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"I also have a guardian"

ok before Home Week of FR-Fest ends i think this is as good a time as any to post my Way Too Many Thoughts about Seul-gi and her stepmom and parenthood in Friendly Rivalry that i've had marinating in the drafts for like six months. Kids can't have homes of their own, after all, only the ones created for them, and thus Seul-gi's physical precarity all her life and her abandonment as a child are one and the same — she has to fight and claw to survive on her own, because there's no roof over her head she can ever trust. Until there is. If you have no idea what I'm talking about please watch Friendly Rivalry if it seems like your speed, and if you're here for @fr-fest thank you for helping build the fandom that's been such a big part of my experience with the show. And now, onward! It's fascinating that a show like Friendly Rivalry, with its dark and gritty genre and tone that's perfectly suited to depicting the unsparingly bleak side of life, could very well have made every adult some form of antagonist and every parent-child relationship some form of toxic. And it very nearly does! It comes so close; as far as Seul-gi is concerned at first there's no reason to think it would be otherwise! And the ways in which Kwon Hui-yun is the sole exception have burrowed into my brain and refuse to leave.

Because on the one hand, the thematic contrasts are not subtle, and they're quite daring! Parenthood looms large over the whole premise, by way of the elite academy setting — it's the exact point where literal reproduction meets elite reproduction, the place where all the baggage of legacy, class status, and children as investments is at its most amplified. We see this most starkly in the prologue to Episode 3: Jae-yi's birth is precision engineered in a grimly comedic parody of both patriarchy and religion, her father seeking an extension of himself via scientific and superstitious control of a process where her mother is depicted merely as instrumental.

danny devito I Get It Now.jpeg

The cross above the bed ain't subtle: this is one man, one woman, and a child made to obey the will of the Father, maybe with a few modern bells and whistles but ultimately just like it's supposed to be now and forever, amen. All part of the Plan, made by men who pass it off on God. Chaehwa merely integrates that control into the broader engine of the economy: the Father's investment will pay off, society will keep its elite pipeline chugging along, and Jae-yi will be rewarded handsomely as long as she keeps the whole cycle going undisturbed over any fussy feminine quibbles like "autonomy" or "justice" or "falling in love with a girl the system was designed to quietly dispose of."

Love the way Friendly Rivalry depicts institutions that don't even bother to fake a pretense of kindness when they think they don't have to, so many anonymously loathsome motherfuckers to hate

Seul-gi in turn lives such a hard life precisely because she's been accidentally cut off from this cycle. If she'd grown up with her father she'd be indistinguishable from the rest of Chaehwa, maybe even with a massive leg up, but as an orphan from nowhere trying to better herself without the built in cheat codes of elite access she's at best a regrettable glitch, and at worst a threat to be eliminated. She's not part of the Plan, not anymore. And consequently her stepmother doesn't "count" in the way everyone else's parents count; she provides no status and no inside track with her husband dead, her financial resources are tied up in wrongful death litigation, and the way she's come to be Seul-gi's guardian is viewed not with reverence by society but confusion and pity. The one thing she can give, whether Seul-gi thinks she deserves it or not, is love — a kind of love that's frighteningly rare.

Because although Tae-jun is orders of magnitude crueler to his daughters than every other parent we see [ok maybe not Ye-ri's mom, who incidentally shares with him the specific evil of abandoning a disfavored child to predators], it's clear from everything we see that the culture that produced him is everywhere. It's in Gyeong's strained relationship with her mom [and that's mostly as good as it gets]. It's in Beom-su's parents closing ranks with the school administration to ensure she has impunity for her violence after they clearly couldn't prevent her from spiraling to that point in the first place. It's in the angry mob chasing after Byeong-jin after he fails to help their kids cheat the system with the system's tacit permission, those kids' actual skills and growth a secondary concern at best. And the only exception, the only parent we see who both loves her daughter unconditionally and manages to cultivate a genuine relationship of mutual care and respect, is the one who isn't a biological parent at all.

