[Review]: On "Shades and Shadows" and Being Seventeen

If there’s one manhwa I’ve reread many times, it would be Shades and Shadows by Hongja.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I used to read manhwa on off-periods, I guess, because when you google "manhwa" (or, god forbid, "webtoons") you get all sorts of results that’re kind of… trashy. You know, the sort of junk food you use to turn off your brain.

I say all of this affectionately! Trashy is good. You need trash sometimes.

To paraphrase the premise in my own words, Hye-in is a high school student trying to get into a good art college - which, I related to deeply, if you swapped art out for CS.

Unlike the kids who can afford pricey private art academies - which, I also related to deeply - she goes to a regular school with an art club that coaches students through competition prep and entrance exams.

Two college TAs, Mr. Lee and Ms. Park, have just joined the club to serve as counselors; both are students at an art college, and Hye-in sees them as people who've made it to the other side. Her two closest friends are Eun-yeo and Eunhyun. The story is about the five of them.

What's in a genre

The vendors label this as a “romance” manhwa, perhaps because romance is the best-selling genre of the webtoons market.

I personally think that the romance label is reductive, and this is more of a coming-of-age story.

The story is really about growing up and figuring out how you want to show up for people in your life. The romance is almost minimal; you don't see a couple get together until far into the timeskip after graduation.

It's the most accurate portrait of me at seventeen that I've ever encountered, and it made me wonder who the author Hongja was. Perhaps it’s because I was in a similar stage in life when I “met” the female lead, Hye-in, in 2019, and I felt like she was basically a mirror of me, with her anticipation for the Korean art academy admissions and dreams of mastering her craft of art sort of mirroring my anticipation around the US college admissions process and dreams of mastering the craft of CS.

Like, back when the English translation was just releasing one episode a week, I’d log into Lezhin, and whenever she was beating herself up about narrowly missing points in a competition, I was doing the same. Whenever she was grinding through an exam, same girlie, same.

I'd say that Shades and Shadows is very much an acquired taste - it’s a slice-of-life where if you relate with the main character, you’ll love it, and otherwise you’ll feel like nothing much happens.

So, consider this your warning that I am exactly the target audience, and if you've ever wondered what kind of person I was at seventeen (the demeanor/vibe/inner psychology, all of it), just read the manhwa and look at Hye-in, and she'll explain herself better than I can. :)

Eun-yeo

I think the most meaningful relationship in the webtoon was not between Hye-in and any particular guy, nor any particular couple, but actually Hye-in and her best girl friend Eun-yeo.

On the surface, Hye-in and Eun-yeo are classic odd-couple pairing, where Hye-in is quiet and serious, while Eun-yeo is loud and carefree. Perhaps the best way to capture their dynamic is through their Instagram incident, where Eun-yeo creates an account for Hye-in (who doesn't use social media), uses it to stalk their TA Mr. Lee, and accidentally likes his photo.

In this friendship, each person is certain that the other has something they lack.

A recurring theme for Hye-in is that she wonders why she is the way she is, why is she introverted? Had she grown up in a different family under different circumstances, would she have been more outgoing?

She's secretly envious of Eun-yeo, whose parents can afford to send her to a fancy academy to prep specifically for art and who she believes to love their daughter Eun-yeo very much (spoilers: it's not that simple), and she theorizes that this is why Eun-yeo is so bright and outspoken and worry-free. (more spoilers: really, it's not that simple...)

I also wondered on occasion, not quite "I want what she has" but "I wonder who I'd be if I'd started where she started," where it's not aimed at a particular person but rather a version of myself that could've existed. Not that I would trade my family and upbringing for anybody else <3

And of course... PLOT TWIST...

...yes, you guessed it, that worry-free and cheerful Eun-yeo isn't worry-free and cheerful all the time!

Eun-yeo envies Hye-in too, for reasons I won't spoil. So, both girls are carrying their own insecurities that they secretly envy the other for, and each is constructing an idealized version of the other out of the parts of themselves they like least.

Neither of them knows the other is carrying said insecurities, and their very opposite communication styles naturally result in a pretty bad misunderstanding.

I've been this Hye-in, where I stayed quiet because it felt like the natural thing to do, then found out later that someone had read my silence as a snub, like Eun-yeo here…

A pretty recurring theme in the story is two people with mismatched instincts constructing different stories about the same set of events. At the start of the story it’s done for comedic effect and later in the story it starts to cost them a little more. I've been on both sides of that one more times than I'd like to admit, and I'd like to think I've gotten better at noticing when it's happening.

