Hui-Jae is one of the more mystical characters in the Korean rom-com Crash Course in Romance, playing a role with seemingly primary antagonistic motivations and a penchant for murder.
Crash Course has a fair share of antagonistic characters that make up the villainous side of the central storyline.
While the show doesn’t necessarily need a genre-style antagonist who operates from the shadows — the obsessive moms make for really great villains just fine — there is one regardless, and his motivations remain in dark thus far.
Introductory rundown
Hui-Jae is Sun-Jae’s elder brother. He’s also the metal ball attacker who’s been involved with a couple of characters’ deaths so far in the series, with Chi-Yeol being the primary target in these serial killings/attacks.
Always sporting a hoodie, Hui-Jae moonlights as a clear giveaway in the streets of midnight Korea. Walking in the vicinity of those who will eventually fall to their deaths is his favorite activity.
The list of victims
The first victim he’s shown to claim the life of is the obsessive student fan of Chi-Yeol, the same girl who stages a fake scandalous scenario targeting the star math teacher and further dragging his name through the mud on social media platforms.
The preferred choice of weapon to kill the victims is metal balls thrown at high velocity. One of these balls shatters the glass of the ‘Nation’s Best Banchan’ shop, where Chi-Yeol, along with Haeng-Seon, Yeong-Ju, and Jae-Woo all dodge the hit.
The next victim of the hoodied-up Hui-Jae is Lee Young-Min, a bratty kid from an influential family, who boasts about his unethical and unfair entry into the Pride Academy’s special program, which clearly seems to perturb Hui-Jae who happened to be nearby at the moment.
Not long after that, he follows Young-Min, and the latter catches on to his killer’s intentions when he’s hit by balls, running off to the academy and eventually thrown off the building to his death, and the last person to stand in front of him before his eventual mortal fall is Hui-Jae.
Detective Bae, who was instantly alerted by the suspiciousness surrounding Young-Min’s presumed suicide, has already caught up to Hui-Jae and highly suspects him to be the murderer.
He’s figured out the metal balls are the weapon of choice in all the fatal killings of both the human victim he’s investigating, as well as the cats whose deaths were reported to him by an old woman, with the same metal balls found in the vicinity of the crime scene.
Future & past
However, Detective Bae is yet to track down Hui-Jae and nab him, while the latter’s motivations in all of this morbidity are still unknown.
Hui-Jae is Sun-Jae’s elder brother and suffered treatment from her mother same as the one Sun-Jae’s currently being given.
From the fights between the dysfunctional Ms. Jang and her husband, it’s revealed that the former has always been the mother obsessed with her children’s education and wants them to excel at their studies, akin to almost all the moms in the show.
From all that’s been revealed about his past, it’s clear that Ms. Jang became obsessed with his education which ultimately put an incredible amount of pressure on him and he ended up failing his exams.
As a result, he ran out of his home and was eventually brought back, and ever since then, he’s become a shut-in, confining himself within his room and rarely ever coming out of it. However, recently his activities have become common and he gets out a lot for a person who’s such an extremely anti-social person.
The latest development in Hui-Jae’s storyline is that his mom has caught up to his suspicious activities a bit, even unearthing the metal balls he has in his drawers. Earlier, she overheard Detective Bae talking about an attacker using metal balls as his weapon.
It’s inevitable that Ms. Jang would connect the dots and figure out what Hui-Jae’s role in all of the recent morbidity around town has been. But what’s intriguing is what her decision will be, considering it’s her son and she’s been shown to have flexible ethics.
Also Read: Choi Chi-Yeol’s dark past in Crash Course in Romance explained