cry or better yet beg is a drama romance about how if you torture someone for years they'll fall in love with you introduced to webtune in November 2023 it ran for 24 chapters before going on Hiatus this March now I've heard a lot of people talk about how bad this comic is but after reading it I'm honestly shocked that webtune would even allow this comic to be posted to their site this ain't just a fun to read poorly written garbage web tune like I usually look at I straight up think this comic shouldn't be on this website but don't take my word for it let's take a look at cry or better yet beg our main character Leila luellin is a 12-year-old orphan girl being abused and passed around from one family member to another unwanted and derel Lea is sent to live with her last remaining relative her Uncle Bill Bill had no idea that ilila was being sent to him but he takes pity on her after seeing how she had been treated by the rest of their family he lets her stay with him until he finds something to do with her but like your and the pet he claims he doesn't want he grows really attached to her and lets her stay through the rest of her childhood Bill and Lila live and work on the estate of the Grand Duke of a place called Berg he and the Mansion staff all come to love Leila and do their best to take care of her and if that's all the story was I wouldn't really have any qualms I love the found family Trope and I really like historical fiction I was just genuinely happy to just keep watching Lila live her imperfect life as best she could in a cute little an of Green Gables type of story story but then the male love interest gets introduced no not that male love interest this one yeah meet Maas the main love interest for Lila throughout the comic now when the two meet for the first time Lila is 12 and Mathias is 18 years old a full-on adult now to be fair to the comic nothing happens between them when they're at that age which is good but it really begs the question of why they would have the two characters meet at the age they meet with such a weird age Gap in the story I can pretty confidently say there is no reason for Mias to not be closer to her in age like our secondary love interest Kyle who's also 12 now there's nothing wrong with them meeting at that age and getting romantically involved when they're both old enough to be consenting adults but as we'll see later in the comic the weird age power Dynamic only gets weirder and weirder I say he's the main love interest but when he's introduced and actually for most of the comic Leila doesn't really like Mias the reason for this being is that she loves the birds in the forest and he hunts them for sport before Maas had arrived home for the summer Lea had made the forest on the property her Sanctuary she adores drawing and writing about the birds and creatures of the forest and Maas disturbs that piece by brutally slaughtering them but since he's the Duke there's not really much Lila can do other than bury the birds and hope he'll grow tired of hunting them at this point in the comic Lila and Kyle are aged up to become 18 meanwhile Mias is now 25 Maas and Claudine a rich girl Lea grew up with are set to be married by the end of the summer in an arranged marriage meanwhile Kyle has grown up to be absolutely infatuated with Lila and wants to confess his feelings for her he wants to marry her someday but doesn't want to tell his feelings for her quite yet since he still likes the friendship he has with Ila I say all that but let's be real this isn't going anywhere the author clearly has a favorite ship and any other character is just a roadblock for our main leads to get so they can fulfill the author's preferred ship because Mias hunts the bird she likes Lila is one of the few people on the estate who doesn't jump at the chance to speak to the oh so important Duke Mathias this causes him to want her as she's the only thing he can't have just by asking for it so when Lila rushes away from him to go off with Kyle who he sees as below him it's like a slap in the face with a new challenge presented to him Maas now sets his sights on Leila completely disregarding the feeling of his soon Tobe wife Claudine since she hates him for killing birds and he doesn't really want to stop doing that he decides the only way he can get her is through basically torturing and manipulating her using his position of power to make her miserable he makes her repeat already finished tasks makes her come to his house alone as well as keeping her against her will until she does tasks he orders her to do when Lea tries denying him of any of these things he uses his powerful position against her making her feel that if she denies him her uncle will lose his job and when Lila further continues to go against Mias he takes her belongings from her or even degrades her as a person in one instance he throws a hat her uncle had gifted her out the window and into a river and when Lila tries to retrieve it she ends up nearly drowning and after watching her nearly die over an incident he caused he jumps into the river to save her after they both get out of the water he notices she's still holding on to the hat and laughs at her when Lila becomes enraged by his actions he then tells her it's her who should be apologizing to him for making him jump into the river after her making her apologize repeatedly until he deems it an acceptable apology after she leaves he notices she had left her glasses behind and keeps them for himself Lila realizes she lost them and starts to look all over the forest for them coming to the conclusion that either a crow had taken them because they were shiny or Maas had them since they were no longer where she had left them sees her searching