TW: sexual assault

Let me preface this review by making it clear that I read pretty dark romance, so I honestly have pretty high threshold for things that happen in dark romance such as assault etc. This drama however, is tagged as DubCon and it is actually NonCon. The stepbrother plans out the r*pe, gets his brother drunk and then violates him while the man can barely speak. It plays into a horrible cliche that gay men are violent with each other. In other BL, we see men forcing kisses etc and whilst problematic, it’s usually addressed by the characters as pushing through their internalised homophobia. The brother is a gay man, he has already been with men. His brother isn’t “making him wake up” to his sexuality with a kiss, he is R*PING him. It got so uncomfortable for me that I ended up having to skip a lot of the show because it became clear that nobody was going to voice what this was and the stepbrother wasn’t going to have proper repercussions. It was completely unbelievable that the main couple would accept the brothers after learning about the assault. That being said, the main couple (while having a couple of problematic scenes of their own) fulfilled the BL tropes that we love so much, the golden retriever top and the moody bottom, the total flip from pursuing woman to falling in love with a man, the OTT romance, the PDA. It wasn’t like, award winning TV but tbh BL rarely is, due to budget and culture constraints. I hope we’ll see more quality BL dramas as the world changes.