Posted in: Comics, Movies | Tagged: Aidyn Arroyal, death rescheduled, digital comics, Freaking Romance, LGBTQ, Snailord, Webtoon

Freaking Romance Creator Snailord Talks Comics Success, Film Version

Freaking Romance creator Snailord, aka Aidyn Arroyal, talks about the WEBTOON series' runaway success and upcoming live-action film adaptation

Wattpad WEBTOON Studios and Skybound Entertainment recently announced the development of Aidyn Arroyal / Snailord's Freaking Romance into a live-action feature film. The series is a webcomic hit on WEBTOON, with over 468 million global views online. The webcomic has also been published as a graphic novel by WEBTOON Unscrolled, with Vol. 1 available now and Vol. 2 released in June 2024.

Freaking Romance follows a girl named Zylith when she leaves home and moves into a decrepit apartment believed to be haunted. She discovers that the "ghost" occupying the house isn't a paranormal apparition but a young man named Zelan occupying the same space but in another dimension. Curiosity between them slowly grows into a love that can cross cosmic boundaries.

Creator Aidyn Arroyal, aka Snailords (he/they), is a manga, comic, and WEBTOON artist. He's best known for Freaking Romance and Death: Rescheduled, the latter still running on WEBTOON. I had the pleasure of interviewing them to talk about the creative process behind Freaking Romance and the upcoming film adaptation.

Hi Aidyn, congratulations on the success of Freaking Romance getting print editions and an upcoming film adaptation. Lily and Zelan feel like not just a love story but also a personal exploration of two sides of the psyche. Let's start at the beginning, what inspired you to create Freaking Romance?

Thank you for the congratulations! I went through a breakup before writing "Freaking Romance." It seemed to me like someone could go to the market and come back married. Meanwhile, I kept struggling to find love. Even now, I've been single for 8 years. I always jokingly thought, "Maybe my soulmate got hit by a bus or got born into a different dimension. Billions of light years away from me. What if he and I are living parallel lives? I'm looking for him, and he's searching for me. But we're from different worlds, so we'll never collide.

Freaking Romance has a unique tone hopping between serious issues like abuse and trauma, romantic yearning, and whimsical, goofy humour. That seems to be your style, which no other comic creator has. How did you come to it?

Hahahah, you just described my personality in one sentence. It's pretty much the ingredient of who I am, I guess.

Did the editors at WEBTOON work with you to figure out the tone of the series on top of its increasingly ambitious and escalating storyline? In fact, telling stories on WEBTOON requires a very particular pace with the scroll-down method. Did it take a while to get used to?

My editor, KennyComics, helped me a lot with structuring the story in the initial chapters. I didn't know much about story writing prior  to "Freaking Romance." Most of it came from listening to advice from my editor, then branching out to watching countless videos and reading books on story writing. It definitely was a learning curve for me. Making a WEBTOON combines writing, art skills, and a new format to traditional manga layouts.

The funniest and most unique part of your work is your dialogue, which I find hilarious. The characters often talk like the internet. Was this a conscious decision, or just what you thought was fun?

I read a few books on writing dialogues and making them more engaging. Dialogues are the most fun part of storywriting for me. So, thank you for noticing the humor. I tend to write them like how I speak or definitely inspired greatly by internet slang/memes.

Is there anything about Freaking Romance you'd like the fanbase to know about that they haven't worked out yet?

From the beginning of the series, they asked me a lot about the missing tenant girl, Misty. At the end of the series, when Zelan's brother swiped the mirror, he saw a girl. That's Misty—the missing girl. Like Zylith, she fell in love and fell into a different dimension. Unfortunately for her, she fell for the illusions created by one of the monsters in the other universe. So she's trapped there for the time being. It's hilarious to me. I wouldn't do season 2 of "Freaking Romance" but it would have been about Aushi (Zelan's brother) rescuing Misty from the other dimension, the two would have 7 days to [pretend] to fall in love. By the end of the 7 days, if they didn't successfully convince the "Dimension Repairer" that their love is real, her portal gate would close, and she would be trapped with monsters forever.

Fans are excited but also nervous about the prospect of a live-action movie version of Freaking Romance. How are you collaborating with the producers to develop it, considering your unique tone?

The project has just begun, so I'm not sure how much time I'll be allowed to be involved in the development! But I am also super excited to see someone else's take on the story! We are just all collectively praying for one thing, Cha Eun Woo as Zelan. Hahahah. I hope the universe answers my "I wish…" emails once more.

I can't resist asking about Death: Rescheduled, which is even darker, crazier, more ambitious, more violent, and funnier, like you've taken a lot of lessons from Freaking Romance to evolve your work to the next stage. Anything you'd like to say about this series?

I love this series with every cell of my being. Every panel definitely whoops my *** and calls me incompetent in 19 different languages. I still love it. It's an ambitious project requiring skills level 100, and I'm at a 10. Haha, I'm learning so much every episode. It's the best project for growth.

I have so much fun writing violent, unhinged, but funny stories. I wanted to add a few murders into "Freaking Romance," but it didn't adhere to the romance genre, so I had to opt out of a few murders.

I love that you also read and enjoy Death: Rescheduled! That's an honor!

Freaking Romance, Death: Rescheduled, and Snailord's slice-of-life comics Snailogy and Snailed It are available on WEBTOON.

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