A Trace of You

1.5 stars. This is not completely terrible, but there were so many things that showed me how poorly written this story was.

Sihoo, one of the main characters, suffers from amnesia as a result of a traumatic experience. Because of this, he forgot all the happy memories he had and only remembers the painful ones, leading to him forgetting his boyfriend, Yesung as well. Once Yesung and Sihoo's relationship starts to reignite, a very toxic friend of Sihoo's named Taehyuk constantly comes between them.

What I didn't understand was why the hell Sihoo was so lax with this Taehyuk's toxicity when the toxicity was so painfully obvious. Sihoo's a fully grown adult who knows how to speak his mind, but when Taehyuk did things that were overtly toxic he couldn't say a damn thing? Taehyuk was trash-talking Yesung, deliberately saying triggering things to Sihoo (and we know that Sihoo realized this), hell Taehyuk even goes as far as to force himself on Sihoo, but Sihoo's response to all of this is just letting him get away with it? Wtf? I just couldn't buy it. Sihoo was never established as a character who's a people pleaser or has a hard time saying no, so a character like him who definitely has at least somewhat of a backbone should have been able to deal with Taehyuk. This whole thing just seemed like poor writing on the author's part.

Also, even by the end we never see Taehyuk getting confronted by Sihoo. He didn't get a happy ending, but Sihoo never even acknowledged anything? It was so incredibly unsatisfying.

A lot of the miscommunication and events that push forward the conflicts really drove me up a wall. The reasoning behind why characters do things was often not even explained or was treated with a half-assed reason.

There was also a really contrived miscommunication scene that was not explained to us.

This next complaint might just be me being nitpicky, but there's a scene near the end where a character is really emotional, and all of a sudden we get this close up panel of it raining on them RIGHT when they start crying. It was so on the nose and cliche that I had to take a step back to process that that was an actual authorial choice. At this point, I really am critiquing minor things, but with everything accumulated my distaste for the story just increased even more.

I personally wouldn't recommend this story because I found it trite and unpolished, but I realise that some people might not be as critical as I am and therefore still enjoy it. If the premise interest you, then do check it out for yourself; it's only 20 something episodes.

You can read this manhwa on Tapas