Umm...

No wonder that chapter seemed off to me

Yeah, if it had been the other way around and Jaekyung did that to Dan, those readers would have no problem mentioning the rape in that case lmao

ya it was rape and so were quite a few of the interactions between dan and jaekyung. glad we have that settled

Then why isn't it talked about more?? Dan r*ping JK, i mean...

- it’s an older chapter, and people are paying more attention to what’s been happening more recently
- it was a one time thing
- the context, dynamic, and meaning of that interaction were different from what they usually are

if you’d like to actually talk about it then i’m happy to explain my interpretation of that moment further and hear what you think about it. however, it feels to me a bit like you’re trying to bring that moment up as a sick #gotcha against readers who are unhappy with jaekyung (whether as a character or as a “person”) in order to call them hypocrites. while perhaps true, if that’s the entirety of your intention then i’ve no interest in talking about this further.

ヾ(☆▽☆)

It's not a "gotcha", it's literally me pointing out how hypocritical the moral grandstanding applied to this story is.
Dan is perceived as the "soft mew mew powerless can do no wrong baby boy", when he's a 30yr old man with childhood emotional/sexual trauma history that has shown his strength and fortitude with dealing with everything life has dealt him, and that he has a pretty strong will on his own.
Jk is perceived as "the most evil man to exist or ever walk the earth", when he's just another fuck boy asshole with zero emotional depth. We've seen him show kindness to strangers and he has an actual charity foundation, but seems completely inept in dealing with interpersonal emotional dealings.
You can have your gripes about the storytelling, but it just seems so incredibly immature to draw such black/white lines in this story. And that's why i brought up chapter 43, because the way it's sidelined "bkoz it happened one time" or "earlier on in the story" bkoz no one wants to muddy how they view Dan, or imagine he couldn't ever hurt JK in the story.

can i just ask before we proceed, do you think at any point in this story jaekyung also rapes dan

i will more fully address your statements depending on how you answer ╮(￣▽￣)╭

Yes, i do. I don't think every single interaction was r*pe though, most if them i label it as dubious consent.
But the time JK gets Heesung to walk in when they're having sex and lies to Dan about it, and when Dan got a call from the hospital regarding his grandmother and JK didn't let him go... Dan didn't consent to having a third party there, and in the latter instance, he asked for JK to stop what he was doing, and he didn't.
When Dan starts falling for JK and starts enjoying sex with him (but wanting affection and foreplay from him), I don't view those interactions as r*pe at all.

Okay, sure, we don’t have to litigate every single situation (unless you want to lmfao) but I would generally say/agree that most of their interactions consist of Jaekyung raping Dan (especially at the beginning) or there being some dubious consent, and that things become somewhat muddier once Dan catches feelings for Jaekyung.

It’s just that some readers really HAVE brought up the drunken incident just to say that Dan has raped Jaekyung, but then refuse to remain consistent and say that Jaekyung then has also raped Dan several times as well. Hence why I asked if you meant it as a “gotcha” and asked for clarification on whether or not you think Jaekyung has done so to Dan at any point in this story. I just don’t feel like dealing with someone like that.

Anyway so okay, back to your and my original messages…

I would say re how people characterize Dan and Jaekyung and their dynamic, it’s a combination of things.

First, I personally think a lot of why Dan becomes a little meow meow and Jaekyung a demon in peoples eyes is because of how the author herself writes them. This is a story taking place in a reality that’s adjacent to ours, not like a historical type of setting where more casual violence and brutality might become more “acceptable” in a reader’s eyes, or a fantasy setting where you’ll get methods of enacting violence that don’t register as “real” as the type of violence we see in our reality (although it depends on who’s writing the story, after all). So any type of indecent behavior on the part of any character is going to hit closer to home just by default.

