This is Part 3 of the Oh Beom-seok chapter in a chapter-by-chapter blog series adapted from the free ebook We Keep Coming Back to Get Hurt. Start from the Prologue here.
Chapter 3. Oh Beom-seok
The One Who Needed to Matter. On His Own Terms.
Part 5. He Was Just Doing His Job
There's a figure in Beom-seok's story that doesn't get nearly enough attention.
Aide Park.
In Korean, Aide Park shifts registers mid-conversation. When he confirms Su-ho is alive, he uses formal speech — acknowledging Beom-seok's status as the congressman's son. When he delivers the oxygen machine threat, he drops into casual speech — with just a hint of contempt, barely detectable, yet somehow completely drained of feeling.
He clocked Beom-seok's reaction to Su-ho's condition in an instant. Understood exactly what mattered to this boy. And weaponized it without hesitation.
Director Han Jun-hee has talked about this across both D.P. and Weak Hero — how these are stories about adults who, instead of protecting young people, make the ones who are already bleeding bleed more.
Aide Park is one of those adults. Not out of malice. Just out of professionalism.
And somehow that's worse.
Part 6. Thirty Seconds That Never Happened
Su-ho followed Yeong-i. He didn't follow Beom-seok back. And for Beom-seok, that became the whole story — acceptance versus rejection, belonging versus abandonment.
We all know Su-ho wasn't the type to carefully tend to his follow list. Maybe Yeong-i grabbed his phone and did it herself.
If Beom-seok had just said, during that Han River session: "Hey, why didn't you follow me back?" — Su-ho would have laughed, said he deleted the app, and immediately re-downloaded it.
Thirty seconds. Done.
But Beom-seok didn't say it. He probably ran hundreds of mental simulations. Worried about looking desperate. Turned over every possible version of how it might go wrong, until the thinking itself became the trap he couldn't escape.
That gap — between what was actually wrong and what could so easily have been said — is the whole tragedy in miniature.
"Beom-seok's needs were growing exponentially. Su-ho's capacity to meet them stayed constant." — subscriber
A mathematical inevitability.
The friendship didn't get destroyed by outside forces. It was suffocating under the weight of two people who spoke completely different emotional languages — and had no way to tell each other that.
Su-ho expressed care through action. Showed up. Stepped in. That day, he even put aside his own shift to help. In his world, that was everything.
Beom-seok needed to hear it in words. Explicit words. You matter to me. I see you. I choose you.
Two people speaking in languages the other couldn't hear.
The math teacher drifting through the background of that mediation scene says it almost too plainly: "You know why you're all bad at math? Because you don't understand the fundamentals..."
The fundamentals were different. They had been different from the very start.
Closing: The Question This Fandom Can't Let Go
The question that keeps this fandom talking.
According to Director Yoo Soo-min's interview — Beom-seok didn't flee to the Philippines. He went, against his own will and into a program he wanted no part of, because that was the only way to keep funding Su-ho's medical bills. He probably regrets it, the director added. And has learned a lot.
So: Beom-seok is likely alive. Somewhere. Carrying it.
When this sleeping beauty finally wakes from his long sleep — this boy who lives so completely in the present will still have his grandmother. And Si-eun. It's not hard to guess where his attention will go.
But let's sit with the question of forgiveness for a moment — because it's impossible to think about the post-coma world without it.
Si-eun and Beom-seok are twins sharing the same Venn diagram. But the way each one arrives at forgiving himself looks nothing alike.
Si-eun is someone who cannot forgive himself. He took the full weight of Su-ho's coma and filed it under his own failure. And the theme that Season 2 — this second act of a beautiful poem of youth — keeps quietly returning to, is exactly that: forgiveness. Si-eun learning to forgive himself is the arc of the entire season.
"That's why I personally want to celebrate Si-eun's choice in that Season 2 ring scene — letting go of this boy in the black t-shirt's hand and choosing to wake up. It was agonizing. But by releasing him, Si-eun chose growth over guilt, healing over holding on.
I rewatched the scene where Si-eun lets go of Beom-seok's hand and pulls himself up on that pitch-black boxing ring.
This is a kid who genuinely believes he's the reason both Su-ho and Beom-seok ended up where they did — that getting close to people was the original sin. I've never read Si-eun as someone with a healthy sense of self-worth. Even here, he's still filing himself under 'the one who ruined everything.'
I'd love to hear Director Yoo's take on why Beom-seok looks at Si-eun so coldly in that dream — that line: 'I didn't say that to hear you're sorry to me, did I?' It cuts.
Si-eun gets it, though. He understands instinctively what it means to be that completely undone by Ahn Su-ho. But where they split is this: Beom-seok needs Su-ho to see that he matters — on his own terms, no one else's. So even though both of them would willingly bleed for the same person, what they need back couldn't be more different.
And I think Beom-seok is also Si-eun's first love — not romantically, necessarily, but in the way that people are drawn to someone who might actually understand them from the inside out." — Jennie
"Si-eun-ah, you of all people should understand me." "...I do." — EP8, Weak Hero Class 1
Beom-seok's story ends open. As Weak Hero did.
Some questions stay unanswered. And perhaps that's exactly what makes this fandom refuse to let go.
When Su-ho finally wakes — I find myself hoping that somewhere out there, Beom-seok is on his way back. And that when he arrives, he's wearing a white sleeveless shirt. No cardigan. Just white. Nothing left to hide.
P.S
Last but not least.
There's a scene — and if you know, you know — where he looks Su-ho dead in the eye and says: "What, are you showing off? Should I just pay you your part-time wage?"
And Su-ho completely loses it.
Su-ho carries wounds around money and poverty that he would never let anyone see. Poverty that couldn't even bring his parents back to his bedside while he was on life support.
Beom-seok knew exactly what would hurt most.
A boy throwing a tantrum at the person he'd loved most in all his seventeen years — in the only language he ever learned.
What a character.
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