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Han Joowon + #7🧑🏼🚀 - Dream job?
Oh, what an interesting question, I haven't thought of this before! Being a police officer definitely suits him, but it's unlikely to be his dream job. Does he even have one?
In terms of canon, I doubt he ever thought about it himself. His father and grandfather were police officers, and that's what was expected of him, too, and as a teen or young adult without a profession he wasn't ready to stand against Han Gihwan. Realistically, it was decided for him before he was born, and there was very little he could do about it. It's like, does he even have a concept of a dream job?
However, it's interesting to think how his life would unravel in an AU setting. What if he wasn't Han Gihwan's son, what if his parents were supportive, what if he actually had a choice and the capacity to dream? Here are a few options I came up with.
1, He's a naturally caring person, seeing how he was drawn to help out the sex worker victims who would otherwise fall through the cracks of the system, but he lacks the practical knowledge of how to care for people, since he doesn't have the experience of being cared for. If he grew up in a more nurturing family, there is a chance he would have grown up to work in a "caring" profession: social worker, teacher, doctor.
2, Also, he's definitely into cooking. No one cooks as good as he does if they aren't into it. This is not a result of his upbringing (having to take care of himself from a young age). I've seen people who had to learn to feed themselves when they were very little: those who love cooking will become good at it, and those who don't will settle into learning to prepare a few basic meals, and they will be fine with it. I believe Joowon cooks because he loves doing it.
So, how about an AU where instead of becoming a police officer, Joowon opens his own restaurant? And meets Lee Dongsik, who loves to eat, when he one day comes in as a customer?
(Or combine it with Yuyeon lives AU, where their parents would still own a restaurant, and you get Dongsik and Joowon as competitors, but in a restaurant business, and you can even keep an enemies-to-whatever-you-want arc.)
3, And finally, I'll admit I actually want Joowon to be a private investigator rather than a police officer—both post-canon and in an AU setting. This is more like my dream rather than Joowon's, but hear me out 😄
Joowon is an incredibly good detective, despite what fandom says about him. Investigating the wrong people and looking into the wrong clues are part of the job—you can't realistically expect a detective to be right about everything all the time, but you can expect them to thoroughly investigate every suspect and every clue to eliminate all the wrong answers and find the right one. That is what good investigation looks like.
So, Joowon would make a fabulous private investigator. Why do I prefer that over his police work?
I think it's simply dangerous for someone honest like Joowon to work for such a deeply corrupt system. Despite what Dongsik thinks, Joowon's police work is a ticking bomb. He really only has three options:
To work with the corrupt system. In this case, no matter how pure he is now, eventually it will inevitably corrupt him, too.
To work within the corrupt system, actively doing good for the citizens, but staying away from the corrupt parts of the system. And this is the most out of character option for Joowon—we all saw how long he can handle not investigating police corruption in canon 😂 (upd: This is Dongsik's in-character option. This is precisely what he was doing throughout all of his career to stay on the job and stay semi-sane.)
To work against the corrupt system. However, in real life, when police officers are honest and work against the system for the greater good, they don't stay in the system for too long. If this is the path Joowon chooses, it would be reasonable to expect him, in the best case scenario, to do something serious that will get him dismissed (probably morally right, but against the rules), or in the worst case scenario, to "conveniently" die on the job.
Think about it. If Han Gihwan wasn't his father, and was some random unrelated high-ranking corrupt officer, would Joowon survive the canon? Han Gihwan does already entertain the idea of killing his own son off, would he hesitate if it was some random guy poking around the case he wants to keep closed?
Either way, working for the police post-canon, Joowon will inevitably encounter more police corruption, which he will inevitably investigate and ask questions about, which in turn will inevitably make him a pack of enemies—some of which could be powerful like Han Gihwan. And without his father's protection, how is he going to fight it?
He's not going to handle more than a decade on this job. Maybe even less than that.
So, all in all, I just wish for him to encounter some complicated case of police corruption that he's powerless to do anything about on his own, or he might be able to do something at the expense of his career (and hopefully not life), and that would get him kicked out of the force, and he can open up a private investigation business together with Lee Dongsik.
It would be the best solution for both of them.
But hey, let me know what you think? What would be Joowon's dream job if he could have one?
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