📍 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.
Hi Asuka,
Early winter just showed up out of nowhere here, and everyone – not just me – is getting wrecked by this seasonal cold 🤧
Everyone’s coughing their heads off, holding their foreheads complaining about headaches.
I got hit early so I have some immunity, but everyone else is just busy hacking away and moaning about their heads. I bet the moment they get sick leave and go home to watch Netflix with a beer, they’ll be magically cured, hahaha
If you’re coming to Korea in October, definitely bring a thick jacket.
Summer was so hot you couldn’t even breathe, and now we’ve jumped straight into early winter before we could even enjoy trench coat season.
The world is so harsh.
How can people who deny global warming even exist?
The Song of Achilles
I totally fell into the turbulent waters of The Song of Achilles – and it only took me two days.
I really read it in one go.
It’s been so long since I’ve seen love portrayed so lyrically that I just couldn’t put the book down.
I read 2/3 the first day, finished it the next day.
After Pat died (damn Apollo…), when his spirit kept going as the narrator, I was bawling. When Briseis tried to wash Pat’s body, and Achilles screamed, “I didn’t give you permission to touch him”, even my nose was stinging.
I thought Achilles’s son (Pyrrhus…) was truly his grandmother’s – that most poisonous sea-bitch Thetis’s – grandson.
Achilles was half-god, but honestly, except for his athletic abilities, all his circuits were basically human.
But Pyrrhus, this little shit, haha, wasn’t even half-god yet he already acted like one, so arrogant and irritating. Later, when Thetis and Pat’s ghost talked and she mentioned he was killed (he totally deserved it for the shit he pulled), I felt vindicated.
Pat even said he was “glad” when he heard about his death…
Briseis
Compared to Archie and Pat already knowing their fated destiny, the most tragic one was still… Briseis, I thought.
She even told Pat she’d be fine with him keeping Archie as his lover if only she could have his child and build a family with him.
More than any other scene, when Briseis surprise-kissed Pat (this scene was also so lyrical and beautiful, when I recover my energy, I’ll definitely compare it with the English version), and it said she was waiting for Pat’s “judgment” – my imagination went wild and my whole face turned red (because being ‘happy’)
But imagining the honeyed anticipation in her beautiful eyes, her heart pounding, her deep admiration for Pat as she waited for his positive feedback – that scene brought tears to my eyes too.
And when Archie got jealous hearing about Pat wanting to have a child with Briseis, honestly, that was too cute. Except for having faster feet than regular humans, Archie was just… such an innocent, bright puppy of a boy.
Summer
I’ll read the English version over and over, but if I had to pick my favourite passage in this beautiful novel that feels like it contains all four seasons, it would be when the two boys in Chiron’s cave were far away from that surveillance telescope and could freely make love. Summer.
Archie and Pat’s love was undeniable, and as the author described, they didn’t hide things or lie to each other. Instead of jealousy and resentment, even when those feelings arose, they ultimately controlled their emotions for each other’s sake and devoted themselves again…
While watching Weak Hero, I’ve told subscribers this often – that I was breathing in the scent of real love again after forgetting about it for so long.
Reading The Song of Achilles, I felt that the whole time.
Among all the emotions and attributes that come with love, it’s been so long since Weak Hero that I encountered another work reminding me that love is ultimately connected to sacrifice, and that sacrifice is the most sublime thing.
After reading this, I finally decided to upload a video, have been sitting on the fence. I commented that I’d received the most questions about whether Suho and Si-eun were in love, that I needed subscribers’ voices so it took a while, but I was finally happy to post it.
Both works… how do I say this, I’ve had times when I loved someone and felt okay sacrificing a bit for them – sometimes that sacrifice itself made me feel richer, you know?
But it feels like so much media focuses only on love’s byproducts – jealousy… hate… resentment – or talks only about sex. Of course, sex with someone you love is great, but these days, people see sacrificial love as naive.
Yet coincidentally, both works I’ve been obsessed with all year deal with love that moves the audience through sacrifice. It feels strange.
Like I’ve rediscovered the scent of a perfume I’d forgotten.
Just as a reader having fun, but yes, like you said, without a doubt, I noticed traces of Suho, Si-eun, and Beomseok in Archie and Pat.
It would’ve been harder NOT to find them. They overlapped throughout my reading.
Yeah, like you said, the overlap isn’t exactly identical, but there were definitely enough overlapping contexts to make me laugh out loud.
My imagination is so ridiculously active that honestly if someone told me to sit and stare at nothing all day, I could do it, haha
Engagement
Remember that scene?
In the Weak Hero intro (I heard Director Yoo didn’t want to include this intro – kudos to his final decision and sense to include it), when Suho, Si-eun, and Beomseok are walking up that hill to Byeoksan High in that order.
