Work Text:
Sung Hyunjae with chains and with yarn is a very interesting compare-and-contrast topic honestly. For one, there’s the literal objects themselves:
- Chains in literal usage are used to tie things down, to bind things in place. Symbolically they’re linked to imprisonment; with Sung Hyunjae’s chains being gold “metal”*, you also have the associations of strength with metal, and of purity and nobility with gold. Sung Hyunjae’s SS-rank chains literally and metaphorically set him apart from every other Hunter, every other person on Earth, putting him above the rest.
- * Metal** turned gold through being charged with his electric-attribute mana, if you want to get specific. (This is confirmed in chapter 253 specifically, where having the mana drained makes the chains lose color.)
- ** If you look at their description window, it says that despite looking like metal, they’re actually made of “deepest moonlight” by Crescent Moon. Which does lose us the metal-strength connection, but gives us the untouchable nature of light. Sung Hyunjae, and these chains, are literally of a different material than anything used by those of Earth. Forget something living, let alone something human—this is something else entirely.
- Wool, on the other hand, is very much a down-to-earth material. It has solidity, it has the tight connection to something living and real. It has variability and texture, soft and rough and everywhere in between—nothing unexpected or bad or wrong of it, mind you, this is natural variance in a natural object. It has the ability to flex, and perhaps most importantly, while it can be linked together like chains are to bind things, what wool is bound into is sweaters and scarves and gloves and hats. Soft, protective things. Where chains weave together to restrict, wool weaves together to comfort. Chains are to apathy (if not threat) as wool is to safety (if not kindness).
- And the nature of the specific wool associated with Sung Hyunjae is also worth talking about. According to Yoojin, it has “excellent thermal insulation” and “is resistant to dirt”. Unlike the unnatural purity of the chains, these were specifically sought out features for comfort and utility, even if it’s a gag gift.
- The hot pink dye was also done deliberately, initially meant as a slightly-mean joke, as admitted by Yoojin in chapter 269: “I was the one who’d dyed it hot pink thinking to give him something nasty as a present […]”. There’s an element of personal connection in the fact that this wool was deliberately dyed a color meant to convey meaning to Sung Hyunjae, even if that meaning was “fuck you”. And if you put that meaning out of mind, as Sung Hyunjae and Yoojin do as the novel progresses, hot pink (or deep pink, as it’s sometimes put down in the text) is a bright, vivid, passion-filled color. Unlike the noble gold of the chains, it’s a less classy and more playful shade. In flowers, pink is associated with gratitude and affection, somewhere between romance and platonic care. It’s a color that carries emotion.
Then you have the specific contexts they’re given to Sung Hyunjae in:
- The chains come to Sung Hyunjae from Crescent Moon. There’s a Tumblr post that I think of every time I think about Crescent Moon, ever since I first saw it, because of how concisely it pinpoints her role: that “Crescent Moon’s affection is a bad thing to receive” (credit to @buqbite, I love your work!!). She loves him so very much that she’s trapped him in this horrifying eternal cycle of living and reliving and reliving, until he’s been human so long he’s become inhuman. She’s given him these chains—both metaphorically and literally—and he can’t escape them. They’ll always come back to him, after all, cold and hard and unyielding.
- Then there’s the yarn, given to him by Yoojin in chapter 182. Enough wool to fill both Yoojin and Noah’s inventories flung at speed all over his rooftop, unraveling and making a mess everywhere… given to Sung Hyunjae as a birthday present by someone who wasn’t even invited to his celebration, because he wasn’t invited. This isn’t the trapping gesture of terrifying affection that Crescent Moon’s gift of chains were. This is a gift from a friend delivered with childish, petulant annoyance. And yet, the latter is far more forgiving than the former.
Next, if you look at how he approaches and uses the gifts:
- The chains are an SS-rank weapon.
