This is Part 1 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.
"Beomseok wants to matter. He needs to matter, especially to Suho. But he has to matter on his own terms." — Asuka
Chapter 1 was Si-eun's story, told through Si-eun's eyes. Chapter 2 was Su-ho, read entirely through Si-eun's lens.
Chapter 3 starts differently — because Oh Beom-seok is a character you genuinely cannot see through anyone's eyes. Not through Su-ho's. Not through Si-eun's. Not even through his own.
And the reason is simple: this boy has never properly looked at himself. What he wanted, what he felt — nobody ever taught him how to name those things. So he expressed them in the only language he had. Money. And eventually, violence.
Writing this chapter, I set one rule for myself: I won't defend him. But I won't flatten him either. Because of all the characters in this story, Beom-seok is the one most at risk of being reduced to a plot device. And that would be a disservice to a character this carefully built.
"I deeply agree with Director Yoo Su-min's interview where he called Beom-seok the core of this story. If it weren't for Beom-seok, I don't think I would have fallen this deep into this drama." — Jennie
Part 1. The Closet He Never Left
The flat reading of Beom-seok — the one that sees him as nothing more than a desperate hanger-on, an Instagram-obsessed loser clinging to Su-ho's coattails — has never sat right with me. That reading makes him too thin. It lets the story off the hook too easily.
Director Yoo called Beom-seok the core — the nucleus — of Weak Hero's narrative. That word matters.
It is his hand that turns the wheel so violently that these young lives begin their downward spiral — accelerating until, at the very last moment, everything shatters beautifully. Su-ho falls into a coma at the peak of his most brilliant youth. Si-eun completely breaks apart.
At the very back of the official script book, the cast wrote messages to each other in character — rolling paper style — and there they are, preserved.
Hong Kyung, writing as Beom-seok to Su-ho:
"I truly looked up to you. I loved you. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Su-ho."
And to Si-eun: "Si-eun, I'm sorry. I'm really sorry."
Two messages. Admiration, love, and a guilt too large to carry. That's the whole character, right there in miniature.
One of my favorite things about Weak Hero's direction is the way characters are expressed through color and space. And Beom-seok hiding in that closet — curled up in the dark, alone with feelings he couldn't name — is the most perfect example of all. Almost too perfect as a metaphor.
Because that's what he did his whole life. Hid. Pressed himself into smaller and smaller spaces, thinking only of the person he both hated and loved. He had no room to process any of it. So it stayed inside, and it curdled.
One subscriber put it in a way I keep coming back to:
"Underneath all that violence, underneath all the manipulation, there's a pitiful boy who simply never learned how to give or receive love without conditions — never learned what to do when someone rejects you or walks away.
Every time Su-ho and Si-eun showed him warmth, something in Beom-seok lit up. Like someone tasting that feeling for the very first time. And because that warmth was so unfamiliar — so dangerously sweet — he became terrified of losing it. Until the fear became resentment. And the resentment became hatred. And the hatred exploded on that ring.
What strikes me about actor Hong Kyung's choices is the cardigan colors — the deliberate shift from white to black, and then back to grey at the ring. Not a coin flip. Something dying slowly." — Riefweren
Part 2. "I'll Buy" — The Only Thing He Knew How to Say
Beom-seok had exactly one way of saying "I love you." Money.
To understand why, you have to look at the world he grew up in. An orphan adopted by a politician. An environment where love was conditional, where it came attached to expectations — and where failing those expectations meant violence. In that world, kindness always has a price. Generosity is never free. Everything is a transaction.
That's the lens Beom-seok holds up to every relationship he has.
Yeong-bin, Jeong-chan, Tae-hoon's crew — they took Beom-seok's money and liked him for it. The relationship worked exactly the way he understood relationships to work. But Su-ho and Si-eun were different. They actually saw him as a friend. Which meant they gave the money back.
When Beom-seok sold his adoptive father's watch and showed up with a large sum of money to protect them from Gil-su — he wasn't being reckless. He was saying "I love you" in the only language he knew.
And they handed it back.
That wasn't just awkward. That was the complete collapse of the only grammar he had.
And this next reading opened up territory I hadn't thought to look at on my own:
"The adoptive father adopted Beom-seok out of some form of love, presumably. Saved him from poverty. And also hit him when he fell short. So in Beom-seok's twisted logic, built from years inside that household, if the person you love disappoints you — you teach them. With your hands. Which means the ring scene wasn't just an explosion of jealousy. It was, in some terrible way, a form of love that Beom-seok had been taught to recognize." — Gomesbandrey
Elaine drew the sharpest possible contrast between Si-eun and Beom-seok on this point:
"Si-eun has become a kind of scholastic automaton — numb, self-contained, denying himself the most basic things. Food. Sleep. Human connection. But Beom-seok suffers from a completely different kind of abuse. His father demands total obedience. Beom-seok lives in a constant state of fear. He desperately needs the strength and protection that Su-ho and Si-eun represent — a need the other two literally cannot fathom.
So Si-eun is numb and self-contained while Beom-seok is desperately needy, constantly over-sensitive to any hint of rejection. Beom-seok's responses to a perceived abandonment will be rapid, overly extreme and deeply personal — where Si-eun's response is to sink back further into self-enforced isolation. They both resort to what they already know." — Elaine
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