#*cfc

This review will contain some minor and major spoilers, so read it at your own risk. Disclaiming already that I read the book almost live as it was updating since chapter 10 and sourced the translation from everywhere including MTLing the Spanish translation since they used to update the fastest. They did an amazing job. They all did. Very grateful for their hard work. Also yes I have read all the R rated smut as well. Meatbun really unleashed herself and I AM SO THANKFUL.

As one can see from my rating, I really love the book and also highly recommend it. If you have read the tags and understand their gravity that is. (If you read the book pretending you can handle the warnings and then cannot handle it and complain here, the fool would be you) I also think its one of the most misunderstood book of the author Meatbun who does not eat Meat since her breakthrough with her first novel Dumb Husky and his White Cat Shizun. I will explain in a bit.

First of all the kind of book MB writes, its about not just one bad guy and the good guy who redeems them. That is one of the most fundamental misunderstanding of the basic skeleton of her genre. No, what she writes is Gong X Shou pair who are both very unlikable people by any normal standards (hilariously enough the weak rival love interest here in the end gave up on pursuing Xie Qingcheng because he finally saw how rancid he really is and he is not into it LMAO) . Yet it does not stop them from falling in love with each other and getting a second chance in life despite the terrible things they do to each other, to other people and being terrible in general. Her exploration of redemption, love and its limit is not one dimensional as one usually expects in stories like this, so to pretend she writes her shous as some minimally flawed martyrs who never do anything wrong is why I see so many people give this book very weird reviews. Granted Xie Qingcheng, the apathetic, paternalistic shou of the story is definitely the greyest character Meatbun has written in her shou gang, but still. I don't think she was giving Chu Wanning a ringing endorsement with him weaponizing his authority as a Shizun to beat his student in jealousy and never communicating his thoughts which resulted in his tragedy in 0.5 timeline (or Gu Mang from Yuwu being hailed as a good person for patronizing Mo Xi on what is or is not good for him and nearly getting him killed because of that).

XQC was once personal doctor to a deeply neglected and mentally ill child He Yu and story starts from there. He has his own turbulent secrets due to which he acts hypocritically throughout the story which ends with him having chronic suicidal impulse to self destruct his life. That includes leaving a 14 year old He Yu to fend of his own illness which is explained in detail in first 3 chapters alone, that its fatal if not managed carefully. XQC however is opposite of Chu Wanning where he is extremely reluctant to take responsibilities of his wrong doings and his patronizing attitude towards those he thinks will get in the way of his one and done death plan.

He also is deeply reluctant to be a bad person so once you start reading his perspective in the story you would be tempted to believe every lie and every well crafted excuses he gives himself to act like a shitty person (aka breaking his Hippocratic oath in the name of "I was not mentally equipped" only to see him happily take care of another teen who is suicidal and mentally unstable called Chen Man… the devil is in the details) . However you must not. XQC is not just mentally ill himself but also a psychiatrist, if anyone knows how to lie and gaslight people its him. If you read any other label of dark story where one of the person is a doctor to a mental ill person, you would be tempted to think the doctor is exploiting his power over the mentally ill one to get his way. Its DEFINITELY true for Xie Qingcheng too but just not the way people expect and hence they think he never is doing anything wrong when compared to wrongs He Yu does. That is a logical fallacy which will cost readers understanding of what is going in this book.

People say that He Yu is written with mental illness as a shitty excuse to get away with so many bad things he did, however he fully justifies his presence as a heroic personality despite his dark side too. If it weren't for both the good things and bad things he did in the story, Xie Qingcheng would have died ages ago after traumatizing him and his sister and everyone and all the sacrifices so many side characters did in order to get the ultimate villain of the story get their just desserts would be in vain (including but not ending in XQC's deceased parents).

This is He Yu's story fundamentally. A child like the Cinderella archetype who was never cared for despite having a deliberating illness, his condition being made to be shamed and hidden by his affluent family and that being exploited by his own doctor for his own self destructive ends to keep him at his arms length, to the point of letting him having hallucination and not even telling him about it like a red flag doctor would. Through the course of the story, he snaps and gives up too because the burden of being alone and isolated mentally and yet being told to make bridges with the society without any help. But due to guilt and determination he vows to do better and save himself at any cost necessary and save as many mentally ill people as possible who are shunned and left to die by the society who do not understand what is it to live with an illness which will never allow them to have complete control over who they are.

