#please let the mafia shoot tong

[heretherebedork]

Joe was convinced Ming would never change but this? Ming trading his privacy in the hope that Joe would see him and come back? This is the first moment that Joe truly believes that Ming is changing. That this can be real. That Ming means everything he says.

Because Ming changed in so many ways but this was a way that showed Joe exactly how much he meant.

I love angry Ming. This boy was gonna commit a murder in a crowded theater in front of fans and cameras. No hesitation. Nothing. The only thing holding him back was Joe himself. Tong would have been punched right in the nose, right there, if not for him.

And, again, it's about how Ming has grown. It's about how he changed from losing Joe and from getting him back. It's how Ming isn't the same selfish person he was then, he's still damaged and hurt but he's not the same.

Ming has changed. And Joe knows. Joe, who has loved Ming all along but never let himself because he knew the risks, sees how Ming has remade himself in his love and his loss. And Ming still aches and Ming still doesn't know how regulate a single emotion but he does it all for Joe. He does it all with more self-awareness and with love and with this knowledge of who people really are.

And Tong is the real monster here. As we all know. Right off the cliff.

(But Joe is tired and he doesn't want to fight and Ming is scared, so scared, so hurt, aching and screaming inside and the family that supposedly loves him is what's going to destroy the one person that Ming actually loves. And, for the first time, Ming doesn't go after Joe. Because he showed Joe all his love and all the ways he changed and, in the end, he was still destroyed by the family that forces him to hurt himself and in the end he will choose that destruction for himself)

Ming chooses this. He lets Joe walk away so he won't be hurt by what happens but he still tells his father, he still stands in front of his mother and Tong and says I am not yours. I am Joe's and I am my own.

This is Ming's final growth. To stand up to the people who are using him and say no more, to say that he will choose the pain and the loss and the isolation over this loneliness, over being used, over the fear that has always been held over his head. To step out on his own for the sake of love, to say all of this without Joe there but rather because Joe isn't there.