#in-seob

Scratches an Itch

Tropes: Black flag, yandere, psychological, mental health, trauma, asshole-character development arc, chasing arc

This manhwa was truly a hit and a miss for me. There were parts of it that I liked a lot and I thought was really well done, and then parts that really missed the mark. 

Let’s start with the characters.

I really liked how Woo-Yeon, the male lead, was written. He is very complex but I thought the author really pulled him off. I thought that his clinical sociopathy was portrayed well and I like that we were privy to his inner thoughts so you can fully grasp his true mental state. The art also complements his portrayal so well. The way his eyes and facial expressions are drawn whenever you see him lose some control of his masking - it’s somehow subtle yet obvious at the same time. And then we move on to In-Seob, the main character, who is one of my least favourite characters ever written. He suffers from ‘Kim Dan Syndrome’, the typical timid, meek, spineless doormat bottom. This is already my least favourite character trope but there is a way to write them well (e.g. Nakyum from POTN) with depth and subtlety to show that they aren’t all that clueless. But In-Seob doesn’t have any depth to him. He isn’t layered, he doesn’t go through a character arch, he’s really just boring and at parts annoying. I feel like they had an opportunity to develop him as a character given how much he went through in his backstory and the trauma he had to endure but he really just kinda exists throughout the entire story and everything is just happening around him. Any trauma that they tried to write in were just eventually forgotten and written off. I tried to give him some credit at the start since he masterminded this revenge plot but even then his motivations and actions were flimsy and he ended up not doing much.

Now moving on to the plot. I liked the rather accurate depiction of mental health issues in the characters. I found it refreshing that there was an explanation for Woo-Yeon’s clearly black flag behaviour instead of just leaving it as it is as a ‘psychological manhwa trope’. I also liked how Jenny’s storyline was written because it showed BPD quite accurately including how destructive it can be to the individual and those around them. But if you’re going to go all in on this mental health angle, it has to be carried on through the entire story, which just didn’t happen. And this culminated in the one of the worst story climax scenes that I’ve read (sorry not sorry). Woo-Yeon completely losing his mind leading him to do something truly horrible in the climax was perfect because it was in-keeping of his arc. I even kind of like that they went that extreme because someone with Woo-Yeon’s level of sociopathy could be that violent and uncontrollable. But everything being resolved and forgiven within 1-2 chapters, and within that exact same night in the span of presumably minutes of it happening was the biggest travesty to the story. It didn’t make sense for him to suddenly be able to recover from such a big meltdown, nor did it make sense that he would thereafter be able to control his sociopathic tendencies and even show empathy in the subsequent chapters until the ending. It was like suddenly everything, including all his mental health issues, self-resolved out of no where. Nothing about treatment or therapy or anything in between, everything just magically got better. The pacing of the story was also way off. They spent a lot of time at the start (and I mean a lotttt of time) showing Woo-Yeon’s sociopathy and also his affection towards In-Seob (e.g. the inclination to keep him around, him freaking out when In-Seob gets hurt) with so many arcs and subplots to the point that it’s no longer subtle to the readers. They also spent a lot of time building a very detailed exposition-type back story. And while it’s more of a personal preference thing that I generally like more nuance and subtlety, it just made it more jarring for the climax of the entire story to be only 2 chapters long.