#whale star: the gyeongseong mermaid

[fairytale-poll]

ROUND 3C, MATCH 2 OUT OF 2!

Propaganda Under the Cut:

Su-a-Heo:

Whale Star: The Gyeongseong Mermaid is set in Joseon (Korea) during the Japanese occupation. Su-a is very sweet and determined. She becomes mute due to having lye poured down her throat to kill her after accidentally overhearing a conversation between the resistance fighters. She eventually joins them, having witnessed firsthand the impact of the Japanese colonization. Even though she's in over her head at first she proves to be reliable and effective despite not knowing how to write or read at first.

Bug:

Their a bug that falls in love with a human they rescue and becomes human, but even when they don't get to keep their human body, they still get to be with their love. It's a sci-fi fairytale musical.

Little Mermaid meets Starship Troopers musical starring awesome puppets and the most trans coded main character ever. Please. Please vote Bug Starship I love him. Go watch Kick it Up a Notch from Starship. Go watch Status Quo from Starship. You will understand.

He's a bug and he lives in space on a bug planet but he really wants to be a starship ranger which you can only be if you are a human and then one day a spaceship lands on his planet and so he goes to an evil bug called Pincer who then helps him become a human. And Bug falls in love with a human on the spaceship and it's very sweet. The musical and storyline are based on the little mermaid story, the creators themselves called it "the little mermaid but in space". Bug wanting to be a human/a starship ranger and achieving that and falling in love with a human is very much like the little mermaid

Starship is a musical that can only be described as The Little Mermaid meets Starship Troopers. It follows Bug, an alien bug who dreams of being a Starship Ranger, a galactic explorer/soldier, but the rigid confines of bug society keeps him trapped in a job he hates. He reaches a Starship Ranger named February from the hive and immediately falls in love with her. In order to be with her and pursue his dream, he makes a deal with a giant scorpion named Pincer who through sci-fi bs gives him a human body. Near the end of the second act he sacrifices his human body and returns to his bug body, and saves the day and wins February's heart. It's truly the ultimate Little Mermaid. He has multiple songs, and his bug body is portrayed by a puppet!! Vote for Bug!!

“It's a big, big, universe So many dimensions And unanswered questions Not to mention Life What an invention Life There's no choice involved in what you are given One mind, one voice, one body to live in It's a short, small thing we lead With so much potential Pointless or essential Which one can I be? Where do I fit? Where do I stand? Who are they to say what I am? And how can I stay inside this awful world I know? I need a way out I need an escape I'd rather be dead than to live in this place I wish that something or someone could just take it all away Someone take me away” dear god….. can anybody hear me…. (song from starship)

They are the purest little mermaid adaptation done in the most unuque way. An alien insect gets turned into a human, a race he has always loved and admired, to be with the woman he fell in love with. Also just a great musical.

Bug's whole arc is so so in tune with that of the little mermaid. He is an alien who has fallen in love with humanity through a crashed spaceship and trades his place in the hive for a chance to be with both with the human he's falling for and to be a Starship Ranger. He body swaps with human in a cryogenic pod! It's literally sci-fi Little Mermaid!

[mymemoirs]

"Just as you searched for Uihyeon this whole time, I also searched for you. I hope you were alive. So live, Su-A Heo"

- Haesu to Su-A in Chapter 95 of Whale Star: The Gyeongseong Mermaid

I remembered reading the author's interview on the writing process of Whale Star (unfortunately I don't remember which website I read it from), I think she wrote powerful dialogues and monologues which she really give some thoughts to. She really tried to think what kind of conversation or thoughts would the characters have and the context in it.

In this case, this dialogue happened after Su-A was shot by the Japanese soldier and reuniting with Haesu and Uihyeon. Although the word "love" or "like" wasn't mentioned, what Haesu implies at that time feels like a confession especially when it's the first time they meet again when Su-A departs without him to find Uihyeon. It also shows how he came to care for Su-A, the girl he tried to poison in the past.

At some point in the story, I wanted to cheer for him and hope that he will one day be able to live happily.

-Reina

[mouseunnie]

just read this panel from episode 71 of Whale Star and was struck not just by the poignant writing but by how relevant it feels in light of current events. Really rips your heart out and exposes it.

