BTS: Yeji

I thought it would a good time to take a breather and talk about Yeji, because “Drowning in Air” just did something to her that requires context. You just read a nightmare chapter where the protagonist’s deepest fear manifested as the woman he loves going blank behind the eyes, and in case you don’t understand why that image is so devastating then I haven’t done my job across the previous however many chapters - so let me try.

Yeji is the protagonist of this fic and she’s also my ult in K-pop, and to say I like her is probably an understatement. ITZY is a group I’ve followed since debut and Yeji’s journey (the real one not the fictional one) hits me in ways I didn’t fully understand until I started writing her, which is part of why this character work feels so personal.

I come from an East Asian household and in that culture there’s a specific kind of person who carries everything, for the family and for the team and for everyone around them, and they do it quietly without complaint because that’s what’s expected. We all know someone like that: the stoic father/eldest child who never breaks down, the leader who shows up first and leaves last, the person everyone relies on precisely because they never ask for help.

In real life Yeji practices every single day of the year except Lunar New Year and Chuseok, she arrives at photo shoots before the staff, she told Cosmopolitan “I must do well. I must do better.” When she makes a mistake on stage she fumes at herself, she says the small things are harder to maintain than the big ones, and she is by her own admission someone who cannot tell herself “it’s okay” because she needs her members to say it for her.

That person, the one who holds everything together through sheer discipline and then crumbles alone at 2 AM when no one’s watching, is the foundation of Jeju Heat’s Yeji, and everything she does in the story radiates from understanding that core.

Except the person behind all that armor is not cold at all. She’s not stoic or brooding or any of the things the “strong leader” archetype usually codes as, because real Yeji is goofy and bright, the kind of person who lights up a room when she stops performing composure, whose laugh comes out before she can catch it, who dances to cheer her mom up for pocket money and never actually went through a rebellious phase because she was too busy being actually sweet. In the series Minho sees this version of her constantly and it’s the version he fell in love with, the Yeji who steals his shirts and does impressions and smiles like the sun came out specifically for her, and that contrast is key. The walls aren’t protecting someone fragile, they’re protecting someone warm, and the tragedy is that warmth is exactly what she’s afraid to show because warmth can be disappointed and disappointment is the one thing she’s never learned to survive.

Let’s talk about Kung Fu Panda for a second, because Master Tigress maps onto Yeji’s pretty well in my opinion. Think about her being raised by someone who trained her to be the absolute best and never once told her she was enough, so she internalized that perfection is love. Discipline became her entire identity because she learned early on that vulnerability gets you nowhere, and that right there is Yeji’s core wound in a nutshell. She isn’t just disciplined because she wants to be great, she actually believes that delivering a flawless performance and carrying the weight for everyone else is the only way she’s allowed to earn affection.

It’s the exact Tigress dynamic - the fierce, untouchable exterior protecting a soft center she was never given permission to hold onto. When Tigress melts around the baby pandas or finally drops her stance it’s this massive emotional event, and for Yeji the equivalent is stealing Minho’s shirts and doing goofy faces where the warmth leaks out before she can catch it and put the leader mask back on.

And the reason Minho is the one who breaks through to her is the exact same reason Po breaks through to Tigress, because he does it by being disarmingly unheroic. Po was a clumsy, sincere guy who kept showing up without any armor of his own, which makes the armor of the people around him feel completely ridiculous by proximity, and Minho operates the same way. His superpower in this fic is seeing people instead of personas, so in Practice Room B he’s just present and offers absolutely no pretense. That total lack of guard is the master key to a girl who spends her entire life manufacturing composure, because he doesn’t impress her into falling in love with him so much as he just makes the performance feel unnecessary.

The D-grade moment is where it all starts. In real life Yeji received a C+ on her first monthly vocal evaluation as a trainee and then it got worse, so she practiced alone at home on school days and sang into a recorder over and over and came out to practice when everyone else was on break. In the fic this becomes Practice Room B at 2:47 AM, a girl sobbing on the floor after a D-grade evaluation convinced she’s going to fail, and the boy who finds her and stays. That’s the night they lose their virginity to each other, fumbling and trembling and driven entirely by emotion, and she whispers “stay” when he tries to pull out, and afterward she says “Thank you. For making me feel like I’m worth something.”

Every single wall Yeji builds in this story traces back to that floor and the logic is brutally simple. If I admit I want something I become accountable to it, if I become accountable I can fail, and I already know what failing feels like, so she shows love through everything except the word. Stolen shirts and 2 AM phone calls and forehead-to-forehead silence and her body pressed against his in sleep claiming territory her conscious mind won’t acknowledge, five years of this, five years of “not her boyfriend” while being physically and emotionally and sexually monogamous in every way that matters.

