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farewellneverland2004 · 10 months ago

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Being a reincarnation sucks! and UWMA told us, but we were too happy for DeanPharm to listen!

Okay! This might be a little bit of a hot take, and also possibly a little theorizing. But I will stand my ground and die on this hill!

UWMA is my all-time favorite BL, and might I even say, one of my favorite web dramas ever!

It's a compelling, heartbreaking, beautiful story about a wonderfully healthy relationship between two very traumatized people. Finding each other, and in the process, reconnecting the tortured souls of two people who loved each other but weren't given the option to be happy together.

Now, though that scenario is not likely to happen to me or you, it's still an interesting story, using the soulmate trope to its ultimate advantage. I love the idea of a healthy, yet unconditional and unending love that prevails through all.

However, although I love the reincarnated love trope, there is a blatant fact that I, and many other UWMA fans have been oblivious to. and that is how much it would SUCK to be in our beloved Dean and Pharm's shoes!

What invoked me to make this post?

Well, it's plain and simple. I'm sick of all the complaining and making fun of My boy Pharm for being a cryer!

Am I biased because Pharm is my favorite character and I relate to the inability to stop myself from crying and it usually takes a while for me to stop, so I see a lot of myself in him? Maybe, but that's not important!

What's important is that I believe, people who complain or laugh at Pharm for this know that this is a response to PTSD, but don't take time to really acknowledge how bad this PTSD would be if you were faced with it in real life. This is why I want to shed light on how being the reincarnations of Korn and In have done little to nothing beneficial for Dean and Pharm, other than the fact it's what brought them together.

(But just an FYI, crying is a normal reaction to things, and maybe Pharm is just a very emotional and expressive softy and there is nothing wrong with that! MEN SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO CRY GODDAMNIT!)

Well, since I just ranted about the Pharm crying disrespect, might as well start with him and his respected past life counterpart, Intouch!

As we see all through UWMA, Pharm probably has the more blatant PTSD from his past life out of the couple, and it makes sense.

In was left to watch the man he loved take his own life in front of him. He was the one to witness his improvement, his confession, and his mutual decline until he had nothing left to say but "I love you" and "I'm Sorry", and in the end, he was still left alone. he is left cradling the body of not only the first man he probably ever openly loved but also the first person who he could actually relate to in a world that told him if he wanted to survive, he had to hide who he was.

This user makes an interesting point on how Korn dying isn't just a traumatizing event for In, but in his mind, also an act of betrayal. Because he promised him, yet he traumatized and left him alone in a world that would hate him for who he is.(in Intouch's mind ofc). Yet he also knows that though he is hurt, all he wants is to be with Korn, so he commits suicide to escape the life he'd have to live without him.

These very hard-hitting and intense feelings are already bad to live with for the one who actually experienced the trauma firsthand. But imagine, being a normal kid with a happy loving family, yet you are plagued by vague but traumatic memories that are not your own? you wake up crying every morning, you panic at any unsuspected loud noise, and you get seemingly random panic attacks that you can't even explain why they happen.

You seemingly have no valid reason to act this way. You want to stop, or at least to know why, but can't for the life of you understand. I think many people can understand the feeling of being depressed, angry, anxious, etc., and don't really know why. So they feel guilty and exhausted from these strong emotions they don't want or understand.

For Pharm, the more he learns about his situation, the more he's around Dean, and the more he learns about Korn and In, the more intense his episodes get. he has more nightmares, more flashbacks, and he's less able to discern In's emotions and pain from his own.

At one point, he even realizes that the more he finds out about In, the more power In's feelings of betrayal and anguish have on him. He ultimately decides he doesn't want to know how In died, believing what's done is done and it's best to leave it in the past, just for him to find out later and for all his efforts to stay himself to be diminished by In's immense grief.

He straight up almost DIES because In's soul can't distinguish Dean from Korn, and therefore Pharm from Intouch. And people still thinks he doesn't deserve to cry all he wants?

Moving onto the titular man that, for lack of a better phrase, "started it all", and his green-flag of a reincarnation! Dean and Korn.

(If you don't agree with the dean, green-flag statement, I respectfully disregard your opinion)

So... let's just get this out in the open. I believe Korn was always suicidal. Or at least, very depressed.

Now when I say that, I obviously can't know how his childhood went or when his mental health began to decline, but considering the family he was born into, and the time he was in when he realized he liked men, it's not too hard to suspect that these feelings have been festering for a while.

Korn was the eldest son of a mafia loan shark. We don't ever find out about his mother, whether she was around or not, but considering how his father treats him and his children, I can assume that even if she was in their life, his father would still be calling all the shots.

We know that Korn is expected to carry on the family business, and at the point of his life where we are introduced to him, we see his father is beginning to put even more pressure on him to start taking up jobs and practicing to take over when he's gone.

But we see that Korn doesn't want to take over. He doesn't want to hurt people and he just wants a normal life for his brothers and himself. However, due to familial obligation, and threats from his father, Korn is submitting himself to a life he hates for the sake of his brothers, so neither of them has to throw their lives away for their father's business.

