Bullying and Bullies

Warning, this post contains unannounced spoilers of the Webtoon Her Pet, read at your own risk.

So, I was making use of the free read promotion of Lezhin to read Her Pet, which is a pretty nice GL webtoon. At first you might think it's just a lewd fetish thingy, but that's totally the wrong impression. Like... The webtoon isn't even R-18 in the first place. It does touch a bit in the fetish side of things, but that's not really the focus of the story tbh, or at least not IMO.

In any case, the story revolves around Gayoon, who is a highschool girl that constantly suffered from bullying in middle school... And she very quickly finds her middle school bully (Yurim) as soon as high school starts and she braces herself for a few incoming years of hell... Well, she ends up getting saved by a girl (Soha) she liked back in middle school, some stuff and misunderstandings happen and she gets into a very weird pet/owner relationship with Soha... I won't bother going into the details because that's not the point of this blog, but suffice to say this is not really what Gayoon was aiming for and she isn't exactly happy with the relationship in its current state.

As the story progresses, you see that Yurim is laying low and not really bullying Gayoon again... Mainly because of Soha, and it's quite interesting because Yurim is actually a good boxer, so she could probably beat Soha up if she wanted to... Yet she doesn't feel like she can, it seems like there is something more to it, but the story doesn't dive too much into it at first... Until the end of season 1 happens and we go into a flashback arc for Yurim.

And it is quite interesting to see how it goes... At first I was expecting to see her being depicted as an evil antagonist and never getting any development whatsoever, yet we're getting multiple episodes actually developing her. Showing how she was doing well at boxing, how she lost to a newbie by chance, how some people started mocking her for it... And how some people tried getting into a fight with her because of it, and how she refused to fight back because she didn't want to raise a fuss over a minor issue and beat up some people when she knows how to fight and they don't.

It's really nice to look at how rational she is about the whole ordeal, she feels very human, she gets very pissed, but retains her cool and tries to avoid trouble. Even if it means she'll take a small beating from it. At the point I am now at the story (I can only read 1 chapter/day, so I can't really read ahead to see how this ordeal ends) she finally snapped and beat down one of the people that were... Bullying her, yes, bullying her.

For you see, after she refused to fight back, the people that were mocking her started bullying her... And she took the rational decision of plain and simply ignoring them, because she knew they would stop after a while if she paid it no heed, bullies look for the reaction of the victim after all, it's no fun otherwise... Only, not all bullies are like that, some times they keep escalating things to try and spark a reaction from you... And when one of them forced another girl to push her down some stairs... Well, Yurim got really damn pissed.

And that's the point I'm in now, I have no clue how things will go from there, but I do know that some months/years from this event, Yurim will be the one bullying Gayoon. And I think it's a really interesting way things will go... She knows how annoying bullying is, she experienced it first hand after all, yet she'll be the one delivering it at someone else, and apparently without any remorse whatsoever.

It might seem contradictory, but it's not... I mean, if I were to use personal experience as a reference, I went through a fair amount of bullying back in my school days... Only, I wasn't exactly a kid to take it quietly, I fought back and got into trouble, which made the bully also get into trouble, so they stopped bothering for a few months... And then it restarted.

I also got involved in bullying some people... Which were actually my friends. Yeah, I wasn't a smart girl... Rather, I didn't even realize what I was doing was bullying, I was just having fun, and never understood how much it bothered them until one of them confronted me about it, I was completely shocked when I realized what I was doing, and strived to change my behavior for the better, and I think I did an excellent job at that... But I wasn't able to salvage any of those relationships with middle school friends.

And that makes Yurim a very relatable character to me... I mean, the bullying I went through and the one I delivered was nothing even close to what she went through, and I definitely have know nothing about fighting, when I fought back I just did what any child would do while getting into a fight. Still, I understand what she goes through very well, and it's quite nice to see her reactions... How she makes rational decisions, how she avoids trouble because she knows it's not worth it... And how she snaps and beats the crap out of her bully even though the rational side of her knows that this is not the ideal course of action, and she knows it will have consequences... But she doesn't care, because she is pissed off and needs to take an action.

I did all of that myself... Well, not the beating the crap out of the bully part, but I did get into a fight with them that led to both of us earning a suspension... And this means letting parents aware you got into trouble in school, which leads to being grounded or getting hit at home... And well, the bully was as susceptible to that as I was, so we both layed low after the fight happened... And I was perfectly aware that the punishment I'd get at home was far worse than anything I went through at school, it was not a good idea to get into trouble... But I needed to do something, so I did it anyways. And I did it time and time again for years.

I don't think Yurim's problem will be like mine, hers will probably be more related to her school life, she might also be kicked from her boxing gym because she beat a girl at school... All kinds of stuff may happen, and she's probably aware of the problems of doing what she did... And I'm happy to see her do it anyways, it makes her so realistic to me, I'm really liking how she's being developed right now.

Rather, I'm cheering for her internally, even while I know that she will become the evil big bad bully that hurts the MC in the future, I still cheer for her right now and hope she solves her problems, because she became a really likeable character for me~

Well, where did I want to get with all that though? Mainly that... Bullies are people too. They have their reasons and their own sets of trouble. Yurim was initially depicted as a complete asshole that took pleasure in torturing Gayoon, and now we can see how much she went through back in her younger days... And well, what about the asshole that is bullying Yurim right now? She... Started the whole bullying process because Yurim lashed out at another girl due to the whole "lost to a newbie at boxing" thingy. In a sense this whole ordeal started because the bully wanted to enact revenge for the girl Yurim lashed out at, though it clearly went very very out of hand.

I'm not really sure what causes a bullied to become a bully, more often than not I don't think it's a very rational process and it's probably mostly something done on the spur of the moment... Even if this "moment" lasts months. But still, all of them are people and they have their own reasons and motivations for doing what they do... I'm happy to see a webtoon exploring that in-depth, it was definitely something I wasn't expecting when I started reading it, it's been a pretty good experience so far and looking forward to how it will develop~