Want Your Bad Romance – This Week in Anime

Lucas and Steve explore the “Toxic Together” K-Comic special on Lezhin.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

Every manhwa title mentioned in this column is available to read on Lezhin.

Lucas

Steve, since Kendrick brought about the Summer of Haters last year, I’m more than happy to get the ball rolling on this being Hot Tox Summer! The webtoon platform Lezhin Comics is also making this pivot easy for us, as they’ve made a whopping ELEVEN manhwa focusing on toxic relationships, free to start and heavily discounted after the first few chapters. Are you ready to dive into the spicy side of the Korean webcomic scene with me and discuss these promoted titles???

Indeed, I am! And in the spirit of baring it all, I want to commend our editor, Rebecca, for originally turning us onto this promotion. She posted a screenshot of that “Toxic Together” logo, and I thought that was a good opportunity to dip my toes into the wide world of webtoons. After all, what better way is there to learn about an art form than by peeking into its most problematic side?
In short, I’m a webtoon noob, so I ask any veterans in the comments to be kind.

I’ll do my best to be kind to the works we read! While there are a couple of standouts, I, regrettably, had a hard time getting into a lot of these series.

Starting from the top of the Toxic Together page, Triggering Idle Desires by GANU features a nearly 30-year-old man who looks and acts like a spoiled teenager pining after an employee at his father’s company whom he shares a dark past! Between the amnesia and the growing love polygons, this work has all the makings of a good, trashy read, but just didn’t click into place for me.

That’s also the first one I read, and while it wasn’t my favorite either, it was good at priming me for the format. It’s weird, tonally inconsistent, and overall rough around the edges in a way that evoked my memories of reading webcomics in the mid-2000s. I wasn’t surprised to notice that—these are an evolved form of Korean webcomics—but it was still amusing.

Moreover, it’s interesting to observe that these more amateur qualities still come through in the rapidly growing webtoon industry. This is a far cry from stuff that comes out of the older and more rigidly structured manga industry in Japan. There are pluses and minuses to that.
I guess this is also a good place to note that the majority of these titles are BL.

You beat me to posting my biggest criticism of this webtoon; how it tries to convince me that this incredibly mid ass is supposed to be sexy! Oh well, at least it nailed an implied boner moment. Hisoka from Hunter X Hunter would be proud!

And yes, I’m also trying to remember as I read these that a wide swath of these creators are young and trying to break into an extremely competitive industry. This results in a lot of works having kernels of interesting ideas, but that prioritize being approachable to wider audiences and aren’t always the most technically proficient.

A lower barrier of entry is a blessing and a curse, but even the poorer results have value as part of a whole phenomenon. Like, granted, the economics don’t map onto the webcomics scene I remember, but the intertextuality is very similar. Even in this small sample size, you can see different authors and artists riffing on similar themes and tropes. While this is the kind of insularity that got us into our current isekai anime situation, this scene is still largely novel to me, so I’m not annoyed by it! Yet.

Speaking of common themes and tropes, our next example tackles the big one. And by that, I of course mean omegaverse.

Cozy Obsession (specifically the “all ages” version) sees a dude get transported into the plot of an omegaverse novel that coincidentally starred a protagonist with his very name. Or maybe the book is reality. Or maybe nothing is. One thing that is real is the omegaverse.

As an appreciator of smut with convoluted lore and worldbuilding, I see the appeal of omegaverse fiction, even commonly used nouns in this genre, Alpha, Beta, etc, have been forever corrupted for me by toxic dude bros using the same terms.

That being said, Cozy Obsession has a lot going on as a super meta omegaverse-BL-isekai! I’m not sure all of those ideas quite fit together in a way that’s especially gripping, but it goes big right out of the gate, and I can respect it for that!

It’s also better composed than Triggering Idle Desires because it does more with the webtoon structure. For those unfamiliar, a single webtoon “episode” is a long, unbroken vertical scroll, so you’re meant to read these on your phone or tablet, and the direction of the action is from top to bottom. That means an artist can put together these extended and unbroken panels and backgrounds that you can only do in this digital format. Until we start printing things on scrolls again, at any rate.

Sadly, the anatomy is what holds this one back for me, although I know big, broad-shouldered BL boys have plenty of fans out there.

If I can be old and catty for a moment, while I appreciate those elements and genre staples, I think they both feed into why I’ll never be big into BL manhwa. The vertical scroll format makes me feel like I should be reading these works on my phone, and I don’t use that device for this kind of entertainment. I’m also noticing that a lot of BL falls into regressive gender norms, ie. one traditionally masculine character and a more feminine character filling out the relationships, and that’s super limiting to me and not at all similar to the queer relationships in my life.