Si-eun walks up, looking at the ground with those melancholic eyes as usual, while Suho radiates that sigma energy…
I bet when the girls Suho bedded during those five years Si-eun was deployed as a military doctor in Iraq wanted engagement, he gave them “exactly that expression” hahaha
Hands shoved in his pockets, staring at the ground, not saying anything – and the girl who’d already fallen hard for him would turn bright red, demanding he say something, right?
But really, if you think about it, the girls were the ones who actively pursued Suho first for a one-night stand, and Suho just went along.
In the morning, when he wakes up and carefully removes the hand wrapped around his waist from last night’s partner, gets out of bed, puts on his underwear, jeans, stretches his arms while putting on his t-shirt, and she wakes up at that sound.
“You’re leaving now? At least have breakfast with me,” she’d say, wrapping her arms around Suho’s waist.
(My imagination is exploding hahahaha)
Without responding, Suho shoves his phone from the nightstand into his left jeans pocket and calmly walks out her front door, heading leisurely toward Anguk-dong.
(Hope you’re not blown away by my imagination hahaha)
And the next day, he’s at his first-floor office reviewing contracts when that girl – all made up and hair done – walks in. (She knew the place because her parents are Mr Ahn’s client)
For days, she’d cling to him, whining about whether he’d consider continuing their relationship, and each time Suho would respond with that same expressionless school commute face, silently working on tile colour combinations.
Any reasonable person would quit out of pride, but the woman who intuitively knows she’ll never meet another man like this in her life (hahahahaha) keeps wrapping her arms around Suho’s arm, pleading.
Suho doesn’t push her away, just remains unresponsive, and when she gets hysterical, that’s when he’d pull out his final card – one of the thousand-plus photos of Si-eun saved on his phone, specifically one of them hugging and kissing.
“This is my boyfriend”
(Politely using formal speech, like addressing a client)
(Even, he’s not saying “He is my partner”)
Wait, I snapped back to reality and realised I wrote a whole fiction of light fluff? Hahahaha
No matter how much a woman swallows her pride to cling to a handsome man (pretty women are common, but handsome guys are rare), Mr Ahn – if he says his real lover is a man, even someone with no pride left would have no choice but to give up.
In our deluluverse, during those five years Si-eun was deployed, could sweaty, hot-blooded Suho really go years in monk mode without scratching that itch… When I built that brick wall, honestly I thought it was impossible hahaha
And I think it was the same for Pat and Archie in The Song of Achilles.
Itch
Sure, Archie slept with Deidameia because his control-freak mom gaslit and blackmailed him. Still, honestly, Pat also couldn’t really control his urges (though Deida’s seduction and manipulation were factors). I felt that if Briseis had been a bit more aggressive in seducing him, he would’ve had sex with her regardless of his love for Achilles.
But interestingly, I’ve built detailed bricks about Suho’s nighttime mates during those five Si-eun-less years, yet somehow I don’t think Si-eun felt much of that itch, haha
Or maybe whenever the itch came, he used that Newton’s mantra technique he’d already built up during school days to control his urges.
In your previous fiction, you wrote about something Suho secretly remembers about Si-eun without him knowing – maybe Si-eun’s milkshake volume is way more than his own.
Scientifically impossible, but maybe Si-eun really “held it in” to pour it all out.
In front of the person he loves most in the world.
And I’ve built bricks that Si-eun might have some germaphobia. Being a doctor, too, but also mixing bodies with someone other than Suho wouldn’t be easy for him.
Yet on the other hand, like Pat, I felt Si-eun would be sexy even with a woman, of course, in our deluluverse haha
Lliad
A novel written 3000 years ago… It feels like light that flew in from a star
light-years away.
So in the Iliad, Archie and Pat’s relationship was more ambiguous, I see.
I can vividly picture those self-proclaimed experts’ jealous criticism of Madeline Miller.
Looking at the same myth and writing something so beautiful and lyrical that makes readers (even ADHD patients) finish it in one day – how jealous must they have been?
And Plato and Shakespeare agreed with the romantic interpretation—could there be more reliable “oppas” than these two? 😂
Yeah, and I imagined those two otters freezing under one blanket, shivering, then without saying who started it, pulling each other by the waist, Si-eun (shorter than Suho) burying his face in Suho’s neck, and suddenly heat rising below both their waists as their lips slowly collide under the covers haha
Why did the boiler have to break that particular day?
Asuka, do you know about Korea’s “ondol” concept?
There’s like a charcoal kiln under the floor, and when you stuff it with wood logs, the room built above that kiln gets warm.
My great-grandmother’s house had this traditional heating system.
I remember when I was really young, going to her house and warming up in that ondol room on winter days.
