Ginger and the Cursed Prince – Another romance webtoon that goes nowhere (spoilers)

Last time on this blog, we talked about False Confession, a webtoon that spends 45 chapters circling around back to chapter 1. Ginger and the Cursed Prince is another in the same vein of long drawn-out romance series that you spend months reading only to realize that almost nothing has happened.

Summary (from Tappytoon): For hopeless romantic Ginger Torte, getting engaged to the man of her dreams is a fairy tale come true. It isn’t long before she realizes the gut-wrenching truth — her fiancé has been seduced by her rival! The heartbroken Ginger finds solace in a new book that recounts the tale of a young woman and a cursed prince… But to her horror, the protagonist turns out to be none other than her beautiful nemesis, Lerazie!

As reality unfolds according to the book, both ladies fall in love with the handsome prince at first sight. Ginger vows to steal both the spotlight and the prince’s heart! But, does this story harbor a sinister secret?

So far, what is listed in the summary is what is happening in the book… but nothing beyond that! In other words, you could read the summary and stop there, and you wouldn’t have missed anything by not reading Ginger and the Cursed Prince (known in fan translation as “Virtues of the Villainess”).

The handsome prince is cursed to be able to read the minds of anyone whose eyes he looks into. The story revolves around Ginger discovering that Lerazie has a special necklace that can block the prince’s abilities. Then it’s all about Ginger scheming to get the necklace, trying to get close to the prince, amusing him with her silly/perverted thoughts when she thinks he can’t read her mind, and round and round they go.

In 44 chapters, Ginger has failed to get the necklace twice, had way too many “he can’t read my mind” scenes and bantering skits with the prince and strongly considered date raping him with very strong wine. She is not a bright character – in fact, she is extremely stupid. Her ineptness at hiding her feelings, scheming effectively or doing anything correctly might endear her to readers… or make her the stupidest, most annoying heroine you have ever read about. To me, she’s meh. An idiot, but not a lovable one.

The other characters are not as bad, but they’re not very charming or worth following either. The Prince/King has far too much leisure time to be believable. He’s also too quick to fall for a drooling fool like Ginger when there have to be better choices available. Let’s face it, Ginger would make a horrible queen. It’s hard to root for the romance between an idle prince and an IQ-challenged love interest, so it’s hard to root for the whole series.

If we had to summarize whatever progress had occurred since the start of Ginger and the Cursed Prince, it would be that first the prince barely knew Ginger existed, now he’s somewhat fond of her. Lerazie didn’t know her necklace had a special effect, then thanks to Ginger’s bungling she does and she’s actively aiming for the prince too.

And the second male lead Hamel claims to love Lerazie, but seemingly confessed to Ginger just now. But it doesn’t matter because the second male lead never ever wins in Korean webtoons. I’ve seen it happen very rarely in one or two long-running Japanese shoujo manga (Peach Girl comes to mind) but in Korean romance? Forget it! So the whole Hamel Bray side plot is a massive waste of time.

Actually I’ll cut it short here and say that the whole of Ginger and the Cursed Prince is a waste of time. Especially in a day and age where Tappytoon and other companies are churning out romance webtoons that are funnier and more focused with more likeable characters. I’m going to put this particular series on the shelf until I hear that it’s complete, then give it one big binge. Hopefully the eventual pay off will be worth the wait, but I’m not holding my breath.

False Confession – Promising series that went nowhere

False Confession (잘못된 고백), now sadly(?) on hiatus, is a romance manhwa that promised much from the start but didn’t go anywhere except hiatus in 45 chapters. I honestly feel like I wasted my time reading the whole of Season 1, but maybe Season 2 will finally have the story/awkward romance we were all expecting when we picked it up.

Summary (from the Tappytoon official site)
“I think I’ve fallen for you.” With a single drunken confession, Renesha’s plans to live a comfortable and uneventful life were shattered. Somehow she confessed her love to the wrong man: the Grim Reaper of the Battlefield, Duke Cavert Willard! It’s the worst thing to happen to her since she woke up in this fantasy universe and discovered her divine powers.

In the midst of a war with a neighboring country, Renesha must balance her duties as a healer with her feelings for two alluring knights. When romance blooms on the battlefield, who will be victorious in the battle for Renee’s heart?

