What Good Is Godhood
Working-Class Mr. Ahn's Unscheduled Visits to Dr. Yeon's Clinic continues...
Missed Part 1? Start here → PART 1
Warning: this post deals with some heavier psychological topics and dark fictional elements. Everything here is totally fictional.
P.S. — Amazon Research
J: Oh Asuka, sending you a quick P.S. to make you laugh. I actually searched Amazon for those rainbow rubber rings from Suho's blue bowl of toys. My curiosity knows no bounds. This goddamn curiosity showed me all these colourful varieties of toys, and I imagined Dr Yeon's delicate physician hands "filling" Suho with those rings before quietly closing my browser.
Jen.
Ondol and Bee Lips
J: Yeah, and I imagined those two otters freezing under one blanket, shivering, then without saying who started it, pulling each other by the waist, Si-eun (shorter than Suho) burying his face in Suho's neck, and suddenly heat rising below both their waists as their lips slowly collide under the covers haha. Why did the boiler have to break that particular day?
Asuka, do you know about Korea's "ondol" concept? There's like a charcoal kiln under the floor, and when you stuff it with wood logs, the room built above that kiln gets warm. My great-grandmother's house had this traditional heating system. I remember when I was really young, going to her house and warming up in that ondol room on winter days.
Even if Suho's grandmother's house was a crumbling old place, setting it up with the traditional ondol heating system felt like too much of a stretch as a brick, so I set it as "an old-fashioned house heated with coal briquettes." But somewhere in our deluluverse, I imagined two otters warming up in an old house with ondol heating during a vacation in some rural mountain area.
I think they'd both love each other's bee-body-like lips — literally both have plump lips like bee bodies. Maybe the first place the two boys kissed was Juntae's animation club room... Si-eun, who finds joy each day seeing Suho awake from the coma, watching him succeed in rehab day by day — I don't think he could've waited until adulthood to satisfy his desire to kiss, hahahaha.
P.S. Oh, you might have seen this in K-dramas — there's an expression for men with delicate, pretty features like Suho. We say they "look like a gisaeng's brother" (gisaeng being similar to a geisha). When someone hears that description, it means they're truly handsome hahahaha.
And one more — the blanket they huddled under that night when the boiler broke was one of those thick quilted comforters — the one grandma had used since her newlywed days.
Almost a Boner
J: In The Song of Achilles, the Greek soldiers (the Myrmidons) really worshipped Archie's masculinity. This is a tangent, but remember that scene in filmverse Weak Hero? When Suho and Si-eun are sitting across from each other in the student cafeteria, eating lunch together for the first time, and the boys from their class are whispering? "Why are they suddenly hanging out?" "Hey, Ahn Suho was a UFC fighter." And one kid says in the script: "No wonder his counter punch was killer, I almost got a boner." It didn't make it into the actual film, right? Of course even without it, they captured well in filmverse how Suho's strength was an object of admiration among 17-year-old boys whose conflicts are all fistfights. But I think it would've been fine if it had stayed in.
Not just Beomseok — among the many reasons Si-eun fell in love with Suho, I think his pure masculinity was one of them. The beauty that captivated Pat in Archie was also very primal masculinity.
Some Picnic
Asuka: Hi Jennie, I'm down with a cold myself, one that leaves me with phlegm the colour of milk tea in the morning. It probably got worse because of a sudden workload increase this week, so to my frustration I couldn't boil any soup. Thank goodness I have Monday to Wednesday off.
Hearing the story from Pat's spirit was a brilliant literary decision. Those pages where he narrates Archie's sadness, and Briseis', and his own, hold some of the most heartbreaking things I have ever read in all fiction. I am so glad I read the last 100 pages at home — at least I could muffle my sobbing with bath towels.
Till today I have only read it 3.3 times. The first time was in a relatively quick four days, the last hundred or so pages covered in a shot. This was a terribly painful experience that left me ugly crying. I don't think any other fiction book has done that. The second time, immediately after the first, I read it much slower, and replayed my favorite sentences a dozen times at different tones and speeds. It was like summoning different Pats and Archies from different universes and having them all interact at a picnic.
Some picnic.
