if you like feeling bad you'll love this

dropped at ch59
i haven't been this angry at a manhwa since Even if You Don't Love Me.
so let's recap
s1 was okay.
s2 either feels like an entirely different author or author took their brain out of their head. it was such narrative whiplash it was like an entirely different genre.
kind and naive rich young man turned into slave, raped repeatedly and held captive by his insane childhood friend who actively ruined his life in every possible way, turning him cold and heartless and proving that being a good person is a Bad Thing.
insane shitty fuckass childhood friend stays winning until FUCKING CHAPTER 50
the once-adorable namwoo spends until ch50 or whatever either suffering or just not there at all.
seriously why was he even in the story. i guess he and the mc reunite or whatever but i just don't care anymore bc by ch59 their vibes are so off it's just uncomfortable to read. mc is traumatized in the most clumsily-excuted and cliche way and namwoo has always been a lamp, a weak foil to fuckass's Plot Cruelty and that still has not changed. it's not balanced and so it just seems like fuckass was the main character. the author spent so much time on his backstory and trauma and motivations that there almost seemed like no other point to the other characters. this is an example of someone who spent way too much time justifying their villain's motivations and then wanted everyone to know.
I was just skipping chapter after chapter after chapter of the fuckass raping the mc over and over again. the amount of time the author spent on that was so ludicrous it became borderline fetishistic or just lazy filler. whatever story was sandwiched in between of allathat could have been wrapped up in like, half a chapter. at least fucking SKIP some of it we KNOW he's being raped day and night do i have to see it every single goddamned time? I literally could not give less of a flying fuck for the literal rapist's pathetic whiny internal monologue about how much he wants to be called fucking hyungnim jesus christ. wrap. it. up.
and then yay mc wins and he's not a slave anymore! but no THAT'S what we get half a chapter of. then his mother dies and he almost dies too. at that point i really had had it. bro what is this writing.
there's no break to the shit piled on the characters. The pacing doesn't give you a second to breathe and has no variation from repeated tragedy. it ends up feeling dramatic but in a campy, clownish, forced way rather than based out of relatable reactions to the narrative. even the good things that happen are either rushed or straight up paid for in blood. there is no happiness in this universe, only zuul.
even whatever political intrigue slipped in was vague and ill-researched. why exactly did mc's entire family, to include the repeatedly narratively-established extremely honorable and talented and well known family members up and down the tree, do to lose their entire fortune and their political standing, to the point of the utter destruction of an entire branch of said tree?? s1 made SO MUCH to-do about how sought-after mc and his family were and how everybody respected them and were squabbling for a chance to lick their boots and it changed in like two whole chapters. what faction was he a part of?? what appeal did he put up that pissed off the emporer or whatever SO bad?? did they call the emperor a doody-head??
at this point whatever ending the author comes to will always feel anticlimactic. it will always feel massively unbalanced by almost a hundred chapters (and who the fuck knows what horrors s3 has in store for us--i will certainly never know bc i won't be reading it) of the kind of trauma that would in any universe that made sense make people just end it.
authors like this piss me off. just write the tragedy you wanted to write and have everyone die.
if you enjoy tragic stories, I truly hope you found this a good one. but i don't, and i wasted my time reading it