This review may contain spoilers
I finished it. I wish I could say it was worth it.
I went into this as a FortPeat fan — genuinely invested in their dynamic, their chemistry, the particular way they work together. Yesterday was announced as darker, Peat's character described as a black flag. I was open to that. The first three episodes gave me reason to stay.
Then the kidnapping arc happened, and something shifted that I couldn't shift back.
There's a line for me between dark romance and something else. A toxic dynamic where both people have psychological agency, mutual pull, even obsession — I can engage with that. What I can't frame as romance is one character imprisoned, distressed, stripped of choice, while the other brings in a therapist not to get help but because surely something must be wrong with someone who stopped loving him. That's not darkness I find compelling. That's a portrait of abuse dressed in the language of devotion.
What makes it worse is the narrative decision to explain Kelvin's behaviour through mental illness. I want to be careful here because I think the intention may have been to add complexity — and Kelvin being the first toxic BL character to actually go to therapy is, on paper, interesting. But the execution does something I find genuinely harmful: it uses BPD and depression as a reason for his actions, which both stigmatises those diagnoses and quietly absolves him. The implication becomes he couldn't help it, and he can be fixed. Neither of those things is true to how these illnesses actually work, and neither should be used to explain away abuse. If you're going to bring mental illness into a story this seriously, you owe it the honesty of showing it as an ongoing process — not a plot device that gets resolved by a time jump.
The ending felt like a bad joke to me. Veir's forgiveness is framed as emotional maturity, as living in the present. Maybe there's something philosophically interesting in that framing. But the series didn't earn it — not with this story, not with what Kelvin actually did, and not with a resolution that skips the hard part entirely.
FortPeat still perform. That part I won't take away from them. But something recalibrated after this, and I'm still sitting with what that means.
Then the kidnapping arc happened, and something shifted that I couldn't shift back.
There's a line for me between dark romance and something else. A toxic dynamic where both people have psychological agency, mutual pull, even obsession — I can engage with that. What I can't frame as romance is one character imprisoned, distressed, stripped of choice, while the other brings in a therapist not to get help but because surely something must be wrong with someone who stopped loving him. That's not darkness I find compelling. That's a portrait of abuse dressed in the language of devotion.
What makes it worse is the narrative decision to explain Kelvin's behaviour through mental illness. I want to be careful here because I think the intention may have been to add complexity — and Kelvin being the first toxic BL character to actually go to therapy is, on paper, interesting. But the execution does something I find genuinely harmful: it uses BPD and depression as a reason for his actions, which both stigmatises those diagnoses and quietly absolves him. The implication becomes he couldn't help it, and he can be fixed. Neither of those things is true to how these illnesses actually work, and neither should be used to explain away abuse. If you're going to bring mental illness into a story this seriously, you owe it the honesty of showing it as an ongoing process — not a plot device that gets resolved by a time jump.
The ending felt like a bad joke to me. Veir's forgiveness is framed as emotional maturity, as living in the present. Maybe there's something philosophically interesting in that framing. But the series didn't earn it — not with this story, not with what Kelvin actually did, and not with a resolution that skips the hard part entirely.
FortPeat still perform. That part I won't take away from them. But something recalibrated after this, and I'm still sitting with what that means.
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