This is almost certainly the first time in her life Seul-gi has ever heard anything like this!! i'm not ok!!!

That combination, of uncynically asserting a model of single adoptive parenthood that's wholly positive, and then pointedly contrasting it with "natural" models of respectable nuclear families that are repeatedly shown to ruin lives, is one of the most satisfying rejections of an entrenched status quo I've ever seen in fiction. And it's not an accident that it's done by the same show with an A-Plot about lesbian love and its capacity to break these specific cycles of abuse; the two narratives aren't just deeply radical, each is fundamentally an extension of the other.

After all, Seul-gi's biological mother is never seen once. And her quest to first find her father and then get any kind of closure for his death, initially presented as the core of the story, is rendered anticlimactic in the most horrific way imaginable — he wasn't killed by the man tormenting Seul-gi and the girl she loves, but by a girl just like them that he victimized himself. By the end her quest to ruin Tae-jun is no longer about revenge for her father but about rescuing the life she's built now. That means her love for Jae-yi, and that means the home she's built with her stepmother, who she has gradually come to realize cherishes her as her own. Both of those sources of love are made up of dozens of hard individual choices, but they're also both deemed mistakes by society, aberrations from the Plan that are either regrettable or outright verboten. And that lack of built in acceptance, that deviation from the Plan, provides a blank slate for these women to build love on their own terms, and a grim clarity about what they're fighting to protect and who they're up against.

Which way, parent of dark academia toxic yuri daughter?

But on the other hand!! This subversion of expectations lands with the same grounded, layered thoughtfulness that runs through the whole show. Hui-yun's parental virtues are so powerful precisely because they're not reified. Seul-gi and her stepmom aren't found family, there's not a whiff of sentimental trope-iness about them even when it totally would have landed. They simply are family, in every traditional sense but with their unique contingent challenges. And while Hui-yun's status as a stepmother matters immensely to both the story and themes, she's not embodying some overdetermined symbolic contrast to the dominant culture; in fact she was enmeshed in it, married to one of the most powerful and reprehensible men we meet! The flashback where it's revealed that she was helping search for Seul-gi as a futile stepping stone to biological kids of her own is heartbreaking, and raises the question of how different things would have been if they had found her earlier. Would she have loved Seul-gi the same as her hypothetical half-siblings? Would any family involving Woo Do-hyeok have been a good place to grow up?

The ambiguity in her motivations! We'll never know what combination of regret, hope, and responsibility drove her to this and that's awesome!!

We can only guess, and in another instance of incredibly thoughtful restraint we never get any other hints of what her marriage was like, including when/if she ever would have found out who Do-hyeok truly was had he survived [her half-truth explanation to Seul-gi for why she settles the lawsuit, "I don't want to be disappointed by your dad anymore," is soul-crushing for how understated it is. And her one briefly narrated interlude where she attributes her understanding of Je-na's situation to "women's intuition?" That's simply the void screaming at you, forever]. In any case, whatever plans of parenthood she once had are replaced by a very different reality, a classic "one door closes/another door opens" story but with none of the triteness of a cliche — and one where Hui-yun forces the door open herself, initiating the search for Seul-gi after her father had given up and sustaining it past the point where any pretenses of self-interest, of restoring or creating a "real" biological family, were still in play. EDIT: ok i knew i was gonna miss something and i know the FR timeline is hard to keep straight but this is pretty embarrassing: of course Do-hyeok IS [briefly] alive at the moment they find Seul-gi, *because Tae-jun is the one who makes that possible,* manipulating this man's love for his daughter [possibly the last thing he doesn't hate about himself] to facilitate that same man's abuse of his own, and extract advantage for himself at every step. It's a horrifying final twist of the knife that every circumstance of Seul-gi's life and presence at Chaehwa has been an object of exploitation from the very beginning, with Jae-yi's manipulations only the unwitting aftershocks of her father's, but it's also grimly poetic. In assuming Seul-gi was a disposable bargaining chip and accidentally bringing her into the lives of both her father's widow and his own daughter, Tae-jun has brought her to the two woman who will love her in ways he could never fathom, and in underestimating all three of them he ensures his own downfall. END EDIT