Even if Suho’s grandmother’s house was a crumbling old place, setting it up with the traditional ondol heating system felt like too much of a stretch as a brick, so I set it as “an old-fashioned house heated with coal briquettes”
But somewhere in our deluluverse, I imagined two otters warming up in an old house with ondol heating during a vacation in some rural mountain area (Si-eun’s gap year would be good – people go to these countryside houses for health vacations these days).
Bee Body Like Lips
I think they’d both love each other’s bee-body-like lips – literally, both have plump lips like bee bodies.
Maybe the first place the two boys kissed was Juntae’s animation club room… Si-eun, who finds joy each day seeing Suho awake from the coma, watching him succeed in rehab day by day (as expected of the stamina king), gaining the will to live – I don’t think he could’ve waited until adulthood to satisfy his desire to kiss, hahahaha
In The Song of Achilles, the Greek soldiers (the Myrmidons) really worshipped Achie’s masculinity.
This is a tangent, but remember that scene in filmverse Weak Hero?
When Suho and Si-eun are sitting across from each other in the student cafeteria, eating lunch together for the first time, and the boys from their class are whispering?
“Why are they suddenly hanging out?”
“Hey, Ahn Suho was a UFC fighter”
And one kid says in the script:
“No wonder his counter punch was killer, I almost got a boner”
It didn’t make it into the actual film, right?
Of course even without it, they captured well in filmverse how Suho’s strength was an object of admiration among 17-year-old boys whose conflicts are all fistfights.
But I think it would’ve been fine if it had stayed in.
Not just Beomseok – Among the many reasons Si-eun fell in love with Suho, I think his pure masculinity was one of them. The beauty that captivated Pat in Archie was also very primal masculinity.
Yeah, and I watched gigi’s animation. Watched it five times. Cried while watching. It was exactly the image I’d imagined.
Ah, love really is…
From here entering early winter,
Yours
Jen
Oh Asuka, sending you a quick P.S. to make you laugh.
I actually searched Amazon for those rainbow rubber rings from Suho’s blue bowl of toys. My curiosity knows no bounds. This goddamn curiosity showed me all these colourful varieties of toys, and I imagined Dr Yeon’s delicate physician hands “filling” Suho with those rings before quietly closing my browser.
Jen
Cold
J: Hi Asuka,
Early winter just showed up out of nowhere here, and everyone – not just me – is getting wrecked by this seasonal cold 🤧
A: Ah, I’m down with a cold myself, one that leaves me with phlegm the colour of milk tea in the morning. It probably got worse because of a sudden workload increase this week, so to my frustration I couldn’t boil any soup. Thank goodness I have Monday to Wednesday off.
J: Everyone’s coughing their heads off, holding their foreheads, complaining about headaches.
I got hit early so I have some immunity, but everyone else is just busy hacking away and moaning about their heads. I bet the moment they get sick leave and go home to watch Netflix with a beer, they’ll be magically cured, hahaha
If you’re coming to Korea in October, definitely bring a thick jacket.
Summer was so hot you couldn’t even breathe, and now we’ve jumped straight into early winter before we could even enjoy trench coat season.
A: Yikes, this sort of sharp transition can overwhelm the body, yes.
J: After Pat died (damn Apollo…), when his spirit kept going as the narrator, I was bawling. When Briseis tried to wash Pat’s body and Achilles screamed,
“I didn’t give you permission to touch him”
even my nose was stinging.
A: Hearing the story from Pat’s spirit was a brilliant literary decision. Those pages where he narrates Archie’s sadness, and Briseis’, and his own, hold some of the most heartbreaking things I have ever read in all fiction. I am so glad I read the last 100 pages at home—at least I could muffle my sobbing with bath towels.
Till today I have only read it 3.3 times. The first time was in a relatively quick four days, the last hundred or so pages covered in a shot. This was a terribly painful experience that left me ugly crying. I don’t think any other fiction book has done that. Non-fiction, yes, but that is for other reasons.
The second time, immediately after the first, I read it much slower, and replayed my favorite sentences a dozen times at different tones and speeds. It was like summoning different Pats and Archies from different universes and having them all interact at a picnic.
Some picnic.
This was an even more painful experience, probably because I attempted it before I was properly put back together. After the second read, I took a break and used fan art to cope. Bless all those wonderful fan artists, they made me smile.
The third time was several months after the second. But the pain still burned bright and real. Somehow, the writing triggered memories of actual losses in my life. Madeleine Miller, how do you do it?…
The last time, I stopped at Mount Pelion, where I left them sticky and happy, playing around in the river and in the cave. They are the cutest couple. I wonder how much Chiron knows. I can imagine this dignified centaur scrubbing his cave floor going “tsk, bloody teens!” while the boys went out hunting and swimming.
Pyrrhus
J: I thought Achilles’s son (Pyrrhus…) was truly his grandmother’s – that most poisonous sea-bitch Thetis’s – grandson.
