No Longer Useless
On the screen, Yoo Seul-ho wore a scowl that could curdle milk.
He was speaking to a middle-schooler who had just lost his parents.
“And how's that working out for you, sulking all by yourself?”
“No, I—”
“While you're off playing actor, I've been busting my ass greeting customers. So I'm supposed to work my fucking fingers to the bone alone, is that it?”
He was vicious from his very first appearance. His voice was as cold as his lines, and the look in his eyes was genuinely unsettling. Whatever way you sliced it, that was not the face of a man looking at his own little brother. It was the face of a man staring down the murderer who had stolen his parents' lives.
Those eyes are good.
Noh Ham-rak set down the popcorn he'd been eating and leaned into the screen. With every line that followed, another silent叹 of admiration built up inside him.
He really nails the character.
Plenty of actors, handed a garbage villain, overact their way into extra unlikability on purpose. But Yoo Seul-ho didn't look like a man trying to seem more hateful. He looked like one of those villains you inevitably run into at least once in real life — the kind of performance that made you think, I swear I've met someone who actually lives like that. It was that naturalness that made it all the more twisted.
Jesus.
How could a person transform like that in a single instant?
Frankly, it wasn't easy for Noh Ham-rak to admit any of this. He'd spent months watching Yoo Seul-ho's acting with fury that had long since curdled into disillusionment. A flicker of contrarian stubbornness rose in him, too. He rewatched Yoo Seul-ho's scenes from episodes one and two dozens of times, half convinced his own judgment had failed him — and arrived at the same conclusion anyway.
He can act.
At the very least, his acting in this drama was excellent. It was nothing like his old work, where every role he touched came with that same signature awkward twitch.
So the rumors were true — villain roles really are his calling?
Whenever he focused on dissecting Yoo Seul-ho's performance, at some point he'd stop seeing Yoo Seul-ho at all and see only Kang Min-woo, the male lead's older brother. That was partly why he'd been slow to notice that while a different child actor played the fourteen-year-old version of the male lead, twenty-year-old Kang Min-woo was played by Yoo Seul-ho himself.
Well. Fair enough, actually.
Thinking it through, that made sense. Young as Woo Jun-seo was, no way could that face pass for fourteen. And you couldn't hand twenty-year-old Kang Min-woo to a child actor either.
It's not like a face changes just because a twenty-year-old is written as twenty-six.
Still, it was unavoidably jarring when one of two actors playing siblings was suddenly swapped out for someone else. Some degree of dissonance was only natural. Which was exactly what made this so uncanny.
Why is it so seamless?
Noh Ham-rak studied Yoo Seul-ho's face on screen with unusual care. There was no difference in makeup between the flashbacks and the present-day scenes, no change in his features at all. And yet the acting in this episode felt distinctly more grown than what he'd seen in episodes one and two.
That's strange.
Had he secretly gotten work done back then?
He obsessed over pinpointing where the odd sensation came from — and then it hit him.
Ah.
The expression.
It had changed. More precisely, the emotion inside it had changed.
The look of a man who wants the other person to hurt.
It was entirely different from the nastiness Kang Min-woo had shown so far. Gone was the leisurely, practiced ease — that sense of cruelty grown as habitual as breathing. Unlike the present-day Kang Min-woo, who hit and hurt his brother for no reason at all, the man in the flashbacks carried intent. The desire to wound his brother with his words was written so plainly across his face that the character seemed, paradoxically, more raw. Younger. Purer.
Was that deliberate?
Or just dumb luck? Was Yoo Seul-ho really an actor with that kind of talent? However satisfying the performance on screen was, the memories of the past were far too bitter for Noh Ham-rak to simply trust him.
While Noh Ham-rak dissected the drama down to the nanosecond with eyes half suspicion and half curiosity, his girlfriend had fallen head over heels for the show itself.
“Oh, so that's why he turned out that way.”
The drama compressed the flashbacks with real momentum. Unlike the male lead, who'd snapped out of his grief too late, the older brother — who'd caused no serious trouble until adulthood — spiraled sharply afterward. Kang Min-woo, head of the household overnight, gave up on college and started earning money, and he poured all his rage over his ruined future onto his little brother. That was why the male lead had endured years of domestic abuse without saying a word to anyone. At some point he sensed it had gone beyond all reason, but the belief that he himself had destroyed the family kept his teeth clenched and his mouth shut.
What the male lead never knew was that his brother had always been rotten to the core.
“Wait — Mom and Dad had life insurance? Uh… how much?”
Where his brother had been a loud troublemaker from childhood, Kang Min-woo had been the quiet kind. He'd given up on studying long ago, but he dreaded going home, so he stretched every hour he could at school. He'd even wring money out of his parents for a study room they couldn't afford, just to stay out of the house on weekends. But even Kang Min-woo felt grief at his parents' sudden death. At first he denied the facts outright. Then he was swallowed by regret — I should have been better — then by the fear that he, too, could die at any moment. Heavy emotions for a kid who'd barely just become an adult.
