beta
long rant incoming
when i started reading this, i liked the first couple much more even though i always had mixed feelings about the way seok would kind of force his feelings on kiwoon. still, it was clear kiwoon wasn’t actually bothered by it and that seok had his boundaries so it wasn’t that much of a big deal for me. but ngl i ended up disliking both of them A LOT as we got through the second couple’s story. honestly, i feel very weird about how the author makes jaeha seem like this crazy bad guy in the first story just for it to be revealed in the second story that jaeha has been done incredibly dirty by the two people who he believed to be the only ones he could rely on during his middle school years. i like hyun but him not clearing up the fact that he knew jaeha didn’t kill kiwoon’s cat and basically letting their relationship go to shit is pretty fucked up. i understand he was jealous of their relationship but jaeha basically being abandoned by one of only two people he could trust was not worth it. but honestly the root of the issue was kiwoon, i don’t understand how he saw jaeha wrap a dead cat with his blazer and automatically assumed his own friend killed it. there is literally no logic or sense behind this thought and just shows how he had negative biases against jaeha just because he’s mentally ill. yes it sucked how jaeha would just trauma dump on kiwoon, and kiwoon has every right to protect his own mental health but there is something so evil about knowing your friend is in a horrible place mentally and that he is dealing with domestic violence just to decide to abandon him. the way seok speaks about jaeha and calls him an “evil psycho” completely ruined his character for me. because of personal reasons, i take mental health issues very seriously and seeing a character basically reduce a domestic abuse victim who is obviously suicidal into an “evil psycho” made me sick to my stomach. considering seok wasn’t even personally involved in the situation and is only chatting shit about jaeha because he is overly obsessed with kiwoon gave me a huge ick. i’m not into characters who don’t give a fuck about anyone except their significant other and that’s basically how seok ended up.
ngl my feelings towards seungha have been weird since the second couple’s story. he came across as a nice person at times but when jaeha dropped the bomb that was seungha’s crush on kiwoon, it suddenly became incredibly obvious that he was only helping out jaeha because he didn’t want jaeha to cause problems for kiwoon which just comes across as pretty callous. ever since then, i haven’t been able to look at him the same. it just became clear that no one except hyun has given a fuck about jaeha and even then, hyun fucked up big time by taking two years to clear things between kiwoon and jaeha. i know jaeha’s mental health issues and domestic abuse don’t excuse some of his actions but i feel like he hasn’t done anything crazy bad? everyone makes the fight he had with kiwoon in middle school sound like a big deal, but we’ve never been shown it from jaeha’s pov. tbh the whole fight just seems like an excuse from the author for kiwoon to be traumatised and closed off towards other people because the author has literally never portrayed jaeha as the type of person to start randomly attacking people, especially not his closest friend. from what i can understand it seems like kiwoon just assumed jaeha killed his cat just because he was holding it (kiwoon assuming the worst about his own friend is shitty of him) and this somehow escalated into a fight with jaeha (sorry but this literally makes no sense). considering hyun cleared up that jaeha never killed kiwoon’s cat, it just seems like that whole situation was comepletely kiwoon’s fault and that jaeha lost two friends over a situation where he was massively misunderstood. even when kiwoon is told the truth, he never apologised to jaeha about seriously misunderstanding him and it just comes across as kiwoon only giving a damn about how he’s hurt and nothing else