Dear old world

원더풀스 | The WONDERfools E7 ° if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. if you can't join 'em...?

+ Bonus: Here comes Chaeni!!

Snap out of it, Choi Un-jeong! It's Lee Un-jeong.

Most of the kids in the orphanage were either abandoned or orphaned and it seems safe to assume that Jun-mo is the latter, as the only familial relationship we see him exhibit is with the grandmother. While he and the other kids who weren't experimented on were rescued, the Wunderkinder were not because Dr. Ha told them to hide and wait for him. After Jun-mo and the Wunderkinder grew up, they found their way back to Haeseong. The difference was that Jun-mo went there of his own volition while the Wunderkinder were taken back there by Dr. Ha.

Jun-mo worked with the grandmother and clearly built some parental/mentor relationship with her despite the fact that her actions had caused him harm because she'd tried to repent for it. The Wunderkinder, on the other hand, act as if they owed Dr. Ha their trust despite everything he had done to them because he was the only one to show them any kind of parental love (as twisted as it was). Jun-mo and the Wunderkinder's loyalty and love for their parental figure is different because the grandmother doesn't take advantage of Jun-mo. She funded his schooling and pays him for his services while Dr. Ha just uses the Wunderkinder, taking advantage of their abilities to escape consequences and accomplish what he wants despite the fact that he knows using their abilities hurts them. He dangles relief and freedom over their heads to keep them underneath.

There's something so genuinely fascinating to me about the scene where Ho-ran (hallucination girl) takes on Jun-mo's appearance and the one thing that gives her away is that Jun-mo always calls the grandmother 'Grandma' (and she calls him a nickname "Gunie', similar to the one she call Chae-ni, which is "Eunie"). The first thing she does is check that he's okay, which is the complete opposite of what Dr. Ha does with the Wunderkinder.

There's also the fact that out of everyone in the room, Ju-ran (brainwashing girl) used Jun-mo to point a gun at the grandmother's head after Dr. Ha, the man she viewed as her father, was indirectly killed due to her actions. The guilt Jun-mo would've felt if he had pulled the trigger would've mirrored her own turmoil.

Here is a boy who gave you kindness and friendship in a scary place where you're constantly hurt and dehumanized, who comforted you even while going through worse at the hands of your captors, who helped you figure out your abilities even at the cost of his safety. Here is a boy whose name you never knew, who you tried to save from the torture he was being put through, who was dead long before you returned to the city that haunted your nightmares in hopes of saving him.

Here is a girl that you found dead in a ditch hours after you first met her, that woke from the dead in a haunting reminder of the friend you failed to save. Here is a girl that seeks you out to help her and her friends control their volatile abilities, that gives you her friendship and trust regardless of how many times you've hurt her and turned here away, that gives you kindness and warmth you haven't experienced in years, that fills your cold, impersonal apartment with personal affects and her weirdly endearing charm. Here is a girl that holds the stolen heart of the friend you failed to save, that you betray in hopes of moving on and closing this haunting chapter of your life, that you realize filled a hole in your heart that you couldn't handle losing again. Here is a girl that dreamed of traveling, being kissed, and living past 30, that pushed through all the physical and emotional barriers shielding your heart and helped you at the cost of her safety and dreams, that wants to save you as much as you once did him.

There's so much overlap between Chae-ni and that boy and I think there's something so hauntingly beautiful about how they sort of become the centre of his lonely world, the beating heart that brought the colour back into his life.

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