#hyj let me study you [hand emojis]

[wovenstarlight]

rambling thoughts about hyj (canon vs ywbk)

yoojin is so so fascinating as a character to me... i think about him 24/7 he occupies every available inch of brainspace i have. like this man and his issues am i fucking right. so i’m going to talk a bit about how i see him working and how i chose to portray him in my time travel series

so canon hyj, right. he’s like. he’s such a funky narrator. he’s like if i occupy my mind with endless work i will avoid falling into the pit of depression and immense grief from all that i went through pre regression. but also what i went through pre regression wasn’t even that bad. but also everyone who hurt me back then is assholes. but anyway ignore all that because i have work to do.

and on top of that the way he interacts with people is very... i won’t say it’s utilitarian but he’s very focused on what he can do for people and what they can do for him. in a currently-unpublished but translated chapter, he says that (SPOILERS!) he’s asked his thoughts on shj, and he answers that sung hyunjae is a useful man, and yoojin has to be polite to him on the off chance he needs to rely on him in the future. a very “he’s useful” kind of answer. this despite the obvious chemistry he and shj have-- not even in a romance way (though i do like jinjae), they just? get along? they banter easily and they have similar senses of humour and even though sometimes hyj gets exasperated at his behaviour, he still chats with him in a friendly way all the same.

and yet he’s also like SHJ Is Useful And That’s It. I Don’t Like Him At All. and he saves him in his contacts as “skill” and generally acts like he’s completely uncaring. which, compared to how much love he has for hyh and then for byr, i understand- shj at the moment quite honestly does not rank up there at all compared to those two? but he does rank somewhere, i think, because then hyj gets annoyed and upset when shj doesn’t show up to help him, and past a “shit, i needed his specific skillset for this situation and now i’m not sure how to manage this”, he does react in a very... i’ve been let down by someone i had high hopes for, kind of way.

so basically he’s got this whole, i don’t care about people1, thing going on, but then he also very much does care. and hyj is a caring person! fuck, shj even says to hyh at one point that han yoojin-gun has a bad habit of letting people into his heart too easily. what that tells me is that hyj has like.... SEVERE trust issues. he won’t allow himself to care about people, to be aware of any feelings he holds towards people- he makes himself only think about the skills people offer him, about how he can use them. and even then, whenever possible, he does things himself and he avoids relying on others, sometimes because he “doesnt want to bother them [with adult matters]” (that one talk with yoohyun) and sometimes because he just doesn’t really trust them with whatever needs doing

1. as an aside i do think hyj’s moral sense is very funny because like. if anyone touches his fucking kids they’re as good as dead! he’ll kill them! he cares about no one but his kids and everyone else can die! [the world is in danger] ah, fuck, maybe he cares about people who aren’t his kids. he doesn’t want the world to die. but don’t BRING IT UP!!! JEEZ!!! HIS PRIDE!!!! but also if you get blacklisted for whatever reason then Die literally Die he will kill you himself. it’s a very funny, he’s a good person but oh, he’s also a little bit insane, actually. that sort of situation. i love him. go crazy go stupid, sweetie, you’re doing great.

WHICH IN CONTEXT MAKES A LOT OF SENSE, WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT PRE REGRESSION! like hyj was raised with the experience of his parents, the people in the world whose unconditional support he was meant to have, being tossed down the drain because he chose to take care of yoohyun. so he’s already like, yeah, i gotta rely on myself. he has that understanding that.... he’s gotta rely on himself first and foremost, rather than trusting people who are supposed to be taking care of him. not just caring for him, actually, caring for him and yoohyun, because then he basically has to dedicate his life to yoohyun growing up. he’s been acting as yoohyun’s primary guardian from age Baby. and age 17 to 22 was literally just him dropping everything he was doing for himself in favor of getting a job and making sure yoohyun stayed in school and was fine. yoojin himself dropped out of school so he must’ve lost his whole friend group and support system. and then post-dungeon shock, he gets thrown aside and pretty much discarded by yoohyun without so much as a goodbye from the kid, which-- wow! ouch! that shit must have hurted! talk about being fucking burned, jeez. and even after that, spending three years running after yoohyun, trying to “regain” his trust and love, yoojin would’ve seen his Unawakened self as ‘not good enough’ for s-rank yoohyun. and therein comes the “if it’s not useful it’s worthless” mindset. and then he Awakened as f-rank-- already a blow!-- and then on top of that he gets backstabbed by the dozens of people who were like “you’re an s-rank’s brother! go get Awakened, i’ll bet money on you Awakening to a good rank!” and then pulled out on him, leaving him with idk how much debt (this is all mentioned in early chapters somewhere, i’ll pull citations later). man, i’m not surprised he has trust issues.

