Look Yall

I know you want to hate Chang and love McQueen but I'm about to come at you with more facts than yall ready to handle out here.

Criticisms of Chang:
1. He gave Ed a debt with sky high interest
2. He's in the Chinese Mafia
3. He rapes Ed
4. He and Ed get violent with each other (it's not always Chang who throws the first punch or gets handsy first).

Defense of Chang:
1. He tries to give Ed outs on the debt on multiple occasions
2. He tries to save Ed from escorting
3. He beats the shit out of McQueen for making Ed's porno and asks McQueen to sell the licenses to him so he can stamp that bullshit out of existence (the cost would be $500,000+, but he doesn't care what the cost is)
3.2. He asks McQueen wtf kind of man makes a porno of his lover
4. He protects the image Ed has of Granny Lingbao so he can receive love and affection despite the fact that Lingbao abused him for years.
5. SPOILER He takes Ed in as family and is considerate of his feelings for many years (giving him a Bruce Lee poster when he's upset, listening to him recite lines from his play).
6. He supports Ed's acting interest (Bruce Lee poster, taking him to see Othello).
7. He would give Ed a sweater off his back if Ed asks

Criticisms of McQueen:
1. He is a porn director and player type
2. He shot a rape porno of Ryan which fucked Ryan up deeply
3. He lived with Ryan and Cecil for three years and abandoned Ryan at his lowest
4. He started dating an employee of his own company
5. He abandoned Ed when the going got rough and only apologized about what he said, not about how he left when things got difficult.
6. When he is jealous, he does not let Ed speak and takes things out on him with angry, rough sex.
7. He didn't know about Ed's debt or reasons for doing porn (so that seems like a deep relationship lol).

Defenses of McQueen:
1. He has not raped Ed
2. Some people think they look hot together
3. Some people think that McQueen knows how to make adult apologies
4. He gave Ed the money he made off of selling the rights to Ed's pornos
5. He eventually apologizes to Ryan

Now, I know this comment section is full of people who love to proselytize and say porn is okay and fine, Chang made Ed do it, there's nothing wrong with McQueen, and the only reason I am stepping in to say anything at all is because there are children here reading this when they shouldn't be.

So first.

The porn industry is not a safe environment. The avg lifespan of a porn star is 37 years (compare to 70+ for the rest of the population). They face coercion, unsafe work environments, and pressure from male stars and directors to do scenes they're not comfortable with. We see this for Ed. He loses his anal virginity on camera to a man that he didn't even know he was shooting with that day. He says that he doesn't care, but later we see that it does bother him (from his own internal monologue). The psychological blowback of this is unconsidered because McQueen is the main ship and we can't be having too much darkness there.

In the work, Ed's porno pays $6000 to $7000. Considering this would have been in the 2000s based on setting, that is incorrect and porn scenes actually pay closer to $1000. If Ed's debt is say around $300,000 max, that means he needs to appear in more than 300 pornos, and the production quantity of pornos is not high enough to support this. Porno was never really something that was going to get him out of debt.

Next, Ed says he would rather help McQueen in his work with porn than Chang who exploits people.

Surprise, surprise, the entire porn industry is funded by Italian mafia money laundering schemes and porn shops and website are completely run by organized crime. So he's running from the hands of the Chinese mafia to the hands of the Italian one. This is unconsidered either because the author did not do the research and does not know, or because Chang is supposed to be one true bad guy whereas McQueen is one true good guy.

Finally, the writer chose to write an asian american male (a group that has difficulty making it in hollywood and acting), had him give up on his dream, had his debut in film be a porno, and then had him uncritically fall in love with the man who shot his porn and fucked him in it. I'm sorry guys but Harvey Weinstein is in jail for a reason.

Again, the psychological blowback of this goes uncriticized because we're supposed to believe that Ed made these choices and he was forced by a shitty situation with Chang to do so.

As a plot, this is disgusting and it would be fine if it was just a shitty BL that didn't masquerade as deep but it does masquerade as deep.

