Tae&Kookies????

This is just gonna be my one hell long personal reflection on the series, rather than a critique focusing on the two main characters.

There is something deeply cruel about the way life sometimes offers us things. Just when we have almost stopped expecting anything from it, it gives us something we might have desperately needed, only in circumstances where we cannot possibly accept it. And I think that is what makes *Boy, with Caution* so affecting.

Let’s start with Gi U. He is thirty-two, at an age by which the world expects you to have figured things out, accomplished something, built a life of your own. Instead, he seems to have settled into the monotony of simply existing. Between his mother’s expectations, his estranged marriage, his responsibilities as a teacher, and his own sense of what his life should have been, there are so many knots that he doesn’t even seem to know where to begin unravelling them. So he goes through the motions. He carries on, getting through one day after another. I wouldn’t necessarily call it depression. It feels like something much harder to articulate: a profound exhaustion with life itself. A loneliness that comes not from having nobody around, but from having nobody to lean on when you have always been the one expected to carry everything.

And then there is Yong Jae, barely twenty-one, who has already been given more than enough reasons to distrust the world. He finds in Gi U someone who notices him, believes in him, and cares enough to look beyond the person everyone else thinks he is. What begins as a source of comfort gradually becomes something he holds on to with all he has.Ha Jung Hoon conveys this beautifully, particularly through the gradual changes in Yong Jae’s expressions. There is a fire in him, dimmed by the life he has lived so far, that Gi U’s small gestures of kindness seem to rekindle.

But I think this is how the age difference comes into play as something more that just a number. It isn’t simply a matter of twenty-one and thirty-two, or the boundaries of a teacher–student relationship. They are standing at entirely different points in life. Yong Jae thru Go U is still reaching towards the possibility of a future, while Gi U seems to have lost the ability to imagine one for himself.

There is something deeply tragic about being at that point in life when someone comes along and loves you so earnestly, so completely, and yet is precisely the person you cannot accept that love from. Perhaps some part of you even wants to. But what can you do with a chance that arrives in a form you cannot make a life out of? What do you do when you are barely holding yourself together, let alone imagining what you could offer someone else?

One of the moments that stayed with me was the hug, when Yong Jae tells Gi U that he doesn’t have to do anything, that he will still love and care for him. I felt that hug. There is something so vulnerable about being told that you don’t have to prove your worth, accomplish something, or become someone else to deserve affection. Gi U has spent so much of his life being expected to carry things, to be something, to fulfil one obligation after another. And here is this boy telling him that he can simply exist and still be loved. I don’t know what Gi U feels in that moment, but I can imagine how profoundly it must affect someone who has almost forgotten what it feels like to be understood. And ye, as Yong Jae continues to confess his feelings, Gi U keeps asking him to stop.

This brings me to another favourite scene towards the end, when Yong Jae tells him that he would have stopped if he knew how, if that was what Gi U wanted, but he simply doesn’t know how to. Ha Jung Hoon’s expression in that moment is heartbreaking. There is no grand declaration, no dramatic outburst. Just the gradual resignation almost like that fire dimming again - of someone who has tried so hard to explain himself and still cannot make the other person understand. What is he supposed to do now? How does he make someone understand that he cannot simply switch off what he feels?

Both actors are remarkable in how much they convey through so little. Ryu Se Il’s Gi U is never simply expressionless; his exhaustion reveals itself in the smallest changes of his gaze, his pauses, and the moments when he cannot quite meet Yong Jae’s eyes. There are so many microexpressions throughout the series that say what the characters themselves cannot. That restraint is what makes their performances so affecting. These are two people who, for entirely different reasons, struggle to articulate what is happening inside them.

