#yapped about it to two of my friends in multiple audios and texts

[genericgirl420]

Sang-woo/Gihun analysis based solely on the Sae byeok death scene.

As we know, in episode seven of season one, Sae byeok gets struck by a shard of glass on her waist and has to go through the whole dinner before the last game while bleeding out, trying her best to postpone her certain death.

All while Gi hun is now wary of Sang-woo for pushing a man to his death in the glass bridge (which, in context of the game, is completely understandable) and is trying to plot with Sae byeok to kill him and completely ignoring her pleas for him to swear to look after her brother, brushing them off with blind optimism.

Blind optimism is an interesting quality of Gi hun's that we see all throughout the series, it is often portrayed as a good thing, but not in this scene. When confronted with the death of someone he cares about, he refuses to look at things objectively, using his delusions of her living as a shield from the reality right in front of him, the reality that she is dying and he cannot save her. Sae byeok has accepted her death and is only thinking about the safety of her loved ones, her last wish is for the only man that she deems trustworthy in this place to look after her family and carry on. But Gi hun cannot look into her eyes and accept her death wish, because by doing so he would be admitting to himself that she is indeed dying.

So he runs away from reality, physically and mentally, by banging on the doors and calling for a doctor he knows won't come, but do you know who is not afraid of reality?

When Gi hun turns back he is faced with one of the worst sights he could possibly have, his lifelong bestfriend, Sang-woo, staring blankly at the girl he has grown to care so much about in so little time, bloody knife in hand, and a black coffin with a red bow just waiting to carry her limp body away.

And that makes Gi hun panic and rage, which is understandable. But if you were to look at this scene outside of his biased point of view of someone who was already seeing his own best friend as a cold monster, and think logically. Sang-woo took away the last minute or so of Sae byeok's life, a long and cold minute of dread and regret over all the choices she's made that brought her to this moment, wondering if her brother and mother would ever get a chance at life, in pain, as blood pools under her body in a lonely death bed.

Sang-woo did what Gi hun was too cowardly to even consider as a possibility, he doesn't care about being perceived as good, unlike his best friend who would rather let somebody he loves so much suffer alone, because facing her death head on, or even terminating her suffering himself, would be damaging to his internal image of being a good person. "Good people don't kill other people", that's Gi hun's black and white thinking, but the world isn't black and white and Sang-woo is well aware of that fact.