every Crow nest and doesn't say anything about having her glasses hoping she'll get fed up and come to his place to search for them she does eventually retrieve them after going to steal them from him in the middle of the night wearing a see-through night gown good job Leila very smart of you Mias relents and gives them back to her not before telling us he desires this woman with a full moon now becoming shrouded in darkness to represent his not so well-intentioned feelings towards Lea after this encounter Matias sets up a hunt and kills multiple birds in hopes Lila will come out of the safety of her home to come bury them in the woods he lies in wait until ilila appears telling her to continue on with her business while he watches her and when Lila says she's going to leave after burying the last bird Matias threatens to shoot another unless Lila tells him why she likes birds so much not wanting the life of another creature to be cut short Lila relents and expresses that she likes Birds because they're always there no matter where she travels there's always the sight of a beautiful bird for her to enjoy after this Maas tells her that she should stay in her place that he likes his world to be the way he wants it and that ilila needs to stay put he makes it very clear that to him she is not a person she is an object a prize to be had and then placed on the shelf and immediately ignored and after this interaction the comic went on Hiatus in March of 2024 this is a little out of the ordinary since it's rare for a web tune to go on a break so shortly after starting according to the artist van jay they ran out of storyboards that they had planned but I also heard rumors that they were just straight up bullied off of the platform by the audience and seemingly for no reason now I wasn't super comfortable with the dynamic meias and Lea had but when I was reading I kind of just assumed we were heading in one of two directions a Maas is the explicit villain of this comic and Lila would gain some sort of victory over him either by vanquishing him in some way or just escaping or B mathas is headed for a pretty extreme enemies to lovers Redemption Arc where he grows as a person and stops being such a bad guy because he realizes that ilila isn't going to be with him the way he is but as I was reading the comic I noticed some very interesting comments which kept talking about how the Yonder novel the comic was based on and how it's apparently actually much much worse than the comic Yonder is an app where you can read novels a chapter at a time paying per chapter owned by the neighbor Corporation who also owns webtune as well as watpad sometimes when stories on Yonder get popular enough they'll be adapted into a web tune which is the case with cry or better yet beg something else extremely important I want to note is Yonder is specifically labeled as 17 plus on the App Store so since I was interested in finding out what happened next in the story I did something I have never done before I read a book well part of a book that is as the novel is so despicable and hard to read I eventually gave up and found a story synopsis and double checked if my info was correct with the novel version so I've read basically the worst parts of the novel and even that left me like absolutely shocked and disgusted with the Direction the Story went for starters one of the first differences between webtune maias and novel maias is he's straight up evil and vindictive towards Lea which isn't necessarily a terrible thing to have a main character be some of my favorite characters tend to be very flawed people Kim Wexler from better kol frames someone who wronged her as a drug addict to get revenge and get a big money payout ruining their life in the process Joker from the movie Joker murders a teleost because he was being made fun of by him and these are really great anti-heroes or villains because they have clear goals and don't care how they accomplish them maias is straight up a villain who does reprehensible things for selfish reasons and that wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for the fact that I'm pretty sure that's not how you're supposed to see him I am almost positive that the author's intent is for the reader to be rooting for him and Lila to get together the characters I mentioned before Joker and Kim Wexler do horrible things but a they're super charismatic and likable or at least entertaining in some way like a train wreck would be and B each one of them receives comeuppance for their horrible actions Kim Wexler is left feeling like a shell of herself and miserable and unfulfilled Joker though the movie leaves it a little unclear goes mad and is seemingly arrested and put into the Arkham Asylum they were fun to watch and get to understand their motives and even root for a little but you as the viewers see the consequences of their actions and are left to understand how what they did was wrong and how they'd be better off if they had made different choices maias is in no way charismatic or even fun to watch fall apart it's it's less like watching a train wreck and more like seeing a video of someone getting violently injured and it's just so shocking that you want to look away furthermore he receives absolutely no come upins for his actions spoilers not that it matters it's not worth reading but he and ilila end up together with Lea saying she loved him all along in doing this the novel really makes it seem like that both the universe and the author tactically condone his actions saying to the reader do this and nothing bad will happen and you can get away with it which is Despicable especially because this novel is explicitly labeled as being for young adults which in common