sayeon lee and trust as a substitute for love
in hand jumper, sayeon uses trust as a substitution for love.
sayeon lee has never experienced mutual unconditional love. no one truly knew her for who she was as the daughter of a criminal aberrant. the closest she ever got was jaeil, who died. her sister’s love is (arguably) unreciprocated. thus, she doesn’t acknowledge the love she feels for other people (like all her other emotions). sayeon is a utilitarian. trust is directly tied to her ability to manipulate, by extension, mission success. so, it is the only form of affection that she allows herself to have.
additionally, sayeon doesn’t trust people easily. she is a logical person who questions and criticizes everything. in the corps, blind faith could mean death. as a leader, trust is indicative of power and skill, both things sayeon aspires for. sayeon understands the weight trust carries in the aberrant corps, where the survival rate is minimal.
so, she searches for affection through the trust placed on her by other people.
this emphasis on trust is paralleled with love. when sayeon learns her teammates trust her, she starts smiling and blushing, which is a stereotypically romantic reaction. she searches and even craves for trust in the same way many people want affection. in missions, she tries to be as efficient and successful as possible to gain trust. she constantly wonders if characters like min and ryujin trust her. like love, trust needs to be earned. her journey towards gaining trust mirrors a journey towards genuine relationships, albeit a more twisted, complicated version.
but the most compelling parallel is that sayeon lee does not want characters to be forced to trust her. instead, she hopes they will trust her out of their own volition. as ryujin says: “you want me to choose you all on your own”. even absent the obvious romantic undertones, the treatment of trust as something that cannot be forced mirrors the nature of love. in the same way true love is mutual, sayeon wants trust to be real and reciprocated.
through the parallelism of trust and love, sleepacross delves into complex and ambiguous relationships, which allows her to further explore themes of moral grayness. but more than that, she explores how a person’s psyche can be impacted by trauma, and thus, inability to acknowledge love.
