#the kim taeho meta no one needed

[luna-rainbow]

I feel like I’ve seen somewhere that parents often vicariously live through their child. Even in the most well-meaning, they try to fill in the gaps in their own childhood and protect their child from the things that had hurt them.

So I keep thinking that perhaps Kim Taeho is, in some way, trying to right the injustice done to him through looking after Suni. He was brought into the organisation as a young orphan and trained as a child soldier (SJK is really mean to him and says he has no good points and is full of flaws, but he’s one of the first geniuses to be “carried” - ie very young - into UTS and broke flight records at age 17). His relationship with Sullivan is strained at best and likely cold and distant. Sullivan isn’t a father figure, barely a benefactor, and he was discarded as soon as he stopped being a useful executioner.

Taeho tries very hard to recreate for Suni a childhood he never experienced himself — a warm home, protection, unconditional love, guidance. I wonder how much of that is him trying to save himself. Not just the act of redeeming himself for all the wrongs he was (brainwashed into) doing, but for actually undoing the hurt that was done onto him for making him into a child soldier before he understood what it meant. And how demoralising and despairing it must have felt to have every little mistake lead to the worst possible outcome, as though his attempts of shaking off the past were never going to work.

Suni was his only attempt at living a normal life, and he spent 3 years wallowing in self-pity and trying to get closure for it. His final choice wasn’t just a sacrifice or a commitment to “being good”, but it’s him finally moving forward. He has peers he can call family, he’s no longer by himself, and he finally sees that - even if he lost Suni, who might have represented the wronged childhood he had - there is still an opportunity to live for himself.