LITERALLY YOU WORDED THIS SO WELL….. i don’t care about anything or anyone in this manhwa apart from jaeha, the way the author treated his story and character literally broke my heart and all the other mains are objectively horrible people who actively abandoned and treated their friend like shit whilst knowing he was suffering SERIOUS domestic abuse…. he’s just a kid i wish instead of him ending up w hyun we got to see him find true unconditional love whether that be platonic or romantic the scene of him going back to his dad’s house and getting abused like that was horrible to digest, how could they downplay something so serious and terrifying, how can you let your friend/student etc come to school with bruises like that and a demeanor as withdrawn and terrified as jaeha’s is and just be okay with that??? he needs serious professional help but all he got was a toxic love interest to depend on mentally and financially my boy deserves sm better :(
It hurts me to know that you were so dissapointed in boys and I think it actually hurts you too, because you liked them during 1st season, so I thought I should respond to your rant...(it will be vey long..) I agree that after 2nd season there are many bitter feelings and that jaeha is trated really unfairly, but...
I will start from seungha as there is less to write about him, basically he has this mature vibe because he gives no sh!t about others, thanks to that he can see and solve evrything more rationally, be it seungha having some feelings towards kiwoon or not he treats jaeha with bare minimum human emphaty and maybe even gives more attention than he normally would to others.. from his perspective jaeha is just a stanger in complicated and pitiful situation who has heavy backstory with his friends, his attitude is expected and i think he actually helps jaeha more mainly because of hyun, i am not sure if after 2nd season he even includes jaeha as his friend but i believe it will improve if they hung out more, i am grateful that he become a bridge between the couple
As for kiwoon, i am not saying that what was done in backstory was any good, both of them were at fault and also victims, middle school is still early stages of emotional growth, we cant just blame them for beign unexperienced kids, though i was pissed at hyun, and jaeha taking all the blame was very horrible. I think kiwoon is on the weaker side when it comes to handling emotional problems and as a kid it's not strange that he wasnt copable of emracing jaeha's problem, he felt trashy in this situation and jaeha continued to rely on him while he 1) couldnt give him enough support 2) was exhausted,frustrated and didnt want to be involved any longer 3) was feeling guilty after all jaeha was his friend but he started to see jaeha as a "problem". As a way to protect himself from mentall exhaustion (i strongly believe he was falling into depression too) kiwoon ignored jaeha eventhough it didnt improve situation, but he really belevied it was for the best for both of them. When he just assumed that jaeha killed his cat grieve, anger, exhaustion and anxioness worked together, it was totaly an subconscious excuse to "cut of" his relationship with jaeha, he mentally couldn't stand this any longer
Its scary to take responsibility for others, not many people are strong enough to help emotional unstable people like jaeha so i dont think that kiwoon can be blamed for not being such admirable person and not having emotional copacity to handle jaeha even as a high scholler. of course during their last conversation apologse for misunderstanding wouldnt be unappoprate! still i think him being harsh on jaeha in order to cut of their relationship was a good decision, isnt it just logical to cut of a person if you feel depressed and sick with them? he couldnt help him and keep falling deeper and deeper. its cruel toward jaeha but he depended too much on kiwoon, they couldnt move forward together so it was necessary for them to move separetaly, of course jaeha was in disadvantage here, without anyone to support him, but even in real live situation can a person afford to think about another if they want to esccape hurtful enviroment?
Its true that it resulted in abondoning jaeha, wchich is really sad, they did wrong towards their friend, but could they any better? kiwoon started to become depressed and when hyun tried to help jaeha he made abuse worse
they did the best they could but they ended up hurting each other and doind sh!tty things (only hyun could have done better, but he didnt, he better makes jaeha happy or else i dont know what i will do to him) the situation itself is very frusturating but as long as we are just human beings it will be like that forever
So as i said before kids cant really be the one responsible for what happend, we should questions more the adults in this history, like jaeha parents seriously they are the whole seed of the problem, but what about teachers? why they did nothing?
