bussybuddy's Topics (15)

We love this because it's not real life, don't worry

Wym?? my bf won't be secretly a snake god who can solo dp me???? I want a refund!

I'm confused, are you talking about seth?? Can you please explain what are you trying to say? Please don't take it the wrong way, I'm just confused!!

I forgot their names but the pregnant one starts the story as a hyper competent general and we can infer from that he's also a good strategist. Then, the moment he sees the guy who got him pregnant smile at someone else, he acts out and puts himself in a situation he couldn't handle. It felt like a betrayal. The author is telling us he became stupid because? Of burgeoning love? No evidence of love yet, so it's just hormones? What a betrayal! Oh no pregnant people can't make good decisions anymore bc they're too pregnant to think!?? Annoying.

The impregnator was also soooooo out of line barging into the pregnant general's office and yelling at him, calling him irresponsible for making decisions about what battles he'll engage in like the pregnant person's bodily autonomy doesn't matter anymore. What, now he's just an incubator for your spawn?? Sit down, dude. You have an opinion about how he uses his own damn body, then you raise it respectfully, don't scold him like he's your property.

Ughhhhh got me soooo angry. What made it worse for me is that the story is trying so hard to seem progressive, but it's so obviously still falling into blatantly heteronormative, patriarchal ideas of what a good "masculine" partner and "feminine" partner should do. Like I'm supposed to give the impregnator a gold star for not being abusive in bed?? Thanks for doing the bare minimum. Also! Why is the general swooning over someone he barely knows wearing a fancy outfit? It's unearned at that point.

I'm just not the target audience. It asked for too much suspension of disbelief (the LEADER of the revolutionary army is allowed to roam freely in the house of the GENERAL of the empire??????????????????????) and wanted too much credit for too little, then my already beggared patience shattered after the snow giant sequence.

I'm not offended by you btw. Happy to rant. Don't take my reply personally it's all directed at the story, not anyone else.

No no it's alright, i dropped this story cause I honestly got bored and after sometime this manhwa came to mind and I thought I should complete this caus everyone was saying how green forest seth is and so, but after seeing your comment and when I started reading, it doesn't felt right, and I had doubts about their relationship that's why I asked

Yeah it doesn't feel right for me either. There's something about the way that he's green flagging that feels sooooo exaggerated and "look how good I'm being!"

IRL, it would make me super suspicious. In a story, it just feels like kinda sloppy storytelling that bungled its point.

Right, honestly their relationship seems more like a contract and formalities rather than an actual relation where you lean on eachother for support, and not being a robot where the author has given you a script and you just read all of that without an expression especially for theo

wdym no reason?

Yesol? Who himself says he has no reason to be bad tempered and whose mother is generous and gracious with him?

Obviously I'm not saying the battered child has no reason to be traumatized.

NO!!! this is a misunderstanding of Yesol's character, he does have a reason for his personality (to an extent)! he has a big theme around the adults in his life pushing responsibility on him, like the mom in chapter 12 telling yesol to be the bigger man and to take care of hanrim. despite her kid telling her about his classmate's troubling behaviour, she doesn't ask how he feels or checks up on him or anything, and yesol, internalizing this, meets her advice in earnest, staying up all night figuring out how to help hanrim, compiling the list of students, etc... we see this again in chapter 25 where she does the same thing to him and he reacts the same way. 2nd is the whole coach thing, how yesol is pushed into this role of coach and again meets it in earnest, training harder than anyone else in such a way that they all notice it, and 3rd is in the workplace, how despite his little acts of rebellion, complaining abt his boss and spitting in his drink, he still does the work, AND he tries to work while injured even when his coworker/new boss(?) tells him to rest. a conversation that happened at the surfing place summarizes this: yesol has good intentions, but acts them out in a bad way. I think there's more layers to it all (e.g. ch24 where he can't stomach intae's healthy relationship represented by him putting down the drink offered by him and his wife). what I love abt yesol is that there is no single grand reason for the way that he is, it's a constellation of issues that snowballed into how he is now. he has a subtle history of neglect. he is self deprecating even when he was 17, and he never got to unwind that. whatever personality he started off with was incompatible with this environment that he keeps getting thrown into. his crappy behavior is his inability to see a lot of these things, of neglecting himself (which he directly does in ch16-17(?) where he doesn't wanna pursue the culprit + there's this alcoholism). I LOVE HIS CHARACTERIZATION!!!

