Start-Up: The Childhood Letters

Ah the childhood letters.

From the start it was obvious to me that Start-Up was going to be one of those stories where a young person / woman, who has been enamored with childhood ideals about "love," outgrows these ideas as she meets and falls in love with someone real. Happens all the time.

Look. For 15 years Dalmi thought that when she was 12, a boy of 12 called Nam Dosan wrote to her because he wanted to be her friend (maybe she even thought he was a secret admirer). He was eloquent, considerate, and always on her side. Reading his letters comforted her. She puts him on a pedestal because he just seemed so beyond any of the boys his or her age.

And then she finds out that that was because the boy who had been writing to her was an 18-year old young man who was doing her grandmother a favor. Sure later on, he may have grown real feelings of empathy for her and he felt less lonely with her letters. Still, while she was utterly besotted with the letters, he had not felt the same. He certainly does not remember them the way she does. He didn't even remember her name at the start of the drama (see Episode 2, conversation with Halmeoni as she asks for his help to locate Nam Dosan).

So you see? Even Dalmi's feelings for those letters must have become questionable to her after she found out the truth. What she thought was her first love now felt fake. She must have felt embarrassed. A lot of JP fans cry out, "Why did she not even talk to her Halmeoni and JP about the letters after finding out the truth?" Well, if she did talk about it with them, what would they talk about exactly? What's the point of railing against her Halmeoni? Dalmi can't exactly get mad at her. What's the point of badgering JP? When he confessed about the letters, he opened with the explanation, "You're grandmother asked me to write them." So clearly, he hadn't written to her because he wanted to be her friend. Dalmi understood that the letters had been written with good intentions. What's the point of dredging up the rest?

And besides, by the time she found out the truth, she had already fallen in love.

Her confusion wasn't really about whether she liked JP or Dosan. Her confusion was about whether or not her feelings for Dosan were because of the letters or because she really liked him for himself. 

In the end, she chose Nam Dosan. Why? 

He was always kind and gentle with her; he was considerate. Even if Dalmi wasn't a programmer, Nam Dosan always patiently and earnestly listened to her inputs and wisely found the value in them. Remember how he had coaxed her to talk about her thoughts on the anti-forgery algorithm for the Hackathon? His friends had been quick to dismiss her suggestions but Dosan encouraged her to share them anyway. And good thing he did, because her thoughts on the problem made something click in his brain leading the team to try out a different solution which helped them increase the accuracy of their program.

Nam Dosan always had Dalmi's back and defended her from anyone who shamed her (Chairman Won), intimidated her (Injae), and made her cry (Chairman Won and yes, Han Ji Pyeong). On the two occasions that Dosan gets physical, the act is precipitated by Dalmi crying in helpless anger (Chairman Won) or despair (Ji-Pyeong when they were acqhired. Watch that scene again when JP went on and on about how it was their fault for not reading the contract properly and pointing out relentlessly how NoonGil was unprofitable that's why the CEO-Dalmi-got cut. He was basically saying she had failed as a CEO. Yes, this was the truth and it was important that she and the team hear these important lessons at some point. Dalmi had asked JP to give this answer truthfully, and JP "merely" complied. But was that really the best timing and delivery for that kind of a lecture? And then to cold-heartedly walk out on the group immediately after? Where's the empathy? Where's the humanity? Watching JP say those words as a stricken Dalmi listened, watching JP walk away right after, hearing JP dismiss their pain with the words, "If this hurts you, you shouldn't have started a business," well it was all Dosan could take).

If you think about it, these qualities: being considerate and being completely on her side, were qualities that Dalmi had loved about the penpal Dosan. So Nam Dosan, different as he was from the penpal persona, had at least two of the three significant qualities. 

Dalmi had also loved the eloquence of the penpal Dosan.

Ji-Pyeong was eloquent yes, but he was often also brusque and Dalmi confesses to him that he had hurt her feelings at least 2 or 3 times (but definitely less than 10). 

So no, Ji-Pyeong was not the Nam Dosan in the letters either, as he points out in Episode 16. Compared to him, Dosan was actually more like the Dosan in the letters. When Dalmi confesses to Halmeoni in Episode 7 that Dosan seemed like such a different person from the one who wrote the letters, I think she meant there that he spoke rather differently. He was plainspoken and rather scientific and literal. Penpal Dosan was more poetic. But actions speak louder than words and in many instances in her young adult life, it is Dosan that comes to Dalmi first in her hour of need. 

The real Dosan.