rewatching the first episode of bloodhounds and the instant connection between gunwoo and woojin has struck me all over again! I adore that gunwoo just genuinely loves boxing. This hobby-turned-passion may have started to protect his mother but it’s something he finds such solace and joy in. He truly embodies the heart-of-a-boxer mentality that he mentions on the rooftop.
You can see gunwoo be a little taken aback at the showmanship of woojin. I’d like to put a little bit of intrigue there too because it’s so different to his own serious, by-the-book style. And then after the match, when gunwoo is waiting outside the locker room and his puppy energy is just off the charts!!! he says that everyone else left :( but I think he secretly he was just waiting for woojin. And he is so eager and woojin is just staring at this kid like what the fuck? shouldn’t he be annoyed at this rookie who KO’d him? but nah how could he be when it’s so glaringly obvious that the kid loves boxing for boxing’s sake and he’s such a sweetheart.
so they get dinner!! at the barbecue buffet!! and it’s at this part that woojin’s interest is well and truly piqued. He wants to know more about gunwoo and his rapid-fire questions are his way of getting the information. the two of them bond and i gotta love sangyi’s and dohwan’s chemistry because you can literally see their friendship come together, that bond unbreakable.
And then the next morning! I could write an entire thesis about that first morning after the match! Gunwoo immediately calls his new friend woojin and woojin answers and even when he’s so tired and he doesn’t understand just why gunwoo would go to the gym, he still picks up the phone and his little amused-- and already so fond!!!!-- “gosh, you’re so clingy in the morning” is immediately nullified whenever he tells gunwoo to come over!
and i love that woojin rapidly and without missing a beat understands and reworks his potential first impression of gunwoo. you can literally see him decide that “idk how this kid has managed this long without me but now i’m here and i’m not letting anything hurt him.”
and just the moments later-- their married couple ass bickering the second time they go to the buffet with hyunju before they are once again a united front as they both bicker with her!
the montage after the devastation of Episode Six-- the way gunwoo so totally loses it all, his driving need to save his hyung, the way he carried woojin’s drunk ass to bed the night before (and if i hc that woojin wasn’t as drunk as it showed? that maybe there’s a conversation that happens in that moment?). his sheer relief. the way that in the wake of everything falling to pieces, they have each other and nothing will ever come between them-- the way they’re stronger than ever.
and don’t even get me started on their time in the granddaughter’s apartment?! it’s so obvious??? the way she tells them not to be creepy old men and they’re so confused but as soon as they realize what she’s alluding to, their faces wrinkle in disgust and they’re like “lmao wtf absolutely not u don’t have to worry about that” the way they’re talking one morning and??? they don’t realize she’s in the room???? and that’s because she was ON THE TOP BUNK AND THAT NECESSARILY MEANS THAT THEY SHARED THE BED ON THE GROUND FLOOR BECAUSE HOW ELSE WOULD THEY NOT KNOW SHE SLEPT THERE??????????????
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So I once made a funny shit post about the Young Wizard actually beaming to the Spiral at the tender age of 45 but it got me thinking of the opposite. What if the Wizard was incredibly young
Since in the game it isn't specified at what exact age we arrived in the Spiral I think it's just up to the player to come up with that part. I personally like to think The Wizard was around 7 or 8 when this happened but what if they were actually like four or five years old
Like shieeeet that's young enough where we wouldn't really remember our time on Earth very clearly right? Our family and maybe our friends but unless we had like ungodly memory powers, we wouldn't be able to remember all of the details of our original home. Like isn't it proven that human beings first gain self and special awareness at 3 or 4? Something like that
And this can open up for some sweet scenarios - little kid Wizard running up to Malorn with a scribbled drawing of him with a big smile on his face, or us and Ceren reading picture books together or clinging onto Nolan's robes as we attempt to stand on his feet as he walks like a penguin, but there's also this sad and messed up undertone that in this universe Ambrose took what was essentially a child just out of toddler stage and decided to keep them in the Spiral instead of returning them to their family
And like imagine how that would affect us. We would see it as normal at first because we grew up in the Spiral, we spent more years in the wizard world than in our home on Earth, but what if the Wizard gained awareness later on in life and actually realized what happened. Would they even care at that point because the Spiral was integrated in them at such a young age? Would they feel any yearning towards their original family, would they miss them at all? Would the Wizard be bitter about not getting to know them?
