#based on his characterization + byeon woo seok's portreyal

[magicaldragons]

the clusterfuck that was episode 14: an analysis

disclaimer: this does not condone any of ryu si-o's actions, were they to happen in real life. this is purely an objective examination of si-oh's psychology.

so, episode 14. that happened.

to start with, we've been getting insight into ryu si-o ever since he's started having more screen time (around episode 3), and since then we've been either seeing his backstory, or hearing his thoughts.

all of this abruptly cut off in episode 14.

obviously this is because he could could no longer remain as a character to be sympathized with, & the writers/directors needed to cut us off from his thought process to facilitate that. – for as long as we see the complexity within his motives, he will be a character we emotionally connect with.

if you want to see me vent about the potential his character had for positive growth leading up to this, here you go

but this will be an objective analysis on his motives and a likely explanation for his behavior, since we didn't receive that.

now, we have to acknowledge that up until this point, ryu si-o has had two main motives for anything he's done:

gaining strength [both himself and through tsetseg] & creating a trump card [the antidote] so that he can separate from pavel

finding binbin

and we've also seen, that all of a sudden, the cards are suddenly against him:

he's angered the mafia by directly going against them, regarding the antidote and his ownership of it

his leverage against geum ju's assistant didn't work out, and he's trying to disprove the drug accusations

the leverage he held against the police hasn't worked out either and there's now an arrest warrant out on him and no way for him to escape the country

his wild card, tstetseg, turned out to be just that, infact, and now the one person he thought he could depend on in case of a fallout with the mafia/any unfavorable situation is now gone

and from his perspective, it's infinitely worse because, putting aside that she is gang nam soon, tsetseg is no longer the person he thought she was:

he fell in love with tsetseg in the first place because she was honest – she spoke without a filter and lived without constraints. she talked informally, yet did so innocently. to him, she didn't hide her emotions, or mask her thoughts.

but now he realizes that she has been lying to him the whole time, has pretended not to recognize her own mother, and has listened to him talk about his past and seen him at his most vulnerable, while working against him all throughout.

throughout the whole episode, we are seeing ryu si-o at his rock bottom.

from all of his previous patterns, he only commits violence when absolutely necessary, or under the influence of the drug, when he is at his most aggressive, but this episode was an exception to that.

and it makes the most sense when you consider it this way:

right now his condition/mindset is akin to that of a desperate animal, backed into a corner, he will claw at anything to survive right now.

and as we discussed here, pain/fear is not a very useful emotion, especially with how badly it must threaten to shake him right now, so obviously he'd react to something like heartbreak the only way he knows how, or the only way that will help him get past it: anger.

he's doing what would be a regular stage of heartbreak after a breakup – blame. [albeit in a very terrible, violent way, because of the way he was raised]

he's trying to find where to place the blame for what happened with tsetseg: who can he blame except himself for getting so close to the one person who was meant to ruin his plans?

so he goes after hwaja, (and interestingly has someone else stab her) for lying to him, and does (what I think is a larger-than-usual) dose of the drug because he is genuinely trying to escape the pain, while simultaneously doing damage control as everything he's been working on, falls apart.

his approach is completely wrong, and cannot be justified, but the place it's coming from is understandable and so is the rage.

if we continue to see him act in line with the way he is characterized he will definitely hesitate when it comes down to directly hurting namsoon, should she be in front of him, because the emotion we're seeing clearly isn't "how dare she betray me?" — it's "how could I have let her hurt me like this?"

the writers may choose to ditch the character patterns and motives they've been giving him, in order to villainize him and lead up to their intended ending, but i do believe reckless violence (not just against namsoon), would be completely out of character.

#mini-analysis #based on his characterization + byeon woo seok's portreyal #strong girl nam soon #ryu si o #byeon woo seok