this story reminds me of that tweet thats like “sometimes people exist to do the most horrendous inexplicable shit to each other then die #wutheringheights”
i see this in media a lot and unfortunately i also see it in real life. the overgeneralisation people are prone to do when they’re brainwashed into their elders’ bigotry gets me so bad. i hate the whole my bastard uncle killed my legitimate parents so i will also treat you a bastard daughter like shit storyline. because its an artistically lazy at best and flagitiously ignorant at worst attempt at characterisation. (you see this a lot in fantasy. eg: my parents were killed by vampires ergo i will kill every vampire to ever exist like yea bro commit genocide and drive a species to extinction this will in no way perpetuate generations of looping cycles of violence producing countless assholes like you who think the indiscriminate killing of any people justifiable so long as they hurt you via the constant reproduction of victims like yourself. youre so right.) (and this is not an anti-revenge message, dont get me wrong, i think you should get to kill the asshole who killed the mother you love. but thats almost never the case. instead theyre killing a bunch of vampires who got nothing to do with them just because theyre vampires. like ok you sound like a cop. die.) how, in the most genuine fuck possible, does one piece of shit illegitimate child make every illegitimate child equally complicit in his crime? do you fucking hear yourself?? a fully grown man and he doesn’t even have the mental capacity to ponder? to question?? to hold space for fucking whimsy???
whats more important to note about this is not the way in which this flimsy hot bag of air storyline attempts to excuse his feudalist prejudice via trauma, but the way it ultimately didnt even matter. because sure it might have excused, if youre dumb as a rock or naive as a doe i suppose, the beginning of their relationship, the schemes he orchestrated, but he married her bro. he lived in the same house as her bro. do you know how hard it is to actively ignore the existence of someone you are married to, share a house with, and fuck often? really. super. fucking difficult. it requires an extreme level misogynistic inhumanity through which he viewed his own wife for him to be able to continue living that way for several years. literally drawing the curtains close at the sight of her. the comments make it clear that we all hate this man and for that i am glad but i think its important still to label the ways in which he used like her like a sex object then exclusive womb, literally reducing a woman down her functions like an animal (vitriolic misogyny). and the way the story excuses him in order to, i assume, assure some semblance of a future romance in some capacity (also vitriolic misogyny).
its not just the character but also the people who created that character, who give that character the leeway to be excused of all his crimes. because the cleaning house and actually looking his son in the fucking eye is that. excusing his crime (because accountability is to be held responsible, to bear blame in essence, and he didn’t do that did he? no he just killed everybody else. how predictable). he neglected her, dismissed her, lied to her, forced her, abused her and held her captive. but its fine now because he killed the people who did exactly as their master had done and treated her like shit. what did he think was going to happen? the body moves with the head. you should not be allowed access to such power and be characterised as a brilliant schemer if you are so dead behind the eyes and rotten in the brain and low of intellect that you could not see the ways in which a head of house’s mistreatment of one person enabled their mistreatment by the hands of everybody else. none of it even means anything because shes dead now. but the story, i believe will attempt to make it matter by bringing her back into the hellhole she despised so greatly that she drank poison to escape from like fuck! god gives my girl nothing!!! and sure hes grieving but thats hardly suffering in my opinion, youre supposed to fucking do that anyway. if shes just going to come back and hes just going to get everything he wants in the end and the story is just going to make it out to be that shes happy and that’s all that matters then its just another cishetero patriarchy propaganda piece trying to normalise the women end up with their children’s father fantasy. and most of us here i believe have seen in our lives the numerous ways in which that is just pure fiction.
the main reason that i wanted to leave this comment was to say that us here raging in the comments, wishing this man pain and everyone wondering how the story is even going to progress, is ragebaiting in its purest form. this is how the author manipulates you into consuming a story that has no fucking weight or worth in any way. i know because ive seen the people’s reactions on webtoon and several other manga forums where this story is being updated. this is not to attempt to police what anyone is consuming, i cant stop you nor do i want to. this is just to say that the reason youre reading it and the reason i read it, is because we’re being actively manipulated into engaging and i think thats worth saying.
