Warning: long. Don't come into my inbox or replies just to tell me it's long. I prefer to only have a friendly dialogue about this and maybe learn something I don't know about Serendipity.
I know there's the element of RM saying he'd written it based on a friend's relationship, and people seem to/can take that in different ways.
The first way is that he was using 'based on a friend' as an excuse the same way people say 'asking for a friend' when they're really asking for themselves. The reason why I'm entertaining this is because idols who write music do this all the time. They cover for their own experiences by pretending that those experiences are someone else's. Another similar thing idols do is say that something (usually a song they wrote or a certain performance) is 'for the fans'/dedicated to the fans when really it's for their significant other. Both these things are extremely common (and in fact, if you believe any two idols are dating, it makes more sense to accept this idea than the one I'll discuss in the next paragraph.) I mention this was because RM could have totally written this song about his own experience with someone and just transposed it onto someone else. There's also the fact that RM wasn't the only or even main writer on the published version of the song, so other writers could have been writing from their experiences as well.
The second way is that he meant what he said: the song was based on a friend's relationship. Who that friend is we may never know but, many people (particularly Jikook shippers/supporters/what have you) think that this friend is Jimin and that the relationship in question is Jimin and JK. The idea being that it fits with the common narrative of Jikook's 'love story' and that the song was given to Jimin to perform. On the other hand, the "friend" could very well be Slow Rabbit himself lol since he's credited as the main writer (if I'm not mistaken) and, again, songwriters tend to write music about themselves (this falls in line with the first way of looking at things, thus making it even more plausible.)
As for what I think, I tend to fall into the first camp, and there's a couple reasons for this -
First, the first way is just so much more common than the second way that logic would just dictate that it's likely written from the songwriter's perspective and RM's using his friend as a guise. Please keep in mind that I'm not 100% on this because I'm not sure what else the writers have said about the process of writing Serendipity, I'm just going on that one statement from RM.
Second, I don't even know when Serendipity was written. You could say it was written for Love Yourself Her and thus was written in the months before the album's release, but sometimes songs written years and years ago get revamped and released on new albums. I'm not saying it wasn't written in 2017, I just don't know that it was. I'm using 2017 as a marker because that's when I noticed Jimin and JK like that.
To segue off of that point, and, this is purely speculation based on what I've seen with my eyes/heard with my ears (that is, not theories on what might have happened), Jimin and JK didn't seem too different to me until Jimin's birthday 2017/Tokyo at the very earliest (though I mainly feel like 2018 was really the time they seemed to take what seemed like a mutual crush further than I've seen with typical friendships.) Because of this, it's even harder for me to see how Serendipity could be about them. The timing just doesn't add up. I say this as no offense to anyone who thinks they've only ever been just friends and no offense to anyone who thinks they started dating in 2015. (full offense to anyone who seriously thinks they somehow got legally married in 2017 though. like how?)
Anyway, I'm curious about what other people think or if I'm missing something.
stormborns
prguitarman
titsay
origamiaround
izzy806
