RED LIGHTS || ESCAPE

i love sieun so much as a main character because he tries so hard not to be one.

in the beginning of the season, all he wanted was to sit quietly in the background, exist in peace, and yearn for suho without the world clawing at him. but he’s a gravitational force. he doesn’t seek the world, the world seeks him. the good, the bad, all of it. and even though he never seeks human connection, insists that he doesn’t need friends, he loves having them. he loves loving them.

he’s not loud about it, he doesn’t know how to be, but his loyalty is violent, bone-deep, unwavering. he’ll fight for his friends, kill for them, stand up to their dads without blinking. he’ll set himself on fire to keep them warm.

and the most tragic part? he could’ve stayed invisible. he could've stayed out of it all. the bad guys didn’t even want him, they wanted baku. but sieun’s heart won't let him walk away. his instinct to protect always wins. always. something he learnt from suho.

he shows up (all four feet of him); no real fighting skills, no actual strength, just this terrifying cocktail of rage, stubbornness, desperation, and whatever object he can get his hands on to stab someone with.

but beneath all of that, he’s just a kid. a scared, tired, broken kid. he flinched when seongje first cornered him in the bathroom. he cried when his friends told him it wasn’t his fault. he carries the kind of guilt that rots you from the inside out, and he’s still trying to make sense of it. still trying to believe he deserves good things.

he’s just a teenage boy who’s been handed too much pain too early and still, still, he chooses to love.

The way that if you think hard enough about this, Gaon’s reaction to Yohan’s death could totally be interpreted as a parallel to how he perceives the deaths of his parents (one dies first and the other immediately follows)…

It is not like that with Suhyeon for him. It is, in fact, like that with Yohan though.

Can you please explain the part whereby Gaon said soohyun was his world, and how that doesn't mean he loves her despite the confession.?

Hey Anon!!

I poured out the bulk of my thoughts in this post here! But in essence, Soohyun to Gaon is as Isaac to Yohan (which Writer Moon Yoo Seok confirmed in this post). He definitely loved her; there's no denying that, but that love was very different from what he feels for Yohan. The latter was so all-encompassing and wild, and painful that after Cha Kyunghee's death, which itself harkens back to Gaon's parents' death, our man ran to what was familiar and soft and comfortable, all of which Soohyun represented to him.

He was swept up in a maelstrom of emotion: all the death, the Foundation nabbing people, Soohyun not wanting to talk to him. He was essentially adrift and he can't be faulted for latching onto the only anchor he's had since childhood. But even with those flashback scenes of them as children, what we see is Soohyun playing more of a caregiver role than anything else. She blows on his scrapes, he comforts him when he's sad. She might as well be his sister or his mother, because she truly is his Isaac.

On top of everything, Gaon was under the false belief that Soohyun rescued him from the thugs when it was really Yohan, all that gratitude, and his need for comfort, and the fact that she came back for him despite being angry with him, manifested in him confessing emotions that were long dead if he was being honest with himself.

But Gaon was too confused to be honest with himself and he just didn't want to think at that point. So he didn't.

But at the end of the day. Gaon brought a knife to avenge Soohyun and a bomb to avenge Yohan. Gaon tried to die for Yohan twice.

Gaon's reaction when Yohan was announced as dead is so so telling. While Sunah collapses, he's silent, frozen, then he leaves, because he knows he'll be joining Yohan in death.

And even when Yohan's alive, when Gaon no longer has reason to be guilty anymore, he still wants to die with Yohan because it's better than living without him. Soohyun might have had a pretty confession, and a wooden kiss (really wooden) but Yohan won in the end, because by word and deed, Kim Gaon vowed before all of Korea that he would die with his Chief.

Plus when he thought Yohan was gone for the second time, he went through Yohan's bedroom and reminisced about them ogling each other. That's gay. We love to see it!!

I had to make this post after seeing this amazing post because this needs to be said for all new viewers of TDJ. 

I can actually confirm that the writer did intend for Yohan and Gaon’s relationship to be gay. 

Ji Sung said their relationship was one of “seduction”. At the Devil Judge press-con, he confirmed that his role was that of Mephistopheles (around the 23 min mark but I’m at work and can’t pinpoint rn loL) who “seduces” Gaon who is Faust. I’ve analyzed this in more detail in this post. 

