Maybeblue's manga / #Co-workers(154)

So cliché it was almost funny

For a long time MC has been in an urequited love with his friend who's soon gonna get married. Heartbroken, he enters a gay bar where he's approached by the popular and handsome Kou. After what was supposed to be a one-night-stand, they meet again at MC's office and Kou turns out to be his new superior at work. After some time MC starts to warm up to the caring and pampering (and kinda pushy) Kou, however we soon realize that he isn't as nice of a person as he appears (instead he's a real ass). The plot itself is nothing new and the characters have like two personality traits at best but we get to see a jerk seme suffer for at least 3 chapters while he repents and chases after a quite unwavering uke and it's honestly very satisfying. Sometimes you just wanna read a simple jiwon-from-bj-alex redemption arc and this definitely does the job.

Honestly it wasn't as bad as I thought it would, the plot is pretty predictable but there are some good points to it. I actually liked the fact that their issues did need some time and multiple confrontations to be solved, I don't like it when all the negative feelings the characters hold suddenly disappear as if nothing ever happened because in reality even when people are able to talk their relationship problems out, they still need some time to get over all the angsty emotions they experienced. Also I don't think Yonwoo's plan for revenge was too out of pocket compared to others I've read, it made sense both in terms of what his reasons were and what effect he wanted to achieve. I often read this type of stories and get frustrated by all the drama that starts from some dumb misunderstanding, or by the fact that everything that the characters do it's unnecessary or could be avoided if they just communicated with the other person. Luckly this wasn't the case thanks to the fact that Keith was actually a complete jerk and Yowoon had every right to be mad at him, it took a while but everyone learned their lesson in the end. Now what I didn't like about this were the dialogues, idk if the problem lies on the translation or the original work was actually this awkward, but most of the times the dialogues were confusing or felt unnatural, and I think especially the scenes where they were addressing their feelings trying to sort out their problems could have been better, because they definitely had a lot of potential. Also the parts of the story with more action, like those chapters where they get kidnapped and almost die like a million times, didn't match the rest of the story at all and I think were pretty unnecessary too. They come out of nowhere and are given an absurd explanation (what was that with the cult thing? It made no sense, plus how did that even had anything to do with Keith??). I mean, the scene where Yowoon gets hurt and they cry etc was nice, and I also get why it was needed as a turning point for their relationship, but was there really no other way to go about it? It was an accident anyway so what was the reason for it to involve guns, fire, cars crashing and a whole cult to make it happen? Also the secondary characters were hella random, the only one that fit the story was the blond secretary, all the others felt like they would eventually play an important role but never did. Like mr.miller??? What was his purpose? The lady with brown hair that slept with Keith and then popped up here and there for no reason, what was her role? The handsome firefighter who helps Yowoon, too, wasn't necessary at all, if the author needed a character to be Yonwoo's friend and support, Josh would have been a far better choice 'cause he had already been introduced and it would have made sense for him to cover that role, otherwise what was his purpose in the first place? What I mean is that you usually develop a character, give him a backstory, a nice design and some unique traits if you want to make him special to the readers, you add those details either to make some pieces in the story fit better together, or to give him depth, because maybe he plays an important role or you want to give them more space in the story. You don't just give this level of details to anyone, because then as a reader I expect them to actually do something, or to make these details find their place in the plot. But here everything's so confusing to me! These characters are not detailed enough for me to become attached to them and their own lives, but they're too detailed to just be background characters the author uses as tools to make the plot going. Some of them didn't even need a name for how unimportant they were.