Reading comprehension is indeed a lost skill from these comments

Ilay’s attachment to Taeui is the really interesting part

One of the biggest pieces of subtext is that Taeui becomes an exception.

Not because Taeui magically discovers the “real Ilay.”

Rather, Taeui is one of the few people who interacts with Ilay without treating him exclusively as a monster.

And that seems to be enormously significant to Ilay.

There’s even a childhood connection that gets adapted into the manhwa, which adds another layer to why Taeui occupies such a strange psychological position for him.

Ilay doesn’t suddenly become morally better because he likes Taeui.

Instead, his relationship with Taeui begins exposing a part of Ilay that seemingly didn’t exist in his ordinary relationships with other people.

That’s why his behavior toward Taeui becomes so contradictory.

He can be:

* possessive
* threatening
* cruel
* jealous
* genuinely protective
* emotionally dependent
* fascinated
* sexually attracted
* and eventually deeply attached

simultaneously.

That’s the point.

⸻

And the “contradiction” is intentional

This is something I think people miss when they interpret Ilay exclusively through contemporary relationship discourse.

If you approach the story as:

“Would this be acceptable behavior in a healthy relationship?”

Obviously fucking not.

But that’s not really the literary question.

It’s a dark character study wrapped inside an action/spy/BL story.

Ilay is basically a person whose emotional development is profoundly abnormal.

And Taeui becomes the person who forces that development to happen.

That’s why some of the later material is so fascinating. Ilay doesn’t become a fundamentally different person. Instead, Taeui becomes the person around whom Ilay starts developing behavioral constraints that he didn’t previously possess.

There are discussions of the later novels where Ilay explicitly becomes concerned with controlling his anger around Taeui and even frames Taeui’s existence as something he can’t imagine living without.

That’s not redemption.

That’s attachment.

And those are not the same thing.

Taeui is much more complicated than “victim who falls for his abuser”

This is probably where I think the comment sections sometimes flatten the story.

Taeui’s relationship with Ilay begins developing before the rape. That’s enormously important.

There’s already an unusual intimacy between them. There’s attraction, curiosity, irritation, fear, friendship, sexual tension, and eventually a kind of sexual relationship developing before the assault.

So the story isn’t structured as:

Ilay rapes Taeui → Taeui inexplicably falls in love with rapist.

It’s closer to:

Taeui becomes emotionally entangled with an extremely dangerous man → their relationship becomes sexual → Ilay commits a horrific violation → the existing emotional attachment doesn’t magically disappear → both characters have to exist inside the consequences of that contradiction.

Those are very different stories.

And the novel itself actually makes the contradiction uncomfortable rather than pretending it isn’t there. At one point Taeui reflects on their sexual relationship and distinguishes the ordinary encounters from the time Ilay raped him.

That’s psychologically messy as hell, but messy doesn’t mean incomprehensible.

this actually like reflected how I saw the manhwa. like this hit HARD like oh my goodness finally someone who could see past the "oh Stockholm Syndrome" but go IN DEPTH. This is peak, pure cinema. perfect omg