BTS: Ryujin

Ryujin doesn’t show up until “Reckless Abandon”, but she’s responsible for almost everything that happens by the time of “Nobody Like You” before she even bursts onto the scene.

In K-pop, the leader and the center have totally different jobs. As ITZY’s leader, Yeji is the face of the group - the one who speaks for them, carries the vibe, and holds everyone together when they’re out in public. She’s fierce and commanding, and she sets the tone that the rest of the group builds on. The center is more about pulling people in, and that’s exactly what Ryujin does. She anchors the choreography and she’s the one the camera naturally goes back to. Her image is cool, nonchalant, and carelessly magnetic, designed to be a direct counterpoint to Yeji’s heat. They’re perfect foils, and the story copies that dynamic straight out of real life. If Yeji is the emotional heart of the series, Ryujin is the pivot point. The whole narrative swings around her.

I want to point this out because it’s true in the plot. Ryujin is the absolute MVP of accidental salvation. She lit a torch to burn the house down and accidentally cooked everyone a Michelin-star meal. She just follows her own chaotic, hypersexual impulses and somehow hands everyone the exact map to their own salvation.

That six-month unspoken monogamy between Yeji and Minho started just because Ryujin glared at him across a yacht party in Busan because she wanted to fuck him. That single glance is what triggered Yeji’s possessiveness into overdrive and accidentally initiated an exclusive relationship (or situationship, if we’re being pedantic here).

Look at the Karina timeline. Ryujin casually told Karina to go find a “normal guy” purely to spread her own slutty agenda, and that offhand, wildly predatory advice pushed her straight into the frat boy meat grinder. That specific disaster starves Karina completely, stripping away her pride until she becomes desperate enough to accept Yeji’s wild threesome offer in the sauna. But the funniest part is why Ryujin planted the idea of him in the first place. She was literally just trying to cheer up her crying homegirl with some juicy gossip. She sees a miserable Karina traumatized on the beach and thinks, I know what will make her feel better, I’ll spill my leader’s deepest, darkest secret. “Hey, my leader has a secret guy who actually knows how to handle a woman.” If Ryujin hadn’t tossed out that casual distraction, Karina never would have looked at Minho with such desperate curiosity.

Then you have Yeji and Minho. They were perfectly content to rot in their comfortable, cowardly bubble forever. Yeji would have kept intellectualizing her attachment. Minho would have kept silently worshipping her without demanding actual space in her life. But Ryujin jumped Minho on the pool deck specifically to prove he was just another disposable cock and to assert dominance over Yeji’s new toy. The result? She injected pure radioactive panic straight into his system. She blew up their whole bubble of denial, forced their secret into the open, triggered his “Drowning in Air” nightmare, and left everyone with no choice except to actually communicate and grow.

She even gives Yuna the mental framing she uses to view herself for the next fourteen chapters by cornering her in “The Trap” and giving her a warning that manages to be biting and protective at the same time.

She cures intimacy issues with collateral damage. Nothing says “I want the best for my friends” quite like aggressively milking your best friend’s secret boyfriend into a competitive finish to cure her avoidant attachment style! She inadvertently acted as the world’s most chaotic matchmaker, playing 4D chess without even knowing the rules of the game. Absolute legend behavior. We absolutely have to buy her a drink.

This version of the character draws really heavily from the real Ryujin’s actual persona. She puts out this unbothered, magnetizing pull that just makes entire rooms turn around to look at her, but then her groupmates are always describing someone who is actually rather shy and takes a minute to warm up to people. I think that gap between the front she puts up and the person hiding underneath is basically the heart of her character.

You can really hear it in her solo track, Run Away. What I love about that song is that it doesn’t romanticize running away - it chases the act of escaping itself. There isn’t even a destination, it’s just moving for the sake of moving. But there’s a deeper layer to those lyrics that became the blueprint for her self-destructive spiral. The song isn’t just about her running away; it’s about pushing the other person to run away from her. The lyrics outline a self-sacrificial martyr complex: “If you’re afraid, I will be the villain,” and “You can be the pitiful main character, I’ll take that ugly part.” She volunteers to be the monster so the other person gets a clean break without carrying any guilt.

