I agree with all your points, but a correction. Koogi never said that, you cannot find her saying it was not yaoi in any of her interviews. On the lezhin site it is classified under bl (that is the translation of yaoi to the west) and koogi talks in her interviews about her relationship with the yaoi genre.
Also yaoi is not a romantic genre, nor a genre that ever wanted to be a representation for gay men. We can have really beautiful romance works, but that is not the main point of the genre. So calling this or ks yaoi does not defeat the point, cause yaoi is a huge demography that from the start worked with visceral topics where love was nowhere to be found. It is different from queer media in the west.
I dont know from where people got that koogi said that.
i understand why this is being called rape porn. i would be able to call it something else if it literally offered… anything else. but it doesn’t. we get small glimpses of the completely unhinged behavior from park, but not enough to really warrant all the advances that follow.
SPOILER: Because park is reenacting revenge from the trauma he experienced in middle school, i get that. to an extent. the plot hole that isn’t adding up for me is park throughout the whole series is acting as if things are being done to jiwoo that essentially have nothing to do with him. when he hired guys to gang rape him, it was though as if he wasn’t in the wrong, the guys who gang raped him were in the wrong. when he essentially kidnapped him and locked him up, and wasn’t his fault, it was jiwooks fault for running away.
but the crux is, he blames jiwoo for getting him assaulted in middle school. if he followed his own logic, it wouldn’t be jiwooks fault. but he can’t do this because as he hints, this revenge and how he’s goin about it is also a way to erase his own guilt from what he’s done.
but we don’t really see the further dive into either characters psyche. it remains just very visceral and unnecessarily long panels and chapters of repeated rapes.
with killing stalking, the author told their audience “this is not yaoi”, and they did that because it’s not based of any sexual act between the characters. but the psychological undoing of them over time. this is just yaoi with some psycho stuff blended in as an excuse.