And it's in that context where all we have left to assess is what Hui-yun does upon that search's miraculous success: she takes in a traumatized high school senior, having missed all the formative parenting years she presumably once desperately wanted, and immediately tells her that she'll never have to apologize for her presence in their home. She's not a good parent by way of her Woman Settings being set to Motherly Virtue; if anything she clearly has no idea what she's doing at first. But she immediately gets started on becoming a good parent, and she quickly laps her competition simply by stepping up for a child who has never been able to rely on anyone before.

almost murdered? car totaled? not important, got a hungry teenager to make happy Of course Seul-gi doesn't trust it at first, and though that skepticism is misplaced she's never framed as stupid or shortsighted for it. In fact both parties are allowed to be flawed without judgement; her stepmom doesn't deal with burdens with superhuman grace. She leaves the apartment a mess sometimes, she gets frustrated when Seul-gi's desperation to beat Tae-jun clashes with her own grief and responsibility to protect her, she clearly dislikes Jae-yi [an understandable parental instinct lmfao] and only belatedly realizes how much she means to her daughter. Her love for Seul-gi is unshakeable, but not frictionless. That's why the scene outside the courthouse, where Jae-yi races down the steps to walk together with Seul-gi and Hui-yun quietly lets it happen, and THEN visibly realizes what it means that they're holding hands and that Tae-jun is Not Happy about it, is my favorite in the entire series.

Look at her eyes! She's barely in the frame but you can still see her realize exactly what talk she's gonna have to have in the car lmaooo

But the show also provides clear benchmarks for the evolution of Seul-gi's feelings. At the beginning she just barely restrains herself from venting her frustrations over a quiet, awkward dinner, because she thinks she doesn't have the standing to speak her mind. She treats herself as a temporary guest in her own home, not wanting to burden Hui-yun and convinced that the only reason she's been taken in to begin with must be rooted in some kind of self interest, the only kind of human behavior she's ever witnessed. If it doesn't quite add up, it doesn't need to — Seul-gi's simply operating from the assumptions that best allow her to protect herself. And she might have continued to, were it not for her injury and the subsequent smear campaign that threatens her last chance at a real future. With the walls closing in and her own resourcefulness not enough to save her, she has only one card left to play. But still she holds off as long as she can, and her fateful decision to call Hui-yun to her expulsion hearing is ultimately a split second choice — a choice to reject the school's vicious framing of her as a loveless orphan who can be easily railroaded, a choice to call their bluff, and a choice, no matter how desperate, to believe in someone.

when your back is against the wall but the opportunity to be petty is so tempting that you accidentally confirm that your stepmom would die for you

We never know for sure exactly how much Seul-gi thinks this is actually going to work. And when her stepmom gets the call, she has all the excuses in the world not to respond, if she truly didn't care. The hard u-turn she takes, and her subsequent furious challenge to the entire power structure of Chaehwa [who in their bottomless apathy don't even understand why she's there at first] can only be attributed to love, and even Seul-gi knows it. So it's after this that she starts smiling freely around her stepmom in a way we otherwise only ever see with Jae-yi; she opens up to the love of her life and her newfound parent in parallel as they both keep showing up for her in the same places, and proving her assumptions that she's unloveable wrong in different ways. EDIT: my other miss was right here, though the thrust of it all still stands – it's just that the trust was already planted in the car ride over from the hospital, when Hui-yun tells her not to back down and belatedly fills her in about the lawsuit negotiations Seul-gi had left the apartment earlier to avoid; that gesture of goodwill, so far removed from her prior hesitancy to even ask for Seul-gi to communicate when she'll be home "if we're going to live together," is an unambiguous signal that she's ready to stop doubting herself and take this parenting shit seriously. So when Seul-gi makes the call, there's still uncertainty, but she does have reason to be confident it'll work. END EDIT And then there's the most explicit moment of all — the one exchange where the unspoken becomes spoken, when Hui-yun prevents a desperate and rage-stricken Seul-gi from throwing her future away permanently by murdering Tae-jun. In the aftermath, both of them shaken, she admits her refusal to settle the lawsuit in the face of Seul-gi's fear that she'd do the opposite, but reframes it from the perspective of the parent — Tae-jun's lawyers are trying to guilt her. What kind of parent would put their child through this? What kind of parent would pass up the financial windfall of a settlement to protect her child's future? If she's failing to prioritize Seul-gi, maybe it's because she's a stepmother? But what makes Hui-yun so unique as a parent is that she doesn't TELL Seul-gi what to think about this, she asks her what she DOES think.

