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This review may contain spoilers
A Writer's Hopeless Cruelty
Re-edit for the kids - Dont come in to the more analytic reviews with knee jerk defense reactions.
Fiction is meant to explore all corners of humanity but that does not mean it was done well just because it was more brutal.
Real gay people and real survivors of trauma watch these shows. They are allowed to consume complex, dark media, and they have every right to call out writers when human suffering is reduced to cheap shock bait and disposable drama.
Content warnings and dark labels prepare an audience for subject matter, they are not a blank check for gratuitous writing, abandoned character arcs and sloppy plot resolutions, no matter how good the chemistry between the leads was.
*****
Payback opens like a standard revenge plot, but beneath the surface, it’s a dark study in karma, corruption and exploitation within the entertainment industry, and human pain.
We are not gently guided into Sun's world, we are thrown into it, face down into the mud, with our bare asses in the air.
We first meet Sun pulling a knife out at a talent audition, not for a role but for revenge. In a story driven by grief, that impulsivity defines him.
Flashbacks reveal a brutal past. He worked for a loan shark to support his aspiring actor boyfriend, Bank, only for the violence to backfire when a ruined debtee stabs Sun's younger brother to death. On top of that, Bank then steals Sun's savings for his dying mother and flees.
Five years later, Sun is a hollowed out delivery man who ignites his quest for vengeance after learning that Bank (now an actor called Sunny) redirected that debtee toward Sun's brother. Sun infiltrates Sunny’s agency, aligning with company outcasts and recieves the help from a man called Jay, a mysterious figure with his own dark agenda.
Set up as a fast paced, action heavy revenge show, it is in fact, the opposite. The core engine of this story isn't revenge, despite being titled Payback. It’s the destructive cycle of playing God. Ironic considering where the writers take this.
When the ruined debtee warns Sun that karma will catch up to him, it is in the form of himself, killing Sun's brother.
Sun later emulates that exact same impulse. Naive, blinded by grief, and impulsive, Sun sets out to tear down Bank, completely blind to the fact that Bank is just a tiny cog in a massive, sickening web of sexual abuse, trafficking, and executive exploitation.
What starts off as a hell yeah! narrative, quickly shows us how out of his depth and powerless Sun actually is, and in essence, us the viewer.
The show never shies away from the crime, the poverty or the violence. I can sit with that for a while, as long as there's hope.
It was the first time I actually sought out the OG manhwa so I didnt have to stew in my own anxiety waiting for weekly episodes.
For eight weeks, that grim tension held me on the edge of my seat.
....And then came Episode 9, and a heartbreaking narrative choice that completely shattered any enthusiasm I had maintained up to this point, and never recovered.
It took a full 24 hours for my cortisol levels to cycle out of panic mode.
By then, we knew who the villains were and how utterly evil and sick they could be.
That information had been fully established, and episode 8 ended with the most sensual and realistic portrayal of sex I have ever seen from a BL.
I was on a complete high for this show.
Then came episode 9's pool scene, and all enthusiasm and defensive arguments for it fell away, and I saw the writing for what it truly was: Gratuitous torture porn.
All that building up towards a satisfying finale was just ....gone, collapsed under the writers' desperate thirst for pure shock value.
We already knew the sponsor was a monster. We already knew Sunny and the executive were abusing their power. We had seen at least three upsetting scenes of assault already at that point.
Doubling down on that with a very explicit and violent assault and murder, without offering a single breath of reprieve, stepped past a darker plot and slid straight into shocking and triggering the viewer.
Worse still was the sheer pretentiousness of trying to mask that shock as emotional resonance. The following scene of Sunny's panicking and laughing off tears in a mirror, right after that horror felt like a slap in the face.
Why should I care more about his feelings, more than the kid who's been raped and strangled, and is now floating dead in the swimming pool? Where was his justice in the end?
In cinema, there's a line between true Horror and Splatter sensationalism. Good horror is a delicate plucking, carefully curated to give you a thrill while maintaining the illusion of control. Torture porn or Splatter, drops the art entirely for the full on, unearned exploitation of the worst of humanity.
'Because it's reality' isn't good enough or acceptable to me. If I wanted that, I would watch the news.
