust we place in fanfic writers is something very precious that should not be harmed by rare occurrences like this one. (also there's trust i'm placing in you right now not to be jmc and ask for a reverse manual on how to plagiarise works so they're undetectable)