I don’t dislike this manhwa trope of accidentally confessing to the wrong person, usually a very scary person. It would be horrible and awkward in real life, but that’s what fiction is for, right? And it usually makes for a sweet and fluffy romance with a huge gap between the guy/girl’s perceived tough image and actual thoughts and actions. I like it.

BUT! We didn’t get any of that in False Confession. The problem is the way the series is structured. It starts with Renesha falsely confessing to Cavert in chapter one. Then it goes on a veeeery extended flashback covering the next 35-36 chapters, showing how they went to war, Renesha fell in love with another guy, they won the war and then she got drunk and confessed. 

If they had done all that without the “spoiler” of chapter one, then it would be okay to sit through the whole thing and see how she messes up her love life by confessing to the Duke instead of the Prince she had a crush on. But as it is, 35+ chapters are waaaaaay too many to sit through when you just want to see the confession and the aftermath.

You sit through many, many chapters of Renesha squealing in terror because she’s scared of the duke, complaining about the tough march, gushing and blushing over the prince, and it’s all kind of meh because you know where it’s leading. You know they’re going to come back safe from the war, you know she’s going to get with the Duke, so why all the time wasting?

Plus, Renesha is really annoying. She’s acting all scared and cautious around the Duke when he hasn’t done a single thing to hurt her or anyone she knows. He’s been a little rude, but very supportive and even saved her life in battle. But no, he’s somehow the object of sheer terror. I’m not saying she has to fall in love with him because of that, but why is her fear of him played up multiple times in the series when it’s completely unfounded? It’s annoying.

Nevertheless, despite the slow progression and Renee’s paranoia, I still sat through week after week of minor update after minor update. Then finally, finally, we got to see the false confession and the aftermath… uh, not really. Just when it seemed the whole war arc was over and normal life was about to begin again, the series went on hiatus! 8 months ago! Yipes!

Rumor has it that False Confession will resume between January and June 2021, but we’re already halfway into that period with no resumption in sight. Apart from That Girl’s Damn Wild or whatever it was called, most of the romance manhwa I read that went on hiatus did come back eventually. At the same time, an 8-month hiatus is unusually long, so I’m a little worried.

After all, all the negative comments I’ve made are coming from a place of disappointed expectation. The series is pretty promising though it has yet to deliver. I like the art, I really like both of the male leads though I prefer Cavert. Fans may rage about the uselessness of Renesha in battle, but I thought her struggles, paralysis and depression were pretty normal for a teen from a peace-loving country. It’s weird when normal kids from Korea/Japan/China suddenly become master strategists and gods of war in isekai. I was also looking forward to seeing the power struggles and political intrigue that would revolve around Renee’s healing powers and relationships.

So despite the letdown that was season 1 of False Confession, I’m still hopeful for the next season. Let’s hope I won’t have to write another negative post about it when it finally comes out. See you then!

Update: False Confession is back! In Korean raws and in (mediocre) fan translations, at least! As of June 30th, chapters 46 and 47 are out, and it seem the author is determined to destroy any feeling of “Second Lead Syndrome” in the readers. Not that I ever felt any – Cavert all the way! But no spoilers here. Wait for the official translation, catch up and let’s discussion this again at the end of Season 2!

Finished the FSI Cantonese Anki deck (a sort of review)

As I wrote a few posts ago, I’m mostly dropping Cantonese in 2021. However I don’t want to lose my progress entirely over the course of the year, so I’ll still be reviewing my Anki deck cards and Memrise lessons, reading and watching a little Cantonese here and there, that sort of thing. Shortly before Christmas 2020, I finished up the FSI Cantonese Anki deck, so I figured I should say a few words about it here, this being my language blog in addition to anime/manga. However did I make any progress from it? I think I did, but it’s hard to tell because:

  1. I have no objective standard for marking my progress. I didn’t take any tests before, or try to understand something and fail etc. There’s no way to do an effective “Before and After.”
  2. I didn’t use the FSI deck exclusively. I also used a Cantonese vocabulary deck, the Cantonese conversations at OPLingo (fantastic resource, try it for sure), Peppa Pig in Cantonese and a bunch of other resources. After all it took months to complete the FSI deck, so it didn’t make sense to stick to one resource exclusively.
  3. The FSI Cantonese Anki deck is pretty basic. I’ve been studying the language long enough that most of it was old-hat in terms of vocabulary and structure.