this moment makes me want to run through a goddamn brick wall. confidence in herself but without ego, trust in her kid but without delusion — a parenting clinic. the best to ever do it

And with the last of her distrust evaporating, Seul-gi immediately responds: "No. You did the right thing." And when Byeong-jin does Byeong-jin things and ruins the moment, she shoves her bag into her stepmom's arms before recklessly running off, the trust they've been steadily building since that school hearing sealed in a moment of classic teenage childishness — here mom, hold this, i gotta go.

Of course because this is Friendly Rivalry, breakthroughs without true escape are only prelude to more heartbreak, and as long as Tae-jun is on the board he'll try to turn love into weakness, oblivious to its resilience but very effective at inflicting pain all the same. Jae-yi and Hui-yun will both do anything to keep Seul-gi safe, even if it means Seul-gi hates them for it. And so at the same time that Jae-yi appears to be slipping away for good Seul-gi finds out that the lawsuit WAS settled after all, the nightmarish betrayal she was always afraid of, and immediately after she was promised it would never happen. And that's when she DOES blow up, her anger paradoxically a sign that she's comfortable enough to let her vulnerabilities show [again in parallel to her lesbian situationship, where she can only express vulnerability after finally defeating Jae-yi in the battle of galaxy brain 12D cat and mouse by trying to drown herself. Yuri!!] But she still responds to her stepmother's wounded but calculated rebuttal with a chastened "I have no right to argue." She can't entirely shake the internalization of herself as a burden, the scared child behind the mask of fierce independence — but in this home her outburst won't cost her anything, and by the end she'll realize that even the most painful conflict will never make her unloved.

Hui-yun adhering to the principle of "if I'm mad at my kid, really I'm mad at myself"

Because what Hui-yun never does is treat Seul-gi as one of her burdens — her status as the One Good Parent is built not with any inherent qualities or cultural signifiers but by her nigh-revolutionary insistence that her child is not indebted to her. First she's just a roof over Seul-gi's head and a guarantee of food in her stomach without judgement, then she's falling asleep at her side in an operating room even if Seul-gi can't know she's there, and then, when Seul-gi takes the first leap of faith to ask her for help, she's dropping everything to turn the car around and defend her from expulsion. The other side of that turning point, the one that ensures they'll never truly go back, is that it doesn't just sink in for Seul-gi how her stepmom feels about her as a parent. She realizes in that moment how she feels as a daughter.

