Reincarnator (Manhwa)

THIS ADAPTATION DOES NOT DO JUSTICE TO THE ORIGINAL WEBNOVEL!!!!!!!! 

The original webnovel, Reincarnator, was one of the greatest and most memorable webnovels of all time. Note that I’m not merely saying that it was “good for its time”, no. Compare it to the best webnovels of today and it is still one of the best. I am not exaggerating in the least and this is absolutely not nostalgia – I will explain why I think it’s so good. But if you’ve read my other reviews, then you would know that I rarely ever give this kind of praise to any webnovel. I have literally read hundreds of webnovels (including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) and only a handful even come close to how good the first half of the Reincarnator webnovel was. I read the entire Reincarnator webnovel from start to finish and I will tell you this: the first half of the Reincarnator webnovel is easily top 5 among all the webnovels I’ve ever read – literally 10/10 perfection – and I have given the 10/10 rating to only a handful of webnovels.

One of the core things that made the original Reincarnator webnovel so great was that it was heavily psychological. The Reincarnator webnovel was very heavy in internal monologues to the point where internal monologues often made up significant portions of each chapter. These internal monologues were so critical because they served so many different functions – they served not only to flesh out the personalities of the characters but also to explain the backstory, to convey the central themes of the webnovel, to explain the setting, as well as so much more. I will give an example from Chapter 3 in the webnovel to show you what I mean:

> Next is Keldian.
> <That day with 100 people inside that cage was really a great chaos. Shortly after the beginning of the first day we fought and killed each other and all died. I was the only survivor.>
> And Keldian ate all the runes as he quickly rushed out.
> “In my view Keldian might have stimulated them a little.”
> But Hansoo shook his head.
> There was the words of Eres and him, who had come to save the humankind, doing that sort of thing is absurd.
> And there was more bad than good on the long term if that were to happen.
> If you kill somebody a rune will appear but it didn’t mean that the person who took the rune will become as strong as the dead person combined with them.
> Since runes didn’t drop in large numbers.
> In reality, the man who died earlier had more than 20 together if you combined his strength and stamina but the only thing that was dropped was a strength rune.
> If you see from the point of a society, coexistence was the answer. That was the reason why Eres, who had included everyone, was able to stay as a leader until the end.
> More than anything else if he were to think of his plans, killing a person to get a rune is forbidden.

Let me explain why this part is so brilliant.

First of all, let me give the context for this quote. The above passage came from the part in Chapter 3 where the main character, Kang Hansoo, was thinking about how he was going to make the best out of the tutorial. He first thought of Eres’s solution, and then Keldian’s solution (which is described above), and finally Kangtae’s solution, before settling on the hidden dungeon as the answer.

This was brilliant because at one fell swoop, it accomplished all of those things:

1. It revealed backstory – it shows how Eres, Keldian, and Kangtae each solved the problem in the past.
2. It fleshed out the characters – by telling us what Eres, Keldian, and Kangtae would have said about and approached the problem, it tells us about their personalities.
3. It revealed the setting – it tells us that when a person dies, only one rune drops randomly, rather than all of their stats dropping as runes.
4. It revealed a central theme – it told us about the phenomenon of “killing people for runes” which was one of the major issues that plagued humanity in the first timeline.
5. It revealed the personality of the main character. From reading that internal monologue the reader got a sense of the kind of personality that the main character had – he was a thoughtful person. He first considered how Eres would have dealt with the situation, then about how Keldian would have dealt with the situation, then about how Kangtae would have dealt with the situation, and then debated the merits of the various options in his mind before finally settling on hidden dungeon as the approach that he was going to go with. This is great storytelling because it SHOWS (rather than tells) that the main character is thoughtful – it SHOWS his internal thought process, it SHOWED what kind of person he was and AT THE SAME TIME it also reveals the backstory AS WELL AS the world setting all in one go!

In the passage that I quoted, there was a part about how the person that got killed probably had a stat of 20 if you added his Strength and Stamina stats together, but only 1 (one) Strength rune dropped from him when he died.

The strength rune that dropped from the guy’s death had a value of only 1 (one). The main character, Kang Hansoo, took that rune and his strength went up from 10 to 11, increasing by 1. But the guy who died had a combined Strength+Stamina stat of 20. So humanity as a whole lost 19 stat points from that guy dying. But Hansoo gained 1 stat point.

That’s why Hansoo said in his internal monologue that killing people for runes was absolutely forbidden. Because it benefits the individual (the killer) while harming humanity as a whole.