This was an even more painful experience, probably because I attempted it before I was properly put back together. After the second read, I took a break and used fan art to cope. Bless all those wonderful fan artists, they made me smile. The third time was several months after the second. But the pain still burned bright and real. Somehow, the writing triggered memories of actual losses in my life. Madeleine Miller, how do you do it?
The last time, I stopped at Mount Pelion, where I left them sticky and happy, playing around in the river and in the cave. They are the cutest couple. I wonder how much Chiron knows. I can imagine this dignified centaur scrubbing his cave floor going "tsk, bloody teens!" while the boys went out hunting and swimming.
The Divinity Quotient
Asuka: It seems the 'divinity quotient' in a person is based on the rank of the deity parent and what sort of action the person takes while alive. Technically, both Heracles (aka Hercules) and Achilles were half-god, but when Heracles was cremated, his mortal half faded while his immortal half ascended to Olympus. Achilles though, with his lower ranked water fairy mother and his utter disrespect towards gods — ie dragging Hector's corpse around town was an insult to Apollo who loved Hector; and he actually slashed and wounded a river god — seemed to have turned almost fully mortal upon death. "I couldn't make him a god," his mother said.
I take comfort in the fact that the 3000 year old sequel The Odyssey, written by the same author, confirms that Archie and Pat really do reunite in the underworld. It wasn't all Miller's fantasy.
Cold as His Marble Tiles
Asuka: HAHAHA oh my, cold as his marble tiles, Mr Ahn! The client is king, as they say. This really makes these girls like Deidameia, daughter of a king. Suho ignores them like Archie ignores Deida. Just a total silence.
This is such a boss move, so Suho. Hahaha Mr Ahn Suho, coldly professional even when revealing something so precious to him. It's something he's so proud of. And he uses it to calmly hammer in the nails for the coffin of his one-night stand. "Miss, one-night stands live for one night only."
In parallel, when Pat tried to free Briseis from her bonds, and she thought he was trying to rape her at knifepoint, he then seized Archie by his clothes and deep-kissed him. It must have been for a while, because Briseis was really staring wide-eyed when they were done. She didn't speak much Greek then, but she got the message: "This is my boyfriend and I love him." Yup, the overlap isn't perfect, but it's there all right hahaha.
I Really Wanted to Beat Odysseus to Death
Asuka: Honestly, if Suho never had a coma and pursued an MMA career with all its health hazardous risks, would Si-eun have stopped him? I doubt so. I think if Si-eun knows Suho's next fight is very dangerous, he might say something simple like 'it's dangerous', but Suho would reply 'don't worry so much. Don't you trust your hyung?', and then he would wink and do some silly curled bicep gesture, and that would be the end of it. Both guys would keep their concerns buried. And then this may be a precursor to another coma in another universe, when Suho finally meets someone like Mike Tyson. In hindsight we may say Suho was stupid and Si-eun was an idiot. No doubt guilty Si-eun in filmverse called himself an idiot all the time when Suho got kicked into life support. But obvious solutions only appear when we look back. On the ground, it can be very difficult for young guys to voice out their opinions and concerns all the time.
For peace lovers who think Achilles the murder machine had no right to love or be loved by Pat the Pure (and there are many of these delulus out there), there exists the inconvenient fact of Pat urging him to go out and lead the Myrmidons when the Greeks were faced with the threat of extinction. Pat wasn't asking him to go out to do diplomacy with princely speeches... As if it couldn't be more clear, when Archie refused, Pat did the killing himself, quite gratuitously in fact. Even Pat the healer knew that killing could not be avoided.
No doubt Achilles was not a flawless character. He had a terrible ego trip towards the end of their lives, and he thought shockingly little of Briseis. But I forgive him. I forgive him because Patroclus forgives him, and that really should be the end of it. But I also forgive him because, how is a boy supposed to resist years of cunning brainwashing by someone like Odysseus? And what chance does he have to remain totally pure against decades of strange seaside talk with a power-obsessed toxic mother? And I forgive him because he could not forgive himself. When he saw Pat's body, he knew immediately and completely that he was wrong. When Pat died everything died. "What good is godhood when it can't bring him back?"
