The Weak Hero Comment That Made Me Cry on the Subway: Beom-seok’s Currency of Love

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카테고리:

I was on my morning commute when I read this comment. I had to wipe my eyes with my sleeve before anyone noticed 💦 Here it is, exactly as the subscriber wrote it:

“People who are as deprived of affection as Si-eun and Beom-seok are will definitely have a flood of many emotions when someone they admire says or does something kind or shows an honest interest in them. Whether they realize it or not, they are totally needy. So an offer of genuine friendship would bring forth tidal waves of disbelief, surprise, extreme gratitude, happiness, self-esteem, confidence, joy — and totally, it’s love.

It’s that truly heady experience of first love. But it’s also a huge leap of faith. How can they fully trust a friendship when they’ve never really been awarded one before? They’ll be hyper-vigilant looking for evidence that it might not be real, or that it’s going to be taken away. They’ll also be wondering how to pay for it — if all of their relationships have been transactional up to that point.

And the devastation that signs of rejection would bring? What’s the cost of rejection when you’ve never had anything before and feel like you won’t have anything again.

I’m afraid it’s too difficult to figure out what kind of love this is. It’s too often difficult to figure out what any kind of love is.

But I know that Beom-seok was trying to figure out how to pay for it. He’s not strong. He’s not audaciously smart or brave like Si-eun is. But he does have money and position.

So he’s deflated when his new friends don’t think he’s a hero for getting the money to pay Gil-soo. And then some street kid jumps in between them? How is she paying for Su-ho’s good graces? His real money isn’t good enough? And so he starts to really resent having to spend it on them. He doesn’t even have any clue how sexist and classist and insulting his thoughts are — because he’s too desperate for Su-ho’s attention not to vanish. So when he thinks it’s going, going, almost gone… he becomes a tornado of resentment and anger. He feels that he’s been betrayed.”

Beom-seok’s Only Currency

Yes, Beom-seok isn’t strong. He doesn’t have Si-eun’s “total lunatic” quality — that fearless thing Su-ho loved instinctively in people. What he has is money and status. So when he got the money to pay Gil-soo — knowing full well that if his adoptive father found out, he’d face real violence — and Su-ho and Si-eun refused it, the rejection hit somewhere specific.

That brief flash of confidence on his face when he leads them to the science room with the money. Pride, almost. I did something. Then nothing.

People reduce this to the Instagram follow. But for anyone who’s genuinely tried to understand Beom-seok — money wasn’t transactional. It was the only language of care he knew. The only thing he had to offer that felt real. When they didn’t take it, he didn’t just feel rejected. He felt erased.

The Yeong-i

Yeong-i has no money. She can’t fight. She’s a runaway with nowhere to go.

And Su-ho let her sleep at his place and gave her a job.

Beom-seok’s interrogation of Yeong-i reveals exactly what had calcified in his mind:

“Are you dating Ahn Su-ho? Relationships are all about give and take. What have you given Su-ho in return?”

He couldn’t process unconditional care — he’d never seen it. So he assumed a transaction. The fact that Yeong-i had nothing and still earned Su-ho’s protection meant, in Beom-seok’s framework, that she must be offering something he couldn’t.

One subscriber made an interesting point here — Beom-seok’s reaction to Yeong-i wasn’t really classist, since he’d also been without money before. It was sexist. The assumption was specifically about what she could give Su-ho as a woman that Beom-seok couldn’t.

Another subscriber offered a different angle entirely — that Yeong-i’s presence in the drama was simply realistic. Season 2 has an almost entirely male cast and it reads as slightly strange. Having a girl around at seventeen isn’t a narrative device. It’s just life. The Season 2 scene where Baku suggests going out to meet girls landed as genuine bro code to male viewers.

Were They Actually Taking Him for Granted?

A subscriber raised this directly, and the answer is genuinely complicated.

Su-ho and Si-eun never saw Beom-seok as a money source. The scene after the watch incident — Su-ho suggesting they round up Beom-seok’s Mungang High bullies and make them apologize — that was Su-ho’s version of loyalty. Si-eun went to the karaoke room for him. These weren’t small gestures.

But Beom-seok was already in a different psychological place by the time Yeong-i arrived. Walking behind Su-ho and Yeong-i side by side. Paying for coffee at weekend meetups that had started to feel like charity. Watching his currency lose value in real time. The resentment didn’t start with Yeong-i. She just forced it into focus.

Su-ho Was Also Just Seventeen

The karaoke argument scene.

“Are you showing off now? Should I give you your part-time job wages?”

Beom-seok chose those words deliberately. He knew exactly where Su-ho was most exposed. And Su-ho — who had always played the older brother, the one who held things together — crumbled at those words the way any seventeen-year-old would.

Su-ho giving up a shift to be there. That was his version of saying everything. Beom-seok knew that. And he used it anyway.

Si-eun’s First Love — and Beom-seok’s

The subscriber’s framework reframed something I hadn’t fully considered.

For boys who’d lived in isolation their whole lives, Su-ho’s genuine friendship arrived like a flood — disbelief, gratitude, confidence, joy, all at once. The only word big enough for that experience is love. Which is exactly why Director Yoo called it first love, and why that label works without requiring a romantic definition.

But this subscriber helped me see something else: Su-ho wasn’t Si-eun’s only first love in this story. Beom-seok was Si-eun’s first love too — in a different register, through a different channel, ending in a completely different place.

Both of them lost something they couldn’t afford to lose, after having it for the first time. Which is why both of them, in their own way, went ballistic.

Full analysis of the ring dream sequence: 👉 HERE

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