#if you disagree i'd love to hear your insights first before you call me names

[opineonion]

Chae Yul: He had it coming... Or did he?

Warning: mild spoilers, disorganized thoughts, a bit of a rant-ish, flowery essay because I can only speak in metaphors, talks on who deserves redemption and who doesn’t.

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Just finished Secret Alliance, and as someone who needs conversation after a satisfying, cathartic read, I decided to head to the manwha’s trailer to look at the comments, and, to no one’s surprise, saw a crowd of readers with divisive opinions (I always love this. It means the story was provoking enough to inspire different insights.) Of course, when you have a tragic, pretty boy with a murderous streak, you’d get an interesting crowd, and I found it quite easily. This crowd was divided between two factions— one that sympathized and exonerated Chae Yul from his actions, and the one who believed that he had everything coming to him. 

Personally, I’m part of the latter. 

Legally speaking, he committed criminal acts against Eun that deserved to be penalized. In fact, he was extremely lucky that she didn’t press any charges at all, that much I can agree with. The fate he received in the end was much more benign than what he was setting himself up for; but, at the same time, I’m happy that he was given that chance for redemption. To carry the burden of guilt, regret, and remorse is the punishment of those who sobered from delusion, as they will carry sins of their former selves with them for the rest of their lives.

Obviously, I sympathized a lot with Yul, but to sympathize doesn’t mean to exonerate one from their actions. As I read through the story, I wasn’t hoping for a happy ending. In fact, I felt dread each time he dug a deeper hole for himself. (You could even say that he was already deep inside it before the story even began.) I was half-expecting that he’d end up behind bars, or dead. It’s how a lot of yandere stories would end, as if stamping the message on our heads that people who are this far gone do not deserve to carry on as they are. How would you even hope to redeem a character like Chae Yul? Sad backstory aside, does his character deserve to be redeemed? 

I think that a chance for redemption comes when a character could have chosen the path that their circumstances molded them to be, but instead chose the one that allowed the first step to break away from that mold. (Arguably, Chae Yul was halfway down the first path, but sobered by Eun’s harsh reality check where he no longer had a place in her life, he was allowed a glimpse of the other path through the brambles, and he chose to tear his way through to get on the other side.) The more his past was divulged, the more I wished that he had a better “everything” before his nosedive in the story. Chae Yul was just a product of his circumstances. Mocked and objectified for his beauty (Why is conventional feminine beauty somehow always objectified... deserves another mini essay methinks), resented by his father who likely mistreated him because he lacked the masculinity he expected from a son he sired, he turned up bitter and resentful without a single ounce of faith in the world that had done nothing but consume what it desired of him only to spit him out right after.

It came as no surprise that he clung onto the first person who saw him as a human being, something other than an amalgamation. It also came as no surprise that without anyone to derive any form of healthy attachment from (My god, everyone either mocked him, or wanted to get rid of him or defile him), all he knew was that he’d be hard-pressed to release who he thought was the only person who could ever see him for who he could be behind his face. 

Cue the stalking, gaslighting, and blackmailing, and the terrible, no good, terrorizing of Eun. 

And yet, two years later, he was able to let go. Even though his heart “shattered to a million pieces, the sun still rose the next morning and he was still breathing.” When he realized that he no longer had a place in Eun’s life, the one person who his life revolved around, he pieced himself back together, perhaps alone, perhaps slightly cushioned by his tentative reconciliation with his sister. Drifting in space with nothing but the sobering pain of his heartbreak, he chose to honor Eun’s wishes and made himself scarce in her life, living the life she decided to spare instead of end in court trial that Yul would have lost. It’s true that he was a cruel, selfish, delusional egomaniac who terrorized Eun for most of her adolescent and young adult years with the sad hope of keeping her in his life. But, in time, he accepted the grave error of his ways—carrying with this the pain of knowing that he had hurt the only person he would ever love, the pain that he was a monster—and he would wear this truth around his neck as he presses forward. 

Did he deserve this ending? I believe he does. Does he deserve something worse? I believe he does so as well. What made the difference is that he chose to end it before it got worse. He chose to own up to his mistakes, and he so he lived by its consequences. He chose to carry his love for Eun as penance, afraid to ever forget her, and enacting it by leaving it unrealized. Perhaps without even knowing it, he’s performed his first pure act of love, a feat given that he was never spared some of it for even just a bit.