So, there's this webcomic I read.

The main plot follows Generically Sassy and Infuriating Heroine who is OMG Like Totally Rebellious And Free-Spirited and her fiance, Quiet And Gentlemanly Cardboard Cut-Out Nice Guy Romantic Lead. (Yes, he's boring and she's so impossibly coolly rebellious and self-confident I want to slap her.) They're in love; they're also in an arranged marriage. I'll skip the backstory since we're a few years in here, but after a brief scare involving her cousin - who, it turns out, was desperate to get out of her own arranged marriage - they've settled down into their own brand of deeply boring coupledom.

There's also a bunch of supporting characters, most of whom are, of course, much more interesting and make you wish the story was about them instead. The entire damn story should have been about the heroine's shy, troubled best friend and the quiet but bad-tempered guy she's falling for, or the older cousin who was also pushed into an arranged marriage but didn't feel anything for the boy, and was in love with another boy but left it too late - or, even better, about the cute lesbians. They're all far, far more interesting than the hero and heroine, because they have actual personalities, aren't as defined by their stereotype, and are actually responsible for a lot of the shit that they go through.

Needless to say it's pretty tedious that all the problems the main characters face are external. His dad is stuffy. Her cousin's hit on her man. She gets kissed by a drunk at a party. They never seem to have problems as a result of anything they did; it's always because someone else is jealous or upset or is trying to pull them apart. It's not because she, say, is unsure of herself (like her cousin) or he fears intimacy (like the quiet boy). The only dumbassed thing they've done is, for some TOTALLY RANDOM AND INEXPLICABLE REASON, they won't tell her classmates they're engaged. Um, why not?

Anyway. After what seems like a long-ass stretch of time in which nothing much at all interesting that involves the hero and heroine more than tangentially happens, making me once again wish this entire story was about the best friend and her cool yet irritable not-quite-boyfriend or, better still, about the cute lesbians, finally the plotline has gotten moving again

This, unfortunately, probably isn't a good thing. See, the story has taken the NOT-PREDICTABLE-AT-ALL-RLY move of, after some really, really clunky foreshadowing, having the male lead's totally evil father - who we know is totally evil because he has traditional ideas about marriage and family and finds his wife's childish antics infuriating, as opposed to all the sympathetic adult characters who act like silly college students and hold shamelessly Westernized attitudes about damn near everything - decide that their arranged marriage should be called off because he doesn't think the heroine is suitable for him. And it took him three years to figure this out?

Of course, for maximum melodrama, this all has to happen on her eighteenth birthday.

And of course, we're now almost definitely going to see Boring Generic Hero forced into an arranged marriage with another girl he doesn't love and ultimately walking away from his stuffy traditionalist family so he can be with the Girl of His Dreams. Ho hum.

And of course, just before this so-called bombshell it was revealed that his mother actually went behind her husband's back to fix his son up with the infuriating heroine and her generic SASS in the first place, and Big Bad Dad never approved of it at all. Because his mother and her parents are goddamn psychic and knew the pair would be perfect for each other and fall madly in love despite there being absolutely no observable indication to suggest they would.

(Oh wait - they met once when they were kids. A meeting which just screams This Webcomic Was Not Well Plotted, as the only way said meeting doesn't make a total nonsense of continuity is if they both magically forgot all about it in between times. Of course, a single meeting when they were both young children in which the boring hero and infuriating heroine of course Got On Amazingly naturally means OMG THEY WOULD BE A PERFECT COUPLE, because it's not like people change as they mature--actually, given what a bunch of cases of arrested development most of the adult characters are, it's debatable if the webcomic author actually realizes that character traits are not set in bloody stone from the get-go.)

Again, this whole thing about his father never really approving is utterly goddamn predictable given that the more we learned about the hero's family, the less sense it made that he and the heroine were engaged in the first place. (I suspect the author made his family progressively classier as the story went on, making a nonsense of the 'engagement' as she did so.) The heroine's family are not particularly wealthy or well-placed, have nothing to bring to the table dynastically, their only value is as the wife's friends - friends her husband doesn't much like - and their 'sassy rebel' daughter isn't exactly a classy catch. This match is in their son's best interest how? More to the point, the owner of a company his father's deals with has a daughter who has known their son since childhood, and the hero's family choosing this other random girl over her has put her father's nose out of joint. Quite understandably, because it makes no damned sense!

I'm sorry, but I just don't buy it.

( They Do Things Differently There. Don't They? )

Worse, before this point - the utterly contrived 'break-up' relying, once again, on external pressure because God knows there's no way this phenomenally boring couple could do anything as interesting as actually disagree about something, still less actually have to work to make their relationship happen - there has been very little even vaguely interesting about the main couple for several chapters. They've just been boringly, gushily in love. It's like, why are these two the main characters again?

I was really hoping they'd have an argument. Or the romantic lead would have a moment of weakness and kiss another girl, or our annoyingly spunktastic heroine would start to wonder if maybe she was missing out on something by being in a long-term relationship which was almost definitely going to end in marriage while she was still in High School. Or - I don't know, that something one or both of them did would be the catalyst that had them rethinking their relationship. But no, it's external pressure yet again, it's the hero's Evil Daddy with his aspirations for his son (who needs to live his dreams and be free and flyyy, little birdie) trying to tear them apart. You'll have to excuse me here, but come on! Why can't these two have any problems that actually originate from themselves, not from other people?

These characters are boring as shit, and they're boring because they never seem to do anything. They're a pair of nonentities, passively there while more interesting things, involving characters who actually, you know, do shit and make mistakes and get over it, happen around them. Things happen to them, not because of them, and that utter inertia is what makes them such infuriating main characters and so goddamned dull.

You know, up until this happened, I was pretty into this story, but this one stupid plot 'twist' I totally couldn't see coming a mile off really honest has totally lost me. The sheer stupidity with which the inevitable break-up has been handled makes a nonsense of the central conceit - Girl A is in an arranged marriage with Guy B - and, worse, it's lazy.

Why am I still reading this stupid webcomic?

Actually, I know why I'm still reading this stupid webcomic: because there are cute lesbians and the author's fantasy voice artist for the irritable quiet boy who is far more interesting than the romantic hero is Tomokazu Seki.

If you made it through all that, congratulations. Please enjoy some cute and mostly worksafe femmeslash. Well, it's worksafe unless you work in, like, a monastery or something. (And if you want the non-worksafe stuff, I have that too. Mm, femmeslash.)