The end to Harada's Messiah series (Messiah no Yakubi and Messiah no Kyojitsu) brings back the the nameless Messiah's friend in an unexpected role: as the person behind the rape in the first one-shot. Turns out Friend was the one who hired Seme. Which brings up ALL SORTS of questions, like how did Friend and Seme meet, and how did Friend realize that Seme had the Skills (tm) to resist Messiah's mouth, and most importantly, what the actual fuck?! I don't find the ending, where Messiah has to choose between an obsessive, boundary-ignoring, bullying rapist and a manipulative, monopolizing, and pathetic rape-conspiracist, to be funny or sweet, and honestly neither does Harada, who throws in a peanut-gallery who calls both choices "trash" and a strange "it's all just a story!" implication to the final page, making Messiah and Seme metafictional characters to boot. Friend's long rambling speech where he reveals his plans for Messiah's sexual submission is disturbing in an over-the-top parodic way, especially when he misunderstands Messiah's ability to see only him as a person apart from his penis as some sort of longcon hater joke by Messiah.
And that's really Harada's wheelhouse -- sexy, dubious consent-y romps with not very nice characters. Still, something here smacks of victimization: Messiah feels too much like a victim who has spent all their life being sexually abused and thus can only respond with inappropriate sexuality, and when he's caught between two abusers, he doesn't make the obvious, self-empowered choice to leave. Instead, he feels like he's forced to go along with one of them just because they like him (or, maybe, because he knows neither one of them would leave him alone even if he said no). Here's hoping that Seme's inability to understand "no means no" is mostly motivated by Friend's money and disappears with the closing pages of this oneshot. I wouldn't hold my breath, though. At least the sex is hot.
Messiah no Sentaku