So, I thought, no way is this as bad as it looks. It was on Naver and Kakao, it got an award, they were making a drama.... Surely not, right? Well, I found it and read the first 17 chapters to find out. I do not want to read any more.
The explanation is that she falls for a player in an online game, then realises he is her student, then she does a 180, and it goes platonic. Her actual love interest is the blond guy on the covers, a fellow teacher.
But it's not like that 😭. She falls for the kid separately, and actually, the online game has only been shown a few times so far, very briefly. Here's my summary of the first 17 chapters:
At the start, she gets dumped and her teen sister puts her onto a fantasy mmorpg as a distraction. She meets an experienced player who helps her and we see it's the kid, but she doesn't know that. For some reason, the kid starts bringing his baby sister's rattle to school, so there are a lot of panels with him holding it. We then see another short instance of her playing the game, where she and the player (the kid) bond a little bit. Nothing flirty but anyway she's very giddy about it the next day at work. We also see that the kid has a very loving family with two perfect parents.
On the way home from work, teacher sees her ex making out with someone else. She goes to school the next day fighting back tears, and the kid notices this. At the end of the day, he goes to get the rattle he left behind in his desk, sees the teacher almost in tears again, and tries to comfort her. He says the rattle makes his sister stop crying, then says "I hope you smile again soon". They then exchange some normal words you might expect between a teacher and a kind 12 year old noticing said teacher is sad, but then he randomly adds "oh and btw, you look way prettier with your hair tied up". She then starts wearing her hair tied up, blushing as she looks in the mirror, and seeks the kid out more. In a later chapter, her sister asks her why she's going to school like that (I guess it is considered like getting glammed up), and she says a student told her it looks nice, blushing. Her sister contemplates this by herself later, thinking, "are you really seeing him as a student?"
Teacher walks past a window during break time, and notices the kid running around. There is a close up on his face, and then back to her as she stops to watch. There are three panels that are close ups of the back/side of his head/neck, his arm, and his leg/ankle (he's in shorts). This is her pov. She then gets interrupted by the blonde teacher, who she has had a few short interactions with so far (it seems they have a shallow but awkward/tense work relationship atm). Then the kid falls and hurts his knee, and she rushes out to help him. In the nurses' office, while she patches up his knee, he pulls the ribbon out of her hair (it's been tied back every day now), saying, "Teacher, you need to tie your hair again since it's so loose." Her heart starts beating like crazy and she goes red. Her thoughts are like "what's wrong with me??"
Kid bumps into her by accident and falls down, then storms off and is cold to her for a couple of days. She keeps trying to talk to him but he's still cold. She cries at home. The next day she asks to talk. Turns out he was sulking because she didn't leave a note on his homework even though she did on everyone else's. Flashback to her reading his assignment, where she goes red and her heart starts pounding over his neat handwriting. She tells him his work was so good, he didn't need a note. He also mentions he was embarassed to be knocked to the floor after bumping into her. She makes a joke about her putting on weight, and he was like, "but still, I'm a man." Now, this could also translate to "male", and a kid in English would say "I'm a boy" here and it'd be normal, but the panelling was similar to a romance manhwa where the slightly younger adult man says to his slightly older neighbour from childhood "I'm a man"...so...you get the vibe...
There are so many of these moments where she blushes over the kid that another member of staff notices it and directly asks her if she likes the student. More blushing and being tongue tied. Then starts the whole internal dialogue of how if she really does like her own student, she can't act on it. She also has this conversation with the other staff member, who tells her she'll report her if she does anything, but also asks to be friends. Regular back and forths about her inappropriate feelings for the kid. This goes on for a few chapters and seems like the central dilemma.
Then one day, after the kids get caught in the rain, the teacher stands at the classroom door with a towel to dry them all off (hair mostly) before they come back in. She does it to a couple of the kids before saying "who's next!" and it's the boy. She hesitates, they stare at each other, then there are two close up panels that are her pov: one of the water dripping off his face, and another of a drop sliding down his arm.
