You must be a fairly good person if the guilt and shame of what you did to your loved ones still haunt you 400 years later.
I don’t know if I’ve just been exposed to awful people all my life and that’s why my standards are a bit messed up, but what I think usually happens is that people repress their guilt, and after a while they expect forgiveness — and they’re willing to give it to themselves because time alone makes them feel entitled to it. I’m not sure if this is a correct moral assessment, but I hold grudges forever, so I’m presumably the worst person to evaluate this.
If enough time has passed and you’ve accepted responsibility, you’ll probably try to move on with your life, and that mistake won’t define everything you do afterward — especially when it comes to a choice you made simply to get yourself out of misery. It will probably stay in the back of your mind, but generally what happens with truly selfish people is that they immediately justify themselves and refuse to take any kind of responsibility, even when they aren’t facing starvation or any real threat.
Jinu’s sense of self is completely twisted by his guilt and shame, and he’s painfully aware of what he did. He doesn’t justify himself at all. When he lies about what happened, it’s because he’s facing a hunter who is threatening to send him back to hell (in their first meeting). After that, he becomes emotionally involved, but even when Rumi offers him a justification — saying he was just trying to help his family — he rejects it and insists it’s more complicated. In the end, he admits the truth and uses it to prove to both himself and Rumi that he’s a monster.
I’m not saying any of this is healthy. What I’m saying is that Jinu is unequipped to help himself in any meaningful way. He’s being tortured by a powerful, mind-controlling deity, and all he wants is for the pain to stop. I said before that the only redemption he can access is sacrifice, because the redemption he needs is with himself first and foremost — and I don’t think he’d ever be able to enjoy his time away from Gwi-ma knowing that his little sister died of hunger.
I hope he comes back at some point in the story, because after you’ve given everything, you also deserve to heal. It’s important that people who made terrible mistakes heal, just as much as it is that people affected by generational trauma heal.
