seungho blackmails nakyum into painting erotic pictures. but nakyum is in love with his teacher and mistook seungho as the teacher the night he lost his virginity. seungho fell in love
a topic by danae: ow could Seungho not fall in love with Nakyum?
It is not only that Nakyum is the cutest thing he ever lay his eyes on but also because Nakyum totally disarms him from his cynic view of people.
Look at the people and society that Seungho is used to and how his main way to deal with people is to assume no one is to be trusted and deserves contempt.
- He mocks the high society he lives in and enjoys to provoke them with his libertine behavior; This is clear in the scene where he tells Jihwa that, since the lords are all already expecting the worst of him, he better not disappoint.
- He clearly doesn't trust his circle of fuck buddies and he doesn't let them get personal (turns out he isn't wrong. Jihwa had a spy on his house. The other one started a plot with an assassin).
- He obviously has a hatred for his father and it becomes more clear that it has to do with his taste for men.
- Inhun never had a chance to fool Seungho. From the very first meeting Seungho could read Inhun as just another fraud, someone who pay lip service to nobles and driven by selfish ambition. As his feelings for NK grew, it must have been frustrating to watch NK idolizing Inhun as someone who deserved deference.
Seungho survives in his society by outsmarting and being defensive and on guard against betrayal and falsehood all around him. His first assumption when NK reached out on his own to be intimate was that he was doing it under Inhun's orders.
Nakyum, with his pure heart and honesty is something Seungho isn't prepared for. He gets disarmed by Nakyum's lack of malice. Neither is the fact that someone so clearly in disadvantage keeps challenging him. One of the first scenes when we see Seungho is getting intrigued by Nakyum is when he thinks how Nakyum had the courage to stand up to him even though he looked so afraid. (The chapter where Nakyum defended Inhun's against Seungho's mockery of his poem as plagiarism).
Last, just like Seungho only knows one kind of people his whole life --- the kind that cannot be trusted --- Seungho only know one way to treat people, a range between sarcasm and violence but we see Seungho flustered that his method doesn't work with Nakyum. He clearly wants to please Nakyum and get from him the affection he gives to Inhun but all he has done by force and intimidation only had the opposite effect.
Nakyum is the first person who makes Seungho feel bad for something he did. Seungho killed one person, knifed other, he humiliated Jihwa and the other guy before him, and we don't see him flinch or getting one second bothered by any of it. However, every time he caused harm to Nakyum, we saw him flustered and on edge. Nakyum forces Seungho to feel remorse, guilt when before there was nothing.
To me, this is a tale of two virgins and get their virginity lost to one another. Nakyum was literally virgin of lust and sex but Seungho is virgin of humanity and the feeling of caring for someone and Nakyum is his first.
So, the path for Nakyum to fall in love with Seungho may be more complicated but Seungho, for all the might power he has, never stood a chance the minute Nakyum walked into his life.
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Painter of the Night(Yahwacheop)