So next, we have Chang's character. He is an orphan who has lost his mother and father, and is taking care of a dementia addled woman who is not his relative, who also hates him and wishes he would have died. He has been doing this since he was 12. He is growing up in low-income housing in New York, living on ostensibly peanuts from the government. He gets involved with the Mafia because poverty and gangs go hand in hand, and he has no support system, no parental love, and no opportunities.

It's really easy for people to hate him, but I don't know how many of you have grown up in the states or grown up in major cities of the states. Inner city experiences mess people up.

Within this he has Ed, someone who grows to be like family to him and eventually someone he likes romantically. However, Ed is not gay and so Chang keeps it to himself. He sees Ed dating women and he's respectful of it though it hurts him. When Ed's porn comes out, note that Chang says "then why did I hold back for so long?"

But despite having held back, he still doesn't make a move on Ed even after finding out about the porno. He's doing his own thing when he finds Ed selling himself. When he finds out about that, he still makes it clear that he's not trying to have sex with Ed. When Ed asks if Chang is going to do it, he tells Ed to know his place and come to work.

Chang has created a distance between him and Ed because he doesn't know how to love without it destroying his peace, but that makes sense. He's someone who grew up without love and though Ed is precious to him, the anxiety of loving someone makes him push him away. I'm not defending it, but I am saying this is a common defense mechanism.

Now let's talk about the Mafia right quick. Apparently Chang gave Ed a really high interest debt as a form of loan sharking. This loan was legal because Ed declared bankruptcy at one point and was denied (ostensibly due to Chang's intervention). If Ed can declare bankruptcy on the debt, then it's not a secret illegal debt. However, at times, the work makes it seem like Chang has an illegal bookmaking business and Ed pays into that.

Regardless of which it is, going into porn is not going to solve the issue for him, but also the US govt does not look kindly on illegal book making operations. There have been several FBI stings of illegal loansharking and gambling dens, and California Senator Leland Yee went to jail for his ties with the mafia. If a senator can go down, Chang isn't all powerful like the author seems to imagine he is.

Secondly, Ed decides to not pay the debt eventually though that's not translated. Which begs to ask the question, what's the point of this fucking plot?

Now let's look at what we're all reacting to here.

Ed/Yeowoon starts out as a sensical character who loves Chang's grandma and Chang to the extent that he feels they were family and Chang was the only one who understood his loneliness. However, he's damn fast at turning on Chang when he learns Chang has given him a loan. He goes from "we were family" to "he hated me all along". Forgive me but you guys have been friends / family for 15 years at this point. That's quite the jump to make.

For Ed, everything revolves around his own self and he isn't able to imagine the motives of other people. I don't know why this is, because Chang's character is decently fleshed out emotionally and psychologically, but Ed's reasoning is legitimately "I'm angry at Chang because he turned on me, I will never pay attention to his efforts at starting a conversation (when he asks for them to get dinner), making amends (multiple job offers, multiple check ins), helping me out (stopping the prostitution from happening)."

On the other hand, Ed sees everything McQueen does as golden. "He can hurt me and I will heal." When McQueen continues to have sex with others despite them being in a relationship. Feeling like he wants to die, but fine when McQueen comes back to him and gives him a flimsy apology about how he said mean things. I say this is a flimsy apology because the fact that McQueen has an abandonment kink is never addressed, not by McQueen, not by the plot, and not by Ed. At the end of the day, McQueen apologizes to Ryan about what he did, but we as readers only know the following things about McQueen:

1. He's good at sex
2. He gtfo's when the going gets rough
3. He doesn't care what people think about his porn
4. He likes to make celibate looking people cry

Going back to Ed though, for someone who loved Chang dearly, he doesn't for a second think about Chang's pain even when he finds out about it. He goes so far as rejecting Chang because he's a weak man who couldn't show love. However, Ed does acknowledge that saying I love you was difficult for him (at McQueen) and that apologies are difficult as adults. This consideration, however, is only applied to McQueen, and never Chang.

This is what we call bad writing. If you're going to take a character and just turn him into angst porn, then don't do it with such a serious plot. These writers seriously fumbled every aspect of American immigrant life, from poverty to race relations, and these are real, legitimate issues.

