fantastical reality.

DISCLAIMER: i have only done casual story mode routes, with the most recent being jaehee so if anything i say is inaccurate, then please excuse me

jumin is my fave char in mysme even from running through other routes (shallow reason being he’s in a suit and i’m a sucker for the proper-looking types). he’s generally depicted as a very stern, pragmatic person who doesn’t care for nonsense like emotions and can be extremely self-serving at the cost of jaehee’s sanity and sleep. he apparently hates women (a past i know very little about considering that it was just alluded to in jaehee’s route). he has the appearance of someone who is very well put-together and nothing much seems to bother him. 

but then you have scenes of him saying “meow” and teasing zen and then i think mr jumin han who or what are you really like???

one of the points in his personality i found really interesting is the whole hating women thing. let me get this straight: in jaehee’s route, he was a little shit and acted like a spoiled brat. but then i also got to thinking, mc in-game is a woman, no? why doesn’t he act like she has some kind of disease? again, this is all my reasoning and speculation but i feel that i have to rant a little bit.

in jaehee’s case, jumin has basically demoted her to a level of “assistant” - with that title carrying a very heavy, work-related responsibilities. that’s all he ever saw her as and so he treated her as, well, someone under him (which technically, is correct). he gives her such a hard time in her route because to him, she was there to do whatever he said and take care of him whenever he had one of this eccentric moments with cat franchises and businesses that he refused to see her more than, well, sub-human. or so you’d think, but the way he reacts to her quitting definitely shows that her absence has affected him. was he right in the way he treated her? no, of course not. but as we’ve learned, jumin tends to very clearly differentiate between work and personal life. so to his credit, it’s because he runs his ship the way he does that every goes smoothly.

in mc’s case, jumin does not react anywhere nearly the same way he does with jaehee with mc. sometimes, you can even say pretty antagonistic things against him but his replies are never angry - or at least, they are never angry towards mc. sometimes he even asks her for advice. i think in this aspect jumin has come to regard mc as one of the members of the rfa, a real member, and not sub-human or just another woman. despite his aversion to that sex, he seems to treat mc fairly normally and even has moments of being close to her - like when he describes her voice and how it’s not grating. like i said, i think this is largely owing to the fact that how jumin sees people under him and working for him and how he sees members in the rfa are completely different. i think jumin has learned to compartmentalize who goes where, how to treat different categories of people, and how to deal with them. because of that, he can seem like he is just a slave driver but somehow shows mc favouritism, but i think that it’s because he lives by such rigid rules and classifications that he can still function and run his company as well as he can.

and then comes v. mr jumin han is still a ball of complication but nothing has hit that home more than the above scenes.

holy shit was definitely my first reaction. in three screenshots alone, more was revealed to me about jumin than the entire week’s worth of chats. in three screenshots alone, i saw on his face and in his head emotions that i didn’t know he could exhibit:

anguish

hurt

betrayal

“At least not you... at least not you...!” gotta keep in mind that this period was already more of an emotional bombshell to jumin than he’s probably used to. jaehee had just quit and he couldn’t come to terms with the fact that he did miss her and took in out on poor 707′s car. so when v comes in wanting to disappear and gives him all this crap, look out. the above line, to me, comes from someone who’s just lost something important and he’s sick and tired of bullshit but he’s about to lose something else. i don’t even know their backstory but from this i can tell that jumin finds v extremely valuable to him as he tries to find answers in his friend as to why, of all the people in the world to turn against him, it had to be v. this simple line tells me that jumin has been through a lot of relationships, all probably shallow, and maybe some deeper than others, but that they didn’t hold a candle to how much he values v. jumin acts as someone who has experienced true betrayal for the first time, so much so that he’s actually pleading.  i have never seen something as heartbreaking as someone who usually has it together breaking down and pleading.

“Even my friendship... how dare you treat it like this!” my lord. this line screams selfish, but it also screams “after all the times we’ve spent together, did that all mean nothing to you?” i’ve honestly never seen jumin lose control like this, with such simple words screaming of anguish that it’s almost indescribable how much v really means to him. it means that he’s seen all those times with v as precious and extremely important to him, although he’d never admit that out loud. jumin has obviously invested a lot of personal and emotional ties in his friendship with v to a point where, well, v means almost everything to him. he looks like someone who was drowning, had a life buoy tossed at him, then having it taken back when he was almost back on the boat.

“Quit with the bull shit that you have cancer.” jumin’s pretty much done at this point. after everything, the fact that v still feels the need to lie to him at such a pivotal moment brings nothing but hurt to the guy. i can see him thinking “please, not you too, i don’t want to lose you” because, as i said, this had been around the moment jaehee quit. he was feeling a sense of emptiness from her loss, and v, of all people, coming in and dropping the bomb on him like this just made him snap. there’s a desperation here to me, in that jumin feels that if v’s gone too, he’ll have nothing and no one left. i think nothing screams about jumin’s loneliness more than this - well, more than all these lines.

i think the cherry on the top of my jumin feels sundae is his facial expression. the anguish, hurt and betrayal are all so evident on a face usually so stoic that it really makes you wonder and mull over how close the two of them are truly are that a couple of words from v can get jumin’s facade to crumble so completely.