A: Ugh yucks, I really hate that sick bastard child. He gives me the creeps. I actually think he’s a serial killing psychopath who enjoys the suffering of others. There’s something off and inhuman about him.
Yes, Achilles had a far higher kill count, but he killed swiftly and did not torture his enemies. He could have easily prolonged their anguish, one limb and one eye at a time, but he never did any such thing. Instead, we see him deeply disturbed by Iphigenia’s terrible death.
Also, before he charged out for his first battle, he sought Pat’s forgiveness (and Pat’s kiss, if I remember right). He couldn’t be more different from his son. Yes, he gloried in his fighting ability, very much like our favorite young mma fighter, but Archie was in a war, and he had to kill or be killed.
And I think in such an honor obsessed culture, it could have been worse and more humiliating to his enemies if he had just chopped off their arms and left them maimed and useless without killing them. A false mercy.
I know at this point I sound like I am justifying his actions, but I remember: he never wanted to go to this war in the first place. He spoke defiantly to his father, and tried to get Pat out of his ridiculous sworn pact; he cross-dressed and risked humiliation just to dodge recruitment, but in the end his simplistic 16 year old mind was no match for the genius slyness of Odysseus, who entrapped him and fanned his male pride relentlessly with poisonous promises of eternal glory, and who also recognized and strongly pressured Pat to head to Troy (“Oh yes, and you’re welcome to bring Patroclus along… we have business with him as well.”)
If Pat had been forced by Odysseus to honor his sacred blood oath to Menelaus, Achilles would have willingly honored his bedside promise to Pat, “if you have to go, you know I will go with you.” But clever Odysseus managed to turn this around, and it became Archie who asked “I will go to Troy, will you come with me?”
(I really wanted to beat Odysseus to death.)
When condensed like this, it feels like Archie is really dumb and Pat is not too bright himself for not voicing his opinion (“don’t go to Troy!”). But it’s realistic.
Honestly, if Suho never had a coma and pursued an MMA career with all its health hazardous risks, would Si-eun have stopped him? I doubt so.
I think if Si-eun knows Suho’s next fight is very dangerous, he might say something simple like ‘it’s dangerous’, but Suho would reply ‘don’t worry so much.
Don’t you trust your hyung?’, and then he would wink and do some silly curled bicep gesture, and that would be the end of it. Both guys would keep their concerns buried.
And then this may be a precursor to another coma in another universe, when Suho finally meets someone like Mike Tyson.
In hindsight we may say Suho was stupid and Si-eun was an idiot. No doubt guilty Si-eun in filmverse called himself an idiot all the time when Suho got kicked into life support.
But obvious solutions only appear when we look back. On the ground, it can be very difficult for young guys to voice out their opinions and concerns all the time.
For peace lovers who think Achilles the murder machine had no right to love or be loved by Pat the Pure (and there are many of these delulus out there), there exists the inconvenient fact of Pat urging him to go out and lead the Myrmidons when the Greeks were faced with the threat of extinction.
Pat wasn’t asking him to go out to do diplomacy with princely speeches… As if it couldn’t be more clear, when Archie refused, Pat did the killing himself, quite gratuitously in fact. Even Pat the healer knew that killing could not be avoided.
No doubt Achilles was not a flawless character. He had a terrible ego trip towards the end of their lives, and he thought shockingly little of Briseis. But I forgive him.
I forgive him because Patroclus forgives him, and that really should be the end of it.
But I also forgive him because, how is a boy supposed to resist years of cunning brainwashing by someone like Odysseus?
And what chance does he have to remain totally pure against decades of strange seaside talk with a power-obsessed toxic mother?
And I forgive him because he could not forgive himself. When he saw Pat’s body, he knew immediately and completely that he was wrong.
When Pat died everything died. “What good is godhood when it can’t bring him back?” Nothing mattered to him more than Pat.
I think even in his power tripping last days, he fully thought Pat would outlive him and that his own time was running out, in part thanks to Odysseus saying he was lucky to have eked out an extra 10 years against the Fates. What manipulative nonsense.
Unfortunately because Archie believed it, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy that he would never leave Troy.
If Archie had taken Pat and all his men and left Troy right there and then, and sailed to Korea or some other place, and Hector survived, I believe Archie could have lived like a middle finger to the Fates till he was a hundred years old (or whatever age Pat lived up to. I suspect he would die after Pat died…these two…)
Archie naively thought Pat would be with him all the way until he passed on. Pat himself never told Archie that he didn’t plan to live after Archie died (it’s really so Dr Yeonish, come to think of it).
Nor did Pat confide this feeling to Briseis (“I do not say that I think I will never leave Troy”).