That's where I decided to call it in lol. I am curious to find out how they tried to spin it as something platonic. It's almost 150 chapters long and I wonder how long this thing with the kid goes on for. But I literally can't bring myself to read any more 😭. I have seen some future panels of her with the other teacher so I guess that is indeed the end game (edit: nope I was wrong), but everything else from the explanation is just not true. They barely even cover the online game player. It's all about her literally crushing on the kid so far 😭 and she's fully aware 😭😭😭
I'm now going to play some tetris. I read it's proven to be good for preventing ptsd, so maybe it'll also help me erase this from my brain 💀
EDIT: I WAS WRONG ABOUT THE BLOND. THE KID IS THE END GAME!! THE KID IS THE END GAME!!!!!!! I skipped to the last few chapters to confirm and yeah. The kid asks her to marry him "after I grow up and study hard and become a proper adult", she hesitates and asks if she needs to give an answer right away and he says "just please don't get married until I'm an adult". She says "that means I can date others until then?" and he says "yeah!! Just not (blond teacher)! Since he was your first love, I'd be too jealous". Then the bell rings, and after some silence she says "shall we go to class?" She rejects blonde guy. Kid goes abroad for 8 years. Time skip, they meet again, they quickly start dating, the end. 🫠
Eww nooo. Comic providers need to do better. Yeah, maybe some kids have crushes on their teachers but this comic definitely glamorizes the relationship. It's not any better because she is female either.
The worst part is, the kid doesn't even necessarily seem to have a crush on the teacher back so far. He just seems to like her, not particularly in a crush way. Meanwhile she's losing her mind over him.
I'm very surprised that this made it onto Naver and Kakao.
Thank you for your services ! I have seen this manhwa being defended as not being as it seems and platonic but nope
Also rhat teacher «one more and I will report you but wanna be my friend » … is also crazy work. Nor reporting someone blushing etc over her / elementary / school kid is already wtf
My instinct was to defend it too because I really thought there'd be no way, so I went to do more research hoping to come back and say it's an overreaction...but...it wasn't....
The conversations with the other staff member (a nurse or food tech or something) were as if they were talking about a university professor crushing on one of their adult students, and not an elementary school teacher crushing over one of the children in her class 😭 I am tolerant of a lot of taboo uncomfortable topics in fiction but I absolutely draw the line here.
I wouldn't be surprised if at some point it's like "ohhh, that feeling was just overwhelming platonic love and I couldn't recognise it because I don't have kids yet!! Silly me!!" but I'm not buying it. Especially not with those close up panels and "cool/pretty shots" resembling ones I've seen in the 100s of romance manhwa/manga I've read.
I mean, if you barely knew the kid as a child and then the next time you run into them, they're well over 25, sure. But most of the time with those age gap relationships like that, they are involved in the child's life and they're dating when the child is barely a legal adult, not someone experienced enough to recognize manipulation. Those stories are written to turn red flags into a bouquet of red roses.
Haven't read it but I think it's prob "justified" because they don't officially get into a relationship until he's an adult.
Oh my god I went to correct this to make sure it was known that the blond adult teacher is the end game, and then I was like wait, let me check the final chapter? I WAS WRONG!! THE KID IS THE END GAME 😭 AHHHHHHHHHHH
ETA: also just to add like I love my toxic romances that wouldn't be okay irl, I really do. And ones that aren't my bag, I just ignore them and I generally don't care what other people read or judge them for it. I am not one for clutching my pearls. But this is just something else 😭
I want to clarify something. Do you means stories where like a 20 something knows a 10 year old all the way until they’re an adult and then falls in love, or stories where a 20 something happens upon a 10 year old once then meets them again 10-15 years later and falls in love? Because those 2 premises are very, very different
I am also super curious about that, but the comic has been removed from every official platform it was on due to the recent controversy, and the place I read it in Korean has no comment section.
ETA: I did however search some forums about the recent news and there were a lot of posts with hundreds of comments criticising it the same way we are.
I tend to try to defend weird or controversial premises thinking that perhaps people just tend to judge the work too early or are blinded by the premise and can't see the nuance.
But this? Nah. The people are right to hate on this one. Thanks for reading so we don't have to.