So while I do feel I improved a bit in Cantonese listening comprehension and reading comprehension last year, I can’t give the FSI Cantonese deck any solo credit for helping me get better. I will say three things though.

  1. It’s a good resource for reading written Cantonese. I’ve lost track of the number of materials I’ve seen with Mandarin/Standard Chinese subtitles or text. That’s how it’s done on a native level, but it’s not helpful for beginners at all. I mean eventually you’ll have to adapt to listening in one language and reading in another, but in the early stages, a pure Cantonese resource is great.
  2. It’s also a good resource for understanding Cantonese spoken at close to regular speed. There’s a good mix of both men and women chatting about a variety of everyday topics without making the dialogues feel excessively “manufactured.” Though the conversations never really “go” anywhere. They’re just snippets, so if you want full conversations, check the OPLingo site I linked earlier.
  3. There still aren’t many Cantonese materials aimed at the intermediate-to-advanced learner. And especially not those that include both audio and an accurate text transcript. And doubly-especially not free and still available. So there’s no reason not to use this deck if you can find it.

Here is the Anki link. As I often say for Cantonese, you don’t exactly have a lot of options, so you might as well take what you can get.

In contrast, I just picked up a couple of good Korean decks because I’ve almost exhausted all of Evita’s decks and finished the Hanja deck as well. I’ve had so little to review lately that I’ve been doing more and more of the Spoonfed Chinese deck I said I was putting on hold. But that changes today. Back to learning more Korean so I can read promising series like “The Emperor Reverses Time” and “The Villainess is a Marionette” without having to deal with scanlation drama. See ya!

 

Sweet Wife in My Arms (Chinese webnovel) – Gave up at chapter 270 (spoilers)

I don’t remember when it was, but I know I promised myself not to start any webnovel with a ridiculous number of chapters. I told myself I would always check first and not start something that was bound to get tedious and stupid. But time passes, people grow old, we forget our promises and then… we end up reading long-winded dreck like Sweet Wife in My Arms.

Summary: For his sake, she was willing to abandon her career as the best actress and be his wife. With her own network, money and unscrupulous methods, she helped him rise to the top of the world. He, on the other hand, held another woman in his embrace and kicked her away with no mercy. It turned out that all he ever wanted was her rare blood type, her six-month-old child’s cord blood. It was her life…

When she opened her eyes again, she returned to her 20-year-old self. Time repeated and her life rewound. In this life, she would live well. [source: Webnovel]

Now, to be absolutely fair to Sweet Wife in My Arms, the first 250 chapters are a decent and enjoyable read. The female lead Yan Huan is definitely a Mary Sue with perfect acting skills, the most beautiful face ever, amazing wire-fu skills, etc. but that is normal for this kind of series and she’s not obnoxious about it. And unlike many trashy series of this sort, she does not fall back in love with the guy who killed her because it was all a big misunderstanding or something.

In the same way, the male lead Lu Yi is your general icy cold super powerful guy who doesn’t like women at all but somehow there’s something special about the heroine… etc etc. You know the drill if you’ve read even one Chinese romance web novel. Lu Yi is miles and away better than most other CEO/Prince MLs. He’s not rapey, not physically or mentally abusive, not over-the-top protective and doesn’t try to force his way into her life. If anything, she’s the one who starts clinging to him even when he has a girlfriend.

Furthermore, the plot isn’t bad. It has the generic “super talented actress” gimmick  romance web novels use when they’re not using “super talented doctor” instead. I like this gimmick better because we get to read about the various cheesy, campy movies and series. Yan Huan takes part in. Which the audience laps up, but they sound sooooo bad. Like this one called “Divorced” about a woman whose husband cheats so she finds another man who doesn’t cheat, happily ever after, after all a woman can’t be happy without clinging to some rich man, haha… And somehow it grosses 600 million yuan and makes her a millionaire, lol.