One of the threads that runs consistently through the story is Gi U’s instinct to notice students in need and extend a helping hand, even as the emotions between them become increasingly complicated. The scene of their reunion in the staff-room toilet, the very place where they first met, is where I felt my heart break for Yong Jae. After the anonymous chats are leaked, Yong Jae is an obvious person to blame, given that they came from his phone. But Gi U almost immediately tells him that he knows it wasn’t him, taking Yong Jae by surprise once again that someone believes in you without presuming the worst. What makes the scene even more poignant is what happens immediately afterwards. Gi U is present during the meeting with the other boy’s mother, but when the chairman asks him to leave him and Yong Jae alone, he has no choice but to walk away. He wants to help, he understands what is happening, and yet he cannot intervene. It is such a painful reminder that recognising someone’s suffering and actually having the power to stop it are two very different things. Gi U has spent so much of his life trying to carry others, and yet there are situations in which he can do nothing but watch.

And this brings me back to the night they sleep together, a moment I found myself conflicted about. I don’t think it was a romantic culmination, nor do I think it necessarily meant that Gi U had reciprocated Yong Jae’s feelings. More importantly, it was not a testimony to the idea that Gi U’s kindness had ever come with the expectation of something in return. He was already overwhelmed by everything unfolding around him. Perhaps he wavered in a moment of vulnerability, loneliness, or attraction that he himself could not fully understand. But the encounter means something different to each of them. For Yong Jae, it may offer hope; for Gi U, it may be something he cannot reconcile with the boundaries he has tried so hard to maintain. The story seems to insist, time and again, that Gi U’s kindness for his students always existed but with Yong Jae, he found the reciprocity when Yong Jae kelt diving into the deep end to pull him up making Gi U realises with a start that he, too, needed saving, but how do you let that same person pull you up for whom you wouldn’t dive in for?

By the time Gi U decides to leave, Yong Jae has begun to find the courage to resist his father’s control and imagine a life that belongs to him. In that sense, their encounter has changed him. But I think it has also left him more wounded than before. He has already experienced what it means to love someone who may not love him back. But now he has experienced something even more difficult: the possibility that he may have been wanted, in some way, and still not be chosen. When Yong Jae finally gives up pursuing Gi U, I don’t think he is simply accepting rejection. There is a quiet heartbreak in the way he seems to understand that he cannot keep reaching for someone who keeps pulling away, someone who might disappear altogether. And perhaps the most devastating thing is what this leaves him with. He was already looking to life for a reason to believe in it, for someone who could make him feel that he was worth something. Gi U gave him that. But the experience may also teach him to be afraid of reaching for someone again. When he says that loving someone can itself feel like a mistake, I wanted him to know that it wasn’t. His feelings were never wrong. But it is heartbreaking to think that he might carry this experience into the rest of his life as yet another reason not to trust what he feels.

Gi U’s own ending is just as unresolved. He confronts his mother and makes decisions about his marriage, but we still see him breaking down alone. Has he finally begun to reclaim his life, or is he simply escaping something he doesn’t know how to face? The final bus-stop scene, with the night giving way to morning, seems to leave room for hope. I want to believe there is some change, some movement towards a life of his own choosing. But the series doesn’t tell us enough to know.

And this is why Boy, with Caution could have benefited from more time. Across eight short episodes, it introduces so many aspects of their lives, and while many of these details enrich the story, some remain underexplored. There is a difference between leaving something unsaid because it is more powerful that way and leaving something unexplored because there simply isn’t enough time. I wanted more room for both characters to sit with the consequences of what happened, and for their journeys to arrive somewhere more emotionally complete. Not necessarily together. Just somewhere.

What stays with me is not whether these two should have ended up together. It is how profoundly they change something in each other, even when they cannot give each other what they need. Yong Jae finds someone who sees him and makes him imagine a different life. Gi U is offered the extraordinary experience of being loved when he no longer knows how to receive it.

And perhaps that is the cruelest part of it all. Life gives Gi U a reason to want to live differently, but in the form of someone he cannot bring himself to choose. It gives Yong Jae a reason to believe he is worth loving, only to leave him wondering whether love is something he should ever reach for again.

They both leave changed. But neither leaves unhurt. And there is no guarantee that what they gave each other will be enough to heal what they take away.