A Shoulder To Cry On
A Shoulder To Cry On
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Average rating4
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This is a very realistic, believable first love story with a melancholy tone present throughout. The stand out aspect here was definitely the really well-written characters and their development.
What I found fascinating was that the readers' emotions consistently reflected Dayeol's (main character's) emotions regarding Taehyun (love interest). When I saw Dayeol's initial hatred for Taehyun, I felt the exact same way. Whenever he was worried for Taehyun, I felt the exact same way. Whenever he realized that his hatred for Taehyun was subsiding, I had the exact same realization in myself, because my hatred for Taehyun was also subsiding. The author was really good at making the readers' emotions in tune with the main character's emotions.
The character development was also executed in a very sophisticated way. There weren't any contrived misunderstandings interspersed for the sake of adding drama; the story felt very real and the misunderstandings never overstayed their welcome and made complete sense whenever they were present. The ending—while it was definitely happy—wasn't this perfectly manufactured happy ending that's so common with love stories. While I definitely don't mind those endings, here the characters weren't forced into a picture-perfect ending, but rather a very happy ending that still maintains the sense of realism present throughout the story (for the sake of avoiding spoilers, I'm keeping this vague).
There was a comedic relief aspect in this story that I really loved. Every once in a while the author included these really hilarious panels—they weren't chibis per say, but rather were intentionally low-quality images used for panels during scenes where characters were in awkward or amusing situations. It would have been really easy to throw off the melancholic, somber tone of the story by doing this, but the author managed to incorporate these panels at just the right moments, which allowed for them to never feel jarring. Instead, the carefully placed comedic relief was a really refreshing welcome whenever they did appear.
My experience reading this was almost entirely positive, however, sometimes I think the internal monologues went on for too long and/or were used too frequently. They were definitely necessary a lot of the time, but there were instances where the storytelling being done through the characters' internal monologues could have been shown to us, rather than directly told. Also, there was this one instance where Dayeol said in his internal monologue “...I never hated him...Nor could I ever hate him [referrring to Taehyun].” This line seemed very forced because to say that he could have “never hated” Taehyun was simply a lie. He did in fact hate Taehyun very clearly (and understandably so) in the beginning. This line was probably used for emotion-evoking purposes, but it came off as unpolished and briefly made Dayeol's characterization appear inconsistent.
Other than these two minor gripes, I overall really enjoyed this story. I think character-driven readers like myself would enjoy this the most, as well as readers who are looking for a shounen-ai BL story that isn't slow-paced.
You can read this manhwa on Lezhin. Please support the author by purchasing the episodes from an official website or platform such as this one :)