or best known as He is That Guy. another BL novel experience of mine soo fair warning; this contain spoilers!
tags; video games, light angst, comedy, slice of life, age gap, romance, adult, nsfw (side stories).
chapters: main story (133 chapters), side story (10 chapters), 5 volumes.
completely translated, where to read:
https://www.novelupdates.com/series/he-is-that-guy/MC: Jihan, handsome + a real gentleman and very likeable irl. people want my boy left and right and he’s an easygoing person. good in games, very mature btw and i honestly love his character a lot! in their relationship, the writer balances it out well with their characteristics so honestly both are likeable but yoo chae.. is a headache lol.
ML: “yoo chae”, very good looking but his character is honestly stressing me the fuck out. he’s…..a lot lol. but it’s not “a lot” as in the very depressing kind of a character, it’s just that it seems like his frontal lobe was not fully developed much (and that’s why i said it’s jihan who’s really matured between them, age wise age wise). honestly he’s not a good character much as his main focus was just jihan throughout the whole novel so nothing about him is easygoing or social with other people, he’s good at games tho and he’s a pro player irl. but he’s like a fake extrovert as he’s actually didn’t like people much and somewhat timid. i started to questioned his real characteristics after they finally meet irl and got close.
for summary, this is another video game novel that started off as “enemies” to “lovers” and it (might) can rival TGMND (The Guild Member Next Door). but imo TGMND has much more comedic scenes than this one and much better in terms of writings tho ngl. mc (jihan) was a somewhat known pro HOL player and also joined offline games tournament but he quit HOL game after being taunted (it’s a stupid misunderstanding as usual) by ml (yoo chae), yk the drill.
so basically jihan hated yoo chae’s gut afterwards but oh boy they got entangled again in this new game that jihan played (and no, yoo chae didn’t stalked jihan, he just met jihan in this new game by pure luck and has been obsessing over him since then).
i think what’s kinda turned me off (VERY slightly) about this novel is it has an (again) overused “i’ve loved you since i was young / i met you when i was a kid” moment and how the writer seems like they dk how to spin the plot into something much darker and deeper. spoiler ahead, the fact that the author wanted to make yoo chae’s character as dark as possible and twisted doesn’t came out well imo.
it’s kinda sloopy and didn’t click well into the place bcs even his backstory is not explained much. from my pov, the author deliberately wanted to make yoo chae’s character suddenly became twisted due to his childhood memories but the thing is his childhood is not even that bad and it doesn’t even warrant or worth the whole big drama that he made in present, trust me.
like honest to god if i was jihan i will be very very pissed off as well if i got played like that by yoo chae so them breaking off things TWICE is very much needed for the plot imo! third time is really the charm they said.
so i like it better when the author wrote a short but good redemption arc from yoo chae bcs when the conflict happened before that, it was such a massive headache that i had to take a break for whole fucking week as shits were messy. the whole drama will got you thinking like “that doesn’t even make sense, how long is this going to be dragged on, why would he do that?”, yeah stuff like that.
so from what i read the author can actually write a really good writings about good characters but they can’t write a “bad” character that well bcs the plot twist for yoo chae’s character is not twisting much. but oh well i still lost some tears here and there bcs the conflict was soooo heartbreaking. glad my babes are happy now laughing at my ass for the whole stress and tears.
for side story the nsfw scenes were just okay, nothing non con dub con and nothing special it’s just your typical “first time” sex experience. but there’s one “oh wow….” sex scene that make me respect jihan so much. and that’s why i like his character in this novel a damn lot. he’s a man with a good *wink* kink and once he wanted it, he will get it periodt.
i’ll give this an 8/10, minus 2 points bcs the characterization for yoo chae is not that good and the whole drama got dragged a lot. jihan carried the whole novel tbvh.
still a good read tho and i recommend it! spent 2 weeks to finish this one ^^
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