This maps directly onto her blow-up in “Flickering Flames”. When she realizes Yeji is outgrowing their old dynamic, Ryujin doesn’t ask her to stay. Instead, she weaponizes her unhinged persona. She hurls insults, acts abrasive, and blows up the relationship herself. She plays the bad guy on purpose to give Yeji a justified, guilt-free excuse to walk away and choose Minho. It made me wonder: what happens when you train yourself to play the villain and run toward chaos because you’re terrified of being left behind quietly, only to find out that the thing you’re running from is waiting for you at every exit?

“A Blaze of Glory” is where that question gets answered for the first time. That chapter is set at the 2021 MAMA afterparty - the peak of the Mafia era, the best night of their careers, the one you remember for the rest of your life and can never quite recreate. It’s structured as Ryujin’s villain origin story, except she isn’t a villain. She’s a twenty-year-old at the top of her world who is so terrified of losing the feeling that she decides, in that room, at that party, to become someone who can’t be hurt by its absence. She watches Chaeyoung claim her body through tattoos and reads it as “make sure no one else can own you.” She watches Yeji’s untouchable stage presence and decides invulnerability is the only way to survive. She takes every beautiful, empowering thing she sees that night and turns it into a wall. The tragedy isn’t that she made a bad choice. It’s that she made it at the exact moment when everything felt infinite.

Master Oogway’s quote from Kung Fu Panda, “One often meets his destiny on the path he takes to avoid it,” sums her up well. When she storms out of the villa to avoid sitting with her guilt, the long walk forces her to think through every memory she’d been suppressing. Then she sprints back up the hill because she’s terrified of losing Yeji, depositing her right in time to witness the most vulnerable thing she’s seen Yeji do, which is to get fucked from behind, get choked, and let a guy cum inside her.

She originally built up her cool-girl persona to protect herself from a very real, very specific kind of internet cruelty. I intentionally lifted actual events from ITZY’s history directly into “Nobody Like You” to show what built her armor. Those viral posts calling her signature stage expressions “cringe” actually happened in 2022 on Korean forums like TheQoo. They demanded she act like an untouchable badass, and when she executed the concept flawlessly during the MAFIA era, they tore her apart for “trying too hard.” The producer telling her to get botox really happened in 2024. An older male JYP producer publicly humiliated her appearance on Instagram, and the psychological horror is that she was the one who had to log onto Bubble at four in the morning to apologize to the fans on his behalf and defend his right to “joke.”

When you’re dealing with that level of public surveillance - when thousands of strangers are debating your facial expressions and your own bosses are insulting your skin - hypersexual, aggressive “unbothered” bravado isn’t a personality flaw. It’s a necessary survival adaptation. She built herself around “I don’t need softness” as a direct response to a world that was constantly trying to find a soft spot to stab. But that same untouchable persona turned into the weapon she used to hurt her best friend in their living room. Every escape route she takes delivers her straight back to the starting line.

That pattern started with the bunk bed memory. She threw that going-away party so she wouldn’t have to admit how sad she was over them losing their shared bedroom. But then Yeji fell asleep, leaving Ryujin to eat chocolate by herself in the dark. Years later, she storms out of a villa for the same reason and arrives at the same emotional destination.

There’s a second pattern running underneath her escape routes that defines her better than anything else. Every time Ryujin does something loving, it’s a pure reflex, but every time she does damage, it’s a deliberate choice. Her body intuitively slides the salt across the counter before Yeji finishes making the face. Her legs automatically crouch to offer that piggyback before anyone has to ask. Her hands unpack her Chuseok bag in three seconds flat without stopping to weigh the options. Or her fingers snap a terrified fifteen-year-old’s mic wire into place without thinking about it. But then her brain catches up a second later and files the act under some safer label to protect herself. She’ll tell herself the salt was efficiency, and the piggyback was gravity doing its thing. She reasoned that staying for Chuseok was a practical decision because Yeji would burn the dorm down if left alone. The mic wire was well, what you do.