Then you get down to the characters themselves…or let’s start first with perspective. We’ve spent the majority of this story up till now in Dan’s perspective—we know his thoughts, actions, motivations, and backstory pretty well by now. Up till now we still don’t really know why Jaekyung behaves the way he does. We’ve gotten hints, we can intuit his personality is at least in part the product of some kind of insecurity and, of course, his wealth and fame, but…nothing else, really. If we’re taking the rape literally and seriously here, it would’ve been hard to sympathize or empathize with Jaekyung by default…because he’s a rapist, and he does it multiple times, and on top of that his overall personality and way of going about things is pretty shit. You add on top of that us the readers seeing nothing but the consequences of his actions on Dan and the fact that we don’t even know WHY Jaekyung acts the way he does? Yes, people are going to overlook the few good and unselfish actions he does to see the overwhelming bad we get presented over and over again. Donating to charity is near and all but does that mean we just forget the fuckshit he’s done and CONTINUES to do?

As for Dan being little meow meow yeah, you’re right, he is a grown man with childhood and sexual trauma, he is pretty strong to have endured all that he’s endured. But is he actually consistently written to be that way? Does the story itself take this kind of character seriously? Being in Dan’s head all the time is a double-edged sword, so we can see how and where his thoughts and actions feel flimsy and inconsistent—at least to me. Dan rarely ever seems to have any real fight to him whatsoever. I don’t mean in the physical sense, but in the emotional sense. I don’t and never will really need him to be physically strong or violent or anything, but the guy just takes everything thrown at him, especially from Jaekyung, and doesn’t feel any shred of indignation about it, resorting to blaming himself and feeling guilty about things that just aren’t his fault. When he falls for Jaekyung he worries like a teenager if Jaekyung can/will ever like him back, rather than questioning how and why he could fall for someone like him. Even in these recent chapters we see part of his more immediate concern about going back with Jaekyung being a lingering sense of guilt over the butchered spray can incident (something that was not his fault! which he left Jaekyung for out of guilt! instead of all his mistreatment!).

So like yeah, Jaekyung is just written to be an almost completely one-note demon, and Dan is written to be a helpless little meow meow. Trust me I’d LOVE to have seen some real, consistent, surprising and yet convincing variation on the way these two are written. I would’ve loved to see the power dynamics between the two be demonstrably less one-sided (Jaekyung has this whole stupid jinx thing and we never once got to see Dan actually leverage that against Jaekyung, we never once got to see Jaekyung flop from not having it fulfilled—it might as well be as mythical as it sounds). But I personally hardly saw any characterization of them that matched those conditions.

So let’s take precisely the scene in question, Dan and Jaekyung fucking while Jaekyung’s drunk. It’s 100% non-consensual, the right thing for Dan to have done was to say no Jaekyung, we can’t have sex, you’re drunk, and left it at that. He didn’t do that—he took full advantage of the situation to have some more self-indulgent, tender/gentle sex with Jaekyung. But this is a story where the sex and the context surrounding it says and/or reinforces something about the characters having it, which factors into how to read the scene overall.

I’M NOT TRYING TO EXCUSE DAN WHEN I SAY THIS, but this scene is like, fundamentally different from, yeah, the scene where Jaekyung baits Heesung into coming to the apartment to see him fucking Dan. Dan IS being selfish—probably the most we’ve seen in the entire webtoon?—in taking advantage of a drunk Jaekyung but it’s not just out of pursuit for his own pleasure (something that, mind you, has mostly not been a part of any of their interactions together) but also in his own words to “get to know” Jaekyung better. The drunken scene tells us not only that Dan wants mutually pleasurable sex but just a more mutual relationship overall where he and Jaekyung can get to know each other more and be gentle with each other. It reinforces how ABSENT any of that kind of thing is from their usual dynamic. The fact that Jaekyung HAD to be drunk and vulnerable for it to even happen in the first place makes even clearer how otherwise impossible that type of scenario would be normally (and if I’m being completely honest it feels like a trashy plot-device if anything else, because the almost complete and total personality switch is just, c’mon).

