william of the wardrobe (์ท์ฅ ์์ ์๋ฆฌ์) - (a review!)
(KR) ์ท์ฅ ์์ ์๋ฆฌ์ (ridibooks)
(EN) William of the Wardrobe (manta)
โ disclaimer! โ this is a #sponsored review from manta comics based on the manhwa's first few episodes, not all of them!! mild spoilers ahead!!
โฉ premise โฉ
william of the wardrobe does so many things well, but something i've loved about this story from it's onset is it's structure as a story full of callbacks. there's something magical about a story about stories.
โฉ leads โฉ
our heroine, julia green, is one of my favorite kinds of heroine. she's honest, earnest, unsure, anxious, and braver than she thinks. though her family life is difficult, and it would more than understandable if julia primarily saw fairytales and romance as an escape from her day to day life, it's palpable from ep. 1 how much she genuinely loves love stories. twelve year old julia is lovable in all the ways that, looking back, we were at that age. she's old enough to question the world around herโโwhy her parents fight and why they got married in the first place if all they ever do is fightโโand the worlds that she becomes witness to.
"it's just...do you think romeo and juliet were happy with the choices they made? don't you think they must have been scared or wished they could take it all back?"
it's a reward in and of itself to watch julia grow, but it shouldn't be lost on readers that julia's ability to believe: in people, in uncommon circumstances, and in her own judgment, is what's most admirable about her. you have to be of a certain age and a certain disposition to take people at their word. kind, rather than naive.
julia's counterpart, william (spoilers!) shakespeare, is in many ways, a living, breathing archetype. he appears in disguise, comes and goes in impossible ways, and is a figure of admiration at first sight, importantly because of and not in spite of a mistaken (gendered) identity. walking in the footsteps of some of contemporary romance's greats, ร la kuranosuke from princess jellyfish, william is one of julia's main sources of emotional and narrative change. he listens and advises, empathizes and comforts, but is also, ultimately, just like julia, a teenager tripping and falling through life. as much as julia needs him, he needs her too.
โฉ relationship dynamics โฉ
reading the romantic relationships in william of the wardrobe through the lens of romeo and juliet is rewarding in that even when it hurts, the pain is both familiar and compensated for. julia and hunter's romanceโโfleeting, secret, and a foreshadowed tragedy in its own rightโโ, is almost 1:1 with romeo and juliet's. though their families aren't feuding, their respective family conflicts are more than enough to create a situation in which they act as sources of comfort for one another. they speak to each other covertly from their windows, from twin houses, bound together by a thin red string. they, with william's help, are reunited as kids, only to be separated one-sidedly, intentionally, by the world in which they live, and by social status in particular, as they grow older.
william helped write their love story, but much like romeo and juliet's own fated romance, they don't get a happy ending.
tldr; 1) the vagueness of this review means that you'll have so much more to dig into once you start reading the story and 2) william of the wardrobe is a romance not just in the contemporary sense, but in the way that romance used to be understood, like feeling of losing yourself in a big storm.
tldr; tldr; this is a manhwa and a review that i'll be coming back to!!
