Webtoon Spotlight

Spotlight#76: The Tragedy of Lookism's 4 Big Crews

Across many long-running webtoon series, I've gotten greeted with many antagonists. From Weak Hero's delinquent union, Apollo and Minthe from Lore Olympus, and God of Highschool's Nox. However, the titular Four Big Crews have proven to be a rather interesting subject for all webtoon. 

While some people in fandom have argued that the Four Big Crews have taken the story in an unfavorable direction from the slice of life genre it had, others praise them as some of the most complex and well-written characters in the series. However, today, I will be taking a far more different take as I explore the tragedy of the Four Big Crews and how they fit with the themes of Lookism.

Note

Since the Crews have a lot of history and subsections behind them, to make things a lot easier, this will mainly focus on the four heads of the crews (God Dog: Johan, Hostel B: Olly, Workers: Samuel, and Big Deal: Jake)while giving a decent description of their history and how they've run them. Now let's begin.

Johan Seong

Although Big Deal is the first of the 4 to make a full-on appearance, here is truly one member we need to talk about: Johan Seong. Because despite God Dog's listing as a crew, Johan has proven many times over that his potential easily eclipses the need for one. Gun and Goo have even acknowledged that Johan's potential is arguably the greatest of the series throughout the story. His ability to copy, adapt, and evolve as a fighter makes him the arguably most improved fighter series. Yet despite that, Johan I believe is the one who probably has suffered the most of the heads.

During his younger years, Johan had been born into poverty; the only thing holding himself together was his faith in God's mercy and his mother. But faith can only take you so far, and once he realized that the church they were associating with turned into a venomous cult when he realized that his mother's condition started to get even worse.  Johan turned his back on God and instead realized his potential.

 Unfortunately, and ironically, it was this lack of faith that proved to be his biggest downfall. Johan's forceful attitude and lack of leadership quickly turned any potential allies into nothing more than rabid traitors waiting for the moment to strike.

And yet after his betrayal Johan kept working, kept improving, realizing that to rely on himself fully, he needed to work even harder to win, similar to Daniel. He kept improving to the point he became his one-person wrecking crew free of all weaknesses, all to one day get revenge on Gun and get his mother the proper treatment she needed. But that once again proved to be a punishing mistake.

With the reveal of his now worsening blindness, his potential quickly fades away. He is nowhere close to beating Gun and saving his mother, even in this new state where he has nothing but revenge left in his heart. Nevertheless, the lonely rabid dog still decides to go in alone, if only because he genuinely believes all the more now that no one strong nor kind enough will help him.

Olly Wang

Out of the four, it could be considered that Olly had the most normal upbringing of the crews. However, much like many things in lookism, things aren't how they appeared at face value. Every minute of Olly's life was scheduled by his parents, meaning that it was no life at all for him. Combined with his inability to feel pain, the caged bird must've seen Eli as his light to freedom. The thing is though Olly never truly loved Eli, only the basic perceptions of him. This is probably the main reason that Olly would eventually twist Eli's worst traits to suit his own needs.