I built her so that her body is always three to five chapters ahead of her mouth. This isn’t just a writerly choice because it’s actually the defining behavioral trait of this specific character archetype. Tigress communicates entirely through physicality - the punch she doesn’t throw, the stance that softens, the hand on a shoulder that says more than any dialogue ever could, and Yeji operates the exact same way. It’s the possessive leg-lock during sex in “The Fall”, the accidental monogamy reveal where her body just stopped responding to other men six months before she admitted it in “Mine”, the shower door she locks after sex in “Morning Devotion” keeping intimacy contained and post-sex vulnerability at arm’s length. The way she grabs Minho at the Busan yacht party saying “You’re mine” and then flinches when he reaches for her shoulder an hour later, snapping “go to sleep, Minho” with the leader mask already back in place.

That pattern of body confesses and mouth denies and walls rebuild is the engine of her entire arc, and it’s such a deeply East Asian thing, loving someone through action and never saying the words out loud. Sometimes the relationship suffers both ways because of it and many of us have this exact dynamic with our own parents, the person who packed your lunch every day but never said “I love you,” the parent who showed up to every performance but couldn’t say “I’m proud of you” without the words catching in their throat. But I think we’ve all been in Yeji’s shoes sometimes too, not just on the receiving end but actually being the person who has to hold it together for the people you love, because the alternative is breaking down in front of them and that would hurt you more than staying strong ever could. When you’re the one everyone relies on, disappointing them feels worse than carrying the weight alone, and Yeji carries that energy for Minho and her group across eighteen chapters, which is why the “saranghae” at the end of “Drowning in Air” is what it is.

Five years of showing love in every language except Korean, and the first time she says saranghae, the heavy one, the real one, the one K-dramas build entire seasons around someone finally saying, she’s asleep. Unconscious. Her waking mind has never allowed it and her defenses had to be completely down for the word to slip through, half-formed and mumbled into his collarbone. That’s tragic but it’s also beautiful because it shows the tension between what we feel and what we allow ourselves to feel, between who we are and who we’ve trained ourselves to be for the sake of survival.

And Minho opens his mouth to say it back and his throat closes and the words turn to ash. She hands him the most important thing she’s ever said and she won’t even remember saying it, and that moment is the entire fic in miniature. The person who can only be vulnerable when she’s not aware of it, the person who loves her back but can’t say it because guilt has eaten the air out of his lungs, two people who deserve each other separated by the things they can’t bring themselves to articulate.

“Drowning in Air” is in some ways about the terror of disappointing the person who carries everyone else, and we’ve all felt that fear. The parent or eldest sibling who finally cries and you realize you’ve never seen them cry before and the ground shifts under you because if they’re not okay then what the hell is holding everything together? Minho’s nightmare is that realization played at horror-movie volume, amplified by guilt until it becomes something you can’t wake up from.

And then there’s the nightmare itself, and I think the most interesting choice in “Drowning in Air” is that the nightmare doesn’t happen to Yeji at all. She sleeps through the entire chapter and it happens to Minho about Yeji, his guilt constructing a horror movie starring the woman he loves, and the horror isn’t violence or murder or any conventional nightmare fuel, it’s her face going blank. The idol mask settling into place and “Leader Yeji” appearing where real Yeji used to be. The nightmare weaponizes every mask she’s ever worn, the professional shutdown and the “I’m fine” deflection and the camera-ready shell. Dream-Yeji’s tears crawl backward up her face, healing themselves and reversing vulnerability and putting the armor back on, because that’s Minho’s real fear. Not that she’ll leave him but that she’ll stop being real with him, that the one person who puts all that weight down in his presence will pick it back up and carry it alone again, and it’ll be his fault.

When I started thinking about this story I kept coming back to two films that ask the same question from opposite angles. Black Swan, where achieving your dream as a performer means losing yourself completely to the role until there’s nothing left of the person underneath. And The Greatest Showman, where the protagonist realizes mid-triumph that he’s chasing the wrong dream entirely, that the applause from strangers means nothing compared to the people who actually see him. Both films are about what it costs to achieve perfection as a performer, and both ask whether that cost is worth paying, but Black Swan is a tragedy about someone who can’t stop performing and The Greatest Showman is about someone who chooses to walk away from the performance before it consumes him. That tension, that question of whether Yeji will disappear into Leader Yeji or find a way to be both the idol and the human, is the thematic spine of everything I wanted this story to be.