Chang's character makes no sense. On the one hand he is the only one speaking sense about Ed's porno and trying to protect him, and on the other hand he is this callous evil man. Forget that Ed has known him forever and knows almost everything there is to know about how he ticks. Forget that Ed is supposed to care for him so at some point would have tried to understand what's going on under there. Forget that Ed grew up with Youyu, Youyu's mom, and the restaurant crew and could have easily talked to someone about what was going on with him and Chang (there's a picture of them at the restaurant opening).

Ed's character also makes no sense. On the one hand he is yelling at Chang, throwing away offers to have his debt's interest frozen, or having his debt paid off; on the other hand he is putty in the hands of a man he barely knows (legit they're together for like three months), and forgives that man for indirectly ruining his life and then *disappearing*. Taking an extra week or two to get back together with someone is not enough here. The conversation needed to discuss trust, reliability, commitment and instead it's like "I thought about you but you're with Chang now???"

Glen's character doesn't even get screentime. You guys realize we see the story from Ed's perspective, we see it from Chang's perspective twice (one is coming up in the raws), but we never see it from Glen's perspective? Because there's nothing there. He's just a dildo ken doll with no character development outside of edgy lover movie director buff white dude.

And finally the contrived rape scene. Rape happens. Rape is terrible. It is mishandled in BL all of the time, but I have never seen a grander fuck up of a rape scene than the one in this webtoon.

What Ed does is assault. It doesn't matter if he didn't think Chang wanted sex (that's WORSE cuz he's just assaulting someone for funs). It doesn't matter if Ed was in an escorting situation. Ed had asked if Chang was going to do it and Chang had already indicated no. Chang says no about 4 times.

And then he flips. Now this is EVEN worse. Because usually, when we look at rape scenes, we understand that one person did it to another person and the other person was not responsible for anything. But in this situation, they both legitimately assault each other.

If they went to court over it, Ed would go to jail too. They are gay men. Telling a man to bend over so you can fuck him is assault. And obviously what Chang does is assault/rape.

But, from what we can understand, someone sat there behind a computer, typing and minimized one type of assault and made a victim story for the other character. This is horrendous mishandling. Like what the absolute fuck, you needed a plot device so bad that you did this???

Especially coming from a character who has managed to hold back for 9 years. What's one more night for him? He was trying to convince his childhood friend and person he likes to stop selling his body and then the plot powers created this garbage?

It's irresponsible to people who have been raped, it's irresponsible to males who are sexually assaulted because it erases certain types of assault, and it's an absolute insult to rhetoric around assault because we trust that when people say they didn't do anything to start the violence, they didn't. In this case, Ed instigates violence where there was none up until that point.

Anyway, this has gotten long, I will leave my comment with this.

Walk on Water portrays selling your body as something equivalent to bagging groceries. There's no psychological blowback, there's no pain, there's no hurt. This is not true of the real world. Despite destigmatizing sex work, sex workers still need mental health services because the actual work hurts them.

The only person in the whole work who recognizes this is Chang, and he tries to protect Ed from it on multiple occasions. Everyone else sees porn as fine and okay, until the end of the plot where Glen suddenly sees the error of his ways for the past decade and randomly decides he was trying to get out of porn all along and is therefore selling his company.

We don't see him logically reach this point, but the narrative wants him to reach it. We are left off in the end with Glen is the better man because he knew how to change his ways and because he knew how to apologize. But where was Glen's struggle? He says he never cares about what people said and he only cares that he hurt Ed with his words. What kind of power does Ed have over him after barely 3 months of knowing each other. Also what kind of reasoning is that? There's no consideration of the ethical implications, no struggle with his own self. TF? He just changes because that's what the plot needs for the story to end.

But the real question is, did he really? At what point did we see that? Real convenient that suddenly everything goes to Ed's happily ever after.

So let's see we have one (1) decently fleshed out character, one (1) mary sue / wish fulfillment vehicle that loses all semblance of his own thoughts and feelings as a previously straight man when he decides to start doing porn, and one (1) walking orange dildo who we learn nothing about except that he is the bigger man who knows how to change his ways despite having benefitted off of the 100s of actors that came before Ed.

COol Cool cool cool cool. I wish this garbage would unpublish itself.