love for loveās sake carefully, and beautifully handled mental health. they didnāt sugar coat the depression myungha and yeowoon were experiencing.
a lot of times in bl we see characters going through hardships, but by the magic of love theyāre better again or everything gets fixed. external love definitely plays a huge part in healing and being able to get through hard situations more swiftly, but itās hardly ever the sole solution.
myungha getting a bf didnāt cure him, gaining friends didnāt cure him. he had two guys wrapped around his finger, his grandma was alive yet he still has low self worth. heās someone that has been depressed for so long, has had deeply ingrained negative beliefs about himself that have kept him from ever being truly happy. he believes that nobody could ever love him, he canāt bother anybody with his problems because heās a burden.
this is why depressed people isolate, they believe all of the things the depression is telling them and it is incredibly difficult to change that. it can take years to change the way you percieve yourself and the world, i think the buffs were the blockages in myunghaās perception. when yeowoon said āi love youā to him, there was an error message because deep in his soul he believes that as an impossibility. his buffs were because of his attempts to getting close to yeowoon, he saw it as a danger because getting close would mean that he would burden yeowoon.
myunghaās life was so so sad, poor guy was dealt such bad cards. his mom living happily without him as if he never existed served as proof of the negative things heās been telling himself. realizing that youāre nothing to no one, that youāre hard to love or youāre too much is such a hard pill to swallow. it might not be objectively true, but if your mind believes it, then thatās all it takes to completely break your spirit. myungha kills himself because he sees no reason for his life, his mom abandoned him, his gf broke up with him, and his grandmother is dead. his reason for life is reliant on other people it isnāt an internal reason.
now when heās in the game, heās faced with the choice of who he loves more, yeowoon or his grandma. i think that they decide to make him choose between them because he canāt fathom receiving love from two people at once. itās overwhelming, and terrifying for someone that has had limited quantities of love his whole life. his love for yeowoon is the truest love heās ever felt besides his grandmother. yeowoon and myungha are equals, share a lot of similar life experiences, yeowoon opens up his heart and is ready to be there for him unconditionally. even when myungha refuses to share what heās feeling, when he is actively breaking his heart, he is willing to change whatever it takes just to be around him. having someone show you that unconditional love is both incredible and so scary at the same time. that person is seeing you at your most vulnerable, at your worst and still choosing you.
myungha is used to self-abandonment, itās all he knows. he felt like choosing yeowoon would mean choosing himself, and in turn would mean he is selfish and leaving is grandmother to die. if he chose his grandmother he would stick to his usual self, but yeowoon would possibly go back to how he was in the beginning and die. to him everything seems like a huge risk because he feels the weight of the world on his shoulders. of course in the game that really was the consequence, choose one life over another. but i think this show really did a great job at showing just how impossible choices can be when youāre depressed, how warped your point of view gets. but i couldnāt help to think what wouldāve happened if he had chosen himself, maybe thatās what he was supposed to do.