She’s a chronic mislabeler when it comes to her emotions. When she’s grieving over the streamers, she calls it “annoyance.” When she gives up a guy to Yuna, she writes it off as “not worth the energy.” And memorizing Yeji’s set of condiment faces? She acts like “someone had to do it.” Every time her body naturally does this enormous thing, her internal monologue jumps in and downgrades it to something mechanical. If she used the right words - love, devotion, deep need, or the fear of losing her people - it would shatter the cool-girl image she built her identity around.

The tragedy is that she spent five years training her brain to overrule her natural reflexes. She taught herself to walk away instead of leaning in, and to put on a show of indifference instead of following what her gut wanted, until that override became so automatic she thought it was her personality. When we get to the emotional climax of the chapter, the payoff isn’t her learning a new lesson, but rather finally giving up on stopping herself from doing what her body always knew it was supposed to do. She lets her legs turn her back to the couch before her brain can execute its plan to nod coolly and walk upstairs, and letting that happen is the emotional truth of her arc. There’s an old Chinese proverb: The sea of bitterness has no bounds, turn your head to see the shore (苦海無邊，回頭是岸). The misery of her cool-girl performance was endless, literally resulting in her standing alone looking out at a dark ocean at midnight, and escaping it required nothing more than finally turning around to the villa. The person she is was always there, getting vetoed by her own head.

So, I purposely set up this three-person chain between Yeji, Ryujin, and Yuna. Yeji throws up all these intense emotional walls because she’s actually in love and completely terrified of what that implies. She’s literally just trying to survive and keep herself together. But Ryujin watches her do this for years and misreads that survival instinct as some deep philosophy. She just assumes this is what strong, independent women are supposed to do - stay totally untouchable and never ever burden anybody else with their messy feelings. So Ryujin basically absorbs Yeji’s entire coping method, strips out all the fear that was actually driving it, and turns it into her core personality.

And then Yuna watches Ryujin. Yuna sees this whole perfectly unbothered performance and just assumes it’s genuine, bulletproof confidence she needs to copy for herself. So Yuna ends up replicating the surface level of this attitude without ever understanding the fear hiding underneath the act.

It’s essentially three misreadings in a row. None of them signed up to teach each other anything, but the message got passed down the line anyway.

To fix all that accumulated damage, you have to travel backward up the exact same path. Yeji finally shatters the pattern right at the source in “Moonlight and Memory”, letting Ryujin receive the signal and drop her own act in “Nobody Like You”. And the final Yuna moment is the echo of that reaching the end of the line, which frees her to realize the truth she’s been trying to get to since “The Trap”.

I want to pause and compare Ryujin’s arc to Karina’s, because looking at them side-by-side reveals a lot about how the story came together.

Karina’s arc was carefully planned. It was designed from the jump to be the sexual and emotional climax of the series, carrying the main theme of a girl learning the difference between being desired and being loved through body worship. Every piece was placed with intention. You can clearly see the pacing and the way it came together. Her arc resolves through receiving: Minho sees her, Yeji permits her, and she is given the care she desperately needs. It’s a beautiful, satisfying journey, in my opinion.

Ryujin’s arc is a different animal. It was originally meant to be a marginal aside, but she bullied her way to the front in true Ryujin fashion. While Karina was mapped out, Ryujin was found. I didn’t sit down and chart out a recursive avoidance pattern; I followed a girl storming out of a villa until she showed me where she was going. When you plan a climax, you set a destination. When a character blooms out of an aside, they discover the destination in real time. Because of that, her arc resolves not through receiving, but through choosing. Nobody gives her that pool baptism, nobody watches. It happens unwitnessed in the deep of the night because she decides to stop running, and that decision belongs to her alone.

That difference in how they were formed also reveals an intentional irony buried in how I resolved their physical storylines.

Karina is the character who was fundamentally wounded by sex. The industry, her fanbase, every guy she’s met - they all reduced her to a body meant to be consumed. Naturally, her healing has to arrive through sex. That’s why the Karina threesome is so important. Two people finally manage to touch her while seeing the real person trapped inside the idol image. Sex fixes Karina because her deepest wound was being desperately desired without ever being known, so when someone manages to do both at the same time, the physical act becomes proof that she’s a real human being - the cure matches the disease, right? She was broken by physical intimacy that ignored her personhood, so she’s repaired by intimacy that centers it.

