halfcactus

https://thefridayfive.dreamwidth.org/150938.html

1. What was the last book you read (or are currently reading)?
Last read manhwa: On My Way to Meet Mom, would recommend! It's a 30-chapter story about an orphan boy in a post-apocalyptic world (where there are more aliens than humans) who discovers the concept of family one day and sets out to find it. Very comforting because the boy is so ordinary! He is small and round and human and that is enough reason for him to be deserving of love. It's gen through and through, which I like, and acknowledges that gender and gendered family roles are human constructs, which I also like. And the character designs are so good!!! Beautiful fantasy elements too, like whales in the sky.

Last read book: A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid, an 80-page essay about Antigua, post-colonialism, white tourism, and global power dynamics. Hits pretty close to home and written quite lyrically. Would also recommend!

Currently reading: The Fellowship of the Ring audiobook (narrated by Andy Serkis)—I'm not sure how sustainable the audio format is for my attention span but it got me further than all past attempts to read the text with my eyes. I now see the appeal of Tolkien. I still can't visualize anything, though...

2. What was the last movie you watched?
This morning's groupwatch—we meant to watch the Journal with Witch live action movie, but the subs were machine-translated from Chinese which was painful, so we switched to 100 Meters on Netflix. It's about what running means to athletes, the years and years of training and self-doubt all for these races which are over in 15 seconds, and what those 15 seconds mean. On paper: good concept! I can see this being a nice, thoughtful manga. In practice, it had some really interesting textures and breathtaking moments, but I thought the storytelling was poor and did not maximize the animated form. None of the characters also ever really have inner lives, and because of that, the main character's speech at the end feels unearned.

3. What television series are you currently watching?

Loving Strangers (cdrama): I stopped watching this for a while and then got back to it because I was feeling tired and 委屈, and this show is nothing but characters who are tired and 委屈.

How Dare You!? (cdrama): 14 eps in, I don't have very strong feelings about it but it's a group watch and there are enough interesting plot points that I'd like to see through. The show is kind of uneven, some sets of episodes are paced better than others. I really liked the first ED so I was very sad that they changed it to the more "serious" one.

Pursuit of Jade (cdrama): One of my oomfs said this got her out of a cdrama slump and true enough I managed to watch 2 eps in a row. XD I am not very enthused that the FL, a small village butcher, is Secretly Proficient in Martial Arts and has Secretly Important Parents (deceased).

Witch Hat Atelier (anime): So beautiful and worth the wait! Not sure how much the anime covers and how long I'll stick with it, but I'm pleased that its impact is mainstream enough that I have a common interest with IRLs again.

4. What are some of your favorite blogs or communities online?
My fav community is the HnG server where we groupwatch non-HnG-related things and people share pictures of their local birds and flowers. :') Also the gaming channel in the NiF server, it's like the only channel I check haha. Also all the bookish people in my Dreamwidth and Storygraph circles because how else do I know what books exist! I read A Small Place because I saw two of my Storygraph mutuals (one of them is, naturally, aartichapati) finish it recently.

My favorite blogs are mostly defunct. </3 Some old blogs that are still up but no longer active: Lazy Evaluation Ranch, a personal farm blog; Hanzis Matter, a blog "dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in western culture"; Source Code in TV and Films; and Said the Gramophone, a music blog (still updates every December).

5. What social media do you belong to and check often?
Twitter and Bluesky... I also have an Instagram but as usual I've stopped checking it 😂

Potion Witch
90-chapter webtoon about a woman who's a pharmacist by day and vigilante witch by night. A good, tight, case-centered story with het romance and equal-opportunity emotional hurt/comfort. The ML is an ex-nepo baby who's managed to eke out a living as a cop. Due to his lack of physical endurance, his duties are mostly paper-pushing are cat-feeding. He and the FL are equally competent investigators, but the FL is physically stronger, which I thought was very nice.

Interestingly enough, the first half of the story is about unpeeling the layers of the ML's family trauma while the FL remains opaque and unaffected until the last act that reveals her. I loved the little found family beats between the FL and ML, and the ML's relationships with his estranged brother and his privileged nepo baby peers.

