A summer vacation on Jeju Island was supposed to be simple - sun, saltwater, and the same careful dance Minho (OC) and ITZY’s Yeji have maintained for years. Instead, their FWB dynamic gets pulled into the chaos of her group vacation, dragging up old memories, buried wants, and a version of each other neither has ever really let go of. Beneath the heat and chaos, something tender is trying to emerge. But on Jeju, nothing stays simple - not lust, not love, and definitely not the truth.
“Me Know Me Love Me” was supposed to be a quick scene explaining why Yuna was masturbating by the pool, but turned into a 10k-word tragicomic character study about a girl who performs confidence to hide the fact that she has no idea what she actually wants.
I know a lot of public discourse depict Yuna as this air-headed, pick-me bimbo who doesn’t understand anything, and that’s never sat right with me. Jeju Heat Yuna is not dumb - she’s allocated 100% of her skill points into the art of seduction and has zero left for consequences. She’s the maknae, so everyone babies her. She can read a room, optimize her angles, time a masturbation session against a flight departure. She’s brilliant at what she prioritizes, she just doesn’t prioritize what most people do. The universe has never made hot impulsive girls face real consequences, so why would she start thinking ahead now? She’s basically never had to develop the part of her brain that asks “but what happens after?” because nothing bad has ever happened after. She’s min-maxed her character build for one specific playstyle, and it’s worked perfectly until now. The tragedy isn’t that she’s stupid - it’s that she’s brilliant at exactly the wrong things, and she’s about to learn that trying too hard is its own kind of prison.
Yuna is my favorite kind of disaster. She’s self-aware enough to know she’s spiraling, but not emotionally equipped to stop it. Every orgasm makes her MORE desperate, not less. Every bit of attention she receives feels hollow because she knows it’s transactional. She’s knowingly using her body as social currency because she doesn’t know what else she has to offer.
She’s 21 years old, objectively gorgeous, professionally successful, and deeply, profoundly lost. She’s a young person making mistakes while trying to figure out who she is and what she wants outside of external validation, which is a phase many of us go through in life as we step into the realities of adulthood.
That’s also what makes her dangerous to everyone around her, but mostly dangerous to herself, and she doesn’t even realize it yet. Yuna’s pure instinct: she doesn’t plot or scheme, she just acts and the dominoes fall. She’s about to set literally everything in motion without meaning to. She’s her own catalyst. The growth is coming, the fire is already lit, she’s just too busy checking her reflection to notice the smoke.
If I had to sum up Yuna’s whole tragicomedy in four words: she’s trying too hard. She already IS hot, desirable, talented - objectively, canonically, universally acknowledged, right? But she can’t believe it because everyone treats her like a baby sister, so she performs it. Times her orgasms like an athlete, films herself to study technique, practices surprise faces in mirrors, makes eye contact with seagulls to prove her hotness extends to wildlife; the effort itself undermines what she’s trying to prove. The harder she works to feel enough, the farther she gets from actually feeling it. She’s running full speed in the wrong direction, and it’s funny until you realize it’s heartbreaking, and it’s heartbreaking until you remember she’s also genuinely hilarious about it.
Which brings us back to “Me Know Me Love Me”. This chapter started as absurdist physical comedy (toilet scene, phone hammock, crypto bro) but ended in a place that surprised even me: jealousy. Not jealousy over Minho specifically, but jealousy over what Yeji has even though she can’t quite articulate it: intimacy, aftercare, someone who sees her as more than a body.
That jealousy is what drives the pool seduction in “The Siren”, it’s what will drive her entire arc, and it’s what makes her a beautiful disaster worth rooting for.
Yeji may be the protagonist of this fic, but Yuna has been one of my favorite characters to write. Our baby monster (no pun intended!) She’s messy, she’s delulu, she’s extra, and she’s simultaneously oblivious and hyper self-aware, which makes her antics funny. And I think you’ll love her for it 💕
Or, as Yuna would say after accidentally farting while masturbating on a toilet at 7 AM:
“Bless me 😬”
-Shin Yuna’s words to live by
(Except Shin Yuna doesn’t need anyone to bless her because she’s already blessed)
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