[webtoon-related-tournaments]

Jinhui is a high schooler fighting with a sword against zombies of all kinds in a time loop she is unaware of. This is not made any easier by the fact she cannot see with one of her eyes. Su-A was but a teen, too, when she was poisoned with lye after spying on Joseon anti-japanese rebels, and survived by a thread but lost her ability to speak forever. Su-A then set on a journey of forgiveness, resilience, healing and blowing japanese stuff up in a historical webtoon partially inspired by the Little Mermaid.

Like with Christine, I'm allowing myself (oh, thank you! you're welcome!) to make some propaganda here because Surviving Romance is quite popular among the following of this blog, but Su-A is just the best, both representation-wise and for her whole webtoon! Adapting to her disability, learning to read and write and sign, finding a job, finding friends, learning to shoot a gun, learning to forgive people who hurt her, learning to forgive herself for putting people in danger unknowingly... and again, blowing stuff up as part of the underground resistance against the japanese occupation.

[squidlles]

Manhwa I read in 2022

I have become the heroes' rival - chapters:70 status: ongoing

A business proposal/the office blind date - chapters: 124 status: completed

Marriage of convenience - chapters: 68 status:ongoing

The whale star - chapters: 102 status: completed

Ps: All of the above have romance and the first 3 also have comedy.

[lithi]

HIMMMM OH MY GODD

[friendrat]

I finished Whale Star. Man... I knew that it was a little mermaid retelling, and it wasn't gonna be a happy ending, but it was still so sad to reach the end and see it happen. I am really impressed with how the author pulled off a historical fiction fairy tale retelling, and especially how it translated at the end. I was really curious how the mermaid sacrificing herself for the prince would play out, and it did not disappoint.

I don't like historical fiction generally, but I really enjoyed this one because of the little mermaid parallels. I would be willing to read more historical fiction if it was written as a fairy tale retelling.

[intruding-stranger-universe]

is there anything worse than having no solid fandom for your favorite books/tv show/anime/manhwa 

i am obsessed with Whale Star: The Gyeongseong Mermaid but there is no fancontent and i am mad like what happened to my fav character i want alternate endings and fan theories.

somebody write it. everything is accepted

[ben-talks-art]

Going over tons of Webtoons I like!

I feel like I haven't really talked about webtoons as much as I should even though there are quite a lot of them that I enjoy a lot, so I felt it would be nice to go over some of my favorites, what they're about, why I like them and maybe help others discover something they might like as well.

I won't be talking about Unordinary, Trapped, or Dreaming Freedom since I basically said everything I had to say in their own posts, so if you want to see how I feel about these series just follow the links.

(Also worth noting, when it comes to webtoons I'm usually more of a fan of those that focus on drama, so things like Tower of God or Lookism that focus more on battle, while fun series, aren't really amongst my favorites and are probably not gonna be on my list. I don't really go to webtoons for action, I go for seeing people dealing with personal problems and how they handle them.)

This one is still fairly new but it's already got me very hooked. The premise is about a girl that is going through some money problems that finds out about the world of live-streaming and starts getting too into it.

The main conflict comes from how much of her own life and herself she exposes to the world and how she deals with the public while also trying to think about making enough money to take care of her family.

It can be very depressing but also very informative as it shows how ugly people's online behavior can be and how much they can affect someone's life.

Speaking of depressing, this one is a series of stories about a rotating cast of protagonists who are all dealing with some very heavy personal problems while trying to advance their love lives.

One is trying to deal with the pressure of keeping up appearances at class, another is grieving over the loss of a loved one, another is trying to recover from a past of bullying, and so on... And each one feels real and earned. The way these topics are dealt with feel like how actual people would deal with them.

It doesn't just skip over to a happy ending, it walks you through the entire process of recovery necessary to get to them eventually feeling better, and when they do feel better it's always so very satisfying because you followed through all the hardships they endured.

It's a great series with a very-needed theme of "It gets better, so don't give up!"

I think people are kinda mixed on this one? Some love it, some hate it, mostly it comes down to how they feel about the female lead.

The idea is that this girl is a victim from some sort of bug in the system of the god of love (or something like that, it's really weird...) and now she has a really hard time being romantically loved by others... So in order to fix that, she needs to raise her love score with the male leads or she will die... Also, her boyfriend cheated on her with her sister...

