#because she understood pleng... but simultaneously she didn't

[top-pleng]

thinking about Pleng and her song that she wrote for wan again 🥺🥺

[top-pleng]

I kind of don't want to compare Wan to Ek cause Wan's love for Pleng is actual love vs. Ek's "love" for Wan being just pure possessive obsession. He doesn't care for Wan in the same way that Wan does for Pleng, but I do feel like both of them have similar levels of obsessive love for their targets of affection and I think in a lot of ways the novel kind of has Ek serve as a foil to Wan.

More spoilery novel thoughts below the cut.

When Ek threatened Wan and Pleng with a gun, Wan was extremely nonchalant about the whole thing ... like disturbingly chill in how she stood against him and did not seem afraid of the gun at all. And that was because that Wan argued that she knew without a doubt that because Ek loved her, that he'd never hurt her like that.

Ek's "love" for Wan is monstrously evil and possessive—he married Wan despite knowing that she didn't love him and he raped her when she wouldn't have sex with him—but Wan seems to understand him and his feelings well enough to know that he wouldn't actually kill her. And that instead, he would try to kill himself to hurt her and her relationship in another way.

That's utterly deranged thinking, but it's thinking that Wan understood immediately, which was why she reacted quickly and was able to change the trajectory of the bullet when she intervened.

I really hate to say it, but Wan and Ek are actually extremely similar in a lot of ways. As fucking deranged it is to marry a man in the hopes of seeing your true love who you haven't seen in over ten years at the wedding ... it is also fucking deranged to marry a woman you supposedly love when you know her sole reason for marrying you is so that she can see the person she really loves. I wonder if part of the reason that Wan remained by Ek's side for so long wasn't only because Pleng had picked him, but because a part of her felt a little bit understood by him.

He does constantly dismiss Wan and Pleng's feelings towards each other and their relationship with one another, of course. He is still, after all, a homophobic violent misogynist who views the lesbian relationship between the two as "non-threatening" up until the end of the novel when he realizes that Wan was genuinely incapable of ever loving him.

But he was also probably the only person in Wan's life who could even begin to understand the pain that Wan was going through. In the special chapters, Wan mentions that he offered her comfort and hope about the idea of Pleng returning. He dismisses the relationship because they're both women, but simultaneously, he understands the depth and intensity of it.

And I think Wan was partly able to tolerate his feelings towards her for so long, because she felt understood by him in a sense and because she might have felt she understood him.

She loved Pleng enough to want to remain only a friend for the rest of their lives. She only became emboldened in her feelings and flirting when she realized that Pleng felt the same way towards her. I think maybe, initially, she thought that Ek's feelings towards her were the same. That he loved her enough to be satisfied with a friendship. That he loved her enough to want to care and protect her, but of course that wasn't the case.

Because the similarities between Ek and Wan are fairly surface level when it comes down to it, because while both are obsessive, possessive, and ultimately toxic, Ek cares more about having Wan than he does about Wan's safety and well-being.

Ek tried to kill himself in order to hurt Wan. Which directly contrasts against Pleng and Wan. In the novel, Pleng mentions contemplating suicide in the past but she doesn't act on it for fear that Wan would learn of it and it would hurt her, lead to her own death. And at the end of the novel when it seems like Wan is on the verge of killing herself—as implied in a note that she left for Pleng to spitefully hurt her (Wan's love is more "pure" than Ek's, but both still have malicious streaks)—but while she considers it, she ultimately decides to not kill herself because she wouldn't want to hurt Pleng like that.

Ek's love for Wan foils Wan's love for Pleng in this sense, because it demonstrates that while Wan is selfish, obsessive, possessive, and deranged that she is still a caring and loving partner and that ultimately her love for Pleng is fueled by a genuine love for all of Pleng whereas Ek only loved Wan as a possession to be owned and only loved the parts of her that were palpable to him.