Let’s Talk About How Gihun Felt Watching The Other Players In The Pentathlon.

what the fuck did they inject into Karma (2025)'s theme to make it that good?

i can’t stop thinking about sang-woo’s suicide attempt. more specifically, little details surrounding that.

on the floor, we see a pile of cigarettes and ash, an empty bottle of soju, a trash bag filled with wrappers of what i’m going to assume are some kind of food or beverage… and shaving cream. which means it is more likely than not that sang-woo shaved himself before his suicide attempt. (he also does look cleanly shaved as well)

further more, when calling his mother, he’s not wearing the jacket of his suit. we see him put it back on. it wasn’t a spur of the moment decision; he willingly got in the bathtub with his suit on, assuming he was going to die.

so sang-woo made sure that even in death, he looked presentable and clean. he doesn’t want to be found a mess, because he’s meant to be better than a mess, and he wants people to think highly of him, even if he’s dead.

oh, the sheer irony of his actual death being messy.

look how far we’ve come.

—

also, it still breaks my heart that sang-woo was never able to tell his mother he loves her. while yes, he did get interrupted by the customer, i feel he also held back because of the things that had happened.

he’d basically jeopardized his mother because of his own wrongdoings, and he hadn’t really been the son she thought he was for the past couple years. that alone feels like a betrayal on its own.

and he’s basically drowning himself in shame and guilt that maybe he’s tricked his psyche into thinking “well, if you really loved your mother, none of that shit would have happened.”

so, when they're all sitting together and sharing their names in the fourth episode, ali reveals that he's been under the assumption that gi-hun's name is ssangmun-dong.

which means that whenever gi-hun started praising sang-woo by calling him the pride of ssangmun-dong, he thought... oh, i need to sit down for this...

“You know I always keep my promises.” | Sae-byeok & Cheol from Squid Game

throwing this into the ring like a beyblade

Managed to gif some of the instances where Beom-jun smiles/laughs and quickly cuts it off. I like that little detail about him.

karma (악연) behind the scenes

i read a post somewhere that said something along the lines of “dr santos wants people to believe she doesn’t care but in reality she cares too much” and you can really see that when she invites whitaker over at her apartment. she lives alone in an apartment with a spare room. maybe it was a temporary situation, maybe she simply can afford it. it doesn’t really matter. she lives alone and it could stay that way if she just turned a blind eye. she could leave whitaker, pretend she didn’t see. people could argue that basically everyone in the pitt is kind enough to extend a landing hand and i believe that to be 100% true, but what matters is that dr santos did it. the one who everyone thought was heartless just for being arrogant. trinity santos saw this guy and said “fuck it. you’re coming with me. i’m not gonna stop making fun of you but if you don’t come with me now i’ll use my krav maga skills to bring you home myself.”

trinity santos the woman who had a close friend kill herself because of an abusive older man. trinity santos the woman who could’ve been that friend because mental illness has a hungry grip that spares no one. dr robby could be that person and dr santos doesn’t know. every single character could be that person and we wouldn’t even know because we, much just like dr santos, were allowed no more than a peek in these people’s lives. we only have a vague idea what they look like on the outside, what demons they’re fighting against. any day now, that person could be whitaker. could be any patient dr santos can’t save.

dr santos’ arrogance isn’t a lie, but it’s not a complete truth either; there are so many layers etched under her façade and it think whitaker is a great way to show that. they can be so beneficial to each other in terms of character exploration and development.

this thumbanil is so funny to me theyre like who invited that guy