 So, over the past however many years, Manga has gotten much bigger in the West than it used to be. And I think that's great because I was a fan of this stuff right when it was just starting to enter the mainstream, and it's been great to be able to talk about, you know, big mainstream series with other people who previously would not have been interested in it, and it's nice to see other people get introduced to stuff like Berserk and Vinlin Saga on the internet. It's a lot of fun, but what's even more fun to me than talking about big mainstream series, and again, nothing wrong with it, I'm not trying to be a hipster here, but I do really like talking about smaller series that very few people have ever heard of and no one ever seems to talk about, and that's what we're here to talk about today. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. So Veritas is a manga that ran from 2005 to 2010, and it's incredible. I love it. It's one of my favorites, and again, I'd never hear anyone talk about it. Now, technically, let's get this out of the way, technically it is a manhwa because it comes from Korea, but manga just sounds better, and more people will know what I'm talking about, so that's what I'm going to call it. And also, yes, I am aware that the name is supposed to be pronounced weritas because weritas is actually a Latin word, it means truth. But when I first read it, I called it veritas, and I think that sounds a little bit better personally, so that's what I'm going to continue calling it. And if that's a problem, I don't really care, so save your breath. The premise of this series will probably sound very familiar if you've read very much shown in manga. There is a Korean teenager who just loves to fight. His name is Magong Ryong, and he loves to fight, he's very good at it, he constantly picks on people and gets into trouble, and he just wants to be strong. He wants power for its own sake. Not for any real reason, he just wants to be strong. And one day he meets this dude by the name of Lightning Tiger, and Lightning Tiger fights a group of thugs by himself and wins, and Gong Ryong specifically says, whoa, that's crazy, you took on an entire group of guys, will you train me? And Lightning Tiger refuses at first until Gong Ryong jumps through a series of hoops for him, and eventually he says, alright kid, I'll train you. And when this is happening, Gong Ryong realizes Lightning Tiger isn't just some dude who's really good at martial arts, he actually has powers, like he can use his ki, or chi if you'd rather, but in Korea it's called ki, which is your inner energy, and he can use that to be way stronger and more durable than a normal person, and also he is a disciple of this martial arts school known as Enlightenment of Thunder and Lightning, so he can actually shoot Lightning from his hands and stuff. Gong Ryong is obviously really impressed by this, and they train together for a while, and then Lightning Tiger just says, hey, some people are after me, so I gotta disappear, I'll see you later. And then he disappears, and several months later the dudes who went after Lightning Tiger find Gong Ryong and they say, hey, we killed your master, and they show him proof that they did in fact kill him, and they don't want to kill Gong Ryong though, they actually invite him to this special school called Reunion, and basically at Reunion they study all these crazy, powerful martial arts, which are all a secret from the general population for some reason, I'm not sure why, and they try to unlock the potential of the human body and the potential of Ki, and it's worth noting that in this setting most martial arts are taught kind of like, well they're almost like the Sith, you know, it's a rule of two, there's one master and one apprentice, and the techniques just get passed down like that from generation to generation, and it's kept very secretive, and you're not supposed to teach people other than your apprentice, you're not supposed to teach people all your techniques, they're secret, but Reunion is taking all of these old traditional martial arts, and they're studying them, and they're cataloging them, and they're also combining them to make new mixed styles. So with the death of Lightning Tiger, Gong Ryong is the only one left who knows about enlightenment of thunder and lightning, and so they take him to Reunion specifically because they want to study his techniques, and then there's also people at that school who want him dead because he's Lightning Tiger's disciple, and they were enemies with him, and thus the story unfolds. So like I said, this probably sounds familiar if you know Shonen, you know, you have a thick-headed protagonist, you have a school where there's school sanction battling going on for some stupid reason, there's a secret society of people with superpowers, and there's no real reason for it to be secret, you know, like a lot of that you've probably seen before, but it's at least done in a very unique way, or in some cases it's just done super well. Take Gong Ryong for instance, he is not a typical Shonen protagonist by any means, in fact, he's an asshole, he is a gigantic asshole, like all he wants is power, and he just wants power for its own sake, like he doesn't really want anything to do with it. Like if this was a more traditional series, he'd probably have like some reason for it, like I just want to protect my friends, or I want to make enough money to get my sister's illness cured, or he would have some sad backstory about how he used to be bullied or something, but no, there's nothing like that here. In fact, Gong Ryong was the bully before he joined this secret underground martial arts world, like he was the bully, he got into a lot of fights and picked on people. What makes him really endearing though is just how committed he is to this dream of becoming strong. Like he will not give an inch in pursuit of this, like if people get in his way, he will step over them, or he will stomp down, and he perfectly acknowledges this. Like in one of the last chapters, he just straight up says, yeah, I'm just gonna do whatever I want, and other people can deal with the consequences. And it's almost like Monkey D. Luffy from One Piece in a way, where like Luffy is