Whoever wrote The Iliad must have given his ancient audience a terrible twist when it turned out that Pat would die first…
It is interesting to see Achilles’ tone with his mother totally shifts after Pat’s death. It’s like the gloves finally come off, and he basically tells her to shut up and fuck off…
It makes me wonder how much he was holding in over the years, and did he do that for Pat’s sake? To make Pat’s life easier? To prevent his mom from quietly assassinating Pat?
(Like suddenly appearing from behind and kicking him off a cliff while he was out gathering herbs…)
Because when it didn’t matter any more, he let her know how much he detested her because she detested Pat. And true to form, far from apologizing or comforting him, sea-bitch tells her son she is glad his most-beloved is dead.
(What she never tells Archie is that she can actually see and hear Pat’s spirit, so that Archie would not think to talk to him through her. World-class salt level, this parent of the year.)
Oh my, so much ink spilled on Achilles, sorry about that!
We all love Pat, he’s really so, so sweet, and we know how much he adores Archie since the story is told from his point of view.
But I chafe when I see readers complaining that Achilles was ‘flat’ or ‘dull’.
Yes he could be naive. Yes he also had the sort of one-dimensional focus that Suho has.
And he had a bit of an infuriating high school boy mindset sometimes.
But flat? Flat?! Achilles had a complexity all his own, and his grief really broke my heart.
J: Achilles was half-god, but honestly, except for his athletic abilities, all his circuits were basically human.
But Pyrrhus, this little shit haha wasn’t even half-god yet he already acted like one, so arrogant and irritating. Later when Thetis and Pat’s ghost talked and she mentioned he was killed (he totally deserved it for the shit he pulled), I felt vindicated.
Pat even said he was “glad” when he heard about his death…
A: It seems the ‘divinity quotient’ in a person is based on the rank of the deity parent and what sort of action the person takes while alive. Technically, both Heracles (aka Hercules) and Achilles were half-god, but when Heracles was cremated, his mortal half faded while his immortal half ascended to Olympus. His father was Zeus, king of the gods.
Achilles though, with his lower ranked water fairy mother and his utter disrespect towards gods
(ie dragging Hector’s corpse around town was an insult to Apollo who loved Hector; and he actually slashed and wounded a river god—he really didn’t give a shit anymore after Pat left) seemed to have turned almost fully mortal upon death and ended up as a shade in the underworld.
“I couldn’t make him a god,” his mother said. I am probably wading in mythological waters far out of my depth here hahaha but I really think you hit the mark when you said his “circuits were basically human.”
(I take comfort in the fact that the 3000 year old sequel The Odyssey, written by the same author, confirms that Archie and Pat really do reunite in the underworld. It wasn’t all Miller’s fantasy.)
Briseis
J: Compared to Archie and Pat already knowing their fated destiny, the most tragic one was still… Briseis, I thought.
A: It was terrible, my god that bloody Pyrrhus! I wish she had stabbed him harder and deeper, or used a poisoned blade… The fact that she managed to slash him at all means the little monster is overrated (by himself). A move like that would have never landed on Achilles.
J: She even told Pat she’d be fine with him keeping Archie as his lover if only she could have his child and build a family with him.
More than any other scene, when Briseis surprise-kissed Pat (this scene was also so lyrical and beautiful, when I recover my energy I’ll definitely compare it with the English version) and it said she was waiting for Pat’s “judgment” – my imagination went wild and my whole face turned red (cus being ‘happy’)
But imagining the honeyed anticipation in her beautiful eyes, her heart pounding, her deep admiration for Pat as she waited for his positive feedback – that scene brought tears to my eyes too.
A: hahaha it really got Pat by surprise. He’s really also quite naive sometimes. But he was very kind and gentle about it with Briseis. This scene was bittersweet, softly sad. He imagined he would have had a life with her if he never met Achilles.
J: And when Archie got jealous hearing about Pat wanting to have a child with Briseis, honestly, that was too cute. Except for having faster feet than regular humans, Archie was just… such an innocent, bright puppy of a boy.
A: haha yeah, and he tried to sound all adult and rational “actually if you really wanted to, it would be fair, since I also have a child.” But Pat wasn’t buying this fake maturity haha
J: I’ll read the English version over and over, but if I had to pick my favourite passage in this beautiful novel that feels like it contains all four seasons, it would be when the two boys in Chiron’s cave were far away from that surveillance telescope and could freely make love. Summer.
A: I can’t remember exactly which link I sent. Some have expired, but this one still works, I checked.
If you have the time, you definitely should read it. I promise Miller doesn’t use harder words than I do; our difference is in our levels of mastery. (I feel terribly shameless comparing myself to her, she’s one of my idols haha)
You used the word ‘curated’ to describe how I wrote Yeon Clinic. I’m really very honored. And ‘curated’ is exactly how Miller has written The Song of Achilles. The language is curated for colour, smell, sound, rhythm, feeling. It is drop dead gorgeous.
