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The heart-pounding novel that inspired the hit BL comic! Computer science major Sangwoo Choo lives by the following tenets: reason, routine, and rules. So when the rest of his groupmates flake on their class presentation, he deletes their names from the project without hesitation―inadvertently destroying one groupmate’s plans to graduate and study abroad. That’s got nothing to do with Sangwoo, though…or so he thinks, until he realizes that Jaeyoung Jang, the talented design major he was hoping to hire for his video game, is not only that very same classmate, but eager to get some payback! Will Sangwoo be able to debug this semantic error before it upends his entire life?
I think this a very pretty book (at least as for as I can tell with the ebook version), with a good theme.
The writing is fine, and I’d even venture to say this is one of the better webtoon novel translations out there.
Sangwoo is still our beloved:
“During his freshman year, for example, he’d almost gotten into a fist fight with an older student who tried to force him to down a soju bomb”
I also appreciated getting more of Jaeyoung’s perspective on events, especially seeing just how unhinged he actually is.
That said, as a novel, it really doesn’t hold up for me. The writing is very tell-not-show and extremely matter-of-fact, and the repetition made it hard to keep going at times. Of course, we get some fun lines now and again. But, it was just boring after a while with no pretty art to look at.
Also, reading in more detail about how much fun Jaeyoung had basically torturing Sangwoo, paired with the extra focus on how much it genuinely bothered Sangwoo, stopped being funny and just made me feel bad. Although, the bullying seems to slow down around the 40% mark.
The dialogue and banter between the two was the best part about this, although too few and far between in my opinion. And maybe because I had to work so hard for it, I did enjoy the smooches at the end 10x more.
TL;DR: Manhwa pretty privilege. As a novel, the writing doesn’t hold up, and I’d only recommend it to existing webtoon fans, as I was able to get through it and enjoy mainly because I enjoyed the webtoon.
Side note: It’s getting an audiobook, which I think will be a much better format. The story is slow and padded with filler, and a strong narrator could really improve the experience.
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