good dog's manga / #Yuri(3)

i really like the art and think this is a pretty hot and surprisingly genuine little short comic. my main criticism is i wish that narratively dohee would have come around more to bobin's point of view re: her posting porn videos because like. objectively what bobin does with her body is her choice and it felt a little icky for the narrative to sort off portray her posting videos as something that having a girlfriend would "fix" about her. however what i really did enjoy was how surprisingly genuine to the lesbian experience this comic felt. there's a pretty clear thru line of dohee sort of grappling with her desire for women vs her disgust at pervy men, and while i think it would have ideally been explored a little further it's something i did not expect going into what i thought would be a fairly straightforward college situationship erotica. i found dohee relatable in a way i genuinely wasn't expecting and i really liked that aspect. I also really liked how bobin was portrayed as objectively hot in a way that girls with her body type rarely are. and it it doesn't hurt that she's kind of my exact type.... all in all, while i think there are areas that could have used improvement, this is a really worthwhile read, especially for sapphic readers. 4/5 for this short and surprisingly heartfelt horny gl

i initially started this because i loved the art style and it was short, thinking i'd just give it a shot and probably drop it after a few chapters. i ended up reading the whole thing all at once and then going back and re-reading various scenes after i'd finished. the characters are so charming and the writing is clever and really funny. gyerin and juyeon's sub/dom dynamic really entertaining to watch develop and i love the contrast between how they are during scenes vs the non-bdsm aspects of their relationship. i also love how the setting changes when they're immersed in their roleplaying. i thought that was a really fun way to illustrate how in-character these dorks get for nobody but themselves. just as a heads up, because of the subject matter there is some content that could be bothersome to some readers. it's a very lighthearted story and the actual relationship itself is adorable and surprisingly wholesome, but consensual non-consent features pretty prominently in their bdsm roleplay so if that's something you would find triggering i'd sit this one out also you don't need to be a reader of the main comic to understand this one. you honestly don't even need to read the chapters that gyerin was in prior to getting her own side story. i did, because i thought it would provide important context, and if you're dying for more gyerin content after you finish this it's a somewhat worthwhile read (although i found the dom she was with in the main comic sort of bland and cold especially in comparison to juyeon, and ive heard that the major relationships in the main series are incredibly toxic so my advice is just stick with this one) ps the translation is real shoddy on a couple of these chapters but most of them are fine

i absolutely adored bongchon bride so i was eager to read this since son gaepi worked on it, but gaepi is just the artist here not the writer, and in fact gaepi's art is one of the only things i enjoyed about this. i gave up about halfway through because i just couldn't deal with the snail's pace that the plot moves at. this manhwa is just a series of murders happening off-screen punctuated by occasional dispassionate slightly rapey sex scenes and difficult-to-follow conversations retreading things we've already heard from other characters told in slightly different ways. there are too many characters with different but similar goals and motives and while you can tell the author wanted to make that feel clever, it came across as redundant and incredibly hard to follow. at least 3 separate characters tell soon-ock to kill the crown prince at different points in the story, and each time it happens it's played as if its some shocking twist. i literally rolled my eyes the third time around because i just did not get why i was supposed to care about yet another person trying to kill the crown prince. there's so much that happens that has the potential to be interesting, but instead of actually getting to see any of that intersting stuff happen we get to watch soon-ock learn about it secondhand and then wander around the palace grounds monologuing internally about it for multiple chapters until inevitably another maid gets murdered and the whole process repeats again. i found myself giving absolutely zero shits about soon-ock or what was happening to her, and while i wanted to care about hyang-yi because she's a somewhat tragic figure, she's also barely in the damn thing so i never got a sense of her personality. she's the character with the most harrowing backstory and ironically has more interesting stuff happen to her than anything that happens on screen to soon-ock, but we see almost none of it happen. i found myself hating soon-ock because all she does is talk about various conspiracies and occasionally think about how much she wants to save hyang-yi. meanwhile hyang-yi is barely a presence. i also forgot soon-ock's name multiple times despite the fact that i'm generally great at remembering character names another huge disappointment is that the vast majority of the explicit scenes are just soon-ock getting passively fucked by the nasty old king, which i found really unpleasant and happened often enough that it felt weirdly gratuitous for something that i think was not intended to be read as sexy in the slightest. my biggest complaint, however, is how damn repetitive the storyline is. as i said, at least 3 different characters enlist soon-ock in 3 different plots to kill the crown prince and/or king at different points in the story, and that's only in the first half or so. it could very well happen more times after that but i'll never know because i'm not reading any more of this. and the cherry on top of that is that for all the bluster about killing the dude, soon-ock had one (1) entire conversation with the crown prince by the time i stopped reading, and while that conversation did trick me into thinking the story was going somewhere new for a second, it ended up not actually changing things much at all. the one saving grace here is son gaepi's art. it's not quite as polished as their art in bongchon bride (probably just because bongchon bride is more recent and their style has developed and improved over time) but there's a hell of a lot more symbolism and very cool surreal imagery going on, and for a while that tricked me into thinking i was reading something of a higher quality than what this actually is. i especially liked the visuals of the long winding snake being used to represent the palace as a living entity, and the hollow, faceless hyang-yi that soon-ock sees in a nightmare. my final verdict is that while the premise sounds interesting and the art is beautiful, the execution blows chunks and this series is definitely not worth your time.