Take that compared to the Heesung baiting scene…I don’t remember everything about it, if you have the chapters on hand I’d be happy to reread and give more fully fleshed out thoughts and change anything I got wrong. But it’s where, after Heesung takes some strides to try and “woo” Dan, Jaekyung straps Dan up with a bunch of BDSM gear, deafening, blinging, and restraining him to make a point to Heesung, right? To me, that scene just reinforced the shittier things that we already knew about Jaekyung as a character—that he’s entitled, that he sees Dan less as an actual person and more as a piece of property he owns and with whom he can do whatever he wants to, that he doesn’t care for Dan’s physical or mental safety and comfort, nor his desires…that he’s manipulative…yes we could read this as Jaekyung being possessive out of some type of love for Dan, we could read him lying to Dan about it afterwards as him trying to protect Dan’s psyche from the impact of knowing someone saw him in such a state but like. C’mon, you know?

All this to say, yeah they’re both rape but there’s more to these scenes and why they read as being more or less severe in nature. And to end it all off I wasn’t trying to be smart when I said that people are simply more preoccupied with the current events of this story rather than talking about that rape scene…quite literally if you go to like the last 100 or so comments it’s just people reacting to the most recent chapters. I wasn’t around when the drunken Jaekyung scene was published and I don’t know if you were either, but if you weren’t, then neither of us can really say whether or not people talked about it then, can we? And since then, has Dan done anything similar? Compared to Jaekyung here in the most recent chapters being back on his usual bullshit?

gomen my long messages i have many thots

I will agree with you that a major portion of hate JK gets isbdown to the way his character is written.. bkoz there are far darker tops that have been able to win the public's love/empathy ( eg Seungho and Taeju), bkoz the authors were intentional about showing the "why" behind their actions.
Same with the way Dan is written, though i think there are more instances of him being strong-willed (esp earlier in the story when he's ignoring JK and in more recent chapters, and with that other team that wanted him to undermine JK). We can tell from the way he was bullied a lot as a child, that he doesn't have much of a self esteem, which is why he got very invested in being part of team black, cause JK's successes felt like his as well.
But still, i think the way a lot of ppl are engaging with this story is unbelievably naive? They're multiple videos bemoaning the fact that they're having sex cause they view it as "Dan giving in or not having any backbone"

Yeah, i was here during that chapter, and the comments were mostly joking about Dan getting JK drunk often so he'd be kinder or theorising that he was pretending to be drunk (which we now know wasn't true ☠).
I don't necessarily think one's intent matters as much as their action, so i think both of those actions suck. BUT, i honestly don't necessarily care as much, morally speaking, cause this is fictional and I don't think of them as real ppl. I just think it's interesting that almost no one recalls what Dan did as r*pe.
And for the comments and stuff, i genuinely think it's a trend to hate on the story now bkoz the idea that ppl hate Jinx more than Roses/Champagne, No Reason or Codename Anastasia is CRAZY to me, but there you go

If you ask me I think this story in and of itself is naive—I have to laugh a bit when people call it “dark fiction” when all it does is take darker/more mature subject matter and dumb it down for the sake of trying to create what will eventually be sold to us readers as a happy, healthy “romance.”

I’m just the type where if I’m reading something like this I can only enjoy its execution in 3 ways; 1: Where it’s all porn without plot (where things like rape and abuse and all that don’t have any real consequences on the characters anyway): 2: Where the author actually dives into the the full implications of what they’re writing and have the characters actually fully reconcile with everything that’s happened and what they’ve done (the author already doesn’t do this—on top of everything else I mentioned, [some of] the rape scenes are obviously drawn to be sexy…so part of why the drunken fuck scene isn’t viewed as being severe is because the author herself drew the scene all fluffy and flowery, it’s a framing issue, too), and then the characters either decide to split of Or do the serious work needed to become that happier, healthier couple; 3: Where the characters simply remain in their fucked up dynamic because none of the work gets done, and we explore the full implications of that. Idk, I like psychological depth.

