SunAndRain

Morpheus in the show:

People who watch Devil Judge and don’t understand that Kang Yohan is a domestic terrorist who 

a) collected people who were in pain and seduced them to his side by manipulating their pain in order to get them to commit unethical acts (he openly admits this is what he does in episode nine)

b) manipulated public opinion to consciously erode the rule of law and institute mob rule in korea, paving the way for the President to turn the state fascist

c) asked millions of people to become complicit in murder

d) BLEW UP A BUILDING AND KILLED PEOPLE IN IT…

like.

I get he’s pretty, I get he’s broken, and I’m not saying you can’t love him. Jisung turned in a fantastic, vulnerable performance. Go ahead and love him.

But he literally says himself he’s the abyss. He’s the embodiment of angry mob rule. His actions were both unethical and ineffective: as Ga On points out, none of what Yohan did changed the broken system in the end. 

It worries me that people praise Yohan as this savior character just because he sees the system is broken. The difference between Yohan and Ga On is Yohan sees the cracks and tries to smash the whole pot. Ga On sees the cracks and tries to perform Kintsugi. 

One way is violent and painful and chaotic. The pieces go flying, random bystanders get hurt, and at the end of it, you have a smashed pot and nothing to carry water in. You could make another pot afterward, but if that pot cracks again later, what do you do? Just smash that one, too?

The other way is deliberate and painstaking and difficult. No random bystander gets hurt, and you have a beautiful pot that’s stronger than it was before, that can’t crack in the same places, and that can carry all the water you need without spilling. If another crack appears, you’ve established a quick and immediate way to deal with it: pour in more gold.

To change the system

Yohan never wanted to change the system anyway he just wanted to take revenge on them to what they did to issac and his wife and elijah that’s it.

Yohan never suffered the Injustice of the system. He suffered for his father and human around him and issac is only lite in his life

But gaon suffered from the injustice of the system that’s he wanted to change the system make at least better.

I think Yohan made it very clear he never wanted to change the system. He knew Gaon have the potential to do that and he is wrong.

Yohan achieved his goal and left with elijah to give her a perfect life the only remains of issac.

And he would only come back when the world need the devil again. Yohan role more like a destroyer who destroy because it’s beyond repairing and Gaon role would be builder/creater/repair.

In indian mythology we have god of destroyer shiva and according to our mythology when the world would polluted shiva would destroy it and build the world from start.

If he was truly a hero of the people, he would recognize that it’s the system, not the person, that needs to be changed. His goal is to punish the person, and to manipulate the system to enact his own revenge on humanity: just as he did in the classroom all those years ago. Monsters are made, as modern psychology tells us, and I think the show is also relatively clear about believing this. 

Just look at the asshole son of the Minister: who clearly grew up in an abusive household, whose absent parents and position of societal privilege truly screwed him up. His anger comes from somewhere, and society excuses it because he has money, so he’s learned his violent actions are excusable. The society/family/system a person lives in builds them to be who they are. While the show doesn’t excuse him, and doesn’t shy away from how terrible he is, it is sympathetic to his circumstances: we see his parents crying over his flogging, we constantly hear he never heard a kind word from his mother at home, we see others kowtowing to his whims and excusing his violence, and we see him suffering.

We are shown how Yohan actively fosters a societal environment that will create more monsters. In the classroom scenes, he takes the teachers’ attempts to suture a wound in the system (sitting poor kids next to rich kids to foster empathy) and purposely stresses the wound so as to break the stitches. In the present day, we see kids playing at flogging each other; we see folks take to the streets for vigilante “justice” to beat up foreigners; we see the entire population gleefully press a button to murder someone. His brutal punishments normalize violence, abuse, and retribution.

There’s this odd fan re-writing of Yohan’s character: portraying him as someone in the right, as someone who carries some sort of wisdom about the state of the world. But his many assertions about human nature are demonstrably false in the show -- and in real-life human psychology.

And.

"Hollywood (tbh EVERYWHERE, dont think I dont see this shit in novelas and Mexican films too) needs to start allowing darker skinned people of color, whether that's darker skinned black, southasian, latine, afrolatine etc to have a space in film and TV because that will be more accurate representation and using lighterskinned actors so much is colorism and we need to talk about it."

I’m not good with Japanese, but these lines sound VERY similar!  

It would be interesting to know if there are others, did you spot any?

I love both couples, and would have loved to see Dan-ah and Young-hwa in their own drama. But I got into this show because I was excited for Mijoo and Sungyeom’s slow, beautiful journey toward understanding each other. I was interested in their juxtaposition -- how Mijoo ran away from things and Sungyeom ran to them; how Sungyeom’s experience growing up in an abusive and neglectful household had taught him not to value himself, and how Mijoo’s taught her the opposite. I was excited to see the fallout of Sungyeom's epic decision not to run, to see Sungyeom choose to fight for himself and see Mijoo choose to fight for someone else. And we seemed to be on that journey up until episode 11.

Then it felt like the second half of this show dropped all that in favor of focusing on Dan-ah and Young-hwa. And I loved the two of them, but it felt like I was watching a different drama, with our leads being shunted to a secondary B storyline and our secondary leads becoming the emotional focus and dominating screentime.