This point – that people killing each other for runes was one of the main reasons why humanity failed to survive in the abyss – is ABSOLUTELY KEY and central to the plot of Reincarnator!!! It is SO, SO CRITICALLY IMPORTANT to the story that I am absolutely infuriated by the webcomic’s failure to incorporate it.

Part of what made the Reincarnator webnovel so outstanding was that it gradually revealed its setting, backstory, central plot points and themes in an extremely terse but natural way – the Reincarnator webnovel was unique in that it mixed the dialogue, action, narration, and internal monologue together in a way that felt extremely natural.

Bad writers often use boring infodumps to reveal setting or backstory. Reincarnator doesn’t do that. Instead, it masterfully reveals the setting, backstory, character personalities, central plot points, major themes etc. in a very gradual and natural way, telling the reader only information that is directly relevant to the situation at hand.

The terseness of Reincarnator is what made these internal monologues so absolutely indispensable. Unlike other webnovels which can be extremely repetitive, Reincarnator does not like to repeat things. This means that when adapting Reincarnator, you CANNOT cut out bits like the internal monologues and expect to end up with a coherent story, because crucial information is often revealed in those internal monologues. So if you cut them out then you cut out many crucial bits of information and you end up with something that doesn’t make sense. That’s why it is SO, SO IMPORTANT for any adaptation of the webnovel to include those internal monologues, and why it’s such a fatal mistake for this webtoon adaptation to not include them. I am BEYOND PISSED OFF that these internal monologues were not included. It absolutely and directly degrades the story to the point where it cannot even be considered comprehensible anymore.

I was prompted to write this review because I saw the following comment on mangaread.org:

> Dimshke
> 7 days ago
> So, if you kill people you get a full point stat, why dont you just kill everyone and become stronger? And these guys who joined along are annoying

This comment got 2 upvotes and zero downvotes on mangaread.org. This EXACT QUESTION was FULLY EXPLAINED in the webnovel in the exact same chapter: Keldian actually did kill everyone for runes, but Hansoo considered the long-term consequences of what would happen if he did the same, and decided against it – all of his reasoning is explained in the webnovel.

The above comment got upvoted because the webtoon adaptation CUT OUT the part from the webnovel where Hansoo explained EXACTLY WHY he considered it absolutely forbidden to kill people for runes.

What makes this EVEN MORE UNFORGIVABLE is that the part that got cut out, the part in the monologue about the guy who got killed by the fairy having a combined Strength+Stamina stat of 20 but only dropping a +1 Strength rune, was one of the BEST POSSIBLE ways to illustrate just why people killing each other for runes was so detrimental to humanity’s survival. But this wasn’t mentioned AT ALL in the webcomic. This absolutely infuriated me and is what motivated me to write this angry review.

I am BEYOND FUCKING PISSED OFF at this webtoon adaptation for not including the internal monologues from the original webnovel. These internal monologues were a crucial part of what distinguished and set Reincarnator apart from all the other trashy reincarnation/regression webnovels. Moreover, cutting out the internal monologues means cutting out crucial information without which the reader CANNOT make sense of the story.

EDIT: I forgot to answer the question of why Hansoo didn’t kill people for runes, so here’s a brief explanation:

Hansoo’s mission, the ENTIRE REASON why he went back in time, was to save humanity and prevent it from being destroyed 50 years down the line. People killing each other for runes was one of the direct causes of humanity’s downfall so that’s why it was IMPERATIVE for Hansoo to prevent that from happening again.

Hansoo’s plan for this was to become strong so that people will follow him so that people will follow his rules which include the rule that “killing people for runes” is absolutely forbidden.

But if he became strong by killing other people for runes, then people will see that and think “hey, this guy became strong by killing other people for runes but now he doesn’t want us to kill other people for runes, this guy is a total hypocrite who’s just trying to prevent us from becoming as strong as him!” And they won’t listen to him.

That’s why Hansoo had to behave himself right from the start, not only to set a good example for the rest of humanity to follow but also so that he would have moral authority and not be seen as a hypocrite. Another reason, I think, was to show people that it was possible to become strong without killing other people for runes, so that people wouldn’t think that they had to kill other people for runes in order to become strong.

All of this and many other things like this were fully explained in the webnovel. That’s why it deserves the “psychological” tag which is what really sets it apart from all the trashy generic webnovels. That’s also why the webtoon cutting all of this out made me so angry.

Nothing enrages me more than seeing one of my favorite webnovels get butchered like this. Fuck this webtoon.