Cons: Disappointed that the 2FL's storyline didn't really go anywhere outside of being a plot device. She's seen at the beginning as being unhappy with her family situation and abusive towards her employees, but nothing comes out of that?


Meg Cabot, "No Offense"
This was a Valentine's Day read: librarian x sheriff romance with small-town mystery/case elements that felt far too short for either storyline to land. The apology pies were pretty cute, though.

Unveil: Jadewind ep1
Only saw ep 1, which was was an hour long..... I like how the FL is written like a ML? She fills some sort of leadership role as a palace-appointed investigator and is good at martial arts. The ML is a physically weak astronomer who can deduce information with math which can be really funny if the drama leaned more on humor. Didn't continue bc ep1 didn't really grab me, which is normal with cdrama but I just have too little patience these days to give 30-episode shows a chance.

Cosmic Princess Kaguya (2026)
Surprisingly, not bait!!! The yuri was real!!! The characters not so much. Iroha's character actually felt like the ML in a 90s/2000s anime... The concept of a tired student who brings home a manic pixie dream robot that proceeds to follow her around at school... The trajectory of their relationship... I really wish they'd done better in developing her arc. I was so invested in her family backstory but it doesn't feel like the movie particularly cares about the characters as people. I did like the sibling relationship even though the relationship progress never translates into action when it matters.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
I totally need to rewatch this bc I wasn't looking at the screen the first time and only started paying attention to ep4 (a really good episode) and missed so many fun visual details. I didn't read the original novella(s?) so I don’t have much to say about the show except that the performances were interesting—especially among the older Targaryens, they had such flavorful interactions and I could actually recognize them by the energy they brought in (I kept forgetting who everyone else was). And the music was great… AND it was nice to see texture again after years of living on cmedia lol

Book recap bc I managed (barely!) to fulfill my goal of finishing 12 books this year. Goodreads tells me I read 4,000 pages with an average book length of 300 pages and an average rating of 3.7/5, which is... not bad for someone who hasn't really been feeling books. Most of what I read this year were by authors I haven't previously read, and most are some kind of Asian. Read 0 books/comics in Chinese (but not for lack of trying).

Also read a bunch of webtoons and indie oneshots (from Shortbox), but those are harder to quantify, so:
( the 12 books of 2025 )

As with the last two years, I had a shared haul with a few other people. And as with the last two years, I've mostly only read what I got for myself, because we kind of got... a lot. I got more than I usually do bc the organizer (Zainab Akhtar) has been talking about taking a break so this is our last Shortbox Comics Fair for a while, which is also good for me bc both my wallet and my brain could use a break from month-long comic fairs. 😂

Hero in the Serpent's Skin by Hwei 🇲🇾
Wrote about it here.

Kasalan ng Bayan | Community Wedding by Renren Galeno 🇵🇭
An overachieving student deals with the duality of (co-)organizing a community wedding while convincing her parents to file for legal separation... A story about transferrable skills and girlhood. Renren Galeno is most known (locally, at least) for her thriller comic Sa Wala | Nothing to Lose which is about a magical cockfighting chicken (which I haven't read), so I was surprised to see her put out something with such a mundane and low-stakes setting lol.

Dead Horses by Freya JN
Or as the artist calls it, feline lesboviolence. A marvelous feat of storytelling that sets you on a winding path that twists and twists—"in circles, in knots"—until it takes you back to where it begins and gives you release. The writing is patient, the dialogue snappy, and the visual journey perfectly cinematic and emotionally rewarding. There's also a soundtrack for it.

Highly recommend if you like fantasy with worldbuilding, action, messy women, rewarding twists, and a dose of horror. Hands down one of the best things I've read this year.

how i made Dead Horses, from thumbnail to final page 🐱

[image or embed]

— Freya JN (goblinstunts) October 21, 2025 at 2:05 AM

Layover By Lis Xu
Short comic about visiting family in Shanghai during a layover. Everything is drawn in pencil which makes the story feel like a diary entry, and the characters drawn as anthropomorphic dogs which gives it a sense of distance. It's not too detailed or serious but still feels very personal and might be triggering for people who have sick family abroad.

