Preach, I read this twice last year and back then I would still argue that the main villains in the story were mokyeon and sunhwa. Nothing much has changed now, but I can clearly see that he's DEFINITELY not as naive, "innocent" or the huge victim everybody thinks he is (as you've also noticed).
During this third read of mine today, I found myself questioning nanjo's decisions for every time, mokyeon "coerces" him to do his bidding. I'm not denying the fact that he was definitely being manipulated at some level, but ppl misunderstand how incredibly and stupidly easy it is to paint someone in a good or bad light, depending on how the story is portrayed. Mokyeon is no doubt toxic in his own right and so is sunhwa, but for a character as important as nanjo— being the literal male lead, we have ZERO information on what his actual intentions and motivations are. On the surface his actions might seem appropriate given that, the audience's already set on seeing mokyeon negatively but the more you scepticise and analyse, the more you realise that things aren't really what they seem at first glance.
Sorry for the yap, I didn't mean to throw a word vomit under your comment
nah ofc I feel bad for him but lets be real I wasn't expecting nanjo to be buddy buddy with him at all still though kind of unrelated but i find it interesting how a lot of people think of nanjo as the victim (as in, he really needs to get away from twink and our mc, he's being manipulated by both) but nanjo himself isn't that great either. The reason he's in this situation is because he sees himself as some kind of "protector" of the twink, he doesn't really see twink as a full person if that makes sense. Like, in the beginning, he was justifying sleeping with our mc for the sake of the twink but what kind of logic is that like be fr..? So in a way, all three of them suck. Nanjo is not explicitly trying to manipulate anyone but he refuses to accept the truth in front of him. Twink doesn't need him to make a backdoor deal to "protect" him, mc isn't making twink do things he doesn't want to do etc etc
but ofc ill side with our mc bc he's the mc