literary terms is often used as a label for books for ages 12 to 18 so since they end up married and together it doesn't really feel like a story where in Mias is the villain and it's not a story where two enemies become lovers I've come to the conclusion that it's just a horrible book about a woman getting Stockholm syndrome for a man who is literally just evil and and then lives happily forever miserable with her mind being too broken to realize that she is miserable the entire premise behind the title cry or better yet beg came from miah's telling her to do so in order for her to receive her belongings that he had taken from her why do you hate me so much unlike her trembling voice Lila looked straight at him with abundantly Lucid eyes hating you makes me feel good Maas answered calmly raising one corner of his lips it's a great feeling when I see you cry and it's fun to see you beg yeah he sure seems like like marriage material babe out of the stuff I read before giving up it stuck with me that Maas and Claudine are officially engaged yeah that's right whilst doing all of this stuff Maas was an Engaged man who was already taken albeit in a Loveless arranged marriage Lila gets invited to a party the couple are hosting and while there Mias steals her shoes and tells her to cry in order to get them back ilila does satisfying Mias and she leaves the party that's the scene where the comic SL novel get its name the scene where he's just needlessly being cruel for no reason after all of this Kyle repeatedly proposes to Leila until her uncle pressures her into saying yes because he thinks she could potentially have a good life with Kyle after that something happened that made me put the book down for good and give up Lea's out climbing a tree to put a fallen baby bird back in its nest whilst climbing her ladder Falls and she slips nearly falling out of the tree Maas is headed that way looking for her and when he sees what's going on he tells her to beg for his help Lila does and falls and he catches her and doesn't let go Lila was scared shitless and desperately tried to break free but the more she wanted to resist the more helpless she felt whatever she did Lila couldn't push herself off of him and what follows is Lila trying to fight back by biting his ear which makes him drop her but then push her to the forest floor bites her back and starts to kiss her even going as far as to rip her shirt off before finally coming to a halt thinking to himself self that if that nobody woman Leila hadn't cried it would have been meaningless Vain and ultimately insignificant I wouldn't have such a visceral reaction to this if the writer wasn't treating it mundanely either matias's vicious actions are played off as not that bad by the narrator and even Leila herself her adolescent Sadness the unpleasant memories of her horrible first kiss all of the bewilderment and despair wound down as she was no longer alone referring to sadness over the experience as adolescent makes her feelings seem childish and overall insignificant the phrase adolescent sadness makes me feel as if she sad over spilt ice cream cones not sad over becoming a victim in an assault it also tones down matias's actions extremely Lea is just sad because her first kiss wasn't the way she wanted it not because she was prayed upon by someone older and more powerful than her poor little Ila's first kiss was ruined silly woman and her trivial emotions this also brings me back to the subject of age differences in Lila and maias while in the comic Lea is 18 when Mias starts acting the way he does the novel depicts a slightly different version every single person refers to Lea as a child from character interactions to inner thoughts to the narrator everyone refers to her as a child or a kitten or just overall naive and innocent I was already uncomfortable with the implications of the age difference in the topic but the novel really lays it on thick that child was always there in the Rosefield Garden as if she had become an Inseparable part of Arvis itself which means she was also a part of him what the [ __ ] I get that for the sake of the story the author is telling there's supposed to be an unbalanced power Dynamic but that being said that could have 100% been portrayed without maias being a straightup abusive PDF file coded psychopath he is a super rich dude who family employs her uncle and gives him a home if she doesn't do what he wishes she's at risk of getting her Uncle Bill potentially fired that fact alone is a huge power Dynamic ilila is in a very sensitive and compromising position Maas pushes her around and takes her dignity and self-respect he degrades her and treats her like less than an object more than anything he wants to hurt her I guarantee every reader understands the unbalanced power Dynamic without the in Ane age difference and comparisons to Lila being a child look it's kind of weird that the two meet when Lila's a kid and Mias is an adult it's really weird that throughout the book Leila is infantilized by everyone but put together I end up having this really unsavory feeling that the author would much rather just be writing a book about a child and an adult entering a non-consenting relationship and that feeling looms large over every minute of reading this novel as it goes goes on it just feels like ilila isn't a person anymore she had so much personality and heart in the beginning of the story but as time went on and Maas was introduced she just became empty just another female for Maas to torture one bad thing after another keeps happening to her in the beginning I was imagining myself as Lea free and wild in a forest drawing and writing what I saw being loved by my newfound family but after she was