Lina and Eileen by Shuning Ji
Fantasy comic about a princess who dreams of being kidnapped by a dragon, and a lady knight who dreams of slaying one. Painted with a vibrant watercolor style that evokes fairy tales while questioning them. The plot is too YA for me, though I'm fond of the note it ended with.

Meet Me at the Seafloor by Gojiberry
A depressed marine biologist hears a siren's song, tracks it down, and meets a selkie. Life-affirming and manga-like and a nice change of pace from my dark fantasy fish romances. Also reminded me of this other manhwa I was reading at that time called I See You, which is about a woman who's about to commit suicide but is challenged by the Reaper (also a woman) to live three more months. And then they were roommates! I haven't finished that one yet.

Fashion Intervention by Chereen Francis-Roberts
28-year-old Bertie has a party to attend but her closet is haunted by a fashionable demon. 😱 Very fun oneshot about self-care through self-expression. Has the thrills of shoujo transformations/makeovers except the MC has to do it all herself and make do with what she has. I basically live in Uniqlo so #can't relate to the struggles but the outfits were super fun.

Aquatic Lives by Pepe Reyes 🇵🇭
This was actually part of last year's comic fair, but since Pepe Reyes also participated this year I wanted to read his previous entry first. This is such a beautiful piece about being in the sea. The visual style reminds me of the Delirium chapter in Sandman: Endless Nights. In his afterword he posts underwater photos he took when diving in preparation for this comic, which was very cool! His 2025 comic is about bugs (I think), though, so I'm kind of nervous about reading that. 🙈

1.
Some manhwa I read at the end of August:

Shall We Bathe, Your Grace?; Savor the Taste; Live Happily Ever After With My Ex's Uncle (DNF)

All on Manta:

Shall We Bathe, Your Grace? (m/f, complete): Short, cracky, fairly standard romance, tropey villains. Plot gets progressively mediocre, the bigger it becomes, but it's short. The FL gets transmigrated to a pseudo-European fantasy world and struggles with the lack of hygiene and sanitation standards. Although her new family is very loving, they have also forbidden her to bathe, citing bathing as the cause of her illness. She finds a kindred spirit in the duke who is notorious in high society for being scrupulously clean and obsessed with bathing. The obvious solution is to marry him and get unlimited access to baths. Eventually they become a power couple that changes the world, one hygiene practice at a time, fighting scientific misinformation by... equating water and bathing with divinity.




Savor the Taste (m/f complete): As always, the initial cooking plot is pretty fun, and the transition to romance and Big Plot is meh, but it's also fairly short. Plot: the ML is cursed so all food tastes bad to him (...which reminds me of Covid) so he avoids eating. The FL, a transmigrator from the modern world, is about to executed as the princess of a subjugated nation, but because she's Quirky, she brought a snack as her last meal, which she offers to the ML. Unexpectedly the ML finds it delicious and this gives her a path to survival: he delays her execution, brings her back to his estate to cook for him, and falls in love.

The storyline with the FL's half sister is actually pretty good! Her sister is a beautiful and honorable princess, and the reason where their nation is conquered in the first place. The emperor courted her, was rejected, and decided the best recourse was to take her nation, kill her family, and keep her as a caged bird. This puts the FL at odds with her: her sister wants to avenge her family and take the FL with her to protect her, not knowing that the FL has fallen in love with the duke. It's resolved in a bittersweet way that I really like, even though I find the plot unimpressive (they add it some stuff about witches too which I don't think blends well) and the romance too bland to warrant the drama.


Live Happily Ever After With My Ex's Uncle (DNF): Misleading teaser which makes it seem like the ML is happy to be used by the FL. Atrocious translation (I think this might be Kuaikan's own translation, and Manta is only distributing it). Dogsblood. You're better off reading Marry My Husband.

I also finished Semantic Error, which I loved all the way to the end, even though I needed a few more chapters for closure. It's the first time I've been disappointed in a manhwa for not having extras. I wanted to know more about Sangwoo (MC)'s family relationships and previous romantic relationship. All you get from the manhwa is that he does have a family, and he did used to date, but none of these are ever shown or treated as relevant information Still, it was a lot of fun, and all those scenes where Jaeyoung (ML) calls Sangwoo and prompts him to tell him all about his day felt like food for my heart.