Those patterns and more apply to We’re Not Brothers At All! as well. This is the first one that came together for me, though! I think it strikes a good balance of trashiness with concreteness. Like, the premise is that a rich playboy seduces his estranged stepbrother, without letting his stepbrother know who he is. It’s not “true” incest, but I’ll take what I can get.

However, it also introduces some deeper emotional beats about family that do a lot to ground the characters. It’s easily the best-written of these first three examples.

And I appreciate that this work low-key acknowledges that Johan Liebert from Monster was hot as hell and emulates his design in the manipulative brother!

Good catch!

And I agree that there’s a bit more meat on this manhwa‘s thematic bones, even if the dialogue is a bit clunky early on.

I generally like the art, too. It’s in the same milieu as the others we’ve covered so far, but it uses colors better, and there’s a surly dog. Those are two points in my book.

My Pet Bat, though. That one has style for days.

My Pet Bat is the only one of these that I think I would recommend to people without any caveats. The art is both striking and pretty economical, doing a great job of the lead’s circumstances and emotional state in just a handful of images.

Also, and maybe this is because I was a teenager at the height of Twilight fever, but I’m a sucker for a good vampire romance and the affection and semi-reluctant symbiotic relationship the characters form early on seems like it has legs! I also might have to buy some Lezhin tokens to find out what is going on with that nurse.

It is a highlight of this excursion. The flat coloring, limited palette, and extremely confident paneling/pacing elevate a solid story about two wounded souls coming together. It stands out from the crowd.

It’s also pretty funny and adorable. Still toxic, but a gentler poison.

The nurse is cute, too. And she’s an ally! To either LGBT youth or to vampires. Maybe to both.

We’ll have to read on to find out! Which probably isn’t something I’m going to do with A Nonsense Relationship, even if its opening was very appropriate for Pride month!

Oh, that’s what Rainbow Dash has been up to lately.

(Hey, if we want to read a bunch of brony fan fics for a column next week, I won’t say no!)
Even with the twist of the first chapter revealing that the two leads, who had just hooked up the night before, have a pretty interesting and complicated connection, I just couldn’t get into this one. Maybe that has more to do with this being the webtoon I read immediately after My Pet Bat than anything else.

I’ll give it this: the name is appropriate. While it’s tagged as a love triangle, these opening chapters sketch a far more complicated polygon. Unfortunately, that doesn’t translate to a more compelling narrative. It flits around its cast of dudes in various forms of businesswear. This had the most free chapters—seven out of all of them, but I don’t think that extra time helped much.

What I will say is that this is the funniest motto possible for a high school, i.e., my “happy school without violence” banner is raising a lot of questions already answered by the banner.

One thing I will say about a lot of these series is that they focused more on 20 and 30-something adults than I expected! While that doesn’t necessarily make the stories more interesting, I would kill for this kind of diversity in age in popular manga leads.

Of course, as I say that, our next series is Friends at First, which takes place in a high school setting with teenage leads.

I’ll be honest, outside of having the most flagrantly horny opening out of this collection, I don’t remember much about this series. Which I think means it’s the closest to boilerplate genre fare than any of the other works we read for this column.

The sheer thirst on display makes it stand out. I’m being genuinely complimentary, too. Out of all of the series featured, I think this one has the most sensual gaze. It comes across as really tactile and authentic, even if the narrative doesn’t go anywhere unexpected in the free chapters.

Above average paneling and scene composition, too. I probably won’t continue it, but I respect the craft.

Friends at First is from the writer-artist team of galbi and Kari, and it feels like they’ve almost got their tone and style figured out. Their next series will be one to watch out for!

And that brings us to Blue, Black Sky! Which stood out to me in terms of technical prowess as well, even if the “not siblings” rug pull is a bit played out in my opinion.

I would have liked a couple more episodes on this one. It starts slow, and I think the story needed more time to cook. Then again, I might have been distracted by how almost every character looks like they’re in a staring contest.

I respect the black-and-white art, though. The norm for webtoons is color, as you might have already noticed.

Speaking of norms, out of the 11 series featured on this “Toxic Together” promotion, 7 of them are BL, 3 of them are het, and only one is GL. I don’t know how precisely that ratio maps onto Lezhin‘s entire library, but BL holds the majority. I scanned through the current ranking posted on the site (by popularity, I’m assuming), and the top 100 was 90% BL and 10% straight romance, with no GL to be found.

See, this is where I wish knew a bit more about manhwa space. That breakdown is super interesting and says a lot about folks’ expectations and preferences for these kinds of works, but I’m not comfortable making any anecdotal insights at this time. Credit to Lezhin for making the offerings in this promotion pretty eclectic, though!

