There’s this genre of BL that’s sad but not a tragedy, playful but not a comedy, and has meaningful drama instead of the flashy kind.
Sometimes it’s just a guy who just got cheated on and dumped after an 8 year relationship meeting another guy who has been kicked out and is now homeless.
Sometimes it’s a boy who hasn’t left the house in 5 years, who’s one sided crush is leaving him behind and sets him up with a roommate to watch over him
Sometimes it’s two boys who cross paths at a bus terminal and then the rest of their lives intertwine
Sometimes it’s a masochistic yakuza boss and his silent impotent bodyguard trying to figure each other out and somehow find happiness
Sometimes it’s a man who sees the mostly beautiful pair of hands on a stranger and can’t help but invite him to a hotel where he waits for him blindfolded
Sometimes it’s a werewolf who trusts no one except the man that killed his ex-lover
Sometimes it’s just a kid who loved his older neighbor so much he proposed. And now, years later would do anything to get him to take his love for him seriously
Sometimes it’s a straight man and a gay prostitute slowly falling for each other despite all of the rules forbidding it
Sometimes it’s two men holding onto the pain of losing those close to them, who find each other again and the pain doesn’t go away but the fact that they have each other makes life brighter
Sometimes it’s a boy in the drama club who falls in love with a boy thinking he’s a girl
Sometimes it’s someone wanting to redeem himself from his past mistakes and move on from his first love… only to find himself being confessed to by a boy who looks like sunshine
Anyway, I really love this genre ♡ I love to read it when I’m feeling something I can’t always put into words
teacher AU + vampire AU (gojo got cursed from Romania when he was supposed to get the cursed tool used for exorcising a vampire. but it's more like gojo let it happen for fun lol)
Not my best but I wanted to finish this because my brain is begging me to draw Springtrap, so I had to finish this before it rots in my wips folder JKHJGHFDSHGDJKDSJ
I love these two sm, they're by far my favourite spider characters outta the films and I even ended up reading their comics... given I only read the newest one for Hobie but I read like, the OG's and newer ones for Noir HEHEHEH
My favourite thing about TMS2 is that there isn't a darker, deeper reason for what Jiwoo did. Nope. Just a man with his self-loathing suffocating inside the walls of his own making.
Viewers expected another blackmail storyline, another nefarious scheme, some third party involvement or a secret. Of course, what happened with his parents and his past relationships informs Jiwoo's walls but at the end of the day, it was just a misguided attempt at self-preservation.
I think what some people who are constantly repeating that “Jiwoo should’ve just talked to Seojoon” aren’t realizing that for some people that feels impossible. Jiwoo clearly has just as much trauma and mental health problems as Seojoon, but they present differently because they are different people. From the beginning of the show whenever Jiwoo pushed Seojoon away I just felt like he was terrified and was desperately hiding behind walls he built for himself, and I felt like these episodes proved it. Jiwoo had got it in his head that he was a burden to Seojoon, that he was inconveniencing his life and career for Jiwoo and that Jiwoo was holding Seojoon back from living his full life. And Jiwoo probably didn’t want to say that because his biggest fear was that Seojoon would say he was right. And so he left in a self destructive manner thinking Seojoon would get over it bc he had so much more life around him than Jiwoo ever did.
When Seojoon came to the village with his lil antics I think he panicked. We don’t know exactly what he was feeling at that point, but I wouldn’t be surprised if at first he thought Seojoon was just there bc Seojoon isn’t the type of person who can just leave things open. Or once Jiwoo got wind of some scandal he thought maybe Seojoon needed to lie low and was just bored and that’s why he showed up. I don’t think he let himself think that Seojoon was there because he loves him, even if all the signs were there because Jiwoo is very proud but very insecure. He can’t let himself realize he messed up bc it would break him, and he can’t imagine that he could be so important to someone so he had to keep denying it.
I think that’s why he lashed out especially hard after the kiss too, he felt like he had messed up again by letting Seojoon in. He was seriously panicking. And when he panics he withdraws within and attacks anyone who tries to reach him. Even if he realized Seojoon still loved him he was convinced Seojoon would move on eventually, that their relationship had an expiration date, and that he was a burden and Seojoon would realize that eventually. Was he cruel? Yes of course. Was that acceptable? No not at all. Do I think it’s a realistic portrayal of someone with Jiwoo’s issues? Yep. And I also think they can get back together and that Jiwoo isn’t some awful person who doesn’t deserve Seojoon (I also don’t really believe in the concept of “deserving” someone but that’s another conversation). I think people often ask for realistic portrayal of mental illness and then get angry at characters for acting in ways that hurt others bc of their mental illness. And don’t get me wrong, illness isn’t an excuse for being cruel, but I dont think anything on this show has made Jiwoo irredeemable or made him unworthy of Seojoon’s love or made their relationship impossible. Anyway that was a lot of stream of consciousness so I hope it makes a bit of sense lol.
Your stream of consciousness is more coherent than whatever I can cook up in my text posts anon.