Writer Moon Yoo Seok has been very open about his influences in crafting Yohan and Gaon’s relationship being: Beauty and the Beast, Goethe’s Faust, and the movie Let The Right One In .

All these influences are either romantic or homoerotic. All of them. 

The writer has also confirmed that Gaon occupies a traditionally female character and feminine gender role. He’s used tropes that we normally only see in heterosexual romances for Yohan and Gaon’s romance. A non-exhaustive list:

living together

snooping through the mysterious house of the man who’s whisked you away

undressing your partner and wound-tending

making him food, refusing let anyone eat unless said man returns

understanding him like no other, being the only one who sees through his facade to the loneliness within

choosing him over everyone else (ep 8 and then end of 15)

trying to die for him (twice)

defending him to the het love/past love, everyone around really

PINING, yearning (Gaon literally looked at the bed in ep 16 and thought back to shirtless Yohan okay)

taking care of each other

being vulnerable before and for each other

oogling him shirtless (both of them did this)

hand holding

DEEP. STARES.

sexy bomb defusal

love triangles (K and Soohyun)

Homosexuality is so taboo in Korea that the closest we’ve gotten to proper rep is the wlw couple from Nevertheless and Kim Seo Hyung’s character from Mine, and even then that’s because men find it easier to see women in love with each other than men being in love. And men finance drama production.

Writer Moon Yooseok (who has 25 years of writing experience) has literally done everything he can to get a queer story out there. Heck he’s even including stuff in the TDJ comic (spanking, anyone?) that wouldn’t fly on TV because he has more freedom there. 

Ji Sung and Jinyoung have known this from the start as well (that poster photoshoot), and it’s hard not to know that your character is gay when they’re staring at another for 95% of the show and undressing and oogling each other, or when the ending is 2 minutes of sappy staring. They knew. 

The director in episode 8′s bts at 6:04 as Jinyoung and Jisung rehearse Gaon ditching Min Jung Ho: “Gaon’s become cute now that Yohan’s here”. 

Jinyoung: nods.

Me: Okay we’re all in agreement clearly. 

Rather than new fans being disappointed for it not being gay enough, I hope they can uplift this for what it is: a serious attempt to bring a gorgeous romance onscreen. Writer Moon Yoo Seok really said lawful husbands. He’s been saying it from the beginning. 

THIS!!!

if season 1 was a testament to sieun’s fight of self-determination — standing up for himself, punishing those who hurt him and his friends — and eventually realizing through beomseok’s plotline how damaging that sort of mindless violence can be, then season 2 is the portrayal of sieun’s reckoning with that, tempering down his viciousness, choosing force only when it is necessary, in an effort not to be cruel or do excessive harm.

it offsets so well with the baku-baekjin plotline — baekjin, a similarly intelligent and calculating boy who grew up bullied by others, who has that capacity for swift, harsh violence that sieun demonstrated all through season 1. but that’s not the person sieun is anymore, nor is it the person he wants to be.

“don’t cross the line” - that’s what embodies sieun’s approach to violence now. it’s why his takes resonate so much with his new friends at eunjang, who have all seen and felt very personally the harm of those who carelessly do so (jun-tae with hyoman, gotak with seungje, baku with baekjin). this is what broadly characterizes the motivations of our protagonists in s2, and it’s certainly a breath of fresh air in the vicious cycle they more broadly exist in.

"What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going, I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all"- The quote at the beginning of WHC.

And this is so perfect because:

This time Sieun didn't fight to avenge, he didn't to damage, to hurt, to win, he never fought for himself. Not once. This time, he fought to protect. And what makes WHC2 great is that you can actually SEE this difference in his fights this time. He is not vicious, just calculated, just enough to hold it at bay. He was calculating before, too, but this time it was subdued, quieter.

Park Jihoon truly is amazing as Yeon Sieun. Because everything this season, the way he acted genuinely showed the trauma, he embodied loss, hopelessness, not really belonging, the desperate plea to not get into a fight if he could avoid it, not to make the violence personal, Jihoon portrayed this all soo sooo well: from his body language to his eyes.

binge watched xo kitty this week (to make fun of it) (the joy of rage. the joy of rage) and minho and kitty give Such similar energy to seojun and jukyung in true beauty... ah...

