Let Dai

I was very unsure about Let Dai, but the cover art was so incredibly gorgeous that I was intrigued despite the warnings of how dark and violent it was. A good friend allowed me to borrow volumes 1-3, so that I could see what I was getting into before I actually paid money for it, and am I ever glad she did.

It turns out that the art is gorgeous -- if I could plaster this stuff all over my walls, I'd do it in a heartbeat. However, that's really all the title has going for it. The darkness and violence... didn't at all seem dark and violent to me. In fact, it was the campiness of the whole thing that really put me off. I found myself wanting it to be a bit more dark, just so I could start to take it seriously. Dai is not evil. He's not even sadistic. He's just a rich kid, playing at being a gang leader/bully. There is no rhyme or reason to anything he does, other than that he wants to do it. The growing, if twisted, relationship between him and Jaehee is something I could have been interested in, but there is so little focus on them, together, that it wasn't worth the bother of slogging through pages and pages of supporting characters who seem to have been thrown in because they looked cute with braids. Even characters who should have evoked nothing but sympathy reacted in such a rote way that I couldn't dig up any feeling for them at all.

I read all the reviews I've seen of this manhwa, and wonder if, perhaps, I got some Let Dai knock off, cuz I would really like to read the title everyone else is describing.