Releasing Anger Through Pain

Releasing Anger Through Pain is a recurring pattern in which emotional distress becomes physical force: a punching bag, an opponent, or the character’s own injured body offers an outlet when anger cannot be expressed or contained in words. The pattern is most stark in Jungkook, but Shelby’s experiences show how the same physical language can emerge from a different history and carry a different meaning.

Jungkook’s Self-Punishing Violence

At Ares Garden, Jungkook uses training not simply to improve his fighting but to exhaust anger through impact. After a bad night, he spends an hour striking the heavy bag, continuing until his fists and wrists hurt; afterward, he studies his tattooed, battered hands in the large mirror. The scene makes the cost visible: pain is not incidental to the exercise but something he is willing to incur as he tries to discharge what he feels.

The pattern becomes more dangerous in the ring. Jungkook opens a fight in a way that surprises Chen, then spreads his arms and gives his opponent the opportunity to hit him. Chen recognizes that Jungkook wants to feel the sharpest pain, while Namjoon sees him being struck in the ribs and fears he may be killed. Jungkook’s indifferent, arrogant smile deepens the alarm. Here, the violence turns inward even as another fighter delivers the blows: the bout becomes a means of seeking pain rather than winning, and his mentor and friend can recognize the danger without immediately stopping it.

From Repetition to Numbness

The pattern recurs outside the ring, where Jungkook’s anger turns rapidly into impact. After ordering Lexie out of his room, he strikes the wall with his fist, puts on his leather jacket, and drives to Ares Garden without greeting Chen. In the training room, he attacks the punching bag with all his strength, again and again, with rage as his only company. By this point, the violence has dulled its own warning signal: he no longer feels physical pain when his fists meet an object or another person’s face. What begins as an attempt to release anger has become a practiced form of brutality in which even pain offers little resistance.

The aftermath makes clear that physical numbness does not amount to emotional relief. After another fight leaves his face injured, Jungkook sees the damage in the bathroom mirror, then breaks down in the shower as memories of a nightmare return. Tears mix with the hot water; he slides down the shower wall, cries out his rage and sadness, and eventually rises with red, exhausted eyes. The contrast is central to the pattern: striking can exhaust or injure his body, but the grief beneath the anger returns when the blows stop.

The novel places this response beside the family violence Jungkook witnessed as a child, without reducing the adult behavior to a simple explanation. In Seoul, his older brother Ye-jun holds the eight-year-old back as their parents argue downstairs. Jungkook struggles to get free and wants to intervene, while Ye-jun tries to keep him from putting himself in danger. Later, Sunmi recalls that Jungkook once came to her with a battered face, concealing that his father had hit him, and that he eventually fled home at sixteen. Read against these scenes, Jungkook’s chosen exposure to blows repeats a world in which violence has already shaped his bodily experience: as a child he tried to stop it, while in the ring he can appear to invite it.

Shelby’s Different Route Through Pain

Shelby’s response to pain is not simply a mirror of Jungkook’s aggression. During her first boxing lesson, he demonstrates the basic movements and she carefully copies him, mindful of not hurting herself. Then memories intrude. As tears gather, her punches against the bag grow harder and sharper; Jungkook has to pull her away while she struggles and cries out, unable to stop. The scene begins as instruction and becomes a physical reenactment of distress: the bag receives force that Shelby cannot yet put into words, but the blows intensify rather than contain what has surfaced.

Her panic makes the limits of physical intervention unmistakable. Jungkook carries her toward the changing-room showers, but she stops him and tries to regain control of her breathing. Earlier, when Cassiopée Smith puts both hands on Shelby’s shoulders during another panic attack, Shelby jerks away with a cry of pain and remains curled up, refusing to be touched. The resemblance between these moments lies in the body’s alarm, not in a shared appetite for violence: Shelby’s distress makes unexpected contact frightening, while Jungkook’s attempts to help can only work when they leave room for her to signal what she can bear.

The boxing match at Ares Garden pushes that distinction into public view. Jungkook blames himself for bringing Shelby there, but he cannot enter the ring without violating its rules. Shelby waits for her opponent to move, then lands a punch to the stomach and an uppercut and continues attacking as anger overtakes her. Her opponent withstands the blows, waits for Shelby to tire, and eventually knocks her down; Shelby is struck in turn until the fight is stopped and she is declared the loser. The contest gives her anger a physical outlet, yet its rules do not make that outlet safe: Jungkook watches helplessly as the expression of her rage becomes an injury he cannot prevent.

Afterward, the mirror in the bathroom confronts Shelby with the severity of the damage. She tries to get up despite her injuries, then sees her bruised condition, retreats from the sink, and slides down the wall in tears. Jungkook crouches beside her and rests a hand on her knees; this time she is seeking comfort rather than recoiling from contact. His regret that he brought her to the fight does not undo what happened, but the quiet gesture marks a different possibility from the ring: pain can be met with attentive presence instead of more force.

Care as an Alternative to Pain

The novel sets these bodily outlets against forms of care that do not demand that distress be turned into punishment. On the university rooftop, Dorcas finds Shelby after Cassiopée has hurt her with what she said. Dorcas apologizes on her friend’s behalf, but Shelby tells her not to; Dorcas insists that Shelby is who she is and should not be spoken to that way. Later, Dorcas makes her support more explicit, promising to be there in both difficult and joyful moments and to serve as a source of light. The contrast is not between anger and an easy cure: it is between being left alone with pain and having someone stay present without condemning the person who feels it.

Connor offers Shelby another form of safety. When he sees her sitting outside, he settles beside her, puts an arm around her shoulders, and draws her close. His touch does not alarm her; she feels safe with him, and he tells her that she can tell him anything before asking what is wrong. Beside the unwanted or overwhelming touch that Shelby sometimes cannot bear, this contact is defined by trust. The distinction shows why physical closeness alone is not comfort: safety depends on the relationship and on whether the person in distress can receive it.

Jungkook’s care for Shelby likewise becomes more effective when it follows her signals. During a panic attack, Cassiopée approaches calmly after Shelby recoils from her hands and remains curled up, refusing contact. At Ares Garden, when Shelby’s distress rises during boxing, Jungkook moves her away from the punching bag, but she stops him before he can take her toward the showers, telling him she needs to steady her breathing. Later, when a panic attack overwhelms her in a restroom, Madison recognizes that Shelby believes she is in danger, leaves to find Jungkook, and tells him what is happening. He comes to Shelby and holds her; recognizing his familiar spring scent, she puts her arms around his neck, and his touch helps her breathing return to normal. The difference between these scenes is not that one person’s intervention is always right and another’s wrong. Shelby’s own response determines what kind of help is possible in the moment.

Jungkook’s gentleness also reaches Shelby through a memory of care. At the university dormitory, while she cries in his arms, he strokes her back and sings “Fix You” by Coldplay. The song calms her; as she settles against him, he remembers that his mother used to sing to comfort him. A capacity learned in childhood resurfaces here not as a way to deny pain but as a means of accompanying someone through it. The scene makes tenderness part of the same history as violence, without suggesting that one erases the other.

The support around them does not make either character’s distress disappear, and the book does not assign Jungkook sole credit for Shelby’s change. When Dorcas thanks him for making Shelby happier and observes that Shelby seems more open and less cold, Jungkook redirects the praise toward Shelby’s therapist and her own efforts to move forward. That response matters to the concept: physical pain can make anger visible, but it cannot by itself explain or resolve its causes. The narrative’s counterpoint is sustained, responsive care—friends who affirm, a parent who offers safety, and a partner who learns to wait, listen, and stay beside someone—through which pain no longer has to be the only available language.