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.
Blind Passion Webtoon