Rating - ⭐⭐⭐1/2
"Mr. Doyun Kim’s a pretty quiet, unassuming guy at the office — with a big secret. He’s actually half vampire! But without full vamp status, he can’t drink blood and has to seek out some human essence (read: sex! and more sex!) to live. Drained and desperate, he finds a “special” companion, but everything goes wrong. Now he’s caught up in a one-sided office relationship, and most importantly, it’s not working!!! Will Doyun survive and keep his secret intact?"
The Unquenchable Mr. Kim, also known as K's Secret, is a completed supernatural BL manhwa written and illustrated by Morak.
For the original raws, called 회사원 K의 비밀, you can read it here on Bomtoon. For the official English translation, you can read it here on Tapas. Note that on both websites, only the first chapter is free to read. Also, note that all images included in this review are credited to Morak.
I am conflicted about how I feel about this manhwa. On the one hand, there were elements I liked, and I did think that the author did a pretty good job for their first work. As a vampire story, I am always going to be intrigued by the premise, but what put me off the story the most was the relationships.
Now, let's get into the details.
ART
Don't let the original style that is used in the beginning put you off, as the style does change and become more visually appealing. At first, the characters are depicted as almost amphibian-like, which was a bit off-putting. The change to the more typical art style seen in manhwa and webcomics, as seen below, made the visuals a lot more appealing.
Even with the improvement, however, there were still stylistic elements that bothered me a bit. This mainly pertains to Kangwoo, the main love interest as I found his body proportions to be a bit off. He has rather large shoulders, long arms and crab-like hands. Aside from that, there was only one other minor thing that bothered me. It has been made aware to me that I get rather annoyed when characters are depicted with socks on while having sex.
PLOT
The set-up for the story is rather simple: our main character Doyun accidentally texts the chief of his workplace that he was looking for a 'sex friend' so that he could feed. The chief immediately sees this as his opportunity to get close to Doyun as he volunteers himself for the role. What comes next is the story of Doyun and Kangwoo's developing relationship as they get to know more about each other.
I had issues right out of the gate as, as I said in the introduction, my main issue with this story was the relationship, as there were a lot of one-way assumptions and slightly dubious consent happening on the part of Kangwoo. As soon as Kangwoo gets the accidental text message, he kind of forces himself on Doyun, and then immediately assumes that they are now dating. Doyun in no way expressed that he wanted to be in a relationship, and when his confusion over the situation was made apparent, Kangwoo, well, more or less put his job on the line.
Now, despite my feelings for the relationships, I still managed to get through this just fine. I will say though, that the extra chapters almost ruined everything as the content was very...questionable to say the least. I also spent half of the story waiting for the ball to drop. When I got halfway through I thought that there was a lot of room for something to go wrong, but the story wrapped up rather cleanly. There were plotlines that began that kind of just dropped off without seeing a clear resolution.
As for something that I liked, I thought that the introduction of Nox was rather interesting. I just wished that that storyline was explored more.
CHARACTERS
Doyun, while a bit more on the meek side for my liking, was a rather likable character. Kangwoo on the other hand, as you can already tell, was a bit toxic. He straddled the line between dubious and non-consent, and he was rather possessive. From threatening to fire other employees for getting close to Doyun to copying the key to his house, he made a lot of questionable decisions throughout the story. We also didn't really get to know much about it, as most of the information we learn came from the author's Q&A.
My favourite character in the entire story was by far Jooyoung, Doyuns best friend/father figure. There is something about long silver hair that always gets me. His connection with Doyun, I found, was much more appealing to read about compared to Doyun and Kangwoo. It even got me a bit teary-eyed in the end.
What brought his character down a peg was his relationship with Jaegun, who was another possessive character. Jaegun made some very questionable decisions in order to re-insert himself back into Jooyoung's life, and I wasn't here for it. Despite my aversion to their relationship, they clearly have a lot of history together, and we didn't really get to see that.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Overall, I thought this was a decent BL manhwa. I would not suggest this for anyone who is not comfortable with toxic relationships or with smut (though it is censored).
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