wow. ok had to enjoy the post-read afterglow for a week before getting down and dirty and putting my thoughts into words but! yes i wanna talk about all the details and characters i loved. ty have a seat ♡
i ate this up. we get major story-driving characters who are complex and morally ambiguous, wc makes the story so gripping. they possess motives that are deeply justifiable from their own perspectives. nothing felt arbitrary. every action felt like it came from survival, trauma, desperation or pressure from a system that was built to chew people up.
that's what makes the story esp tragic to me. so many of these kids were failed by the world long before they started making their own morally fucked up choices. they were failed by the adults, institutions and systems that should've protected them, and instead were left to survive in a world that kept teaching them that people were disposable.
i particularly want to point out the nuanced writing of heeseong. despite her role as a major antagonist, i found myself completely sympathizing with her. had the story been told from her perspective, this could easily have been tagged a tragedy. she was a victim too, raised and shaped by a cruel world run by shit adults and abusive figures in positions of power. while i am ultimately satisfied with her ending (because ofc i was rooting for je-oh), a part of me still deeply aches for the tragedy of her character arc. she became a product of the very violence that was inflicted upon her.
and then there's je-oh. god how i fell in love with this character. his grit, even his flawed ways of thinking, and his cute tiny short fits! i feel so much for this feisty but desperate little creature who was always clawing his way toward survival. i can't help but feel very maternal towards him and share his joy upon finally being free from that life (ᴗˬᴗ)ꕤ.ﾟ
i also really enjoyed looking at him in parallel with heeseong because their trajectories initially feel so similar. there's something particularly distressing about how close je-oh came to becoming her, only for him to get that brutal wake-up call that forced him to confront reality.
and then we have seongrok, who has witnessed two people he loved become corrupted by the very power they were once victims of. while i remain disappointed by THAT CERTAIN CHAPTER, i still feel like the rest of his character arc gave me enough to understand and ultimately believe in the depth of what he felt for je-oh. and i esp loved that scene with the two of them and heeseong, where he gets down on his knees and gives je-oh the trigger (metaphorically ofc).
alsoo guys that was an 80-chapter situationship. hella hot duo but fuck was i stressingg when the story alr moved to geumok-dong and i realized they still hadn't defined what they were lmao. i have so many thoughts about whether their relationship was partly born out of trauma and circumstance and whether je-oh's attachment to seongrok was tangled up in the way he understood him as this savior who had pulled him out of the life he'd been trapped in. but their chemistry was top-notch. i love their verbal back-and-forth. i'm just glad they're finally free from the system and happy.
sieon is another interesting contrast. born into wealth and power, and despite the assault and harassment, he still ultimately made the choice to help. i don't want to glaze him too much tho because his position was never really under the same kind of threat as some of the other people in power, particularly someone like heeseong who had everything to lose. his choice was meaningful, but i think there's a difference when your position allows you to make such choices. i don't think that diminishes sieon's decision!!! but it does make the circumstances around everyone else's choices that much more significant (even if they were morally wrong). i also lowk feel bad for that je-oh replacement who was basically character growth fodder for sieon and je-oh, but at least he is happy with sieon (ᴗˬᴗ)ꕤ.ﾟ
i also really enjoyed how the crime thriller / case-solving side of the story played out. it was disgusting seeing the amount of corruption and callousness within the police (supposed upholders of justice) and the politicians (supposed servants to the public), and even among those who were supposed to be allies. i especially loved that hyeonwoo, this hard-line stickler for justice, chose to let our beloved je-oh and seongrok escape, accepting that they were all victims of a system that had pushed them into making desperate choices. that just felt like such a satisfying extension of the story's larger themes. how my heart ached when he broke down after finally finding his brother (˃ᯅ˂)
finally (yay) i loved all the parallelisms throughout the story. characters reflecting one another, repeating cycles and constantly seeing one character's choices echoed or inverted in another made the whole story feel so much more deliberate. each character's journey felt tied into the same larger question of power, survival and what people become when they're forced to play by someone else's rules. i think the whole janggi metaphor worked so well to capture all of this and was beautifully executed ₍ᐢ. .ᐢ₎ ₊˚⊹♡
anyway. what a fucking ride. deeply fucked up, deeply frustrating at times, but also incredibly deliberate and emotionally satisfying. love love loveee (ily je-oh)
wow. ok had to enjoy the post-read afterglow for a week before getting down and dirty and putting my thoughts into words but! yes i wanna talk about all the details and characters i loved. ty have a seat ♡
i ate this up. we get major story-driving characters who are complex and morally ambiguous, wc makes the story so gripping. they possess motives that are deeply justifiable from their own perspectives. nothing felt arbitrary. every action felt like it came from survival, trauma, desperation or pressure from a system that was built to chew people up.