2.
Into the Woods

Oh, if life were made of moments / even now and then a bad one—! / But if life were only moments / then you'd never know you had one

Saw a local staging for Into the Woods. It was my first time experiencing the musical in any form, and I enjoyed every moment. ( Read more... )


I Am Setsuna
A year ago, I started this song purely because the Spotify algorithm played me this song:


I've been playing it on and off ever since, and when I finally heard the song in the game, at the very end of the story, you bet I teared up. I'm glad I finished it and got my catharsis! I was pretty ready to DNF it because I found it to be kind of a slog—the characters felt deliberately familiar as the entire game is modeled on classic JRPGs, but nothing about them was individually compelling. Gameplay-wise, I don't think I really enjoyed it until almost the end when I got access to the MP-recovering Spritnite (Gagnrath) and settled on a rotation of characters (Endir, Setsuna, and Nidr/Aeterna). On the plus side: it is so short and linear and totally finishable! And yeah, pretty nostalgic! I was worried about getting lost in dungeons because there were no maps, but non-random encounters made it easy to tell if I've been through an area or not. ^^;

My final party was Endir (lv 60), Setsuna (lv 56), and Aeterna (lv 53)—I spent an hour repeatedly challenging the Stoniel trio in the Last Lands and losing before realizing that the answer to all my problems was simply the Grand Cross triple combo. With Aeterna's crit rate boosted by her weapon and combo damage boosted by one of the Spritnites, none of the regular bosses in the final dungeon stood a chance. I was probably also over-levelled by the end of the game, which helped?

( random notes about the game—contains endgame spoilers )

Words are from a poem by Li-Young Lee and Bird of the Summer by A Fine Frenzy.

I have not seen any egrets—which used to hang around our area in the recent years—since the 7th of May, but I've had sightings of other birds after that. These days I'm back to only seeing sparrows, though sometimes I hear orioles flying overhead in the morning.

More journal photos

The fire was just down the street. It turned out only to be a first-alarm fire and was put out pretty quickly, but I was too alarmed to take a video. /o\






Went through a minor crisis because these Japanese jam and butter packets gave me SO much joy but are so wasteful:


Vocabulary from Justice in the Dark:

Movies

The Rose of Versailles (2025)
Most of the story was compressed into music video form so it felt kind of like a musical? It's a very vibes-y adaptation with unapologetic anachronisms, but ultimately lacked closure between the two lead characters. It's a fun movie to watch with a friend, though, especially when none of you are familiar with the original canon. There's so much to comment on! (Me: "Oooh is he regaining his eyesight?" / Daisy: "Oooh is he losing sight in his other eye?")

The Match (2025)
Netflix markets this as a psychological thriller that highlights the main character's breakdown, but it's actually a character study about two inter-generational baduk players (the peerless mentor and his prodigious student) who push and pull each other and breathe new life into the sport. (Found out afterwards that this movie was based on real players.) Really enjoyed this one!

Detective Chinatown 1900 (2025)
I... How do I put it? If my paternal elders' chain letters were turned into a movie, this is what comes out—buddy-cop dynamics, broad humor, Chow Yun-fat's long dramatic spiels about Sinophobia, and racist caricatures of Native American culture (that these characters are portrayed as good people is immaterial).

Zhang Xincheng (playing a supporting character) was very attractive when he swore in English. IIRC he even won an award for his performance in this movie, which is painful to me because while I like that he did this movie because it broadens his network, I absolutely do not want people to associate him with this. 😂

Webtoons

The Wicked Ladies-in-Waiting (S1)
Het romantasy that puts emphasis on gen + found family relationships. Although it begins with a standard romance setup (the FL and ML's first meeting), the two leads part almost immediately so the FL can pursue her revenge and nudge the second prince to bid for the throne.

A quote from the scene where the second prince cross-dresses and earnestly draws inspiration from his ladies-in-waiting: Examples of true women I know, and not mere images people made up... It's Coco, who is confident and charming like a flickering flame, and Julia, who is tranquil yet formidable like the waves. Julia and Coco are like teachers, friends, and sisters to me, and I have been closer to them than anybody else.