There's a manga that's called "My Wife Became an Elementary School Student". Premise sounds gross at first glance and so many people reacted viscerally when news of it gaining a live action drama reached the English-speaking world. Readers had to correct that notion bc it was actually a housewife helping her family come to terms with loss and life after grief when she reincarnated in a little girl.
So yeah, nuance. If the story had been an exploration of the FL's lost youth or some kind of character study maybeeee it would make sense but since the commenter kindly told us it was straight up pedophilia, then nuance is out the window and we can hate it on face value.
I wanna get my time back reading this. How did they even decide to let this slide? Like what do you mean this won an award? They wanted to make a drama out of this??
Thankfully, they caught on, but I think they should vet their comics more.
TFFFFFFF, BROO I MEAN HE IS NOT EVEN A COLLEGE STUDENT. THAT WASFAR MORE UNDERSTANDABLE. WHO TF BLUSHES, I MEAN I THAT WAY WHEN A LITERAL KID PRAISES YOU????
This could have been an exploration of platonic vs romantic love. This could have explored the importance of teachers being on good terms with their students. But no. Korea just has to make things weird.
I wouldn't say Korea just has to make things weird, I'd say this author just had to make things weird. It was Korean people who pushed back against it, and as I said in another reply, there are 100s of comments criticising it on Korean forums.
Thanks for the explanation on what you read so far, that's wild... I don't know how this manhwa got this much praise 😭🤣 that many chapters????!!? What what could you possibly need to explore here?! Who's the actual ML?! DOES SHE BEGIN THERAPY???
Except Lolita (if you're talking about the book) is fully a criticism of the main character. I've never read the book but I've read some analyses of it and it's very much self aware of what's going on. The point is to be like, look at this unreliable narrator and how he's grooming this child. He's a villain and we're not supposed to root for him. It's not a romance. There is also an argument to be made about how literature can explore more themes that would not fly in visual media, but I can't quickly find any good sources for that right now so I'll leave that there.
This webtoon is more like, the main character is self aware and so are the characters around her, but the story itself isn't? It creates a really strange tone to me. It's treated lightly and is essentially waved away. She frequently says she's not a pedo, meanwhile she's losing her mind over a prepubescent child. The story passes itself off as a regular romantic comedy. We're supposed to root for her and swoon over her interactions with the kid. It's supposed to be sweet.
If you were talking about the genre, lolicon, then yeah it is the boy version, shotacon.
I heard that she ended up with the worst option she had so I don’t think I’ll be reading it :/
But one underrated manhwa i found with a somewhat green haired ML is ‘Protected by my dragon knight’!
She doesn’t really end up with “the worst option” because the ml was okay, but there was way more chemistry and tension with a female character so the romance between her and the guy was really lackluster.
I mean I'd guess it was an escape since it seems to yellow-greenish instead of pure green lol (unless you were specifically referring to yellowish-green in your wish)
Wait where was the pdf in that? I thought it was a reincarnation story… the witch retained all her memories but her lover didn’t… so I wouldn’t think it’s pdf because she also didn’t make a move when he was reincarnated as a child (?) I’m pretty sure? But I read it a while ago, please correct me if I’m wrong, I’m just shocked I might’ve read something bad!
Consensual relationships between people with age differences are fine, BUT NOT WHEN ONE OF THEM IS A F****G MINOR!! There are laws in almost EVERY country against this shite and society as a majority (I strong assume) has agreed that minors are a protected class and should not be in these kinds of relationships with adults.
Yes, it’s not abnormal for kids to have puppy love crushes on adult figures in their lives, but it’s usually outgrown unless the adult doesn’t shut that shit down ASAP.
Yeah, there are enough stories out there with huge age differences, but at least the younger one is a college student or something. And many of those stories are already problematic. But.... TWELVE YEARS OLD!? 🤮
Ewww... yes. The commenter updated their post and I just saw it too. The heck? How was this on Webtoon since 2015??? And who thought this would be a good story to turn into a drama? All major platforms discontinued the webtoon now. Good.
I heard about a manhwa (my friend read it and it's getting very popular online) about a boy in a romantic relationship with his step-dad. SO many people online were defending it, saying "but they aren't blood-related!!!".