continuously bullied and prayed upon by maias I didn't want to be reading anymore once a character I loved and could relate to just became a punching bag throughout the entire story it was so sad to read and then it turned out she liked it and was in love with Maas from the beginning what a terrible message to portray don't worry she liked it this is something so many people of assault have to deal with in the aftermath of assault and for it to be an ending message to leave readers with is awful she just wanted to be with Maas it may be a stupid choice this might not be normal love even or even a healthy one but she didn't care anymore this felt too good to be in his arms like this to be the wrong kind of love she doesn't believe this love is wrong she loved this man she will only ever wish for this man by her side and if that was the point then maybe that would be something as Lea's situation gets worse and worse her life gets harder and harder to read your discomfort comt Rises with hers and you viscerally feel her pain and suffering as it happens the book hurts to read Because living her life hurts it's pain it's misery this horrible man has inflicted so much on her for absolutely no reason she is well as we do see no means of Escape for this ultimately terrible situation she's in against her will but no we're told that she loves him she has loved him since the very beginning and finds comfort in his presence has always loved Mias couldn't you tell victims of assault are exactly that victims and it's an absolute insult to have this story spend pages and Pages depicting a very visceral sexual assault and then have the main character have a plot induced labotomy so we can have a romantic fairy tale ending the villain of the story wins and the novel doesn't have the self-awareness to know that its main romantic male lead is the villain how could she have ever thought to resist him even with their lives threatened to be over now she couldn't help but look and Savor this image of his sweet eyes and warm touch her mind fought back with those heartless and affectionate moments they had had in the past Tangled in sheets and limbs wrapped around each other she wanted to turn a blind eye to it but it didn't work out it had always been like this she'd always been in love it's odd the Comic version of the story has me torn a little bit the Whimsical art style paired with the really terrible and distressing story is an interesting contrast to show the difficulty of recognizing red flags in relationships you're in in the movie extremely Wicked shockingly evil and vile the director Joe Berlinger specifically cast Zack Efron as Ted Bundy his reasoning behind this was because so many women fell prey to Ted Bundy because he was hot so they ignored red flags even after he was arrested and put to trial people couldn't believe such a handsome person could do such heinous things casting a heartthrob like Zack Efron to be an evil person like Ted Bundy was to put viewers in the mindset of guessing if such a person could do such things along with reminding viewers that pretty people can be evil too that being said it's hard to tell if the art contrasting the story was a purposeful choice or if they accidentally or purposefully tried to make the story seem less Sinister than it is dressing it up in the trappings of any other romance web tune like sure maybe they were setting up a thematic contrast but it's equally if not more likely they just didn't know what they were making and cuted it up I read a mini synopsis of what happens in the story and read the necessary chapters just to have a basic idea of the ending and it was actually vile Maas rap Leila which ends up with her getting pregnant she leaves the Mansion estate and an unrelated War breaks out Maas finds her and captures her imprisoning her and telling her he wants to kill K her unborn child because Lila pays more attention to it than him she begs him to release her and when he does the enemies attack Leila left alone calls for someone to rescue her and when no one comes she wishes for Mias to come because he's always been there for her and like I've already mentioned when he inevitably does she does a complete 180 and tells him that she's loved him from the very beginning All is Forgiven because the author decided it was so stories like this can work but not when the original novel doesn't seem to understand the magnitude of the actions Maas has committed in one of my favorite books speak by Lori house Anderson we follow the story of Melanie who gets sexually assaulted at a party and calls the police who break up said party unable to accurately describe what has happened to her to the police or any one of her friends Melanie becomes ostracized by the school and she nearly gives up on speaking altogether until Melanie learns to work through her feelings through her art and express and acknowledge what happened to her the difference between speak and cry or better yet beg is how the story treats the actions the victim then takes Melanie is deeply distressed by what happened to her she can't move forward or properly deal with what's happened to her Lea in the story acts like his actions are terrible but then when the story calls for it she completely forgets every terrible act he had done to her and says she loved him from the very beginning beginning these stories work when actions are condemned not glorified this should have been advertised as a horror or psychological novel not a drama romance and this leads to one of the most distressing things about this comic as I mentioned in the beginning this was originally a novel on Yonder certain Yonder novels if popular enough get picked up by webtune and adapted into Comics the neighbor company