Webtoon Spotlight

Spotlight#69 A Complicated First Love

Have you ever been terrible at relationships? Well, don't worry because this special sexual spotlight will be telling you why the girls in A Complicated First Love by Rodrigo Lee are far worse.

Summary

In a small ass time town, four separate girls suddenly fall in love with four different guys; and they have absolutely no good way of expressing those feelings. This means that these eight individuals will have a lot of mishaps as their separate paths keep intertwining.

Characters

To make sure the list is consistent, I'll summarize the supposed relationships in the series.

Karen: A very determined and intelligent teenage woman, Karen is the most proactive in her specific crush. To the point where she masterfully stalks and manipulates her crush wherever chance she gets.

Kyle: A stoic, nice, and hardworking man down on his luck. Kyle spends his day trying to live day to day while at the same time helping anyone he meets at any cost to himself. He mostly tries to avoid Karen, though, given the illegal age difference.

Valerie: Known exclusively for her tomboyish, rowdy, violent, and loud attitude Val is very abrasive to most people. However, she has proven through her work at her private gym that she can be highly supportive and friendly. However, upon meeting Bob, she displays a more sexual personality.

Bob: A caring and supportive single father to his son, heroic, friendly, and dense son Jake. Bob doesn't judge people very much and works the hardest out of the boys.

Dave: A man with absolutely no self-confidence, Dave often is self-deprecating, shy, and fearful.

Ellie: With a shyness on the level of Dave, Ellie has almost no social skills but still wants to be with Dave regardless.

Hellen: Ellie's little sister and complete opposite, this preteen, are trying everything in her power to protect her sister in her tsundere fashion.

Overview

The art of First Love isn't something that impresses the eye in terms of art. That said, the anime influences of this webtoon are strong. And so far, the real big strength of the webtoon is its character interaction. This series has a love maze instead of a love triangle as out of the eight characters, no one has been able to connect the dots, instead interacting with a select few of the cast at a time. 

Combined with the binge-able style, we can get a lot of good fast jokes with all these elaborate personalities bouncing off one another. While I'm not the biggest fan of the whole "nearly yandere" trope, I think this series succeeds through several factors. Mainly by acknowledging just how crazy every one of the girls is and keeping itself as strictly comedic in tone (Unlike DalDal from Girl's of the Wild, who we are supposed to be taking seriously). 

This series acknowledges how bad these girls are at what they do, and that's the joke. Underneath all that though they are some legitimately good moments in the webtoon that are somewhat heartwarming. There is much more story left in the webtoon, so we'll have to see what happens.

Epilogue

First Love is a crazy and funny webtoon with very little substance. However, if you want a fun comedy series with some romance aspects, this is undoubtedly for you. But with that out of the way, let's take the canvas spotlight to another webtoon.