Ryujin, on the other hand, is arguably the most sexually aggressive character in the series. She fucks around constantly and treats the whole thing like this twisted, hedonistic competition. Sex is her primary language, her go-to way to cope, and the main way she measures every relationship, even other people’s. She tried to disprove Minho by fucking him, and tried to outrank Yeji by fucking harder than her. She measures love by tallying up who came first.

And so, her healing involves zero sex at all.

Her big pool “baptism” is floating alone in chlorine water, while her “wet embrace” resolution is pressing her soaking wet self into a sleeping Yeji and whispering two nonsense syllables. For the most sexually chaotic character in the story, her climax is a fully clothed hug and the sound of a doorbell. There’s no orgasm scene, she doesn’t conquer anyone, and there’s no performance to rate.

That’s not an accident. Sex was never going to heal Ryujin because sex was her armor, not her wound. Every random guy she collected, every frat house and hotel room she used up, was just adding another layer to the wall she built after people picked apart her body online. She used sex to prove she was desirable in the same fake way she lowered her voice to sound tough, or walked out of the villa to prove she didn’t need anyone. It was a barricade, and you can’t tear down a wall by throwing more bricks at it.

Her deepest wound is totally platonic. It’s the pure terror of being seen and known without relying on a performance. The fear of needing someone, letting them see that need, and daring to be soft in a world she was convinced would eat her alive for it. So her healing had to come from the thing she was most afraid of: raw, non-sexual intimacy with no audience. Which resulted in a crying, soaking wet girl shaking against her best friend’s neck in the dark, apologizing in a weird little language that only the two of them understand.

While Karina heals through sex because that’s where she was broken, Ryujin heals through a hug because tenderness is what broke her. They both (and arguably Minho too with his nightmare) had to walk directly through the worst possible version of their own fears to get to the other side. The untouchable goddess had to let someone fuck her while seeing the scared girl inside, and the unbothered cool girl had to let someone hold her while she finally turned the concept off.

I think the relationship between Ryujin and Yeji hits so hard because it resists clean categorization. They aren’t romantically involved - Ryujin isn’t trying to date or fuck either Yeji or Minho. But they exist outside typical platonic friendship, too. They represent the person you built your identity alongside, whose approval you organized your life around, whose chaos felt like home, and who you developed a private shorthand with. Two nonsense syllables at 2 AM can unlock a decade of their shared history. When Yeji started quietly changing - falling in love, growing soft, letting a guy into her space - Ryujin didn’t lose a girlfriend, and that wasn’t her fear. But she is deeply afraid of losing her Ddaeng Ddong, the person she fought the world with, and by extension losing the version of herself that only made sense when Yeji was running right beside her. And that fear drove her to push her best friend away.

In case it wasn’t obvious in “Nobody Like You”, Ryujin’s arc here is inspired by Toy Story 2 and 3. That’s why I embedded a clip of “When She Loved Me” into the end of “Flickering Flames”, because that’s where I wanted to take all of this from the beginning. It’s the devastating trope of a someone seeing their their do-or-die choose a different happiness and feeling left behind. Woody didn’t lose Andy’s love, he lost the version of the relationship where he was the only one Andy needed. Culturally, we don’t have a clean word for that specific flavor of grief. In fiction, we have plenty of vocabulary for romantic breakups, but very little for the feeling of being outgrown and left behind by the person you tied your identity to, and yet, it’s a universal human experience that transcends K-pop or gender. The question is whether you can figure out who you are after that anchor disappears.

What Ryujin represents in the larger conversation extends past any one relationship. I intended her story to be an extended metaphor for identity loss and abandonment, but she’s also the physical cost of performing invulnerability inside a culture that actively rewards it. K-pop specifically, sure, but the principle applies broadly to any system that tells young people being untouchable is the same thing as being strong. Ryujin bought that premise, executed it flawlessly, and this chapter is what happens when you weaponize it against the people who never asked for it in the first place.

The argument I’m trying to make through her is that the opposite of vulnerability isn’t strength - it’s loneliness. And the way back isn’t through courage or some grand revelation, but through the body remembering what the mind trained itself to forget: she was soft first, and that softness was her real self all along.