Top 10 Seul-gi faces to break your heart :(

The moment she refutes Beom-su's lie, she doesn't do it to the administrators, or to her attacker, but to Hui-yun. For the first time, she cares what a figure of authority in her life thinks of her. For the first time, she wants an adult to be proud of her — and in the back of her mind she's probably terrified that even if her stepmom has inexplicably stuck by her up to this point, now she has a reason to stop doing so. And when Hui-yun never doubts her for a second, and instead throws protective scorn over every other adult in the room, they truly become a family. It's why Seul-gi can say no when an indignant Hui-yun tells her they're leaving in protest, because now she knows she's talking to someone who will protect her at all costs but also respects her as a human being. The impact of this growing bond is significant, but never overplayed; never distracting from the main story, but always mattering when it appears. When Hui-yun is forced to go back on her promise to Seul-gi and settle the lawsuit [because Tae-jun nearly kills both of them via vehicular sabotage while making Jae-yi watch, naturally, jfc this show], it's not a moment of high melodrama, merely a grimly necessary choice and its consequences. Her chance for closure is gone, justice is impossible, but her daughter's safety comes before any of that. So she lets Seul-gi believe it was an accident, even knowing that the missing context will make Seul-gi resent her for settling for what she thinks are purely financial considerations — better her daughter be furious with her than live every moment of her life in incapacitating terror. She even takes a moment to ask Seul-gi if she wants to keep her father's wrecked old car — not because that's a reasonable course of action, but because she wants Seul-gi to know that she has a say, that her opinions matter. And yes, she's also guiltily covering for the choice about the lawsuit that she's not going to give Seul-gi for her own safety. Even the best things don't get be clean in Friendly Rivalry, but they do get to be Good, in the end.

At least Jae-yi has the courtesy to be cryptic and gay — this girl has no idea how to deal with people caring about her this directly, with words and shit

And in the end the painful sacrifices pay off, because all the work Hui-yun has done has made it undeniable to Seul-gi, no matter how high her emotions run — that everything her stepmom does, she does for Seul-gi first. You can see it even in her penultimate confrontation with Tae-jun, having hit rock bottom but still making unhinged evil genius chess moves to make Jae-yi proud [ok worried out of her mind, in reality, but still]. In her characteristic style of blunt confrontation, she lets Tae-jun know that she suspects exactly why her stepmom did what she had to do, and that she's willing to fight for her just as hard precisely because she would never ask her to. And it's not a coincidence that she's talking to the highest-status, most celebrated parent in the Chaehwa orbit, whose meticulously planned and perfected daughter was willing to die to destroy him, and is now willing to live for this girl from nowhere.

i swear this show would be 10/10 solely on the strength of its full gallery of Chung Su-bin facial expressions

Of course Friendly Rivalry's greatest balancing act is that while it's a furious rebuke of societal cynicism, it never loses its grounding sense of realistic pessimism. The power of love is great and wondrous, but it cannot in a head to head fight overcome the power of, well, power. The final tragedy is that there's only so much any of them can do against their incredibly entrenched tormentors and the systems they represent — Seul-gi goes through physical and mental hell to put Tae-jun away for a despair-inducing few months, Jae-yi goes over the ledge for only the possibility of saving her sister and seeing the love of her life again, and Hui-yun is powerless to spare Seul-gi from the grief that follows.

But everything she can do she keeps doing, down to the final scene, when she fends off invasive reporters while for the first time calling Seul-gi her daughter in dialogue, no qualifiers attached. Seul-gi's relaxed suggestion that they move elsewhere together to escape Tae-jun is met with her mother's stern but affectionate veto, and the implication is loud and clear: This is our home. Let me do my job to keep you safe, and you do yours by living your life. It's a stunningly beautiful resolution for how restrained it is. There's no grand climax because that's coming in the mail courtesy of Jae-yi — there's simply the quiet depiction of a family made whole, not triumphant but surviving. No bloodlines, no 20 year plans, no missions from God, just one woman and her daughter against the world.

Ok that's uh. everything that was building up in my brain on that. Masterful work from Chung Su-bin as my GOAT protagonist, Kang Jin-ah as Parent of the Year, and of course from Kim Tai-hee, Min Ye-ji, and the entire Friendly Rivalry team for creating something you never run out of things to say about. Happy FR-Fest, everyone — this goes out to all of you whose writing and art has built up an incredibly vibrant fandom for one of the best shows of the decade; I wouldn't have found it without you guys. Here's to one year of Seul-gi and Jae-yi, and many more to come <3

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