This is Part 2 of the Ahn Su-ho 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 2. Ahn Su-ho
A Character Who Exists Only for Yeon Si-eun. A Fairy Godmother in a Windbreaker.
Part 5. Do Si-eun and Su-ho Love Each Other?
This is the one I've been sitting on for months.
"Is Su-ho in love with Si-eun romantically or friendly?"
Director Yoo confirmed in a commentary interview that Su-ho is Si-eun's first love. Many fans immediately assumed: romantic. But is that what the director meant? Is that what we saw? And does the label even matter?
I decided to open this question up to my subscribers. What came back was a collection of perspectives so rich, so varied, that I realized the 'answer' wasn't the point at all. The conversation itself was the gift.
One rainbow-profile commenter once told me my video talked for '7+ minutes while saying nothing.' They wanted a direct answer. A clean label. Romance or friendship — pick one. I knew what they were really saying. Stop dancing around it.
I was avoiding a direct answer because I genuinely believe the sophistication of this drama lies in its refusal to define these boys' emotions with adults' boring language. Teenage boys — especially boys like Su-ho and Si-eun — don't sit around having feelings-talks. They don't say 'I care about you' or 'This is all for you.' They just feel. And they express those feelings through actions, silences, and wordplay that hides sincerity behind jokes.
Weak Hero Class 1 respected that. It never forced these boys into a box they don't fit. Because the moment you label it, you limit it.
The production team found something brilliant: the middle ground. Most viewers watching this drama will pick up on the undertone of bromance. It's there. You'd have to be actively ignoring it not to feel it. But the show never makes it explicit.
Here's a trick that youth dramas with lasting fandoms all seem to know: they never go full BL — but they always leave the door cracked open. If they leave it ambiguous, fans fill in those gaps, which naturally form fandoms and create longer-lasting memories. Everyone gets to see what they want to see.
If they'd defined Su-ho and Si-eun as a couple, the fun of secondary imagination disappears. They lose the demographic resistant to BL genres. The show becomes about their sexuality instead of about their bond. They told the story they wanted to tell — and trusted the audience to fill in the rest.
Part 6. Three Viewings, Three Different Truths
This section belongs entirely to Asuka — my dearest friend and Scheherazade, who has spun stories with me across the line between reality and something else entirely, under many a dark and moonlit sky. Her words need no reinterpretation from me.
"The first time I saw WH season 1? I sensed the two boys loved each other so deeply, and I had to pause the show more than once to sob, if not I could not read the subtitles, but I did not detect a romance or a sexual attraction between the two.
On second viewing with an older friend, she quickly said she thought the boys had a romance going on, to my surprise. She said Si-eun looks like a girl and she felt Beomseok was gay. This lady is a very conservative Protestant Christian, I am a strange sort of Buddhist agnostic, we couldn't be more different. Well, sin or not, it didn't stop her from finishing the series in two noisy viewing sessions at a café with me. She liked it intensely.
On my third viewing, with my mum, I tried to watch WH through my rose tinted BL lenses. I realized it was possible to see it as a kind of very understated BL drama. The tone and 'layering' is different when viewed that way, and it has a special beauty all its own. Director Yoo has created a piece of art like that viral dress that can be seen as white, black, blue or even gold, depending on the lighting and on one's preconceptions and preferences.
Several more obsessive viewings later, my preference is still to see WH as mostly straight and non-romantic, although there is love, great warmth, and affection between the boys." — Asuka
Part 7. People Tend to Belittle Friendship Compared to Love
More important than first romance. Let that sink in for a moment.
No conditions. No performance. No need to be a better or more palatable version of yourself. Just: I see you. I accept you. I will fight for you.
That's what Su-ho and Si-eun found in each other. And here's the thing — neither of them had ever experienced anything like it before. Which means it wasn't just rare. It was, for both of them, genuinely life-changing.
We underestimate this. I think we do it constantly, almost automatically. Our entire vocabulary around relationships is built to elevate romance and quietly diminish everything else. Are you guys just friends? They're only friends. Friend-zoned. As if friendship is the consolation prize you collect when the real thing didn't work out.
But a real friend — someone who sees you clearly and chooses you anyway, who shows up when it costs them something — is just as hard to come by as any great love. Maybe harder. Because we don't audit our friendships the way we audit our romantic relationships. We let them be what they are, without the weight of expectation crushing them from both sides.
Think about it: who do we call when our partners disappoint us? Who holds us when the person we chose to build a life with turns out to want something different? We turn to our friends. And yet we keep treating friendship like a waiting room, a placeholder for something more.
Su-ho and Si-eun never did that to each other. They gave freely — no ledger, no scorecard, no fine print. No restrictions, no demands. Nothing that would have been there if this had been a romance. And that, at their age, with their respective damage, is genuinely extraordinary.
Sometimes marriages end. Best friends remain.
The fact that we barely have language for what Su-ho and Si-eun share — that we keep reaching for romantic frameworks because our vocabulary for deep friendship is so impoverished — says more about us than it does about them.
📖 Want to read the whole thing at once? Download the free ebook here:
We Keep Coming Back to Get Hurt — Download Free
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