EPISODE RECAP
At Team Black gym, everyone is on edge. No one is safe from Jaekyung’s wrath. While he spars with victim fighter after fighter, the head coach and Dan watch from the sidelines.
To lighten the mood, the head coach reveals the team’s latest swag: Team Black track jackets. He passes them around to all the fighters, but when he spots Dan, he realizes he’s out of jackets. He apologizes profusely to Dan. Dan tries to ease the coach’s worries, saying that he doesn’t need one, but the other fighters begin offering their jackets to him regardless. Jaekyung throws his jacket at Dan’s face. He commands that everyone shut up; the jackets are not a big deal anyway. The coach hurries the team out the door as those who are left get ready for an important meeting.
During the meeting, Dan is in the gym mopping the floor mats. He looks at the jacket that Jaekyung gave him and thinks about how much the champion MMA fighter has done for him. Sure, he’s still scary and the sex is still too intense for him but things aren’t that bad. He thinks back to his last conversation with Heesung at the cafe, and while he believes that Heesung believes what he said about Jaekyung, Dan still thinks that there’s no chance that could be true.
In the break room, Jaekyung, the coaches, the team attorney and Jaekyung’s agency manager are in the middle of discussing the article. The attorney posits that someone at the hospital sold the information despite it being private health information. She says that they’ll get the article taken down, but the public discourse has already veered away from sympathy and is now bordering on grim satisfaction for Jaekyung’s downfall.
Jaekyung’s manager mentions that the MFC matchmaker inquired recently about a non-title fight again Dominic Hill, a middleweight champion. He supposes that this may be the perfect opportunity for Jaekyung to prove he’s still got it. The match, however, is only a month away. Considering how much weight Jaekyung will have to drop in such a short amount of time, the coach is hesitant to agree. Jaekyung, however, wants to fight.
Some time later, the head coach is coordinating the logistics of the trip and tells Dan that he’s going with them. It’ll be a small group: just the coaches, Jaekyung, Dan and Yoongu. Yoongu won the team raffle for the trip, so he’ll be there to help out. The head coach implores Dan to be patient with Jaekyung because he’s only going to get worse in this next month.
But that’s something that Dan doesn’t need to be told. He’s already been victim witness to Jaekyung’s wrath at home. When Dan tries to offer Jaekyung some water after noticing the fighter had been in a hot bath for too long, Jaekyung swats the glass away and breaks it. Dan cleans up the mess and throws out the shards in the kitchen trash. While he’s tending to a cut he got from the broken glass, Jaekyung approaches him and forces Dan down onto the counter. Dan, withstanding the pummeling from behind, reminds himself that even though this is hard for him, Jaekyung is suffering more.
Then, before everyone knows it, the group is in America and it’s just about time for the fight.
My Takeaways
I want to shake some sense into Dan sometimes. Jaekyung’s suffering more? Really? Really? I don’t know… I think we all know by now that I’m biased against Jaekyung for his assholery so I don’t really feel any sympathy for him. But I just don’t think Dan should have to subject himself to such harm all because his discomfort is not as bad as Jaekyung’s.
We’ve seen Dan do this a few times already, where he dismisses his own pain because he thinks it’s not equal to or more than Jaekyung’s. I could go into a deep dive of how that is such a wrong way to think, but I won’t. I had to deal with similar thoughts, so I know how warped that kind of thinking is. I worked all of it out in therapy, so I guess that might be why I’m so frustrated with Dan. I see myself in him when it comes to that kind of thinking, and it just makes me want to bang my head against the wall.
I swear I still like this webtoon lol
MY PREDICTIONS
I think Jaekyung makes the weight class. It would suck if they flew all the way to the US just to fail because Jaekyung doesn’t drop enough weight. And as much as I dislike Jaekyung, I do think he’s disciplined enough that when he puts his mind to something, he’ll do it no matter what.
Do I think Jaekyung wins the match? Hmmm… hard to say. I’m not saying this as someone who doesn’t like the character, but plot-wise, I don’t know which I would rather see:
- Jaekyung wins the match and is validated that he’s still got it, thereby affirming his status as champion and inflating his ego further
- It’s a tie (That happens in MMA fights, right?), but that still equals a loss to Jaekyung and so —
- Jaekyung loses the match and loses major face. He starts spiraling and everyone around him suffers for it, Dan especially.
We’ll just have to see what happens. My spidey senses are tingling though… or it could just be my webtoon paranoia… that something’s going to happen to Grandma while Dan is out of the country. We haven’t seen her in a while, and as far as a plot device, Dan being out of the country and hundreds of miles away from her if something does go wrong, would make for interesting drama.
WEBTOON GODS, DON’T LET ME BE RIGHT.
Series Details
Episode release date: Thursday, Oct 12, 2023
Original Title: 징크스
Author/Artist: Mingwa
English Publisher: Lezhin
Audience: NSFW