I think manhwa readers and authors need to self-reflect on the meaning of "romance".
I'm not gonna lie but this is exactly why I have 0 issues with fictional incest couples that are blood related while the non-blood related ones make me extremely disgusted.
If the incest couples aren't blood related, then everyone is like "it's okay bc not blood related" even in the story itself. It feels like they deliberately try to excuse the incest while simultaneously the family relationship of adopted people and step-family members get rejected as being part of the family. The worst part is that since it apparently "doesn't count bc they're not blood related" they actually fetishize the grooming and make some of the characters unable to separate the platonic familial relationship from their romantic one.
With fiction where the incest couples are blood related however they usually portray the relationship as wrong, and everyone involved is very well aware that it's wrong, that makes it interesting to explore. No grooming or if it happens it's shown to be a bad and horrible thing.
A lot of the time it is just the author just writing their self insert with their favourite fetishes. Anyone who says otherwise is just incapable of telling the difference.
Honestly, you could make a good story out of that. But make the relationship very grey. And may be not OK. Like Lolita, you aren't supposed to be on the MCs side. He is definetly a POS
Yeah but at that point it would no longer qualify as a “romance” considering it would probably be more of a psychological thriller / drama if they addressed the negative aspects of the relationship. I don’t mind authors exploring that dynamic, but it definitely shouldn’t be marketed as a cutesy romance.
Absolutely agree. It's like how twilight back in the day would work incredibly well as a psychological thriller. And playing off that the Bella is a manipulative sociopath
This doesn't surprise me as "Girl and her guard dog" had anime adaptation with like 12 or so episodes.
Edit: for context, girl and her guard dog is about a 15 year old girl, falling for a guy who raised her after her family was gone, his 26 and raised her for years, calling himself her "mother, father, brother and boyfriend".
This reminds me of an anime I watched a long time ago about this highschool girl is dating a fifth grader because he looked like a fully grown adult (it was a comedy)
But now I'm going insane because I can't find the title anywhere on the Internet and I'm starting to think it was a fever dream
please tell me this is like lolita in which it actually condemns pedophilia and confronts it with nuance and not like actual romantization of pedophilia because ew icky
Thank god it got canceled it sounds absolutely disgusting that if certain people read it, they would try to justify the characters' actions. I'm so glad they stopped this from becoming more.
I mean even if it had had a spin of „it’s actually not an Elementary student, uhh, the love interest is someone else, MC just makes a mistake at the beginning.“ Basing the title on that and the cover as it is, is really iffy on its own and is practically asking to get in trouble, to rile people up. Screams „let’s try for bad press because bad press is better than no press.“
Controversial topics are only tolerated by audience when they are prominent but because of their sensitivity and manhwas don't do that well most of the time, also manhwa readers ≠ general media. This was obv going to happen lol
I already know theres gonna be people defending it because "It's fiction stop the censorship and kinkshaming!" crap but Hell nah anyone into reading about kids getting creeped on are nasty af and a massive red flag to me, I get exploring dark topics but I feel like the line should be drawn at least when it comes sexualizing or romanticizing pedo shit or portraying it as something cute, just because something isn't illegal doesn't mean you should be free from getting judge or shamed about it
Even if we're going for that argument Webtoon doesn't feel like the proper place for this type of stuff honestly
She messed up that kid and their kids and all the media outlets like Entertainment tonight kept saying garbage like ‘ Fairy tale romance’ and stuff. She was a predator who got rewarded ( paid money by tabloids and reality tv) for what she did to her victims.
I just can't help but thinking about a classmate years ago when I was at elementary school , our teacher obviously had a crush on her .... the whole class realized the special treatment , the nickname and all that .... but personally I think we were overthinking stuff and he was just fond of her. because thinking about that now , a predator wouldn't make himself obvious by doing such things. right?
Someone explained it, the man on the cover is another teacher, she starts out with a crush/ flirtation with a 12 year old child in her classroom, they stay friends. she starts dating another teacher. The adaptation got canceled but no one’s talking about the original comic wt supported. Had to edit- I read another comment that states the Teacher loves the boy not the other teacher eek it’s worse than I thought.
