loaded questions here anon…

solboo thesis:
the premise of solboo is already enough to be a good ship, right? meeting when they were really young and enduring hardships as some of the youngest in their group, sharing the grueling experiences of being trainees and eventually debuting, all while being the two of the main “faces” of seventeen, promoting so hard, trying to make a name for themselves. that wild, hard and fast, head first falling in love is already so good. they are a textbook friends to lovers epic love story, even, to me, a textbook queer love story – falling in love with your best friend when you’re still learning who you are and suddenly this person who’s so important to you is also waking up all kinds of questions in you, ones about attraction and sexuality and love and it’s all so new that it can’t help but bubble over and maybe it’s obvious to everyone around you but you don’t know or you don’t care because you have this tunnel vision, and this passion, and this shared dream, and it consumes you and it’s so beautiful.
but what really makes solboo good is how full of contrasts they are. they have been making space for each other from the day they met. really, i think the thing they probably have most in common is how stubborn they are, and then also how hard they love. but on paper there’s not that much to them that’s a stereotypical match, i was actually trying to write about this exact thing last night, which is how i landed on the line, “one would not know the song of the trees until the wind passes through the leaves.” what i mean to say is, they’re not an obvious match. it’s that they love each other that makes their love so interesting. how could we know that the leaves make such a beautiful sound if there was nothing to make them sing? solboo are like that to me. we only know what a perfect match they are because of the way they come together. they’re this devoted, blazing, unlikely love, and out of it we get so much goodness, we get sides of them that we don’t see with other people. they are soft for each other but also teasing, and quick witted, their bodies are attuned to each other, god just the softest touch from seungkwan on hansol’s arm or shoulder or ear is so learned. so much of it is in the history. i can’t even fully put it into words, try as i might.
and so it’s not only their origins that’s so good but also the way they look now, years down the road. hansol has said it before but he said it again at the encore the other night, when seungkwan joked about what color hair looks best on him even though he knows hansol thinks it’s dark/black, and hansol still replied and said “do whatever you want,” and in a way it is teasing, but you also know how wholeheartedly hansol believes that, and wants that for seungkwan. he wants seungkwan to follow his heart, to live the life the way he wants to live. i think that’s what keeps them coming back together over and over again. they know each other like no other, and maybe sometimes their hearts or desires take them in different places as they follow their different interests or have their different habits, but they always converge again. that’s all they know how to do.

god anon honestly i could write pages and pages of a solboo thesis. every fic i write about them is a different iteration of it.

jeongcheol thesis:
god jeongcheol… honestly the one jc i wrote kinda has my whole thesis laid out in it, but that’s more of a take on where they are now, in their thirties, as opposed to where they began. sometimes i want to explode with the intensity of what they must have been feeling when they were starting seventeen, seungcheol who’d worked so hard for his dream for so long, who found himself with this ragtag team of kids, who would put himself through hell to get them to the finish line, even knowing that finish line was really just their beginning. in jeonghan he had a rock, and an equal, someone who could absorb all of his emotionality when he was so busy sucking up everyone else’s. even though they were the older of the kids when they first met, when i think about it, they were so young. they probably also had that same giddiness, that rush of attraction, i imagine it must have felt so good for them to lower their walls and act their age with each other, instead of always needing to be in that position of hyung/leadership. i think jeongcheol make each other giddy, maybe even reckless, and it’s such a thrilling part of their ship knowing that they’re both people who thrive on having control of the situations they’re in (though in entirely different ways, but especially in their work).
jeonghan might be an island to visit for all his members but especially to coups, who needs those calming waves, and who has been so enamored with everything jeonghan is from the moment he met. i think that’s also one of the best things about them. the way they love each other is so good and pure and clear. they want to do everything together, even if it’s just sitting by a fire to cook up some meat and talk over a beer. there’s a comfort of them that shows the mark of best friends for over a decade, and i often find that more romantic than anything. like the thought of, oh, after all this time, you’re still by my side, you’ve seen every side of me and you’ve been okay with all of them
but there’s also the tension that they have, seungcheol’s willingness to put others before him, or to let his anxiety win over, and jeonghan’s evasiveness, his avoidance, his ability to worm every emotion out of the people around him before talking about his own. that’s kind of where i wound up when i wrote the leap. even though i find them both to be deeply romantic, i could also see them being the kind of people willing to put love in the back seat compared to all the other things they want to accomplish or do. especially because they have the kind of love that is self-evident, that they convince themselves they don’t need to talk about because it’s obvious how different it is, how stark it is. they could argue that they don’t need to say it at all, because of course he knows. but when they do say it, it’s earth shattering, world shifting. actually, it’s the words themselves that matter the most, that’s “the leap,” when they both push aside everything about their love that might scare them and decide to make it real