thank u for this bc u said it better than i could. i don’t get how the original commenter came to their conclusion, yesols characterization is sufficiently supported by his background and the roles he occupies (willingly or otherwise) throughout his adolescence/adulthood, and also he seems to just be a little devious/sarcastic/self deprecating by nature, which is acknowledged repeatedly by other characters (hanrim literally spells it out like you said) and anyway doesn’t exactly need an overt explanation as not every character is going to be cute and demure of all the slop in this genre, this authors characters are so well written and break traditional archetypical molds so idg what this person is saying (this authors other ‘fucked up’ characters certainly have valid reasons to be, even more than hanrim/yesol do in this story - one is literally a victim of csa and one was kidnapped and held for ransom by gangsters as a kid ????).

well idk maybe reread it then because idt you picked up on what the author is putting down. and family dynamics (much less a single justifying traumatic incident) aren’t the only thing that can influence a characters temperament, yesol is an example of that

oh yes thanks for touching on other characters from the author's works because I forgot to! I also don't see an issue when messed up characters don't get an explanation, like that's just how they are, but Yesol's case is super satisfying and fun to follow because It's so complex and layered !!

Hmm I think when a character has csa or abduction you can practice a little bit of theory of mind and realize those are not the characters I'm talking about. I'm talking about a reporter who made some really shitty choices before having trauma, tho yeah his self flagellation and guilt after makes a lot of sense. I'm talking about people who commit murder and drag their friends (toxic behavior and toxic friendships that predated the murder and guilt) into a mess.
I'll reply further in a reply to supersaga

Omfg I refreshed and lost my whole reply I can't even...

Ok super quick, not as carefully as I wrote the first version:

1) a tone correction: interesting == good. I like reading about these crazy bastards. I think we've misunderstood my stance. This is the 3rd or 4th Bad pharmacy piece I'm reading.

2) my point is that these are misfits. They have disproportionate reactions to fairly normal pressures. It's important to tell those stories! But I don't think it's appropriate for us as readers to pretend verbally abusive, erratic, physically violent, disruptive behavior is a natural and acceptable outcome of normal pressures someone was dispositionally ill-suited to face. Maybe in middle school, but then we journal or get therapy like everyone else; we don't keep on lashing out interpersonally. Leading into 3

3) my original phrasing was too absolute. They have reasons, but their reasons don't fit their outcomes for an average person. They're not average people. I'm glad we're reading about misfits! That's why it's an interesting theme.

Actually most of this is a reply to oomf more than supersaga, as I look at it.

Ok, sorry I was a bit rude (hostile/condescending) earlier with my "Hmm... Practice a bit of theory of mind..."

It just felt like you were being deliberately uncharitable in reading my comment... but you don't know me, so maybe you genuinely thought that I think that people who are abused and treated as image management for their parents and then abducted and mutilated count as having idyllic youths. It's a difficult reach for me to believe that you believe all that, rationally, about another person, but it's nominally possible.

And even if you were being uncharitable, I should have been polite or just not reacted.

See, Yesol? We can journal and control or if necessary remediate the urge to lash out.

‘practice theory of mind’ on mangago when the average commenter here thinks slop like jinx is peak? im more inclined to believe mangago users err on the side of illiterate, which is why i took your comment (where ALL you said was ‘their fucked up characters’ btw, and it’s not as illogical as you present for me to immediately think of their actual fucked up characters who kill people, than a character like yesol or the reporter, who are just good people who do shitty things in the abnormal circumstances they’re in & also probably have mental illness lolol) at face value - which, even after your (polite) explanation, i still disagree with. i mean i think we agree on that because you literally contradict your original comment in your explanation but i genuinely respect that you seem literate and well spoken so i agree that i took your comment too strongly as an absolute which you evidently didn’t intend :P