The Tale of Goldiluck the Black Kitten
Life has simply not been the same since I finished this. I spent months unlocking 2-3 chapters a day, a most soothing routine, and when I finally got to the end life felt so empty. ;__; This is a gen + found family manhwa that ended with a trope that's usually associated with romance. Ahhhh I love them so much! And the manhwa loves cats so much, I cried so hard over each and every one of them (except maybe Goldiluck's derpy bio-dad lol).

The artist's current project is a Shape of the Water-esque BL manhwa where one of the characters is an orca that can take human form, which is... very on-brand for them.

Misc.

Sa Ye audio drama eps 1–2
Listened to the first two eps of the censored cut; I am unclear if anything was cut in these two eps and hated the feeling so much I couldn’t go on. The AD seems to start you off at a different point from the novel. Rather than guiding you through the leads' first meeting, it drops you straight in the classroom, at which point they've already met and I have no idea how many characters I'm listening to because they're all delinquent-type boys.

A little annoyed because I've been reading WIPs that haven't even finished serializing the first season (at least for the English versions).

Divorcing the Emperor by Legendary Cat (story) and Hara (art)
Ongoing, < 30 chapters on Tapas.

The English title is so difficult to distinguish from other generic transmigration rofans, but the content is completely different. For one thing, there's no transmigration (or regression, for that matter). For another, it's an ensemble-cast adventure/comedy set in a fantasy world where the romance is secondary to the characters' shenanigans, and the style and pacing are very anime-like.

PLOT: The main character, Krisha, is the daughter of a soldier who grew up in a battlefield before they settled in a province outside the capital. One day she is informed that she is married to the emperor in an accident of paperwork with neither of them having met each other. Thus begins Krisha's quest to go to the capital to file for divorce—and in her travels she sees the true state of her country.

Krisha is: 1) very strong, and 2) the founding member of ANRA (The Archuke of the North Research Association), which leads to some very funny developments. AND she has a magical meat-eating horse called Creampuff.

The plot is moved by comedy, hijinks, and likeable characters, and a sort of reverse harem format, except so far only Archduke#1 has fallen in love with Krisha and even then he's been manipulating her for his own political/revenge motivations. Everyone is so eccentric and interesting it's actually hard to tell who the ML is (I'm going to guess the emperor, if only because the Krisha's trajectory seems to be her learning how to be empress), and Krisha herself is a force of nature who is the perfect balance of smart and dumb. There's enough genre awareness in the story to subvert some tropes (eg. slave auction / desert kingdom character trope) while parodying others magnificently.

Enjoying this so much I'm not sure I'll have the willpower to let more chapters accumulate before continuing. ;___;

As the Heart Leads ny TILDA, CHT, Octopuschu
Ongoing, < 30 chapters on Tapas

Romantasy where the MC was originally the granddaughter of a shaman in modern-day Korea, born with the ability to see spirits, preternaturally bad luck, and a poor affinity with water. She transmigrates into the body of a woman in a western fantasy world who drowns herself before her marriage to the king, an otherwise good-natured man who's driven to insomnia and fits of mania by the spirits that are attracted to him and his accumulation of negative karma. In spite of her commitment to avoid any entanglement with the supernatural at all costs, the MC takes to surreptitiously punching spirits, creating talismans and totems, and massaging the king's energy points to help him sleep.

So far not much is happening but I'm invested enough to subscribe to it, though I am as usual expecting the quality to drop after S1.


The One within the Villainess by Makiburo (story), Shiraume Nazuna(Art)
Ongoing fantranslation

Reverse revenge isekai with fantasy/adventure elements. Rather than being a transmigrator who takes over an otome game villainess's life, the MC is the original villainess who gets her body back after it's taken over by a well-meaning transmigrator. The transmigrator, Emi, is a modern-day Japanese girl who empathizes with the villains and wishes for the villainess's happiness, so she spends the MC's formative years improving the villainess's life and relationships while the MC is unable to do anything but watch until Emi detaches from the body.

