The Dangerous Convenience Store

Best manhwa ever! It was so emotionally packed, so beautifully written that I couldn't stop reading it. Geon Woo is the greenest flag in my manhwa reading history. I really recommend reading it because the pacing is great, there is no high angst that will keep you at the brink of insanity(which I usually read, hehe) so, you can enjoy a sweet romance between a gangster and a student. Oh, yeah! The age gap is significant but not too much( suitable for all fujoshis like me, lol). I hoped Eui Joon brother will get a book but I think the writer said they are notplanning on one. Oh, well, plenty of manhwas are there to read, right?!

I decided to sit with this one before making a review, at least for a month, and… I can't defend it. Let's be clear on something. Finding a good Yaoi out there is like finding a needle in a haystack; possible, but mostly a goddamn coincidence. So I decided to go for one of the most popular ones, and this is what's there to offer? That's so… sad. The problem with this one is definitely the people who hailed it as one of the best ones out there. I can't deny, among the worst, this isn't on that list. It's an okay in a goodday, bad at worst, Yaoi about a clerk who gets in a toxic relationship with a dangerous, tall gangster, who according to standards is “respectful”. Let's get the issues out of the way first, the age-gap. I hate age-gaps that big, and don't come at me due to “why read it, then?” Hey, I wanted to give the story a chance before dropping it. Why judge a book by its cover? Who knows, maybe it can be dealt with maturely, with care, and a realistic sense of progression, but not, the story has more concerns than that, I'd say it's the least of its problems. Rapey scenes. Whoever is the first on the list of reviews saying there's no sexual assault is blatantly wrong. If it weren't for the characters eventually forgiving or giving into pleasure, so many scenes turn into sexual assault. It isn't sexual assault because they eventually liked it? Absolutely not, so many scenes are the person stating, “please leave”, they force, get them naked, and then they have sex with them, and the main character still is angry about it and makes the other person leave, but they later admit “oh, but it was so good”. This isn't okay to glamorize as non-sexual assault, Christ. They don't touch the theme with maturity, they justify these actions, and even if there's some reflection on the gangster, it's not even from that. Both characters are good on their own. A university student, struggling with so many life problems. His brother in a coma, his romantic history in shambles, he's being cheated on constantly. He has the power to overcome that on his own, and that's such an interesting story, but when you couple him with the gangster guy? Let's talk about him. His suffering is quite different. Tortured into being part of an organization due to being more useful than the son of the leader, who's homosexual. His story is that of revenge, until he can become the leader and dismantle it from the inside. Great story, very exciting, bad news is, the author doesn't care about any of those two. These two characters are coupled together to have sex, to be sex symbols of the story. The revenge? Off-screen. The brother's coma? Off-screen recovery. The suffering? Off-screen. What is on-screen, then? Sex scenes, lamenting on the sex, the build-up to the sex, a weird love triangle, which leads to more jealous sex. It wouldn't be bad, if the sex wasn't incoherent. Sex without preparations, inconsistent ideas, such as sometimes they introduce lube, but then they have sex without it. Being too big, but taking it, no problems. Going harder, with no consent or consistency. If the focus is the sex, or the story, do one, and include the other, don't make each overshadow the other. Not only that, but the roles of the protagonists is so out of wack. The main guy, the clerk, is not a bottom, it's a woman reskinned as a man. If you're gonna make a gay relationship, I'm not asking for both to be tough, and huge, but to be real about what it means to be a gay man in the context they are. The author mustn't have known how to write a soft guy, and a tough guy, so they just wrote feminine traits, and masculine traits in the most basic way and called it a bottom and top. Honestly, till this day, Banana Fish, and the movie Doukyuusei still stands as the best homosexual stories I've seen, and nothing has come close. Not even a supposed 8.10 in MAL. 3.4/10. Whatever was good, is just potential. Both stories that were crammed here should've been done by themselves, since they're pretty good, to be honest.