that's what makes the story esp tragic to me. so many of these kids were failed by the world long before they started making their own morally fucked up choices. they were failed by the adults, institutions and systems that should've protected them, and instead were left to survive in a world that kept teaching them that people were disposable.
i particularly want to point out the nuanced writing of heeseong. despite her role as a major antagonist, i found myself completely sympathizing with her. had the story been told from her perspective, this could easily have been tagged a tragedy. she was a victim too, raised and shaped by a cruel world run by shit adults and abusive figures in positions of power. while i am ultimately satisfied with her ending (because ofc i was rooting for je-oh), a part of me still deeply aches for the tragedy of her character arc. she became a product of the very violence that was inflicted upon her.
and then there's je-oh. god how i fell in love with this character. his grit, even his flawed ways of thinking, and his cute tiny short fits! i feel so much for this feisty but desperate little creature who was always clawing his way toward survival. i can't help but feel very maternal towards him and share his joy upon finally being free from that life (ᴗˬᴗ)ꕤ.ﾟ
i also really enjoyed looking at him in parallel with heeseong because their trajectories initially feel so similar. there's something particularly distressing about how close je-oh came to becoming her, only for him to get that brutal wake-up call that forced him to confront reality.
and then we have seongrok, who has witnessed two people he loved become corrupted by the very power they were once victims of. while i remain disappointed by THAT CERTAIN CHAPTER, i still feel like the rest of his character arc gave me enough to understand and ultimately believe in the depth of what he felt for je-oh. and i esp loved that scene with the two of them and heeseong, where he gets down on his knees and gives je-oh the trigger (metaphorically ofc).
alsoo guys that was an 80-chapter situationship. hella hot duo but fuck was i stressingg when the story alr moved to geumok-dong and i realized they still hadn't defined what they were lmao. i have so many thoughts about whether their relationship was partly born out of trauma and circumstance and whether je-oh's attachment to seongrok was tangled up in the way he understood him as this savior who had pulled him out of the life he'd been trapped in. but their chemistry was top-notch. i love their verbal back-and-forth. i'm just glad they're finally free from the system and happy.
sieon is another interesting contrast. born into wealth and power, and despite the assault and harassment, he still ultimately made the choice to help. i don't want to glaze him too much tho because his position was never really under the same kind of threat as some of the other people in power, particularly someone like heeseong who had everything to lose. his choice was meaningful, but i think there's a difference when your position allows you to make such choices. i don't think that diminishes sieon's decision!!! but it does make the circumstances around everyone else's choices that much more significant (even if they were morally wrong). i also lowk feel bad for that je-oh replacement who was basically character growth fodder for sieon and je-oh, but at least he is happy with sieon (ᴗˬᴗ)ꕤ.ﾟ
i also really enjoyed how the crime thriller / case-solving side of the story played out. it was disgusting seeing the amount of corruption and callousness within the police (supposed upholders of justice) and the politicians (supposed servants to the public), and even among those who were supposed to be allies. i especially loved that hyeonwoo, this hard-line stickler for justice, chose to let our beloved je-oh and seongrok escape, accepting that they were all victims of a system that had pushed them into making desperate choices. that just felt like such a satisfying extension of the story's larger themes. how my heart ached when he broke down after finally finding his brother (˃ᯅ˂)
finally (yay) i loved all the parallelisms throughout the story. characters reflecting one another, repeating cycles and constantly seeing one character's choices echoed or inverted in another made the whole story feel so much more deliberate. each character's journey felt tied into the same larger question of power, survival and what people become when they're forced to play by someone else's rules. i think the whole janggi metaphor worked so well to capture all of this and was beautifully executed ₍ᐢ. .ᐢ₎ ₊˚⊹♡
anyway. what a fucking ride. deeply fucked up, deeply frustrating at times, but also incredibly deliberate and emotionally satisfying. love love loveee (ily je-oh)