winteraeon

I agree, it works narratively until the reveal but then it adds more questions once you hit the reveal. I actually assumed that their hallucination did the same thing for them that the show did for us viewers: jumped. When Phee asks Jin if he remembers how they got out of there I immediately wondered if they hallucinated the intervening years similarly to the way an author gives a brief synopsis of events during a time passage and then their story resumed in the hallucination where it picked up for us too.

Though that would also suggest that the "two years later" was purely Phee's hallucination and that everything that happened from the moment he snapped out of his own hallucination onward was actually just another layer of his hallucination (like a movie inside a movie and when you consider he was on a film set two years later that parallel is more interesting). So we wouldn't actually know what happened to Jin, New or Tee because we witnessed all of that with Phee after he came to.

Is anyone in the manhwa actually bigger and stronger looking than him? hat's an actual question not me challenging the idea. Myles is kind of a big guy but he always struck me as more the broad shouldered big. Donald is tall but we only find out how jacked he is once his shirt is off. Ben, to me, looks much more like the typical build of a guy who goes to the gym and works out moderately (with decent genetics). His build is also one I much more frequently see among men in western countries rather than asian countries. I am not saying I have not seen some asian guys with a scary lack of body fat and insane amount of muscle, but the physique I've seen has always been more inverted triangle on the asian guys (broad, built shoulders, narrow waist with an insane 10-pack, at the more extreme) while non-asian guys (white, latino, black) aren't as often the inverted triangle. Wider waist (due to how they have built muscle), bigger chest and back so the shoulder to waist angle isn't so severe.

Sorry that totally got nerdy in a different direction there.

I love this review/breakdown/pondering!

I will only add re: the two year skip, if they are still hallucinating then it’s a moot point as the time skip is likely completely fabricated by the hallucination anyway.

If you’d ever been in a situation where you were worried what would happen to you if you said no to sex you’d understand what it’s like to agree to something you don’t want for safety.

100% agreement. He never should have said a damn thing when he went into that classroom and they were pondering a movie plot.

I find it interesting how often you have sidestepped in this conversation rather than responding directly to something I have said.

You are trying hard to paint Non as adept and knowledgeable despite us seeing how naive, gullible and easily taken advantage of he is. He is set up from the very beginning as someone who is an outcast but wants to belong. He endures a lot of things that he knows he shouldn’t because he gets to write a script and is in, some very vague way, accepted by the people who bully him and is now less bullied. You see the way those kids take advantage of him and the ways in which Non sees it but allows it because the alternative is worse. This is a kid constantly put between a rock and a hard place who constantly seems to try to take the path that will seemingly do the least harm to him. He is almost always wrong in his choice. But he very obviously never anticipates the knife people have in the left hand when they reach their right hand out to him. We see that over and over. Non is both too trusting and not trusting and is trusting at all the wrong times.

I’m really curious why you are so tunnel visioned on this topic. I’ve seen other comments you’ve made. I don’t think you’re someone overall who just takes the series strictly as it’s spoon fed to you and doesn’t think about what’s going on. But you seem so determined to only focus on “he’s a cheater!” without thinking about it or considering all the adjacent pieces. I find that puzzling

Imagine yourself at 17, desperate, drowning in a mess you have found yourself in with no apparent way out. Wanting someone to help you or save you because you’re so overwhelmed and hopeless trying to figure it out alone. Someone of the same sex as you positions themself as caring about you and wanting to help you. They offer you a large sum of money to do so. Soemthing you desperately need. Are you automatically going to assume what they will want in return is sex? I know it’s a BL but irl the odds of everyone you meet being gay just aren’t so high as to make that an automatic assumption. Will that person want something? Yes. Sex? Not necessarily. Sex isn’t anywhere near worth that amount of money.

“Just decide whether Non plays the evil or not.” This right here is your problem. That’s why you can’t make sense of what I’m saying. You are trying to Black or White your way out of a Gray situation. It’s not that simple and you are either refusing or incapable of seeing that.

