I sometimes think to myself that mangaka/manhwaga must be determined to embarrass their readership with these silly-sounding titles that are like their genre’s equivalent to the shirtless Fabio covers in romance novels.
When this manhwa was recommended to me, I wasn’t enthusiastic because of the title. Call it judging a book by its cover, but although titles like this never fail to elicit a smile from me, I tend to not give them a second glance to explore their contents further. Packaging matters a lot in fiction, some readers pick books solely on the cover, others on the blurb, and some more by the title, a fact publishers know well or they wouldn’t spend millions on all three.
I’m glad I decided to trust the recommendation over the corny title, because My Secretly Hot Husband was one of the most charming manhwas I’ve read in recent years. A mix of the complicated and the simple, the cute and the silly, the melodramatic and a dash of seriousness, and more adventure and engaging characters than I had expected.
This manhwa was adapted from a South Korean novel, which I hadn’t known about until after I finished reading all the volumes currently translated into English (four so far, and more coming this year). The plot is more an Isekai tale than Beauty & Beast, but shares enough elements with the fairy tale to appeal to me.
It’s the story of Letitia Grey, a young orphan girl living a hard Cinderella existence at the hands of her abusive uncle, who sacrifices her to an arranged marriage to the Monster Lord of the North to fulfill an oath. When she arrives in her husband’s castle, she learns she’s now in a different world full of demons that must be contained by the Northern Kingdom lords that serve as a human wall like the Night’s Watch in Game of Thrones to prevent the demons from overtaking the kingdom. One of these lords, Erden Halstead, has a reputation for being ”monstrous” and a strange habit of wearing a mask/helmet combo resembling a monster’s head when in reality he is strikingly good-looking. Why does he believe he’s dreadful to look at? We don’t know, it’s a mystery in the beginning, and learning the answer is the draw of the first volumes and, if you are familiar with Beauty & Beast, you’ll likely guess the reason before it’s explicitly stated.
For me, this sold me on the manhwa after the first volume, when I was still unconvinced that this would be worth the investment. In B&B retellings, it’s not uncommon for the Beast figure to be really handsome and the “beastliness” to be only decorative, a trope I detest, and in the first scene that Erden takes his mask off and asks Letitia how can she endure the sight of him every day, I confess I rolled my eyes and took it for clumsy fishing for compliments on his part. Then I wondered if this was an Eros & Psyche situation, in which Eros is a gorgeous god with a horrible reputation as a monster and he hides his appearance from Psyche in an attempt to be loved by himself before being seen. And, after the 3rd volume, I finally understood it: Erden does genuinely believe he’s disgusting to look at, it’s not a ruse and he’s not feigning it or asking for reassurance.
Why? It’s an Eros situation with a slightly Faustian version of Beast’s situation, is all I’m going to say so as to not spoil too much. I want to see this explained further, because I could be entirely right or entirely wrong in my guesses from the crumbs we’ve got so far.
The second thing that sold me on the story was Letitia herself, her character growth. She goes from a crushed little girl to the self-assured Lady of Halstead Castle. If Erden is the heroic fighter and demonslayer, Letitia is the diabolical (pun intended) schemer capable of swindling a Greater Devil out of the clothes on his back. They are matched perfectly: their demon-hunting styles are complementary, one slays them in the battlefield, and the other slays them in their own homes.
It’s Letitia that carries the plot on her shoulders. Needing to win the day for the Halsteads over the devils makes her come up with plans ranging from the hilarious to the serious, from scamming flamboyant metrosexual Belaire out of his wealth and status to out-manipulating dangerous cult-leader Mephistel to save innocent believers. It’s like this girl is in the devils’ world to scam the scammers and manipulate the manipulators. And, in the process, she shows herself as more morally grey than you were led to think at first; she does good and protects her people but her methods aren’t necessarily always ethical because she’s wrestling with devils, not precisely known for ethics or morality. I liked this ambiguity quite a bit.
Before I forget, has anyone noticed the predominance of redhead/brunet pairings in stories with Beauty & Beast undertones? Heh. I’ll have to look deeper into this trope one day. This manhwa doesn’t escape this trend: Letitia is red and Erden is dark.
The story begins by the end, with the couple already married and everything that led to this marriage behind them, so a lot is confusing and a lot isn’t understood. That can bore the reader and cause them to abandon this series, and it also can make this feel choppy and full of plotting holes and loosely woven threads. Explanations are given in layers, like peeling an onion, which requires patience. The tone of the story can be cheesy and YA cute, too, and that mightn’t appeal to those that want a more circumspect tone.
It takes a while to warm up to the relationship between the main characters. Letitia can come across as too enamoured of Erden’s looks, she even says “who would want to divorce a handsome husband?” when he grovels that he should set her free to be happy with someone else; and Erden does grovel often enough that he can come across as a simp. I’m not a fan of this insecure/reassurer dynamic in a context of Beauty & Beast stories, though I understand the psychology of it, and in the case of Erden, I rolled with it considering what he is, even if I wish he was more self-assured and imposing, and didn’t beat himself up so much. And yes, I’m aware that there’s an explanation for his appearance issues and look forward to how this will unfold.
Romance-wise, one development that I’m also not a fan of is that the slow-burn is made artificially slower through the characters’ refusal to acknowledge their mutual feelings, and through the frequent talk of divorce, which became a plot device to drag the story round, because they keep postponing the signing of the divorce with some excuse or other, and once the “obstacle” is solved, they drag their feet back to talking about divorce.
Besides this corny dynamic, it also felt that Letitia has it too easy over the devils, because as smart as she is, she’s still an inexperienced human and those she faces off with are immortal devils, for goodness’ sake, they should know better than let themselves be bested by a slip of a human girl. Even Lucifer says as much! (That scene was amusing, I must admit.)
Will the stakes rise later? Will Letitia (and Erden by association) face really serious danger sometime? Will one of her plans fail one day? Will she find her devilish nemesis? Not sure; the stakes are high for her, but so far it doesn’t look like she can fail. Making her struggle more than she has would probably add more emotional impact to her arc, but we are so early in the story and for all I know this was always meant to be just a cute story with no real danger of struggle and failure.