the official translation is literally so trash. i am always grateful to jujucat for feeding the class but why is bestie juju having to pay for genuinely one of the worst official translation i done ever seen? like sorry are we seriously sticking with boy when they are having raw sex in a few chapters?? knotting and everything??? (╯°Д°) ╯
moonflowergem would have never done this to us
everything by garamdal is so boring. the premise always promise so much and the actual story is always a let down
we need to all grab a garden shovel or a fucking gun and free my girl
i kind of enjoyed the bigender take of 15 year old girl being also 200 year old man like,,, relatable! but i dont see it to be trans allegory in any way because there is no sense of dysphoria or incongruence with what shuria is seen as by society and what she perceived herself to be for a very long time as amarzan which is pretty essential to the newly transitioned experience nor does the story have any subtext regarding other aspects of the trans experience like gender euphoria and questioning of gender norms etc. but what is very much a part of the trans experience is the fuckass prince’s response like so what if the girl you love is also the 200 year old man who rules the north, does that change the game? you literally saw her apathy first hand yearsss ago! get up and get over yourself!!
the premise is complete crack on fire but there is actually a lot of potential for the story to explore the genuine power of friendship in the way that we all know a good friend can better save you from seemingly the worst despairs when we are much more likely to search for that saviour in lust and romance and disappoint ourselves even further iykyk. my point is the insane level of depression and suicidality sion expressed by killing the hildegards every single time has made the whole story so far about fear (his pain battling the evil identity / her murder) and grief (her future potential [dreaming of reaching 90] / his familys future potential [dubbing the hero cassion after his brother]) thus his growing obsession with her (because she performs emotional labour wow how revolutionary) as well as the introduction of black haired red eyed boy will crush all of that potential underfoot to pursue some half baked bitchass romance (im not going to explain to you that no one should fall in love or pursue a relationship with someone that has killed them seven times / someone they have killed seven times. you should know that from like common sense) so whilst i can only see this story as one with genuine depth if the main characters do not fall in love, its clear where the story is going…(￣ε(#￣)Σ
i finished this story because i bulk bought it on tapas for the main story and honestly i regret persevering through it. the side stories were better than the main but i think too much is missing in context for it to be consumed separately.
all in all, she was sold like a broodmare by her own father at age of 11 to man i approximate to be 21 from the clues, a political manoeuvre she remained completely ignorant to for the sake of securing support for a prince that was to die a death only an inch less pathetic than being shot on the toilet, prior to which she was told by her father never to return, during which she was neglected and scorned in her home for being what if not being a child then by her own accounts raped (because i do not know what succumbing to him means but that cannot be fulfilling any tenets of consent) every time he went off to war, thrown out of the land she was sold to when zachary died like the stupid fuck he is, left to starve and died in some abbey only for god to turn back time so that she could die giving birth to an heir that must exist?! what level of bioessentialist fuckery must one possess to write a story in which the purpose of their main character’s entire existence is to have some white guy’s child because said child would unify the continent??? im convinced she has gone insane from the trauma of her previous life because the level of pure delusion required to accept being the saint of such a god requires the abandonment of all sanity.
