I’m glad to see this kind of comment. I found the whole story extremely interesting and felt all the jabs the translator took at it were kinda shallow. It’s a hard hitting tragic story with characters that have complex minds that try to justify their abnormal rationality. Seeing Minho’s downward spiral also hit hard cause I felt the same way, it’s crazy to read something that stirs your feelings up so much. That’s why I think heavy topics are so interesting to read and I’m sad not everyone sees that!
Yeah, the translator was very biased for minho which sadly made them perceive everyone’s character more 2 dimensionally instead of understanding that each character is complex with their own flaws and struggles. People downplays minho’s emotional abuse on duna then fails to grasp the significance of ch.35: he finally realized putting duna down wouldn’t have made him happy, he felt off and uncomfortable bc he successfully made her into someone he wanted, which is not her true self.
On the other hand people refuses to sympathize with wookyung who clearly grew up emotionally and physically abused by his mother, although u can clearly see how this fucked up his perception of love and even sense of self.
Both characters have a lot of baggage and people just reduced them to two dimensional abuser and victim roles, completely forgetting that these are fictional characters and we are not judges on criminal court.
The translator was so annoying, I never seen long notes on every page/ end of the chapter before.
I enjoyed a bit reading the translator’s notes bc we have very different tastes and opinions so it was interesting but I feel like there were many times when the translator completely missed what the author was doing. Like i’m pretty sure the author never tried to justify wookyung raping minho even if minho got an erection bc the whole point of the rape was minho *NOT* enjoying it (he even puked during and after the whole thing). Also when wookyung told minho to move out in the hospital, it was clearly bc wookyung finally realized he’d rather let minho be free than miserable with him. If wookyung actually meant what he had said (about how looking at minho disturbed him and he’d had enough etc.) then why spend days at his bedside waiting for him to wake up? This was made clear by the final chapter where wookyung admits that he actually wants minho to stay.
I think the translator sometimes conflates what duna/wookyung was thinking or saying to what the author themselves think. But duna and wookyung were never meant to be reliable narrators; if anything they kept questioning themselves and changing throughout the story, they sometimes justify their own actions with flawed logic or even lied, and its up to the readers to think and come to conclusions on their own. If u’re expecting the story to spoonfeed u the answers then of course u will come out of it thinking “what the heck?? Do people actually think this way?” Its like watching American Psycho and thinking the moral of the story is that its okay to kill people.
Anyway, the author even left it as an open ending (where its unclear whether wookyung would truly change or not and whether they could be happy or not) so its up to the readers to decide whether or not minho made the right decision.