WARNING: absolute word vomit

wow i have so many thoughts. okay, first, the actual story and the whole piece itself: it was great. not the best i’ve read but certainly up there and deserving of many praises. i was iffy about the characters at first and was worried they would be very transparent (typical psycho seme and pushover uke) but sekye and yijun turned out to have some of the best characterization i’ve ever seen. sekye was INCREDIBLY unstable and was uncomfortable to even be in a room with him even though he was just a guy on my phone screen but he turned out to just be someone with his own fair share of problems with no clue how to deal with them. and yijun was so sensible and so responsible for a man so young. he was in a tight spot and knew getting involved with sekye wasn’t a good idea but was too kind to others and less kind to himself to step away. but after falling in love with sekye he knew when enough was enough and couldn’t love someone at the expense of hating himself. OKAY ill just regurgitate the whole plot if i keep going but bottom line is i LOVED the characters they feel so fresh and so alive and so relatable just ugh. kudos to their creators id love to eat ur brain someday. the story was…unoriginal. but the characters made it into something that felt unique and emotional and ultimately made a story you’ve heard many times become one you wanted to see the ending to.


now this part gets a bit personal so you’re welcome to skip this, i just wanted to get this out there in the small chance that someone could be feeling the same way and know that you aren’t alone:

i have never. EVER. related to a character as much as han sekye. i didn’t quite like him at the beginning. he felt dangerous and i was worried for yijun but then we learned more and more about him and i was just left utterly devastated. im sure his dreams about haram will be interpreted differently for everyone but to me he had a severe case of maladaptive daydreaming, which i also suffered from. my entire childhood is lost on me and i can never look back fondly on those memories because i have none of them. my mother was a teen mom and immigrated to the US to have me without my father. she was young and didn’t know what she was doing or how to be a parent paired with having to work for herself and me and not having a great grasp on english, it was hard. so she wasn’t around much and when she was she just didn’t know how to properly parent and said things she shouldn’t have. for as long as i can remember i’d spend my entire childhood dreaming in order to get away from that inescapable loneliness. i slept and slept and daydreamed and slept to live in a world where i had a family that would be around from breakfast to dinner and parents that were happy they had me. my mother and i had a very strained relationship up until my late teens and unknowingly to the both of us i had ADHD and was severely autistic. i couldn’t get along with other kids, couldn’t do well in school, and the things i did excel at we didn’t have enough money to support it. i remember when the pandemic hit i had fallen so deeply into my daydreams that i had accidentally burned all of my bridges and by the time i had woken back up the seasons had changed and everyone i called a friend had all moved on. it was so so incredibly jarring it felt like everyone had aged those two years but i hadn’t. my freshest memories were of one’s two summers ago and i had gotten so disheartened i just gave up on forming any kind of connection with the outside world. 2023 i spent asleep, for as long as i possibly could. my average sleep schedule was 18-22 hours a day and i had dropped to 90lbs that year. dreaming had nearly completely destroyed me and it took nearly dying in the ER and having my mother weep but still try her absolute best to do what she could to realize that if i was to chase this perfect dream world any longer it would cost me the life i currently lived. if i kept dreaming i was 100% going to die.


it took a long time coming to terms with everything and taking the steps to get help and it was heart wrenching watching han sekye go through all of this too. my heart bled at how lost he was and how he had no one to help him and i cried when he and yijun ultimately found a way to love each other without hurting each other. i love this story so so so much and ill reread it whenever im down. i also really felt for sekye about his mother too and my personal hope is that they reconnected somewhere down the line. my mother was far from perfect but ive come to terms that she was also a kid that had her childhood robbed from her in order to have me. she’s not perfect. she’s a lil autistic weirdo and is bad at expressing herself but i know she loves me and even if she’s hurt me and left me with some wounds that may never recover, i still love her dearly and she’s my bestest friend. my mother and i have found peace just as han sekye and yijun have, and to anyone still reading, i hope you find your peace too.

to anyone that suffers from maladaptive daydreaming, please seek help. there will always be people who don’t understand and can’t see how dangerous it is. but it is. it’s dangerous and please find new outlets. just like han sekye i also became a writer. you don’t ever have to stop daydreaming and you don’t ever have to be ashamed at wanting to live in the good times, but you have to find a way to reminisce without drowning yourself. i just learned how to put my dreams to paper :) and just know that you aren’t alone. there will always be someone out there that shares your pain, and someone else willing to share that pain with you.