#hm. yeah.

but like. hm. yes, i absolutely agree with you because while i might not have ocd myself, i do have family members + friends with ocd, and i also have pretty severe anxiety + i used to struggle with an eating disorder, which overlapped with some ocd tendencies (at least, according to what my friends/family struggling with ocd told me from their own perception of me). because of that, i absolutely saw joo won and his tendencies and realized that. like. yeah, a lot of his behaviors can absolutely stem from anxiety-driven issues like ocd.

i think what makes me personally upset about the kind of "ugh the writers just dropped joo won's ocd storyline" is that it totally misses the fact that not all mental illnesses or disabilities are quite the same. because mental illnesses like ocd or anxiety disorder or panic attack disorder are actually mental illnesses that people want to better cope with/somehow heal from. when i was younger, i remember being told by someone who was also struggling with similar mental illnesses as mine that "yeah, you're never gonna get 'better'--this thing is gonna stick with you forever", and as a teenager, that really made me scared about like. oh my god. am i going to personally be living this weird half-life for the rest of my days? that's terrible.

but of course, that's not true! yeah, people with mental illnesses like ocd, anxiety, depression, etc--they all struggle from time to time, and that def. all varies with different degrees of stress (ie. my own anxiety and depression gets significantly worse when i've encountered a triggering situation, and my own past eating disorder tendencies like to pop in when i'm feeling stressed out with work/school/etc). but the thing about these mental illnesses is that you can get better, usually with the help of therapy, medication, a support system and, as cheesy as it sounds (but it's true!), compassion and love for yourself.

in the case of han joo won, who has clearly never had a very stable family or friends situation, it would make sense that his own ocd or other unspecified mental illness would be pretty severe at the start of the show. we've seen how he was raised, even if only for 5 minutes--we see his interactions with his father. it seems that his family also has some history of mental illness too, given how his mom was.

but the great thing about the show is that over the course of the series, joo won gets some greater sense of support and love than he had felt in his entire life. even when he was still being a jerk, the station was so accommodating to joo won (ie. chief nam cleaning out the bathroom for joo won if he wanted to take a shower, and then even later, ji hwa telling jae yi that wait, inspector han needs new bowls in a totally nonjudgmental manner).

the thing about han joo won no longer struggling as severely with his ocd is simply because he's received more support. he's found people who seem to genuinely care about him, and i think along the way, he subconsciously started to let go of his tendencies. his entire dirty history is out there--and unlike han ki hwan, who was so obsessed with perfection, the manyang gang love and appreciate han joo won anyways, annoying attitude + messy mistakes + all. ofc, love doesn't "fix" a mental illness, but it helps one get better, because that's what a support system is all about.

it's also worth noting that, like, beyond evil is a show that's very conscious about the discussion around mental illnesses. dong sik pretty clearly struggles with some kind of ptsd, and jeong je pretty clearly struggles with his own depression, and even oh ji hoon's mentioned in passing about struggling with depression. but what i like about beyond evil is that writer kim su jin and director shim na yeon and the entire cast also seemed pretty intent about those depictions of mental illness--oh ji hoon's a pretty sunshine-y looking guy, for starters, all smiles and cheer, which is the exact opposite people assume of those struggling with depression. (the most frustrating thing a depressed person can hear is oh, you don't look like you have depression though?) as for dong sik, we see him pretty clearly struggling on his own (crying alone in the basement, tucking himself away when he's grieving, the fact that he sleeps on the couch without any heat speaks volumes about how little he cares about himself), but as soon as he's around friends or his loved ones, he automatically puts on a whole act. as for jeong je, we see that he's a pretty timid guy, maybe the kind of more expected representation we see of depression and/or anxiety, but maybe that makes a little more sense, given his relationship with an overbearing mother who never really . . . allowed him to heal or get better, even despite sending him to all those doctors.