lois

The way Dae-ho was treated in this season is just cruel. I feel like I've been beaten up, thrown in the dirt, and spat on. All the unflattering angles, the lack of compassion from any of the characters, and absolutely no chance to redeem himself. They really wanted us to hate him.

I wanted to see Dae-ho as a flawed person, I wanted him to be the three-dimensional character he had the potential to be, but all of those flaws and humanity were completely villainized.

I'm going to start off by saying that I think Dae-ho was obviously implied to be a mentally ill person. He has shown signs of ptsd and I still believe it to be true, I just think that it probably comes from childhood abuse instead of serving in the military. The English subtitles translated his confession of lying incorrectly (see reddit post by Oscar8857, I've reposted on my blog). Dae-ho was in the social service personnel instead of the military, which you get in for various reasons, including mental health issues.

The writing wanted to justify Gi-hun killing Dae-ho so badly. They knew Gi-hun wouldn't murder just to save himself (less so since he was suicidal), so they made this pathetic, unlikable antagonist out of Dae-ho and dare I say it still felt ooc of Gi hun. No regret was shown, none of the empathy Gi hun is known for.

The thing that really got me sobbing was Geum ja's speech about how "bad people just blame their wrong doings on others and move on," pretty much implying that Dae-ho was a bad person. A bad person for trying to cope, a bad person for being scared, a bad person for being creeped out by Gi-huns stares and literal attempts to kill him. Yes, his action led to negative consequences, but there was no intentional malice behind them, just trauma. The rebellion had no chance of success for so many reasons (one being that the FRONTMAN was participating in them). Despite all of this, Dae-ho wasn't allowed to redeem himself.

They could have given us a Hyun-ju Dae-ho duo to highlight how toxic masculinity ruins people's lifes, maybe talk about the misogyny that I thought would be an important topic in season 3 (JOKES ON ME!!!!). Instead, both of them died in the second episode in the most unnecessary, shock valuey way possible.