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Title: Lies Become You

Author/Story: Seoru (original novel) and Winter (the adapted story)

Artist: C.MU, Danbi, and Soo

Rating: Slightly Mature (some steamy moments, but this is R15)

Genre: romantic fantasy, magic, elementals, betrayal, Egyptian-inspired setting, romance, marriage of convenience, contract relationship, politics, historical

Hosted On: Manta Comics

Official Link(s): English

Official Summary:

Once an enemy, now a husband?

Femme fatale Veronica is sentenced to death for obsessing over the prince. With her life now in danger, she boards a ship to escape, unaware that it belongs to her archnemesis, the alluring Prince Halid. He agrees to help her, but only on the condition that she pretends to be his wife!

My Thoughts:

In the introduction to Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, he notes that he “looked especially at cultural forms like the novel, which I believe were immensely important in the formation of imperial attitudes, references, and experiences”. He goes on to say that:

“I do not mean that only the novel was important, but that I consider it the aesthetic object whose connection to the expanding societies of Britain and France is particularly interesting to study. The prototypical modern realistic novel is Robinson Crusoe, and certainly not accidentally it is about a European who creates a fiefdom for himself on a distant non European Island.”

I have wanted to cite Edward Said in an analysis of Lies Become You from the second that I saw the first chapter of this Korean webtoon and noped out of it last year.

The idea of citing culture and imperialism, instead of solely His work on orientalism, comes about as a result of thinking about what these Korean web novels and webtoons are doing by choosing to vacillate between these immensely powerful European themed worlds and these “savage” countries that are often populated by brown-skinned people clad in orientalist trappings.

This is not to say that I hate this webtoon, in fact part of the enjoyment I get in the webtoon – which I returned to just a few days ago – is marveling at the ways in which it plays into the orientalism that Said talks about in his own work and that has existed long before these Korean webtoons ever came into existence. It doesn’t hurt that the characters in The webtoon are beautiful and very well fleshed out across the course of two seasons thus far. even as I struggle with orientalist trappings, I am emboldened and excited by the fact that this is one of the few webtoons I’ve read where visibly brown skinned people, albeit with normative thin features (no large or broad noses or full lips here) that uniformly do not match the people they’re supposed to be representing, our front and center and not laid out across stereotypical trappings outside of the orientalism of the setting itself. 

And when it comes to orientalism as a term, Teen Vogue’s Namrata Verghese defines it as:

a colonial invention. Orientalism is a collection of binaries — between “East” and “West,” foreign and familiar, civilized and uncivilized, primitive and progressive, colonizer and colonized, self and Other. It is a system of representation through which the West produced the East as its opposite, its “surrogate and underground self” — a strange, backward, barbaric land, steeped in mysticism and danger.

As much as I enjoy the building romance between Veronica and Halid in this webtoon, it is impossible to look at it without thinking about the role that orientalism plays in the portrayal of North African / Middle Eastern countries and the ways in which Korean webtoons regurgitate established orientalist practices for better and for worse in their big ticket best sellers.

Ohe original cover of the novel, Halid is portrayed with an almost ash-gray complexion and even in the webtoon where he is more visibly humanized and you get to see him as the puppy male lead that is familiar and exciting, he is still othered in comparison to Veronica even though, she is the outsider in their country and the only person with her pale skin and dark hair. It’s very wild to clock this in a webtoon that I otherwise find incredibly enjoyable. It makes me wish that analysis for webtoons was more advanced and that people talked about this sort of thing in public. Unfortunately, there is a stance in media fandom spaces where thinking critically has become a form of anti fandom viewed as such by people who appear not to think.

Lies Become You is an incredibly interesting story because the character of Veronica is returning home even though she doesn’t know it. it’s not a biological home, but a spiritual one. Upon returning to the homeland across the sea, a common trope in diasporic fiction, she proceeds to evolve as a person and develop magic that elevates her status even beyond what it already has been elevated to as the wife of the crown prince. As I read this webtoon, I could not stop myself from going between this giddy excitement that she was finally about to be respected and treated properly… and the historically inaccurate costuming that rendered these characters in lushly erotic and orientalist fits.

I know this sounds like I have a lot of criticism for this comic, but it is literally an experience where my knowledge of orientalism helps inform an enjoyment in reading the plot and analyzing it. I crave a happy ending for these characters and I believe that the romance and the fantasy are valid avenues with which to get that happy ending. I just want to think and talk more about the ways that East Asian media, especially webtoons and manga, will regurgitate established tropes centering orientalism and revolving around a savage, sexualized, brown-skinned other.

Halid and his family are relatively good examples of how you can create layered characters in these Oriental settings, but even they fall flat in the end because the setting itself is so contingent upon something that we know has informed centuries of portrayals of the Orient, a place Said points out…  isn’t even real. There is no real Orient. It’s like the concept of The Middle East. Political, conceptual, used to excuse art or violence or… both. 

Overall, I don’t know that I would recommend this webtoon. I enjoy it and read two thirds of the English translation in a single night, but is it something that I can recommend in good faith? Despite the beautiful art, lovey dovey relationship, and the mystery behind Veronica’s past, grappling with the Specter of orientalism in this webtoon means that I feel as if I can’t recommend it wholeheartedly even though I do get significant enjoyment from reading it.

If you’ve read this webtoon, what are your thoughts? Do you love it, do you recommend it?