so that’s already part of his difficulty trusting other people. but then it gets compounded when you think about it further because like, His Fucking Skills, Man. he has a whole skill focused around “if you make an emotional connection with someone and then they die, it’s useful to you.” holy fuck! no wonder he’s allergic to bringing people into battle alongside himself! no wonder he throws himself into dungeons solo just to get freebie skills that allow him to be some semblance of independently combat-ready! every time he makes a connection with people he’s wondering if one day he’ll get their dying memories! you ever wonder how many people he had on his list of “keyworded individuals” pre-reg? he’s stated that he used to be at the back of dungeon parties with a spear (the need for weapons with a longer reach because of his low defense, obviously) and so someone else always died before he did? how many teammates that he cared about has he watched die in front of himself, how many times has he gotten the dying memories of those teammates, how many times have the rest of his living teammates turned on him after finding out his ability and accused him of getting the dead person killed on purpose so that he could have their skills? like hyj brings it up when he’s first explaining last repayment, and hyj cares about people so easily that he’d never do it and yet he still thought of it. which means other people would undoubtedly think of it very easily. and they wouldn’t be as forgiving when there’s a body count right there.

just, last repayment basically took hyj’s (largely yoohyun-induced) fear of losing the people he cared about and slammed his head directly into a concrete wall. thanks for that, king. so now hyj forces himself to constantly asses people on a “what skills do they have? how useful are they to me?” basis if they try to get close to him, rather than allowing him to just go “friend :-) i care them“. and it makes him reluctant to get close to and rely on people, because again, Danger Lies Therein

and all of this also must have made him be used to... being unloved, i guess (from his perspective- yoohyun cared, even when he left, but yoojin didn’t know that until yoohyun died). because most if not all of the people who have cared about or pretended to care about him have later left him. he’s got abandonment issues up the wazoo. when people say they care about him (stw, shj) he reacts with distrust. when he reveals the slightest imperfection he’s convinced they‘ll leave him, regardless of how much kindness he’s shown them in the meantime-- remember when he told myeongwoo he’d lied about them being childhood friends? complete confusion that myeongwoo didn’t immediately renounce their friendship. (SPOILERS FOR UNPUBLISHED CHAPTERS!) and later, it happens again with yerim- he tells her that he wasn’t actually a friend of her parents, he just wanted to poach her for haeyeon-- and then wonders why she doesn’t react with betrayal, when what she says is “i’m glad! ahjussi was so kind to me, i was worried i’d bewitched him somehow. i’m glad he actually cares about me. it makes me happy you were so kind”. he expects to lose the people he cares about, if not by outside causes, then of their own volition.

though on the outside causes front, i suppose it does help that like, all the people he’s growing close to now are hypercompetent high-rankers and therefore less likely to get themselves hurt. versus last timeline’s f-rank and e-rank friends, who’d probably routinely get killed, rip. but then there lies the possibility of yoojin thinking “if i pull them into danger then they’re in that much more danger” (see: Literally The Whole Reason Pre-reg Yoohyun Died. he went to help hyj and got in over his head trying to defend hyj and keep hyung alive, when he should’ve been able to defend himself with ease. hyj and diarma both acknowledge this.) which, again, plays into the reason he tries to avoid relying on other people.

tl;dr hyj’s interpersonal relationships are fucked!

but anyways moving on to talk about my fic versions of canon yoojin (hyj): han hyunjae (hhj) and han yoojin jr. (hyj jr). and how i’ve given them both problems disorders based on hyj’s issues

so like right off the bat we have hhj’s major issue, repeatedly brought up in-fic-- his issue with relying on people. let me pull a quote about this from the author notes of ywbk chapter 11:

some of you might be wondering why the yoojins are so [pretends to be okay and centers self on taking care of others], particularly [hhj]. my thinking for that part was mostly... in canon we see yoojin surrounded by people he knows are competent and capable, almost all of them adults. even when he's "raising" them, he has some degree of confidence in their ability to watch out for themselves. plus he's had time to grow out of being the only one in charge of the family; he's seen his brother come into his own and he's pulled back from his caretaking role

but here, [hhj]'s been directly thrust into raising two kids (and yeah even if [hyj jr]'s 18 he's still very much a child). not only that, but his knowledge of the future makes him (in his eyes) more knowledgable than just about all the folks around him, even the adults. mostly, he doesn't want to drop all his baggage on them when he knows they won't be able to relate (and in some cases, he doesn't want them to live with that knowledge). so he kind of distanced himself from everyone and pushed himself further into the caretaking thing as a way of coping, without realizing that's what he was doing.