Lezhin is also just one of many webtoon platforms, so I’m sure the demographics skew differently on others

That’s fair, and that’s certainly what Why Ophelia Couldn’t Leave‘s inclusion on this promotion implies!

I was not expecting a more traditional “romance meets politics of a noble manor” story to pop up in this assignment, but it felt SUPER refreshing and has enough going on outside of its romantic themes to pique my interest.

This and Don’t Look for Me both work in that same space of vaguely European aristocracy as seen through the eyes of a plucky female outsider, so I think it makes sense to talk about them together.

Ophelia is the much more straightforward romance of the two. Although maybe “straightforward” is the right word when her mother’s romantic history is as sordid as it is long-winded.

I am so on the fence about reading more of Ophelia just to see if her Mom was secretly killing her lovers to advance her social status. Is it just me, or was that implied??

While I didn’t vibe as well with Don’t Look for Me, I will say its art went harder than anything else we read for this column!

It has the benefit of being an actual fantasy with magic and fairies and the like, so I think that liberty helps it look more adventurous.

On a technical level, the art is really clean and professional.

Ophelia‘s is no slouch either. It goes pretty hard on the clothing details, and the erotic symbolism is also on point.

Beyond being technically impressive, I also think Don’t Look for Me does a fantastic job of laying out its panels (is that still the appropriate term for webtoons?) in a way that naturally draws the reader’s eyes downward. It feels like it has the strongest mastery of the medium compared to anything else we read.

I think they still count as panels! But the structural language is distinct enough from a page-based medium to warrant novel styles and techniques. Things “flow” in webtoons much differently than they would on a panel transition between page two and three, for example.
Technically, I don’t have many critiques for Ophelia or Don’t Look for Me. But as it pertains to this promotion, I found their toxicity lacking. Ophelia is set up with her step-brother, but that barely counts as incest when European nobility is in the picture. And while Ufemia is treated poorly by her adoptive family, she escapes with the help of the male lead. Good romance fodder, but not exactly spicy.

You make a good point, Steve, if only there were an extra toxic series to make up for what these webtoons are missing…oh! Hello Head Over Heels!

Now you’re speaking my language!

It’s a touching love story about a spoiled bully and the pervert masochist girl who wants him to keep drenching her with milk.

This is about as silly and trashy as this promotion gets, so naturally, I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Is Head Over Heels the best one of these on either a technical or narrative level? No, but it’s the most fun and trashy read in this promotion. It’ll have the longest-lasting impact on me! My only other major note on it is that readers should not take any literal cues about kink and kink dynamics from this work, even if it does capture the energy of that kind of gratification very well.

Look at that face. She was born to be a star.

Thankfully, our final feature doesn’t skimp on the toxicity either. It may be the only GL option, but Getting to Know Grace has enough physical and mental abuse to sustain several webtoons.

This one was the most interesting tonally! While the environment and circumstances are super toxic and destructive, the relationship at its core seems more sapphic than anything else! It’s an interesting whiplash and compelled me to read all of the freely available chapters at least.

I was shocked to see it touch on racism and slavery in a moderately thoughtful way. Herta is a slave who has to hide the color of her eyes to attend their yuri academy, and she’s constantly cognizant of that while navigating all of her relationships across these chapters. She’s manipulating her mistress while her mistress manipulates things behind the scenes. Is their bond fake? Codependent? Romantic? All of the above? That’s a lot of stuff cooking, on top of very evocative art. So many folds and frills.

And I’m aware I’m more biased towards GL works than BL, but regardless, this was one of my favorites of this bunch. Up there with My Pet Bat.

It’s certainly grappling with a lot of interesting ideas in ways that merit deeper exploration, and I’m super curious if it sticks the landing! I think I’m pretty satiated on manhwa titles (toxic or otherwise) for a while, but when I return Getting to Know Grace will be towards the top of my reading list!

And we barely scratched the surface of romance webtoons here, let alone webtoons in general. Seeing as we’re both writers for a site with “anime” in its name, this is a little outside of our comfort zone. But no medium is an island. We’ve already had several anime based on webtoons, such as Tower of God, and like it or not, a show based on a Korean webnovel just swept the Anime Awards. This is the present. This is the future. And while I have little desire to check out Solo Leveling, I had fun digging into this spicy smorgasbord.

I vibed with more of these works than I was expecting! If nothing else, I’m more open to checking out more of the manhwa medium than ever before, and welcome any recommendations! Toxic romance tinged or otherwise!

I, for one, am trembling in anticipation. Normal, ordinary anticipation.