I just realized this sounds like the premise of a generic Otome isekai.

Needlessly convoluted premise aside, this series is actually really fun. The artwork and dialogue makes the female lead come off as really charming, expressive, and likable. Even if you don't care about the major plot with the love god thing (like me!), you still enjoy reading it because you do feel sorry for this girl and want to see her eventually find happiness.

It shows the power of a character's charm. When your character is likable enough, you can forgive how absurd and nonsensical a premise can be.

I thought I was going to hate this series but the more I read it the more I liked it.

The premise is that a broken-up couple goes back in time to when they were young and still together, except one is in the body of the other.

This setup alone is freaking brilliant, so much so I'm shocked I haven't seen it before. You can do so much commentary about perspective, the way women and men are treated differently by society, the things we never think about in a relationship, the way your actions are viewed by others, and so on.

It frustrated me at first because the characters were making some really idiotic choices to the point it made me question what was this author doing, but as I kept reading, all of their choices get addressed. They either explain why they did what they did or recognize that they made a mistake and apologize for it, and I loooooove when series do that! If I see a problem in the story, why can't the characters see it too? Well, here they do, and it feels great every time they do!

This one is the same as Operation True Love. I like how charming and expressive everyone here is, and I also like seeing these interpretations of Greek mythos.

I also really like the female lead, Persephone. I guess many people seem to dislike her but she never bothered me personally. I find her conflicts very interesting and how she deals with them is also interesting, mostly things like dealing with her trauma, the pressure from her mother, and the constant bureaucracy of the gods she needs to endure to get what she wants. She's not perfect, but I don't think she's meant to be.

The one thing I don't like is that since this is based on Greek mythos we have to go over all the stuff about the mythos we don't like but have to live with. For example, Zeus is here, and he is very unlikeable, but because he's Zeus from the mythos you know he's never gonna face any real consequences for being the huge jerk he is and we just gotta deal with it.

There are a couple things like this here and there where because it was in the mythos it has to be here and it gets a little frustrating sometimes, but not enough to ruin the experience.

Lol... "Fantasy..."

This is one I wanted to bang my head against a wall for forgetting to include when talking about Trapped and Dreaming Freedom. It's another story about a thrillingly toxic co-dependent relationship between a group of messed up people.

The basic idea is that three ladies are in love, but not in love with the one that likes them, which makes this the ideal definition of "love triangle"

What's cool about this is that not one of them likes the other for a particularly healthy reason. There is a good girl that likes a bad girl because she's a bad girl, a bad girl that likes a loner girl because she's a loner, and a loner girl that likes the good girl because she's good.

They each have some sort of obsession with their "loved one" that boils down to "she needs me" or "I need her". It's like watching a Spanish telenovela, you know this is going to turn into a mess, but you can't wait to see it unfold.

(also, one of them is a vampire, but who cares about that...)

This is another one that just has a brilliant premise. The idea is that this is a world of superheroes and this one girl has a crush on this one guy, but she's such a mess about telling her feelings that she somehow ends up becoming a supervillain for him to fight.

It's like if someone took that little segment from Rwby Chibi and made an entire series out of it. This series is so freaking funny and stupid, I just love it.

Yoo's life sucks, that's the premise.

She got ditched by her mother, separated from her sister, is forced to take care of her dad alone, struggles with making friends, gets bullied, barely makes any money on her job, people hate her for no reason, and to top it all, she gets stuck in the middle of a rich family's drama that keeps trying to exploit her personal problems to their advantage.

This is one of those "Author, please leave the character alone!!" types of stories where you just keep enduring it because you like these people so much that you just want to reach the end where they'll finally be happy and free from all this misery.

Another case of where a character being charming and likable is enough to make you keep reading because you just want to see something good happening to them because you know they deserve it.

Another case of "Just let them be happy!!"

This is a story about a woman who had to part ways with a family that she was really close with but now suddenly finds herself back into their lives.

I can't say too much about this one because it relies a lot on twists and revelations, but long story short, this is some really good drama.

You ever felt like reading a retelling of The Little Mermaid set during the time when Korea was invaded by Japan? Well, your wish is now fulfilled!

