Surviving Romance

[halfcactus]

My manhwa/webtoon brainrot has finally run its course (to the point that I can no longer focus when I try to read a manhwa/manga on my phone), and Surviving Romance was an excellent note to end on. If you read it on Webtoons (100% free to read, if you don't mind watching ads and only being able to unlock 8 chapters a day), some of the chapters have background music, and one of them is actually plot-relevant since it's an original song by one of the characters.

Plot: A young woman transmigrates as the main character of a (het) high school romance novel. Just as her happy love life is about to begin, the system suddenly glitches and she has to figure out a way to progress through a story she no longer knows and where every wrong choice can lead to death. The first five or so chapters are of her suffering and losing the will to protect herself until an unknown extra takes her by the hand and runs with her, changing the trajectory of her life.

The first season is survival/thriller with a mystery aspect (in which Chaerin tries to figure out who among her classmates is her precious Unknown Extra) and an ALL-GIRL ENSEMBLE CAST. After a high-octane finish, the plot and tension in the second season are much looser and play more into of power-of-friendship shoujo magic and some ~big high-concept plot~ and ~even bigger plot twists~, but I like the commitment to finishing all of the character/relationship arcs in the class.

There are a lot of meta elements (occasionally characters will break the fourth wall and interact with the reader or the page they're in) and an a interrogation of webtoon + het romance tropes. Its most memorable spin to me is the yuri route trope (a yandere female love interest in a het romance)... Not sure how I feel about that, actually—I guess mostly sad, and a bit let-down that that was the chosen ending for this character, but I felt for Seyeong anyway.

Anyway, S1 was definitely the stronger story for me, but S2 gave me scenes of shirtless Jihyeon and her beautiful volleyball-player arms... And, well, one can never have too much Song Rina. Also I get goosebumps every time the artist shows the class roster, which evolves throughout the series. Plus there are a lot of shippable girls; among them Jihyeon comfortably ticks all the boxes for the typical main love interest (with Chaerin already discarding the in-universe male lead). The token het ship is also really cute, but that's mostly because [redacted] and her passionate love for her little pop rock are too irresistibly cute and powerful for this universe. XD

That said, this is an awfully difficult manhwa to liveblog; pretty much every screencap is a spoiler since one of the major plot points is for Chaerin to find out what her classmates look like. And even though I have mixed feelings about S2 and how the manhwa wraps up, it's still one of the more creative takes on transmigration, and the visual aspects were absolutely powerful. The cutesy art style and androgynous silhouettes offset a lot of the gore and violence that pervade the story (otherwise I wouldn't be able to read this at all), and there are a lot of really cool gimmicks and in-universe "rules" even though the worldbuilding can't quite sustain the ambitiousness of the artist's vision.

CW: suicide ideation, depression, violence, body horror (towards the second half of S1 especially), a token lesbian character that the story tries to be meta about but I'm not sure fully succeeds

Comments

[dhampyresa]

Did you read the author/artist's other webtoon, The Makeup remover?

[halfcactus]

I have it on my to-read list because of Surviving Romance!!! Have you? What did you think?