im not even angry anymore because i was angry the whole time i read this and now im just exhausted. this whole story is exhausting. it is so tiring to read stories of women and girls being forced to perform emotional labour to save men from themselves/each other so that the women/girls in question will not become canon fodder for their capital gains or personal development. it is draining to read about her happiness being entirely dependent upon her husband’s power and the children she bore for him like some kind of incubator you take to the ball. sure you could make the argument that she is a saint (with the power to do what beside help her husband lmao) that she brought lace to arno but is any of that independent from zachary? no. he can have all his achievements for himself but everything she achieves is tied to the duchy which belongs to him. if i wanted fuckass misogyny masquerading as white feminism i would just look outside why would i pay for it
there is so much of this story that just did not make sense to me. 1) why they fell in love or what they fell in love with because they seem to have just clung onto each other for survival like what did zachary love if not pussy (since she was fifteen no less,,, kill him!! i need him hung and quartered, i need him gunned down in the streets like a ceo) and what did she love if not the future in which he existed thus she did not suffer (as much)? what annoyed me about the tone of the epilogue was the narrator acting as though this somehow became a marriage of love when it is still very much a marriage of convenience. this is just two people, abandoned by their family, trauma bonding and for some reason we’re calling romance. lets be so serious. 2) the antagonist was the second prince but how is her father not the ultimate villain in all this? if he was just remotely fucking for real he would have thought, being a man of paper as they so claimed, damn i should write to my daughter, that my wife died to have, which i sold like livestock, because surely her coming home to see people who dont fucking hate her guts would not for some reason nullify a marriage?? is that not basic math or simple logic or common fucking sense oh my gods. i need this man to be thrown at the sun i dont want a molecule of him to remain. the fact that her father didn’t even know she was upset with him to me displays the depth with which he did not even consider her to be a person because even if the subject in question were a dog and not a child i still would have visited something known and precious to me for eleven years. if he had empathised with her grief and anger for a single moment, im convinced that he would have drowned. 3) is more general but i have always questioned the cishetero patriarchy not on a ‘moral’ basis at first but more on a logical one because how does it make sense that women cant inherit titles when the children comes out of them? “you can never trust that the child belongs to the man because you never know where the woman have been” men claim to scorn a woman’s sexual history but you leave the title to them when they fuck anything thats remotely warm? you dont need a paternity if you can hear the screams of labour through the door babe. this is my problem with the patriarchy, its fucking stupid. yall sound like the dumbest person to have ever crawled to earth.
ceasar slitting his throat because leewon tried to break up with his is a) classic manipulative tactic of an abusive relationship but also b) he should have let him lmaoo. pick up the gun babe ill even cock it for you say ahhh
gabriel is so annoying to be honest. he is the definition of those uwu im just a babygworl people when in actuality he is merely a man incapable of acknowledging his capacity for evil because he has this whole holy knight of the holy empire rotten chip on his righteous fucking shoulders that makes him habitually situate himself in a position of innocence so that he can never see himself guilty. the level of delusion required for his character to function disgusts me. more than that, the way gabriel is interested in ariadne is so jail like why are you a nineteen year old looking at a fourteen year old like that when even her husband who is much closer to her did not register any sexual interest until he saw her as a fully grown twenty year old?? brother eughhh
harace’s character is so anthropocentric he sounds stupid. i do think that members of a specific species can often realise the scope of that species failings a lot more jarringly than members outside of that species. thus while i can see that vampires seemingly treated other species like cattle would explain why harace who has been socialised into human society would see such inhumane behaviour to be monstrous, i can’t see how he would generalise that monstrosity into a representation of his whole species (without systemic indoctrination) and i certainly can’t see how heilo indiscriminately killing vampires just because his family was killed by one vampire is somehow a proportionate response and not genocidal behaviour. that’s like saying my family was murdered by clowns so i have to personally assassinate all clowns because they are all capable of annihilating families. its so fucking unserious. literally giving the critical thinking skill of a seven year old. the author who built these characters need to first build themselves.
harace’s character is so anthropocentric he sounds stupid. i do think that members of a specific species can often realise the scope of that species failings a lot more jarringly than members outside of that species. thus while i can see that vampires seemingly treated other species like cattle would explain why harace who has been socialised into human society would see such inhumane behaviour to be monstrous, i can’t see how he would generalise that monstrosity into a representation of his whole species (without systemic indoctrination) and i certainly can’t see how heilo indiscriminately killing vampires just because his family was killed by one vampire is somehow a proportionate response and not genocidal behaviour. that’s like saying my family was murdered by clowns so i have to personally assassinate all clowns because they are all capable of annihilating families. its so fucking unserious. literally giving the critical thinking skill of a seven year old. the author who built these characters need to first build themselves.
