"I was not the first incident — only the first to go public."
A survivor tells her own story of fighting back against sexual violence in the manhwa industry.
I'm Here is an autobiographical work written and drawn by the survivor of a sexual violence case that shook the manhwa world in 2014. From the exploitative apprenticeship structures endemic to the industry to the ugly face our society turns toward victims of sexual violence, the author has rendered her heartbreaking ordeal — and her triumph...
This is a pretty heavy manhwa that focuses on the life of a female aspiring manhwa author. Triggers include domestic violence, sexual harassment, rape and suicide. Nothing graphic however, but lots of introspective moments about what the main character feels and the aftermath. Overall this perspective was very interesting, and definitely gives me a lot to think about.
Now, language wise, I struggled, a lot. The grammar is not necessarily extremely hard, although sentences can get a bit long, but it's mostly still intermediate grammar. What got me however is the vocab. There is a lot of topic specific vocab surrounding sexual harassment and law, so I was looking up words left and right. And it's not like it being a manhwa helps that much with understanding vocab in context either, because there can be quite a lot of text in a single page. This is particularly true in the last couple chapters, where topic specific vocab is abundant.
Overall, I very much recommend this, just keep in mind the trigger warnings before reading this.