I gained zero new narrative insight from that scene. It didnt need to be there. It's not in the OG manhwa either. It served as nothing more than an extra layer of misery stacked on top of Sun continuing to be helpless and somewhat more useless than normal, while nearly getting killed twice. I was convinced and bracing to witness a third assault in the same hour.
We were Sun in those moments. Helpless victims with no way out. No hope, no reassurance, nothing.
In another scene, my skin nearly crawled off my bones watching poor Sky, a previous target of sexual violence, get pushed straight into Satan’s arms while Sunny laughed in the background.
And where was Jay? The one person with an ounce of authority? He vanished into a cloud of his own sleep farts, apparently. Man had the rock music theme song playing, smirked with all the information he had gathered, ready for his move and then....poof.....gone with the wind. A sticky note would have been nice, Jay.
Turns out, in a quick step flash back, he was just buying out copyright of a song. No grand scheme or the CEO of a finance company. Nope. Just owns a song because the human traffickers can't switch to any other script to push Sunny's career. Huh?
They swapped genuine plot progression for shock value, and then tried to gaslight the viewer into thinking it was deep character development and realism.
In the end, they just threw a bunch of random band aids onto the missing information to wrap up plot threads as fast as possible. A taser, legal documents no one bothered to look for and debt porn because trauma is a toy in this show, rather than solid, earned justice.
What stung the most is what they did to Two O. He vanished with no one knowing what happened to him or where he was. He was just forcefully dragged back into this show, solely to serve as a plot device for the sponsor's absurd death, and then be left physically scarred and traumatized out of his career.
If anyone was to be given a redemption arc, it should have been him. He deserved something other than being the quiet and sad little moral lesson for Sunny.
They didn't solve the trauma they spent nine episodes inflicting on these characters. They just swept it under the rug, kissed on the roof and promised to travel the world.
Every viewer has an emotional line of trust a writer should never cross. Unfortunately, Payback put its foot on the pedal and drove right over mine, leaving me feeling as empty and as disappointed as Sun was when I first met him. Bleak, depressing and shallow.
The only good thing was Toptap, Min and the music.
Fiction is meant to explore all corners of humanity but that does not mean it was done well just because it was more brutal.
Real gay people and real survivors of trauma watch these shows. They are allowed to consume complex, dark media, and they have every right to call out writers when human suffering is reduced to cheap shock bait and disposable drama.
Content warnings and dark labels prepare an audience for subject matter, they are not a blank check for gratuitous writing, abandoned character arcs and sloppy plot resolutions, no matter how good the chemistry between the leads was.
*****
Payback opens like a standard revenge plot, but beneath the surface, it’s a dark study in karma, corruption and exploitation within the entertainment industry, and human pain.
We are not gently guided into Sun's world, we are thrown into it, face down into the mud, with our bare asses in the air.
We first meet Sun pulling a knife out at a talent audition, not for a role but for revenge. In a story driven by grief, that impulsivity defines him.
Flashbacks reveal a brutal past. He worked for a loan shark to support his aspiring actor boyfriend, Bank, only for the violence to backfire when a ruined debtee stabs Sun's younger brother to death. On top of that, Bank then steals Sun's savings for his dying mother and flees.
Five years later, Sun is a hollowed out delivery man who ignites his quest for vengeance after learning that Bank (now an actor called Sunny) redirected that debtee toward Sun's brother. Sun infiltrates Sunny’s agency, aligning with company outcasts and recieves the help from a man called Jay, a mysterious figure with his own dark agenda.
Set up as a fast paced, action heavy revenge show, it is in fact, the opposite. The core engine of this story isn't revenge, despite being titled Payback. It’s the destructive cycle of playing God. Ironic considering where the writers take this.
When the ruined debtee warns Sun that karma will catch up to him, it is in the form of himself, killing Sun's brother.
Sun later emulates that exact same impulse. Naive, blinded by grief, and impulsive, Sun sets out to tear down Bank, completely blind to the fact that Bank is just a tiny cog in a massive, sickening web of sexual abuse, trafficking, and executive exploitation.
