#what i mean to say is yeon household was cruel and the world was cruel too so it’s all he’s ever known

[deargravity]

i don’t want hajun to be mysterious, beautiful and elusive. i want him to see his messy, fractured moments. no more bare minimum details. i need to be acquainted with visceral details of his childhood.

give me 13 year old hajun in japan, alone and confused and still convinced that this whole thing is a ruse and his parents will come get him eventually. i need 14 year old hajun still clinging onto the hope that if he’s good enough and proves himself his parents will take him back. i want 15 year old hajun disabused of all his faith in his parents and realising home is nowhere now, and he is fundamentally unwantable unless he learns to wear the right masks and say the right things. little hajun who had to figure everything out by himself, while knowing his existence made no difference to his parents back home anyway. now it’s his life and the only person to whom it matters is himself.

i wonder if he had a phase where his anger was just like dongha’s — wet, guttural, thrashing, amorphous. when exactly did it take shape into the cold, sharp thing it is today? i want him slowly getting sick of breaking his own heart with his own wanting. i want him meeting allen and experiencing the terror of caring for someone for the first time. i want him falling back on the “vengeance on my parents” narrative because he can’t admit to himself that allen and anne appeared in his life at a time when his walls weren’t fully up yet and now they’re here to stay after he’s so carefully built himself up to avoid abandonment by avoiding intimacy altogether. i want to see him growing up and retreating slowly further and further into himself the more he realises he won’t be able to survive losing allen and anne, i want him disgusted by his own wanting and uncomfortable with himself but so distanced from his own feelings that the only way he can process / experience anything close to it is by antagonising others to create congruent reactions within them just so he knows what it’s like to feel something.

i want him alone in his room and suddenly so crushed by emotion but incapable of identifying them because he never grew up with the tools to define his own experience. maybe that’s also why making music with bae matters to him (since their theme revolves around taking charge of your own narrative). he built himself a sense of self from scratch and still he couldn’t outgrow his childhood fear of being unwanted. yeah he’s sadistic and callous and morally dubious, but he wasn’t born that way. i am asking once again i need the visceral detail. the guts of it. but i may be crazy.

[starmist]

Theory: The Real Reason Jin Mu Hid Cho Yeong

This bit of information is never actually explained and it drives me nuts, like it makes zero sense why he would do such a thing. If the point of killing the Cho Family (and in such a cruel way as well) was to “torture” Jang Gang, why didn’t he also just kill Yeong as well? Cho Chung slashed plenty of people that night, it wouldn’t raise any questions if he’d killed her and said he’d found the body wherever. This would also hurt Jang Gang quite a bit, that because of him his best friend and the entirety of that family, including such a young girl (that he probably knew as well) had been killed by her own father.

There is no obvious reason to have kept her alive. I’m also going to dismiss that Jin Mu wanted to use her to kill his enemies/soul shifters. It’s unlikely since Jang Gang had the ice stone and sealed it way after the massacre. Jin Mu was only able to perform the alchemy of souls around ten years later after Jin Bu Yeon found it.

Also, I know Jin Mu is absolutely insane but who looks at a five(ish) year old and go “imma turn her into a killer”. Especially since there seems to have been nothing special about her unlike Jang Uk and Jin Buyeon, I mean he himself states that he had never expected her to become as powerful as she did. I’m not entirely sure he even meant for her to survive.

For the same reasons I don’t think he ever meant to actually use her against the four families either, so why? Why would he go into all that effort to kidnap her, hide her, travel into the mountains to provide (the bare minimum of) supplies along with the resources to become a mage? So much effort and for what? What could he possibly gain from this? What benefit did he see in keeping this girl alive?

The answer is: a lot.

We see that Jang Gang abandons Jang Uk shortly after he’s born, but we also know that Cho family massacre, an event he was present for, happened sometime after that day, though we don’t have an actual timeline. Kim Dojoo also mentions in episode 8 that there was a time (before Jang Uk was conceived) that Jang Gang would hole up at Cheonbugwan for days at a time.

It’s not a stretch to believe he did the same prior to the massacre.

Kim Dojoo also tells Master Lee that the real reason Jang Gang left was in hopes that he could find his best friend’s daughter.

So what am I getting at here? What does this have to do with anything? Well, there was no body that means both that Jang Gang had some semblance of hope that Yeong was alive and was willing to do a lot to find her.

To leave the fortress for years and years, to search almost endlessly for her. Because she was his best friend’s daughter, the daughter of the family died because Jang Gang brought the alchemy of souls back into the world, the one and only person from that family the could maybe, possibly be alive!

She was his one chance at redemption, the one person he could save, make it up in some small way to his friend; a way that he hadn’t destroyed everything.

(It’s also not unreasonable to assume that he had personally known Yeong. I mean, if he left to look for her that means he felt that he would be able to recognize her. We also know that she frequented Cheonbugwan with her father and is even implied to have visited the Jang household as well therefore there were plenty of opportunities for them to meet)

Jin Mu, as Jang Gang’s servant and pupil, would know and understand these things. So he makes her disappear and Jang Gang goes looking for her.

In the mean time, with the Gwanju gone, Jin Mu gained power, became Bu-Gwanju, found the ice stone, even created an entire, insanely loyal secret society and put Shaman Choi on the throne. By the time the show opens, the King is looking for a way to make Jin Mu the Gwanju in full! All because Jang Gang was gone!! He had so so much to gain by hiding her away and sending his master on a wild goose chase with the slightest hope that she might be alive.

Also, lets say by chance, Jang Gang did come back. Well, Jin Mu had bred so much hate into Naksu and she trained to become a mage as well. He could easily have sent her after him, not really expecting her to win but to bait Jang Gang. Have him figure out her identity, have him be tortured by her hate or even by Jang Gang unknowingly hurting/killing her.

There are just so many more was to torture Jang Gang by keeping her alive, so much to gain, how could Jin Mu not? Yeong surviving was an absolute golden opportunity for him.