Forgive me because I’m about to sorta put my tinfoil hat on.
So, Maggie and Chris have said Rujinu are soulmates, right? But like, they never intended to have a sequel to the movie because no one could’ve predicted its success.
This isn’t at all bashing Rujinu, but I kinda think that that Maggie and Chris only said Rumi and Jinu are soulmates because reception to Jinu was overall mostly positive, especially by the general public, but also because they saw people talking about how Rumi doesn’t seem especially torn up about Jinu in the epilogue (which i have my own thoughts on), and they were like, “Crap. We have to try to convince people that she actually did care about him, especially if we’re gonna have a sequel where so many people want him back.” So they just pulled the soulmate thing out of thin air, it definitely wasn’t something they were planning because their initial plan was just sorta a situationship that Rumi could move on from, and decided that Rujinu were soulmates only after they saw how much people loved Jinu and wanted him to return so they could run with that in the sequel.
i think there’s a middle ground. i do think the film always intended rumi and jinu to be a tragic love story. maggie was describing their connection romantically very early on. i also think the romance was underdeveloped because of runtime, which is probably why the epilogue doesn’t linger on rumi’s grief as much as some people expected. soulmates feels less like something invented out of nowhere and more like the creators expanding on a relationship they now know they’ll have more time to explore in future installments.