we have hhj who, as hyj’s au twin, has the same trust issues and forced utilitarian attitude rising from pre-reg experiences. and then we dropped him into a situation where that “prioritize work and handle all issues myself” attitude is-- i don’t want to say rewarded, exactly, but it’s definitely useful for him in the timeline he’s in. he’s the oldest han brother, so handling issues naturally falls to him anyway as the head of the family; with both boys in school, he’s the breadwinner of the family, so prioritizing work is good! he becomes a super-efficient worker and it satisfies the needs of everyone around him!

unfortunately yoojin is a caring person, so hyj jr realizes that hhj is very much overreaching when he’s not even begun to address the effects of the Very Obvious In A Non-Dungeon World pre-reg trauma. so he’s like. hyung. what the FUCK, dude. take it easy and rely on people once in a while.

and physically, sure, hhj can rely on them. he can get yoohyun to do chores, he can get junior to take on a part time job so funds aren’t a constant worry. he gets better at trusting them to manage regular life stuff, honestly! he’s pretty good about that sort of thing now!

but then it comes to emotional needs, and like, hyj jr is a kid? and hyh is a kid? so any trust hhj builds there is going to be a little one-sided, since he can’t dump all his emotional worries on children. whatever yoojin is, he is a good caretaker who addresses his kids’ needs, and the kids do not need to be hhj’s therapists.

and hhj doesn’t really have friends his own age, and even when he does (hello jiyeon and hamin and orv gang), none of them can quite- Get it, because there’s not really an easy way to explain “i have deep-seated trauma about my family leaving me and about the people around me dying brutally” without, uh, (a) a LOT of trusting them to take you seriously and not snitch (b) explaining some Context about his youth and also the dungeons. (like yeah he could say “i’m scared everyone i care about will die on me in horrifying ways, particularly if they try to get close to me”, but that’s an irrational fear (because why would everyone die horrifyingly, why would getting close to hhj be a death sentence)-- unless you know that “everyone i care about” consists of Hunters and getting close to hhj involves getting involved with dungeons, and then his fear is very real and very understandable, even without knowing about pre-reg. there’s a reason why, even though hhj had four years to grow close to jiyeon, it still took the dungeon shock occurring for him to finally tell her even the smallest bit about pre-regression.

(from jiyeon’s perspective, she doesn’t notice much amiss, because the things hhj is keeping from her are mostly pre-reg related. he doesn’t mind talking to her about his current life, though he is reluctant to talk about some personal issues with her. hamin is a little more distant, because he is still hhj’s boss, so hhj tries to stay mostly cordial with him. orv gang is a more casual relationship- not really the type where he can dump his personal issues on them; and anyway, they’re a tight-knit friend group themselves, so hhj feels a little more on the fringes, not excluded but not fully included, either. a little like hsy does, but without the whole “i have to play the bad guy of the team” mindset.)

and this distance he creates without anyone realizing, this inability of his to fully trust them with all the details of his life, is what results in the freakout around the dungeon shock. the whole, You Are Actively Dying, if you don’t explain yourself right now i’ll finish the job. (though i don’t blame him for not trusting them with his trauma! i don’t really think he’s ready to talk about it. especially with people who don’t yet have any context for even the start of the story. hopefully this’ll change post-dungeon shock, though.)

unfortunately even with his newfound ability to talk about things more freely, he’s still in a sticky situation-- over the years, he’s developed his ability to rely on people for non-life-and-death situations like “earn money on the side”. but sending his brother to take out the trash is very very different from sending his brother to fight dungeons and other Hunters without backup. is very different from needing to risk a life and choosing his brother’s. so despite his hard-won Relying On Others abilities, they don’t extend to dungeon world situations.

and what does this mean, practically? it means, like canon hyj, hhj is going to persistently overreach himself in trying to fight alone-- he’ll try to be competent, to take on adversaries, to build strength in every possible avenue so that he can keep yoohyun and hyj jr and the rest of his family out of danger. he’ll try to be a one-man army, just to defend the people he cares about.