This is a tragic story about a girl that gets tangled with a man she can never have during a period of war and how they struggle to remain close to each other even though everything around them is fighting to keep them apart.

Very sad, but very emotional.

Speaking of sad...

This one is like Sohee0 where its about a girl dealing with the problems of live streaming her entire life for the world to see and slowly becoming too dependent on it.

I'm not a huge fan of thriller, but the themes this one tackles are so interesting that it made me keep reading anyway.

Keep in mind that this one does not have a happy ending.

This is a series I feel is very underrated. It's about a boy that finds out that the girl he is chatting with on his phone is someone from his class, and he decides to use this new knowledge to help out her love life and other personal problems in return for always being nice to him online, even though she doesn't know who he really is.

There is some nice commentary about catfishing, stalking, the power of social media, communication, and entitlement in here.

There is a very powerful scene early on where the main lead confronts a stalker that's trying to claim he's in love with the girl from the chat and thus has the right to interfere in her life, and when the mc calls him out on that, he realizes he's basically doing the same thing. And, again, I love when a story isn't above calling out their lead characters on their mistakes.

Giving a character flaws is okay as long as you address it, and this series addresses tons of interesting flaws on various characters.

Another story about the scary power of social media. This one is about a woman who rejected a guy in a reality show a few days before he died, and a group of people decided to use that to burn her online as if she was the ultimate monster, and the story is all about she bouncing back from that and getting revenge on everyone that did that to her.

I don't even know how to describe this one... It's just good drama.

I was going to say it's about girls facing school problems, but the problems these characters face kinda go over every possible field.

It starts with the main lead feeling like she's the only ugly girl in her group of four friends, but we kinda ditch that premise after a while and just start to focus on any kind of problem a teenager might be going through.

I find the problems they tackle to be interesting and the characters going through them are all likable, and this isn't a case of "let them be happy!" they get to be happy a lot and very frequently. It isn't one problem that goes on through the whole series but a set of rotating small problems that get dealt with one after another in very nice ways.

This one is a similar case of teens dealing with teen drama.

It starts with a boy finding out that the girl he likes is dating his sister (that's one hell of a way to start your series), and eventually becomes about people dealing with their emotions and inner insecurities.

Odd Girl Out was more about people dealing with the problems life throws at us, this is more about problems we throw at ourselves. How sometimes we don't know what we want, why we want it, how to get it, how to deal with it, and what does that say about us.

I'm just gonna repeat what I said before, I like how these problems are explored and I like how charming these characters are.

That's honestly all I ever need, people to care about and cool problems for them to face.

This one is interesting.

It's about a woman who pretends to be married so she can date a guy who is into affairs. It's like a cheater's cheat.

It goes into detail about why someone would want to betray their partner and how society in Japan puts this pressure on people to pursue marriage and building a family as the ultimate source of happiness.

I always love this kind of talk, exploring how much of what you do you do it because people tell you it will be good for you and how much you do it because you really want it.

This is one apparently a lot of people really don't like, and ironically, it's one of my favorites.

"Get Schooled" is a series that seems to start on the premise of "what if the teachers were allowed to beat up the bullies?" but once you keep reading it you see that it goes a little deeper than that.

The message I personally got from this one was "what if we had the means to actually answer back to those who do wrong?"

The thing about people who commit crimes is that we never have either the time, the means, or the exact words to address all that is wrong with their actions, we're just not always prepared for it. So in this story they just make a character that is always prepared.

Every bully in this series usually works with the mentality of "why can't I just do what's best for me?" and when the main lead appears and confronts them, he makes them realize that in a world where people only think about themselves, the moment someone stronger than you shows up, if they don't need you, you're screwed, that's why it's important to learn how to accept everyone, regardless of whether they're weak or strong.

It shows the futility of "might makes right" by showing that might can turn against you at any point, and thus it's better to create a society of "right makes right."

The conversations these characters have about morality are very interesting and give a lot to think about.

There is one arc is where they go to a daycare and find a teacher that's trying to control how kids should think, but the moment they start questioning their logic everything the teacher taught them starts to no longer make any sense and throws the class into chaos.

The kids were being taught what to think, but not the why, and once they realize they skipped this vital step, their lessons no longer held any meaning.

