July's manga / #Tragedy(31)

Promotional one shot for a web novel, I believe? The cover art is beautiful, but the actual art in the webtoon is average. It doesn't really make me interested to read the novel, since if you're terminally ill, you're going to die regardless of what path you decide to choose. Also, just finishing the male love interest's sentence automatically made him like her? Please.

Wow, this webtoon is really good. It uses the previously popular concept of body-swapping very well, and effectively writes two compelling heroines into its narrative. I think I prefer this over the villainess isekai genre, since it's just done so much better this way. The two heroines are perfect foils for each other, Medea is strong and clever, while Psyche is compassionate and gentle, although the latter sometimes gets on my nerves. They grow as they become more comfortable in their new roles, discovering so much about each other, and learning of tragedies and misfortunes that the other has suffered. The art is absolutely beautiful, the author did a great job, especially with the details of the eyes. Of course, I prefer the look of Medea over Psyche, but I'm always rooting for Medea, no matter which body she's in. She's the badass heroine that goes around taking names and kicking everyone's ass. I hope the two of them can work together to take down the evil crown prince.

This webtoon is all style and no substance. It doesn't do a good job establishing who the characters are, or what is even going on. Pacing is too fast without coherent flow. The art style is black & white Gothic but too messy to make out what is happening in the panels. I think this webtoon had potential, but it just fails to live up to it. All I got out of this is that there's a serial killer and a pedophile priest, and they have some history together. Bleh. Don't get me wrong, I love super dark stories, but there's no actual story in this.

Dark guro about a psychopath angel of death type killer who was saved by the man with epilepsy when they were children. The nurse character already displayed psychopathic tendencies when he was young, and nobody knew that by saving him, he'd be able to carry out his torture on his savior. Lots of blood and gore, including severed everything! I didn't care for this since it was jumbled and didn't make coherent sense to me when I was reading it, not sure if the panels were out of order, or it was drawn that way on purpose to be confusing. I didn't really like the characters, and even the man who was tortured was not portrayed in a sympathetic light. There's no one to root for, and you just read to see if it can get any crazier.

Pretty dark fare, which is to be expected from the mangaka who also wrote Feeding Lamb. I liked this one better, but it still had issues with pacing and plot development. There's a lot going on and it's difficult to get to know the characters. I didn't really like any of them, like Manuel was supposed to be the sympathetic one, yet I felt he was too passive. It didn't follow him entirely either, it also followed Patrick, whose story was really weird and complicated. In the end, no one was really punished for their actions, in terms of the main four characters... Everyone else died horrible deaths though. It's a lot of gore and rape and all kinds of horrible things, but it was mostly shock value and didn't add much to the overall story, so ultimately, this gets 1 star from me.

The art is quite good for this seinen genre, gritty but still somewhat polished. I dislike both of the doctors who are presented here. One is dubbed the God of Death, because he convinces patients to choose death, while the associate director keeps pushing patients to fight their illness, no matter what happens. Both are just asking to be sued for medical malpractice. As someone who works in the medical profession, you must be optimistic but also realistic. You can't promise things that you can't obviously keep, because if the worst comes to worst, and the patient dies, their family will sue you to high heaven. You also can't just tell people to die. There's a lot of discussion involved in a patient's care, including ending treatment so that the patient feels more comfortable, etc. You cannot simply say to a patient to chose death, just because their life is painful as it is now, you need to keep in mind the patient's feelings and their family's feelings to find the most balanced approach with how to deal with a terminal patient. The two doctors are on the extreme opposites of the medical spectrum, and both of them should have lost their medical licenses. And while lots of medical jargon is thrown around, it feels like some of the medicine going on here is inaccurate or weirdly portrayed. The patient shouldn't have 3 potential bone marrow stem cell matches, it's really difficult to find a match in real life. I don't know why the doctors talk to the patients with such complicated medical jargon that patients would never understand. As a medical professional, you have to always keep things simple and easy to understand, because the patient is in pain and under lots of stress so they won't be listening to 100% of what you're saying. There is also no way a dermatologist will have any interaction with terminally ill leukemia patients like this, even in a hospital setting. Dermatology is highly specialized, and they wouldn't be dealing with hematology, which is also a specialty. Maybe if the God of Death was in oncology, I'd buy his interference. It's completely unrealistic that the associate director would be performing so many surgeries. Once you're high up in the medical profession ladder, you tend to see less patients and do less procedures, and it's more administrative work. He wouldn't be doing both cardiac and neural surgeries either, since those are completely different surgical specialities. You only get trained in one subspecialty for surgery, and then you do that kind of surgery for the rest of your life. So all in all, this is an unrealistic medical manga.

