Reviews with content warning for Sexual content - Midnight Rain

Reviews tagging 'Sexual content'

Midnight Rain by Chongtak

6 reviews

seriouslybookedup's review against another edition

2.0

Great concept, art and character design that's completely undermined by rape (stop calling these depictions dubious consent, Mike clearly says "wait", "quit" and "stop"). I also found both characters to be way more antagonistic toward each other than seems reasonable for a one-shot story. I would have appreciated more volumes for Mike to work through his anger issues. Let's pretend Ethan wasn't portrayed as a rapist, Mike straight up physically assaults Ethan for the crime of being too concerned about his well-being. Vulnerability can be an interesting topic to explore but here, we don't get a lot of context about why these characters struggle so much to be vulnerable in front of each other - so they just came across as nasty and toxic.

When Mike makes an effort to demonstrate how he feels for Ethan through acts of service (fixing the mold in the apartment), I was so annoyed that we weren't treated to the payoff of seeing Ethan's reaction. It was probably the only moment that Mike appeared to genuinely give a damn about Ethan.

I didn't think the grumpy/sunshine trope could go so wrong but it did here.

Content Warnings

papercrowns's review against another edition

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fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

What I liked

The character art is gorj
It was nice to see some age and body diversity (even if only some body hair)
The general concept was interesting.

What I didn't like

I was uncomfortable with the lack of consent. Almost DNFed.
The plot was barely there. The threads were real loose, y'all (maybe that's the trade-off for a standalone?). It touched on some heavy themes — poverty, crime, suicide, codependence — but didn't have much to say about them (or at all; pretty surface level).
I'm no stranger to reading manga and following panels, but some of the panels in this I had absolutely no clue what I was looking at and couldn't even make sense of them using context clues. That might be on me though.

Content Warnings