But that’s the thing about the series early on – it doesn’t take itself very seriously. Despite Yan Huan’s sad past and Lu Yi’s coldness, it’s not a mopey or depressing story. It has its dramatic moments, frustrating ones, funny ones, cute ones. It’s no masterpiece, but it was interesting enough to pass the time. To slowly see Yan Huan overcoming her unfounded fear of Lu Yi, Lu Yi learning to stand up for himself a little, Lu Yi bonding with her cat Little Bean, Yan Huan winning him over with her food, etc. Very cute stuff.

So where did it go wrong with Sweet Wife in My Arms? Around chapter 265, when Yan Huan did something very stupid. I mean she had done stupid things before like meeting a ‘director’ in an apartment alone, but this was extra stupid. Here she remembered that a mudslide occurred in her past life, and Lu Yi was trapped in it. Instead of telling him about it, she decided she would look crazy if she did. So what she did was… she borrowed his car… and went there… and almost got caught in the same landslide.

In other words, instead of potentially avoiding millions of dollars in damage, injury, lives and work hours lost, she wanted to play “little rescue heroine” by showing up with food. Look, I get it, in a NORMAL situation, she might sound crazy for saying she had a dream or premonition about a mudslide. But Lu Yi is the kind of guy who absolutely can and would investigate the area if she so much as hinted at it. He told her as much, whatever she needs him for, he’s willing to do it. There was no need to risk his life, her life, many other people’s lives, just so she wouldn’t look crazy.

But see, that incident in itself wasn’t the dealbreaker for Sweet Wife in My Arms. The problem is that the mudslide broke my immersion, so to speak. I sat up and thought, “This is really dumb. Do I really want to read much more of this?” And THEN, only then, did I check the chapter count. Aieeee, 707 chapters translated to date. Over 2500 chapters in Chinese!! Two thousand five hundred! 2500!! I was only 10% of the way through and I was already shaking my head.

So at that point, I thought, eh, I can’t do this. Let me just read spoilers and see their happy ending and then I’m done. But the spoilers for Sweet Wife in my Arms are hooorrible. The series is craaaap!

Highlights include:

  • Yan Huan still tangling with Lu Qin, Su Muran and other idiots she dealt with in her past life when a sensible person would move halfway round the world to get away from them,
  • Lu Yi getting amnesia and getting cuddly with another woman,
  • Switched identities, the usual miscarriages, triplets…
  • All kinds of shenanigans revolving around Yan Huan’s extra special blood,
  • Obligatory Yan Huan in a coma scene, and
  • Yan Huan going through not one, not two, not three but FOUR rebirth sagas before getting her happy ending

And that’s just the spoilers from the thread. I’m sure there were even more ups and downs, especially revolving around annoying side characters like the gluttonous, uncaring manager Yi Ling and her inevitable romance with Lu Yi’s best buddy Lei Qingyi. To be honest, if the series was, say, 400-500 chapters long, I would have stuck it out regardless of the stupidity of the mudslide incident. But 2500 of this and more? Nope, I’m out. Time is precious in 2021. Gotta read better web novels before COVID clobbers us all.

TL;DR – Sweet Wife in My Arms has a passable premise and very likeable main characters. However it goes on waaaay too long and involves waaaaay too much drama. Unless you have nothing better to do with your time, I advise you to read shorter, more compact and more sensibly plotted series.

Dropping Cantonese to focus on Korean in 2021

It’s January again! And January has traditionally been the time for setting language-learning targets. And then February-December is the time for ignoring those goals and doing something else entirely!

You probably don’t remember, but in January 2020 I planned to work on both my Cantonese and Korean throughout the year. And indeed I did my best to do what I’d said I would do.

Giving up on Cantonese

For Cantonese, I found several resources for upper-intermediate learners trying to transition to native level texts/videos. The most important and most helpful was OPLingo/Language Tools’ Cantonese Conversations, 100 native-level dialogues with transcripts and audio. They’re not paying me for this endorsement, btw. I’m genuinely giving my thoughts on a bright oasis amidst a desert of useful Cantonese learner resources. I worked my way through several of those dialogues, and if time permits I’ll give a more detailed review another time.

I also watched the usual “Peppa Pig in Cantonese” as well as other Youtube resources like “Cantonese with Brittany” and “100 Cantonese dialogues.” But after all that, I still don’t feel like I’ve gotten much better at Cantonese.