What starts off as a hell yeah! narrative, quickly shows us how out of his depth and powerless Sun actually is, and in essence, us the viewer.
The show never shies away from the crime, the poverty or the violence. I can sit with that for a while, as long as there's hope.
It was the first time I actually sought out the OG manhwa so I didnt have to stew in my own anxiety waiting for weekly episodes.
For eight weeks, that grim tension held me on the edge of my seat.
....And then came Episode 9, and a heartbreaking narrative choice that completely shattered any enthusiasm I had maintained up to this point, and never recovered.
It took a full 24 hours for my cortisol levels to cycle out of panic mode.
By then, we knew who the villains were and how utterly evil and sick they could be.
That information had been fully established, and episode 8 ended with the most sensual and realistic portrayal of sex I have ever seen from a BL.
I was on a complete high for this show.
Then came episode 9's pool scene, and all enthusiasm and defensive arguments for it fell away, and I saw the writing for what it truly was: Gratuitous torture porn.
All that building up towards a satisfying finale was just ....gone, collapsed under the writers' desperate thirst for pure shock value.
We already knew the sponsor was a monster. We already knew Sunny and the executive were abusing their power. We had seen at least three upsetting scenes of assault already at that point.
Doubling down on that with a very explicit and violent assault and murder, without offering a single breath of reprieve, stepped past a darker plot and slid straight into shocking and triggering the viewer.
Worse still was the sheer pretentiousness of trying to mask that shock as emotional resonance. The following scene of Sunny's panicking and laughing off tears in a mirror, right after that horror felt like a slap in the face.
Why should I care more about his feelings, more than the kid who's been raped and strangled, and is now floating dead in the swimming pool? Where was his justice in the end?
In cinema, there's a line between true Horror and Splatter sensationalism. Good horror is a delicate plucking, carefully curated to give you a thrill while maintaining the illusion of control. Torture porn or Splatter, drops the art entirely for the full on, unearned exploitation of the worst of humanity.
'Because it's reality' isn't good enough or acceptable to me. If I wanted that, I would watch the news.
I gained zero new narrative insight from that scene. It didnt need to be there. It's not in the OG manhwa either. It served as nothing more than an extra layer of misery stacked on top of Sun continuing to be helpless and somewhat more useless than normal, while nearly getting killed twice. I was convinced and bracing to witness a third assault in the same hour.
We were Sun in those moments. Helpless victims with no way out. No hope, no reassurance, nothing.
In another scene, my skin nearly crawled off my bones watching poor Sky, a previous target of sexual violence, get pushed straight into Satan’s arms while Sunny laughed in the background.
And where was Jay? The one person with an ounce of authority? He vanished into a cloud of his own sleep farts, apparently. Man had the rock music theme song playing, smirked with all the information he had gathered, ready for his move and then....poof.....gone with the wind. A sticky note would have been nice, Jay.
Turns out, in a quick step flash back, he was just buying out copyright of a song. No grand scheme or the CEO of a finance company. Nope. Just owns a song because the human traffickers can't switch to any other script to push Sunny's career. Huh?
They swapped genuine plot progression for shock value, and then tried to gaslight the viewer into thinking it was deep character development and realism.
In the end, they just threw a bunch of random band aids onto the missing information to wrap up plot threads as fast as possible. A taser, legal documents no one bothered to look for and debt porn because trauma is a toy in this show, rather than solid, earned justice.
What stung the most is what they did to Two O. He vanished with no one knowing what happened to him or where he was. He was just forcefully dragged back into this show, solely to serve as a plot device for the sponsor's absurd death, and then be left physically scarred and traumatized out of his career.
If anyone was to be given a redemption arc, it should have been him. He deserved something other than being the quiet and sad little moral lesson for Sunny.
They didn't solve the trauma they spent nine episodes inflicting on these characters. They just swept it under the rug, kissed on the roof and promised to travel the world.
Every viewer has an emotional line of trust a writer should never cross. Unfortunately, Payback put its foot on the pedal and drove right over mine, leaving me feeling as empty and as disappointed as Sun was when I first met him. Bleak, depressing and shallow.
The only good thing was Toptap, Min and the music.
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