owns both Yonder and webtune so it is not a difficult task so why on Earth was this distressing piece of of crap made into a comic for a website where the main user base is young female children web Tunes user base is mainly made up of girls between the ages of 14 to 24 and the comic is being labeled as being for young adults which like I said earlier usually means ages 12 to 18 at least when you're talking about books or graphic novels web tune's content age range lists it as appropriate for readers age 16 or older either definition feels way out of L for the actual content presented in cry or better yet beg webtune has continuously been shown to advertise to children out of all of the novels they have access to why on Earth was this chosen this wasn't a story some singular artists posted to Canvas themselves it was a choice webtune made to have the story adapted when the novel had already been fully finished they looked at it in its entirety knowing how it ended and thought yeah let's put this one out there you can't advertise smut porn and then turn around and act like it's the reader's fault it was put in front of them in the first place especially when web tune's own terms of service say that their adult Comics may not contain sexual content and again let me make it absolutely clear that is for their adult Comics if the comics for adults can't feature explicit sexual content what the hell were the plans for adapting the story for young adults you Google young adult books and you'll get stuff like Fahrenheit 451 pery Jackson Charlotte's Webb The Outsiders Matilda Huck Finn Falon Our Stars sure it's a wide range of maturity levels and tones but none of those books would feature a character being repeatedly tortured and sexually assaulted and then ending up together as if nothing was wrong and nothing has happened in the first place do you really think a 12-year-old could tell the nuances of a bad relationship if the author of the novel couldn't even when visiting Yonder if you remember is the original origin of The Story You're War by the App Store that the app is 17 plus on top of that the novel is at least self-aware enough to point out that the story contains depictions of sexual assault when visiting it on Yonder but when you visit it on webtune it only has a warning of child abuse and I wouldn't get so heated if it weren't for the fact that some young girls are clearly reading this and being told that this treatment is okay if you search cry or better yet beg on YouTube You'll see video after video of cutesy little maias and Leila fan cams glorifying relationship built on sexual assault and mental torture it's having a real tangible googleable negative effect on how some readers perceive a healthy romantic relationship even if the artist van jay was planning on changing the story to be better and make the actions more believable for the pair at this point we've diverted so far from the original Source material that what was the point of adapting it in the first place if the story was going to be changed and altered so much from the original Source material the artist should have just written their own story I'm sorry I'm getting so heated but people setting out explicitly sexual content towards kids is something I don't [ __ ] around with the heinous contents of this novel should have just been a warning for webt not to adapt it did they even read the novel before thinking yes this is a good story our user base will love it worked to string along Laur Olympus fans for years so we should just keep pushing out stories where females keep getting abused I get that web tune can't moderate every single comic on their platform but when they specifically call and pay for an adaptation to be made I can't help but wonder why everything I've read everything I've heard about this comic is awful I don't care how the contents were going to be changed from the original Source material I care that the decision was made to basically put a race novel on webtune a site where statistically a young female user base resides there's a whole argument to be made about where to place the blame when a story like this comes up should parents be more involved with what their kids are reading absolutely should webtune have put this content on their app where they are fully aware of the young demographic they have no you can't advertise your app to Young audiences Mark the content as being for young adults and then turn around and claim ignorance when you put smut on a website for kids what would be a solution not putting smut port on a site where a primary user base is kids I really want to emphasize that web specifically had this made it wasn't a lone artist who posted to Canvas if webtune really wants to continue to make smut Port they should put it on another site they own the neighbor corporation owns a huge majority of story- based websites like web tune watpad Yonder you're telling me a huge company can't make a site specifically intended for older audiences they have a South Korean version of webtune so it's not so far out of the question to make another site sex it's not a matter of if they can get an audience it's a matter of why they're mixing it in with other Comics intended for younger audiences in conclusion I really dislike cry or better yet beg the web tune itself is still short with only 24 chapters so the story's contents could change in the comic version the art is absolutely stunning and I wish the artist could have worked on literally any other adaptation as far as where I'm ranking the comic it is last on the list I hate it I feel awful having read it and I wish I didn't know about the novel thank you so much for watching I'm MADD bites and I'll see you in the next one