Kwak Seungjun

Nature vs. nurture, one of the oldest developmental debates. Are some people inherently bad, or are they just a product of their upbringing? Well, the truth is rarely as simple as either or, and most people are a mixture of the two. In his own funny way, Seungjun is a fantastic example of this fact, because if you dig all the way down to the very deepest part of him, the essence of what makes Kwak Seungjun who he is, Seungjun is bordering on monstrous.

There are people who have excuses for their behavior of course, brain chemistry gone wrong that leads them to be unable to empathize with other human beings, or compulsive behaviors that drive them to do bad things, but Seungjun has none of these. For a select few it's very easy for him to empathize with their pain and struggles, and he's neurotypical in almost ever imaginable way. His parents were also loving and supportive, he had the sweetest baby brother one can picture, and a couple of very good and loyal friends.

Despite all of this, however, Seungjun realized at a relatively early age he had no strong desire to make the world a better place or do good for others, and it wasn't born out of the same kind of selfishness that so often drives others. While he has adopted a somewhat hedonistic lifestyle, Seungjun doesn't dictate his life choices by what is best for him personally, but he sure as hell doesn't make his decisions based on what's best for most others either.

For the longest time the boy believed that everyone felt the same way he did, and it wasn't until middle school when one of his two close friends used a simple metaphor that he realized that genuinely good people did exist in this world. See, the friend pointed out that even though it wouldn't benefit him in any way Seungjun would go out of his way to help his friends and family because he wanted to, and made the case that it was normal for humans to want to do that for others as well, even if they didn't know the person. It was hard for Seungjun to agree with that point entirely, but it did put into perspective for him how wide ranging a person's ability to care for others could extend. For him, it never left his small circle, but for others like his little brother and two buddies it could extend far and wide.

This came with another realization: Seungjun liked genuinely good people. He might not really be among their ranks, but there was something that drew him to these do-gooder sorts that kept him in somewhat in line, out of a desire not to disappoint and upset the people in his life.

Somewhat... it didn't take long for Seungjun to realize he had no interest in a typical 9 to 5, and pick up less than legal works helping to run various money scams and arrange drug deals. He had his fingers in a lot of pies, but he kept it to what he considered relatively light crimes. His two best friends didn't necessarily agree, but did still maintain the friendship as they constantly and unsuccessfully tried to steer him back onto the right path. His family didn't have much in the way of an opinion at all, because he refuse to tell them what he really did. In fact, he managed to convince a middle-aged CFO to make up a fake accounting position in his company that Seungjun could pretend was his real job, and even extract some monetary benefits from without doing any work at all.

How did he manage this? Well... he fucked him... he fucked the old man on the regular in order to keep this fake job. It came with another bonus as well, because the CFO had a lot of political and police connections as well, and despite Seungjun's fingers being in all those pies even arrests didn't seem to stick to him.

The one and only hitch in Seungjun's plan was when his baby brother moved from the rural countryside house they'd grown up in, into the big city to live with his big brother and go to a well respected high school.

Having his kid brother who idolized him wasn't enough to make Seungjun clean up his act, but it was enough to make him have to learn to be sneakier about the life he lived.