It's different when you're 7 - 10 and onwards because at that stage in your life you've more than gotten used to Earth life. You've gained awareness and it has been emotionally and mentally established that THIS (Earth) is your home. You know your parents and you know your friends and you know your environment. You will miss that when it's gone and feel it's absence because you're old enough to at least notice when you're taken away from it. But when you're still at that impressionable and oblivious stage of like 4 - 6 years old? The Spiral is all you know now. Your parents faces will be blurry, you may not even remember the details of what your home looked like. You may remember certain smells, colors or feelings you experienced when you were on Earth but that may be about it. And the saddest part about that is depending on what Ambrose and the other adults put our Wizard through, we may grow to completely forget even those essential memories. That Earth part of us would TOTALLY be gone and that would include even our parents (or other caretakers). I'm crying actually
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while only a minority share this view, i do find it somewhat tone deaf when people claim jay's ending is the best outcome for an abuse survivor -- either directly or indirectly implying everyone in the holt house was an abuser that jay, their sole little victim, had to get away from. for starters, none of his endings are happy ones. not even the fugitive path where he's holed up amongst nature, has a dog, and is bathed in solitude. maybe if you close your ears to what jay's saying during that scene you could see this as good for him, but his dialogue is stifled with an achingly loneliness, a sadness. this idea that he craved being alone in the wilderness is not one jay paints himself, it's only something that's said by tyler ; someone who clearly doesn't understand the younger on any level, much less grasps his desires. yes, jay wanted out, he likes nature, though no human can stew in their own space for years without this affecting them mentally. and that's not even taking into account that his entire life is over! he can't travel, he can't visit other countries or get lost in other areas of wood lands or plains, jay is infinitely stuck where he is. it's not a prison cell but it's a cage nonetheless, as the old saying goes : a golden cage is still a cage, after all. he tells zoe these beautiful sights have grown dull on him, laments about missing his family, vanessa, and is so chained by his want for connection he reaches out to a desert dream victim of all people. like, what about this muted cynicism, this barren home, seems happy? maybe he wanted this, some whimsical dream of this, before. now though? it's not what jay thought it'd be, and he lacks any power to change it. this is not some amazing ending for abuse survivors, it's still sad in a melancholy way, simply because jay is visibly unhappy with said circumstances.
but moving on to this, ah, ‘poor little victim in a lion's den’ narrative ... what? i think a lot of people fail to grasp how complex the holt household is in terms of toxicity and abuse. something that's very common nowadays due to how much people project rather than see what's in front of them. and don't get me wrong! projection is fine, you do you, we all consume and parse through media differently -- but this narrative is, by canon evidence, rather fictional. to be completely blunt, jay is not the only victim stuck in the holt house ?? the abusers have always been bear ( physical abuse, verbal degradation ) and sharon ( passive in the face of her kids' abuse, emotional manipulation ) ... and we are literally told point blank by the story itself and another character that these two favored jay immensely compared to their other children. now i'm obviously not saying that he has not faced trauma, he has! favoritism in a house like this does not shield you from the toxicity, sometimes that favor makes things worse, but he was protected to an extent, in ways tyler and dale were not. those two very clearly faced the brunt of bear's physical abuse ; for each other, for jay, and just overall caught their dad's ire more because they stood up to him. tyler takes a beating, a sight that's not at all new by his grim acceptance of this and the fact he states he's been doing this since young :
so, this is normal for tyler. getting beaten by his dad ( which isn't even mentioning the horror story bear can tell to ash, about how he literally threatened to cut tyler's ear or finger off ) and having his mom overall turn a blind eye to it, even going as far as to dismiss this fighting as childish behavior rather than what it is. and dale? we don't see much of him and bear in general, yet the second he steps up to defend tyler, with something as measly as a shove back, bear wastes zero time in hitting him so hard he's practically out of commission for the rest of the fight. he didn't even think about it, merely swung at dale as hard as possible on instinct alone before tyler hastily stepped up to defend him. what happens when jay tries stopping the fight, though?
