shadelapite.com

This post was once a Twitter thread (RIP blue bird) but had to be rescued from the dying embers of that platform and rehoused here.

Every time I rewatch Healer my love for Seo Jung-Hu (Ji Chang-wook) deepens. He is such a delicious basket case of a man

There’s a canyon-sized gulf between Healer’s public-facing, superhero persona – suave, capable. leather clad, talented martial artist, high perceptive, adept impressionist…

…and his private life – a grown man who schlepps around in threadbare cloths in an unheated batcave, surviving on days – old take out, drinking.

He’s highly intelligent so he must know that he lacks the life skills necessary to survive on the deserted island he’s saving up to buy. It’s a goal plucked from the air by a lonely man, traumatised by a series of abandonments, who needs a reason to get out of bed each day.

Healer’s world is a gumbo of excessive capability and extreme vulnerability. He keeps his colleagues at arms’ length, because you can’t be abandoned if you have no attachments.

Writer Song Ja-na has Healer fall for Chae Young-shin (Park Min-young) like a man bespelled. Every emotion is new and unfathomable. He can’t understand why everything she does charms him. Why he runs when she calls. Why he trails her through the streets like a shadow.

It’s so sweet and affecting watching the aloof, untouchable Healer open up. He grabs on to Young-shin like a life buoy. A human barnacle. He has been starved of touch for years and he clings to her, drinking up her warmth.

Loved-up Healer has no slow lane. He dynamites his life and rebuilds it around Young-shin. There is a 95% chance that if she rejected him, he’d wither and die. Young-shin has her father, work, hobbies. Her love for Healer is icing on her life. For Healer, she is the whole cake.

Thank goodness Young-shin is loving and kind because Healer is an open wound. Delicate. Breakable. Hand wash only. Low heat, no steam. The care instructions would be lengthy.

I need a fluffy fanfic where Young-shin sends Healer on a cooking course so he can stop eating like a 1st year university student. Her mother could teach him. Ajumma should knit him a sweater. He needs an industrial space heater for the batcave and to stop calling his hoobae a minion.