Eunhyun

The other close friend is Eunhyun, and in fact, the Hye-in and Eunhyun friendship predates the Hye-in and Eun-yeo friendship. Though, after Eunhyun introduces the two of them, it often feels like Eunhyun is the one barging in.

I won't spoil Eunhyun's backstory. Just know that the author really won me over using his relationship with his mom:

⭒⭒ The scene I've bookmarked as a masterpiece is the closing of chapter 29, where Eunhyun and Hye-in are walking home, the street lights are bright outside. Eunhyun goes in, and just like that, you're plummeted into pitch black. His house is dark, his mom is still at work, not home yet. You feel his loneliness entirely through the panel going black.

Then Hye-in knocks on his door, and the panel becomes bright again. Even without his internal monologue where he explains that he's grateful she noticed he needed someone, you can feel the warmth flooding back in, and feel secondhand his visceral relief of not being alone anymore.

Please read chapter 29! No, I won't include the screenshots. I think it's the clearest example of what this manhwa does in visual form, it’s truly a feat that only works in webtoon’s vertical scrolling format.

On Jealousy and Competition

I like that the author explicitly chose not to write Hye-in as the top student of the class. Although Hye-in is the most studious and hardworking and gets the best grades out of her friend group, she's not the top of her class.

Instead, that distinction belongs to Miyeon.

Miyeon consistently wins all the art competitions and gets the highest grades, and as a result, the classmates gossip about how she's not that good and her results aren't well-deserved.

The author beautifully words a truth about what insecurity does to people in this panel:

Then it ends with Hye-in catching herself:

"...This isn't right. I should be sketching up another composition…

...or memorizing vocabulary words instead.

Like Miyeon. Yeah, like Miyeon…"

I recognized this in myself very much. When I feel overwhelmed by how other people are doing, my instinct is to zoom in on the concrete what can I actually do right now? and burrow myself deeper into the next vocab word, next project, whatever self-imposed self-improvement exercise I have for myself.

And I've absolutely felt the pull towards the uglier, green-eyed "more convenient option" too, and I try to catch myself, like Hye-in does.

On Having People to Talk To

I would've wanted someone like Ms. Park to do this when I was in Hye-in's headspace ♡

College TAs are People Too

When I first read Shades and Shadows in high school, I saw the college students (Mr. Lee, Ms. Park) as the cool adults in the room — they're TAs, so they have authority, they can go wherever they want, they have their own little sources of income and a lot more purchasing power than I've got as a high schooler. What cool adults!

Then I became a TA in college and sort of realized… wow, us college kids are still kids, and those TAs in that novel are kids too. They're just big kids with an unnecessarily higher level of authority over slightly less-big kids.

So, my second read of Shades and Shadows as a college TA was very much from the shoes of Mr. Lee and Ms. Park. My college was rather unconventional in that it was pretty common for undergraduates to be TAs, and there was even a system for student-designed courses (STUCOs).

Some of my fondest memories were of teaching 🫶

Somewhere between seventeen and twenty-two, I grew an outer layer that looked a lot like Eun-yeo. My cheerfulness and mischief shows up mostly when I have a role to step into - I absolutely loved giving talks during internships and instructor stints, and treated both like standup. I used to plan my internship talks down to the timing of jokes and when I'd "break the fourth wall" — the moments that looked off the cuff were often very premeditated.

My main blog is probably the closest written equivalent — that's roughly what it sounds like to hear me give a talk I've rehearsed 'til happy-birthday-level-memorized, a la Tim Urban.

In day-to-day conversations, I'm still a Hye-in. But I seem to have developed Eun-yeo as a second language somewhere along the way, more as a persona I wear when I'm playing teacher.

And of course, as someone who's no longer in college and once again the supposed "cool adult" in the room, I again see us all as kids, some slightly bigger than others, but kids nonetheless.

So What Genre Is This, Actually?

Neil Gaiman once said that genre is what makes the reader feel cheated if they finish the book without getting it (read: The View from the Cheap Seats). In other words, a thriller reader feels cheated if they don't get the adrenaline rush, and a romance reader feels cheated if nobody gets together.

By that standard, Shades and Shadows is not a romance, since you wouldn't feel cheated even if nobody gets together; the story feels complete and full and warm even before anyone ends up with anyone.

What you would feel cheated without, however, is the resolution of the gap between who these characters appear to be and who they truly are.

By that standard, I'd say it's the genre of story about growing up and learning that the people you think have it together mostly don't.

I'd recommend it to anyone, not just people who were seventeen and slightly overthink-y. Though, if that's you, you'll probably love it the most. And don't skip chapter 29!