Bride of the Water God 4
January 27, 2010
Mi-Kyung Yun – Dark Horse – 2009 – 9+ volumes
Oh, Bride of the Water God, I can’t stay mad at you. I wasn’t fond of the early volumes because of the ethereal mood and confusing cast of characters, but I found myself quite taken by this volume. This is probably because the romance ramps up quite a bit, and the roles of everyone in both the human and heavenly worlds are much clearer now.
Soah is engaged to be married, and we see once again the true face of her greedy father, her passive mother, her unconcerned sister, and apparently even the fiancee who doesn’t care whether or not Soah actually loves him. Habaek keeps watch on the situation, and finally driven to the edge in a plot by one of his friendly, but more mysterious acquaintances, he goes down to Earth to take action.
The gods call Soah spirited, which was hard to see in the first few volumes since she seemed shocked into silence by what was going on and only occasionally stumbled into faux pas. In this volume, however, Habaek flirts with her a little and Miu flirts with her A LOT, and after some heroics, it feels like we are getting closer and closer to Habaek telling Soah the truth, especially since now Soah seems committed to stay true, more or less, to Habaek.
There’s some business with his old lover being a bad person and possibly some other stuff. I’m not too interested in these plot threads, but I suppose the gods need something to do.
It’s still very, very pretty. There are still some problems with people and places, and it’s hard to tell where the characters are in relation to one another and who’s who sometimes, but it’s not such a problem anymore now that the roles have become more clear. It is one of the prettier series you can lay hands on right now, and I do give it high marks for that. Now that the story is getting better, I’m pretty excited to get my hands on volume 5 and am hoping that Dark Horse decides to continue the series. Pick up all 4 volumes together and have a go at it, if you are so inclined, because I think a lot of the confusion that I experienced will probably be allieviated with back-to-back volumes.
January 31, 2010 at 10:45 pm
[...] of Bride of the Water God, this week’s review roundup begins with Connie’s thoughts on volume four at Slightly Biased Manga. Rob at Panel Platter reads volume one of 11th Cat (Yen Press). Snow [...]
June 19, 2010 at 2:19 am
At this point of time, I believe it will still be a little confusing, with a lot of things happening at the same time, and new characters appearing. But if you continue on, everything will become much clearer and once you understand it more, the plot will be more interesting.
Trust me, it just gets better and better. :)
Btw, volume 5 is out already. Currently waiting for vol. 6 which is supposedly released in August/Sept this year.
Cheers! ;)
June 19, 2010 at 11:51 pm
Thanks! I just re-read this volume in preparation to digging into volume five, so hopefully that will help me understand more of what’s going on since there won’t be a big gap in the volumes. Also, I think I liked this volume a lot more the second time through.
I keep crossing my fingers and hoping this continues. It’s so pretty, and completely unlike the other books Dark Horse publishes, so I do hope they can continue with it to the end.