#let me repeat: not in any other respect especially when deep in his frontman headspace; this guy is still a mass murder game dev

[ryukiethebored]

personally i feel in-ho wouldn't be into power, control, dominance and that whole universe of behavior when it comes to the dynamics in his personal relationships. not a list of things i have anything against, simply don't see it specifically for him, at least to significant extremes. control issues when it comes to his emotional regulation & approach to operating the games? yes. but been thinking of how he approaches relationships specifically.

his character comes off gentler to me, which— hear me out— i know sounds off considering he'll stride up to somebody and shoot them point blank in the head, or break the neck of a man with his bare hands (really feeling the irony in using the word gentle for him now), but i'm going by the moments when he's him him, not the masked frontman, whether that’s physical or metaphorical.

not that they're two separate entities. i don't necessarily believe he'd have a complex that has him shifting between two wholly different personas. i do believe it's complicated for him, that the lines blur, that he slips and stutters both ways when it comes to juggling the priorities of his young-il role vs frontman.

but it's in the way he looks at people when his guard is down, when for a moment he's let the old parts of himself resurface. he looks genuinely interested & attentive, genuinely proud or empathetic, and that's because i feel he really did (in his past, pre-game mentality) and does still have the capacity to be all of these things. there's of course all the moments with gi-hun, but another scene that always stuck with me is the way his gaze lingers on myung-gi after catching him and thanos during their escalating bathroom encounter, like in-ho felt something significant in the moment (my hc is that he's reminded of jun-ho and is revisiting memories he may have had to protect young jun-ho from similar mistreatment). but the fact he appears genuine with these subtle emotions, as well as seems to have an innate skill of reading people on a nuanced level, understanding why they're doing what they're doing even if it differs from himself (which i feel is the irony in him, because not everyone has the ability to understand beyond their bubble, even when you are a genuinely good person). i feel him being this way & having that natural ability would segue into, almost paradoxically, being a gentler character. because he sees people.

you can still see people and choose to be cruel, to feel internally superior, to control them. but i feel like this isn't the way his character is portrayed. he meets people on their level, trying to reason instead of harm, trying to test them in real ways that sync with their behavior in order to see if it changes anything in them. he doesn't force their hand, shove an immovable truth at them. it's like he wants them to see it for themselves, come to a conclusion as naturally as possible, because he knows that's the only way it'll sink in. not if he forces it.

i believe he's built a wall brick-by-brick to successfully be the frontman, that it wasn't an instinctive, easy transformation for him. that while he may have gotten colder, he would still have to utilize coping mechanisms to deal with what he does, what he decides to participate in, and even more than drinking to take off the edge of any invading doubt, he shuts himself off.

it's the vibe i get in moments like the mingle game, when he kills another player to take over the room and save jung-bae and himself (well, to feed his ruse). that blank, empty look he gets as he stares at nothing in particular after ending the man's life. that he had to jump back into the mental haven of frontman - slam down those bricks before the thoughts of what he's done gets to the man he has hidden away in there - shuts down to cope with the necessity of the situation. you could say he was already in the mindset of frontman because he's actively devising these situations to happen as they do, to manipulate gi-hun into trusting him, but there's some limit i believe he hits when it comes to the bigger moral issue of having murdered someone by his own hands, someone who's (essentially) innocent, was on a fair & equal playing field, and had as much a right to shove them out of the room as they did with him. he could reason killing that man was a part of the game, a part of one's own desperate fight for survival - so it's still ‘fair,’ but he still took direct care of it by his own hand. it isn’t necessarily an integrated part of the game to take someone out yourself (at least until its end). a guard didn't shoot the man for failing. it was him who decided that was the best case scenario.

anyway, gentleness. in my mind his strict adherence to fairness and equality when he's running the games means he has a strict line when it comes to taking advantage of others within his personal interactions. to changing or ignoring the rules because one feels like it. to choosing to be a bully rather than meeting someone where they’re at. its because of this i honestly feel like he would get no pleasure out of someone being in a subservient or lesser-than role, no matter what the context. that he'd find it uncomfortable and demeaning, no matter who the person. everyone's got to be on an even as possible playing ground, and only then will he start playing his subtle games (which are very well still questionable/fucked up/irredeemable, of course, but a story for another day).

i also believe shooting jung-bae, though it was an obvious show of what happens when you break the rules of the game and was something that he felt obligated to enforce as frontman (as was stringing up the doctor and guards in the previous season), it's also something he would have struggled with— in private. he knows it’s a byproduct of for so long following rules with drastic levels of intensity. i believe while he may have convinced himself of the importance behind what he was doing and why he was doing it, he still would've had to shut down in some capacity, because he at the same time understood why they (gi-hun & friends) chose to do what they did. even more because he’d been a direct participant this time. yet he had a mission, and so he placed the bricks, shut off the understanding that would’ve caused hesitation in regard to jung-bae. because understanding, while it is fair and fitting when you're among equals, doesn't change much when you must also be the frontman.

do i make sense? i try but—