There is a thing about poorly written protagonists that makes us not care about them. Everything they do ends up being random instead of making sense as part of a character graph. However, we will try our best to bring it together in this analysis of what made Seo A Ri from Celebrity tick. She had been on both sides of the coin, and that meant that she understood wealth and power in a way others didn’t. It is important to remember that Seo A Ri was dealing with very one-dimensional characters, and what set her apart was her supposed complexity in contrast to them. Now that we have clarified that, let us note that Seo A Ri only cared to bring others down if they were deliberately in her way. While the Gabin Society in Celebrity was constantly plotting and backstabbing each other all the time, with their success depending on how much they could step over the other person, Seo A Ri cared about how she could improve herself. She only ever showed people their place when they tried to undermine her.
Seo A Ri had grown up wealthy, but she was a different kind of wealthy, as in, she was not proud of it, unlike her mother or her other rich friends. Her friend, Min Hye, also claims to have come from a rich family, but we don’t think that is the truth, considering how taken in she was by A Ri’s Burberry bag. She would have no reason to be jealous of A Ri if she was also just as rich. When they are trying to protect themselves from the rain, A Ri has no problem using her bag as her umbrella, but Min Hye would rather get wet than use the bag. The name of the brand was far more precious to her than the utility of the bag, in contrast to Seo A Ri, who says that things are for using and not showing off. This difference was to establish that Seo A Ri had a lot more depth to her right from her childhood. When A Ri’s father passed away, she had to leave behind the college of her dreams and take up a job far beneath her capabilities to sustain herself and her family. A Ri was old enough when this happened, which means that she witnessed and understood the different ways in which people started treating her when she had no money.
While Seo A Ri’s mother still liked to bring up that they were rich and should think like that, A Ri was much more grounded in reality. She worked hard and saved up to fend for herself and her family. She was even successful in sending her brother to college, as she wanted to. But years later, in Celebrity, her past finally caught up to her. When she met Min Hye, she remembered what the taste of money was like. It was a memory of all the things she could be but had to forget about. Unlike others, A Ri treated wealth with care and did not consider it just something to exhibit. But that doesn’t mean that she didn’t want the ease of life that came with having money. It is probably what made her so curious about the influencers and why she kept getting involved in their world.
When A Ri realized that she could be one of them, she saw no reason to hold herself back. After all, people wanted to know what she had to say, and A Ri thought of herself as the “ethical rich,” as in, she won’t act the way Min Hye or Jun Kyeong did towards those with lesser privileges than hers. She was confident that she would be a better master of fame than the others were, so why shouldn’t she take the step to better her life with that? Hence began her journey to be one of the best influencers out there. But the entire Gabin society hated her guts because of their system of hierarchy. They liked to think they were above others because more people followed them and liked their photos, and they were also the first to wear the latest trends. When A Ri beat them to it, they couldn’t handle being second to her, not realizing that they had long forgotten the creativity of their job due to this game of numbers in Celebrity. It wasn’t just that they wanted to be at the top; they wanted everyone else to be at the bottom, and that is why they worked so hard to bring down A Ri because it was her success more than their own failures that was pinching them hard.
A Ri knew that there was no cure for this. She knew that she couldn’t knock some sense into these people. They did not care about anyone or anything; they just wanted to have the most followers. When she saw the extent they were willing to go to—enough that it put Jun Kyeong in jeopardy and killed Mr. Park while taking her mother to jail—she knew that she would have to find a way to make them listen. Since everything they did was for attention, she would use that very thing against them. Her driving off into the water was not just an impulsive self-destructive act but the first step of her revenge. Public opinion was firmly set against her, with everyone calling for her death, saying that she had driven Mr. Park to suicide. When people say these things, they are being malicious with no thought about the repercussions of their words. Whether we like to face this fact or not, people use influencers’ feuds to take out their own frustrations, as we witnessed with Soon Young.
The allegation against Seo A Ri just became another way for them to be the judge, jury, and executioner in a matter where they knew that their words might have an effect, unlike their own lives, which were often governed by factors outside their control. A truly content person might have called for a more thorough investigation of the matter instead of asking Seo A Ri to die. A Ri knew the flimsy nature of public support, and sadly, this is what her entire life depended on. That is why she drove into the water, knowing that once these people saw the actual consequences of their harsh words, they would be forced to reconsider their words and their entire stance on the matter. They would have to think whether they were right in judging A Ri a certain way. This was the attention A Ri wanted, and she got it. Everything that followed was a piece of cake. She had said the same things before as well, but Min Hye’s words had gotten more attention because they were coated with tears. Now, A Ri had come back from the dead, and nothing could be more effective than that. She had the investigation into the man’s death conducted as she needed it to be done and cleared her name in the entire matter. Once everything was over, she decided that she was also done being an influencer. But someone who understands power the way A Ri does is not meant to be on the sidelines, and we don’t doubt that it is only a matter of time before she comes back to the virtual world in Celebrity.
