Child Zhenya

I want tome plain as a novel reader for those who are confused about the child Zhenya concept
So spoilers:









This is the first time Taekjoo sees this child in his dream, he will keep seeing him in the future. If you remember from earlier parts of season 2 (like the contrabass playing) Taekjoo has felt there’s something abnormal about Zhenya and his loneliness. Novel emphasizes this tremendously more compared to the manhwa. That was also what he meant by “I pity you” before he blacked out after the choking scene.

Almost everytime he is separated from Zhenya, he will dream of this child. He doesn’t know it’s Zhenya he keeps thinking I’ve seen this kid somewhere before. It’s what his subconscious mind have developed based on the vulnerable side of Zhenya only Taekjoo in the world was able to see. It becomes a language to source out Taekjoo’s own trauma too. (That’s why he thinks to himself “if I let this kid drag me any further I won’t be able to get away” during the dream. The novel expresses the inner worlds of the characters unbelievably well. Like Taekjoo realizes there are times he’s genuinely having fun hanging out with Zhenya during their betting competitions and it makes him panic. He’s panicking at the fact that he adapted too fast and it can’t go on like this. Manhwa sadly shaved off too many moments that makes you feel what’s going on underneath. especially with Zhenya. We get criminally little to none about his character development so far.
But anyways, this is foreshadowing to what Zhenya’s innerworld was especially as a diabolically neglected toddler, and in the future one day Taekjoo will see a photo of real Zhenya as a child and will be shocked to realize he has been dreaming of exactly how he looked.