#anyway jung yumi and ju jihoon are such fucking great actor their expressions and line delivery alone

[transpat]

realizing that the lilac betting convo was them having three different conversations at once.

yoon jiwon who's been unsettled the whole week bc of seok jiwon's reappearance was now just totally and utterly humiliated bc seok jiwon witnessed her rejection and breakdown (actually going to talk about that in a separate post). if it isn't entirely obv btw the reason she was crying is actually seok jiwon.

(her whole line is 'i'm crying because these days...')

and then,

'To laugh at me?' obv seok jiwon hasn't even thought of that and probably can't add 2 and 2 together. but to yoon jiwon who was an over achiever in high school, always better than seok jiwon the only person she cared about being better than, and is then dumped wordlessly and cruelly by him, her current living situation compared to his are. embarrassing. she normally doesn't care being not that well off financially but again, this is seok jiwon. everything matters when it comes to him.

anyway, her saying 'he's ruining everything her grandfather worked for' is the only valid excuse she has to shit on this man now. there's so many things she wants to complain about, to scream at him about, but he just abandoned her, left without a word, never picked up a single one of her hundred calls and admitting she's anxious bc he came back would only further add to her humiliation.

insisting the lilacs won't bloom again is like saying, 'anything u touch will be doomed'.

seok jiwon on the other hand, is talking about their romance.

unlike yoon jiwon who's had zero contact w this guy for years and thus believes it'd be both mortifying and insane to still harbor feelings for the dude, hence her vehement denial in the consecutive eps, seok jiwon's seen her at her most miserable and vulnerable. it's why he's never been able to move on no matter how painful this is for him, why he's never been able to love any one else even thou yoon jiwon no longer wants him. in fact, him refusing to come back was precisely bc he knew his presence would only upset her, esp involved in a project that is already destroying her grandfather.

it's only when he's told she possibly forgot about him, that he abandons all reason and runs back. and to his relief—initially—she has not forgotten about him at all. no, rather he's come back to hear her say all of this instead.

(he never said he hated her.)

the lilac is barren, the lilac hasn't bloomed in years, the lilac is probably dead—there are no feelings between us, it's been way too many years, after everything that happened there's no way we'd ever fall in love again. that's what he's hearing.

this is also the girl who dumped him over a tiny little fight and refused to ever see him again no matter how many times he tried to reach out to her. this is also the girl he's still in love w. and he just heard her admit to liking someone else and then spit at the idea of them being together.

his words: 'it's not withered or dead', he still has feelings for her and since she feels so strongly about him, he's dying to know if there truly isn't any love in her opinion; 'this is the 5th year not the 40th', even if it's been almost two decades, it wasn't enough for him to forget about her, after what she did to him, was it that easy for her to move on or did she ever think about him, did she ever regret.

insisting the lilacs will bloom, is him trying to convince himself she still loves or still can love him.

and so the bet conditions:

she wants him gone from her life so she can stop feeling so pathetic and embarrassed about herself and her situation and her somehow persisting feelings for him. she loved him for so, so many years, that even if she's in denial now and thinks she isn't in love with him, seok jiwon's long become a part of her self. and she's convinced the only way she can evict him from her heart, is to evict him from her town first.

he wants to know, once and for all, if yoon jiwon truly truly hates him and will never hold an ounce of emotion towards him again. he needs to see for himself if yoon jiwon doesn't regret their breakup at all, if she's never thought of him in all those 18 years, if she really doesn't love him for all. it's the only way he'll be able to move on.

tldr; the lilacs convo was yoon jiwon's metaphoric way of saying seok jiwon ruins everything (she talks about her grandfather but means her heart) and seok jiwon's way of saying a love as deep as there's was can't die no matter how many years have passed and will bloom again, and the rest of the room only now realizing how fucking insane these both are.

p.s. maeng sua spends a lot of time joking about how jiwon must be confusing her feelings of affection for him as hatred and how hate and love are two sides of the same coin and blah blah blah, but it's only now that she realizes her jokes were on point and she looks scandalized.

she's seen yoon jiwon screaming and kicking at the man but this is what made her jaw drop.

and this is where she realizes that yoon jiwon becoming animated and childish and talkative and lively over the past week was bc she'd finally met someone who matched her freak.

she's the only one excited about the bet lol. funnily, she also stops joking about seok jiwon being her type after this and once she snuffs out gong minsu's feelings for yoon jiwon, she turns her flirty jokes on him instead.