Adult series/ spoilers.
Reddit is an interesting place. By that I mean I find some of the oddest stories to read there. Sticking with the Manhwa trend Sweet But Psycho was mentioned as a boring, whimsical romance that heavily played on the NTR tag, to put it nicely. A tag usually adjoined with sexual assault and humiliation that is very popular, even to the distaste of the vanilla enthusiast. Even though I don’t mind NTR stories it wasn’t that, that pulled me to this series, it was more the psycho part.
And on that note, the story flopped.
Sweet but Psycho following college architect major Yoomin who has had a long-lasting crush on Seula, one of the hottest girls in school. This love affair is derailed by a childhood friend of Yoomin, Sanga, who suddenly makes a move getting attendance to the same university with one goal in mind, make Yoomin hers.
It’s also important to note Sanga is hulk smash strong and it is the funniest shit I have ever read.
The story, as a true romance drama is truly awful. The characters suck, everyone is just raping everyone else. The single true couple breaks up early on even though they don’t want to? There is a ghost teacher who kidnaps students and a sex trafficking ring. A lot is going on and none of it is good or remotely interesting. But somehow, in all of that mess, a self-aware comic tone comes to the surface, something I didn’t see coming but nonetheless found myself cracking up at in the later chapters. It is within this humor the brilliance of this series shines but not in a good way.
I am going to go ahead and state I will be spoiling parts of this series because it’s not worth your time in reading.
This is going to be rather short and to the point of why this series isn’t good but for some reason became very funny to me very quickly. Though the world itself is cringe, edgy, and full of rape. Like, so much rape. It tries to paint this story where you as a reader, I don’t know, kinda fucking hate everyone. Even Sanga who is without a doubt the most adorable character at the start, quite literally just beats the shit out of anyone in her way.
So within this story, we have a side-off couple who like to have risky encounters that leads them to break up, but not really. We have a group of 4 guys who kidnap and make women co-dependent on drugs in a sex trafficking ring. We have the main couple Yoomin and Seula, kinda, Seula is kinda fast, and loose who she is with at any given time. Then we have Sanga who tries everything in her power to have Yoomin love her.
She then gets rejected, goes to some other town, becomes a vigilante that wears a costume, yeah man I don’t know stuff gets weird. I should also mention Yoomin’s best bud/ roommate Joonki who is also in this whole sex ring thing and coarse women to do things on film only to blackmail them with it. A real stand-up guy that one.
The story is shit what they do is shit, it is full of morally insufferable things, until, it isn’t. Sweet but Psycho does this strange narrative shift halfway through the 104 some odd chapters. Sanga breaks up the sex ring by beating the crap out of most of the guys leading them to stray from their drug peddling ways to just help her. Yeah, the most disgusting characters in this story do a comically self-aware 180 and we just don’t talk about it.
Also in the event of her breaking it up, she frees one of the kidnapped female students and girlfriend of one of her classmates. Oddly enough we never see her again?
The story starts to really make fun of itself around this time. Throwing in random manga references, throwbacks to earlier, silly moments, and just straight up opening the later chapters with people we as the reader have no clue who they are or why we should care.
It actually does that, a lot, considering how odd and stupid it is, really adding to the off-the-wall fever dream the story devolves into. A massive 104 chapter waste of time that’s only saving grace was its ability to at some level understand it was complete shit, undo all the characters making them nothing more than mere comedic plot points.
I’m not sure why stories like this surprise me. I assume it is mostly due to my desire to have a coherent story or at least some sort of path leading forward, something this story had, for like 20 chapters only to jump ship from that train wreck directly onto another.
All and all there was a lot to unpack with this story and none of it was good. It did everything in it’s power to be as over the top as possible, decided to go against all of that, turn into a comedy ending as a giant mess that cracked me up for all the wrong reasons. This was a one-off series I will be reading like this, honestly, I found it on Reddit, everyone trashing on it, and that was enough for me. I will be getting back to more content creation soon, I have been rather busy with some personal things but I am looking forward to the Fall anime line up so there is that.
Thanks for the read!
Otaku Post 