I'd had this manhwa on my wishlist for quite some time and finally got around to checking it out. Based on the rave reviews it has gotten, I was honestly hoping for something better. I read only around half of the first volume before dropping it, and I would have dropped it sooner if not for my sincere desire to actually want to enjoy this series. After all, it's not often that you get a thoughtful, well-written shounen-ai manga. However, I found I just couldn't get through this one. The art is fairly dated (1998), but I was willing to bear it for the sake of the story. The story, though, hardly captured my interest beyond the first brutal meeting the protagonist has with the eponymous Dai. Only a few pages after that breathless opening scene, however, the manhwa fell into a montage of classic slice of life genre sequences which reintroduced the male and female leads in much less dynamic settings where characters I honestly couldn't care less about at the moment (the protagonists' respective friends) cropped up like weeds.These "cool down" scenes served only to dull the feelings of suspense and intrigue I had begun to cultivate, for I felt like I wasn't given enough time with the two protagonists to care about their mundane daily lives and abstract musings just yet.
Of course, this wasn't the only factor that killed my interest. What felt really clunky to me were the boxes and boxes of narration and reflection done on part of the two main POV characters. It was a chore to read them along with all of the meaningless dialogue made on the part of the side characters. The prose was hackneyed, insipid, and I felt that the author was using it as a vehicle to tell rather than show the characters' reactions. I do not hold the belief that comic artists must be excellent crafters of prose; good writers, yes, but not in the sense of a traditional prose writer. Therefore, I have to wonder why this author fell on a clear weak point of hers to try and tell the story. Perhaps it was meant to sound profound or meditative, but it came across as the opposite - shallow, a lazy cop-out.
Finally, I did not understand the main character's motivation for staying with Dai when he could have left with the girl. Was his irrational and unfounded decision supposed to mirror some crazy Stockholm dynamic or an internal masochistic fantasy of his? We learn so little about his character that it's impossible to say. I felt as if the author couldn't come up with a legitimate reason for him to stay with the guy who had tortured and humiliated him on more than one occasion and so tried to play it off as some weird, superficial fascination he had developed for Dai after only a few abusive encounters. Honestly, the whole thing seemed incredibly forced to me, and I had to stop reading after that because I realized that I just didn't care about the characters enough to keep on.
I understand that this manhwa is quite popular, and I can believe that it's a lot better than most of the BL out there, so I won't rate it after having read only half a volume. However, from what I read, I found myself bored and apathetic, and so I won't be continuing this one.
(-5)
(+64)
