Oh, Ann.

Calling Sangwoo “evil” and emphasizing he was “always a terrible person” completely misses the point of his character.

Spicy take time from a Sangwoo apologist. I’ve been having a lot of thoughts surrounding the Sangwoo discourse and wanted to share.

I find it interesting and frustrating that many people in the discourse around Sangwoo seem singularly caught up in emphasizing how selfish Sangwoo was before the games, and how evil he is inherently as a person. While I think everyone has a right to their opinion, I just don’t get why people care so much about labelling him as a villain and insisting the actions he took and the position he ended up in were solely due to lack of moral character, because that mindset in and of itself is opposed to the very themes of the show.

Moralizing who Sangwoo is as a person to justify where he ended up by the end of the show distracts from the extremely important fact he too was a victim of the capitalist system, of the game. People seem so caught up in wanting to emphasize “how bad” Sangwoo was they completely miss the tragic point of his character. His character decline isn’t just a commentary on innate amoral human nature, it very much is also of the total destruction of character and self caused by capitalism.

Gihun and Sangwoo have trajectories that are foils to each other, but very similar. They both come from an impoverished background; both handle this differently. Gihun resisted capitialism (ie the riots); Sangwoo engaged in it. The point of this shared background is essentially that, both Gihun and Sangwoo, who react differently to their same lot in life, have ended up at the same place, because upward mobility, and throwing off that background of economic inequality, is impossible within capitalism.

It’s interesting because this want to rise above inequality is so deeply ingrained into Sangwoo’s character: Sangwoo “worked hard”, succeeded at school, and then went into the world carrying around the weight of being someone “successful”, having to represent his community. This sense of pride, of responsibility, of having to be better than his humble upbringing, constructs his entire sense of self. Pride is so important to Sangwoo because he came from nothing; he sees everything he doesn’t want to be in Gihun. Even when he has nothing, Sangwoo helps people like Ali; while it is genuine, it also comes from a place of wanting to act ‘elite’; to maintain class and poise that is a facade hiding his own failures and incapabilities. And until the very end, Sangwoo is convinced that he got through the game solely on his skill and ability, not recognizing how much luck and others’ work went into it (Gihun is very much the opposite). His ruthless and somewhat toxic mindset of tying worth to financial success and skill, is in fact a result of coming from nothing and falling back into nothing through the cycle of capitalism, and the desperation and destruction that comes in the wake of that.

While this contextualization of his impoverished background of course doesn’t clear Sangwoo of the actions he consciously made, like ripping off clients and putting his mother financially at extreme risk (not to mention, ya know, murder) it does explain why he ended up so lost in the white collar world, how he got himself into the shit he did, and why he had such a nihilistic mindset in the games.

To reemphasize, both him and Gihun were similarly lost, just on different playing fields, and their “lost” nature comes from them starting out poor / as losers of the capital system. Sangwoo’s character motivations are deeply ingrained into the inequality he experienced, and his misguided attempts to rid himself and redeem himself of that shame and guilt. Whenever people just call him evil, they dismiss this core thematic asset of his character and trajectory that is so important to the message of the show.

Also, to tangentially add to this, I honestly think to characterize Sangwoo as singularly terrible and amoral, while maybe based on actions is fair, ignores his inner turmoil: he wasn’t just a one-note person or character; the guilt Sangwoo carries over what he did to his mother and himself is incredibly evident in every single thing he does. He went to the games knowing it was his one chance to redeem himself and save his mother - it’s not like he didn’t regret what he had done. And we see that in the games too; he puts himself first, as he sees it is a simple necessity (very INTJ of him), but he didn’t LIKE doing it, and it ended up being one long sunken cost fallacy: he did so many things he couldn’t just stop, because all the pain he inflicted then would be for nothing, and he would have to live with that too. Even killing himself, he did that to make sure that his mother would be taken care of. It shows that inherently, it’s not that Sangwoo lacks any moral compass, he has glimmers of it in there, but his experiences with inequality and capitalism have twisted his mindset to the point he determines his self worth on monetary gain and success, which at his lowest he will risk everything to get it back. (This doesn’t really have to do with the main point of this whole rant but it does note that Sangwoo is COMPLEX and not just some one-note villain).

In sum: yeah Sangwoo isn’t likeable a lot of the time and I totally get the dislike for him, but to say he was just a terrible person is completely reductionary and misses the entire point of the show and his character. I wish the discourse around this fascinatingly morally grey character could be embraced more fully without just constantly resorting to demonization and lack of nuance. I’m not trying to police what people say, just point to an issue surrounding Sangwoo discourse itself.

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