I mean... this type of story happens a lot in yaoi so I'm not sure why I didn't like it that much. It kinda felt empty and a little boring. Bio dad left son with an old lover? Maybe just friend who was in love with him? And then died. Adopted son grew up and fell in love with him and then they had sex. The end...
This would have been better if they were actual father and son. Hell even if they were properly just adoptive family would've elevated this. But oh well.
But on a serious note, I really didn't expect this story to be what it was. It was really . . . Melancholic. My first instinct was to describe the ending as "bittersweet," but honestly I don't think it's sweet enough for that. Which . . . I don't know how I feel about. At the very least, I appreciate the balls the author has. To create a pseudo-incest story but then have it actually have weight rather than clearly just exist as fetish material is kind of unique. A lot of people would brush this off due to the pseudo-incest, but I honestly think that's quite a shame, as I loved their dynamic and the relationship told between them.
As I mentioned, this isn't proper incest. It's not even proper adoptive incest, though it is adjacent to it; Jaemin takes in Yeonwoo as a child after his father falls into crippling gambling debt, raising him during the last few years of his childhood. During those years, Yeonwoo develops feelings for Jaemin, and this story is of his advances. So, yeah, it's kind of incest but also just as much kind of not. It depends on how you personally view it.
I was really surprised by the quite heavy tone that this story had. That's conveyed visually through very muted and grey-shaded color schemes, but also through the writing. Throughout the story Jaemin seems quite exhausted and uncomfortable, though at first you don't really know why; is he aware of Yeonwoo's advances, or is there something else on his mind? Yeonwoo's desires too, I felt, weren't very romanticized. He was obsessive and compulsive and it's clear his feelings were kind of suffocating him. It was . . . Ugly, in a sense. It made him be different from the people around him, and the environment with his "father" was tense and awkward. It felt bleak.
Ultimately Yeonwoo and Jaemin do end up getting into a relationship, but I thought the way they were brought together and what pushed them over that edge into becoming a couple was really unique and made me kind of step back and reassess the story.
Yeonwoo's real father ends up dying. It's revealed that Jaemin liked the father, and that's partially why he accepted taking in Yeonwoo—but when he dies, that pushes Jaemin into Yeonwoo's embrace as a desperate attempt to keep ahold of the last existing thing of the man he actually loved, and to love the father through Yeonwoo. And I actually really liked that. It's just such a sad way to love; to not love the man himself but the memory of who he evokes. It's poetic, almost, and I'm weak to that shit