Anyway yeah my friend and I have compared Jaekyung with many like…significantly more brutal characters and the thing we keep coming back to is yeah, not knowing Jaekyung’s why and not seeing more emotional depth and range on him. Interview With The Vampire for example, Lestat in that show becomes pretty abusive to Louis, I mean he’s kinda crazy from the get go LMFAO. But for as brutal as he could be, he was also genuinely amusing, charming, loving to Louis, too, amongst other things…ugh. Can’t recommend it enough (the TV series). And sure obviously the dynamic between those two and Dan and Jaekyung is different but sheesh. More moments of literally anything other than rage or entitlement or smugness would’ve made Jaekyung more... idk. Less like a caricature

I don’t really get people reading Dan’s actions in these recent chapters like that. I mean I do get it but at the same time I’m like I feel like it couldn’t have been spelled out more clearly, Jaekyung went out of his way to fully invade Dan’s little escape, invaded his place of work, moved in right ned to him, wouldn’t take no for an answer…Jaekyung whittled Dan down to dust like yeah. It’d be weirder if he didn’t give up and/or do absolutely anything he could to try to get Jaekyung away.

I mean I can’t say I blame the readers. And I agree that both actions suck but, like you said, it’s fiction—it’s here more so/rather than real life where I feel like the intention behind the action matters just as much if not more than the action itself. Stories are (partially) all about understanding different characters and how and why they do things after all, which is why I brought up the context.

I haven’t read those other stories so I can’t say anything yet. I finally got curious and started reading Roses and Champagne so I’ll report back on what I think. While I don’t disagree that hating on Jinx might be a “trend,” I don’t think all of it is unwarranted. I mean it should be obvious by now I’m very critical of how this story is written but genuinely like, speaking of writing, just because characters from other titles might be more or less brutal than Jaekyung doesn’t mean that they’re written the same way as Jaekyung…which is to say, shallowly (thus far).

I went to go read Sadistic Beauty Side Story for example because I think that was another one people compared this to, and like, the top in there does 10000% worse than Jaekyung but I found his and the bottom’s dynamic more believably toxic…it didn’t pull any punches about how fucked up those guys and their dynamic was. I enjoyed (idk if that’s the right word) seeing the bottom going from resisting the top to falling into compliance, and him NOTICING himself falling into that compliance and feeling like he’s going crazy, I loved that even in the end when he chooses to go back to the top it’s not because he’s happy and in love but because he feels so hopeless about his life getting better he just wants to go back to what he knows, what he’s familiar with…I loved the top pushing the bottom too far and then trying to pull back/make up for it, I loved that that happened multiple times…it felt real and compelling to me!

Or like I’m also reading TOXIN right now and Garon is another one who does Worse but just feels written better to me. He’s absolutely a psycho and I want to study him under a microscope but it didn’t take 50+ chapters for it to become obvious that Garon had a special place in that hole of a heart of his for the MC. We IMMEDIATELY see him make exceptions for MC that we KNOW to be exceptions because we’ve seen how Garon treats others like MC (butchering and killing them like animals without a second thought). It’s incredibly clear he acts out of the ordinary when it comes to the MC.

With Jaekyung like, and this is one of my gripes, we haven’t actually seen much of what Jaekyung has been like to his other/previous partners. We get the one guy at the very beginning of this webtoon and then him again in some one-off scene and nothing else. All we know is that Jaekyung pays guys to fuck for a good while before throwing them away. Which is precisely what we see him openly planning to do with Dan. We don’t actually know if he was doing anything unique in, say, paying off Dan’s debts, paying off his grandma’s hospital bills, letting him stay at his house, etc. I know those seem big but like, Jaekyung clearly has a lot of disposable income and he himself in each of those moments and afterwards said he did it all for the sake of his own convenience, basically—so Dan could just do his job without being distracted.

ALL THIS TO SAY…I think you should take into consideration the writing of these guys and their dynamics and all that, rather than just what their actions are on their face, when you make these comparisons to other stories. At least in my experience so far I can see why people have liked these other stories and their arguably and inarguably more brutal tops compared to Jaekyung.