ok thoughts about Lee Jihye and the absence of Kim Namwoon
It's smth that never really factors in the novel, which makes sense considering they have way bigger things going on and LJH is often used as a comic relief character. But something that I think about often is how isolated LJH must've felt in kimcom. Younger than the adults and dismissed by them as a child, but older than the kids and not being able to really openly talk with them. And of course she had meaningfull relationships with kimcom, she had her captain and the older women to look up to, and she was often goofing around with the children. But still when you're a teenage girl it is very important to have someone your age to confide in. And I just think about the juxtapostition of her mostly doing childish stuff with the kids and then often sneaking alcohol on her own. And with the terrible way she lost her best friend, LJHs lack of peers her age, lack of people she can confide in about just the ordinary problems of being a teenager, must have really impacted her developmentally and affected her social abillities and emotional maturity on a very real level.
And the thing is. Lee Jihye was supposed to have that. She was supposed to have Kim Namwoon as her peer to bicker with and confide in and sneak alcohol with. And the crazy thing is she doesn't even know! She doesn't even know she had someone, that the her in every other timeline managed to have close bonds with someone her equal, even after what she had done, even with everything going on. She had someone and she doesn't even know it was robbed of her.
