#taking advantage of a young and powerless new hire is not a healthy relationship either

[bigyikes97]

"the powerful lawyer lifted the chin of the naive new hire 17 years his junior who he was keeping hostage in his bedroom with no phone until their eyes met"

**SPOILERS TO EP 4**

"'you look just like my dead brother', he implies sensually"

sorry guys they're gorgeous but I can't finish Devil Judge

I mean if you're going to create a tense relationship built on flagrant power abuse (seniority gap, age gap, power gap) and ALSO a weird?? incest-y?? vibe??? I think you've GOT to have some insight into what's going on in your male lead's head to unpack how those themes are being applied.

But I just don't understand Ga On. I have NO idea what's going on behind this boy's beautiful blank eyes. He goes from suspecting Yo Han and antagonizing him every chance he gets with seemingly no reason, to being unfazed when he wakes up in Yo Han's bed as a phoneless hostage (ostensibly to heal from the same explosion that left Yo Han with only a tiny aesthetic scratch). Ga On ditches his job, wanders his boss's house for three days as he "heals" and then cooks him a homemade dinner with a cute note. It's like a whole different story from the "dystopian hunger games-esque trial by mob rule game show shows dark side of internet-linked democracy as increasingly horrific punishments are approved by majority vote that ignores a weakening legal system due to group think spearheaded by fashionable charisma" that I came here for.

If there was maybe gaslighting directed towards Ga On or some kind of effort made to tie this whole arc into that story I would understand it better. I had any inkling into Ga On's thoughts on this, I would know how to categorize what's going on--is it tying in via a cautionary tale about grooming, manipulation and abuse of power? Is it supposed to be as romantic as a lot of people are saying? Is it supporting or condemning Yo Han's actions in doing this, showing how he manipulates the domestic sphere as well as the entire country? As it is, poor Ga On feels like a set piece to me. He wanders around, he stumbles across some important things, he abruptly warms up to his boss and settles into his house as a permanent guest. I think all the pieces are there to build a really compelling, claustrophobic, gothic-style creepy story a la Crimson Peak, but I can't get a read on Ga On, so it just feels uncomfortable and incoherent to me.

A senior using age and power to coerce a naive new hire into this kind of strange relationship is unsexy and problematic. It's a real dynamic and a dangerous one, which is why I'm not opposed to it being portrayed; but why I AM uncomfortable at the lack of context it's given.

In my opinion, portraying this kind of heavy yet realistic dynamic is only possible if you have more insight into what's going on in Ga On's mind as the person being slowly wrapped in the web. Yet, he doesn't offer anything that makes me believe he's thinking anything about it at all. I was rooting for him more in the beginning, but Ga On seems to me like his writer simply forgot to put any thoughts behind his sweet lil face.

ALSO?? the whole thing with Yo Han being ambiguously obsessed with Ga On because he resembles his brother makes it that much stranger (???) Again, Crimson Peak, anyone? If they went full gothic, it could totally work, just like Crimson Peak worked--AS A HORROR STORY where a naive young woman is tricked by a charming man (who has a thing for siblings, ick), trapped in his big gloomy house and then uses her wits to escape and even find sympathy for her captor due to his tragic past even as she firmly condemns his actions. But Ga On, bless his heart, isn't showing us anything that might let me connect with him as a character and figure out the context of the story. It's so frustrating, I really wanted to like this one and it has so much going for it! All the characters, arcs and sets by themselves are marvelous, so it's doubly frustrating when, to me, they just don't seem to mesh.