College Student Turns in Dirty Diary to TA
About:
Warning:
There will be spoilers for the manhwa series Blotted Pages.
Content Warning: There may be references to BDSM (including breath play), overwork, being outed, excessive drinking, plagiarism, blood, obsession, strained familial relationships, invasion of privacy, voyeurism, violence, self-deprecation, suicidal ideation, power imbalance, dubcon, somnophilia, mentions of abuse, gossiping, depictions of murder, strangulation, and manipulation, as they do appear in the manhwa.
Synopsis:
Do-ahn is an overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated teacher’s assistant for a college professor in the English department. All of the students constantly praise the professor’s feedback, not realizing Do-ahn is the one who reads their work and writes that feedback. It’s frustrating, but Do-ahn is compelled to keep up all the hard work. He’s in the middle of another assignment from the professor when a student comes to drop off his work. The student is Soowon, a quiet and shy person who seems to have trouble fitting in.
Or at least, that’s how Do-ahn perceives Soowon. But upon looking through the assignment, Do-ahn finds what’s supposed to be a piece of fiction appears to be a diary of sorts. And it has all manner of sexual escapades featuring Soowon and another man in the department. This is not who Do-ahn imagined Soowon is. But Do-ahn desperately wants to know who this Soowon is.
Review:
What initially drew me into this title was the cover art. It’s very interesting looking, and I had to see what it was like within the work itself. Now, while some of the faces are very nice to see, admittedly, this work is smudgy and ugly 99% of the time. The anatomy is all over the place, and there is something painfully horrific about the hands. They are long, spidery, and look completely out of place in these character designs. It oddly looks like a bunch of different styles were all cobbled together. The heads are from one, the body from another, and the hands are a whole other beast. It’s also in all black and white, which really makes it feel like a nightmarish horror story. That sort of fits the narrative, but barely so. Overall, I hate the style.
Moving on to the story, though it isn’t voyeurism in the traditional sense, this story very much leverages voyeurism. Much of the story’s background and setup is a frame, with Do-ahn reading and experiencing the painful and toxic relationship between Soowon and Sung-on through Soowon’s narrative submission. It heavily blurs the lines between reality and fiction, especially since Do-ahn reads it as if it is a novel, though, in reality, it’s a diary with two people he knows very well. Over time, he comes to realize just how real all of it is, and the depravity of his actions while reading it stuns even him. He recognizes what he is feeling is wrong, but the eroticism and emotion in the writing draws him in to the point that he can’t deny his wants. It’s voyeurism in a far more removed way, but it has the same level of perversion as your standard voyeurism.
It’s dark and disgusting, but in the best way, and it really sets the tone for the entire work as one of obsession. Soowon is obsessed with Sung-on, and through his own retelling of his obsession, Soowon ends up becoming the focus of Do-ahn’s obsession. It almost has a horror vibe to it, like this obsession is something contagious, and it has a weird meta element to it since the core of it is Do-ahn reading an erotic retelling of someone’s experiences, eventually lusting over it himself, which is not unlike us as we read explicit manhwa like this. I don’t at all believe that is what was intended, but its tone definitely made me question how different I was from Do-ahn. It gave me spooky vibes like I was being openly judged, and I loved it.
It very much reminds me of Hotaru Dies Tomorrow, but the book character Do-ahn falls in love with is the version Soowon depicted of himself in his work. There is a moment where Do-ahn compares the book version of Soowon to the real one in front of him, showing how differently Soowon perceives himself in his writing. He also compares himself to Sung-on, even going so far as to revel in the moment when, during sex, Soowon calls Do-ahn Sung-on. This shows just how powerful his obsession is. Being called by the name of someone Soowon wrote with such love and obsession makes him feel loved and obsessed over. It puts him in Soowon’s story, the thing he fell in love with, and it shows just how far he has fallen for Soowon.
Results:
The concept of this story is interesting. I’m really into the concept of falling in love with a book character, including one based on a real person, and then having to come to terms with the dissonance between those two people. Perception is a key focus in all of this, and I enjoyed that part of it immensely. But the wildly ugly art style and the super short story make it hard to enjoy this concept. It has a ton of potential, and I really wanted to love this, but I just couldn’t. I think this is ultimately a miss, though it has its strong points.
Have you read Blotted Pages? If so, what do you think? Do you agree with my assessment? Do you not? Let me know, and comment below!