AN OTAKU GIRL'S SUGGESTION : A WEBTOON EVERY AVERAGE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS SHOULD READ AT LEAST ONCE. December 11, 2022

 

 What is Webtoon?

For those who may not know, especially the older generations, webtoons are digital graphic novels/comics in Korea that are usually read online. While webtoons were mostly unknown outside of Korea during their inception, there has been a surge in popularity internationally by making official English translations of original Korean webtoons and publish them online internationally which made it available to all the people around the world including myself. Such as that, CHEESE IN THE TRAP is a Korean webtoon which was published officially with English translations on July 1st.

INTRODUCTION

        

       The webtoon follows the story of Hong Seol, a returning college student who just wants to attend college, study and get scholarships to study further. Hong Seol is like any other average university students with a financial crisis , studying hard to get scholarships in order to continue her studies in a reputed university she is currently enrolled in. And just like many of us, she has got best friends who are Jang Bora and Kwon Eun-Taek. Seol's life follows a normal routine and is pretty dull until two people enter her life, bringing in changes, fun, difficulties and impacting her life in such a way she never would have imagined. One of them is Yoo Jung, a cool, popular, generous, polite, rich, good looking and almost perfect yet suspicious and mysterious senior in her school and the other one being Baek Inho, the goofy, wild, handsome, childish, short-tempered yet helpful who has a deep past with Yoo Jung and therefore are connected to each other. Although, these three are the main characters, the webtoon contains multiple influential characters with such complex yet normal relationships that one cannot stop themselves from reading this once they start and therefore, the whole story is about each one of them dealing with their own life struggles and overcoming those to become a better version of themselves and in the midst of it, making some good unexpected relationships with each other.

Why Should Everyone read this?

      By reading the introduction, you can guess that this webtoon is a slice of life and as many people may not like slice of life, I think most of them would agree that slice of life shows us the complexity of normal human relationships in our daily lives and that's exactly what the story depicts. When one starts to read this webtoon, they cannot help but think, how much the characters are so relatable and realistic that they can be found in real life so easily. The maturation of all the characters, their multifaced personalities, their backstories telling us how they turned into who they are which I will leave you to know when you read it.

            Coming back to the main story, as I previously mentioned it's a slice of life, it will be seen that the story focuses more on character development as it should than on romance between various characters. The most fascinating part about this story is not only how it addresses every toxic element of the characters and their interconnections so in depth and skillfully, a person's dark sides/habits/pasts  but also, how emotional every character makes us that we even end sympathizing the "bad" characters and that is exactly my point. In this story, one will come to realize that nobody is the good one here  and that is how it is in real life honestly. All our life, since our childhood, we have been shown or read stories that always had a good and a bad side, but as we grow older, we realize every human being has their own good and bad sides and that nobody is entirely either good or bad and that is the main theme of this webtoon. Not to mention, what makes this webtoon so amazingly relatable as an university students is those real-life things like group in group projects letting you down, ex-friends changing so much, manipulative people, toxic families and relationships, stalker's making one's life hell, parents' high expectations, the mental burden from the academic pressure and overall pressures in life, etc as they are talked about in the webtoon.

       Cheese in the Trap has multiple characters , as I have mentioned before, playing major roles, such as, Inho's elder sister Baek Inha and many more. All these characters show layers of complexity which helps us understand them better and beyond the first impression they gave us by showing us flashbacks from each one of their perspectives in the later chapters of the webtoon which completely changes the narration.

ENDING

     Personally speaking, CHEESE IN THE TRAP is one of the very few stories for me in which I could empathize with each and every character more or less, yes it's that good and therefore, has the one of the best endings a story can get. In reality, there is no ending for a person's story until they die, however, their story takes a new turn in their life as people keep changing and try to become a new version of themselves, hence, overcoming their issues and that is precisely what the ending of the webtoon tells us. The ending gives hope to us readers that no matter how much we are struggling, do bad things in the past, we can overcome those by continuing to evolve and become a better version of ourselves. It also gives us hope in way that, no matter where we are, we will meet new people who will impact our life in such a way which will make us see the world in a different way which perhaps couldn't have been possible before meeting them.

I am just an ordinary girl who has been reading webtoons since at a really young age, out of all the webtoons I have been reading, this one webtoon has made quite an impression on me and therefore, inspired me to write this blog. I hope I did a decent job at making it look presentable and I do hope that, it makes the readers inspired to read this webtoon even just by a little bit. Thank you.