The nightmare is basically Black Swan compressed into ten minutes, watching someone achieve their dream while being consumed by the role, except in this version there’s someone who could theoretically pull her back if she’d let him. And there’s something darkly ironic about calling her “Dream Yeji” in that nightmare sequence, because she achieved her actual dream of becoming an idol, but that dream threatens to erase the real person underneath if she doesn’t have someone to ground her. Dream Yeji in the nightmare is what happens if the performance wins completely, if she disappears into the persona because it’s safer than being vulnerable, and Minho is the only person who’s been around long enough to see the difference between the mask and the woman wearing it, which means he’s also the only person who can see what’s being lost. That’s his Black Swan nightmare, that he’ll watch her transform into perfection and lose her entirely in the process.

In her Cosmopolitan interview Yeji says “ITZY is a corpse if you take out confidence.” The nightmare strips her confidence away and shows you what’s underneath, or worse, shows you nothing underneath at all, just the performance running on autopilot without a person left inside it. The blankness, the factory-reset expression, the leader voice without the leader, that’s Dream Yeji as the death of real Yeji.

Another thing that inspired this story is something Vision says at the end of Avengers: Age of Ultron, about how humans are odd and flawed because they choose connection even when it costs them, and how that’s what makes them beautiful rather than broken. That idea, that our emotions drive us to override our survival instincts in ways that purely logical systems never would, became one of the key pillars of what Jeju Heat is truly meant to be about. The idol industry trains people to suppress exactly that humanity, to perform perfection instead of feeling authentically, and I wanted to write about what happens when someone tries to access those dangerous human emotions anyway.

With that in mind, what I’d like you guys to hold onto going forward is that Yeji is not fragile, she is the strongest character in this story, and I’m not ashamed to admit that every character in Jeju Heat is modeled after some trope or combination of tropes from my smut headcanon before I started writing this, and Yeji is absolutely the “strong woman” archetype. But she’s not the kind of strong woman you see in Disney or Marvel movies these days, because her strength isn’t about being physically powerful or never needing help or being better than everyone around her. Yes both real Yeji and fic Yeji can be bossy sometimes but it doesn’t come from a place of “I’m better than you,” it comes from genuinely caring so much and having such high demands of herself that those expectations naturally extend to the people around her, because when you’re the kind of person who can’t tell yourself “it’s okay” you also can’t watch the people you love settle for less than their best.

Yeji’s real strength, the thing that makes her the protagonist of this story, is her courage. There’s this quote from Game of Thrones where someone asks “Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?” and the answer is “That is the only time a man can be brave,” and that’s more or less her whole character in a nutshell. Her strength isn’t the walls she builds, it’s the fact that she keeps choosing to lower them even when every survival instinct in her body is screaming at her not to. Every time she locks a door she eventually opens it, and that opening is an act of courage because she knows exactly how much it could cost her. Locking Minho out of the shower in “Morning Devotion,” asking “what are we?” on a beach in “Golden Hourglass”, telling him “thank you for being mine, even when I’m too scared to say it out loud” under the stars in “Mine”, each of those moments is her choosing vulnerability over safety even when she didn’t need to, choosing to be seen over staying protected.

And that choice, that specific kind of courage, is what makes us human in a way that I think is worth celebrating. Vision put this idea in my head that humanity is special and unique because we have emotions - emotions give us feelings, feelings gives things meaning, and things that are meaningful drive us to muster the courage to sacrifice ourselves to protect them even when the odds are overwhelmingly against us.

Jeju Heat at its core is a fic about peeling back the idol mask, stripping away that layer of performance to expose the humanity underneath, and for Yeji to choose again and again to love fiercely and protect fiercely even when it could cost her everything, that’s the true strength and beauty of both her real-life character and the fictional version I’ve built from it. The path is always toward vulnerability and it just takes her longer than most people because the stakes feel higher when you’ve spent your whole life being the person who can’t afford to break, but the fact that she keeps choosing it anyway, that’s what makes her amazing.

Her arc isn’t finished and there are walls left to come down and doors left to open, some of those moments haven’t been written yet, but the saranghae was real. The KFP movies hint at a romantic arc for Tigress and never actually pull the trigger because her story was always meant to be about finding self-worth independent of a relationship, but in Jeju Heat Yeji gets to take that character archetype all the way to the end of the line. The girl who forced herself to be a weapon actually lets someone in, and the vulnerability of the lotus position, the whispered confessions in the dark, the unguarded saranghae - that’s Yeji doing what Tigress never got to do and finally surrendering the discipline for a person instead of a principle. Even if she doesn’t remember it and even if he couldn’t answer, it was real.

Source: Yeji’s 2023 Cosmopolitan Korea Interview