No Villains: Character Analyses (01 October 21)

Park and the professor are different in some ways, making her relationship with both a little different. Firstly, the professor is older, which in many ways gives him a bigger advantage on Na Bi that Park didn’t have. He may have dated a lot, but if he has never been in a committed relationship, his age makes me think that yes, he may not have been in love with Na Bi but he sincerely felt a bond with her and lacked the experience to fully control it and so his actions to keep her may have been calculated from years of experience of chasing girls, but for the first time his feelings towards a girl weren’t calculated and this is where his age exposed him and evened things out in a way they couldn't be even with the old professor. Him and Na Bi are still at the phase in their lives where feelings of attachments are taken too seriously, where the feeling leads them instead of their heads, not putting enough thought and consideration into what these feelings mean and whether one should pursue said feelings. They are where young people jump head first into what they feel is love, even if one doesn’t know what to do nor takes the time to find out what to do with said feelings of love.

Secondly the professor tore down her self-confidence and self-respect, defiling even her passion in art, he took two very personal things to her and made them into a public spectacle and I think that is why she struggled to love her field of study after and felt no self-worth enough to walk away from the train wreck that is Park, while Park built that confidence back up, by publicly and privately supporting her in her work, he was the first to choose to work with her, technically her friend was first, but he couldn’t do it publicly like Park did, if Park had not stepped up  I doubt even the other assistant would have and as much as her friend would have helped her, she still would have been left humiliated, he did it again when he begged her to let him help her fix her work when it came crashing down, giving her something else to look forward to instead of her ruined work. During that time, he gave her another picture of herself, a picture that supersedes what the professor wrote in that sculptor, gave her a picture of her heart and beauty lying within her art as she pours her heart and soul in it, restoring her love of art while letting her know that yes, she is worth more than the sculptor said she was worth. Which was cemented by the fact that he witnessed that moment in the gallery, he not only knew her open secret, but was witness to it and in that same moment he fell in love with her, the moment her false world came crashing down… Yes, it’s twisted or beautiful depending on how you interpret it. If you see it as twisted then remember Park himself knows rejection, rejection from his mother, Park himself is a public wonder, a human sculptor, an anomaly that women admire and want a piece of and men idolise, but at the end of the day they end up hating when he fails to open up to him, maybe he saw something familiar within Na Bi, something he couldn’t quite grasp, a sadness in the face of one who stood out in the crowd of dark clothes, a light that was not easy to ignore, a beautiful girl that stood filled with tangible sorrow in her face, but no one stopped to notice but him, a sadness that not even her boyfriend grasped as all he saw was what he wanted to see, that I believe gave him an instant connection to Na Bi, which was solidified by the fact that her name is the same as the creature he has tattooed on his neck, the creatures he has been chasing after for so long, he had found his own living Na bi that was a reflection of himself.

Thirdly, the professor had her changing herself while I don't remember him making any changes himself, Park did try to put in an effort by firstly changing his hairstyle simply because she liked it. Otherwise, both men had concerning red flags.

Yes, to most viewers Na Bi had no growth, but that's simply because the growth was done in a beautifully subtle manner that is truer to life and less true to the tv audience, for instance in the beginning of the drama she came in a hopeful young lady that believed in love and would probably have written sonnets about it if she could, instead she made sculptures that were about it. There was a bounce in her steps, not necessarily a physical one but one that radiated from within, a hope for the future, an innocence to how she saw life, all of that hope and bounce came crumbling around her when her love had exposed her to the world. She then became confused about who is really wrong when said love acted betrayed by her not understanding his actions. She slowly woke up to the thing that had been nagging at the back of her head even in the blooming of first love, that inner voice that warned her that something about her professor doesn’t add up, but ignored because she had not yet learned how to fully discern people. Instead of listening, she let the feelings of first love sweep her away.

When she found him with another girl and confirmed what had been nagging at her from the start. She realised he is just like the men she grew up watching her mother with... Probably the closest men to a father figure she ever had, and although she had sworn to never make the same mistakes her mother made, she fell right into that trap, that cycle, taking her back to her childhood disappointments she instantly shuts down, probably the only way she could deal with the idea of her mother dating these men and stop herself from being fond of or close to them. The feeling of first love tainted, the ex-lover unmasked she cuts him off, but as soon as the he’s gone, the weight of losing something that gave her the glow we first saw during her entrance to the gallery finally settles in and the beginnings of heart ache starting, another comes into the scene, one whose presence is significantly harder to ignore as he waltzes into the room, sits next to her and just like that a tentative light is lit within her. He has a butterfly tattoo on his neck and loves butterflies and coincidently her name means butterfly.