(me, my parents, my sister, and the baby are sitting at the kitchen table eating lunch)

baby, pointing at the light fixture over the table and signing "on": o.*

my sister: we actually can't turn that light on right now, because the lightbulb inside is burnt out! it needs a new one.

baby: ighbu.

sister: yes, lightbulb! granddaddy said after we eat he's going to climb up there on a ladder and change it, and then the light will come on!

baby: gadada! adda, uuu! ighbu o!

sister: exactly!

baby, signing "on" and pointing at the light and then my dad, with increasing urgency: GADADA ADDA UUUU. O.

my sister: we're going to finish eating first though, ok?

baby: nonono. O. gadada adda uuu.

[a split second goes by]

baby, pointing to himself: ba. adda uuu. ighbu.

me: you're going to climb the ladder and change the lightbulb yourself?

baby: dzyeah. *pointing to the buckle where he is buckled into the high chair* ububu.

me: unbuckle you? so you can change the lightbulb?

baby, highly businesslike: dzyeah.

*pronounced like "on" without the n

whc2 used the character that haunts the narrative trope and fucking delivered — a rabid (relatively spoiler free) 4am review

Ending off of S1, albeit (extremely) sad, I wasn’t expecting the S2 script to include much of Suho. The original webtoon had made it clear that Suho would be a passing memory for Sieun. It just so happens that Jihoon and Hyunwook had so much chemistry they rewrote the course of what would have been.

Then again, it’s not only because of the og webtoon characterisations that led me to believe Suho wouldn’t be mentioned a lot in S2. It’s because as much as sieun and suho clearly had a close relationship, what S1 never did was have sieun narrate his inner thoughts and emotions. Hence in fact, all of us viewers, were never privy to Sieun’s feelings apart from the incredible emotive acting on Jihoon’s part — we are never completely sure how deeply Sieun felt for Suho. Which is why I was so pleasantly surprised at how the writers made efforts for Sieun to recall Suho in every episode, and Beomseok, in frequent scenes.

Right off the bat in S2E1, we see Sieun have war flashbacks to S1 with Beomseok and Suho. Both Beomseok and Suho? Fuck yeah. We need to remember that both were close to Sieun and of course, impacted Sieun emotionally.

As the season progresses, it’s made clear that the writers prioritise featuring Suho and Beomseok, rather than have them appear in one off scenes. Beomseok always returning in flashbacks and of course, the dream sequence with Sieun in the boxing ring. We see clearer than ever now what morals and fatalistic viewpoints separate Sieun and Beomseok, even though they are both lonely souls hidden beneath everything.

We don’t even need to talk about Suho — Sieun physically and mentally cannot forget about him. Sieun continuously writes his feelings out on text messages which he then sends to Suho’s number, suffers from insomnia because of Suho, and is endlessly reminded of Suho when he fights.

It’s not easy to write a compelling “ghost that haunts the narrative” trope without it being too sappy, but god, the way WHC2 did it for both Suho and Beomseok was compelling and believable. Because of course, Sieun cannot simply forget about either of them. These two will eternally be locked into his reflexes — which the directing and script cleverly includes and remembers.

realizing that i actually was on the same wavelength🤞 as the whc2 writer was so surreal because tell me why sieun started becoming my mouthpiece from the very start of the season. the social applicability of newton’s third law (every action has an opposite and equal reaction) and the danger of perpetuating the cycle of violence were my Exact takeaways from the content of season 1 — sieun’s words were so incredibly familiar to me and that was SO Awesome.

