Manga has been my primary hobby for a number of years now, but I almost never talk about it. This is for a couple of reasons. For one, I’ve read chainsaw man, but I wouldn’t call myself a chainsaw man fan. There’s lots of chainsaw man fans, but very few of them read manga (other than the popular ones). The same goes for basically every other segment of people who read manga. Lots of people have read berserk or oyasumi punpun. But the people who venture beyond the good ones are rare.
This brings me to the other reason I don’t talk about manga. I don’t read good manga anymore, I ran out. This isn’t to say that I have read every single good manga, there’s probably some out there that I haven’t cared to read or don’t really know of. But the majority of the things I read come from the newest releases on mangadex, which mostly consists of manga that basically no one cares about until they get an anime adaptation, but which are also relevant enough in Japan that it’s pretty likely that they will get one eventually.
So this leaves me in a weird limbo, I’m stuck reading all these middle tier manga that people just don’t care about yet. There are some examples that I know will eventually be relevant. Frieren was one of them and it exceeded my expectations. I was going to say that saihate no paladin could be another one, but apparently the anime adaptation of that one was fumbled so hard that I hadn’t even heard that there was one.
All this to say, eventually you run out of even the bad manga. I’ve consumed so much of the slop that I’m familiar with a lot of what I could potentially be interested in. All I’m doing is waiting for new manga to come out or old manga to get translated. And unfortunately, with the recent DMCA strikes, the situation has gotten even worse. However, I thankfully managed to start my ‘into manhwa’ arc back before reaper scans got nuked off the internet so it was a lot easier to find the manhwa I could be interested in.
There’s a core problem with manhwa though (which manga does not share). The contemporary korean webtoon format is a lot younger than the japanese magazine format. So there’s no great backlog of classics to refer back to when you want to dip your toes into the medium. It also doesn’t help that solo middling is the most popular one by far and was formative in creating the current sphere of manhwa communities.
The first manhwa that I really got into was “a returner’s magic should be special”. I think I clicked on it on accident because I didn’t realize it was korean, but decided to give it a shot. I was completely enraptured with it and kept up with the entire thing until it ended. The concept of “the world is being overtaken by a parallel dimension that is both consuming everything and giving the main characters some type of powers” is just a winning formula, and it’s no surprise that it’s the korean equivalent of the isekai trope.
My next step was discovering “only I know the world is ending”, which was one of the first times I saw japanese media very obviously borrowing from what I, at that point, could recognize as korean tropes. This trend has only continued since then. At the present moment, there’s an uncountable amount of examples within this strand of cultural exchange.
Eventually, I decided to go straight to the source and spent a good month or so trying to find the manhwa that I would really like. The actual process was more complicated than that, but for the sake of brevity I will just tell you about the two manhwa that really stood out to me and I think everyone who shares my fascination with pulp media should read.
The first manhwa I want to talk about is “the tutorial is too damn tough”. To pitch it properly, I first have to talk about sword art online. It is my personal opinion that the reason sword art online was ever popular was because of how promising the premise is by itself. The main characters have to face a hundred floors of challenges and develop as people and players to do so. This lets any viewer imagine a countless ways the story could go. There’s a near-infinite amount of ways you could have told this story and it was especially easy to think of what could happen next when you had to wait a week for the next episode to come out. But SAO never really showed that interest in telling it’s story in an interesting way.
This has been a personal gripe for about half my life at this point, until I got into manhwa. SAO-likes are plentiful in the medium. So the format goes like this. One day the world starts getting merged with a parallel universe, of course. And the main characters are put into a tutorial or tower or some other such thing. The goal is to eventually become superpowered soldiers that are capable of holding back whatever force is trying to conquer earth. The tutorial/tower/whatever is often split into a hundred levels of various difficulties, alongside giving out rewards for taking specific and thoughtful approaches to each level.
The story of “the tutorial is too damn tough” follows the only person within the first wave of players who chose the hardest mode and managed to survive it. There is everything you would expect, players forming factions, interpersonal relationships, and a parallel society to the real world. Everything you would expect from it is delivered upon. Their relationship with the korean government is fleshed out, the international ties between players are forged and tested. The main character actually fucks, which we all know is the best aspect of sword art online.
But the “cool thing” happens later on. Within each version of the tutorial, there are team challenges, and obviously there is only one person in the highest difficulty. Over time, injecting this element into the story makes it parallel homestuck more than it does sword art online. The main character is consistently left trying to figure out how to solo various challenges with limited interactions with other people and no direct help.
So it fills both voids left in me at age 13 by the dual disappointments of those two stories. I could go into more depth about why it rules, but you should just read it at this point if you feel like you relate to what I’ve been saying in any way. It’s a great story about a world with very specific rules and a person who has to face an increasing amount of solitude to figure out his place in it.
I’m talking about the second manhwa for a completely different reason. This is quite a normie pick, and is also receiving an anime adaptation soon enough, but I thought I should give some time to “omniscient readers viewpoint”. To explain why this one is so special, I need to go over lord of the rings real quick. Which is quite a divergence from the focus on asian pulp media the rest of this post has had.
So all of you know the ancient meme of “fly the eagles to mordor” and probably a fairly large amount of you also know the reason why that couldn’t happen in the story. The conceit of all magical forces within lotr is that the world operates within the rules of a story. You can’t destroy the ring in mt. doom, you can only do it with heroism. Evil forces can’t ever create anything new, only destroy the things that already exist. This throughline explains pretty much everything that happens in the story and also the reasons for why they happen at all. And it’s probably my favorite magic system in the history of stories.
ORV does basically the same thing, but just manages to also codify it into a more clear system that isn’t just vibes based. This would, of course, be a detriment if it was trying to emulate classic literature, but due to the fact that it exists in a different medium at a different point in time, it’s as interesting to me within it’s specific context. The world in ORV is also being merged with a parallel universe because obviously. But the interesting part is that universe brings various higher powers with it.
Some of them are based on ancient gods, some of them are based on historical figures, but each of them have a specific story attached to them. And that’s the foundation of it all. Normal people can, to an extent, borrow the stories from these significant figures. Aligning yourself with an admiral can give you some degree of power if you’re on a ship, aligning yourself with an angel can give you the power to smite evil forces and evil people. Fairly basic stuff so far, nothing to note other than it’s just kinda cool.
The masterstroke here is that all of these powers are connected through a concept of plausibility. Higher forces can only exert so much influence over the stories of mortals. They can give you a huge sword, but that sword can only kill a dragon if it makes sense that it could. If too much plausibility is expended, the world and the people within it start unravelling in various ways. So the “hunter x hunter moments” are all derived from how to conquer a specific obstacle in a way that gives both a good outcome and is also plausible within the rules of the story.
As the story progresses, the characters gain access to more and more of this force, as they develop as people and face various challenges. By becoming people who conceivably could do something, they gain the power to actually do it. And I think that’s really cool and that manhwa rules, actually.