
You said it perfectly, my heart breaks for him, and it’s wild to me how badly yujun thinks of him, cause in their relationship in the past it felt as if he was seeing past jihos self defense walls of being an apathetic ass, he was seeing that he’s not actually like that that jiho does love and care and connect wih him etc, but now that he was gone he just went to hating him as if he never knew him/?? Oh pity me oh I’ve been suffering oh he left without a word, my guy it’s enough of the pity party
I’m hella sad for jiho ESPECIALLY if it does actually go in the direction of them being just sex partners and him feeling like it’s the least he can do and the most he deserves

Just looked at the rest of the comments after this and it’s breaking my brain how everyone’s saying “yes use him and throw him away too” like are we reading the same thing, did we not watch the situation jiho is dealing with? Did we not watch him actually love and care for him to his core? How are even the readers acting like “oh he played and tossed him away and never cared and deserves revenge” what the actual fuck

genuinely same i usually don’t get into discourse in the comments but seeing all these comments hoping that yujun pumps and dumps jiho made me so angry. i can see why people wouldn’t want them to get together in the end, but to encourage further toxic behavior patterns as the best case scenario for this pairing makes me wonder how many people think like this irl. how would yujun taking some sort of revenge make anything better for either of them? did we not read the same story, showing each of them suffering through their own trauma? why does one deserve a good ending and not the other? did we really not see jiho suffer enough?
i feel like everyone in the comments would’ve watched 500 days of summer and thought summer should die as if tom didn’t force his own fantasies onto her

I haven't read this yet, but this fandom give me ptsd of litc bc of how bad Skylar hate was on tiktok, and I've seen a bunch of hate comment from this fandom for jiho (on TikTok) to the point I remember his name despite not reading this yet. I have a feeling those tiktok readers mischaracterize his character so much, and I have a feeling I would agree with your take about the complexity of the characters in this mahwa. Would read this soon.

I feel like in general ppl have a “during conflict pick one character and hate the other” syndrome no Matter the detail of the situation or past surface level analysis, another comment section that broke my brain was ppl siding with the bottom and hating the top in Dog Daze, so ye the 500 days of summer part doesn’t seem implausible to me
look, they’re both selfish, and with BPD, i’ve been in both of their shoes. but yujun really gets on my nerves. for the entirety of the past 6 years, he was only thinking about himself. how much jiho hurt /him/. how much pain /he/ was in. constantly thinking “what did /i/ do”. never once considering that maybe it wasn’t really to do with him.
the rumours around the school after jiho left were all talking about jiho’s alleged affair with the school nurse, right after jiho came to him physically and emotionally beaten up. he couldn’t put the two and two together to figure out that something bad happened. he never noticed jiho’s absent family situation. all this time it was only about his pain. even now, he doesn’t even really give jiho the chance to talk. he’s just unleashing his own pain onto him, not once wondering if /jiho/ was okay.
jiho on the other hand was assaulted and then had his whole life upended by his father. everyone blamed him, and he believes it’s entirely his fault because he’s inherently broken. so he doesn’t deserve love or care, only pain. yujun’s reaction to seeing him again only cements this fact, and it hurts, because a part of him always hoped that yujun would always love him. yujun’s feelings for him were his solace in painful times, and he hated himself for even having that hope, so now it feels like a punch in the gut.
while it’s definitely not up to yujun to save jiho, nor vice versa, for them to come out of this, yujun is gonna need to be the first to pull his head out of his ass. otherwise what’s gonna happen is that we’ll see a situation akin to that in lover boy — yujun, in all of his rage, will pull jiho into a vengeful relationship, likely along the lines of “let’s just use each other for our bodies”; jiho, who already feels like that’s all he deserves, and looking for release through such self-harm, will agree. they’ll keep hurting themselves and each other more and more until one of them breaks, or until jiho’s father inevitably catches a whiff it, blames jiho again, and sends him away once more.
and the lot of you will just keep saying that’s what jiho deserves.