미숙한 표현 (Unripened Expression)

The art style was good. The character designs were good. This manhwa is your typical slice-of-life story, with exams and summer vacation and... love... pentagons?!? Squares?! We have evolved far from the notorious love triangle at this point. One of the boys on the cover art isn't even a love interest, so I'm not sure why he is there to begin with. I liked the theme of internalized homophobia that is prevalent in the main character and his soon-to-be best friend Junseo, but I don't think the author fleshed out the other side characters enough to make their love square have any tension whatsoever. Me and most other readers vehemently agree that most of the "screentime" was given to Junseo more than, spoiler alert, who the main character Jae Won actually ends up with. I don't think this is a writing problem, since the author managed to make Junseo a very compelling character, as a man who was able to overcome the odds of being bullied for being gay so much to the point that he had to switch schools because of it. He and Jae Won were able to bond over that shared trauma, per se, making their relationship inequivocally the strongest throughout the entire story. Compare this to Han Karam, who is the Vice President of his class. He's, uh, nice, and he has a cute dog, and... that's pretty all that we get to know about him.

I do think my reading of this manhwa was a bit influenced by the quality of the translation. As far as I am aware, I don't think this work ever received an English translation, and so it was left in the hands of young volunteers who likely didn't pay too much attention to the dialogue and what the author actually wanted to communicate, or were not fluent enough in English to get the message across effectively. This is the case for at least half of the story, and there were many panels that straight up did not make sense. Of course, I do not wish to place too much blame on these translators, as doing this tedious work for no compensation and greedy readers is no easy feat. I should know, as I was in a scanlation team for over 2 years at one point. Still, I think there are a lot of meaningful conversations being had by these characters that are lost in absent minded Google Translate mumbo jumbo. This is not to say that the manhwa was unreadable. I think it is very easy to surmise the context of these chapters through the visuals alone, but even doing that, I think the author falls short of giving most of the characters real depth.

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