the appeal of yeojeong as a normal guy who’s just a little bit off. not enough that you would notice when talking to him, of course, but it’s just there, under the surface. a disturbance. and i think it’s interesting because typically you have two types of guys somewhat adjacent to this: guy who seems totally normal but is secretly sadistic/a psychopath, and then guy haunted by a traumatic/troubled past, who has that secret layer of torment running beneath the surface of their image. but yeojeong breaks through these archetypes, and i think part of it is because he’s just so...calm. it’s not that he’s living a double life (kind doctor by day, killer by night) or hiding part of his past (everyone he worked with knew about what happened to his father, and watched his downward spiral during his college days). he’s not the typical male character who is, at every attempt, trying to outrun his tragic past (even though he does run once or twice); he’s not haunted by flashbacks, or suffer from PTSD in the way that is usually portrayed in dramas. and i think part of that is because the glory is a story about victims. it’s dongeun’s story, first and foremost, even though it is also yeojeong’s story, and hyeonnam’s story, and sohee’s story. but it’s a story about dongeun’s pain, and when it’s not about her pain, it’s just about the pain of victimhood - unlike other dramas, this isn’t a show where male pain outweighs the rest.
so yeojeong is just a normal guy. he’s handsome. he has a good career. he’s a plastic surgeon, an interesting choice when both his parents were/are hospital directors, and his father seemed to have worked in the er or something of the sort prior to his death (or at the very least wasn’t a plastic surgeon). something could be said here of yeojeong choosing the ‘safe’ path as a doctor, a path where he cures pain and makes people happy without the added risk of being attacked by one of his patients. there’s no proof of that in the show - why he chose to be a plastic surgeon - but it’s an interesting thought path to travel.
dongeun says he must have lived a good life. that he’s never had to worry about the path that he’s on. and that’s true, to a certain extent. to everyone, including her in the beginning, yeojeong is perfectly friendly. he’s perfect, but not the perfect that people perceive as too perfect (i.e. the guy who’s hiding things); he has his moments where he spazzes out, gets into fights, goes crazy over dongeun texting him back, teases his mom. he’s perfectly well adjusted (a perfect contrast to dongeun’s ‘maladjustment’). he wears flip flops to work and gets the same coffee order daily. he plays go with old men in the park.
he likes to listen to the fizzing of vitamin tablets in water because it calms him down. is this a strange thing? only because he thinks it’s important enough to mention to his therapist. he does it at work too - drops the tablet in, closes his eyes, rests his head. he does it at home - drops the tablet in, opens the drawer, draws a knife. it’s about the noise. bubbles rising to the surface, like bubbles rising from underwater. he stays underwater until the last possible moment, when he has to break the surface in order to breath. dongeun makes him feel like he’s at the eye of a storm - a deceptively calm center, while everything else rages outside. and i think it’s kind of important that he makes that comparison, when he’s someone always seeking that calm. the soothing noise, that makes him feel lonely.
so he’s just a normal guy. a normal guy who receives letters on a regular basis from the prisoner who brutally murdered his father. he doesn’t like letters, he tells dongeun. who knows what he does with the letters - does he keep them? does he throw them away as soon as he sees them? he must have read some of them; maybe you only need to read one to know what is in the rest. maybe he’s still reading them; maybe he keeps them without reading, an invisible torment. it’s not what he does with the letters that matters, but that he receives letters at all.
can you still call it a haunting if you’ve almost made your peace with it? if you’re living with it?
he’s just a normal guy, who looks his therapist right in the eyes and tells her that she couldn’t fix him. he diligently attends therapy for years on a regular basis, even though it doesn’t work. he finally abandons it when he moves to semyeong, because he chooses to embrace dongeun’s revenge. he chooses his own revenge, too, in a way. the dark part of him that he can’t escape. the one that makes him pick up the knife, who asks dongeun who to kill before she even tells him she wants any of them dead, even when he’s a doctor from a family of doctors, and doctors don’t kill - they save lives instead.
you couldn’t fix me, he tells his therapist calmly. so calmly. as if there’s not a bloodied man sitting next to him, a man he dreams of killing. the man is just life to him, just like the letters are life to him to. a dulled numbness. an acceptance of it.
is your son going through hell? can you even tell it’s hell, if it’s what you’ve become used to? is it hell when you’re a doctor dreaming of murder? is it hell to no longer be tormented by dead men and living murderers who send you letters? is it?
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Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: ダンジョン飯 | Dungeon Meshi | Delicious in Dungeon
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Marcille Donato/Falin Touden, Laios Touden & Marcille Donato
Characters: Marcille Donato, Falin Touden, Laios Touden, senshi has a few speaking lines but not much presence
Additional Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Sickfic, Pining, Poisoning, farcille is tagged but theyre still in the awkward mutual pining mode
Summary:
Just as she's wondering that, the door swings open, and Marcille immediately meets twin gazes as Falin and Laios both step into the room. Falin still looks worried, and even Laios looks uncomfortably bothered at the sight of Marcille sitting up, which she would be massively offended by if she weren't struggling to control her stupid body.
