Back when I was a baby sone I had run across this SNSD cliche list. Being an avid soshi fanfic reader, I agreed that this happened in many of the fanfics. When I was writing Misunderstood, I clearly wanted to avoid as many of those cliches as possible. Now some I admit I would do down the line in the sequels but it's unexpected. So I'm blogging today to give you all some of my insights on how the Misunderstood universe was created. 

There may be spoilers from Misunderstood, Comfort, or Insight so if you haven't read them don't go beyond this point yet.

The biggest was for me to combat majority of the tropes was to limit who in SNSD I would put into this fanfiction. I love the girls and all but it's very hard to keep track of everybody from the group. That eliminated 11 of those cliches listed already. 

One of the major issues I have had with fanfics was how fast the characters fall in love. Yes, it's fantasy and anything goes in that. However, for Misunderstood, I knew from the get go that I would not have Yuri and Tiffany become girlfriends by the end. I wanted their relationship to grow from strangers into a friendship and help develop that bond. My decision back then unintentionally set myself up to write these sequels in the future. (Would you believe that I had no intention of continuing this fic after it was done? I will say it's thanks to some of you readers that I decided to test out the limits of my creativity and build a bigger world for the Misunderstood universe.) That eliminated another 6.5 of the cliches. The one I give a half for is the "don't get along" cliche. It's not that Tiffany didn't get along with Yuri in Misunderstood, it's just that she didn't give a care for her. Indifference was Tiffany's status quo. It explains why Tiffany didn't completely blow her off but she wasn't part of Yuri's legion of groupies either.

Which brings me the "most popular" cliche. Yuri I put in that position but it was for different reasons. Between Yuri and Tiffany, Tiffany is actually more well off. Yuri's popularity was actually because of her personality. She genuinely was nice to everyone and did very well in all the activities she was involved in due to hard work.  

The last question would be, why high school? Well I know a lot of the readers were much younger than me at the time I wrote Misunderstood. It's easy to relate to high school settings since many of us went through it or know about it. However, given the fact how I ended Misunderstood, I wanted readers to be able to imagine themselves what might happen to the characters in the next year since it took place in Yulti's junior year.

Overall, I am happy that I challenged myself to write this and avoid tropes and cliches as much as possible. Of course some stuck through but it was fun to do.

So I challenge you writers out there to see if you can do the same or if you have see how many cliches you've avoided. It might be a fun writing exercise for you too.