I think you might be the first comment I see talking about the horrific implications of a forced pregnancy. Everyone freaks the fuck out about rape, but they all gloss over the fact the Seungho might have been forcibly impregnated. It’s as if they don’t consider a forced pregnancy to also be a form of sexual assault.
Maybe because I never want to have kids, but forced pregnancy is a very sensitive topic for me (hence why I mostly avoid omegaverse stories as well), yet I’ll always see comments where people are asking for someone to get pregnant without any consideration to what that actually means.
And that is the main reason why I’m holding myself back from reading this story in its entirety, I don’t care to read about babies, and I specially don’t want to read about a poor sap that was forcefully mutated in order for him to be able to carry a child.
I’ll have to wait to the end to see if the author will really go through with that crazy plot point.
Seungho has already been to hell and back, he does not need the added trauma of child bearing and childbirth.
such a nuanced and detailed comment! love when comments arent just hating on something and instead exploring the themes n shit~
free my man seunho ong.. how far does the bar have to sink for Won to be the best option...?
ive got a few positive thoughts on this!
this manhwa is so oversaturated with excessive rape to the point where as of the end of s3, seunho probably has had an average of 5 different dicks up his asshole every few chapters. i appreciate how it doesn't sugarcoat how rape and trafficking would be a part of apocalyptic words because mainstream media would never show this side to it
it might be cause its god knows what A.M. atp but i'm enjoying the ride! surprisingly avoids a lot of tropes – seunho is my GOAT!! never takes advantage of twink hansoo, always prioritises survival, doesn't pull that t-t-t-tsundere shit that alot of apocalypse bottoms devolve once they find their not-human-or-am-i-hybrid tops. he's compassionate but it's genuinely on sight for every rotten
all the characters are shockingly nuanced! Won's mom, the soccer player in the prison, even the s1 brute who had amputation fantasies, originally i thought he'd be homophobic but no. Won not being a brutish asshole and instead emotional and young-adultish was unexpected. though obsessive, he becomes genuine about seunho's wellbeing, loyal, doesn't see him as property, and never faults seunho for his hatred/revulsion towards him. and it doesn't take 5 seasons for us to reach this character development, it's just in his nature due to his uprbringing, which i really like.
the subversion of expections is really good, conceptually. the scene of seunho's schoolmate getting bitten which is his fuel for his guilty conscience turns out to be the best thing to have happened to him; and then it turns out that the guy he's had so many regrets over lacks the same empathy for seunho himself. (nice little parallel of that seunho wanted to *save* his life, yet the mutant schoolmate wants to *create* life using seunho)
even hansoo - instead of being useless, whiny deadweight, there's something genuinely wrong with him and he has none of the altruism that seunho has like 99.0091% of the cast, hansoo also forces himself upon seunho, he overpowers seunho and it's so unlike the helpless damsel in distress we were introduced to.
2 stand out themes to me—1. colour, through the use of blue as 'human'/sanity, and red as 'inhumanity'/insanity and purple when they blend together. we see it in some of the characters' speech bubbles (hansoo foreshadows becoming a mutant with all his red text bubbles!) and most glaringly with Won's eyes! i just think that, and the way eyes are drawn in the manhwa's compisition are cool as hell.
and 2. (i'm reaching here, but this is mad interesting to write about) the way each 'love' interest seems to focus a specific abuse towards seunho. it's not 100% torture 100% of the time, seunho seems to matter to each of the 3 mutants and it incites them to abuse him differently. with Won, he leans towards emotional abuse (given he promises within the first 10 chapters not to hit seunho, and how the rotten obeys him out of pity rather than fear), and it puts seunho in this spot where he's been tormented so much that he settles for the least painful poison, Won.
with hansoo it's physical. his character is based on not *truly* being as weak as his phyiscal form seems. he freaked out in s1 when his last-resort fallback of just stabbing whoever he hates failed, and he is the only mutant to manifest with literal bondage that he uses to hold seunho down.
and with the mutant schoolmate (bro look like evil hikaru tshd), it's sexual abuse but in the sense of sex/gender. there might also be patriarchal undertones to the dynamic he has with the rotten (fear & training, sees them as circus animal) as at first the rotten look like they're willing to serve when in actuality they aren't, which goes well with his fixation on reproduction and mutants being the superior race to rule society. i think his violation is the most scarring when he forces a mother role on seunho.
seunho has always valued 'holding onto life' over death, so the thought of bringing life into a world where death is so commonplace is unthinkable, plus we've never seen seunho with any special fondness for children, so the forced surgery is personally the most horrifying thing any of the mutants have done.
TLDR; manhwa is a realistic depiction to what happens to altrusits in a free-for-all apocalypse, characters are actually refreshingly 3-dimensional, you'll feel really bad for seunho