Choi Chi-Yeol’s dark past in Crash Course in Romance explained

Choi Chi-Yeol is a celebrity maths instructor with all the air and attitude one would come to expect from a celebrity. However, behind that stern and confident facade is a person reeling heavily from several traumas of the past.

Choi Chi-Yeol is a young celebrity, but his stardom isn’t a result of his fame in the pop-culture zeitgeist. No, Chi-Yeol is a different kind of celebrity, one who got famous for his mathematics classes.

He currently works at The Pride Academy, teaching hundreds of kids in-person while thousands through his online broadcasts. Sporting a mean spunk and flair to his demeanor as well as his teaching style, Chi-Yeol is subject to many of his competitors’ envy.

However, with all the hard shell that Chi-Yeol dons on the outside, he’s a vulnerable and lonely person on the inside. While in the present, he has to contend with the struggles that come with sustaining an already achieved life of luxury, it’s his past life that continues to gnaw at him.

The cost of fame

Chi-Yeol is popular for the various antics he pulls during the classes, and his teaching style that’s not all smoke and mirrors, however. After every session, without fail, he’s instantly ensnared by a bunch of girls giving him gifts while fawning over him.

It was the same for him in the past as well, before he started teaching at The Pride Academy. Even if the popularity, and hence the number of fans were lower, they were there regardless.

One of his fans was a student by the name of Jeong Su-Hyeon, who’d always fawn over Choi Chi-Yeol and ask him for help with her studies. The bright, lively student would go on to meet the grimmest fate and die by committing suicide.

Ever since her suicide would haunt Chi-Yeol and the memories of the traumatic event would never leave his conscience.

The scandal

The scandal that stands to mar Chi-Yeol’s reputation severely in the present paints him with quite an ugly color. Recently, one of the All Care program students, Lee Young-Min, was killed and made to look like a suicide at the premises of The Pride Academy.

Jin Yi-Sang, one of the biggest, most bitter rivals of Chi-Yeol, is also an active poster in the online forum dedicated entirely to hating on the star teacher.

Su-Hyeon Crash Course in Romance
Jeong Su-Hyeon/Image source: Netflix

One of his latest posts on the forum accuses Chi-Yeol of being involved in a scandal with his student in the past, who is none other than Su-Hyeon. The defaming piece goes on to link this alleged scandal with the deaths in the late Su-Hyeon’s family.

The truth thus far

Chi-Yeol taught Su-Hyeon like he taught everyone else, with his ethical code intact like it’s right now. When Su-Hyeon’s mother, a woman obsessed with great mark sheets for her kids, got the papers leaked, the student would approach Choi Chi-Yeol with dispirited morale.

Chi-Yeol is furious and frustrated when he learns that he’s also become a part of this leak, even if inadvertently because he was the one who gave the director of the academy the contact info of the director of the school Su-Hyeon went to.

He didn’t know that this contact would be exploited by the student’s mother to get the questions leaked. However, the tragic outcome of this would be Su-Hyeon, who studied hard, now feeling hopeless because of school life and family life after the incident, finally committing suicide.

Later on, according to Jong-Ryeol, her mother would go insane and start obsessing over her brother even more, finally ending up jumping off a building. Su-Hyeon’s younger brother would go on to catch the allegations for his mother’s death but was later acquitted by the supreme court, following which he’d go missing.

Meanwhile, Choi Chi-Yeol would instantly confront his superior at the old academy who asked him for the foreign language school director’s number and help in leaking the questions.

While he warns the director that he’ll report him, the director tells Chi-Yeol to be wary of such an action, since it’d obviously lead Su-Hyeon’s mother being arrested, following which the kids would definitely suffer.

The director fires Chi-Yeol and the teacher accepts the situation as is, putting concerns for Su-Hyeon and her family over his ethics and departing the city. He’d later become a teacher at The Pride Academy, where he teaches currently.


Also Read: Crash Course in Romance season 1 episode 6 recap & review: There Are No Correct Answers in Life, Only Best Answers

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