DVD Mini Review (manhwa)
September 24th, 2007 by Lianne
PG-16 for sexuality, language, and other delinquenty things; amazon website (since official series website only works half the time)
This manhwa is pretty much Scott Pilgrim if Scott Pilgrim were a highly stylized Korean shoujo. The “serious” aspect of the plot is developmental and relationship-based, as a recent high school grad is suddenly dumped by her jerk boyfriend after she fails to get into college. She decides to commit suicide, but not before having a hot last hurrah in a club…where she meets two boys around her age, DD and Venu, who choose to live life as if they’re functioningly retarded. The majority of the first volume is DD and Venu having conversations about unbelievably stupid things, but everything they say is so ridiculous and funny that I laughed hard enough to cry. I think the plot is about how the girl learns to love life again, and her boyfriend learns how to not be a jerk, all through the idiosyncratic stupidity of DD and Venu. That’s the best plot summary I’ve gotten to write in a long time.
Initial impression: Worth a try. (Lianne)
i love, love, love this manhwa. i love it so much. that’s how i love it. LOOOVVVE it.
i don’t understand why i bought the first volume, i didn’t even like the artwork back then. i don’t even understand why i bought the second volume, i mean there isn’t much plot, just weird conversations and suddenly i realize i’m caught. caught in “omg…. O_O” “what the…???” “oh, yes, i knew it from the beginning” “oh, please, no…”
and suddenly there’s plot and i realize there always was and that i unknowingly bought exactly the kind of story, which contains everything i’m always looking for and which i would have never expected when reading the first volume.
relationships you don’t quite understand, blank, expressionless zoomed in stares, which will immediately lead you to the theory that this guy is TOTALLY in love with the girl and has a twisted side, and of course you’re right (i love expressionless stares where you could interpret anything in it, from love to hate to indifference, which all mean love *lol* ), an interesting love interest, interesting characters in general and above all the questions what is real in this story? what is not? who is real, who is not? and what the hell???
i feared that in the end ddam would go back to her ex-boyfriend and venu and dd will turn out to be just hallucinations of her. the end is far worse. in fact, when i have to imagine a bad end for a story, the end of d.v.d. would be one of my all time favourites of a horrible ending for any (!) story that exists in the world. it’s horrible, but it works? it really does??? i have no idea how it works, in fact it’s the only end that would for that story. it leaves me with a warm fuzzy feeling inside of me, instead of wanting to kill the author immediatley… i mean, if harry potter ended like that i would be traumatized for my whole life. (it’s almost as bad as an end where harry potter wakes up on his 11th birthday in that freezingly cold hut, realizing that everything was just a dream and that another birthday just had passed, without anyone knowing or caring. there’s no hogwarts. there are no hermione and no ron. there are no friends. there’s only the coldness of the floor and a glimpse of how life could have been like, but then it’s gone, that short moment and everything that’s left ist that weird feeling, that something, something was different, for a moment, and then the dursleys interrupt his thoughts and his same old, sad life continues ………. O_o)
the author of d.v.d. says that everything she put in that story pointed to the end it has, because “this cow there is a symbol for…..” and “i choose that shoe design, because it resembles…..” i have to admit, that confused me the most. i guess, i should come to an end with my fangirlish behaviour. all i wanted to say: i love this series. a lot!
Well…i’m a bit confused. How does it end? are DD and Venu only hallucinations or what?