Alright. I'm actually one of the readers who failed to consider and think about the charac...

Alright. I'm actually one of the readers who failed to consider and think about the characters as their own person, but instead, I just solely focused on the plot and just immediately went "Juhyeok used him" and "Su Ah made him that way", but then someone pointed out something that literally made me open up my mind and understand a whole different perspective of this story.

I’m going to lay this out clearly and structurally, because I genuinely think a lot of the discourse around this story misses the characters themselves. Most readers focus heavily on the plot events — who hurt who in which chapter — but not enough on the personalities, developmental gaps, and perception filters that drive those events in the first place. And with characters like these two, that distinction matters.

First, Su Ah.
Su Ah is not written as a calculating dominant alpha archetype. He is soft, overly affectionate, emotionally dependent to Juhyeok, timid, introverted, and canonically portrayed as intellectually underdeveloped in certain areas. He thinks and reacts in ways that are closer to a child than a socially aware adult. So far, he wasn't also portrayed as academically intelligent, he's not socially perceptive, and not particularly skilled at abstract reasoning. What he is strong in is attachment. Once he bonds emotionally, he bonds intensely.

Now place that personality into the context of his unexpected manifestation as a dominant alpha.

He grew up believing he would be the omega — the one protected. Suddenly that flips, and there was also no evidence he was properly educated on how to navigate alpha instincts, social power, or pheromone responsibility. Aside from his father, Juhyeok is essentially his entire emotional world. That creates isolation, and isolation breeds narrow perception.

So when Juhyeok, now a recessive omega—which is the most sensitive to pheromones among all types of omegas— insists on entering an alpha-dominated spaces like competitive judo, Su Ah does not process that through autonomy or consent frameworks. He processes it through instinct and attachment: Juhyeok (omega) + danger + I'm an Alpha = "I must protect him."

That doesn’t excuse what he did, non-consensual scenting is still a violation, but it contextualizes it. His actions are consistent with someone who believes protection equals love, and love equals action. He doesn't think long-term. He reacts emotionally and instinctively. That’s a key trait.

Now Juhyeok.
Juhyeok is pride-driven, egoistic, career-obsessed, and deeply insecure about being a recessive omega. He internalizes societal stigma. To him, being an omega means weakness, fragility, dependency — everything he refuses to embody. So he compensates. He pushes himself into high-risk, alpha-dominated arenas to prove he is not what the system says he is.
But here’s where readers often oversimplify him: he is not some cold manipulator. He is also naive, emotionally avoidant, and is in denial about his own attachment to Su Ah.

The critical turning point is biological dependency.
Years of consistent scenting — regardless of intent — alter his pheromone stability. The story foreshadows this and it didn't just happened randomly. His desperation in later chapters, including the semen request, stems from that compounded biological pressure combined with career stakes. When your body is destabilizing and your dream is within reach, rational behavior starts cracking. That’s not cruelty, exploitation, nor controlling. That’s someone breaking under structural and physiological strain.

Their conflict, at its core, is not villain vs victim. It is two emotionally stunted individuals reacting from very different insecurities:
Su Ah acts from attachment, instinct, and a simplistic “protect = love” belief system, while Juhyeok acts from pride, shame, survival pressure, and refusal to be reduced to omega fragility.

Both are childish in different ways. Both lack proper guidance. Both operate with limited frameworks shaped by their environment and the people around them — which, frankly, is almost no one.
And this is why reducing the story to “he used him” or “he made him that way” flattens everything.

Also, I have a suspicion about Su Ah’s one-sided protective actions, it is very plausible that his idea of alpha responsibility was not self-generated. In a world where alphas are socially framed as protectors and possessors of omegas, it won't be surprising if he absorbed it—maybe from family, environment, or overheard narratives — the belief that an alpha’s role is to protect the omega they cherish at any cost. If you combine that cultural script with his intellectual immaturity and emotional dependency, his actions start to look less like calculated control and more like misguided role performance. And also, Juhyeok’s dependency is actually something that is still fixable. He's pheromone dependent, yes, but it wasn't portrayed as pheromone bonding (or even if it does, bonding is still undoable, there's an intervention method that requires the omega to be physically separated far away from the alpha for years to reset the pheromone dependency, or bonding—if it happened), yes it might negatively physically impact the omega because of the sudden separation from the pheromone's they've been dependent to stabilize, but not to the point that it's impossible to survive. Also, he wasn't imprinted which would make it literally nearly impossible (because imprint sometimes cannot be undo in some omegaverse universes).

Again, all this doesn't justify them, but it explains the psychology.
If readers step back from just reacting to plot beats and start analyzing how these two actually think, process, and misinterpret the world around them, the story becomes less about simple blame and more about structural imbalance, emotional immaturity, and unintended consequences.