There is a lot of that, a lot of having bullies and oppressors facing the flaws in their own logic and addressing why it doesn't work, and it feels very satisfying each time.

Also has bullies getting beat up a lot, which also feels good.

(Edit, these were all feelings I had before learning about the recent events regarding Get Schooled 😓 I'm deeply sorry for having promoted a series that carried so much ill will inside of it)

==========

That's it for now, hope you can find something new you can enjoy!

And with that, now I wait for webtoon to officially translate the other Naver series that are still only available in Korean that I really want to read more of.

[kwiiimchiii]

"How much do you think I can love you?" 🐋💫

An alternate reality where Soo A and Eui Hyeon are living their lives happily. 😌

[fairytale-poll]

ROUND 1C, MATCH 6 OUT OF 8!

Propaganda Under the Cut:

Silver:

[No Propaganda Submitted]

Su-a-Heo:

Whale Star: The Gyeongseong Mermaid is set in Joseon (Korea) during the Japanese occupation. Su-a is very sweet and determined. She becomes mute due to having lye poured down her throat to kill her after accidentally overhearing a conversation between the resistance fighters. She eventually joins them, having witnessed firsthand the impact of the Japanese colonization. Even though she's in over her head at first she proves to be reliable and effective despite not knowing how to write or read at first.

[the-reincarnated-princess]

Whale Star: The Gyeongseong Mermaid is among the series that have 9 free daily pass chapters for a few days, so... go read it!

[leseigneurdufeu]

Webtoon ask

Top 3 stories, hot take of your choice + fav Canon ship, fav disabled rep

Wow that's a lot lol. OK let's do it one by one.

Top 3 stories? Probably Whale Star: The Gyeongseong Mermaid (currently wrapped up), Spaceboy (currently on hiatus), and Subzero. Since two are not releasing rn I'll add two others because I'm a dirty cheater: UnOrdinary and Stagtown.

Hot take of my choice? Some of the top romance series suck. Lore Olympus is a whole can of worm of it's own, but among other things the age gap is mentionned as creepy in-universe then never mentionned again, one of the main characters slept with a woman then with two of her daughters and it's treated as a joke, it's hailed as a feminist retelling but many characters got sexually assaulted and it's either played off as a joke (if not the main character) or the worst thing ever and then never spoken about again (for the main character), etc etc. Perfect marriage revenge is just about the same guy repeatedly coming to the rescue of the FL like she can't deal with a situation alone he has to baby her. Let's not even count all those starting with a girl waking up in a guy's bed with no memory of the night before and forced to marry him (first night with the duke, his majesty's proposal, the newlywed diaries of the witch and the dragon...)... I mean yeah there are tropes and then there are just sucky situations. See a healthy yet very interesting kind of couple in the next answer.

Fav Canon ship is Clove x Kyro from Subzero. Like... they must be the only actual functional couple on the app. They have a heavy common past (murders and war not just anything) and they COMMUNICATE about it! Though tbh all the couples in Subzero are actually both healthy and entertaining.

Fav disabled rep I'll go with Su-A from Whale Star, although Bridget from Nonesuch and Amy from Spaceboy are close.

[webtoon-related-tournaments]

Who's Su-a?

adskhjfgfhdjghkg she's THE best character ever from the best webtoon ever. When she was a kid she was sold into servitude to repay her parents' debts and she works as a servant for an upper-class girl. Then Japan invades Corea and things get a tad complicated but basically she saves a rebel from drowning, is thought to be a threat by another rebel who poisons her, damaging her vocal chords so badly she becomes a mute, and then her only friend commits suicide and she goes into hiding because she's now a researched criminal because she helped that first rebel, and... well the story is a bit complicated but she's the best ever.

Who's Julia?

girl dies and comes back wrong. despite being a part of the undead circus and struggling with a murder plot, her biggest issue with the circus is that the government doesn't approve of it

[cannondisabledcharacters]

Today’s disabled character of the day is Su-ah Heo from Whale Star: The Gyeongseong Mermaid, who has aphonia, an unspecified trauma disorder, and suffered a traumatic injury

Requested by Anon

[Image Description: Drawing of a young woman with black hair in a braid, dark blue eyes, and freckles. She's wearing a blue hanbok with a white apron. She's holding a wooden bucket full of water.]

[lithi]

HAESUU