"Marcille! You shouldn't be upright yet!" Falin immediately scolds, and she rushes forwards to Marcille's side, pressing a hand to Marcille's forehead again– this, at least, feels familiar, easing the previous doubt. "The poison is still in your system, so you have to be careful, okay?"
"What… what happened?" Marcille croaks, wincing at the sound of her own voice– it cracks against her will, raspy and strained and leaving her just as breathless as sitting up had.
"You accidentally drank from my cup," Laios says, and he appears at Marcille's side before she even realizes he's moved, giving her a hard, undecipherable stare. "You don't remember?"
~~
or: after canon, marcille drinks poison meant for laios and has a bad time of it. luckily, she has falin and laios both there to nurse her back to health.
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I finished the first svsss book! my thoughts:
this book immediately latched its hooks into my brain the same way the untamed did. what the fuck. how did it hook me so quickly. I liked the mdzs novels and the tgcf donghua, but svsss and the untamed fucking did something to my brain chemistry
I am such an enormous sucker for Narrative Is Alive stories, especially when both the character and narrative are aware of each other and can interact. Every interaction between SQQ and the System was a delight
Spoiler-y thoughts under the cut
having absorbed most of my knowledge of this series from the fanart put on my dash, I was surprised by SQQ's kindness. I expected him to be a hater (which he is) and kind of detached (which he is, but for dissociating reasons) but his kindness is surprisingly earnest. Sure he tries to couch it in self saving (haha) reasons since he wants to avoid original!SQQ's fate, but he does genuinely seem to care for his disciples quite a bit
speaking of him genuinely caring and the dissociating, HOO BOY. THE GRIEF HUH? "why do my disciples keep claiming I'm out of my mind with grief, I'm feeling and acting perfectly normal" <- says the guy whose days have passed in a haze since he was forced to throw someone very dear to him into an abyss, who has periodically forgotten he's gone and called out to him, who has sat at his grave and mourned. Jesus christ dude. I know the heartbreak points are for Binghe but they are also for me
I was somewhat prepared for Binghe's puppyboy devotion by the fanart, but oh my god this dude has some self worth issues. The guy who has been abusing him suddenly changes his tune and is nice to him, and he's immediately in malewife mode like omg shizun can I cook for you 🥺 shizun can I attend to your every need 🥺 shizun I feel so safe around you 🥺 Binghe babygirl you have serious problems
I was so delighted to meet Shang Qinghua, he's honestly the character I wanted to meet the most and he did not disappoint. what the hell do you mean he transmigrated into an infant
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ok but i actually have sm to say about qi rong's relationship with anger. i could honestly just link a fic i wrote about it here bc i think i worded it better there than i ever can again but my ao3 links to my main twt and i prefer to keep rp stuff separate from my personal stuff for reasons sooooo lemme try to write it differently
cw for mentions of domestic violence bc holy shit like 99% of his character traces back to that in some way
the key thing is, of course, that anger is a trauma response for qi rong. he has every reason to be fucking pissed at like, all times, but fundamentally, his anger is not rational. rage and violence are all he knows! his earliest childhood memories are of being abused and seeing his mother be abused! even when he got out of that, he and his mother were bullied and ostracized, and his mother was eventually murdered. violence and cruelty shape his early childhood and in turn shape who he is today (enabled in large part by the queen's reluctance to properly discipline him when he began exhibiting cruel behavior himself).
in many cases, it's about revenge--getting "even", though he usually takes it much farther than the original offense. his father was abusive? he'll delight in warring against people from the same town as him. the yong'an rebellion tore away the one good thing he had in his life--his royal status? he'll crush their entire royal & noble classes in a single night. xie lian fell off the pedestal he held him on, "failed" and "abandoned" him? unforgivable.
very often, it's simply lashing out. the world has been cruel to him, so he'll be cruel too.
mostly, though, his anger just keeps him going. if he doesn't have his anger, then what does he have? sadness, loneliness, despair, heartbreak, misery.
being a ghost adds another angle to it, too--he can't let go of his anger, even if he wants to. well, he could, but then he'd disappear, and he doesn't want that. not yet. it's his source of life. it's also his source of power! and it's easy to forget with how often the rest of the cast and the narrative itself dunks on him, but he has a lot of power. #4 in the entire ghost realm! a near-supreme, one successful furnace trip away from becoming a full-fledged ghost king!
just--imagine, for a moment, being him. an abused kid--powerless--who suddenly learns that he's actually a prince--powerful!--and then, before even reaching adulthood, his kingdom crumbles, and he eventually dies just as powerless as he started. and then all that resentment causes him to come back even more powerful than before. it's no wonder he leans into it.
idk this is getting long-winded but i guess what i'm trying to say is--his anger is both justified and overblown, it is both understandable and irrational, it is something he needs to hold onto no matter how much it hurts him. he is his anger.
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