okay so we know moonjo and jongwoo are similar in the fact that they’re both capable of and willing to kill, but can we talk about how they differ and why that brings them together so well???
let’s start with the differences first:
to start off with, we have yoon jongwoo. upon introduction into the show, the first impression is that something bad happened to this guy who, as the first episode progresses, just seems like your normal dude who just happens to be down on his luck. he’s moving to a new city on his own, has a girlfriend, and is starting a seemingly normal job at an up-and-coming graphic design company founded by his senior. you’re kind of given the impression in the first episode that everything unfortunate happening to jongwoo has nothing to do with himself. for the most part, you’re right.
but then we move on into later episodes and you get to see what these different unfortunate situations bring out inside of him. understandably, he’s reluctant to have anything to do with the people living in the residence, until he happens upon moonjo. he’s an aspiring writer, so he gets noticeably excited when someone wants to know more about his work, but the focus here is how much he hones in on the murderer character. how passionate he is about it.
and then as the show progresses, we see through fantasies and memories that jongwoo is actually very volatile, and despite the posture that gives off an air of timidness, he is not to be fucked with.
he left busan with a warning from his mother–that hell is other people–and i think with the scene where he’s acknowledging this in the bathroom at work, he’s realizing that he’s not so different without actually realizing it. at the end of the day, yoon jongwoo is paranoid, unpredictable, and very willing to choose the path of violence once that path becomes clear to him.
his relationship with jieun is important as well. min jieun isn’t inherently a bad person–she was just so caught up in her own situation with work that she dismissed a lot of the things that were happening to jongwoo. this unfortunate behavior sort of gave viewers a set in stone realization that jongwoo was very, very alone during all of this.
which brings me to seo moonjo. depicted initially in the show as your local handsome, friendly dentist who just so happens to be good with kids. he comes off as ever the good samaritan, willing to stay after hours to help a local police officer address a situation in need of immediate attention. but you already know something’s not right with him. even before you learn that he’s going to be staying in the eden residence, something’s not right with him.
and then he kills kihyuk, upset that the guy had killed someone so impulsively. ‘what i do is art’, he says, ‘not just murder’. following that sequence, we see him introduce himself to jongwoo, and he immediately seems interested in getting to know him better. by the end of the conversation, it’s obvious he’s set his sights on him. we as viewers know this show is going to have a lot more of the creepy dentist in it because of his interest in jongwoo’s murder story, and the line about how he got the feeling jongwoo was one of his kind.
everything with moonjo following that operates based on some sort of unspoken plan. something he has worked out among everyone, and especially ms. eom. everyone seems to be afraid of him. he speaks almost coldly to most of the others, but also politely. it’s obvious moonjo is very refined, and it’s also obvious that those around him do not matter to him. in fact, the only one he seems to care about is jongwoo.
i’m not going to go into detail about how he pops up everywhere in the show, because the only one that can truly be said isn’t a hallucination before the last episode is when junghwa sees him while she’s out with her dad. but it is obvious in plenty of other ways that he’s a stalker.
do i need to touch up on human meat at this point? if you know you know.
moving on, how this ties them together:
there’s been discussion in the tag before about how ‘jagiya’ translates directly to something like ‘oneself’. the differences aren’t important at first glance, but how they connect to lead to the one big similarity is important. jongwoo is paranoid and doesn’t trust people. he’s lonely, and he feels like he can’t get out. he feels trapped.
and moonjo, obviously using this to his advantage, has a handle on this. despite the fact that he downright terrifies jongwoo, he’s the one person in this entire situation who has jongwoo’s back. he understands where he’s coming from. if jongwoo would let him, he would listen. he’s good at listening, even. he’s patient. he’s probably gotten more attached to jongwoo than he intended, even if he’d known from the start he was going to fall in love with his own masterpiece.
the point i’m getting at is that these two were fated from the start. they’re both depraved in their own way, and they’re unique characters, but they also come together so well that the only way they can not be together at the end is for moonjo to not be alive. and even if he is dead, he’s still there, because jongwoo has become all-but an extension of him. or rather, because that part that was always moonjo is awakened within him.
they are, quite honestly, two halves of a dark, twisted, but somehow perfect whole.
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