At this point, the existence of Korn is miserable. He's being pressured to do something he desperately hates, to submit himself to a life he does not want. He's ostracized at university for his affiliation with loan sharks and his general anti-social demeanor(which is definitely a coping mechanism) He's being berated and called useless by his own dad, which would definitely hurt his view of himself. He cares about his brothers way too much to ever let them know how much he's hurting, isolating himself from their care. finally, his sexuality would make him a target for discrimination, so he's forced to hide more about himself until he's probably forced into a marriage with a person he does not love, producing an heir to take on the job he hates and officially restarting the generational trauma and cycle of abuse.

This person better explains what Korn was going through mentally and what In truly meant to him than I ever could. But basically, they say that before In, Korn had practically dug himself a hole he couldn't get out of, and he was living on autopilot. Just moving through the days, until the day would come when he couldn't take it anymore. I very much agree with this. and every flashback, when they get closer and closer to the day, you can see that he doesn't know how much longer he's gonna last. So now that he is at the point of hopelessness, all he can do is let him know he loves him, and apologize to him and their dads for making them witness what he was going to do, but also for leaving him.

Now, I see a lot of comments about how Korn was being selfish with taking his life, because not only did he do it in front of the person he loves, but also in the process, he left him alone in the world. I personally feel like these comments tend to push a little too much on Korn being selfish that it ends up almost coming off as victim blaming. And I want to make it perfectly clear, people who commit suicide do so (mainly) as a last resort. almost no one who is going through with committing the act is doing so out of spite or to hurt others. They do so because they believe there is no other way to escape or fix what's wrong in their life. Korn is no exception. He was in pain, and he needed help, but he believed there was nothing that could be done, and probably felt if he was out of the picture, he would no longer be a burden on In and he would finally put an end to all the war and suffering in his heart and in his life.

However, suicide is an act that at the end of the day hurts everyone the victim is close to. people who are affected by a loved one taking their own life can feel a piling number of emotions. Confusion, anger, guilt, etc. We see those emotions expressed in In, An(In's Sister), Korn's brothers, their dads, and even Pharm. These emotions are valid and it's a common response. So I won't blame the audience for empathizing with In more than Korn in this series. To be fair, even Dean holds resentment towards Korn once he finds out.

Which brings me to why it'd suck to be Dean. He's possessed by the soul of a very depressed and broken man with anti-social tendencies. He's having issues similar to Pharm where he has memories that are not his own, not to mention he's always preoccupied with looking for someone he has no idea may or may not exist. He also chooses to isolate himself from his parents and siblings for the sake of his paternal grandmother, making his relationship with them more strained once he has to be in their lives. (which may or may not be influenced by Korn due to his tendency in life to self-isolate.) He puts on a stern and responsible act for everyone to mask his social awkwardness, still looking for someone he does not know.

And when he finally feels happy and relieved because he's found the thing he's always felt was missing, it only gives him more questions of who those memories actually are, and what he and Pharm have to do with it. The more he finds out, the more his true anxieties begin to take over and he desperately tries to put on a brave face for his boyfriend because he knows Pharm is already going through a lot, and he wants to make sure he's not worried.

When he actually finds out who Korn and In were, and What Korn did, he immediately starts cursing Korn for what happened. But it's so much more than just him being hateful towards a man who took his own life. Because to him, whether he likes it or not, Korn is an aspect of him. Whatever Korn feels, he feels. Korn's actions are his actions. So whatever Korn did, Dean is responsible for.(at least in his mind)

So Dean is practically cursing himself, calling himself a bastard. to Dean, He's the reason Pharm is terrified whenever there is a loud unexpected noise, he's the reason Pharm has panic attacks, and he's the reason Pharm cries in his sleep. He thinks it's his fault that Pharm was so scared of being in a relationship with him, Not to mention he's probably dealing with Korn's soul feeling the same amount of self-loathing. To Korn, everything is his fault, and because of his actions, he abandoned, hurt, and killed the one person that made him keep going.

So now, Dean is left with double self-loathing, and blaming himself for things that were most definitely NOT his fault.

Now, onto my final point on what the worst part of being the reincarnations of two unresting souls. Which is the lack of being your own person. When your body is holding two separate souls constantly fluctuating on taking the wheel, don't be surprised if you feel just a tad bit unsure of who you are or what things in life are your own.

Now, there are some things that their past life events influence that are not bad and are in fact quite sweet. like how In always wanted to be good at cooking, and so Pharm is born with a mother who is great at cooking, and in the process learns to be a good cook. Or Korn going to the beach for the first time with In being one of his happiest memories, and so Dean grows to love the beach, and therefore swimming. But the main thing that this drama shows as its conflict through the series is both Dean and Pharm trying to stay themselves. To have their actions be their own. and also, when the whole reason they are reincarnations of these two men specifically is to reconnect them and fulfill a promise made long ago, there's also the conflict of how much of their love is genuinely theirs. That's probably the worst anxiety in the world! You finally find a person who can truly relate and understand what you're going through and you feel an intense unexplainable love for them, only for you to fear that the relationship you built together isn't based off of love that is yours. It makes you fear that you are hurting the other person because why would you stay with someone if you're not sure if you love them? This is something they both have to face in the final episode. They separate for a little bit to give themselves time to reflect on their own feelings and only after they know that the souls of In and Korn are content, do they know that the love they have is real and it's theirs.

So...Still think reincarnation is cute and fun?! There's a reason people work to finally escape Samsara! Thank you for coming to my rant lol!

#uwmaseries #until we meet again #deanpharm #thai bl #thai drama #reincarnation #trauma

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