UNMARKED SPOILERS BELOW!
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The webnovel and webtoon
- Sumin Jeong may act like a sweet, pure maiden, but her true persona is one of an envious, spiteful snake. She thrives on Jiwon Kang's suffering and will do anything to "win" against her, at any cost. A list of her crimes:
- She spread rumors throughout high school that Jiwon was bullying her, resulting in the student body ostracizing the poor girl for years.
- She stole Jiwon's love letter to Eunho, replacing it with a letter filled with angry vitriol towards him. Eunho cuts off his relationship with Jiwon, only realizing the truth and regretting it after he graduated.
- In the webnovel, she stole Jiwon’s college boyfriend and convinced him to poison Pang, which is how Jihyeok ended up taking him in.
- She started flirting with Minhwan Park at work, beginning an affair with him in the first timeline and marrying him instead in the second timeline.
- Juran has Sumin act as a saleswoman for a new salad kit at a grocery store while wearing a ridiculous outfit. Humiliated, Sumin forgoes warning people about the salad's dressing containing peanuts, resulting in a customer having an allergy attack. Rather than take responsibility, she keeps the incident secret with Minhwan. When Juran finds out, Sumin first blames Jiwon, then Minhwan, for the incident instead. This is the last straw for Minhwan; he tells her that she will now never make full-time and will not get her temp contract renewed. Furious, Sumin sends the allergy attack customer an "apology" kit with the same dressing and pretends to be Juran so the customer will attack her instead, as her way of quitting the company. Jiwon finds her anyway and forces her to apologize to the customer in person, while Minhwan snubs her. With the situation spiraling out of control, Sumin fakes being pregnant so Minhwan has no choice but to marry her per his parents' orders. One small embarrassment for Sumin leads to two attempted murders on one person and a faked pregnancy.
- Once Sumin marries Minhwan, he and his mother work Sumin like a slave, making her realize that Jiwon really did set her up with Minhwan on purpose. She then steals Minhwan's picture of Jiwon and Jihyeok Yu together and posts it online as revenge, exposing Jihyeok as the grandson of U&K Foods' chairman.
- Fed up with her mother-in-law, she rubs Minhwan's infertility test results in Jaok Kim's face, making the woman have a stroke, and then leaves her on the floor to die. After that fails, she injects air bubbles into Jaok's IV line, ensuring her a painful death by air embolism. When she's caught by the police, she blames Jiwon for it and tries to run her over with a stolen car. In the manhwa, she hits Jihyeok and sends him into a coma. In the web novel, she hits Huiyeon and angers her grandfather so much that Sumin has no chance at trial.
- Sumin’s reason for targeting Jiwon: her father left her and her mother for another woman. Her mother took her anger out on Sumin, depriving her of food and blaming her for her husband’s affair. When Sumin discovered that the woman her father had an affair with was Jiwon’s mother, she blamed Jiwon for everything. After all, if Sumin was the reason her father cheated on his wife and left the family (according to her mother), then it’s Jiwon’s fault for her mother’s affair. Yet, Jiwon gets to live happily with her dad while Sumin has to suffer her mother’s wrath.
- Sumin’s warped perception of things borders on psychopathy. She refers to herself in third person note , holds grudges against people for trivial reasons, builds lie after lie until she ends up in a worse situation than before, and never takes responsibility for her actions. And as the story goes on, she gets worse and worse until she’s screaming at her own murder trial at Jiwon about how everything is her fault.
- Minhwan and his mother abused Jiwon for years in the first timeline, working her like a slave and withholding food as punishment. He didn’t even visit her bedside when she had cancer, even planning her murder so he can collect insurance money. In the second timeline, he turns his abuse to Sumin upon getting married to her, even planning to kill her for insurance money like he did with Jiwon. Jiwon did say he and Sumin were perfect for each other.
- Jiwon was a Broken Bird the first go-around. Not only was she stuck in an abusive relationship, but she discovered that her husband was cheating on her with her best friend. Oh, and she had cancer on top of that. And what does her husband do when his wife finds out about the affair? Slaps her so hard it kills her. Thank god Jiwon got a second chance at life, and could take revenge against both Minhwan and Sumin.
- Poor Juran is basically an older Jiwon, except she has to worry about her daughter, who’s in the care of her neglectful husband. She ends up forcing him to take a job at her parents’ restaurant, where he begins an affair with a younger co-worker. When Juran finds out and starts the process to divorce, he shows up at her home, trying to act like nothing’s wrong and calling Juran the “evil” one for turning away from him. He eventually attempts to kidnap his own daughter, so that Juran would have to cut alimony from the divorce proceedings. By the way, this guy admitted upfront that he would hold his daughter hostage if he were to have visitation rights so he wouldn’t have to pay anything.
- Jihyeok’s death in the first timeline. He was so distraught over Jiwon’s death that he gave up on life and walked into the ocean. He was lucky that he travelled back in time and got a second chance to save Jiwon.
The drama
- Su-min's flat, victorious stare and Slasher Smile as she drags Ji-won down in the lake. If she couldn't have Ji-won, no one could, and she would stoop to ensuring they would be Together in Death as "other halves".
