dont get me wrong

jinhyeong is a victim of both his father and his best friend and didn’t deserve to suffer from either…
just like songrik didn’t deserve any of the cards he was dealt either. bigger picture his dad beats him his mom abandoned him and the one person he trusted chose classism and elitism over him when he just wanted to be seen. obviously we are all more sympathetic to jinhyeong as the protagonist and we’ve seen how he’s grown since then and we have insight to his deeper feelings and regrets but songrik was vulnerable and in pain and im not surprised he snapped in the way he did. not saying it’s okay to bully your best friend of course in an ideal world he would have just walked away from the situation. but in his most intimate precious relationships he’s just expected to walk away and be forgotten so of course he wanted to inflict the most pain here, almost like he refuses to be forgotten again — even if he can’t stop the abandonment. my heart hurts for him more because at the end of the day we know jinhyeong is healing and has privilege and safety net, but what does songrik have? people have waged the class war for centuries and the people at the bottom never win. it’s the harshest reality to face and he has to face it in his own best friend. he’s working as a child because he has no trusted adults in his life and he’s scorned and mocked by others for the insane circumstances he has to live through. for whatever pain jinhyeong has experienced, it is not the same as songrik’s because his fate was not decided from birth. rich kids can choose to ditch their family and travel for a year or pursue art or find a pathway to achieve their dreams even if it’s difficult. poor kids can’t just choose to be rich. of course mental and physical abuse are both violence but the plight of a rich kid whose dad criticizes and controls him is not the same as the life of a poor kid whose mom disappeared, has grown up being physically beat and watching his mother be beat, has no prospects in school, is forced to work at night and consistently doesn’t get proper rest, eats low nutrition food every day because he can’t afford anything else, and has no hope of upward mobility. he wasn’t even asking for jinhyeong to help him, which would have been a drop in the bucket for jinhyeong — he just wanted to be seen.

so yeah the bullying is bad. but there’s more to it.