On Mary: A Note

Friendly reminder that Mary is older than both Cale AND Alver. Do you think Alver used to call her Noona (when he went to the underground city) when he was younger?

Reading tcf again and I had a realization that blew me out of the water.

Not only is it an unreliable narrator story, the narrator simply... Does not spell things out. You have to pick things up from context clues and body language, like this is some kind of game. It's crazy.

Like, here's some stuff that's NEVER EXPLAINED (in the parts I read, which was up to chap 600~)

Cale's trigger is whenever any child is in danger or hurt. His behavior immediately changes, even if he doesn't acknowledge it to us. It's especially obvious when he finds the crown for the first time.

Cale's gets self destructive when he's stressed. If he starts being weirdly self sacrificial or vindictive? He's stressed out of his MIND.

He's extremely petty about anyone who looks down on him. He convinces himself he's not, but it takes *ages* for him to forgive that kind of slight. And in some cases, it's enough to damn a person for good.

He actually has very obvious emotional tells that other characters have picked up on + they have already realized the points above and act accordingly when they see them.

Like, seriously. I thought I understood the subtleties of the story, but it took until now to see these traits. I was always kinda confused why he acted the way he did.

Fire 🔥

We've been blessed with so many good Raon expressions these last couple chapters.

Bonus:

I wonder when Cale will have the conversation with Ron and Beacrox about his life as KRS. There’s always something standing in between that stops them from having that conversation!😭 I like how the Molan duo doesn’t press Cale about and are wanting for him to tell them. Knowing Cale’s personality he will info bomb them like he always does!🤣

On Mary: a note

note on describing mary's voice from the perspective of an in-universe character (who wouldn't know what a 'google translate' voice is)

“[a] child with a stiff voice ... [like] her vocal cords can no longer fluctuate.”

the implications? many, and all with great potential for fics.

It just hits me that everytime Cale having those ‘I have an ominous/bad/iffed feeling’ moments is just his mind calculating and predicting the future based on the information he has through ‘Record’. It literally got mentioned when he took the Failure Test in the Sealed God Temple that his mind is constantly running, reviewing the past, analyzing every detail, and predicting the future.

So Cale, through cold logic, in his mind, totally knows for a fact those situations will come, he is basically just in deep denial about it all the time.

A new understanding of cale’s character

cale henituse is a depressed bastard (we kind of been knew) am currently rereading the novel, so this time I noticed a tea symbolism, where the after the first time ron gave cale lemon tea and he drank it life's kind been giving cale lemons ever since. so of course it got me thinking more about the relationship between cale and ron and find that it would be interesting to study.

what kim rok soo observed of the relationship between og!cale and him was that ron didn’t have any particular like for cale, so could he as cale also operate under that or..?

hehe