Les violences de Dong-hyun contre le jeune Jungkook is the decisive childhood event behind Jungkook’s later relationship with fear, anger, physical contact, and violence. In a duplex in Seattle, the adult Jungkook’s sleeping body relives an earlier assault in a flashback set years before, when Dong-hyun’s authority turns the family home into a place of surveillance and terror. The memory clarifies why Jungkook reacts so intensely to threats, why tenderness can appear both dangerous and necessary, and why his eventual attempts at protection remain entangled with the violence he learned at home.

Setting and Family Context

Dans la maison familiale, Jungkook is eight years old and already understands that the adults’ arguments are dangerous. During one earlier confrontation in the kitchen, Ye-jun forcibly holds his younger brother back because Jungkook is trying to intervene in the dispute between their parents. Jungkook’s anger and grief are directed not only at Dong-hyun but at the helplessness of remaining hidden while Min-ha is threatened. When Ye-jun’s grip weakens, Jungkook breaks free and leaves the bedroom despite his brother’s whispered warning.

The scene establishes a family structure in which Dong-hyun controls movement, speech, and even the conditions under which the children may witness violence. Jungkook refuses to stay in his room and tells his father to leave Min-ha alone. His resistance is courageous but exposes him to the full force of Dong-hyun’s authority. The event therefore begins as an attempt to protect his mother and becomes an experience of punishment, bodily injury, and enforced submission.

The Assault

Dong-hyun responds with a sinister laugh, finishes his drink, and throws the glass across the room. A fragment strikes Jungkook in the face. Before the child can react, Dong-hyun grabs him by the collar and repeatedly slaps him, leaving injuries that may remain visible for days or weeks. The physical blows are accompanied by humiliation and verbal degradation: Dong-hyun demands to know when his son will learn to stay in his place. Violence is presented as a method of restoring hierarchy, not as a loss of control separate from family life.

The abuse continues later that evening. Dong-hyun orders Jungkook upstairs, seizes him by the throat, and pins him against a wall while demanding obedience. Jungkook’s small hands press against his father’s wrist as he struggles to breathe. Dong-hyun sends him to his room until the adult visitor, Hamilton, has left, making clear that the child’s isolation is part of the punishment. Jungkook complies only because he is physically overpowered, and he retreats in tears after regaining his breath.

At the end of dinner, Min-ha follows Dong-hyun upstairs and tries to prevent another attack. Dong-hyun violently pushes her aside, enters Jungkook’s room, slaps the child, removes his belt, turns him onto his stomach, and tears his shirt. The belt strikes his back for minutes that feel endless. Jungkook cannot move, holds back his screams, and watches grief give way to a darker anger because he has no power to stop what is happening. The assault is therefore both physical torture and a lesson in enforced helplessness.

Min-ha repeatedly attempts to intervene, but Dong-hyun ignores her and later threatens her as well. After the beating, he wipes blood from the belt, throws it onto the floor, grabs Min-ha by the hair, and orders her never again to move while he is “correcting” their son. She submits out of fear. When Dong-hyun leaves, Min-ha rushes to Jungkook, finds blood across his back, and begins to cry while he remains silent and allows her to tend to him. Her care offers immediate physical attention but cannot undo the household power that made the attack possible.

Witnesses and Immediate Consequences

Ye-jun hears the younger boy’s suffering from his own room and covers his ears. After the violence ends, he enters Jungkook’s bedroom, but Jungkook refuses to meet his gaze. When Ye-jun begins to speak, Jungkook cuts him off and calls him a coward. The accusation reveals the child’s belief that Ye-jun failed to protect him, while Ye-jun’s earlier attempt to restrain him had itself been motivated by fear that he would be harmed. The event consequently damages the brothers’ bond as well as Jungkook’s relationship with his father.

The flashback ends with Jungkook’s adult body still trapped in the memory. Shelby wakes him from an agitated sleep after he has cried, clenched his fists, and struggled in the grip of a nightmare. The childhood assault is thus not safely contained in the past; it returns as a bodily event that must be interrupted by another person. The narrative links remembered violence to present symptoms rather than treating recollection as mere exposition.

Recurrence in Jungkook’s Adult Life

The effects of Dong-hyun’s abuse are visible in Jungkook’s broader history. Sunmi recalls that he once came to her home with a badly injured face and claimed that he had fought at school, while blaming Namjoon for getting him out of trouble. She believed the explanation until Jungkook ran away at sixteen and sought refuge with her. Dong-hyun did not look for him, and Sunmi welcomed him without hesitation. Jungkook’s flight marks the first major break from the family system, but it does not end the psychological hold of the violence.

As a teenager, Jungkook touches substances that Sunmi believes a sixteen-year-old should never have encountered. In adulthood, he describes his inner demons as having occupied his thoughts since childhood and connects his return to the Ares Garden ring with a trance-like desire to make the destructive impulse feel real. He later admits that alcohol and drugs intensify the confusion in his mind. His underground fighting and substance use are not presented as simple rebellion; they repeat the bodily logic of the home he escaped, where pain, dominance, and survival became inseparable.

The same history complicates Jungkook’s treatment of Shelby. When Shelby experiences panic, he sometimes remains beside her without touching her, as in the Ares Garden locker room, where he turns off the running water and waits while she cries. In another crisis, Madison reports Shelby’s panic and Jungkook runs to her, holds her, and calms her through familiar physical reassurance. Yet the story also shows the danger of contact when consent is absent: Shelby recoils from Cassiopée’s unexpected hands, and Jungkook learns that protection must not become another form of control. His own history gives this distinction particular force.

Narrative Significance and Later Reorientation

The event explains why Jungkook’s anger can become immediate and disproportionate, but it does not absolve him of responsibility for later harm. After hurting Shelby with cruel words during a cocaine relapse, he acknowledges that his behavior was unjustified and attempts to apologize. Later, he tells Shelby that learning to love was partly an effort to drive away the demons that had occupied his mind since childhood. His admission places the childhood beating inside a longer moral struggle: he was made powerless by violence, learned violence as a response to danger, and must still decide whether to reproduce or resist that inheritance.

The flashback also gives meaning to Jungkook’s eventual confrontation with Robert Jefferson. He threatens Jefferson with exposure and imprisonment so that Shelby and the other women Jefferson traumatized can be relieved of knowing him as a free man. This later action echoes the child’s attempt to defend Min-ha, but its form is different: Jungkook now seeks testimony, accountability, and confinement rather than merely striking back inside a sealed family home. The contrast does not erase his violent impulses, yet it shows a developing capacity to redirect protective anger toward public recognition of wrongdoing.

In the wider arc, Dong-hyun’s abuse becomes the origin point of a cycle that Jungkook gradually tries to interrupt. His childhood self believes that defiance is the only available protection, while his adult self must learn that safety can also be created through patience, explicit trust, therapeutic support, and non-coercive touch. The event’s lasting significance lies in that tension. It is the wound that explains Jungkook’s darkness, but the narrative refuses to make darkness his final identity.