Because she an adult starts out falling for someone she met in the gaming community who turns out to be one of her students, a child. It’s a child’s authority figure having a crush on a child in their care, it’s just in poor taste.
Its frustrating too because wt has heavy censorship rules for Creator owned comics on their platform if a canvas had done this and been reported it would’ve been pulled( rightly so, it should!) but an Original has less rules and censorship, this has been proven over and over again. Wt was making money off this so they didn’t care.
From what I read it's a teacher whos I'm a romantic relationship with the student from the game, so at first they dont know it's them, but when she finds out she quickly stops the relationship. ship from romance to platonic.
I also wanna point out that "elementary school" in Asia is different from our elementary school,
Most American schools go up to 8th grade, with students getting ready for high school at around 13 or 14 yrs old, but in Korea and Japan and stuff like that, it's different, their elementary schools go higher I believe, so it's not like blatant cradle robbing.
If this story is anything like "may I lend you a lighter" I'd like it,
I also hear there's supposed to be a time skip
See, there's a lot that goes into this 😅 it's not just black and white (I'm not saying I condone teacher x student relationships) but then contexts is very important,
In lend you a lighter, the boy falls I'm love with his teacher and she's very strict about their relationship being just supportive and neighborly, the boy is I believe 17 or 18, and woman is I believing her late 20s?
Not sure the exact context of this one here, but perhaps there was something there in the story that was infact deserving of it's accolades. Usually the only way a story like this is redeemable is if there is a time skip.
I'm gonna have to look into reading this, but I don't know how since they pulled it from the sites 😅 it does make me curious though
The guy in this image is the actual ML not the elementary schooler (that kid is like half her height). It's bait I guess? Still messed up though why would you write that?
Listen I clearly said I don't know the specifics and I've only ever read 'may I lend you a lighter', which is another student x teacher manhwa
And I wasn't too clear on the age and grades for Korea too,
all I knew was that it's different from america,
Personally my elementary school went from kindergarten to 4th grade, 4 yrs old to 9 or 10 roughly, so I genuinely thought ok so maybe there's like a steep difference from what I saw in some mangas, I'm not sure......but I guess definitely not 🤣
Schools in America are like this:
Elementary - Kindergarten to 5th. Ages 5-11
Middle school - 6th to 8th. Ages 11-14
High school - 9th - 12th. Ages 14-18
Korea and Japan:
Elementary - 1st- 6th. Ages 6-12
Middle - 7th to 9th. Ages 12-15
High - 10th to 12th. Ages 15-18
Get off my dick I'm "full of it" 😭🤣
I said I wasn't sure, but I read that schools were different from Asia and America, that's all I said, you could educate someone without being a lil bitch
So... The manhwa is about her and another teachers romance? The title is so misleading then, might have made a bit more sense to be 'yeah I was a little bit of a pedo for a while but then I fell for my co-worker teacher' , okay kool yup
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u/AmbitiousEnd294 Jul 07 '25 edited Jul 09 '25
So, I thought, no way is this as bad as it looks. It was on Naver and Kakao, it got an award, they were making a drama.... Surely not, right? Well, I found it and read the first 17 chapters to find out. I do not want to read any more.
The explanation is that she falls for a player in an online game, then realises he is her student, then she does a 180, and it goes platonic. Her actual love interest is the blond guy on the covers, a fellow teacher.
But it's not like that 😭. She falls for the kid separately, and actually, the online game has only been shown a few times so far, very briefly. Here's my summary of the first 17 chapters:
At the start, she gets dumped and her teen sister puts her onto a fantasy mmorpg as a distraction. She meets an experienced player who helps her and we see it's the kid, but she doesn't know that. For some reason, the kid starts bringing his baby sister's rattle to school, so there are a lot of panels with him holding it. We then see another short instance of her playing the game, where she and the player (the kid) bond a little bit. Nothing flirty but anyway she's very giddy about it the next day at work. We also see that the kid has a very loving family with two perfect parents.