Nothing mattered to him more than Pat. I think even in his power tripping last days, he fully thought Pat would outlive him and that his own time was running out, in part thanks to Odysseus saying he was lucky to have eked out an extra 10 years against the Fates. What manipulative nonsense. Unfortunately because Archie believed it, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy that he would never leave Troy. If Archie had taken Pat and all his men and left Troy right there and then, and sailed to Korea or some other place, and Hector survived, I believe Archie could have lived like a middle finger to the Fates till he was a hundred years old.
Archie naively thought Pat would be with him all the way until he passed on. Pat himself never told Archie that he didn't plan to live after Archie died — it's really so Dr Yeonish, come to think of it. Nor did Pat confide this feeling to Briseis. Whoever wrote The Iliad must have given his ancient audience a terrible twist when it turned out that Pat would die first…
It is interesting to see Achilles' tone with his mother totally shifts after Pat's death. It's like the gloves finally come off, and he basically tells her to shut up and fuck off. It makes me wonder how much he was holding in over the years, and did he do that for Pat's sake? To make Pat's life easier? To prevent his mom from quietly assassinating Pat? Because when it didn't matter any more, he let her know how much he detested her because she detested Pat. And true to form, far from apologizing or comforting him, sea-bitch tells her son she is glad his most-beloved is dead. (What she never tells Archie is that she can actually see and hear Pat's spirit, so that Archie would not think to talk to him through her. World-class salt level, this parent of the year.)
Oh my, so much ink spilled on Achilles, sorry about that! We all love Pat, he's really so, so sweet, and we know how much he adores Archie since the story is told from his point of view. But I chafe when I see readers complaining that Achilles was 'flat' or 'dull'. Yes he could be naive. Yes he also had the sort of one-dimensional focus that Suho has. And he had a bit of an infuriating high school boy mindset sometimes. But flat? Flat?! Achilles had a complexity all his own, and his grief really broke my heart.
I Will Die for This One Friend Alone
Asuka: I watched that video with a smile. 'In love' is a phrase associated with romance and sexual attraction. Were Si-eun and Suho like this in filmverse? I don't think so. But if they were, or if it became like this, I would be happy for them. Would this be an upgrade from 'just friendship'? For me, no. Because what they have isn't at the 'just friendship' level. It is at the 'I will die for this one friend alone, without regrets and without a second thought' level. It is true-love friendship, not 'just friendship.' If romance and sexual attraction happen, then they might become husbands with true love. If no romance and no sexual attraction happens, then they stay as true friends with true love. Either case is beautiful to me.
Asuka: Yes, I've heard sacrificial love being described very poorly and cynically as being 'masochistic.' What a wretched view of things. I can only imagine what sort of dry, sour heart would think like this.
Asuka: As you know, I'm an agnostic buddhist, but this is one of the things the Bible really gets right. True love is marked by a willingness to self-sacrifice.
Asuka: You used the word 'curated' to describe how I wrote Yeon Clinic. I'm really very honored. And 'curated' is exactly how Miller has written The Song of Achilles. The language is curated for colour, smell, sound, rhythm, feeling. It is drop dead gorgeous. I said that when I watched Weak Hero through a BL lens, that it gained a special beauty, yes? For me, that was partly because all sorts of Song of Achilles quotes started popping into my mind. I was stunned how much of it fit haha, but I didn't mention this previously.
Ah, Love Really Is...
J: Yeah, and I watched gigi's animation. Watched it five times. Cried while watching. It was exactly the image I'd imagined. Ah, love really is...
From here entering early winter, yours, Jen.
Who is Jennie? Bricklayer. Local correspondent for the Yeon Clinic deluluverse. A sous chef who checks whether the soup actually tastes like Seoul. A specialist who designs this kitchen to hold more than Suho's coma — philosophy, history, society, culture, stacked one recipe at a time.
Who is Asuka? Head nurse and main chef of the Yeon Clinic. A Scheherazade who sings the Song of Achilles she found shelved next to a book on Zen Buddhist masters. Fluent in several languages, conversant in single malts and the precise emotional damage of Weak Hero Class 1. Signs off as ASL. (Always starch linen.)
This free ebook will ruin you. In the best way. A character analysis of Si-eun, Su-ho and Beom-seok that goes beyond what subtitles can carry. Take it — it's free → DOWNLOAD HERE
This post was originally published on Jennie's blog in the autumn of 2025. The original blog has since moved to Blogger due to hosting changes — welcome to the new home.
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