Have you ever wanted to read but also not read? If so, then you'll get an extra kick out of Choco Latte by Anne! So let's kick off this month of black history, lonely hearts, quarantined birthdays, and purple space women based on birthstones with a bang!
Summary
Silence truly is golden as two high schoolers have their lives forever changed upon the appearance of a cup of choco Latte. After this appearance, the two seemingly can't get each other out of their head, which soon leads to a love story that will leave their entire school shaking in adorable misunderstandings and cute blushes—all without uttering a single word.
Characters
Lily: Our main heroine, Lily, is a cute, shy, and overall cheerful girl. She always tries her best with her friends, but she is also utterly useless around boys.
Kyle: A natural-born worker and protector. He seeks mainly to make all of the women in his life happy and wishes to be reliable to everyone. This makes him kind, understanding, and very brave to Lily.
Justin: Lily's childhood friend, Justin, is a goofy guy with a lot underneath his beautiful face. A pain that he hopes to alleviate with Lily considering his lifestyle as a popular Canadian idol.
Eve: A young girl who has a massive crush on Justin, Eve feels unnoticed and second-rate, often making her mean, standoffish, and jealous of some people. And while she has worked hard to gain popularity as a part of Justin's idol group. Which unfortunately leads to much heartbreak in the future.
Overview
Choco Latte is a lot different than most romance webtoons. As stated before, Choco Latte has absolutely no direct word bubbles or dialogue. This means that the entire story must be communicated through imagery, metaphors, emojis, and clever workarounds like text messages and news reports. All of this makes Choco Latte easily bingeable while at the same time being very clever in its execution. Which expectedly causes many little misunderstandings between the characters.
Overall the webtoon is ridiculously fucking cute. The entire series is drawn in that shoujo romance manga feeling with light colors and thin outlines to make every character adorable enough to start wars. Simultaneously, a lot of crude images and chibi models get used in the webtoon. Choco knows how to create some wallpaper-worthy expressions with just how disturbingly beautifully illustrated they are. This all causes a very light, adorable tone for the series that can relax you on a bad day.
While many conflicts are very low stakes and interpersonal, the story quickly devolves into your classic romance story. Love triangles and awkwardness galore come mainly from Eve and Justin's interference in Lily's relationships with Kyle. This honestly makes them my favorite characters since their deep stories cause the narrative to use more complex imagery to display their side and add spicy drama.
Despite all of this, the series never makes any of the characters feel necessarily bad. They are all nice and cute characters, and I can't be mad at any of them because they're all just teenagers trying to find love, which can be very messy. So course, I wouldn't know anything about it.
Epilogue
Overall, Choco Latte is a very sweet webtoon deserving of the name. It is by far one of the most innocent webtoons I've seen, and I hope it continues into its current climax. But with that out of the way, let's continue these February spotlights and shine it on something else. Because if you haven't already noticed, I'm up to read just about anything. Thank you all for the generous support you've given me because I hope to carry all that encouragement into our march to 100 spotlights!