Sangihun Coded

i eat like 3 a day 🍊

just finished money heist korea and it was amazingggg !! this was the best song from it 🤞🤞

i really enjoyed the series !! i thought it was really good, all the actors are so talented and now i’m obsessed with the professor lmao

i'm making another tragic sang-woo post because this poor man is slaughtered by the fandom senselessly

i don't see many people discuss this, so i wanted to hop on here and give my own personal thoughts.

flash forward to episode 7! for some context, player 069 begs the other players to leave the games. sang-woo stands up against 069 and yells at him for considering giving up after everything that's already happened.

i will provide the words from the transcript here.

"so what if we stop now? you think your wife will stop being dead if we all go now? and she'll forgive you for letting her get murdered?

if you can't keep going, then why are you alive right now? you should have been the one who died in there instead.

[points to the piggy bank.] see that? that's the price of being in here. and your wife and the others paid it with their lives.

and you wanna go and leave? you wanna start from the beginning again? you ready to do all that, huh? starting over again from nothing with that guilt."

----

from a surface level, this looks like an asshole move. which, to be fair, it sure as hell wasn't coming from a place of love.

from my perspective, however, this entire conversation feels like:

A) a projection of sang-woo's guilt

B) him internally trying to justify his own actions (aka killing ali) to himself

i honestly feel like this conversation is a mix of both. sang-woo obviously feels guilty for killing ali - his horrid thousand-yard stare and flinch as the gunshot goes off, as well as other subtle reactions after are very telling of that. i feel that might be the moment when he internally realizes he's too far gone. but he's trying so hard to justify and push that guilt down.

most importantly, i feel like a part of him isn't just talking to 069 and the other players.. but himself as well. trying to scold the part of himself that feels horribly guilty. the first part of the monologue especially.

anybody who says sang-woo doesn't feel guilt for his actions is very much wrong. but he's so desperate and focused on survival that he tries his hardest to abolish that guilt and justify the things he did. i don't think it ever works.

Chat, what did we think was going on in Gihun’s head in s2e1 when he got back to his hotel and found the recruiter/the salesman waiting for him?

As soon as he comes in and sees him looking at the calendar, his expression is tense and scared. A second later it relaxes and he goes about his business, toweling himself off from the rain like he isn’t at all concerned about the gun in the other’s mind.

Did he expect the Frontman to have stepped out of his nightmares? Does he see the recruiter/the salesman drinking his lil yogurt with a straw and decide he isn’t a threat?

I think something else is happening; something I think about a lot with Gihun. I think he thinks the recruiter/the salesman cannot kill him.

I think one of the manifestations of his trauma, one of the adaptive delusions he’s embraced to keep himself afloat through all the grief and guilt and misery, is that the games can’t kill him. Not until he’s done with them.

I think he thinks he’s destined to end the games and ignores any fear or common sense of his own mortality.

Because if he cannot end the games, it means the hundreds of deaths, including those of Saebyeok and Sangwoo, are meaningless.

I think he physically cannot accept that nor his own powerlessness, and that he’s been driven to a point where fear of death cannot reach him past his dedication to his mission.

I think we see this delusion really calcify in the scene where he plays roulette with the recruiter/the salesman, and I love that that’s how the season presents Gihun’s current mindset.

just got shot 99 times

When you suddenly remember that Ali had a wife and baby, and nobody ever told Gi-hun about them. Sang-woo was the only person who knew about Ali’s family, and he didn’t say anything, so they never got any help.

The winner takes it all