Jung Sang-guk

Jung Sang-guk is the former Mayor of Busan, an exile politician whose public charm conceals abuse, cowardice, and an elaborate defense of his own flight from Korea. His daughter Lee Ha-yul exposes and kills him in the House of Dolls route. In another cycle, Undertaker and Ha-yul preserve him as a gagged, restrained figurehead for the mobile Ark City BusaN. (Chapters 58–62 and 267–268)

Biography

Government in exile and the House of Dolls

Sang-guk escapes to Fukuoka and constructs a Second Provisional Government, approaching Undertaker with the polished rhetoric of a statesman seeking recognition. He claims that protecting a second family justified leaving Korea, but the House of Dolls strips away that public narrative. Ha-yul confines him, exposes the lies and abuse within their family, and forces him to face the daughter whose silence and dependence had made her easy to control. She ultimately kills him in that cycle. (Chapters 58–62)

An alternate route keeps Sang-guk alive for utility rather than mercy. Restrained, gagged, and placed in a wheelchair or torture chair, he becomes the symbolic mayor mounted on Ark City BusaN. His old office supplies legitimacy to the mobile city even when he possesses no practical authority. The arrangement reverses his earlier politics: the man who manipulated institutions now survives as an institution's coerced emblem under Ha-yul and Undertaker's control. (Chapters 267–268)

Appearance and personality

Sang-guk is an older Korean politician often shown smoking, carrying himself with practiced confidence, and later confined to a wheelchair or restraint chair. He is charming, articulate, and self-justifying in public, but frightened and manipulative when control slips away. His attachment to family is not wholly false, yet it is inseparable from abuse, concealment, and a willingness to make others carry the cost of his survival. (Chapters 58–62 and 267–268)

Abilities and skills

No personal supernatural ability is confirmed. Sang-guk's strengths are ordinary political competencies: organizational leadership, persuasive rhetoric, office-building, and the symbolic capital of having served as mayor. He also possesses prior StarCraft skill, a small human detail beside the larger abuse narrative. In BusaN, even those competencies are displaced; his title and body matter more than any action he can independently take. (Chapters 58–62 and 267–268)

Relationships

• Lee Ha-yul: Ha-yul is his daughter, victim, jailer, and repeated killer. Her control of his body turns the power relationship that defined her childhood against him. (Chapters 59–62 and 267–268)
• Undertaker: Undertaker first meets Sang-guk as a political contact, helps expose him, and later uses him as a living civic figurehead on BusaN. (Chapters 58–62 and 267–268)

Items

• Portable ashtray: Sang-guk's smoking accessory reinforces the cultivated manner of the exile politician. (Chapters 58–59)
• Gloves: His gloves belong to the controlled public presentation through which he conceals vulnerability and wrongdoing. (Chapters 58–62)
• Wheelchair or torture chair: In later routes, restraints and a chair fix him in place as either captive or symbolic mayor rather than a governing leader. (Chapters 60–62 and 267–268)