kiwoon and jaeha relationship is not resolved at all, it was buried as deeply as deep goes the wound in their hearts, kiwoon cares a lot thats way it hurts him too but as they were at the end of 1st season they werent ready to real talk. I believe boys cant just "ignore" jaeha while being friends with hyun, maybe during university or maybe later but jaeha will be included in their friends gathering, when he will become emotionally independed and kiwoon will be ready to face his past, then i wish they will talk and come to mutual understanding and restore their friendship
in no way i'm saying that jaeha home abuse was a small matter, it was BIG, but i tried to show it more from kiwoon side, really i love jaeha and wish him the best, but kiwoon too was hurt and we cant just say it wasnt so serius so it doesnt matter
it just hurts very very much when you want the best for characters and nothing goes well, but I hope you wont be too harsh on them while judging, at least kiwoon, because druging middle school hyun's only excuse is him being a kid (i like him as he is now, but still ヽ(`Д´)ﾉ)
oh, but i was totally pissed at seok too, his words were totally unnecessary, like he is not even involved so he cant talk in this way just because he doesnt like jaeha :(
the sad part is not that jaeha was abondoned in middle school but that he didnt receive any help until he appeared again in front of them in high school, this was unfairly done by author, jaeha was just swept under the rug
As much as I love all the characters....I have to agree completely :(
you guys make the discussion interesting that i wanna join but dang, that was long ass paragraph. i will read later hahhaha
you get it.omg I love people who have a way with words!!! thank you so much for saying this
honestly i didn’t even take into consideration the fact that jaeha just went from an abusive household to then being financially dependent on his boyfriend, which is still another unstable situation as they could break up at any point and jaeha would be put in another difficult situation. i liked the second season but it feels like the author didn’t know how to approach serious topics such as domestic violence and mental health issues in a manner that was careful. especially considering how the second season was finished with a HUGE amount of issues still present within jaeha and hyun’s relationship
i totally understand your points about seungha, he has no responsibility he owes jaeha, it just was a shame to find out what i believed to be him being genuinely concerned about jaeha just turned out to be born out of his crush on kiwoon. seungha has been shown to be someone who mainly acts based on reason and logic, he would not involve himself in a situation as complex as jaeha’s if it wasn’t for kiwoon. i thought it was for hyun at first but the reveal about his crush on kiwoon suddenly opened my eyes since it didn’t make sense before how he was actively helping jaeha and hyun while still coming across like he was trying to keep himself detached to the situation.
i don’t blame kiwoon for trying to protect his mental health since jaeha’s situation was intense for any middle schooler to deal with but i still can’t look at him the same considering he couldn’t even apologise to jaeha for misunderstanding him to an extreme extent. “isnt it just logical to cut of a person if you feel depressed and sick with them”, no i’d say that’s pretty fucked up to just drop someone one day when you’re dealing with someone with mental health issues who clearly has a fear of abandonment. i think he at least owed jaeha a goodbye and honest conversation. i’m not blaming any of them for not choosing the mature sensible thing to do since they were just middle schoolers, but only hyun rectified his mistakes (hyun fucked up the most but i forgive him because he went out of his way to save jaeha from his household and likely saved his life). kiwoon still gets to stay in his safe protective bubble while jaeha is never truly vindicated or at least apologised to. at the same time, i absolutely hear and understand your points. kiwoon’s decisions were understandable considering his age, i just can’t help that my heart hurts for jaeha who has just constantly had to suffer. hyun and kiwoon had the freedom to escape the complexity and emotional burden of his circumstances, jaeha did not
but yeah honestly the main issue was that the author very clearly did not know how to carefully and holistically approach a situation as sensitive as jaeha’s
exactly! it’s absolutely terrifying to be financially dependant on someone else, let alone when you just escaped a heavily abusive household, and completely agree with you about seungha also, it made me so mad to realise that he never cared at all about jaeha… what happened to basic human empathy? he basically acted like he was taking out kiwoon’s trash(harsh way of putting it but ) no one genuinely truly cared about jaeha despite him living through literal burning hell, they ALL approached him with superficial, fake and ulterior intentions. those kids are so selfish :/ that and the author wrote a character without doing any research at all, jaeha could’ve been amazing but instead the author ended up romanticising abusive friendships and relationships and victim blamed through out the whole story….. it makes me so mad rip
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