Orange Marmalade VS Webtoon

Orange Marmalade is one of the few vampire love stories I've actually enjoyed. To a point. I mean, Carry On by Rainbow Rowell was better in tens of thousands of ways. Anyhow, I read the webtoon and then found out last year that a drama adaptation was about to come out. Which version was better? Let's see...

NOTE: This post contains several important spoilers to the webtoon, although the drama section is virtually spoiler-free.

Orange Marmalade is set in a universe where vampires live quietly amongst humans. They stopped drinking human blood centuries ago, and now many of their special traits have disappeared. In short, they look and act just like humans do. Baek Ma-ri is one of these vampires. She attends school just like any human girl would. But Ma-ri despises humans and closes herself off from people. All of her childhood friendships have become a trauma to her, so she has no interest in becoming close with anyone. Then she meets Jung Jae-min, a fairly-mysterious boy who falls in love with her, and finds a true friend in eccentric classmate Jung Soo-ri, and begins to really love living for the first time.

  This isn't a favourite of mine. I didn't particularly like Ma-ri or Jae-min, which is a problem I often have with books. I've mentioned this before on my Hana Yori Dango VS Boys Over Flowers post, but sometimes an author just can't bring their characters to life. Jae-min, especially, was so one-dimensional. This is why I was so pumped to hear that Yeo Jin-gu would be portraying Jae-min in the drama. I'd already seen his breathtaking performance in Missing You so I knew he'd be able to take that bland character and make him into something special. Anyway, it's safe to say I wasn't even slightly interested in the romance aspect of Orange Marmalade, rather it was the underdog story that caught my attention. How are you supposed to rise from the ashes if the entire world thinks you're a monster? Watching Ma-ri try to gain acceptance into society as a vampire was the most compelling part of the story, so I'm sad it took a backseat to the romance.

So then came the drama version. I'm not even sure where to start here. Firstly, it hardly resembles the original story. Instead, it seems like the creators took the basic concept and twisted an entirely new story around it. Although the characters were the same, they were effectively living in a different universe. In many ways, this was better, because there were a lot of moments in the original Orange Marmalade which I see I could un-see (like, poor Shi-hoo's entire arc), but there were also fantastic moments that were lost because of this. For example, we lost that dramatic reveal near the end of the story that Jae-min completely despises vampires, long after he and Ma-ri had began dating. That was revealed right at the beginning here, which I felt was a loss of potentially great conflict. But more importantly, Jung Soo-ri's role was so rapidly diminished she was just a background character with a handful of lines and absolutely no contribution to the plot whatsoever. I loved Soo-ri - she was the first person to accept and love Ma-ri for what she was. Alas, Soo-ri was wasted.

  Anyhow, that aside, I actually thought the drama was pretty good. The series was split into three parts, which I wasn't aware of whilst watching, so the first third felt rushed and confusing, but seeing it as a whole made the story feel unique and interesting. As expected, Yeo Jin-gu gave a winning performance, and Seolhyun was also cute as a downtrodden but hopeful Baek Ma-ri. The two of them were adorable together, which is far more than I can say about their original characters. The underdog story was definitely not overlooked, either, and it filled the final third, making for a deeply satisfying ending. 

In conclusion, I preferred the drama. Yes, many of the best parts of the webtoon weren't used, but the drama was able to use victimised vampires in a far better way than the webtoon did in the first place. I didn't enjoy the way it was paced, but I came out of Orange Marmalade glad I'd decided to watch it. For a much sweeter underdog story, try Sassy Go Go, and for a musical one, try Dream High. If you want something just as fantastical, try my favourite webtoon Pinocchio.