🦋🪐🌌☄️🌠🌻

He tells Jinu he can be "good enough". Presumably, leaving Jinu to fill in the blanks with assumptions concerning what that means in practice. We see this by the way Jinu tells the story. The first time we get it, it's told as "I sold my soul to get my family a safe, hunger free, comfortable step up in the world". I think THAT is what Jinu believed he was signing on for. That was what he was willing to sacrifice. Himself. For his mother and sister to live, and live better than if he hadn't.

That is not what he got and it's the negative emotions therein that Gwi-Ma used to control him for so long. Which is probably why he gets his soul back the second he DOES manage to sacrifice himself for someone he cares deeply for/wants to provide a better life for/wants to protect.

As Jinu repeats the story we are subsequently allowed more steps back to see a clearer picture of what actually happened. And I think the shock of how fundamentally wrong he'd been is the biggest thing holding him back. That moment where his mother drags his crying sister away. The soldiers' weapons come down and he is hit full force with "I've fucked up". You see it in his face later around that food filled table where the other court boys were having a good time.

I don't think he wanted to let them go. I think he was so stunned by the depths of his 'I've fucked up' it paralyzed him into inaction. A perfectly normal human response. We have turns of phrase to describe it. "Moving in slow motion" "couldn't drag my eyes away" "like watching a train wreck" It's the unreferenced third option to fight or flight... "Deer in the headlights"

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Author but not on Ao3

Not an author

Obviously a publisher is a business and a business needs to make money, but the idea used to be that you'd have a couple of very successful authors who bring in so much cash that they subsidise the new kid who is building a back catalogue of books that sell okay until they get name recognition and pay for themselves. I was told back then that a couple thousand pounds was very reasonable for a debut novel because you want to get royalties for the sales exceeding your advance and that way the publisher sees you as a profitable investment. The last couple of years I keep hearing about six figure book deals for debut (!) literary fiction (!) novels, what on earth?