To be honest, my immersion is just too low right now. I barely watched any Cantonese movies or dramas last year, I rarely listen to RTHK these days, and the little Chinese manhua I did read raw was all in Mandarin. Furthermore, I don’t anticipate this situation changing much this year – I don’t plan to watch much in Cantonese, plus anything I do want to watch will probably be subtitled, so why should I push myself so hard to learn the original language?

That’s the problem, really. I’ve lost sight of my original motivation to learn Cantonese. Or rather I still remember it, but it’s not enough to sustain me any more. Originally I loved the sound of the language and the free-spirited culture of Hong Kong, so I just wanted to learn to speak it myself. That kind of loose motivation just isn’t enough to push me through the tough hurdles to true fluency.

Not to mention Hong Kong itself is on the decline… growing numbers of people speak Mandarin as a first language in Hong Kong, and the “free-spirited culture” is being rapidly destroyed by the Chinese Communist Party… but we can save that topic for another day.

Contrast all this with my Korean progress

By the end of December 2020, I’d become capable of reading Korean manhwa in the raw. With copious lookups in Naver dictionary, of course (I’ll explain the actual process of reading a Korean manhwa with the Naver Dictionary app in a future post). But I still enjoyed reading the raws of My Husband’s Reversal and What it Takes to be a Villainess and then comparing them to the official translated version when they come out.

I’m really happy to discover that most of the time, there are few differences between what I think a manhwa said and what it actually said. That means I’m understanding most of what I read! It’s still a struggle because I forget vocabulary between chapters (I need to use an SRS) but it’s very rewarding.

Plus I’m currently working through Billy Go’s Korean Reading Made Simple and finding that I understand 80-90% of each text even before I read the explanations and translations provided. That’s a text aimed at intermediate learners, so I can proudly declare myself to be an Intermediate Korean Learner!! Yay! Of course I’m only halfway through the book, but I’m already feeling pretty good about myself.

I’ll be honest with you guys though: knowing Japanese and Cantonese really helps with Korean! Especially if you use hanja to help you learn vocabulary! I feel like I’ve said it before somewhere but I’ll repeat it: if you have a Japanese/Chinese background and are contemplating learning Korean, go for it! It’ll be much easier than you think!

Summary

The TL;DR is that Cantonese has gotten hard and unrewarding while Korean is still easy and very rewarding. Human Behavior 101 demands that I focus on the activity that is giving me the most dividends at this point in time.

My goal for Cantonese, therefore, is to shelve it, focus on Korean, then pick it up again in 2022 if I miss it. That said, I’m not 100% dropping it. I’d lose too much hard-earned proficiency that way. So I plan to watch at least one Cantonese movie/drama episode a month. And to read through at least one of the Cantonese Conversation dialogues a week. And of course I still love Cantonese pop music so I’ll keep listening to my collection. Apart from that, I won’t push myself.

For Korean, my goal remains unchanged. I want to read manhwa comfortably in the raw! Official translation companies like Tappytoon have gotten really good at releasing accurate, high-quality chapters in a timely fashion, no complaints there. BUUUUT in most cases they’re still behind the raws, and I’m greedy and don’t want to wait.

“She was sent by god” has been stalled at chapter 9 for almost 6 months!

Besides, raw manhwa is just the first step in my ambitions to read Korean romance web novels in the raw! There are sooooo many out there that have just started being translated. There’s like 3 chapters here, 7 chapters there, 5 chapters of this other one. So frustrating!! And it’s not like there’s a regular schedule for most of these translations either. Groups just grab titles to keep them away from other groups, then hoard them for ages with scanty releases.

Plus sometimes, to be honest, the translations are completely crap. Sorry, it’s the truth. Even without access to the raws, the quality of the “English” and the nonsensical text alone tells you that it’s bad. Some of it is barely cleaned-up machine translation, and for some reason, Korean MTL is even worse than Japanese and Mandarin MTL. It’s nigh unreadable.

Sooo… for this year I’m going to focus on the manhwa and leave the novels alone. I want to get the point where I refer to a dictionary sparingly or not at all when reading basic romance manhwa of the sort I indulge myself in lately. I’m already close to that point, just need a lot more vocabulary and a little more grammar. We’ll review the situation again in January 2022 and take it from there, God willing. See you then!