Going over tons of Webtoons I like!
I feel like I haven't really talked about webtoons as much as I should even though there are quite a lot of them that I enjoy a lot, so I felt it would be nice to go over some of my favorites, what they're about, why I like them and maybe help others discover something they might like as well.
I won't be talking about Unordinary, Trapped, or Dreaming Freedom since I basically said everything I had to say in their own posts, so if you want to see how I feel about these series just follow the links.
(Also worth noting, when it comes to webtoons I'm usually more of a fan of those that focus on drama, so things like Tower of God or Lookism that focus more on battle, while fun series, aren't really amongst my favorites and are probably not gonna be on my list. I don't really go to webtoons for action, I go for seeing people dealing with personal problems and how they handle them.)
This one is still fairly new but it's already got me very hooked. The premise is about a girl that is going through some money problems that finds out about the world of live-streaming and starts getting too into it.
The main conflict comes from how much of her own life and herself she exposes to the world and how she deals with the public while also trying to think about making enough money to take care of her family.
It can be very depressing but also very informative as it shows how ugly people's online behavior can be and how much they can affect someone's life.
Speaking of depressing, this one is a series of stories about a rotating cast of protagonists who are all dealing with some very heavy personal problems while trying to advance their love lives.
One is trying to deal with the pressure of keeping up appearances at class, another is grieving over the loss of a loved one, another is trying to recover from a past of bullying, and so on... And each one feels real and earned. The way these topics are dealt with feel like how actual people would deal with them.
It doesn't just skip over to a happy ending, it walks you through the entire process of recovery necessary to get to them eventually feeling better, and when they do feel better it's always so very satisfying because you followed through all the hardships they endured.
It's a great series with a very-needed theme of "It gets better, so don't give up!"
I think people are kinda mixed on this one? Some love it, some hate it, mostly it comes down to how they feel about the female lead.
The idea is that this girl is a victim from some sort of bug in the system of the god of love (or something like that, it's really weird...) and now she has a really hard time being romantically loved by others... So in order to fix that, she needs to raise her love score with the male leads or she will die... Also, her boyfriend cheated on her with her sister...
I just realized this sounds like the premise of a generic Otome isekai.
Needlessly convoluted premise aside, this series is actually really fun. The artwork and dialogue makes the female lead come off as really charming, expressive, and likable. Even if you don't care about the major plot with the love god thing (like me!), you still enjoy reading it because you do feel sorry for this girl and want to see her eventually find happiness.
It shows the power of a character's charm. When your character is likable enough, you can forgive how absurd and nonsensical a premise can be.
I thought I was going to hate this series but the more I read it the more I liked it.
The premise is that a broken-up couple goes back in time to when they were young and still together, except one is in the body of the other.
This setup alone is freaking brilliant, so much so I'm shocked I haven't seen it before. You can do so much commentary about perspective, the way women and men are treated differently by society, the things we never think about in a relationship, the way your actions are viewed by others, and so on.
It frustrated me at first because the characters were making some really idiotic choices to the point it made me question what was this author doing, but as I kept reading, all of their choices get addressed. They either explain why they did what they did or recognize that they made a mistake and apologize for it, and I loooooove when series do that! If I see a problem in the story, why can't the characters see it too? Well, here they do, and it feels great every time they do!
This one is the same as Operation True Love. I like how charming and expressive everyone here is, and I also like seeing these interpretations of Greek mythos.
I also really like the female lead, Persephone. I guess many people seem to dislike her but she never bothered me personally. I find her conflicts very interesting and how she deals with them is also interesting, mostly things like dealing with her trauma, the pressure from her mother, and the constant bureaucracy of the gods she needs to endure to get what she wants. She's not perfect, but I don't think she's meant to be.
The one thing I don't like is that since this is based on Greek mythos we have to go over all the stuff about the mythos we don't like but have to live with. For example, Zeus is here, and he is very unlikeable, but because he's Zeus from the mythos you know he's never gonna face any real consequences for being the huge jerk he is and we just gotta deal with it.
There are a couple things like this here and there where because it was in the mythos it has to be here and it gets a little frustrating sometimes, but not enough to ruin the experience.
Lol... "Fantasy..."
This is one I wanted to bang my head against a wall for forgetting to include when talking about Trapped and Dreaming Freedom. It's another story about a thrillingly toxic co-dependent relationship between a group of messed up people.
The basic idea is that three ladies are in love, but not in love with the one that likes them, which makes this the ideal definition of "love triangle"
What's cool about this is that not one of them likes the other for a particularly healthy reason. There is a good girl that likes a bad girl because she's a bad girl, a bad girl that likes a loner girl because she's a loner, and a loner girl that likes the good girl because she's good.
They each have some sort of obsession with their "loved one" that boils down to "she needs me" or "I need her". It's like watching a Spanish telenovela, you know this is going to turn into a mess, but you can't wait to see it unfold.
(also, one of them is a vampire, but who cares about that...)
This is another one that just has a brilliant premise. The idea is that this is a world of superheroes and this one girl has a crush on this one guy, but she's such a mess about telling her feelings that she somehow ends up becoming a supervillain for him to fight.
It's like if someone took that little segment from Rwby Chibi and made an entire series out of it. This series is so freaking funny and stupid, I just love it.
Yoo's life sucks, that's the premise.
She got ditched by her mother, separated from her sister, is forced to take care of her dad alone, struggles with making friends, gets bullied, barely makes any money on her job, people hate her for no reason, and to top it all, she gets stuck in the middle of a rich family's drama that keeps trying to exploit her personal problems to their advantage.