between the father brother teacher lover friend bomb and the cliffhanger. im choosing to hyperfixate on the cliffhanger instead. its so ridiculous when they put a white rag over a character’s mouth to knock them out because chloroform is not going to make a grown man drop from a single whiff. they are much more likely to die from suffocation in the time it takes for chloroform to affect consciousness. thus people used chloroform in this manner to kill people not kidnap them. could have just hit him in the head with a baseball bat. much more accurate and would have taken the same amount of panels in a chapterヾ(╹◡╹)ﾉ~
whenever i see shit like this, i am reminded of my best friend’s motto: i don’t believe in the prison industrial complex but i do believe in murder. because why drag this out when the plot is thinner than the hair of an unloved white man. put us both out of our misery and pick up the gun babygworl
how is this, i mean lee and han becoming romantic or whatever ┑(￣Д ￣)┍, even supposed to happen exactly? because from where im standing han is no different to lee’s highschool rapists. how can the author even defend him after something like this to justify some resemblance of a happy ending? i mean, im sure we have all read worse, but you cannot possibly tell me that han didn’t know how inexperienced lee was when they didn’t even establish a safe word, the foundation of any bdsm play, let alone an ongoing arrangement, until like the third session?? what also doesn’t make sense to me is why han is even doing pain play at all when no matter how experienced he may seem to lee, who knows nothing, to me hes clearly just making shit up. there is barely any after care, no discussion of protection, whoever uses nipple clamps like han does needs to be bashed in the head with a baseball bat. people get their nipples ripped off that way what is this is man doing? also i saw someone use noncon to describe whats happening here, which is a lot more than most of yall were willing to admit, but its still wrong. noncon starts with consent and this is blackmail, lunches and dinners and sleeping in his bed is not going to change the fact that this is blackmail. the basis of consent is informed and reversible and nothing lee has ever heard of. hes had no choice when his job was on the line and no family or friends to turn to. furthermore there is literally no reason for han to not have known that lee was uninformed about his preferences when he spends what seems the whole day staring at our abandoned in the rain dog of a main character. you’re telling me that this man probably knows the shape of every pore on lee’s face but not see that something was wrong when he was having flashbacks (the ptsd kind not the recall kind) in a session? you’re telling me that a man who knows bdsm wouldn’t think to stop? so what can i assume of this exertion of pain if not malicious intent? how can anyone turn this around and say they didn’t know? does the harm of both triggering a past trauma and inflicting a present harm not matter, if han for some reason no logical nor sense could find, did not know?
i don’t understand what the collective upset over rein’s hot and cold act is about like yes its fucking annoying but her anxiety and distrust and resentment (the driver) was the product of will’s actions. he did that. what did he think would have been the consequence of his manipulation when despite having his memories will never made the effort to be honest. instead he went out of his way to portray himself as the “innocent lamb” that he never was. she literally told him her heart could not take it if he lied one more time and he fucking lied did he not? did he think the woman he has been obsessed with for two lifetimes (because he saw a fucking portrait in an abandoned warehouse - pure unhinged behaviour), someone he called his god his sun his world was a fickle woman who did not do as she said she would? did rein give that impression? wilhelm might have been helpless before but he certainly wasn’t when stole her revenge for himself (the sole purpose of which to reclaim the sense of autonomy lost when she was no longer the noblest lady in the land - the purpose she has been working towards her whole life) and he was not helpless when he backed her into corner despite her pleas to be let go and dont tell me that he was helpless when he raped her for three days. his first life was fucked up and not anything i would wish on my worst enemy but was hers somehow sunshine and roses? rotting away in a land she did not know clinging onto revenge she had no chance of succeeding falling into an inebriated stupor to beg a dead man for a miracle was better? i think i read about twenty consecutive comments saying something along the lines of rein lost her iq after michel died,,, you mean when she gave will a chance to come clean and he didn’t? you mean when rein was betrayed by yet another man? after the last time that happened which to everything that was dear to her was taken away over night? also i don’t understand the bashing ive seen over her being a bad mother to wilroy when theres been not one peep over wilhem being a shit fucking dad the man saw him twice in three years when she raised the boy for three years before handing him over (what was she going to do? say no to the emperor?) so yeah she has been no saint but to act like will loves her when it is his obsession that made her put that blade to her throat and slice because he is fucking radioactive waste is crazy. lets take deeper breaths and be a little more for real.