mozaikmage

 I finished reading this comic more than a month ago but I hated it so much I've been thinking about it on and off since.

Behind the Curtain by dagwa is a 46-episode Webtoon currently available through Daily Pass (which if you're not familiar is an app-only feature that lets you read one episode of the comic a day for free or more if you pay for coins. Each episode is available for 14 days after it's unlocked.) The summary for the comic on Webtoon is as follows: Juyeon has a crush on the new recruit to the theater club, Sol. Things seem to be going well until Juyeon’s ex girlfriend, Minkyeong, joins the club and approaches Juyeon with questionable intentions. As if running into Minkyeong wasn’t enough, the trio are asked to perform in a play, “The Maids” by Jean Genet, for the annual theater club performance. Will Juyeon be able to unravel their tangled relationships and find love?

Spoiler alert: Yes, but in a way that makes no sense and leaves readers confused and dissatisfied!

Content warning: discussions of manipulative and abusive behavior in relationships including self-harm. Also homophobia.

First, the art: It's... okay. Not the most aesthetically pleasing thing I've ever seen, but it's consistent and the character designs are distinct enough that it's really easy to tell every major character apart. We do need more butch lesbian representation and Juyeon provides.

Where this story falls flat on its face is its execution of the triangular relations between Juyeon, Minkyeong and Sol, relations it attempts to parallel in the play they perform.
Juyeon's evil ex Minkyeong shows up and starts flirting with both Juyeon and Sol in an attempt to drive a wedge between them because, as she says, "love between two women is wrong and can't make anyone happy." To which you might say, "what the fuck? Why would anyone listen to a person who says this shit in 2021? At college? In a city?" But nobody calls Minkyeong out on this or tells her she's wrong, they just kinda look at her with a ":/" expression as she walks away.
Now, the reason Minkyeong thinks like this is because when she was in high school, she had a relationship with a girl and had to transfer schools to avoid people gossiping about their relationship. This girl she was dating was manipulative and threatened to hurt herself if Minkyeong left her, which is an understandably traumatic thing to happen to someone, but this behavior started after Minkyeong was cold and rude to her for no apparent reason.

But then Minkyeong and Juyeon get together, and Juyeon also threatens to kill herself because Minkyeong won't pay attention to her! And Juyeon is the protagonist we're supposed to be rooting for! The episode in which Juyeon does this has a content warning for self-harm and abusive behavior, so it's not like they don't know this is fucked up, and yet, Juyeon never shows remorse for this behavior or in any way indicates that she's grown as a person since then. Except she's not obsessed with Minkyeong anymore, which I guess counts as character growth.  Seeing how Juyeon behaved in the past makes the happy ending where Juyeon and Sol get together feel kind of hollow, sinister, like maybe Minkyeong was right they're not going to be happy for long.

Like, the thing about Minkyeong's behavior is, it has backstory and explanation, but no dimension. Her internalized homophobia's intense, but I can't buy that "people gossiping about you in high school" is enough of a traumatic past to make her want to ruin Juyeon's potential new relationship before it even starts when she never seemed to really like Juyeon in the first place? Go to therapy, Minkyeong, you have a lot of issues. 

Minkyeong is dating a guy to basically show Juyeon that You Too can Perform Heterosexuality and Be Happy and Normal, but the dude's even less likeable than she is and she treats him like dirt, going out of her way to avoid spending time with him so he's forced to run around college looking for her. It's awful! Everyone in this comic is an awful person! Except Sol. Sol is an angel and we're thrilled to have her here. But also, unfortunately, so are the guys who have crushes on Sol and try to date her. And the guy who wants to date Juyeon and if she turns him down there'll be tension in the drama club but if she accepts there'll still be tension because Sol and Juyeon kinda have a thing going and there is so much drama and the straight boys do not help.

The reason this is post three in my love triangle series is, the very first episode pitches it as a triangle between the three of them. They're rehearsing The Maids (with Juyeon and Sol as the maids, and Minkyeong as the Madame), and the director's annoyed that the maids' performances seem one-dimensional, and Minkyeong shows up and says "they may hate Madame, but they're also both willing to die for her." But the actual relationship between Juyeon, Sol, and Minkyeong doesn't have that dimension to it. Minkyeong is entirely unlikeable all the way through (although she is very attractive) and while Juyeon might have been willing to die for her in high school, Sol just met this woman and does not know her nearly well enough to commit to that. Minkyeong's physical attractiveness and confidence are the only things she really has going for her, which makes it difficult to buy her as the Madame in the real-life drama playing out. Juyeon and Sol are just not obsessed with Minkyeon. Juyeon might be a more accurate cast as the centerpiece of the drama, since Sol and Minkyeong do have tension over Juyeon, but Juyeon's butch so she can't play the lady of the house I guess.

Behind the Curtain is extremely messy high-drama lesbians, which we need more of in fiction in general, but in trying everything possible to ratchet up the dramatic tension it created a narrative full of unlikeable, unsympathetic characters, and a confusing storyline that seems to be trying to say something, but I can't figure out what. 

This comic stuck in my head because it's just... depressing, to read a comic about lesbians because you love comics about lesbians, and you love comics about messy complicated lesbians with messy complicated feelings, and then you read this and it's clearly trying to do that but also does not succeed at it. Characters we're supposed to root for are manipulative, characters we're supposed to believe have depth to their actions are unsympathetic. The intensity feels unrealistic and unbelievable. 

I want my time and energy back.