I don't like this webtoon because it's so nonsensical and inaccurate in terms of detective work. Also, it seems to contradict itself with the prologue. Apparently, the two main characters knew each other from police academy days and were close, but in the next chapter which takes place two years ago, before the incident that caused the blue haired man to be dead eyed and wheelchair bound, when they meet for the first time, they don't know each other. Which is it? You can't be both strangers and police academy rivals at the same time like that. Unless you're going to make both of them have amnesia about their police academy days, which is so lame. It's just basically full of bad tropes at this point. Anyway, I don't know if it's the translation, or if the original text is wrong, but OCD doesn't equate to germaphobe, because you can have one without the other, or both, but it seems the text is saying he's just a germaphobe with implied agoraphobia. He doesn't show any signs of OCD at all. I even doubt he's actually a germaphobe, because he just unnecessarily tore off a dirty business card which was thrown on the ground with his teeth, when he could just have used his fingers to do it like a normal person. Ugh. What was the author thinking? It's not even sexy to do that. And the police chief just outright lied and broke into the other guy's apartment with a hammer, which is classic breaking and entering. He should arrest himself. The so-called psychic detective isn't psychic at all, he's just using observation like a normal detective should be doing, and deducing things based on his knowledge. It's impossible to put a microphone in something as flimsy as a card without someone noticing there's something wrong with the card. The list goes on and on with why this webtoon is terrible. It's clear that the author just wanted to write BL with a detective theme but didn't bother doing research or putting thought into it for the execution. Like why do they have rose-gold handcuffs...? The art is the only reason I gave it a higher rating. Although it's not the best art I've seen, it's slightly above average for a webtoon. Both of the main characters piss me off, and they're extremely unlikeable.

A boy kills his teacher when he sees the teacher sexually assaulting his classmate and first love, but instead of being thanked or recognized for his heroic deeds, he's been condemned as the worst kind of child killer by the media. It's even weirder that the boy has zero anonymity, and basically it's super easy to look up his name and his photo, so anyone can find him, despite him moving to a different prefecture. Usually, the system protects the identity of minors to not ruin their potential future opportunities, even if they did commit a crime. It's also kind of ridiculous how the police did zero investigation work, and assumed he killed the teacher because he hated him, that's pretty weak for a motive. I feel the manga spends too much time looking at how outsiders view him, and not enough on the boy's self-reflection and emotional turmoil at ruining not only his life, but everyone around him. The girl he saved is utterly useless and didn't even bother to come to his defense, despite him doing so for her. Update: It gets better with each new chapter. I want to see what happens next. Update #2: I've reached the end. It was bittersweet, no one was truly completely happy nor sad, which I thought was realistic. Honestly, this is one of the better tragic slice of life mangas I've read. Although Solanin and The Flowers of Evil and The Girl by the Shore all won awards and such, this manga was more compelling to read, with appropriate pacing and resolution. It's definitely worth a read.

Male lead lost his parents in a fire when he was young, and he was permanently disfigured and blinded, but he still can live on because he has an adorable black blob that guides him. Seriously, the black blob is so cuteeeeee. But there's more! It turns out the black blob is suppressing all the black monsters that are bubbling beneath the surface, and there's other people who are like him. It's really interesting, and there are definitely a bunch of twists that keep you guessing. It's been a while since I've read such an interesting webtoon. The art is quite good, and very well suited for this genre. I have no idea what that other person in the top comments is saying, that this is a 13 year old's wet dream because it's so much deeper than that. They dropped the series before it reached its full potential. Update: The first chapter for Season 2 just got released, and it looks like a bummer right now. I hope this series doesn't go downhill, because I really liked the first season... Update 2: Finished. Season 2 was awful, as I had feared. Nonsensical plot, flat characters, and Kkamjang is barely there. Ending was rushed and silly. Got a lot of shounen vibes from this type of conclusion where every is happily married after a timeskip. Sigh. Disappointed.

Read on Webtoons, which has the latest chapters. Although I liked this webtoon in the beginning, the female lead just kept annoying me with her stupidity and selfishness, whining about how the world is out to get her. She's weak and always dependent on others. It made me not care whether she lived or died midway through, because she has zero redeeming qualities. But it's worth a read for those heart-pounding chase sequences. The girl's intelligence is about the same as those in horror movies, ridiculously dumb and always tripping and heading straight towards danger instead of doing something logical. The art overall is below average, but it really is excellent at the intensity of how the panels are drawn when it gets tense. Update: This is rare for me, but I'm bumping it up a star. Although the second season's protagonist seems as shitty as the first protagonist, the premise of the second season is so much more interesting. It takes a supernatural and psychological turn, and it may even get better. At least I certainly hope so, since it opened with a bang in the first couple chapters.