People definitely show a lack of understanding for Jiwoo's struggles.
In S1, Seojoon tells Jiwoo that guys like him, guys with walls around him, are his style. He likes them. But it's just not a trait for Jiwoo and it's not something you can out-kiss or out-hug. The show depicts how unromantic, how heartbreaking it can get to live with such walls.
The boy has abandonment issues which run deep. It's almost pathological. He did it to his ex-girlfriend, he did it to Hyun Pil's girlfriend, his close friend. I agree with you. It's very easy to think "he should have told Seojoon what was going on". Yes. He should have. If self-loathing and loneliness didn't also cause us to act irrationally at times. That night, it was all of Jiwoo's anxieties and fears piling up until he was suffocating and all he could think of was cutting loose.
Not to repeat all the great points you listed but yeah! He genuinely believed that Seojoon would eventually tire of this thing with a guy like him and would and could move on. He says it in their restaurant confrontation- he does not understand why Seojoon is going through all of this, what's so good about dating him? Jiwoo does not fight for this relationship because for him, because of him, it shouldn't be fought for.
Jiwoo was very much entitled to not fight for this relationship if this would have put him in a better position. Seojoon recognizes it himself in episode 8. If tells him that if he left, he should be better off and not be miserable. If up until the breaking point, we experienced Jiwoo's point of view instead, it would be very hard not to feel like Jiwoo should have the right to step away from Seojoon if that's what he wants (of course the show also shows us that those characters are better off together).
Obviously, he should never have ghosted Seojoon for a whole year. It's terrifying and inexcusable. He should never have slept with him, went too far and lash out (though for the things you pointed out, we can see why it happened).
Bang on for the bit about deserving and this aspect makes me love the show even more because this is what you expect from a romance story. The protagonist must suddenly provide a secret, noble sacrifice-reason, risk his life, earn back his love through some grand efforts and declarations spanning two or three montages. It's only if we see him suffer enough as viewers that we deem it acceptable. Life doesn't work like that. Of course, we want Seojoon to start valuing himself. It hurt to see completely ignore any pride and self esteem. We recognize that this stems from his own issues. Why should he suffer when he did nothing wrong.
But also, you cannot move on from the hurt, you cannot truly and honestly fix your relationships if you use a sort of metric. You hurt me x amount thus I require x amount of repenting or i am allowed to hurt you in an equivalent amount. You won't go very far trying to base your relationships by calculating such loss. That may be satisfying but that's not how you achieve true forgiveness and healing.
Of course, I still want, as a viewer scenes of acknowledgement from Jiwoo and a true moment of vulnerability in front of Seojoon. Seojoon deserves a real explanation. He deserves the opportunity to choose whether or not to forgive Jiwoo once all the information is available to him.
But anyways, Jiwoo has been one of the most realistic portrayal of mental health issues in a BL and I am so grateful for the show for this.
y’all thinking the ending was rushed are entitled to your opinion but lemme have my lil corner to say that hwang daseul is a god and the progression made complete sense. their confrontation wasn’t a magical ‘love-will-fix-it’ moment, it was the fact that seojun knows han jiwoo. jiwoo may have not been on his hands and knees with snot running down his nose but he was being the most sincere and the most vulnerable he’d ever been in his life and seojun knows this. he knows how hard it is for him to speak his mind, he’d seen it so many times in their relationship. seojun letting jiwoo speak and come to him before he embraces him in a forgiving hug is what really got me. seojun has compassion for jiwoo, a broken man, because he knows how hard it was for him to say all that. and jiwoo even said it himself: he is not as strong as seojun, he would not be able to chase him if he kept rejecting him.
this is not the end for them, they will continue to work on their communication but from everything they showed us in the last episodes, i know they can make it work. they were already starting to compromise and oh my gOD it made me so inexplicably happy to see that they didn’t give up on their own lives (seojun stayed in seoul, and jiwoo in the village), but worked so they could be a part of each other’s……
y’all thinking the ending was rushed are entitled to your opinion but lemme have my lil corner to say that hwang daseul is a god and the progression made complete sense. their confrontation wasn’t a magical ‘love-will-fix-it’ moment, it was the fact that seojun knows han jiwoo. jiwoo may have not been on his hands and knees with snot running down his nose but he was being the most sincere and the most vulnerable he’d ever been in his life and seojun knows this. he knows how hard it is for him to speak his mind, he’d seen it so many times in their relationship. seojun letting jiwoo speak and come to him before he embraces him in a forgiving hug is what really got me. seojun has compassion for jiwoo, a broken man, because he knows how hard it was for him to say all that. and jiwoo even said it himself: he is not as strong as seojun, he would not be able to chase him if he kept rejecting him.
this is not the end for them, they will continue to work on their communication but from everything they showed us in the last episodes, i know they can make it work. they were already starting to compromise and oh my gOD it made me so inexplicably happy to see that they didn’t give up on their own lives (seojun stayed in seoul, and jiwoo in the village), but worked so they could be a part of each other’s……
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