BTS’s webtoon and web novel is out, low rating and mixed reaction from fans despite the high expectation
Let’s see what Korean netizens think after BTS’s webtoon ‘7 Fates: CHAKHO’ officially released the first chapters.
In November 2021, HYBE shared their plan to work with Naver Webtoon to release 4 HYBE artist-only series in 2021. All these four will be published as both webtoons on Naver Webtoon, and web novels on Wattpad (Wattpad is currently owned by Naver).
Among them, the webtoon ‘7FATES: CHAKHO‘ with BTS as the main character is receiving the most attention. Yesterday (January 15th), this webtoon was officially released with Prologue chapter, chapter 1 and chapter 2 (for those who have paid only, if you want to read this chapter for free, you will have to wait another week).
‘7FATES: CHAKHO’ is an urban fantasy story inspired by ‘Chakhogapsa’ – tiger hunters from the Joseon Dynasty. Seven boys whose fates are bound together will join forces as they encounter mythical creatures from Korean folk legends. BTS’s webtoon also quickly reached the top of the hot topic list on Korean online forums with many comments from Korean netizens.
Accordingly, many people said that they did not expect too much from this series. But when they read it, they found the content more attractive than expected with interesting fantasy details, beautiful art style, and characters all having distinctive identities and personalities.
However, there are also many people who feel confused when reading the story for the same reasons: They can’t tell the members in BTS apart. Accordingly, because it is a series built based on the members themselves, many people thought that their names would be kept, but it turned out that everything changed as the 7 main characters were Dogeon (RM), Hwan (Jin), Cein (SUGA), Hosu (J-Hope), Haru (Jimin), Jooan (V) and Zeha (Jungkook).
However, this is also reasonable because the use of BTS’s name for dramas has also caused many controversies in the past. However, if we look at the characters below without the name tags, apart from RM and V, we won’t be able to recognize the rest of the members.
Some comments of Knetizens:
- Uhhh… But who is who?
- Okay, I read the first chapter and it was pretty good, but what does it have to do with BTS?
- It has higher quality than I thought!
- I was just curious so I read it and it was more interesting than I thought it would be!
- It’s BTS’s webtoon, but I don’t know which character is BTS.
- I can’t tell who the members are. The only person I can name is RM.
- The characters are drawn very well but they don’t look like BTS.
- Big Hit, stop this and focus on BTS’s music.
- I’m really glad that their names and faces are completely different. Now, we can read it without thinking about BTS.
- You’d better forget that it has nothing to do with BTS and just read the webtoon.
- The story is better than I thought, I don’t understand what people are complaining about…
- Can they decide who the target audience of this product is? Is it for webtoon fans or for ARMYs? Because they are two different consumer groups.
- What’s wrong with everyone? It’s better to use a fictional name and not paste BTS’s face in, didn’t people complain in the past that HYBE took advantage of BTS’s image? Now they still complain even when they have changed?
- The webtoon is very interesting and of good quality, everyone, please check it out!
On the other hand, many international fans are disgruntled with Knetizens who underrate the “webtoon characters” for not looking like BTS. They pointed out that it was Korean netizens who were angry when Big Hit took the the group’s image for fictional products to make money, but when the company changed the characters’ name and look, they complained again. On the other hand, a part of ARMYs said that such manhwa drawing is inherently not 100% human-like, but only based on some of the members’ appearance features, so if you take the time to memorize the cast, reading the webtoon would be no problem.
