a thing that i genuinely fucking adore about kiseki and that i always have rotating rotisserie-style in my brain is how much trauma and abandonment informs the behaviors and beliefs of the core four. each of them was abandoned or hurt by a parental figure -- via death, via abuse, via addiction -- and the families and lives they built in the aftermath are informed by that specific pain. zong yi and chen yi are both very focused on their ambitions and staying the course and rushing into an accelerated adulthood while containing their emotions safely under wraps. but even then, zong yi is just focused on learning how to provide and be responsible because he has people who still unconditionally support and rely on him and he's thus able to be the most well-adjusted; chen yi doesn't know how to live a life without danger (to himself, to yiyun meng, to ai di) and has no real sense of safety or stability. he's always chasing that hero-worship model of adulthood because he doesn't know how to be his own style of leader and being the mirror image of chen dong yang is going to give him the closest approximation of a sense of safety. he relied on CDY growing up and he believes that mimicking his boss is going to soothe his own terror at living in a fundamentally unstable, out-of-control world.

ai di, of course, was born with emotional instability due to his mother's drug use, so he never had a chance. like chen yi, who was orphaned at an early age, he never had the sense of stability of even one loving caretaker, and CDY doesn't exactly give off the nurturing dad vibes. chen yi was forced into a caretaking role for a close-to-death feral little kid, and he had no one to model affection for him. he did the best he could, and he does succeed in being protection and safe haven for ai di, but he's never had a chance to process and navigate the emotional complexities of burgeoning adulthood and romance. (ai di is, in many ways, similar to macau from KP, i think -- starving for attention and affection that their broken older sibling figures can only give so much of. both vegas and chen yi try mightily to give them the chances they didn't get, but they were equally failed first.) so ai di has the advantage of having a slightly safer space to begin spreading out his messy emotions, but he doesn't know how to really express them in healthy ways (hence his self-destructive attention-seeking behavior).

ze rui is the outlier in many ways -- he doesn't fit in zong yi's world, but he doesn't fit in chen yi's and ai di's, either. as ai di points out to him, he still fears death. he's got his feet wet in the mafia world, but he doesn't have the commitment. he's not as trapped there. he can slide more seamlessly, if awkwardly, into the real world (such as at zong yi's school; he's clumsy and it's played for laughs, but he's old enough and poised enough to keep the ruse semi-on the rails, whereas ai di's prickly, itchy energy makes it a lot harder for him to easily ingratiate). he has somewhere to go home to, both literally in the sense of his apartment, and more figuratively, in the sense of his vile family unit that wants to use him as a pawn for the business. he's more or less kept on ice as a second-best option, told he can be trotted out when he's useful, but slapped down at any moment where he might dare to outshine his brother. of all the four, he's the one in the most gilded cage. zong yi is in a prison of poverty; chen yi and ai di are trapped in a cycle of violence and death. they contain themselves into their own self-created, pre-determined paths. zong yi has no choice but to go to med school and become a family provider. he knows he'll be a workhorse forever. chen yi and ai di have the blackly comic life of wondering if they'll even both be alive on their next birthdays, and they alternately chafe at that and welcome it. ze rui has a financially advantageous future, if he'll continue being a loyal pet of the same people who ruthlessly crushed the independence and ambition and self-esteem out of him from childhood on.

it's just such a crunchy show with so much to really dig into and pick apart at the marrow. i'm fascinated with how everyone starts at a similar point (parental failures) and spirals out in vastly different ways. sometimes they parallel each other, sometimes they intersect, and sometimes they diverge into wildly different paths. there are so many rich veins to mine (and that's not even touching a lot of the traumas inflicted in canon, for fuck's sake) and it's so refreshing to see a show about trauma and healing that doesn't manage to disrespectfully screw over its characters in the eleventh hour.