I said that when I watched Weak Hero through a BL lens, that it gained a special beauty, yes? For me, that was partly because all sorts of Song of Achilles quotes started popping into my mind. I was stunned how much of it fit haha, but I didn’t mention this previously. (I still do prefer to see WH as a non-romantic epitome of intense, deep and binding friendship.)
J: Archie and Pat’s love was undeniable, and as the author described, they didn’t hide things or lie to each other. Instead of jealousy and resentment, even when those feelings arose, they ultimately controlled their emotions for each other’s sake and devoted themselves again…
A: Ah, I think they sometimes do keep things in their hearts. But whenever one senses the other is doing that, and presses on it, the other would reveal his thoughts even if it was embarrassing. Like how Pat pressed Achilles to reveal the things he made his mother promise him, and he did.
But they really never lied to each other. Not even the smallest white lies. It’s incredible.
J: While watching Weak Hero, I’ve told subscribers this often – that I was breathing in the scent of real love again after forgetting about it for so long.
A: It is real love. I stand by your description.
Self-sacrifice
J: Reading The Song of Achilles, I felt that the whole time.
Among all the emotions and attributes that come with love, it’s been so long since Weak Hero that I encountered another work reminding me that love is ultimately connected to sacrifice, and that sacrifice is the most sublime thing.
A: As you know, I’m an agnostic buddhist, but this is one of the things the Bible really gets right. True love is marked by a willingness to self-sacrifice.
J: After reading this, I finally decided to upload a video; I have been sitting on the fence. I commented that I’d received the most questions about whether Suho and Si-eun were in love, that I needed subscribers’ voices, so it took a while, but I was finally happy to post it.
A: I watched that video with a smile. ‘In love’ is a phrase associated with romance and sexual attraction. Were Si-eun and Suho like this in filmverse? I don’t think so.
But if they were, or if it became like this, I would be happy for them. Would this be an upgrade from ‘just friendship’?
For me, no. Because what they have isn’t at the ‘just friendship’ level.
It is at the ‘I will die for this one friend alone, without regrets and without a second thought’ level.
It is true-love friendship, not ‘just friendship.’
If romance and sexual attraction happen, then they might become husbands with true love. If no romance and no sexual attraction happens, then they stay as true friends with true love. Either case is beautiful to me.
Both Works
J: But it feels like so much media focuses only on love’s byproducts – jealousy… hate… resentment – or talks only about sex. Of course, sex with someone you love is great, but these days, people see sacrificial love as naive.
A: Yes, I’ve heard sacrificial love being described very poorly and cynically as being ‘masochistic’. What a wretched view of things. I can only imagine what sort of dry, sour heart would think like this.
J: Yet coincidentally, both works I’ve been obsessed with all year deal with love that moves the audience through sacrifice. It feels strange. Like I’ve rediscovered the scent of a perfume I’d forgotten.
Just as a reader having fun, but yes, like you said, without a doubt, I noticed traces of Suho, Si-eun, and Beomseok in Archie and Pat. It would’ve been harder NOT to find them. They overlapped throughout my reading.
Yeah, like you said, the overlap isn’t exactly identical, but there were definitely enough overlapping contexts to make me laugh out loud.
My imagination is so ridiculously active that honestly if someone told me to sit and stare at nothing all day, I could do it, haha
Remember that scene?
In the Weak Hero intro (I heard Director Yoo didn’t want to include this intro – kudos to his final decision and sense to include it), when Suho, Si-eun, and Beomseok are walking up that hill to Byeoksan High in that order.
Si-eun walks up looking at the ground with those melancholic eyes as usual, while Suho radiates that sigma energy…
I bet when the girls Suho bedded during those five years Si-eun was deployed as a military doctor in Iraq wanted engagement, he gave them “exactly that expression” hahaha
Hands shoved in his pockets, staring at the ground, not saying anything – and the girl who’d already fallen hard for him would turn bright red, demanding he say something, right?
But really, if you think about it, the girls were the ones who actively pursued Suho first for a one-night stand, and Suho just went along.
In the morning, when he wakes up and carefully removes the hand wrapped around his waist from last night’s partner, gets out of bed, puts on his underwear, jeans, stretches his arms while putting on his t-shirt, and she wakes up at that sound.
“You’re leaving now? At least have breakfast with me” she’d say, wrapping her arms around Suho’s waist.
(My imagination is exploding hahahaha)
Without responding, Suho shoves his phone from the nightstand into his left jeans pocket and calmly walks out her front door, heading leisurely toward Anguk-dong.
A: HAHAHA oh my, cold as his marble tiles, Mr Ahn!