(ONE DAY. one day he will learn that it may not be safe to care, he may still be hurt, but that doesn’t mean he should cut himself off in advance. he’s still allowed to care. he’s still allowed to be cared about. oh, hhj. i want to beat him up but more than that i want to hug him.)

and then there’s hyj jr. oh, junior, you’re a delight. i love the concept of a yoojin who’s never had the trauma of being left behind by yoohyun, who’s gotten to flourish and become everything he has the potential to be, fighting at yoohyun’s side and being amazing. it’s too bad the method i chose to achieve this through also left our prodigal son with extreme issues.

(FAIR WARNING: THIS PART WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR LATER PARTS OF YWBK VIS A VIS SOME CHARACTER DECISIONS AND ACHIEVEMENTS. mostly since hyj’s time to shine hasn’t come through quite yet, so we don’t have as much of him)

so our boy junior may not have the various traumas induced by pre-regression, but he does start off with the same parental neglect that makes him hesitant to rely on seniors. and when his parents die, it’s about a week or so before hhj shows up, which junior spends realizing that he’s really going to have to give up his life and completely dedicate himself to guardianship, huh? and then hhj appears, and rips that role out from under him-- not just the “head of the family” role, even the “primary guardian of yoohyun” role. because yoohyun trusts him instinctively, and looks to him with just as much respect as hyj jr. junior becomes desperate to regain that role he’s lived all his life, in whatever form he can, resulting in the chapter 11 blowup. and past me already covered this:

as for junior, he's suddenly gained a new brother out of nowhere who is demonstrably bad at taking care of himself; on top of that, the "head of house + reliable caretaker" role junior's played almost all his life has been stolen out from under his nose without his realizing, and he's not really been able to adjust to suddenly being made to depend on yoojin (and, to a degree, jiyeon). yeah it helps a bit that yoojin's his elder self but even so. so he's attempting to re-assert himself in the role he's familiar with, particularly now that he's due to [go to mandatory service and] not see any of these people for months

he’s trying to figure out where he fits in this new family setup, trying to figure out what he can do for his family. and he would’ve started out on a track similar to hhj, trying to be everything for his family, except then the dungeons start appearing.

and what does hhj reveal? that hyj jr is destined to be an f-rank. that most of the useful skills hhj has, the hard-won power that he has, it’s all earned from other places that hyj jr won’t be able to replicate, most likely. and hyh-- hyh is going to be the pride of the family, as always. s-rank, top of the nation, worldwide hero, peerless and amazing.

hyj jr starts feeling like he’s falling behind. he starts feeling a lot of pressure to keep up. as the dungeon shock hits, he decides he’s going to keep up, one way or another.

and then there’s the aftermath of the shock, and all hyj jr can do is- is sit in the hospital room and wait for hhj to be okay. there’s monsters on the streets, yoohyun is out there killing them and making a difference, and all hyj jr is doing is sitting around. all he can do is offer yoohyun emotional support when he gets back, all he can do is keep jiyeon sane when she calls for daily checkins, all he can do is wait for the nurses to check that hhj is still alive. all he can do is support the people around him without actually acting out himself.

all that determination he had during the shock doesn’t get killed by the realization that he can’t actually do much, with his strengths; by the realization that he can’t be a one-man army like hyung is, sometimes. he decides, instead, that he’s got his handful of things he can do, so obviously the only path left is to do them perfectly.

he throws himself into learning to fight; he throws himself into playing support whenever possible (though allowances are made for being bratty, sometimes, the remaining anxiety from the aftermath of the shock leading to him acting out); he throws himself into working for haeyeon, to the point of becoming the deputy guild leader. he throws himself into perfection so hard that he takes the slightest failure to meet his sky-high expectations hard. (”Why can’t i fight high-ranks without being afraid like hyung can,” says local E-rank without his hyung’s L-rank Fear Resistance) because he only needs to be good at these few things, he can’t do anything other than these few things, so why can’t he at least do this perfect, y’know? why can’t he keep up with his family? why is he never good enough?

(what if he gets left behind again for not being good the way they want him to be? he’d only wanted to take care of yoohyun, and look where that got them.)

so basically, hyj jr winds up with the same Need To Be Enough that hhj has-- but where hhj needs to be able to do Everything, hyj jr needs to be able to do Perfectly at his (self-assigned) Roles. where hhj wants to do whatever he decides needs doing, hyj jr has no illusions about his abilities; he knows he can only be the supportive brother, the hard-working guild leader, the caring friend, the perfect whatever. everything else is something he won’t dare to try for, because he Knows he’ll never be enough. and if he ever fails even slightly at the things he can do, it’s an instant game over, anyway.

congrats, junior, you’ve given yourself clinical anxiety!

but yeah, that’s. yoojins.