Please Read No Home I Am Begging You

No Home has officially ended today! (Well, technically yesterday. It took me a while to type this post.) It was a fantastic ride the whole way through. It was pretty convenient to have found out about it when it was just under half a year shy of finishing, but part of me honestly wishes I had found it much earlier so I could have stuck with it longer even if I had to wait through so many more painful cliffhangers for updates... in any case, it was a very good ending. While I had a general idea of how it may end, I was unsure for a while what direction and nuance the ending would take with the characters, and it ended up being both exactly what I was expecting while still leaving me pleasantly surprised. I'm thoroughly satisfied with the story's conclusion and it bolsters my previous recommendations for the comic overall tenfold.

That being said, I want to take the opportunity to talk more abt some things I liked abt the comic that I didn't cover in my first post. Nothing huge, just stray things I appreciated about the story that I didn't squeeze into my first post, and also some extra context on how I found out about the comic.

One thing I really like was that for how dramatic the story can be, it never felt like it ever veered into melodrama. Many Tumultuous things happen and some characters are really put through the wringer, but none of the events or the character's reactions to them feel exaggerated or forced. This doesn't just apply to negative events or reactions, but also positive ones, like the feel-good moments don't feel overly sappy either, If that makes sense. I'm not really sure how to articulate it. Like, there are a lot of moments where, if it Did go a bit melodramatic (or sappy), I wouldn't have necessarily faulted it for that. It's not what I actively wanted out of it, but I would understand the impulse to go in that direction if it did. I never found myself going "phew thank God" at the more nuanced moments of writing but more "Damn, really?" that it held itself back, but not in a way that disappointed me. I guess what I'm trying to get at is that No Home has a near-perfect stride in hitting its emotional beats by striking a good balance with its drama: it knows exactly when to hold back and when to let loose. When it does get dramatic in a heightened way, it feels completely natural and earned. But I find that its all the better for the places it chooses to hold back, and this is especially highlighted in the ending, I think. I don't want to spoil it obviously but I think it ended in a very subdued manner, yet not in a way that is lacking.

Another thing I really enjoyed was the level of detail put into the Entirety of it... Though I have just finished the story, I want to reread the whole thing right away. It will be my third time rereading it. The first time I reread it was almost immediately after catching up with the story for the first time, and the second time I reread it was shortly after my first reread. And through each reread I felt like I unearthed more and more about the characters that I didn't see or understand fully on my first read, bc of how layered they are... Even though the story as a whole is very simple and uncomplicated, the characters themselves are very much Not. It makes rereading feel very rewarding since it has a high level of recontextualization; since you understand the characters better some scenes read completely differently with proper context and its like getting a brick thrown over your head repeatedly. Even the final chapter has given new context to some scenes that happened over a hundred chapters ago. There's also a lot of small details hidden in the story with things that aren't told outright but implied in the artwork that are hard to catch on a first read... idk this comic just feels like a gift that keeps on giving. Even though it ended I feel like it has more still left to give.

Now for the aforementioned context on how I found out abt this comic.... it's a bit of a long story but a very special one to me. No Home is actually Wanan's third work; they have made 2 other manhwa beforehand: Welcome to Room #305 (often called Room 305 for short), and Hana. Room 305 is.... quite old by this point. It ran from 2008 - 2011, but didn't get a full English translation until just recently. It's about a homophobic guy who moves into a new apartment for college, and finds that he has a gay roommate. It's a gag/comedy manhwa for the most part but also a meditation on the lifestyle and struggles of LGBT people within Korea specifically. This is actually the first work I read from Wanan. It was recommended to me by a friend way back while I was in high school, but at the time only an incomplete English scanlation existed. I enjoyed the chapters that were translated, but lamented the fact that the translation was just dropped and hadn't been touched in years. Since it never got updated, it inevitably faded from my memory. Fast forward nearly 10 years later, I see talk of No Home on twitter from Alien Stage fans saying that an animated adaptation of it by the same animation studio as Alien Stage is coming soon, and giving high praise + recommendations to the manhwa it's being adapted from. This piques my curiosity so I check it out and instantly fall in love with it. Imagine my shock when I look into it a little more and find out that it has the same author as the comic I read a decade ago! Not only that, but in the time between me forgetting about Room 305 and discovering No Home, Room 305 had gotten translated in its entirety! I cannot express how mindblown and overjoyed I was to find out about this. 

It turned out that Room 305 got repeatedly picked up and dropped again by multiple scanlation groups, so it got slowly translated in piecemeal chunks by different translators over a long period of time, but even then a large chunk of the story had still been left untranslated. Then Whatafruit, the scanlator of No Home, decided to run the home stretch and translate the rest of Room 305. I'm honestly so grateful to this guy. Thanks to him I was able to read one of the best comics I've ever read in my life, and also was finally able to see the conclusion of an old story I enjoyed Back In The Day. After rereading No Home a couple times I got around to rereading Room 305, and then reading the rest of the story that I was unable to when I first found out about it. As Wanan's debut work, it feels unpolished, but has a lot of great heart to it. I see in it a lot of the roots of Wanan's storytelling and writing strengths that got nurtured and refined in No Home. I might write a separate post abt it in more detail sometime, but in any case I'm glad I was finally able to read the whole thing, and have both No Home and Whatafruit to thank for it. Since No Home has been completed, Whatafruit intends to translate Wanan's second work Hana soon since no one else ever got around to doing that for whatever reason. After having read both No Home and Room 305, I can't express how excited I am for it. Wanan is such a fantastic writer on so many fronts and I'm sure Hana will deliver the same way their other works did. And whatever Wanan is going to work on next now that No Home is complete, I'm excited for too.

No Home has made me experience Every emotion at once. It pulverized my organs and crushed my bones to dust in a way few other works have been able to. I'm sad to see it end, but it's a story that's going to stick with me for a very long time to come.