The intergenerational impact of domestic violence

The intergenerational impact of domestic violence in the story is not presented as an inevitable inheritance but as a pattern carried through fear, silence, anger, and distorted ideas of masculinity. Dong-hyun’s violence harms Jungkook directly and shapes what both brothers believe they could do in response. Years later, Jungkook’s fury at Ye-jun and the brothers’ eventual recognition of each other’s fear reveal the cost of that pattern—and the possibility of interrupting it through honesty, care, and solidarity.

Childhood Violence and Its Rules

Jungkook’s childhood establishes the violence at the pattern’s source. When he tries to protect his mother, Dong-hyun orders him back to his room. Jungkook refuses, insisting that his father leave her alone. Dong-hyun responds with a cruel laugh, throws his glass against the wall, and grabs Jungkook by the collar. A shard strikes the boy’s face; his father then slaps him repeatedly, leaving him afraid and furious in the same moment. The scene makes the violence both physical and relational: Jungkook is punished not only as a child under his father’s control, but for attempting to intervene on behalf of someone else.

Dong-hyun also imposes a rule about how a boy should respond to pain: men do not cry. Jungkook can only nod, unable to answer. The command turns emotional silence into another form of obedience. It does not remove his fear; instead, it leaves him without a safe way to express it. The story later returns to that learned muteness and to the anger underneath it, showing that the father’s influence persists not only in remembered blows but in the expectations Jungkook has absorbed about masculinity and vulnerability.

Ye-jun is shaped by the same household violence from a different position. Jungkook later accuses him of standing by while Dong-hyun beat their mother and Jungkook. To Jungkook, his older brother’s inaction looks like cowardice and betrayal. Ye-jun answers that they were children and asks what he could have done. His explanation does not undo Jungkook’s sense of abandonment, but it places Ye-jun’s silence within the same structure of danger: he, too, was a child facing their father’s power.

The Brothers’ Conflict and Its Aftermath

The brothers’ unresolved memories surface in a bar after Jungkook discovers that Ye-jun is working for Dong-hyun. Jungkook is furious that his brother appears to have returned to the orbit of the father he blames for their childhood. He confronts Ye-jun publicly, recalling that their father beat their mother and him while Ye-jun watched. Ye-jun insists that they were only children; Jungkook counters that Ye-jun was their father’s favorite and should have told him to stop. Beneath the accusation is a demand for the protection Jungkook believes he never received.

Jungkook comes close to turning that anger into another act of physical violence. He stands inches from Ye-jun, clenches his fists, and struggles against an inner urge to strike him. The restraint matters, but it does not make the confrontation calm: his rage is still organized around the impulse to answer injury with force. The scene places that impulse beside his accusation of Ye-jun, exposing a painful contradiction. Jungkook condemns his brother for failing to stop their father’s violence even as he must actively stop himself from reenacting violence against his brother.

The encounter continues to affect Jungkook the next morning. After remembering that Ye-jun is in Los Angeles and works for their father, his heart races and his breathing quickens. He smashes the bathroom mirror with his fist, then cleans and bandages his injured hand before returning to the apartment. The broken mirror makes his anger visible as damage to his own body and surroundings, while his practical care for the wound shows that he is not wholly lost in the outburst. The incident also demonstrates how news of the family can reactivate old pain before the brothers have found words for it.

Fear, Complicity, and Reinterpretation

When Shelby asks Ye-jun what happened, he describes Jungkook’s hatred and explains that Jungkook guessed he was working for their father. Ye-jun acknowledges that Jungkook has resented him since childhood because, in Jungkook’s view, he did not act as a brother should. But Ye-jun also admits that he remains afraid of Dong-hyun. His account complicates a simple division between the brave brother and the cowardly one: Jungkook resisted their father openly, while Ye-jun lived under a different but continuing pressure and could not free himself from their father’s influence.

Ye-jun later tells Jungkook that Dong-hyun never hit him, but subjected him to psychological pressure that continues into adulthood. He wishes he could leave his position and defy their father, yet says that he cannot bring himself to do so. The difference between the brothers’ experiences matters, but the story does not treat the absence of physical blows as freedom from abuse. Ye-jun’s fear helps explain his earlier inaction and his present difficulty leaving; it does not erase the hurt Jungkook carries from having watched him stand aside.

Hearing Ye-jun’s account changes Jungkook’s understanding of their shared past. He realizes that his anger prevented him from seeing what his brother had endured and that Ye-jun, too, had wanted them to face the situation together. Jungkook feels guilty for the way his resentment intensified the distance between them. The change is not a declaration that either brother was blameless: it is a movement from judging Ye-jun’s conduct without understanding his fear toward recognizing that both brothers were children under the same abusive authority, with different injuries and different ways of surviving it.

Breaking the Pattern Through Care and Accountability

The story places Jungkook’s struggle with anger alongside his efforts to offer care rather than force. When Shelby is in distress, his response can be to stay beside her and wait for her to calm, or to offer contact when she is seeking comfort. In another crisis, he comes to her when Madison tells him she is panicking; Shelby recognizes him and holds on to him while he helps her regain steady breathing. These scenes do not suggest that tenderness erases his history or cures either person’s trauma. They show, instead, that intimacy can involve attention to another person’s fear rather than control over it.

Jungkook’s own harmful choices remain part of this account. He acknowledges that, after he and Shelby kissed, he reacted badly, bought and used cocaine, and hurt her without justification. Later, he describes the pull of the underground boxing ring as a return to vice, even as seeing Shelby’s tear-streaked face makes him regret going back. These actions are not presented as equivalent to Dong-hyun’s abuse, nor does family history excuse the harm Jungkook causes. They do show that pain and anger can spill into destructive behavior, and that recognizing the pattern requires him to take responsibility for his own actions.

The brothers’ reconciliation begins when Jungkook can hear Ye-jun’s fear without reducing him to the role of bystander. Ye-jun, in turn, expresses happiness that Jungkook has found Shelby and admits that he was terrified of their father. Shelby’s counsel helps Ye-jun imagine resisting that control, and he suggests that he and Jungkook could confront Dong-hyun together. The proposal offers a sharp contrast to their childhood: instead of each boy being isolated before an abusive father, the brothers can choose to stand together as adults.

The wider story also distinguishes confronting violence from answering it with more violence. Jungkook challenges Robert Jefferson’s denial and argues that money cannot protect him forever, expressing a desire for the women he harmed to know that he is behind bars. Shelby, meanwhile, identifies Kayla’s nonconsensual kiss as sexual assault when Jungkook struggles to name what happened. Such moments broaden the book’s attention to harm and responsibility beyond the brothers’ household: recognizing an assault, supporting its victim, and seeking accountability resist the silence that protects perpetrators. Together, these strands give the family history its significance. Dong-hyun’s violence has lasting consequences, but the story does not make it a destiny: its inheritance can be confronted through truth, restraint, mutual recognition, and a refusal to leave the injured person alone.