Was Kim Jon-Ill this bad in real life? Making soldiers watch movies with him, eating while talking, being racist to the citizens of the only country willing to take him in. I’d never imagine he’d be so bad his own son would casually dismiss his kidnapping. Like
@Sorairo what sources did you use to find this information? I’m curious to know if this attitude is based on reality or just an exaggeration of his character to make him seem worse than he really was.
The North Korean state is a black hole, now compounded by the events of TTL that would surely have made things exponentially worse for Kim's psyche. As a writer, one has to express the tendencies and brushstrokes of the characters, rather than try to photographically record them. Kim is widely believed to have been a psychopath from a young age (he supposedly murdered another child when he was one), and in an environment where he was treated as a God he would therefore have no one to counteract his negative tendencies with the possible exception of his father.
On the eating when talking, I got it from a documentary I watched a while back, though I don't recall if it was a metaphor for how evil he was (the full anecdote was of eating lobster while giving off about the citizens complaining about starving but the implied detail of eating while talking subtly showed his lack of social development and gave a sense of lack of cleanliness). On the racism, it's simply an extension of North Korean racial beliefs (I know people who've been to North Korea who have attested similar experiences) - it's not a dig at the Chinese in particular, a lot of internal North Korean propaganda revolved around South Koreans becoming mongrelised due to US soldiers. The movies part is a reflection of his obsession with creating internationally successful films in the 1980s - Kim also loved Bond films and modelled his own spy operations off them.
At the end of the day, I am not writing the OTL Kim Jong-Il - I am writing a Kim Jong-Il who has lost his empire, has been cast from power and now has to effectively hide in exile from his home country where everyone wants him dead. I had to decide how that would effect him, and I guessed that he would feel bitter and ergo would probably care less and hate more than he already did, perhaps longing and boasting of the glory days. Ultimately, Kim is in the category of people (like Hitler) where his character is so base as to be impossible to defame.
