#yang seungbae

Art by me

Warning for description of violence

Killing Stalking for me pushes the boundaries of what can actually be classified as love and obsession so well that the lines blur to make the story compelling.

The story plays with love in a very twisted way, where love itself is not sacred but often depraved on its own.

There are fans that think its not love, its just unhealthy obsession, and then those that believe the relationship is love pushed to the absolute toxic extreme. The latter tends to romanticize the relationship in a way that it absolutely shouldn't be.

But the thing that makes the story so good in my opinion is that the two central characters have been crossed and ruined so many times by the people that should have taken care of them in their earlier lives, they both now try to force the other to a play a role they weren't meant to fill.

What both central characters feel towards each other is genuine love, but the love itself is disgusting and wrong. Its not obsession masquerading as love, it is just the dirty depravity of two men ruined and trying to cut and carve away at each other to meet their own needs. This is very often to the detriment of the other person.

Its the kind of love between two absolutely crazy people who will eventually kill each other. They are the opposite of a symbiotic relationship, they are mutual parasites, sucking the marrow and life from one another until one can't bear to live without the other.

The absolute tragedy of the story is that Sangwoo actually does feel real love for Yoon Bum, it just manifests in the wrong way. Its proven in the final scene where Sangwoo calls out to him, only to be smothered by that woman in the hospital with his name still on his lips.

We see this when Sangwoo and Seungbae are fighting and Yoon Bum refused to stab Seungbae, making Sangwoo angry enough to attempt to kill him. We also see it earlier when Yoon Bum cuts himself and Sangwoo fetches the baseball bat from the basement to rough him up, only to completely drop it and panic when he realises there's something actually wrong with him and he's not just being dramatic.