Han SeungHee and Jeon JinSeok - One Thousand and One Nights, vol. 01 (Eng. trans.)

[oyceter]

This is a retelling of 1001 Arabian Nights, only this time, Scheherazade is the boy Sehara. I was excited about the gender bending until I learned that the sultan was still played by a man.

So far, the story is following the frame fairly well. The sultan (I forgot his name in this version) marries his father's old wife, who then goes on to betray him. In return, he decides to marry a woman every day and execute her the next morning. To stop the carnage, Sehara steps in and begins to tell stories.

Well, actually, I can't remember if the sultan's wife was originally his stepmother in the original. Also, instead of doing it for the sake of the murdered women, Sehara steps in because the sultan rescued him (or he rescued the sultan) a while ago, and he fell in love with the sultan. We also get the stubbly, glasses-wearing, extremely hot vizier, now imprisoned, and not Sehara's father, and a near-incestuous relationship between Sehara and his sister.

Honestly, I found the frame story to be rather boring, which is sad because I like the original so much. But they removed the women! So instead of getting a contrast to the sultan's evil wife in Scheherazade, you get the sultan's misogyny having him accept a male wife instead, which I feel reflects poorly both on a feminist and on a glbt level.

On the other hand, I may read the next one because the art is so gorgeous. Also, instead of staying with the tales from Arabian Nights, the manhwaga is adapting tales from all over. I really loved the story within this volume, which stars a cold, icy princess. I would read an entire series about her if there were one!

On a side note, when I was reading this at rachelmanija's, I noticed that the manhwaga had a thing for Chinese culture. The younger sister notes that Chinese people eat "dirty" things like pork -- I bristled at that, until another character refuted it or said it wasn't forbidden for them. There were other random mentions of Chinese culture worked in, like a Romance of the Three Kingdoms reference, along with the Chinese influences (sideways, given that it's Turandot) in the story. I was very amused by this, given that the manhwa is still set somewhere in Baghdad (I think).

Comments

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

Sehara actually winds up in Scheherezade's situation not because he's already in love with the sultan (although he does soon develop more positive feelings for him than the immediate situation justifies, apparently partly based on the fact that the sultan was supposedly a benevolent ruler and a really great guy until his dead wife's duplicity warped his mind), but because Sehara's younger sister is next on the list of wives/murder victims and he's desperately trying to save her. Of course, since the sister, who really is incestuously in love with Sehara (or at least thinks she is, in a "first crush" kind of way--Sehara seems to have more standard brotherly feelings toward her), sticks around instead of having the sense to flee, logically this plan should have wound up with both of them getting killed as soon as the sultan found out that Sehara was actually a guy disguised as a girl.

[seajules]

It's all in the reading. For myself, the flashbacks to his previous meeting with the sultan make his sacrifice of himself for his sister look like a convenient excuse to get closer to the object of his crush. The fact that he doesn't leave with Dunya when he has the chance, to make sure she gets out of the kingdom, but rather stays to free the sultan, only reinforces the idea that he's in it for the sultan.

[oyceter]

Yeah, that's how I read it too.

[oyceter]

Well, I think like seajules says, the flashback in the manhwa is meant to make the reader think that Sehara is doing a lot of it out of love for the sultan.