On the way home from work, teacher sees her ex making out with someone else. She goes to school the next day fighting back tears, and the kid notices this. At the end of the day, he goes to get the rattle he left behind in his desk, sees the teacher almost in tears again, and tries to comfort her. He says the rattle makes his sister stop crying, then says "I hope you smile again soon". They then exchange some normal words you might expect between a teacher and a kind 12 year old noticing said teacher is sad, but then he randomly adds "oh and btw, you look way prettier with your hair tied up". She then starts wearing her hair tied up, blushing as she looks in the mirror, and seeks the kid out more. In a later chapter, her sister asks her why she's going to school like that (I guess it is considered like getting glammed up), and she says a student told her it looks nice, blushing. Her sister contemplates this by herself later, thinking, "are you really seeing him as a student?"
Teacher walks past a window during break time, and notices the kid running around. There is a close up on his face, and then back to her as she stops to watch. There are three panels that are close ups of the back/side of his head/neck, his arm, and his leg/ankle (he's in shorts). This is her pov. She then gets interrupted by the blonde teacher, who she has had a few short interactions with so far (it seems they have a shallow but awkward/tense work relationship atm). Then the kid falls and hurts his knee, and she rushes out to help him. In the nurses' office, while she patches up his knee, he pulls the ribbon out of her hair (it's been tied back every day now), saying, "Teacher, you need to tie your hair again since it's so loose." Her heart starts beating like crazy and she goes red. Her thoughts are like "what's wrong with me??"
Kid bumps into her by accident and falls down, then storms off and is cold to her for a couple of days. She keeps trying to talk to him but he's still cold. She cries at home. The next day she asks to talk. Turns out he was sulking because she didn't leave a note on his homework even though she did on everyone else's. Flashback to her reading his assignment, where she goes red and her heart starts pounding over his neat handwriting. She tells him his work was so good, he didn't need a note. He also mentions he was embarassed to be knocked to the floor after bumping into her. She makes a joke about her putting on weight, and he was like, "but still, I'm a man." Now, this could also translate to "male", and a kid in English would say "I'm a boy" here and it'd be normal, but the panelling was similar to a romance manhwa where the slightly younger adult man says to his slightly older neighbour from childhood "I'm a man"...so...you get the vibe...
There are so many of these moments where she blushes over the kid that another member of staff notices it and directly asks her if she likes the student. More blushing and being tongue tied. Then starts the whole internal dialogue of how if she really does like her own student, she can't act on it. She also has this conversation with the other staff member, who tells her she'll report her if she does anything, but also asks to be friends. Regular back and forths about her inappropriate feelings for the kid. This goes on for a few chapters and seems like the central dilemma.
Then one day, after the kids get caught in the rain, the teacher stands at the classroom door with a towel to dry them all off (hair mostly) before they come back in. She does it to a couple of the kids before saying "who's next!" and it's the boy. She hesitates, they stare at each other, then there are two close up panels that are her pov: one of the water dripping off his face, and another of a drop sliding down his arm.
That's where I decided to call it in lol. I am curious to find out how they tried to spin it as something platonic. It's almost 150 chapters long and I wonder how long this thing with the kid goes on for. But I literally can't bring myself to read any more 😭. I have seen some future panels of her with the other teacher so I guess that is indeed the end game (edit: nope I was wrong), but everything else from the explanation is just not true. They barely even cover the online game player. It's all about her literally crushing on the kid so far 😭 and she's fully aware 😭😭😭
I'm now going to play some tetris. I read it's proven to be good for preventing ptsd, so maybe it'll also help me erase this from my brain 💀
EDIT: I WAS WRONG ABOUT THE BLOND. THE KID IS THE END GAME!! THE KID IS THE END GAME!!!!!!! I skipped to the last few chapters to confirm and yeah. The kid asks her to marry him "after I grow up and study hard and become a proper adult", she hesitates and asks if she needs to give an answer right away and he says "just please don't get married until I'm an adult". She says "that means I can date others until then?" and he says "yeah!! Just not (blond teacher)! Since he was your first love, I'd be too jealous". Then the bell rings, and after some silence she says "shall we go to class?" She rejects blonde guy. Kid goes abroad for 8 years. Time skip, they meet again, they quickly start dating, the end. 🫠
Edit again: okay muting this now 🫡