So is Sung Hyunjae.And that means the number one thing they’re good for is violence. Even when not directly used in melee combat, they’re still weapons—Sung Hyunjae uses electromagnetism through them to attack Song Taewon in chapter 135, and uses his electrolysis through them against Yoojin in chapter 141. Outside of direct combat, too, he wraps them around Yoojin and drags him across the ground and up stairs in chapter 140. Sigma uses them the same way, wrapping Yoojin up and dragging him around roughly in chapter 248, and earlier showing an ability to split the chains apart into individual links and reconnect them in chapter 244, but still using that as a means of attack. And before all those comes the scene in chapter 123, where Sung Hyunjae binds a chain around Yoojin’s throat as a collar and leash. They’re a tool of control, first and foremost. - Meanwhile, when it comes to the yarn, Sung Hyunjae appears to have taken the time to sit and wind all of it back into proper yarn balls and skeins (as seen in chapter 210), which already shows that he himself is forgiving in return to the gift. And its primary use is making scarves and other comfy clothing, which Sung Hyunjae promptly gets to work on, as seen in chapter 185, a mere 3 chapters after receiving the gift. The scarf gets finished, and gets followed up presumably by a cardigan, which is then followed by gloves and a hat, that are all given to Yoojin in the virtual reality dungeon, complete with a Cold Resistance skill attached, somehow. He uses all the yarn given to him to give back tongue-in-cheek gifts to Yoojin. It’s become silly and fun, an in-joke for the two of them. The yarn has turned into a medium of fondness and comfort. And safety, as signaled by the single strand used by Sung Hyunjae to show the monster Panuz turned into was on Yoojin and co.’s side.
Also. Really quick. I joked before that Sung Hyunjae is also a high-rank weapon. [Takes off my clown makeup] I lied. It wasn’t a joke,
Okay, but really:
- Sung Hyunjae is represented by the immoral people as Chain. This isn’t a title he’s picked for himself, any more than Little Moon is. This is a title that represents his connection to Crescent Moon and his ability as a fighter. They’ve named him after his weapon, because that’s what he is to them—a weapon against the source. He is, quite literally, chained to this role.
- But given the yarn by Yoojin, that’s what he chooses to represent himself as in the VR dungeon’s in-between system space: a suit- and gloves-clad figure with a ball of yarn for a head. Or, once Yoojin destabilizes that first half, a ball of yarn in his entirety. If you read further into the suit as well, taking the formal three-piece outfit as a symbol of the formal responsibilities of guild leader and #1 Hunter worldwide and everything that comes with that, then that pushes this even further—when reduced to his simplest self, it isn’t his work that defines him: he becomes someone who is cared for, passionately and unquestionably.
- Chain and Little Moon, the extension of Crescent Moon, aren’t people—they’re things, tools, identities he hasn’t chosen for himself. But the yarn ball, and by extension “Sung Hyunjae” himself—a person in charge of a whole guild’s worth of people, a man with people he cares about like Song Taewon and Han Yoojin and Kang Soyoung and so on, who care about him in equal measure, even if those feelings are just developing or hard for them to show—those were chosen. Those were claimed, deliberately, by a man whose very life isn’t his own, right now.
…Representation and identities aside, now that we’ve arrived in the VR dungeon, we can talk about how the way Sung Hyunjae using chains and yarn also changes over time.
- That incident with Sung Hyunjae dragging Yoojin around using chains in chapter 140 wasn’t the only incident of using his chains to carry Yoojin, as I’m sure we’re all well aware. In chapter 185, during Sung Hyunjae’s birthday party, when he shows Yoojin the in-progress scarf, a visible start of their relationship being knitted into something kinder and more genuine? He uses his chains to gently wrap around Yoojin and carry him up safely to where Sung Hyunjae is standing on the cruise ship. His sharp edges are literally starting to smooth over.
- And the yarn, meanwhile, trades positions with the chains. Sung Hyunjae first uses it as a weapon in chapter 249 when he’s “short on points to support [his] partner with”, and then later against the centaur scout in chapters 268/269. Indirectly in the former scene and directly in the latter, his goal in using the yarn isn’t just to hurt the other person—it’s to protect and support Yoojin and those with him. It isn’t just the thrill of fighting itself, or being after something interesting, that Sung Hyunjae’s fighting for—at this point, he’s on the defensive, fighting to keep others away from what’s important to him. He’s fighting because he cares, and using the literal symbol of that care to do it.
And it’s a brilliant scene, honestly, in chapter 269, with the silver chains—the symbol of Crescent Moon, wielded by an agent of hers—being met by the yarn, both pouring through the sky, the chains as arrows to pin down and harm and the yarn as a net to catch and shield. Especially this line, right at the start of it all:
On the surface, the yarn was no match for the chain. It felt like it’d snap any second. But not only did the yarn hold out, it jerked the chain back inch by inch.
Sung Hyunjae is just a man. Just one person in the face of a transcendent backed by yet more immensely strong individuals on both sides of the immoral/filial divide, all of whom he can’t afford to fight if he wants his world and his self to stay safe. But with the help of those he cares about, he’s fighting anyway.
And, very slowly, inch by inch, winning.