J: (Hope you’re not blown away by my imagination hahaha)
And the next day, he’s at his first-floor office reviewing contracts when that girl – all made up and hair done – walks in. (She knew the place because her parents are Mr Ahn’s client)
A: The client is king, as they say. This really makes these girls like Deidameia, daughter of a king. Suho ignores them like Archie ignores Deida. Just a total silence.
J: For days, she’d cling to him, whining about whether he’d consider continuing their relationship, and each time Suho would respond with that same expressionless school commute face, silently working on tile colour combinations.
Any reasonable person would quit out of pride, but the woman who intuitively knows she’ll never meet another man like this in her life (hahahahaha) keeps wrapping her arms around Suho’s arm, pleading.
Suho doesn’t push her away, just remains unresponsive, and when she gets hysterical, that’s when he’d pull out his final card – one of the thousand-plus photos of Si-eun saved on his phone, specifically one of them hugging and kissing.
A: This is such a boss move, so Suho.
“This is my boyfriend”
(Politely using formal speech, like addressing a client)
(Even, he’s not saying “He is my partner”)
A: Hahaha Mr Ahn Suho, coldly professional even when revealing something so precious to him. It’s something he’s so proud of. And he uses it to calmly hammer in the nails for the coffin of his one-night stand. “Miss, one-night stands live for one night only.”
In parallel, when Pat tried to free Briseis from her bonds, and she thought he was trying to rape her at knifepoint, he then seized Archie by his clothes and deep-kissed him. It must have been for a while, because Briseis was really staring wide-eyed when they were done. She didn’t speak much Greek then, but she got the message:
“This is my boyfriend and I love him.”
Yup, the overlap isn’t perfect, but it’s there all right hahaha
J: Wait, I snapped back to reality and realised I wrote a whole fiction of light fluff? Hahahaha
No matter how much a woman swallows her pride to cling to a handsome man (pretty women are common but handsome guys are rare), Mr Ahn – if he says his real lover is a man, even someone with no pride left would have no choice but to give up.
In our deluluverse, during those five years Si-eun was deployed, could sweaty, hot-blooded Suho really go years in monk mode without scratching that itch… When I built that brick wall, honestly I thought it was impossible hahaha
A: I have a feeling Dr Yeon would be fully accepting of this.
J: And I think it was the same for Pat and Archie in The Song of Achilles.
Sure, Archie slept with Deidameia because his control-freak mom gaslit and blackmailed him. Still, honestly Pat also couldn’t really control his urges (though Deida’s seduction and manipulation were factors). I felt that if Briseis had been a bit more aggressive in seducing him, he would’ve had sex with her regardless of his love for Achilles.
A: Hmm yes, I recall he did say the type of desire was different, but he would not say he was ‘not-aroused.’ He had never before seen girls naked, and was probably also curious.
This was before they set off for Troy, so Pat was 16. This is literally Weak Hero Class 1 age. Pat does not do the sacred practice of Newtonian Mantras, so I think he definitely had deeper urges than Si-eun.
In fact, he hinted that he sometimes relieved himself around Mount Pelion when he was alone, while thinking of Achilles.
Once again, I think of centaur Lord Chiron, millennia old master of biology and botany, encountering patches of dried sap that he has never seen before near the roots of his favorite trees. He recalls Pat’s increasing absences. He rolls his eyes as he connects the dots…
“It’s fueled by testosterone.”
— Dr Yeon Si-eun, Yeon Clinic
J: But interestingly, I’ve built detailed bricks about Suho’s nighttime mates during those five Si-eun-less years, yet somehow I don’t think Si-eun felt much of that itch, haha
Or maybe whenever the itch came, he used that Newton’s mantra technique he’d already built up during school days to control his urges.
A: yeah, I somehow don’t see medical soldiers in war zones as having much of an itch. The blood, the crying, the last gasps of life…the brutal stuff they deal with isn’t much of a turn-on.
Do you sense we have somehow conveniently mapped Suho with Achilles and Si-eun with Patroclus? Hahahahaha
Well… wasn’t Pat a medical soldier too?
Really, what a confluence.
J: In your previous fiction, you wrote about something Suho secretly remembers about Si-eun without him knowing – maybe Si-eun’s milkshake volume is way more than his own.
Scientifically impossible, but maybe Si-eun really “held it in” to pour it all out.
In front of the person he loves most in the world.
A: Hahahaha this is Mr Ahn’s private theory!
J: And I’ve built bricks that Si-eun might have some germaphobia. Being a doctor too, but also mixing bodies with someone other than Suho wouldn’t be easy for him.
A: “Did you wash your hands?”
— Yeon Si-eun, meat wrap almost in mouth.
Ya, he’s a total germaphobe.
But he knows how often Suho showers (he’s often there himself), so he trusts him totally.
J: Yet on the other hand, like Pat, I felt Si-eun would be sexy even with a woman, of course, in our deluluverse haha
A: Yes, but this may be a little unexpected to Suho, and I suspect he might pout.
