“My fear was actually the cause of my inability to trust people. Fear of being deceived. Fear of being lied to. My fear of people was stealing from me the freedom of thought.”
RIP To my Youth | The Neighbourhood
Mad Hatter | Melanie Martinez
Catch No Feelings | Drake
Mad Hatter | Melanie Martinez
Catch No Feelings | Drake
Name:
Jude Joong-Ki Ahn
Age:
21
Gender:
Male
Sexuality:
Pansexual || Panromantic
Ethnicity:
East-Asian || South Korean
Jude Joong-Ki Ahn
Age:
21
Gender:
Male
Sexuality:
Pansexual || Panromantic
Ethnicity:
East-Asian || South Korean
["You’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that."
Appearance:
Jude stands at 6 feet tall, his body thin and fingers long and dotted around his knuckles are tiny scars. His hair is dark and messy, often in a state of dishevelment, as if tousled by a constant wind. Thanks to having two dental hygiene professional for parents his teeth are straight and immaculately white, and it's not uncommon for him to grin solely to show them off. Aside from how bright his teeth are his eyes are also considered unusual, his eyelids asymmetrical with the left a smooth monolid while his right eye differs with its defined double lid – and to top it all off there are two small scars lying across his monolid. Currently Jude has two tattoos, one on his left arm of a whale, and the other a ringlet on his right.
Secret:
Failure to commit to a suicide pact.
Ever the leader of misfits and damaged youth Jude is hiding what led to a certain tragedy of December, when a group of four ended their lives together by jumping off of a bridge. Two knew Jude through a psychiatric ward, another knew him through a familiar party scene, and the last met him online - and he had brought them together, forming a group of 'friendship', the five bonding over the similar tumults of their personal lives and chronic suicide ideation. It was him who brought it up first, because it was be better to die together, and they met up, all five in the same place for the first and final time. Yet he couldn't go through with it, and he stood on that bridge after they all had fallen, and ran soon after, hiding the truth with his guilt.
"Evil has ways of surprising one. Suddenly it turns round and says: ‘You have misunderstood me,’ and perhaps it really is so. Evil transforms itself into your own lips, lets itself be gnawed at by your teeth, and with these new lips—no former ones fitted smoothly to your gums—to your own amazement you utter the words of goodness."
Personality:
No impulse control, blaring, indistinct music, impatience and loud laughter – this is Jude: artificial flavors, smoke machines, pressing down on the accelerator, detox smoothies made to cure hangovers. He’s been enjoying the fast lane since he became a teenager and still has a liking for trouble and fun, and being overtly social he has the tendency to pull people into his world, taking them away on road trips and impromptu basement concerts. Jude smiles wildly and lives freely, following his instincts and selfish desires wherever they take him and being responsible isn’t something he’s known for. He’s prone to disappearing for weeks to embark on a last-minute adventure and can hardly stick to a ‘normal’ job for a few months at a time, and it seems the only reason why he remembers to pay bills at all is because other people are there to remind him that yes, he needs to pay to keep his phone on.
Perhaps it was pressure and the lack of affection growing up that did him in, maybe growing up wealthy made him lazy and indifferent, or it could have been his family’s cold, solemn demeanors that led him to become so abrasive and reactive. All the bad feelings are suppressed with alcohol and dream-like adventures filled with people who do not care about his wellbeing. There’s little motivation within him to live and make a life for himself and he’s not interested in getting a degree or making a family, rather he questions his existence and wanders closer to the edge. To truly trust people is a foreign concept, and he’s detached from others, feeding into the mentality of fending for himself despite always being surrounded by crowds of people, because he can’t hold onto them. To be Jude Ahn is to despise permanence and absolutes, it’s to run towards destruction with open arms and cover up the bruises of existence, so no one ever sees.
Talents:
Music Arrangement & Knowledge
Mixing Drinks (and holding his liquor)
Orchestrating Road Trips
Weaknesses:
Impulsive & Reactive
Suicide Ideation
Academia
Fears:
Dying
Trusting Other People
Imprisonment
"There is sadness lurking even in gilded palaces, you can’t escape from it anywhere."
History:
He could almost laugh at how stereotypical his family is.
He’s a part of a third generation of immigrants, his grandparents paving the way with their hardships and unwavering strength, and his parents solidifying their place in America with relentless work ethic and pride. The second son of an orthodontist and a dentist Jude grew up as a symbol of envy for his peers – his family’s house was large with a pool, luxury cars parked in the driveway and his cabinets were always stocked with too much liquor for his parents to manage. His parents, David and Crystal Ahn, were pillars in their community with many of the residents visiting their clinic at least once a year for all their oral care, and while his parents were away at work, or at conferences or overseas vacations, Jude learned he could fill his endless free time with the finer things in life, such as not needing to worry about a future he didn’t need to work for and spending his youth drinking and causing trouble, using a credit card to fund parties and trips to the woods or sea.
But if Jude Ahn was infamous for his troublesome deeds, then his older brother Elliot was famous for his unsullied, perfect record. At home he heard enough of it, Elliot was the child that embodied everything his parents wanted; he achieved amazing grades and later graduated as valedictorian, he balanced extracurriculars in the school’s debate team and a youth filled orchestra, and he fled to Harvard as soon as he could. Jude never saw eye-to-eye with Elliot, the older critical and serious, but he was there to remind his parents of their differences – to not expect Jude to be a Harvard student in the first place – and he kept him from tipping over the edge. He wasn’t perfect like his brother, and his parents combated his diagnosis of ADD and dyslexia with long tutoring seasons, heavy medication and lectures, and he was never meant to be a Harvard graduate (he preferred music and art and film) and at least his brother saw that.
Once Elliot left his remaining years in high school met turmoil, he lived loudly and hid himself simultaneously, concealing his fears with drunkenness and intoxicated drives to nowhere. It made no difference if the majority of his company came from people looking for free Adderall, he desperately tried to fill the growing despair in his chest with anything – anyone – he could find, only to greet senior year with an act of submission, a suicide attempt leading to the sterile halls of a psychiatric ward. And that’s where he met people more like himself, people that are both silent and scream so loudly, and they formed a bond over their scars and met two more like them, all five teenagers believing they wanted to descend into nonexistence. If they couldn’t do it alone, then they should be able to die together – at least they wouldn’t be lonely, and that’s what Jude said to them as they held hands at the edge of a bridge, peering down into the mouth of the next world.
They jumped – and he let go, his feet stayed planted on the ground with his heart hammering in his chest, and they fell soundlessly, and he walked away with new demons, regrets and fears. “They’ll haunt me.” He whispered then. “I took the lead but couldn’t follow, I led them to deaths – doesn’t that make me a murderer? Now I’ll be torn apart in death just as I was in life.” The families mourned and he attended no funerals - instead he tried to commit suicide again last summer, going back into the hospital and again into the world - because he knows that someone must have read the IM exchanges of their group chat, someone has to know that there’s another who should be dead with them that isn’t, and he wonders if there’s someone chasing him, ready to take him down to Hell.