Instead of wading into that tangle of confusion, he chose anger. And anger had exactly one target: his only sibling.
This is all your fault.
I was going to turn my life around — and you're the reason even that chance is gone.
So you're the one who has to pay for it.
The bullying that began as revenge had stretched on for six years before anyone noticed, and violence had become so familiar to Kang Min-woo that he could no longer remember why he'd started hitting his brother in the first place.
The hefty insurance payout went entirely to Kang Min-woo, the only legal adult among the children. He never breathed a word of this to his brother — instead, he gaslit him, pretending he'd been forced to give up a college he never wanted anyway, all because of the money.
Look at this. If it weren't for you, I'd have been soaring by now.
I couldn't go to college because of you. I lost our parents because of you. I live like this because of you.
With nonsense like that, Kang Min-woo scraped away even the meager wages his brother earned at part-time jobs. Not that he had any grand ambitions — he just needed money to chase women. This was a man who'd have lived a pathetic life with or without parents, except that now he pinned the blame for every last bit of it on his little brother.
That was Kang Min-woo.
“There was this girl I saw on the street yesterday. Goes to the same university as you. You know her?”
“What's her name?”
“Seo Ye-na? Seo Yu-na? Something like that. Long straight hair, pretty decent face. Ooh~ been a while since my eyes got a treat like that.”
The drama had slipped back to the present at some point, showing Yoo Seul-ho snickering — and Woo Jun-seo's face darkening instantly at his words.
“…….”
The male lead's first impression of the female lead hadn't been a good one, but by episode three the two had drifted into something faintly tender. He'd once been knocked flat mid-walk by a strange dog that came bounding at him out of nowhere — and the dog's owner, of all people, turned out to be her. Right up to the day before they'd been at each other's throats over a group project, so seeing each other's faces was awkward. But the dog's shameless aegyo melted that stiffness away fast. She, agitated enough during the fight itself, was calm now with her beloved dog out on a walk, and once the misunderstanding between them cleared, they finally began having an actual conversation.
Talking to her, the male lead felt something strange stir. For the past several days, her bubbly voice had done nothing but grate on his nerves. He'd found it grating — why is she so excited all by herself? — and his petty irritation had only grown, until it matured into thoughts like must be nice, living that carefree. All those negative feelings came crumbling down in an instant under a soft spring breeze. Drifting cherry blossoms, a night walk that turned oddly sentimental, the fresh resolution of their misunderstanding — the mixture left him thoroughly disoriented.
The romance had officially begun.
“Please. He's confused because she's pretty, that's all. The drama's dressing it up for you.”
“Huh?”
“You're a man, you tell me. Honestly — if she weren't beautiful, would the male lead be having all these feelings? It would've ended as some random incident and that's it.”
Noh Ham-rak agreed without protest.
Fair point.
In real life, running into the girl you'd had a vicious group-project blowout with while she was out walking her dog would earn a discreet spit on the ground at best. Falling head over heels wasn't on the menu. At the end of the day, the male and female leads' faces were the plot's entire plausibility.
“For men, pretty really is everything,” Noh Ham-rak said flatly, and his girlfriend pouted.
“Right? Knew it.”
“Yep. That's why I'm dating you.”
“…Honestly~. That is not what I wanted to hear.”
She grumbled, but she was humming to herself, clearly pleased.
Noh Ham-rak had survived another day.
Meanwhile, unlike the affectionate couple in front of the TV, the brothers on the screen were in a far graver mood.
“What's with that face?”
Kang Min-woo, reading some subtle shift in his brother's stillness, shot up from the couch. The male lead scrambled to fix his expression, but his brother had already caught him.
“What about my face.”
“You know that girl, don't you? What's going on between you two?”
“She's in my department. I barely know her.”
“Bullshit. Be straight with me. What, you think I'm gonna ask you to set me up? Women before family now, huh? You fucking selfish bastard.”
Kang Min-woo redlined all at once, unleashing a torrent of abuse at his brother. The lines threaded the needle of what a terrestrial broadcast could get away with — and every single curse landed clean.
“Whoa~. The Useless guy curses so well.”
His girlfriend, marveling to herself, suddenly paused.
“Actually….”
“Hm?”
“Doesn't feel right calling him 'Useless' anymore, does it?”
Noh Ham-rak hesitated a moment at that, then nodded.
“True. He's awfully… useful these days.”
Yoo Seul-ho's screen time in this third episode had exploded compared to the ones before it. More than that, the character he played now shaped the entire story. Even the people most determined to hate him could no longer call him 'Useless' with a straight face — it simply didn't add up anymore.
“Hmm~.”
After brief consideration, his girlfriend said it breezily.
“Then from now on, I'll just call him Yoo Seul-ho.”
And so, he took back his name.