Oct 8, 2024
Just another manhwa with some readable features but ruined by common major errors such as bad writing, inconveniences, genre tropes, constant shock usage to drag the work as long as the author wants, characters without their own personality and unstable in their role, with their words and actions far apart, yandere bait flowing from the mermaid with inexplicable and inconvenient personality change or dual personality and inexplicable and inconvenient supernatural events.
This work contains an interesting background in terms of the protagonist's psychological story, and his initial relationship with the mermaid seems interesting and creates expectations for a good development between them. In the beginning, the
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mermaid seems to be a character well-placed in the plot, which is perceptible visually, sentimentally, and emotionally. However, all these details are lost right from the start due to:
The setting being in the real world with humans and supposedly having the inexplicable existence of just one single mermaid graft that should be in an old children's fairy tale (which was a source of personalization for young girls of the early generation) or in the urban legends of the mermaid's song (which is just an old form of interpretation and invention of a nonexistent supernatural entity in real life about how women have the power of seduction and attraction, control over men using their voice (song), appearance (beauty), movements (dance), and behaviors ("guide" (making the man copy her out of admiration) or "mimic" (she subtly copies him to stand out and attract attention, drawing him in, similar to the viral term "pick-me girl"), something already extremely outdated.
↓ x - The sudden personality change of the mermaid - x - ↓ victims, deaths, and shock ↓
Initially, she presents herself to us with a normal, sad, melancholic, and harmless expression, only to later reemerge as cold to her victims and obsessive with the protagonist. The possible explanation for this is the trauma she obtained by losing trust in the protagonist since he "abandoned" her when events changed in his life after his father died, his mother became incapacitated, and he had to live with his uncles, leaving the mermaid behind.
The distrust would have made her possessive and obsessive with the protagonist and cruel to the point of killing people to defend/protect him, but not to kill him, which is strange because the real result would only be positive and negative feelings towards the protagonist, not towards other people. The idea of her killing people was something added in to try to make the genre work and fill the void with deaths, blood, impact, shock, mystery, or whatever, to try to keep this 'web of things' alive and moving, using a very common unreal trope: the sudden personality change of an innocent person to extremely aggressive due to a trauma, leading them to kill people coldly and endlessly to protect the one they love obsessively. It's totally out of context and reality because no one goes through such a drastic change after a trauma like that; you either already have symptoms or you don’t. To build such a character, it’s necessary to show signs beforehand, which isn’t the case here and usually isn’t in other cases either, as all attempts to represent 'yanderes' are the same. The first person who created this made a mistake, and others repeated the same mistake with secondary intentions: to successfully sell a product designed to satisfy sadomasochists’ fetishes and thereby make their work popular.
↓- x - inexplicable supernatural - x↓x- inexplicable mermaid↓
Our protagonist found the mermaid in a cave near the sea on an island, and she said that, just like him, she also didn’t have a father, which I understand as her being the only mermaid on the planet. And throughout the story, it’s forgotten that she is a mermaid, and that’s it; no one cares where she came from, how she appeared, what connection she has to the story, or anything. The only thing that matters here is that she 'jumps,' 'navigates,' 'leaps,' 'transports,' or rather 'teleports' in some way from one place to another, somewhere that apparently contains plumbing, but which seems like a sea at the bottom, or who knows what (something simply incomprehensible for us mere humans to understand) to protect her beloved. And the most incomprehensible thing about this was her first 'teleportation.' The protagonist left a remote island and went to live in Seoul, and incredibly, the mermaid found him, managed to move there, said she missed him and that’s why she came back, even though 6 YEARS had passed. She only missed him after all that time, right, no problem here. And to wrap up my comment, before he left the island, she didn’t show up to him, so I don’t need to say more, that’s enough.
Thank you for reading.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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