willing to go to all of these extreme lengths because he just wants to be the pirate king so badly, and so it's endearing, and you want to see him succeed. And Gong Ryong, even though, again, he is a douchebag about it, you still want to see him succeed. And it probably helps that a lot of the people he fights or comes into conflict with are also terrible people, so you want to see them get taken down a peg. They're just so arrogant and they look down on this guy that it's fun to watch them get egg on their face. It also helps that he suffers a lot over the course of the series. Like, I mean, he breaks bones. He gets horribly injured a lot. He nearly dies at several points, but he always just bounces right back, and he doesn't really even begrudge people for it. You know, he understands that what he signed up for and he's enjoying it. And he's also at a disadvantage in a lot of fights. Like, because in this school, people can get artificial key infusions and so they just become way more powerful. And Gong Ryeong does not have any of those, but that's actually okay because Enlightenment of Thunder and Lightning doesn't work on having a lot of key. It works on having really, really pure key that you can do more with. So, yeah, he doesn't have as much raw power as others, but you can still fight them. And it's just, it's cool to watch because, again, he's at a disadvantage, so he is an underdog. And he is also willing to fight dirty. There's a couple of moments I think of when I think of how he fights dirty, but the biggest one that stands out is one, again, near the end of the series, where he just taunts his opponent about their dead family members until they just get angry and charge him and then he hits them, and, well, it's a sucker punch, really, and takes them down. And it's like, well, that's fighting dirty, but it's a genuine tactic, I suppose. And speaking of the fights in this series, they are amazing. Like, almost all of them are just fantastic and among some of the best I've read. The fights need to be good in a series like this, too. Let's be clear about that. If you're a very heavy action-focused series and the action is not good, you're dead in the water. Like, you do not have a foundation to work from. It doesn't matter how good your characters and everything else are. If this is a big focus of your series and it's not good, you will fail. The artwork is really, really bold here. There's a lot of hard, fast lines that just make you feel every hit and every dodge and everything that goes on. It just seems, how do I put this? It just seems so much more important than it really is. Like, that's what good artwork does. It lets you forget that. It's just ink on a page or, in my case, lines on a screen because I read it online, but whatever. The point is, the artwork is really, really good. And it helps that the action in the series is mostly just martial arts. It's like fantasy martial arts where characters are jumping off the ceiling and stuff, which you can't really do in real life, but it is just regular martial arts where you hit the guy up, you hit the guy, you block, you dodge, you hit the other guy again. That sort of thing. It doesn't turn into just elemental blasts like a lot of Shonen manga does. And it just becomes, okay, I need to make my beam bigger than that guy's beam and it can get really boring if you fall into that trap. And so it doesn't get rid of elemental blasts entirely. Like I said, Gong Ryeong's power largely revolves around electricity. Like he can summon lightning from his hands and he's not the only one that can do things like that, but it is used sparingly. So when it shows up, it's a much bigger deal. And I liked that. And on top of that, I kind of got into this earlier when I mentioned that Gong Ryeong fights dirty, but it's not just about raw power. Like there's a lot of strategizing and a lot of, what's the word? Distracting opponents and misdirection and things like that. It's almost never about raw power other than a few points where they're just trying to show off how crazy powerful this villain is. And so all the fights in this work really, really well. And even the ones that are not as good as the others are still memorable to me. The story of Veritas is pretty simple, yes? Like it is largely just a series of fights leading into things. And there's like a bigger conspiracy kind of going on in the background. And we need to find out more about like the backstory of Lightning Tiger and some of the other characters that are at reunion that are in some way involved with him. But overall it is a very simple story until near the climax, when it goes in a direction I really didn't expect. But despite how simple it is, there are some hidden depths to it. See, the story is largely about the conflict between these traditional martial arts where again it's really secretive and isolated and these new mixed styles that are being created by reunion. Like it's basically, when you think about it, it's basically tradition and isolation versus modernity and cosmopolitanism, which is a very real thing that's going on in Korea and other countries, especially East Asian countries, where it's like, okay, we have all these old cultural practices and old traditions that don't always mesh with the wider world and we're trying to develop our economies and our technology and all that and join the wider world. But some people don't like that they're leaving too much of their traditions behind and this is a thing that's been going on for hundreds of years and obviously it's happened in other cultures as well. But like I said, this takes place in Korea, so it's all about that conflict between tradition and modernity, which is really, really fascinating. It's just explored through this lens of teenagers beating the shit out of each other. There is also some racism mixed in with this, obviously, like there is one character in this series who's Japanese and pretty much everyone else hates him just for being Japanese, like not everybody, everybody, but a lot of characters do, even though he's one of the only characters in this series that is genuinely a nice dude most of the time. And it is, again, just mixed in with that whole tradition and isolation thing, like you don't