i think there’s some complexity to yuri, for sure. he acts in some ways that are hella disrespectful to mr.lee and just straight up toxic BUT and this is a big but.. he was not all that terrible. i think their current dynamic makes sense when you think about how they started, not saying they need to be stuck in a vicious cycle because of this. i just like to think even without his big character development being written, they will continue to work on themselves and yuri will become more emotionally stable especially as he ages.
ah, there it goes again. that dejected revulsion i felt when i first read this story.
i kept wanting him to become angry. i wanted him to scream, break something, hate his husband enough to save himself. instead, he only grew tired. he endured the treatments, the blood, the slow betrayal of his own body, and the humiliation of loving someone who returned home carrying traces of another person. after a while, even survival seemed too much to ask of him.
i wanted his husband to suffer. when he found the house empty, i wanted that silence to swallow him. when he searched for him, i wanted every unanswered question to burn. when his flight was delayed and he arrived too late, i wanted to call it justice. but how could there be justice in death? it felt like another useless tragedy added to all the others. his guilt angered me, but i still understood it, and i resented the story for making me understand. i resented myself even more for being so empathetic.
i wanted the doctor’s love to be enough. i wished it could’ve been. he was gentle with a man who had forgotten what gentleness felt like. he gave him somewhere peaceful to spend the life he had left, but he could not give him back the part of himself that wanted a future. not even if he willed the gods to make it happen.
everyone loved him at the wrong time, in the wrong way, or after he had lost the strength to believe them. what do you do with a lifetime of love when the person who should have received it died believing you had none?
i rarely write reviews this detailed but I am so utterly shaken by this one that I cannot help but try to convey the bitter taste it left in my mouth. i finished it with an uncomfortable nausea and a grief that still coils in my stomach.
both Mamiya and Sada are proof that tenderness can survive even when it is intimately acquainted with the grotesque. they remain painfully human though their actions no longer resemble humanity, and because of that, i understood them in places where i could not necessarily relate. there is something almost unbearable about loving another person beyond the usefulness of language.
wanting to give another person everything the body can surrender, only to discover that even being consumed would not satisfy the desire to keep them here. however, their relationship itself was remarkably restrained and i think that was due to them largely being at peace with what they could not give.
that was the grief i carried away from this story. even with Mamiya’s ending, it suggests that a person may live perfectly well without intimacy when they have never depended upon it, but once they have known the relief of being understood, returning to solitude is not a return at all. the absence of being known can become more unbearable than the solitude that came before it.
i also favor the authors refusal to reward love merely because it was genuine. reality does not become generous when people finally find one another. perhaps that is why the story affected me so deeply. it offered no comforting lie about love conquering everything. instead, it suggested that love may conquer nothing at all and still become the most consequential thing that ever happens to us.
oh my god, u write so beautifully ╥﹏╥ u have such a way with words, for a minute there i thought i was reading a story and not a review!
thank u for sharing ur thoughts with us! u should totally start writing more detailed reviews like this, well if u feel like it ofc
this is irrelevant but do u write fics by any chance??? i'd love to read some of ur works if u do! (≧∀≦)
WOW thank you sm! sometimes the stories i read are just straight slop so i usually avoid voicing my opinion on those in fear of being a harsh critic lol.
also YESS, i do write on ao3 a bit. my handle is the same. i have a lot of archived stories but the one i have up right now is a satosugu mystery type of fic called chain of custody. i haven’t dropped a chapter in a few months due to my perfectionism but i might drop the pre written chapters i wrote this week!










WHAT the fuck !???