This is Part 2 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 3. The Street Girl with No Currency at All
You can't explain Beom-seok's collapse without talking about Yeong-i.
There's a reading in the fandom that she was added to dilute the bromance, to make things more "realistic." I've never bought it. Yeong-i doesn't disrupt the dynamics of this story. She reveals them.
She cut right through Si-eun's walls like they were nothing. But for Beom-seok, she was the trigger — the thing that sent this poor kid into a spiral, faster and faster, until he hit the ground completely.
Watch what happens to him after she shows up. Trailing behind Su-ho and Yeong-i like a lost puppy. Paying for coffee with a face that's gone completely dark. At a club with Jeong-chan's crew, still agonizing over that Instagram follow, looking like he could crumble any second.
The reason Yeong-i undoes him so completely comes down to one thing: by every metric Beom-seok uses to measure worth, she has nothing to offer. No money. No connections. No social leverage. Nothing. And yet Su-ho takes her in. Gives her a job. Worries about her safety.
In Beom-seok's world, that makes no sense. And the fact that it makes no sense is exactly what makes it so threatening.
"What does she have that I don't? Am I worth less than this street girl?"
And here's the thing nobody talks about enough. While everyone was watching Su-ho and Si-eun be spectacularly, recklessly brave — Beom-seok had his own quiet courage running alongside theirs the whole time. It just never stood a chance of being seen.
Getting up every morning and enduring that life would have been an act of bravery in Beom-seok's world. He jumps in to block Si-eun from being bottled in Episode 2. He goes alone into Gil-su's territory with money to try to save Su-ho in Episode 3. He steals his adoptive father's watch — that watch, from that man, in that house. That was audacious.
"In a weird way it's kind of a shame that Su-ho and Si-eun are such incredibly crazy brave types... because we and Beom-seok hardly even see Beom-seok's own bravery in comparison. Getting up every morning and enduring life would be an act of bravery in Beom-seok's world. But he also jumps in to save Si-eun from being sliced by a bottle in ep2, he chases after Su-ho by himself to save him from Gil-soo in ep3. That was kind of audacious, really. Beom-seok had some unrealized potential going on." — Elaine
Part 4. Acknowledgement
"And he will kick this acknowledgement into Suho's skull again if need be." — Asuka
What Beom-seok wants from Su-ho isn't complicated. He wants to matter. He needs to exist in Su-ho's field of vision as something that cannot be ignored. But — and this is the part that makes it devastating — he has to matter on his own terms. Not by being grateful. Not by being convenient. Not by following whatever script Su-ho or Si-eun have written for him. On his own terms, or not at all.
Episode 6 is where it crystallizes. Yeong-bin tosses out: "Hey, didn't Ahn Su-ho block your number?" Beom-seok had never reacted to Yeong-bin's crew like that before. The script book notes it: "Yeong-bin's words get under his skin."
Because the worst possible outcome for Beom-seok isn't Su-ho hating him. It's Su-ho not even caring enough to delete his number. Su-ho's indifference isn't just painful — it's the cruelest punishment imaginable. And it isn't even intended as punishment. Su-ho has simply moved on. For Beom-seok, that erasure is existential.
One subscriber left a reading of the cafeteria sequence — the one where the trio's tensions finally crack open — that changed how I see everything:
"The provocation wasn't just Beom-seok being reckless. It was a test. A devastatingly specific one. He was essentially asking: will you hit me too? The way my dad did. The way the Moon-gang bastards did. Are you just like the rest of them? And when Su-ho pushed Beom-seok against that table, the answer was yes. The idealized friend had become everyone else." — subscriber
The boxing ring sequence — the one that left a cinematic trauma on everyone who watched it — deliberately mirrors the earlier abuse sequences with the adoptive father. The camera angles make it unmistakable.
In that moment, Su-ho doesn't just become the person who wronged Beom-seok. He becomes everyone who ever did. Su-ho had no idea he was carrying that weight. He couldn't have.
And then — after the storm had passed through him — Beom-seok stood there shaking, saying he didn't even know why he'd done it.
That moment is the whole character. Confused, conflicted, hurting, obsessively loving, obsessively hating — all of it at once. There was no master plan. There was just a boy who couldn't hold it together anymore, and a mind that shattered — and then had to figure out how to piece itself back, unsteadily, in the wreckage.
"His bogeyman having satiated himself, Beomseok's shy, torn mind pieces itself back together unsteadily." — Asuka
Not calculated evil. A storm that didn't know it was a storm.
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