Author: Narae Ahn (no website found)
Publisher: NETCOMICS
Rating: WARTY!
This story with a bizarre title, is told in three parts, each one from the perspective of one of the three main characters: Jinsuk, Taehee, and Yohan. The story is evidently Korean, and the problems for me were manifold. First of all none of the characters look Korean, so we have the odd depiction of very western looking characters with exotic Korean names. I know this is a common trope in Asian manga and anime, but to me it's insulting. If you're going to tell a story about your own people, make them look like and behave like your own people. I have no time for this selling-out of local ethnicity just so it might appeal to we stubbornly mono-cultural westerners. That's insulting.
Secondly, since this is rooted in Korean culture, it's hard to know what's really an honest reflection of that culture and what is instead merely a quirk of this particular story or this story teller. For example, in this story, there seems to be a motorcycle culture which is both obnoxious and deeply frowned upon. Whether this is true or not in real life, I have no idea, but as presented, it seemed quite bizarre to my western brain, especially since it has no real part in the story - at least not in this first volume of the story.
Yohan is supposedly part of this motorcycle culture, although other than the accident he has, we see none of that culture or of that life. The part of the blurb which mentions the accident is written badly and can make it appear that these two boys are both in a motorcycle accident - perhaps crashing into each other. The truth is that only Yohan is riding a motorcycle - Taehee is on foot. Yohan simply skids and comes off his bike. No one else is involved.
Taehee happens to witness this and physically carries Yohan to the hospital because he can't remember the emergency number to dial! In Korea, FYI, it's the USA number backwards! Whereas the US is 911, South Korea is 119. The fact that Taehee doesn't even know his own emergency number tells me that he's a really a dumb schmuck. The fact that the doesn't know not to move someone in these circumstances without medical advice confirms this. He could have crippled Yohan if he'd had a spinal injury.
This is how these two meet. Jinsuk is Yohan's teacher, who is having a highly inappropriate homosexual relationship with his student. No one seems to find any problem with this - although admittedly the two are conducting this in secret, they have having sex in the classroom with Yohan bent over the teacher's desk! It's really hard to tell whether Yohan is even consenting, not that - legally - he could be, but they are both idiots if they think their liaisons will not be discovered.
Taehee, who evidently has no idea of his own sexuality, finds himself drawn more and more to Yohan, although through the course of this entire volume, nothing actually happens in terms of their making any progress towards any kind of relationship, let alone a loving one.
The art work is fine - very clean and sparse line drawings but the dialog is awful, with frequent speech balloons containing nothing but an ellipsis. I understand that this is supposed to represent awkwardness between these two boys, but it really just looked stupid and was simply annoying to me. I also understand that this is a different culture and we cannot, nor should we expect to this culture to be western in any way, but if you're going to try to market a story (not that there really was much of a story) like this to a western culture, you really need to find ways to make it accessible, and I think the author and publisher failed to do this here.
Whatever it was, I simply could not appreciate the story. In some parts it was hard to follow, in other parts it was dumb. Motivations were foggy at best, and downright obscure at other times, and the characters were neither likable nor relatable. I can't recommend it.