The story is about how no person can be joined to the society and live a normal life on their own steam. Even Xie Qingcheng who lies and is proud of doing it on his own and doesn't understand why He Yu cannot do it on his own forgets the people in his life who made him feel normal and functional. He has to become that bridge and be the good doctor he was meant to be like his mentor but failed to do so for He Yu and that is his arc. Just like He Yu's arc is to find the bridge and save people like him.

If anyone has read forced love genre stories, its usually the shou characters who written this way abused, neglected and gaslighted by masculine care taking figure so they don't know any better when the exploitative gong is who they fall in love with. Meatbun pulls a reverse Uno card and presents a case of "what if it was reverse and Gong is now the shou?? What if the Shou like characters change to Gong instead and are not willing to sit back and take the lies and abuse any longer and snap back??? " The story like every Meatbun story is not about perfection of love or being an example. That would be a mistake to expect from her and the genre. But this is about the redeeming/healing qualities of love and how it can change two fundamentally unlikable people and change the world. Meatbun's writing is very compelling this way as anyone who read 2Ha at least knows.

Writing style wise its also very well done and I would even say one of the best First person POV work to ever exist! You actually feel like you are in the head of another person. The way a person can misinterpret what they see, misremember dates or time, change the way they felt about something or someone as time passes or lie to themselves about certain things makes the writing a very layered and hard text to quickly get into. There are also parts in the story where you are not even given transparency on what the POV is thinking (and its deliberate as one would understand in last chapter before the extras) Moreover the story is written from perspective of a severely mentally ill man who flirts around the idea of suicide too so the narration has a tone of depression and darkness to it.

I have seen a lot of people complain about the darkness of the text, the cyclical nature of the violence and misunderstanding (which again, comes from misunderstanding how the Shou is just a poor meow meow and its not about his redemption along with He Yu when its wrong to think so)but its a necessary part of the story. You cannot write a fluffy text with characters whose mindset is not fluffy, you know? Not to mention the mystery plot of the story which deals with the idea of exploiting temporary mental illnesses that grief and trauma can bring by the villain, also gives lots of dogblood and torture material to read about.

The most smiley. Also the most competitive.

I think its about superiority v/s inferiority complex as well. XM looked down on MR from a place of superiority complex. He needlessly used to think he is better than him and hence CWN, someone he respects and considers above him is certainly above MR's reach to be respected too. That toned down later. The lesson seems to be that one can work on superiority complex if one tries hard enough.

Whereas XX comes from a place of inferiority complex. She thinks she is nowhere near capable enough as her brother, she certainly has done enough crap against her brother's wishes to exacerbate that feeling. Yet she feels immense emotional gratitude for being taken care of aka someone she puts on pedestal means she would never direct the resentment of feeling inadequate against him. She finds HY's ingratitude in her eyes hence extremely discomfiting, since in her eyes HY has always been younger and unequal.

So watching someone like that who on paper is superior to her to, gain a higher moral ground in that video leak incident pissed her off even more. Her already existing terrible inferiority complex hence increasing. To find out later that HY may or may not have forced himself on XQC which made her feel "relief" could be both homophobia and her feeling better about her own self after the video leak episode made her unconsciously feel bad about herself.

I think this is why XM's overall attitude about image narcissism remains the same whereas XX is practically unrecognizable from her first appearance. This is why she has no emotional incentive to change how she looks down on HY unlike XM, who found it more emotionally rewarding to let go of some his superiority complex against MR. XM gains a friend this way.

I think this is one of the crucial reasons why beside her "not minding" XQC giving away all his savings to Meiyu clinic, is why he cannot bring himself to be outwardly mad at her no matter what she has done. By now even XQC, who is generally emotionally very dense, understood that LRQ didn't mind XQC giving all their marital savings not out of complete goodness of her heart but mostly because she is overcompensating for the fact she is about to leave him for good within few months. There is no point in raising a stink against what he can or cannot do with his money now.

Its not like XQC is not capable of being vile and angry to women, so his excuse of "she is a woman" of why he is not being outwardly mad at her will fly. Xie Xue would like to have a chat on that LMAO