The plot begins when the original protagonist—also possessed by a transmigrator—enters the story and completely undoes all the goodwill Emi has worked so hard to build. After the system turns on her, Emi breaks down and disappears from the body. Remi repossesses her body and vows to avenge Emi and pay her back for her kindness. Outwardly she uses Emi's gentle personality and moral compass to win people over and keep the memory of Emi alive, but inwardly she embraces her true villainess nature, only going through the motions of saving the world so the original protagonist is unable to progress in the game and is eventually cornered.

The story moves quite fast: there are only 26 full chapters out, but by chapter 7 Remi is already fighting a god for the sake of her lost love.


While it's technically not yuri, the vibes are very gay, and there's a lot of focus on how much Remi loves Emi. There is only ONE eligible ML (the demon king route), but that character and one-sided romance mostly exist to show that Remi will never be interested in anyone else because Emi is her entire world.


She regards the ML's confession as a confession to Emi and approves of him for sharing the same impeccable taste in women.



Cons: The villains—the original protagonist (or at least the transmigrator who takes her place) especially, but also the two other guys in her harem—are stereotypically a cartoonish level of evil AND stupid, and the manga seems to believe that it should keep layering on revelations of how bad these people are for the revenge to be satisfying. This unfortunately leads to a weird puritanical slant in the ~final showdown~ where the original protagonist is revealed to be a sexual deviant (in society standards) and all of high society basically watches revenge porn.

-

PS. Blind Go (Hikaru no Go fan event) is back this year! The AO3 collection is open for submissions, and submissions are due on May 4. I believe this year's event is open for all mediums (not just fic.)

Links: AO3 collection (open) / Bluesky / Tumblr

1.
snowflake_challenge #6: Share your favourite piece of original canon.
I don't have a favorite anything anymore since I have a very short memory and tend to move on from interests... But here's a list of favorites from the last five years:

the movie Legend of Hei: there's supposed to be a sequel in the works and I'm worried Xiao Hei will spend less time in his cat form in it. I think his human form is cute too but I have cat bias. XD

the manga Witch Hat Atelier: the art, design, and paneling are insanely good, and I cried almost every volume. Not very sure the anime format is for me but I'm excited for it nonetheless!

the baihe youth comic 她們的故事 Their Story: Found out recently that there's some controversy(?) around it, but I still love it and it continues to be a comfort reread.

the Yoruneko comics, which are about the daily (well, nightly) life of a cat owner: this is also a comfort read and the main reason I still check Twitter, as the artist posts there. There's an animated series too.

the webtoon Like Wind on a Dry Branch: I paused at around 100 chapters in (it's ongoing with 200+ chapters), but it was the most invested I was in a canon in a while, a rare occurrence. It has some of my fav tropes too, ie. hurt/comfort and demons raising a human child :'D

I guess it's easier to say that my favorite medium is comics these days... I need to relearn how to read books without illustrations. ^^;


2.
Vocabulary list from the first chapter of 全宇宙最后一只猫 The Last Cat in the Universe (which I'm dropping because I'm looking for shorter or maybe less webnovel-y reads):


3.
Recent bookmarks:

Public Domain Archive: you can filter by style, time period, and tag!

Ellipsus: supposedly a Google Docs alternative.

With thanks to past!me for taking the time to jot notes on my journal. Otherwise I would have no way of differentiating my 4894664 otome isekai webtoons.
( journal photos )

Books

Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (tr. Anita Barrows, Joanna Macy)
Rita Dove, "Playlist for the Apocalypse"

Movies

Wicked (2024)
Look Back (2024)

Comics

Komomo Confiserie

Short shoujo manga about a pampered heiress who is forced to find a job and learn to live on her own while her family is sorting out a financial crisis. The MC is a vibrant and confident protagonist who embraces the chance to grow as a person, handles conflicts (and bullying) gracefully, and breaks out into professional renditions of Lacrimosa when anyone in her life is in need of comfort. The ML is sweet but sort of just there to help her attain her independence. The best parts are in the middle which highlight my favorite shoujo friendship dynamic: the spunky FL and her loud, tsundere best friend.