The height might be a problem but many idols are underweight so that part not really hard actually.

“his body doesn’t even fit the qualifications for what someone who has the strength of a gorilla.” I hate to break it to you, but neither does Ben Park in the comic. Have you ever seen what the strongest men in the world look like? Spoiler alert: they don’t lift for aesthetics so they often aren’t super ripped, they aren’t generally lean bc again they lift for strength not aesthetics and a fair few of them have what would affectionately be called “guts.” Don’t claim your issue is that someone doesn’t realistically look like something when what you’re comparing them to ALSO doesn’t look like someone in that category.

I see that you don’t. I hope that’s because you’ve never found yourself in such a situation or do not have someone close to you who has been in such a situation and therefore cannot pick up on the ambiguous threads that tie it together.

How do you explain that your teacher gave you a very large sum of money claiming to want to help you and then at a later time, when you felt you could trust him, instead started flirting with you and wanting sex from you? How do you explain that because he gave you a very large sum of money you didn’t think you could say no and weren’t sure what might happen if you did? I think that’s exactly how you explain it. Again, I don’t agree with his decision to keep this from Phee, to not have explained things to Phee before he ever got the money from Keng, and I do not overlook how badly this hurt Phee. But I understand the nuance and danger of the situation he was in which you refuse to acknowledge.

Because he didn’t think he could. He was even clearly uncomfortable in the situation when Keng began to initiate it.

With the way things ended I’m not sure we can ever figure it out or even trust everything we saw from the moment of Phee snapping out of his own hallucination.

Non didn’t tell him to get money from him. He had no way of knowing Keng would offer him money if he told him what was going on. Your reasoning doesn’t track at all.

New cares about Non, just not nearly as much as he cared about himself. New cared about his parents caring about him. New cared about the opportunity he had to study abroad and cared about the loss of that when he chose to stay in Thailand. He cared about the optics of him sacrificing for his missing brother. He cared about what Non’s disappearance increasing took from him. He cared about the life he should have had that was taken away in one way or another by Non’s disappearance and presumed death.

New made himself the main character despite it not being about him.

I am not saying every cheater has their reasons. Non’s situation is not the same as someone meeting a new person, being attracted to them and deciding to sleep with them just bc they want to despite being in a relationship. You are willfully ignoring context to shove the situation into a black or white framework that doesn’t work here.

I don’t remember the reference to Non having cheated on him before. You are probably right there. But it doesn’t make the situation with Keng the same. Phee actually never finds out the context of the situation between Non and Keng bc Non goes missing by time he’s willing to talk to him again.

First of all, that still doesn’t make it right or not coercive. I doubt people just offer themselves without any implied need to do so from others but without actual data about that it’s just a moot point. However, this is not Hollywood or business. This is a teacher who offered money to help a student. There’s already a power imbalance in their ages and roles. Non did not offer himself or initiate sex to get the money. The money was given to him. Sex was then initiated by the lender of that money on a separate occasion. This doesn’t compare with the comparison you are trying to make.

I think New lived in at least a partially drugged state much of the time. He was practically an addict from where I’m sitting. As such, he likely had a much higher tolerance to it. Or he was smoking the antidote while he was dosing everyone else.

10000% Abosolute agreement! New paints himself as a good brother (which we see through how Non acts in his hallucinations) but in the flashback of the two we see something very very different. New was never there for him. He never helped him. He never had his back. He never stood up for him. He took resources the family didn’t even have to give him. And he constantly makes it about what HE lost not about what was done to Non.

I think at first he was worried about Non when he vanished. We do see in the flashback that he perhaps regretted not being a better brother and wanted to do better by Non, though Non rejected it. But as time went on it was more and more about him and less and less about Non.

He didn’t perpetuate the deaths of all those people to avenge his brother. He did it to avenge himself.