This is one of those "Author, please leave the character alone!!" types of stories where you just keep enduring it because you like these people so much that you just want to reach the end where they'll finally be happy and free from all this misery.
Another case of where a character being charming and likable is enough to make you keep reading because you just want to see something good happening to them because you know they deserve it.
Another case of "Just let them be happy!!"
This is a story about a woman who had to part ways with a family that she was really close with but now suddenly finds herself back into their lives.
I can't say too much about this one because it relies a lot on twists and revelations, but long story short, this is some really good drama.
You ever felt like reading a retelling of The Little Mermaid set during the time when Korea was invaded by Japan? Well, your wish is now fulfilled!
This is a tragic story about a girl that gets tangled with a man she can never have during a period of war and how they struggle to remain close to each other even though everything around them is fighting to keep them apart.
Very sad, but very emotional.
Speaking of sad...
This one is like Sohee0 where its about a girl dealing with the problems of live streaming her entire life for the world to see and slowly becoming too dependent on it.
I'm not a huge fan of thriller, but the themes this one tackles are so interesting that it made me keep reading anyway.
Keep in mind that this one does not have a happy ending.
This is a series I feel is very underrated. It's about a boy that finds out that the girl he is chatting with on his phone is someone from his class, and he decides to use this new knowledge to help out her love life and other personal problems in return for always being nice to him online, even though she doesn't know who he really is.
There is some nice commentary about catfishing, stalking, the power of social media, communication, and entitlement in here.
There is a very powerful scene early on where the main lead confronts a stalker that's trying to claim he's in love with the girl from the chat and thus has the right to interfere in her life, and when the mc calls him out on that, he realizes he's basically doing the same thing. And, again, I love when a story isn't above calling out their lead characters on their mistakes.
Giving a character flaws is okay as long as you address it, and this series addresses tons of interesting flaws on various characters.
Another story about the scary power of social media. This one is about a woman who rejected a guy in a reality show a few days before he died, and a group of people decided to use that to burn her online as if she was the ultimate monster, and the story is all about she bouncing back from that and getting revenge on everyone that did that to her.
I don't even know how to describe this one... It's just good drama.
I was going to say it's about girls facing school problems, but the problems these characters face kinda go over every possible field.
It starts with the main lead feeling like she's the only ugly girl in her group of four friends, but we kinda ditch that premise after a while and just start to focus on any kind of problem a teenager might be going through.
I find the problems they tackle to be interesting and the characters going through them are all likable, and this isn't a case of "let them be happy!" they get to be happy a lot and very frequently. It isn't one problem that goes on through the whole series but a set of rotating small problems that get dealt with one after another in very nice ways.
This one is a similar case of teens dealing with teen drama.
It starts with a boy finding out that the girl he likes is dating his sister (that's one hell of a way to start your series), and eventually becomes about people dealing with their emotions and inner insecurities.
Odd Girl Out was more about people dealing with the problems life throws at us, this is more about problems we throw at ourselves. How sometimes we don't know what we want, why we want it, how to get it, how to deal with it, and what does that say about us.
I'm just gonna repeat what I said before, I like how these problems are explored and I like how charming these characters are.
That's honestly all I ever need, people to care about and cool problems for them to face.
This one is interesting.
It's about a woman who pretends to be married so she can date a guy who is into affairs. It's like a cheater's cheat.
It goes into detail about why someone would want to betray their partner and how society in Japan puts this pressure on people to pursue marriage and building a family as the ultimate source of happiness.
I always love this kind of talk, exploring how much of what you do you do it because people tell you it will be good for you and how much you do it because you really want it.
This is one apparently a lot of people really don't like, and ironically, it's one of my favorites.
"Get Schooled" is a series that seems to start on the premise of "what if the teachers were allowed to beat up the bullies?" but once you keep reading it you see that it goes a little deeper than that.
The message I personally got from this one was "what if we had the means to actually answer back to those who do wrong?"
The thing about people who commit crimes is that we never have either the time, the means, or the exact words to address all that is wrong with their actions, we're just not always prepared for it. So in this story they just make a character that is always prepared.
Every bully in this series usually works with the mentality of "why can't I just do what's best for me?" and when the main lead appears and confronts them, he makes them realize that in a world where people only think about themselves, the moment someone stronger than you shows up, if they don't need you, you're screwed, that's why it's important to learn how to accept everyone, regardless of whether they're weak or strong.
It shows the futility of "might makes right" by showing that might can turn against you at any point, and thus it's better to create a society of "right makes right."
The conversations these characters have about morality are very interesting and give a lot to think about.
There is one arc is where they go to a daycare and find a teacher that's trying to control how kids should think, but the moment they start questioning their logic everything the teacher taught them starts to no longer make any sense and throws the class into chaos.
The kids were being taught what to think, but not the why, and once they realize they skipped this vital step, their lessons no longer held any meaning.
There is a lot of that, a lot of having bullies and oppressors facing the flaws in their own logic and addressing why it doesn't work, and it feels very satisfying each time.
Also has bullies getting beat up a lot, which also feels good.
(Edit, these were all feelings I had before learning about the recent events regarding Get Schooled 😓 I'm deeply sorry for having promoted a series that carried so much ill will inside of it)
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That's it for now, hope you can find something new you can enjoy!
And with that, now I wait for webtoon to officially translate the other Naver series that are still only available in Korean that I really want to read more of.
