Akatsuki no Yona – fadeslikewhispers

redprincessofdawn:

yonaks:

person: yona is so in love with hak she’s cuute

me: i know riiiiiiiiight

person: she loved him from the start but didn’t admit it ha!

me: ummmmm actually no. Please don’t do that.

I’ve always thought that that “Yona loved Hak all along” mindset kinda degrades the development of their relationship tbh. While I definitely think Yona was more attracted to him than she’d admit (chapter 111.5 pretty clearly shows that even when she liked Suwon, she wasn’t entirely immune to Hak’s charm), I don’t think her feelings became anything other than platonic until all of this went down. The reason for this is that I feel like Yona didn’t really fully know Hak until everything happened.

Sure, they grew up together but Hak was also VERY conscious of Yona’s feelings for Suwon and he was constantly tailoring his behaviour to accommodate them. That meant he felt he couldn’t ever express how much he genuinely cared about her, how he thought she was cute or cool. Any time he did, he’d have to step back and say something (usually in the form of an insult) to put himself back in “his place”. Yona didn’t get to really know Hak until Suwon’s betrayal, when he started to drop the pretense of being the obnoxious big brother-like figure and became increasingly more honest toward her. I don’t think either of them were truly aware how much the other mattered to them and how much they mattered to the other before any of this happened.

By insisting that she loved him all along, we strip her of the reason she loves him now and what makes it more significant to her than her old crush on Suwon. She had fallen in love with an idealized image of Suwon, one part of his personality that he let her see, but not all of it. She fell in love with everything about Hak once she truly knew him; flaws, teasing and all. And I feel that gradual development, the way Yona slowly falls more and more the more she learns of him and the more time they spend together, is one of the strongest aspects of their relationship.

I’d hate to see that overlooked because for some reason there’s this prominent idea that first love=true love, so if Yona truly loves Hak, he has to have been the first. But in reality, first loves fail way more than they last–albeit, usually not as disastrously as Yona’s did–because, shock of shocks, first tries aren’t usually the most successful.