An Incompetent Woman Wants to be a Villainess (ongoing)

Proxy bride story where the FL is very Pure and Cute and Doing Her Best to act like her wicked half-sister whose place she's taking. No one is fooled, but she tries so hard they just go along with it and praise her villainy. Super cute and fluffy.

Like Wind on a Dry Branch (ongoing)
Saving My Sweetheart (a.k.a. A Way to Protect the Lovable You)
The Tyrant's Only Perfumer
廚廚動人 U Kill, I Cook (a.k.a. Kitchen Goddess and Assassin)

Villainess in Love

A good hurt/comfort fantasy canon where the FL, Yunifer, is mature and comfortable with her sexuality, and the ML's trauma is taken seriously. The first chapter timeskips the whole part where Yunifer's just transmigrated and is trying to avoid the main characters, instead landing us straight into a drunken and ill-advised one-night stand with the ML. The manhwa left a lot of loose ends which I hope are tied well in the original novel, but this was otherwise a solid romance fantasy with a less boilerplate setting and some worldbuilding of its own. The ship dynamic is cool and mature older FL x codependent yandere puppy ML, which does not feel as romantic on Yunifer's end since she's also trying to help him be more well-adjusted, but it's appropriately sweet. And there's a beautiful gigantic bird character who always steals the show whenever she's onscreen.

The Villainess is Retiring (ongoing; not sure I'll continue when S3 comes out)

Transmigration with strings attached, with the MC as a reluctant/inadvertent hero. The MC just wants to retire in the mountains but when she summons a demon to light up some unburnable wood, she gets cast into the role of magical problem-solving and leadership. S1 was pretty great (somewhat comparable to Lout of the Count's Family, from what little I've read of it), but in S2 the character writing takes a step back and the power imbalance between the MC and her devoted demon servant felt starkly worse. PS. The outfits for this webtoon are so nonsensical.

Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion

Isekai with a price. This is an enjoyable self-contained romance-fantasy with fake dating and mystery elements, though some of the episodes in the latter half fall into the "plot in service of romantic moments" category, something I wouldn't have minded if they let the hurt/comfort potential marinate a little.

The MC has a strong sense of personality, her own set of pecularities, and is unafraid of getting her hands dirty. The transmigration plot is a puzzle that's meant to be solved and resolved, with the MC having to come clean about who she is and where she came from, which is probably what made the romance more believable for me. Probably not that memorable in the long run, but it was an 8/10 binge with some interesting twists for me.

TV

Link Click cdrama

Mostly enjoyable for the songs and the opera troupe case and the scene in the end which shows the gang with their donghua looks! Bold of them to save that for after the Worst Story Arc I've Ever Seen in a Cdrama (a.k.a the MRA case). The last case was kind of okay but, like most of the cases, overly long. I ended up enjoying the siscon because at least it felt so bizarre it gave the story some flavor and it was amusing to see the actor leaning into it. XD The boys' dynamic was actually pretty good (I loved the conflict), but Qiao Ling was, sad to say, paper-thin and awful.

Nico Baidan, "Firsts"

After being kicked out of his family estate, Lu lives a quiet life in the city until bumping paths with a particular human.

Short (26 pages) comic about a vampire who moves to the city and lives the life of a shut-in until a meet-cute finds its way to his doorstep. I was more into the vampire slice-of-life bits. but it's romantically hopeful/comforting in a "love finds a way even if you're a homebody" sense.




Pearl Law, "Karma's A Peach"

Full of ennui, an Asura wastes away in the mortal world by gaming and stealing paintings. Bodhisattva decides to put a stop to this nonsense by making him collect good karma. Then he meets a goody two-shoes on the way, who turns out to be the kind of help he needs all along.

Content warning: swearing and depiction of smoking

Urban fantasy story about an asura forced to farm karma. The gamified approach is appropriately cynical and thoughtful about the concept of having to do good to achieve a purpose—something I think about a lot when doing the life sim portions of Persona games ahaha. Loved this a lot! And the manga-like format is perfect for my ereader. :')


(Also wrote about Pearl Law's previous Shortbox comic, Parasocial Activity here.)