okay i mostly agree w everything you say here so let’s just be friends <3 but i just want to say, on your second point, i never said that yesol (or any of bad pharmacy’s characters) react appropriately, naturally, or acceptably to any of their circumstances (like the reporter comes to mind, you’d obviously in his position want to say you wouldn’t want to play a hand in a kid getting kidnapped just because of pressures from work or whatever).
but i also never claimed that, i was trying to explain that these characters act in ways that fit cohesively and consistently with the narrative arc & roles the author sets up for them throughout the story (one of my pet peeves with this genre and storytelling in general is inconsistent characters), and that’s where my contention came from regarding your point abt these characters not having reasons to be fucked up, i thought you meant that they act in inconsistent ways from a narrative standpoint.
sure yesol could get therapy or journal or act relatively sane, but that wouldn’t make this story interesting, so it just seems unnecessary to point out. idk if this makes sense but im too lazy to keep typing lol

Have you ever read Natasha Pulley's Hymn to Dionysus? I have to be honest, the characterization is sometimes uneven, but I enjoyed it nevertheless, and this whole conversation is making me think of it a lot. One of the central themes in that book is how surviving certain pressures makes the survivors unsympathetic to those who can't.

Anyway, yeah it's not the most fucked up characters who inspired my comment, just the nearly-as-fucked up characters who got there by a gentler path. It's still, for me, an interesting theme worth commenting on bc it's a chew toy for my brain. Like the fact that they behave about as crazily for reasons that seem less acceptable license for it... Y'know? Not to put my new critical theory hat on (jk completely be-hatted), but maybe the author's saying, "Yeah, you allow that character to be crazy bc they lived through extraordinary circumstances, but here's a surprisingly equally crazy person whose life is relatively normal. Can you credit that?"

I guess for you & supersaga the journey was simple: yes, they're crazy bc even benign pressures can twist you out of shape. But for me, the journey is more windy. I had to take a stop in "Damn... That's wild... Why u acting like that? Calm..." (whence arises my original comment). Before I make it to "Oh, ok, maybe that's the point. Maybe for ppl like me, I'm supposed to be confronted by my discomfort accepting this personality as equally an outcome of a gentle but still incompatible life as one of extraordinary trauma." I mean I still can't let go of "Cool cool but you still have to live in a society, so like your pain can be real, but now solve it."

And yeah I'm happy to land back on mutual respect. Yay reconciliation

Omg what editing a comment erases all the replies?!?!?;

Oh nvm idk what was happening.

never read it, but that sounds interesting i just added it to my list! (i’m wary tho, because the first sentence on goodreads is ‘for fans of the song of achilles’……………)

but yes, regardless of if my takeaway is different, i love everything you said because i think a lot of people discredit this genre by refusing to engage with it from the critical theory lens much more easily applied to traditional forms of storytelling.

i think this authors favorite dynamic is severely fucked up person x relatively normal but still shitty person, because only a somewhat abnormal person can handle the former. it’s fun to read!! but i understand where you’re coming from on why it can come out of left field if you’re expecting a character like yesol to function in more rational or appropriate ways befitting someone who hasn’t suffered extraordinary trauma. i mean he’s properly horrendous in the first few chapters with how he treats hanrim & other ppl

if you haven’t read master peace i recommend it, i think you would enjoy it, lots of parallel archetypes are present in a very well written way :)

Master peace has a promising opening, ty I'll give it a read!

As for the marketing blurb tying it to Song of Achilles, I pretty strongly disagree bc the plot, themes, message, and characterization are all pretty different. I'd say the only parallel is the setting and borrowed mythos, but some similar content warnings apply. There's some of the ancient Greek pederasty stuff for example, but at least in this novel some characters object to elements of it, which is nice. Honestly, I feel like the people who write marketing blurbs seldom actually read what they're trying to sell （￣へ￣）

What specifically did you dislike in The Song of Achilles? I can advise if you can name particular elements you'd not want to experience again.

You're so right btw bad pharmacy is all in on this particular vintage of freak for freak

I think when I was a baby I wanted everyone to be "perfect" and smooth all their rough edges off, but as I've aged I have grown into that freak for freak superdynamic and all the subdynamics it encompasses