📍 Working-Class Mr. Ahn’s Unscheduled Visits to Dr. Yeon’s Clinic continues…
⚠️ Just a casual warning – if you’re following along with Asuka and Jen’s fictional arc and delusion interior series, consider yourself warned. Everything under my fanfiction tab is totally fictional. There’s no need to get overly serious about any of it.
A Stock Antagonist
Thanks Jennie for your consultation!
Wow wow wow, you have given me a heaping plate of ingredients more colourful than Suho’s deep dish of toys. Thanks to another department’s screw up, there were extensive technical delays backstage today, so I had three hours to savour your cooking.
I always try to read things with a frown. Smiling attracts nosy colleagues who come by and ask me what I am looking at. But it is difficult not to smile at your work, and I have probably experienced what Dr Yeon goes through all the time when he tries not to laugh at Mr Ahn’s shenanigans.
You’ve painted a very nuanced, rounded portrait of Beomseok, which he deserves. It prevents him from becoming a stock antagonist.
Oh Beom is so gorgeously rendered in 3D now, when I slap him in my mind I can actually hear the sound of my mental palm bruising his delicate face.
From how he uses Si-eun but can’t bring himself to harm him; how he lies in bed with Si-eun not as lovers, but as friends, as what they were; how he yearns for Si-eun’s stories of Suho, piecing an imaginary life together with him through these scraps hard won by subterfuge: yours is a more tender Oh Beom than how he has been flatly villainized by many viewers, and I love it so much.
I found the filmverse Beomseok to be such a sensitive kid, probably the most sensitive of the three, but so full of doubt and not in control of his violent impulses fostered by abuse.
Even his premeditated tweaking of Suho’s bike was pushed along by a torrent of emotion. It wasn’t coldly planned out, psychopathic and unempathetic (at least to my understanding).
If that had caused Suho to die, I think he would have screamed his lungs out and urged Si-eun to end him, failing which he would have self-harmed.
My conservative friend never got why he cried “I don’t know why I did it.”
But that statement is Beomseok at his essence, is it not? Confused, conflicted, hurting, obsessively loving, obsessively hating.
How could his gentle self, despised into submission every day by the true monster in his household, ever have had the strength to keep his messed-up heart in check?
His bogeyman having satiated himself, Beomseok’s shy, torn mind pieces itself back together unsteadily.
Wasn’t it metaphorically perfect that this closeted boy hid himself in one, where he curled up and thought of nothing else but the one he hated and loved? Your characterization brings this version of Oh Beom to cruel life.
I have elevated the stock of the miyeok guk with your precious spices.
One unpleasant aside: I read with much displeasure some news that Hyunwook is yet again the target of public attacks.
Nearly snapped my work pencil in half. He’s been accused of lobbing a ball too quickly past a child at some ceremonial throw. And right on cue, the public performs a wild dance of outrage.
Ah, so he should not have pitched it so strongly at a baseball event, I see I see. And suppose he lobbed the ball too weakly?
What if it flopped to the ground impotently, before the batter could hit it?
Wouldn’t he have been accused of ‘disrespecting the stadium’ or some such crap? Damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. Give him a break! Ugh…
On a much happier note, many thanks for the two pictures: A melona flavored kiss, and an aggressive Si-eun. They resonated with me at a fundamental level. It’s proof we are all swimming gleefully in the same pool of delusion when we sleep.
Yours,
Asuka, off work at last
Want to see where Scheherazade’s tale begins? → Click here to jump to Part 1