Just caught up with Hand Jumper's latest chapters and oh my lord. First, adopting Jugyeong's full name when it just started as an on the spot alias, and now literally paraphrasing what Mr. Bak said to that front before she sent him towards imminent danger.
I really do think she's made Jugyeong into this personal symbol of hers in a sense, one all-encompassing purity and goodness, because what other kind of person would've hugged her even after what she did? Forgave someone as terrible as her? It's just like how she made Samin and the rest of her family her personal symbol of immoral Aberrancy.
THEN SHE WENT AHEAD AND COMMITED TO ACTING OUT THAT ENTIRE "GOOD" PERSONA. These traits are just too damn specific. She could've said any other set of generic good traits, but no, she went ahead and described the ideal she was slaving away for in her youth word by word. She's reduced the first, foundational people of her life to symbols, rolesβ reframed them as something she can conceptualize and embody to garner a result. Her framework of people, of life. Hell, she even thinks she's above feeling physical pain, and weaponizes her own grief and emotions. She makes everything a concept to figure out, to rationalize, to exploit from a "higher perspective."
And she's been playing into this narrative that she's a bad person. Not quite to the extent she thinks her family is which is something she tries to hold onto, but enough to be believably someone capable of taking on the burden of her family's sins. Because then that means everything was all well within her control and she just needs to make the "right" choices going forward, just like how she thinks "to blame others is to hinder your self-improvement", rather than admit she was and still is just a scarred young girl, someone who fell victim to life circumstances. If she doesn't have control, then what does she have? Everything she's ever accomplished, it was through obsessively micromanaging every single little right course of action. Without it, how can she reform the Aberrant Corps? Avenge Jaeil? Her gift on its own hardly does anything. She needs to account for every variable and control it. And if she isn't willing to sacrifice a portion of her self-perception and moral compass to do "morally questionable" stuff in order to achieve all of that, which includes becoming a better person, then she would suddenly be posturing as something she has not earned- a good person, and it's become this cycle, just like the interpersonality cycle she's in of shutting herself off from other people then believing no one would truly understand her.
And I don't even think it'd be a stretch to say that she uses the name "Jugyeong" to punish herself with her guilt in a sense. Chiding herself for having burdensome, distracting feelings she doesn't even know if she deserves to feel so she presses herself where it's sore to desensitize herself, acting above her own trauma, "reclaiming" it by twisting it into a narrative she can exploit. The role she took to scheme the cultist seems borderline sardonic.
It's easier for Sayeon when she can file everything under black-and-white, cause and effect. Intelligence and time reversal just seems to be the worst possible assests the perfectionistic, traumatized, socially and emotionally underdeveloped Sayeon Lee could have.
I'm just rambling fresh out of binging the past 10 or so chapters really TT could be talking straight outta my ass for all I know, staying awake for days straight to write Snapback fanfics will do that to you πππ