For a moment she lets herself get lost in the feeling of falling again, the feeling she was grieving for just a moment ago, but as the night progresses, she notices the red flags and they keep piling up to the point that she cannot ignore them, the same red flags that had brought her where she is and instead of ignoring them and going with the flow again, she flees from the scene, knowing very well that the type of butterflies he gives her will end with a very bad stomach ache. This to me for Na Bi was her first sign towards growth, a more acute awareness she didn’t have in her previous relationship, even when she gives in, she is not totally swept away with her feelings, this time she knows what she is getting into. But nevertheless, like most addictions butterfly man is not easily forgotten as she failed to wash off the butterfly he had drawn on her arm. And could not help but stalk the ghost she keeps running into on campus, the ghost that looks a lot like him.

And the second step to her growth is in how much she kept on telling him how ridiculous he was, letting him know that she knows he's just being a flirt. Unawareness or ignorance is something that makes it difficult to deal with an issue that is not fully brought into a full level of consciousness, while it is still hidden it becomes difficult to deal with as the person is unaware that there is a problem, all she had was a gut feeling with her professor, a feeling she could not fully place, with Park she had a more tangible reason to believe he was no good for her, she knew what signs to look for, the touches, the smooth tongue, the flirting with everyone, her eyes were open to the way players operate.

I was also impressed by how far she went to make sure he has no chance to seduce her into seeing things his way when she attached herself to the seemingly safer option and even deleted his number from her phone. Yes, she kissed him after seeing him kiss another girl but I was impressed by how much effort she put into cutting him off not long after, precisely after she saw him talking to a girl with an amount of intimacy she had never seen him show with another girl, even after the guy dumped her for his high school love, she didn't immediately run to Park, but with her guard lowered, her ego bruised and him not letting her sleep that night she finally let him in, knowing he wouldn't give her what she wanted, which is a relationship. The next day embarrassed by the thought of being in their non committed relationship she protects herself by asking him to keep it secret.

The drama may not appeal to a lot of people as it's not a typical one, where people get an epiphany about life after one bad decision and learns to make a better decision, it is about delving into the head of an individual who after a very bad publicly humiliating experience finds some kind of comfort in something that she knows will end badly, she has not learned yet that the butterflies and the chemistry is not worth the pain, or maybe she has but lives in the moment, hoping that it could turn into something more one day.

Yes her friend was the better option, but I think if he had made a move before the professor he would have had a better chance, after the professor there was a sadness and loneliness behind her polite smile that was somehow reflected in Park and no matter how many nice things he did, they never hit her like the things Park did when he was encouraging her about her art, because her friend only saw the beautiful friend walking in the snow wearing a white outfit, he never got to witness the image of her seeing the sculpture that turned her into nothing more than a sexual object for everyone to see. An object put up for display. The image she had of herself whatever it may have been before the professor was wrecked after him. 

And Park the fantasy man, the most stable relationship he has is with the butterflies he keeps close enough to know he is not alone, yet he never really fully invites into his world. They live in a secluded closed section of his house one that has trees and is quite beautiful, a prison that ensures they will always be there when he wants to see them and after a while used to only his presence, they become attached to him, so much so that even when he tries to half-heartedly set them free, they have no desire to be free of him as much as he has no desire to set really them free. This is just like the women in his life: he never fully opens the doors of his heart so they can enter into his whole world, nor does he fully venture into their world, instead he creates a world, a safe space for them. He hardly reveals himself to them and instead hides his emotion behind a smile, charm and or sweet words, showing them only the side he knows they will love. He refuses to make a commitment to anyone. But really from the little I witnessed with his mother, that is what he learned about love from her, she herself was not only absent but struggled to let people in and in turn her son got comfortable hiding himself in the shadows.

The series had Park surrounded by so much mystery that the director intentionally or unintentionally gave me a better picture of what is going on inside a woman who stays with a player’s head. On the outside the red flags are all there, the kissing others while pursuing her, mysterious phone calls, girls feeling comfortable in openly flirt with him and the fact that people keep warning her that he is bad news. All these things would have been enough for me to write him off, but as viewers we had a glimpse of more, a glimpse implying that yes, he is a flirt and had one too many female friends, but that he might not have necessarily been cheating, not physically anyway, not after they got together.

That the guilt of keeping them around came from him knowing the women have feelings for him, feelings he himself doesn't have in return, but keeps the ladies around anyway. This creates a question of did he cheat? How many of the rumours are just people who wish they had what he has, the ability to charm almost any girl with little effort? The guys wanted in on the action but Park is not big on sharing, so they paint him as the villain because he refuses to share. He's not being a good sport and is not really close to most of the guys. The girl who left him after a couple of dates I cannot say much about, because she was right to dump him, but what stuck to me is how easily he let her go, how he didn't try to go after her or be her friend, nor did he follow his best friend to the airport when she broke up with him, the one he nonchalantly called his soulmate once. Even the lady whose brother attacked him, he easily let go of, but Na Bi he finds hard to let go of.