both parties grab for him so they can toss him out of the way so he doesn't possibly get hurt. you can speculate bear was only doing this in order to finish his punishment on tyler, he'd deal with jay later whatever, although why not punch him like dale? why, out of all the moves on his belt, does he do the more merciful option? bear, who is nothing if not made of violence and has been molded to respect it? his fist that's raised in the air isn't for jay, since the next frame is jay shoved out of the way and him hitting tyler again ... hell, in dialogue where bear and jay are sitting on their porch, the youngest can even say bear beats on tyler and dale specifically. why not say “you beat on us”? like, the game is heavily implying that while jay is traumatized, there are some methods of abuse he simply did not face. one of them being the physical abuse prominent at home. and no, i'm not counting whatever pranks dale's pulled on jay ( like shooting him six times with a bb gun lmao ) because honestly? that's just older brother behavior, and we know that despite the morbid pranks, he still looked out for jay in the ways that counted. like protecting him from pa and to an extent tyler, something which, again, jay says himself!
back on topic a bit, the notion people seem to have of jay and his family seems overly simplified to me. people just looked at dale being his usual asshole self and went ‘abuser’, people looked at tyler's rather drastic and not usually like himself reactions to a high stress situation and went ‘abuser’, and that's a bit ridiculous to me. can't say i'm shocked! since so many people nowadays just see someone mean to their favorite character and decide woobifying said fave while demonizing their opposing force is exactly what canon intended. as dusk falls couldn't be a game more clear about it's main theme of family and the fact there's no purely good or bad people in this world, two statements that correspond directly to the holt family. are they bad for each other? probably! but that's a different discussion compared to, say, every single soul in that house violently abused poor jay and they should reap the consequences of that. dale and tyler, like their beloved younger brother, are also victims of abusive parents and a toxic home life. in turn, they both show signs of this abuse in ways that aren't entirely sympathetic or easy to swallow, especially when they've been dealing with it longer than jay and have never had their parents' favor the way he did. i see people get angry at tyler for the famous cabin scene, but nobody turns a critical eye to sharon ; who for all intents and purposes is watching this unfold without a care. she never physically stops tyler and her attempts to kill the fight are weak compared to her previously steely commands. and, honestly, the fact that tyler was that stressed about sharon getting on that bike so she can be protected, when she's the most capable out of the three of them, is way more strange than tyler's outburst -- when he's in a high stress situation, his baby brother's dead, and his life as he knows it is over. a life he didn't even have to begin with, since it was stolen due to his abusive upbringing.
whether this excuses what he did or not is entirely up to the player! i personally don't think it does, though i also understand where this is coming from and the game makes it clear this is not usual tyler behavior. throughout other people's views it's hammered into us that tyler has a cool head relatively, is the most sensible and smart out of his brothers. so, no, i do not think he was choking jay out all the time for his misplaced resentment -- i think his obvious disliking came from his stilted interactions with jay, and his lack of bond with him at all. we see in book one two times he reaches out to jay, demanding that he eats ( a minor, small thing to fret and worry about ) as well as panicking when he sees jay away from the rest of them during a shoot out. dale constantly looks out for jay as well, going as far as to take the heat from romero if they get caught and something as small as taking blame for jay's mistake in the barn scene. are his brothers more prone to violence and apathy? sure! yet they clearly love jay regardless. abusive households are not easy and see through. in fact in many cases the different levels of abuse the kids suffer does breed life altering resentment later on, envy that can damage these bonds permanently. honestly the holt family intrigues me deeply because of how well written they were as a unit, the effects of abuse and toxicity subtle and not overt in a ‘psa message’ kinda way. and these horrible relationships and ideals shared do not negate from the even more horrible fact that there is love in this messed up family, even bear clearly loves his sons, but that doesn't make it better. it almost makes it worse, seeing all the good intentions and care. knowing it doesn't excuse what they've done to each other nor does it make them better. they're a picture perfect family of an ugly wound! which is fascinating! i only wish more people saw that wonderfully shown depth rather than this bland and lukewarm take on the holts overall.
jay is a victim, he is traumatized, he deserved to one day spread his wings and put some distance between himself and his family ... but he was not the only one who deserved that ending, and he was not the only victim there. he was merely the only one with easy to parse trauma responses.
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