I should write about it hahaha
J: Looking at the same myth and writing something so beautiful and lyrical that makes readers (even ADHD patients) finish it in one day – how jealous must they have been?
And Plato and Shakespeare agreed with the romantic interpretation—could there be more reliable “oppas” than these two?
A: You know, just as The Song of Achilles enriched my viewing of Weak Hero through a BL perspective, watching and appreciating Weak Hero as ultimate friendship has helped me to see that the original Iliad could also have been a story of sacrificial, very intense, ultimate friendship.
The difference is that I prefer to see Weak Hero as non-romantic and non-BL, while I prefer to read the Iliad as possibly romantic and possibly BL.
This is due mostly to arbitrary personal taste and biases (The Song of Achilles is very romantic and definitely BL, and is the chief reason for my biased reading of the Iliad).
The Iliad does portray Achilles as superhumanly cool and level-headed and with abilities people worshipped. So it must have shocked early audiences to hear how he broke apart upon Pat’s death.
In the Iliad, Achilles was restrained in case he tried to kill himself. He tore out his golden hair and wept over Pat. He brought Pat to bed and slept beside him for days, even after the body started decaying.
He refused to part with Pat until Pat appeared in a dream and said it was time for his cremation, and Achilles honored those last wishes, however painful.
When it was time to cremate Pat, he cut off a lock of his own hair and placed it with Pat, to be burned together (oh my god). And then he decreed that upon his death, his ashes were to be mixed with Pat’s and kept in the same urn to be buried under one grave (oh my god!!).
Were they ‘just friends’? No. Were they ultimate true love friends?
Yes. Must they have been necessarily romantic and sexually attracted to each other? No. Would it have been possible? Yes, definitely.
“It’s obvious to those of us who are educated,” said Aeschines, Greek politician and thinker from 2400 years ago. Would I like it if they were romantic? Well after what Miller wrote, yes, absolutely! Why not? Hahaha
Somehow I think if he lived now, the author of the Iliad would have been an obsessive Weak Hero fan.
J: Yeah, and I imagined those two otters freezing under one blanket, shivering, then without saying who started it, pulling each other by the waist, Si-eun (shorter than Suho) burying his face in Suho’s neck, and suddenly heat rising below both their waists as their lips slowly collide under the covers, haha
Why did the boiler have to break that particular day?
A: Because the Fates intervene all the time in deluluverse to keep things coming
Ah yes, the ondol. I first encountered it on Family Outing when the gang stayed in a luxurious traditional house.
I went to research on it a little more for the Milkshake chapter to make sure Mr Ahn’s current two floored place had no such system installed, that’s why it’s cold in winter and they curl up under the comforters together.
I have stared at these fat bees a lot. Si-eun’s is a little dry (thanks to the frightening dedication of his actor who wanted dried bees). I think Dr Yeon’s is smoother, because Mr Ahn nags him to take care of himself, and because the frequent application of salted caramel cream has healing and moisturizing properties.
The anime club room was where I put their first kiss and Si-eun’s first milkshake hahaha. They had to dispose of Dragon Ball Z volume 2 after that because the pages clung together beyond repair.
Thereafter, every time Juntae audited and sorted the club room books, he would gripe about this mystery missing book, and club leader Si-eun would turn red and excuse himself. Si-eun eventually replaced the missing volume, but because he did this secretly rather than openly, this only further fueled further speculation amongst the otaku members, to his horror.
Yes it would have added an authentic subtlety! Boys really like this sort of thing. Wrestling, even the fake, entertainment type like WWE, is a huge hit amongst guys. I have male cousins totally into this sort of thing. One is a government civil servant my god…
I do think part of the reason is masculinity worship.
It’s lovely isn’t it? The comments, though, are hilarious. There is a huge thread in the comments section sustained by people trying to cope, and it can be summarized as “OF COURSE Achilles and Patroclus live happily ever after on Mount Pelion LaLaLaLa LaDiDaDiDa I can’t hear you”.
I fully empathize.
…the most beautiful and painful thing to bless our species.
Yours,
Asuka, boiling actual herbal soup for a cold
Let’s all eat well and get well soon!
P.S.
Ah the rainbow spread of rings and rubbers…hahahaha I hope you didn’t research this while at work! Remember to put on a frown and mute the volume if you do, just in case.
I’ve actually shamelessly walked into a shop selling these things near Akihabara. I noticed all manner of people entering, so I entered also.
Not too long ago, I learned from an uncle that one of my great-granduncles on my mother’s side, was notorious for running a successful toy shop business. Toys that Suho and Si-eun would play with.
This may mean setting up a deluluverse was always in my blood.
Want to see where Scheherazade’s tale begins? → Click here to jump to Part 1