I forgot to say this last time. Baku, Gotak and I, we all know you visit your friend in the hospital and why he's there. But in my opinion it wasn’t your fault.

this last addition is SO SO BARS i’m in love. yes, exactly; gaon chooses and thrives with the kangs from the start because that’s a place where he can comfortably act on his own based on what he wants and what he envisions. he has so much free will that he makes use of in that house, he has the chance to take charge in a way that he’s very comfortable doing, and he has so much influence on those around him — in contrast to his other relationships, where it is largely just him being influenced and affected by the choices and desires of the other person (min jungho, soohyun).

it’s honestly hard to blame yohan for wanting that family gaon had built up with them to be gaon’s first priority, but by pushing with that ultimatum — instead of, say, just talking to gaon and letting him make that choice — he’s effectively shown to gaon that even here, he does not have the power or equal standing to simply choose whatever he wants and be respected for it, not in the way gaon respects the decisions of the others around him (with a little nagging towards yohan sometimes but ultimately comes back to acceptance, at least up until that scene). and in being triggered into this realization, he pushes back against yohan, lashes out, walks away.

soon afterwards, he chooses soohyun, who dies barely an episode later. his choice is wrested away from him again by something completely out of his control, and it’s no wonder that being manipulated into thinking that there is, indeed, someone to blame for it, and that that someone is yohan, prompts such fury in him that he does go and confront yohan — who, actually, seems to understand and empathize with that anger very well, based on how he initially reacts to gaon trying to stab him.

gaon needs to heal and grow from this place of disempowerment, where his choices are so guided by those around him. he’s frankly a pretty static character throughout the show, and i think it’s done deliberately — that the people around him and his circumstances don’t allow him to really change or grow in a way that’s meaningful to himself. it’s only set up in the very end that he is entering new circumstances which will allow him to explore and exercise his power and free will. (god. i want a season 2 so badly.)

simultaneously, though, yohan is the same in some sense. despite how unilaterally he works and how in control of everything and everyone he seems to be, yohan is a man that’s been driven by his desire for revenge for years — that’s the ultimate “making choices based around the influence of others.” he needs to learn, too, how to take on a life he genuinely wants for himself now. in the time gaon spent with the kangs, yohan clearly realized how much he valued that sort of peaceful, domestic life with his loved ones; but yohan can’t rely solely upon gaon to realize that dream for him. if he wants it, he needs to put in the work to heal and prioritize that, too.

it’s why their choice to walk away / stay away from each other in the last scene of ep 16 is so powerful, in my opinion. no matter how much they still have left unsaid between them, and how deeply they still clearly care for each other, they know that both of them need to grow and heal in their own ways, separately. they want the best for each other — if not yet themselves — and so they choose to leave each other to their personal growing. to them, just getting to see one another, and ascertain that they are safe and healthy, is enough for now.

Kim Gaon as a character is so important to me.

This poor boy, whose parents committed suicide when he was so young, ends up being manipulated by almost everyone in his life who think they know what's best for him.

His mentor, who he saw as a father ends up manipulating him to further his own agendas and goals all while giving him the illusion of choice. Ga On has never truly had a choice.

And Soohyun too. Yes, she only ever wanted to keep him safe, and that is a nice sentiment, but in acting the way she did towards him she caged him in.

Maybe it's the Gemini in me, but if someone tries to limit my freedom of choice or influence my judgement in any way, I start to get suffocated. No matter what the sentiment behind their actions are. She didn't deserve the end she got, and she genuinely cared about Gaon but at the same time she ended up trying to influence him because she thought she knew what was best for him.

And then comes Yohan. Yohan is complicated (as morally grey characters tend to be), because for a good while in the beginning, he too tries to use (or at least wants to use) Gaon for his own ends.

But also, after he sees who Gaon truly is: a kind and caring and a firecracker of a soul, he is the first in Gaon's life to offer him a choice. And not the Min Jungho type of choice where it's just an illusion; but an actual choice.

And Gaon. Gaon only ever tried to do what he thought was right even while being pulled in a thousand different directions by different people. He tried so hard to make the right choices. He finally found the family he lost when he was young in Yohan and Elijah and Ms Ji. Lord knows I wouldn't survive if I found out that the fucker who drove my parents to suicide was living alive and well somewhere else with nothing on his conscience, and that I had been lied to for so long. And then, Soohyun, the last person who he has left from his past tied to his parents, his best friend, dies.

And then he loses his found family as well.

Kim Gaon, at the end of the show has absolutely no one left from his past; the Kangs, Soohyun, his parents and Min Jung ho are all gone.

All he has left is himself and a herculean task of rebuilding the justice system.

And how miserable must that be?