 So I'm writing a fic for an exchange. I'm not gonna tell you what it's about because it's for an anonymous exchange, but the request was a shapeshifter and witch AU for the characters in question. This combined with the fact that I'd suddenly decided to reread Bell Book and Candle by skittidyne (I made it like ten chapters in this time) made me want to write an Urban Fantasy setting for the characters, rather than some pseudomedieval isekai fantasy land kinda thing, or xianxia, or any other flavor of shapeshifters and witches.

In BBaC every fantasy creature you can think of exists and so do all the human professions you can imagine working with them-- dragon hunters, healing witches, spellcrafters, exorcists, clairvoyants, potion brewers. Witches have covens that self-regulate and monitor each other's behavior, ghosts gather in groups once a year on Halloween. But most people don't know, don't notice, or don't see this side of the city unless something happens that brings them into contact with it. Yamaguchi discovers magic when he catches Suga trying to banish the ghost haunting Yamaguchi. Daichi only learns about the whole magical world half his friends deal with when he starts dating Suga. I really like how BBaC balances its insanely massive cast of characters by giving everyone a different level of knowledge about what's going on in the world, from humans who Just Got Here to people who may or may not have kickstarted the whole plot several years earlier to a freshly summoned demon who also Just Got Here but in a different way than the humans.

There's something appealing about the idea that the ordinary world we live in is a little more magical and mysterious than we can see, and that someday, circumstances might grant us the ability to perceive the magic. I also like the fact that there is a scaffolding of the normal everyday world we all know that the magical world can be built on top of, and the fact that it's hidden from the regular folk means I don't have to make up countries and history from scratch. For a short little ship exchange fic I don't need lore, but it's always good to know how the world of your story works. How the magic works, who can use it, and how people perceive it.

An urban fantasy work that builds its lore really well is the webtoon This Magical Moment by Yunhui Na. Unlike BBaC and uh, my fic in progress, magic isn't hidden from normal people in TMM, but witches face varying levels and kinds of persecution for their abilities around the world and across history. I was particularly impressed by the consideration taken of how Christianity perceives witchcraft and how Korea, where the story is set, might have different prejudices or reasons to be wary of witchcraft. Sara, a devout Christian studying to become a nun, clashes with powerful potionmaking witch Bakha over her fear of Bakha's powers, leading Bakha to dub her a Puritan. There's also a clever slang word for non-magical people in Korea: kuruma, a loanword from Japanese that means car (because non-magical people can't ride brooms and have to get around in cars.) The little details and many layers present in every interaction (class, religion, and culture among them) make the familiar premise feel fresh and new, and at the same time highly complex. 

I like urban fantasy a lot, but it takes a lot of thought to really pull it off well. (Remember that Netflix movie Bright?) There's a lot of urban fantasy book series I've meant to read but haven't gotten around to yet (Dresden Files being the main one I've heard about, haha.) But if you're into the genre and interested in checking out some things you might not have heard of yet, This Magical Moment and Bell Book and Candle are great examples. You don't need to be familiar with Haikyuu!! to enjoy BBaC.

 I wrote up a long post and then DW deleted it. I am furious. But not so furious that I will not rewrite the post to the best of my memory. Because I have good content here.

The biggest award in comics, the Eisners, always seem to nominate webtoons to spite me personally. The year before last, they nominated Lavender Jack by Dan Schkade, my beloved, but also Let's Play, my beloathed. Last year, it was Third Shift Society, whose crime was being boring. This year, it's The Kiss Bet, whose crime is being unlikeable and having awkward art and characters that do not behave like people or even approximations of people. 

And what's most baffling about this is there are plenty of good comics with similar basic concepts on that same platform that didn't get that acknowledgement! Why!

One of these comics is The Four of Them by Mai Hirschfeld, about four friends and their romantic entanglements, but mostly their friendship. It's a satisfyingly slow burn with really great characterization. Also, gay people exist in it! Amazing!

I also love the newer comic Seasons of Blossom by Hongduck and Nemone, also about four high school students, but mostly about the romance between them. The plot twists in ways I don't expect, and you end up really rooting for these hets!

Odd Girl Out by Morangji also has awkward art, but the growth and development its characters go through keeps readers invested for hundreds of episodes. I couldn't put it down. It's another school dramedy with romance in its second season, but the focus is on how the protagonist Nari comes into her own as a confident, capable leader. I love her and want the best for her.

If you want something completely different, Yuna & Kawachan by Lauren Schmidt is ending soon, and it's got a really unique and appealing art style and concept. A schoolgirl and a mascot with PTSD try to make their way to a safe zone in the middle of a monster apocalypse. 

Also completely different: Heir's Game by Suspu. The Three Musketeers for gays. Although with more graphic violence than the Soviet live-action miniseries of The Three Musketeers (the definitive version of the story, naturally.)

Both The Makeup Remover and Surviving Romance by Lee Yone are incredible, intelligent webtoons. The Makeup Remover is a deconstruction and critical reflection on how makeup and beauty culture affect all kinds of people in our society, while Surviving Romance is a fun mashup of "reincarnated into a romance novel" + "zombie apocalypse" + "time loop." Their character writing is really compelling, and they make such good, thought-provoking points.

I recently caught up to How to Become a Dragon by eon and it's so good. Do you like exam arcs? Fantasy/distant past characters having to adapt to the modern world? Reigen Arataka? This is the webtoon for you. It's hilarious and has such a unique premise. I'm into it.

Romance 101 by Namsoo is a cute romcom with a really appealing art style and a really relatable nerd of a protagonist. It's funny and I like it.

I hope you enjoy these recommendations I have made!