Flirting By Mistake

Every manga I read is stored on Manta or Tappytoon, but I have no idea which is which most of the time. All five of the different apps I subscribe to have similar icon colors and UIs, making them mostly indistinguishable from one another. Instead, I generally go through my list of “Continue Reading” titles, looking for the cover of the one I left off. And yes, my manga library is a total, fragmented mess, spread across five different subscriptions. It’s not an ideal way to do things, but that’s where we are right now.

I'm going to reconsider voice acting for subbed and dubbed anime. Subbed anime has you read the line, and dubbed anime has you hear it. An effective English voice actor can bring an exaggerated smile to life by matching the smile with an equally happy vocal quality. That can be a difficult line to read and a specific skill to voice act. The line of dialogue that accompanies a smile is often read with a breathy, laughter-like quality. You can actually hear the smile in the voice of the actor reading the line. When all three elements of translation, animation, and voice acting come together in a perfect moment, it’s pure magic and transcends language to give you a direct shot of serotonin.

Yes, technically speaking. I would say that The Godfather is a movie about a family and a business, not just a family. Similarly, while the friendship of the male lead develops into romance with the female lead, the core of the story revolves around their growth and healing from past wounds and their learning to effectively communicate with each other. He’s struggling with the immense pressure from his family and expects himself to meet an almost impossible standard, building walls around himself as he tries to cope. She’s recently gotten out of a very bad relationship that’s left her with very low self-esteem. In the safe space of their friendship, the two of them can finally begin to heal. And their eventual romance is a natural progression of the two healthiest people possible finding each other after each has done a lot of growing and healing on their own. Much of the book explores the male lead’s therapy sessions, his struggles with his career, as well as the separate lives of the two leads and their respective friend groups. A simple love story this is not. Rather, it is a deep and complex character study of two interesting people who just happen to find each other.

It would be great to get some insight into the relationship between the protagonist’s daughter and the administrator. It sounds like their relationship is somewhat akin to that of a researcher and a fascinating yet deadly anomaly. There’s a healthy dose of fear and respect, interspersed with an edgy line of awe inspired scientific curiosity, and a very suspiciously intimate nature, born from long periods of close study and attempt to contain. No, it wouldn’t be romantic by any stretch. Rather she watches him, and he continually defies her. An interesting, even strange, cosmic-scale game of cat and mouse that they play. And it seems they’re mutually dependent as well.

Are romance novels casting a spell on us? When we read novels about love, they can be very escapist and often beautifully written. However, there is a danger that as we read more and more novels about love, we get caught up in an idealistic view of it and start to think that all people are looking for is that special someone to have a sweeping gesture of love for them, to have an epic love story.

In many of these novels, the characters are so idealistic in their quest for the perfect love. The reader is led to believe that everyone must end up in a happy ever after, much like in a fairy tale. And as we turn each page, we are regaled with the heart-wrenching drama and near misses of the characters before us. We fail to realize that most relationships require communication and hard work on the part of both people involved.

Sometimes, the stories can cause us a lot of pain and make us even more unhappy when the elusive thing we long for doesn’t materialize. We need to learn to leave the novels behind, and come back to reality in order to get a true idea of what love is like outside the pages of a novel.

When I think of the ending of the novel I see a row of dominos. The first one is the protagonist’s decision to stop being afraid. The last one is the CEO’s perp walk. But in between there are many wobbling ones: the junior associate who decides to leak a memo, the security guard who decides to do nothing, the other company that wants to be first with the story. It is a big ecosystem and in the end it just collapses under its own corruption.

The reality of a huge corporate scandal is that there are countless victims, and beneficiaries, and just as many people who are left to sit idly by as it all collapses. This is what makes the ending to GoodComeBad so impressive, because it gives all of these characters their due. Their brief reappearances in the last few chapters of the book detail how they fare after the events of the story. Some of them are better off than others, but we get to see their fully formed lives. The story of the protagonist is the spine of the book, but the ending gives so much more to the rest of the people involved in the story of the collapse of this corporation.

I'd say it's a good sign, but with a huge asterisk regarding the rest of his behavior. Does he seek you out? Does he remember things you told him? Does his body language open up when you're around him? One wink is a flash in the pan, but consistent attention and memory is a steady flame that you can rely on. Use the wink as a clue, not the entire mystery.

Instead, I highly recommend another completed series which does not get enough love: July Found by Chance. It is a webtoon, so pretty pictures and updates when the author posts. This is not an infidelity story, as the cheating romantic partner is beaten senseless by the truly aggrieved love interest. Instead, it is a story about the ultimate betrayal: that of fate and the author of the protagonist’s story. When the protagonist of July Found by Chance realizes that she is a character in a novel, she is horrified to realize that her life and the love she felt to be real were all just a farce, set up by the author in order to create a tragic, even worse, manipulated romance for her.

The core of the story is the main female lead trying to search for agency in a story where she is just a pawn in the author's predetermined script. The story is a meta take on the betrayal trope and as a result the earned romance outside of the cheating of the cheating story feels even more authentic. The art is clean and nice to read and I particularly enjoyed how it could express the main character's deep frustration, existential dread, and her unrelenting search for freedom. It's a great cheating romance story that deconstructs the destiny of a forced romance, and stays with you long after the story is over.

My friend said it was kind of like “The Thing” meets “Tron” – a small group of people are stuck in a data fortress in the Arctic and the Error is this shape-shifting digital entity that can imitate and corrupt any person or system. So, a really closed-in, don’t-trust-everyone kind of story.

Rather than trying to understand the Error, you read about a small group of people who are gradually having to struggle to survive as the Error learns to use their environment against them in a series of climactic and increasingly intense events. It’s a totally tense read, with no easy solutions at the end. Just the depature [sic] stark reality of their eventual survival at what cost.

I've seen this one floating around on my feed. Algorithm tends to throw it at me now. Premise is a little too juicy for me to ignore, but overall it reads as somewhat too dramatic for my tastes (fake mating, ex's enemy, etc.). I gave the first few chapters a read simply out of curiosity, but the initial setup does read somewhat tense as the main character tries to avoid social disaster. Prose is readably simple, though the rest of the emotional developments follow fairly predictably from there. Trashy read that I couldn't look away from is the best way I'd describe this. It's not literature by any stretch of the imagination, but it's very Guilty Pleasure. Main draw to me is the exploration of power dynamics, and the author certainly gets a lot of mileage out of them. All in all, very trashy, very over-the-top, extremely fast-paced romantic drama. Just don't go in here expecting too much in terms of character development.