#v rant

Fucking stop it.

I love and adore Saeran with all of my heart, truly. He was one of the first video game characters I actually cried about when I played the Secret Ending, the first being V. Saeran has been dealt, possibly, the shittiest hand out of all of the characters and I feel so sorry for him. V’s route only confirmed how I feel for him. Especially after that ending. Everyone is right- it’s not fair. This shouldn’t have happened to him. He had no choice but to do what he was told and then suffer from the actions of other people.

But this is V’s route.

I was one of the people begging, pleading and crying for V to get his own route because he also did not deserve a single thing that happened to him. He was labeled a villain by ‘fans’, lost the trust of his friends (the only family he had), convinced himself that was okay because they would be safe, and was murdered, alone in blinding darkness. All he wanted was to save the people he loved and he died. Then he finally has this alternate story where he gets exactly what he wants but he’s being ignored by so many people because of Saeran.

I see a lot of myself in V. He’s a bit timid, he avoids conflict, he doesn’t love himself because he doesn’t know who he is, he shoulders his burdens and his friends’ burdens then keeps everything to himself because he feels like he would burden others if they knew of his problems, he keeps secrets because he wants to see everyone he loves happy before he can taste happiness himself. I knew exactly what happened to V before I downloaded the game last August. I downloaded Mystic Messenger because of V. I wanted to see for myself how everything played out and it hurt me so much. Fictional or not, I don’t want anyone else to know how much it hurts to be that alone.

Another V post I knew I would make! I’m glad my post from the other day is so well received ^_^

Okay so I’m pretty sure most of us know about Jumin hinting about V’s mother in the Christmas DLC. It’s also been stated or implied that V and his family weren’t exactly…close and that Jumin was more like family to him than his actual family. I was talking with my uncle, aunt, and grandmother and my uncle said something I’ve been thinking about lately- “We date our parents.”

I’ve gotten pretty interested in psychoanalysis and just studying people’s behavior in general over the last few years (Criminal Minds is a huge influence). In other words, I love picking characters like V apart like a jigsaw puzzle to understand them better.

Let’s get back to the ‘we date our parents’ thing. If your dad is super nurturing and caring and your close to him, you’ll date a man similar to him. Or if your mother is very strong willed and determined and you’re close to her, you’d be attracted to a woman like that. If you have a dating history, think if your ex’s and see if they have any qualities similar to that, you might be surprised.

In V’s case, I think his family abused him, specifically his mother. I’ve read in a few articles for my Psych 101 class that 700,000 children are abused in the United States annually and 70.6% of the abuse is caused by the mother. I also believe V has something called wounded attachment. Wounded attachment is subconsciously being attracted or attached to someone or something that reminds the survivor of or reinforces the wound/trauma. When the abuse happens as a child, the child seeks to please the adult and gain affection, attention, nurturing, love or trust by doing whatever they feel will make the adult happy. This follows the child into adulthood. When the child is missing something early in life such as nurturing, the person will seek it out in a significant other even thought they don’t realize it. Often times, they will sacrifice their own happiness to make their partner happy. In abusive relationships, which they often are for people who suffered abuse as a child, stay in the relationship for a number of reasons, not just fear. Perhaps they are afraid of what will happen to their partner if they leave the relationship. Maybe the victim has been made to feel useless by their partner and the only person that would want them is the abuser. Perhaps the victim and the partner had a perfect relationship in the beginning but that changed and now the victim will do whatever they can to please their partner and bring back the person they fell in love with…

…or at least part of one. I’ll probably do more in the future knowing me.

To be blunt: V fucked up. Many fans or -as I like to say- intellectuals can see and understand that. Anyone that said V did nothing wrong would be lying straight to your face. For right now, let’s focus on Rika and him dealing with her mental illness and why he kept that a secret.

Many people don’t know but having/acknowledging/admitting you have any mental illness is something that is not accepted easily in South Korea. In America, it’s fairly easy to say, “Hey, I’m depressed. I think I should see professional help,” when you have the right people supporting your decision. It’s almost the exact opposite of that in South Korea. Like Japan, South Korea has an alarmingly high suicide rate. In fact, it’s three times as high as America and on average, 30 Koreans commit suicide and about 90% of those deaths are because of bottled up depression. Thirty. Daily. That’s a majority of my family. And why is this so common? Because admitting you have a mental illness there is almost taboo.

Many kpop fans in the Mystic Messenger fandom know about Park Bom from 2NE1 but I’ll talk a little about her for those of you who don’t know. Bom is a beautiful and very talented singer with a great voice. Like many 20-something year olds, she has depression. In Korea, she couldn’t find a strong enough prescription for antidepressants so she ordered them from America. This was of course found out by fans and anti-fans alike and many of them called her horrible names. They said she was a druggie and some even said she should just kill herself. Just for ordering prescription medication.

What the hell does this have to do with V and Rika, I hear you ask. We’re getting there. Confucian practices are still pretty common in South Korea. There is the Confucian ideal of filial piety and maintaining the family hierarchy as well. Preserving the dignity and face of the family is paramount while individual concerns are secondary. South Korean citizens are getting more comfortable with Western psychotherapy but these practices aren’t widely spread. In one drama I watched a while ago, a male character said that not too long ago, a man with a wife and a child with a mental illness would be sent out of the country. He would give his wife the money and he would send her and their child away so they wouldn’t embarrass the family.

This is where V and Rika come in, see? We all know V was in love with Rika but that seems to have turned into an obsession (I believe this is due to possible childhood neglect, specifically from his mother just judging from how his and Rika’s relationship is but that’s a different story). V did well in encouraging Rika to go to therapy like any loving fiancé would, I believe. As he was only her fiancé and not an immediate family member, he had no say when she decided she wouldn’t be getting any better seeing the psychologist she had after only three weeks (you couldn’t even get prescribed something in that time period, bro). What he should have done was told her family, which is what I would have done if this happened in America. But it didn’t. This happened in South Korea. We can’t say what Rika and Yoosung’s family is like since we don’t hear enough about them. I am pretty sure when I say that V was most likely afraid of what her family would do or say when they found out Rika had a mental illness. For all we know, they could have shunned her or kicked her out of the family. I think it would have been easier since she was adopted.