get to teach other people these arts, like these are ours, why are you sharing them with outsiders? It's kind of like a real world example of this would be back in the 60s, Bruce Lee got attacked by traditional Chinese kung fu masters because they really didn't like that he was teaching martial arts to people who were not Chinese. They were saying, what are you doing? This is ours, you do not have the right to give it to other people. Like it's part of what it means to be Chinese. And kind of a more modern example of this conflict would be a guy named Xu Xiaodong who is an interesting dude. You should look him up if you're not familiar, but basically he is a Chinese mixed martial artist who has gotten into a lot of trouble lately because he just came out and publicly said that Chinese traditional martial arts are actually really stupid and not that useful. And he has proved this several times by getting into fights with kung fu masters and beating them without even much trouble, really. But in spite of this, he has gotten attacked by both the Chinese public and the Chinese government because they feel like traditional Chinese martial arts are part of what it means to be Chinese and it feels like he's attacking them and their identity. It's like all of this comes together in Veritas in a very interesting way. The primary problem with Veritas is that it doesn't have an ending. There is no getting around that. There is no ending to this series. It kind of wraps up because it got canceled early and so it seemed like the author was trying to take things in a different direction, which like I said, there's a big twist near the ending, starts going in a unique direction, which I wasn't expecting. And he was probably hoping to bring it back later for like Veritas season two or just to jump back into the things later, but it just, it wound up never happening for various reasons. And so while it does kind of wrap up some of the story, it just, it feels like the ending of a season of television rather than a definitive ending. And so if you go into the series, just keep in mind that you'll never really learn how it wraps up. Now, like I said, this is not as much of a story driven series as before. We're mostly watching to see how Gong Ryong and some of the other characters wind up, but we're also not gonna see the conclusion of their character arcs. So just keep that in mind. Another issue I had, which is not the biggest problem but it still annoyed me was that the women in the series are just way over sexualized. Like it's not uncommon in manga. It's even, hell it's to be expected sometimes, but it's just really annoying. Like there'd be dramatic moments where characters are like fighting or something and it'll have a shot where you're looking at the characters but it's at an angle where you can see up someone's skirt or something like that. You know, or it'll show a character in the shower for a minute or something. Like admittedly it could be worse. I've seen much worse examples of this sort of thing but it is still annoying. You know, I'm not against the idea of having some sexy titillating bits in there but like at least leave it out of the dramatic moments. At least leave it out of the fights and stuff. Although I will say that most of the women characters in this series do a lot more than women characters in other shonen manga do. Like they actually participate in the story and several of the main villains are women characters like Gong Ryong's first major opponent in the first big fight in the series is a woman. And just things like that. You know, they do actually participate in this. They're just oddly sexualized in that. I don't know, that just annoyed me. And some of the fights in this also do drag on a lot which is a problem common in the genre I know but it's still very annoying. Like, okay, sure. This fight goes on for like three chapters, that's fine. But once it starts going to four, five, six chapters it's like, man, can we please wrap this up? You know, like most of the fights are really good, like I said, but that is a thorn in the side that drags down several of them. Like they're just too long, clean it up a little. It feels almost like the author got away from his editor at a few points, but whatever. The point is some of the fights are just too long. And finally, this is not really a problem that is the fault of the author or anything. But the translations of this series are just, they're not good. Okay, like as far as I'm aware you can't buy official English translations of Veritas. Like as far as more you can't buy like physical books or anything, you can only read it online. And the only translations available online are fan translations. And so you just wind up with like some weird grammar and odd dialogue and bits that are a little hard to understand because they're just written weird. And like, it's just not great. Okay, the translation isn't great, which does drag the whole thing down. It's not a massive problem. I was never super confused about the story or anything, but it is annoying and it is a problem. And I've noticed it a lot more when I was going through it again for the first time in years in order to make this video. Like it's just annoying. And I guess if you speak Korean maybe just try and find the original that might be better. But yeah, that's about all I have to say. Overall, Veritas is a really good time. It's a really good action series. And if that sort of thing appeals to you, check it out. And if it doesn't appeal to you, then I would still recommend reading at least the first chunk of the story to see if you are into it. You know, I would recommend reading up until the end of the first big fight. And if you're still not into it by then, then you probably won't enjoy the series. But if you're getting to the end of that and you go, hell yeah, I like this, then please read it to the end. Because so few people know about Veritas and I think that it deserves to be spread around. And that's all. So check out my social media stuff and follow me there and continue watching and rating, commenting, video, like the video, subscribe. Goodbye. Bye. Super special thanks to everyone who has watched this far. 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