 Witnessing all of this, I asked myself why? I wondered if it was love at first sight, her name, witnessing her humiliation, which somehow brought her to the same wavelength as himself, was it the fact that it took some effort to get close to her and the fact that although she gave in to him eventually, she never fully let him in. She established boundaries of her own, boundaries that let him know he would have to make some kind of commitment if he wanted more, otherwise he can only go so far and no further while they were still in this undefined entanglement. She saw through him from the first day, he knew she wanted more yet never begged him for it, nor manipulated him into wanting more, instead she found little ways to not get anymore attached to him then he was to her, like trying to not celebrate her birthday with him. His friend also seemed to be a kindred spirit, but she could never quite reach him like Na Bi did. Na Bi like him closed herself off to him getting anymore closer to her, she had sections of closed doors. She was slippery and he struggled to keep her within his grasp. In the end he needed to open parts of himself that he may not know how to open because he has met a butterfly he wants to keep a little longer, but said butterfly refuses to be kept within the room he made for them, she keeps trying to escape, she wants him to open the doors to the rest of his house, before she will open the doors to the rest of her house too, a butterfly that is attached to him as much as he is to her, but at times goes cold and shuts even the door to their special room, a butterfly that finds it difficult to walk away but is not opposed to trying, yes all of the other butterflies eventually walked away too or he walked away from, but Na Bi he found harder to let go of. From the start Na Bi has not only sincerely liked him and wanted more, but has also played his games by being an equal opponent, she gave him what he gave her and always had one foot out of the door, just as he refused to let her enter his house (a relationship with her). She was a master in the game that his friend tried to play, but could never master as she failed to fully shake the mask that is Park's self-depreciating smiles and half-hearted declarations. She never fully confronted the mask, while Na Bi refused to let him in with the mask fully intact.

Truth is these young people were never perfect, and I don't blame her for not choosing her friend. He did what she did, got addicted to someone he knew was emotionally unavailable, hoping that his presence would change that. No matter how much they may or may not want to be emotionally available, all three of them were in an entanglement with what causes them pain or loneliness, because they cannot quite attain said thing. Park is forever chasing his elusive mother in these women or butterflies, he wants to put her in a room, a space that doesn't allow her to walk away from him, but he himself has spent so much time alone that true human intimacy escapes him. The child inside him longs for the presence of his mother, but since all he knows is the longing, not the relationship or the intimacy that comes with her being there, commitment is lost to him. He is addicted to longing, and never receiving.

Na Bi is used to seeing revolving doors of men that hurt her mother, she swore to never fall for it, but even so those men are the closest she may have experienced to a father, and since a father is a girls first love it's the first kind of love she experienced or witnessed when it comes to the opposite sex. She almost experienced something different with her friend, but failed to recognize it, as I think she was too busy hating her mother’s relationships to notice him. She was unavailable to what is more stable, to what is healthy and to what is open, by the time he confessed she was already in a relationship with her mother’s mistakes, mistakes that caused her pain a pain that is very familiar, a pain she may have seen in her mother’s life.

Her friend was in a relationship with being in love with his childhood best friend. Because of this he saw no other girl nor did he open himself up to other girls who could give him more than she could, he was tied to his friend, to the idea and probably childhood dream of spending his entire life with her, a girl he felt was his own, but in reality, already belonged to another. A bond stronger than their relationship, a bond linked to her mother and her lovers, a bond he could never break.

So, I think that before any of these three people can be free to love another, who may or may not be one of them, they need to deal with and break away from these underlying toxic bonds, to heal from the past. I know that Na Bi’s friends’ issues are not as big as the other two, but the problem here is that he wants something his friend is unavailable to give, just as Na Bi wants something that Park is unavailable to give and that gets himself into a world of hurt.

What Na Bi needed at the time was a friend and not another suitor, what he wanted was something reserved for another. Though she longed to be available to him, she couldn’t make space for him until she made available the space reserved for another. If Park had been a normal guy who had no qualities that were similar to her mother’s boyfriends, I am not so sure she would have fallen for him. The problem for Na bi is not Park himself, the problem for Park is not necessarily the thrill of the chase, the problem with them is the childhood broken relationships that left them chasing after ghosts and for whatever reason, Na Bi’s friends’ childhood elusive ghost is Na bi herself.

To me there is no villain, just young people who found comfort in and are addicted to the familiar childhood pain, that manifests itself in the form of the opposite sex, the pain is something familiar and somehow, they feel a deep connection to the thrill of chasing it, but can never quite figure out the next step because their childhood was full of missing steps that should have taught them what true love looks like… Not an excuse, it's just something very human and sometimes difficult to grasp. The roots are what need to be uprooted first in order for them to plant new seeds and give birth to new and healthier relationships. Park gave her a better image of herself after the professor fiasco, but the core issue was never just the professor. Healing the broken child, the broken parental bond, is what’s truly needed to truly break away from the addiction to pain.

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