The heart-pounding novel that inspired the hit BL comic! Computer science major Sangwoo Choo lives by the following tenets: reason, routine, and rules. So when the rest of his groupmates flake on their class presentation, he deletes their names from the project without hesitation—inadvertently destroying one groupmate's plans to graduate and study abroad. That's got nothing to do with Sangwoo, though…or so he thinks, until he realizes that Jaeyoung Jang, the talented design major he was hoping to hire for his video game, is not only that very same classmate, but eager to get some payback! Will Sangwoo be able to debug this Semantic Error before it upends his entire life?

Semantic Error has story by J. Soori and art by Angy. It is translated by PUBLANG. Published by Yen On. (January 20, 2026)

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

I have a difficult relationship with this series, and I'm now starting to think that's because I started with the manhwa adaptation. While well done, it doesn't get into the characters' heads quite enough to mitigate some of the persistent issues in the early parts of the story, namely Jaeyoung's harassment of Sangwoo. In the manhwa, it feels like he's just being mean to be mean. In the novel, it's clear that it's less that he failed a class (and can't graduate) because of Sangwoo and more that he's had a crush on the other man for years and is hurt that Sangwoo can't remember him and doesn't appear to care about his existence at all. Is it remotely healthy or mature that Jaeyoung's response is more what you'd expect from a fifth grader than a college student? Not even a little. But understanding his motivation helps to contextualize things.

That said, there are still elements of this that are particularly difficult to read. Sangwoo is plainly neurodivergent. When Jihye, a girl he becomes more or less friends with, asks if he's been tested for OCD, he says that the doctor told him his symptoms weren't enough for an official diagnosis; my interpretation is that Sangwoo is on the autism spectrum. He's not treated like a savant or any other stereotype to the point we've seen in other media, but he's also not given any grace by those around him. They just see him as “weird,” and in the case of Jaeyoung's early behavior, as someone to be punished for being different. (Sangwoo also appears to have prosopagnosia,or face blindness.) The story makes it clear that his mother did her best to prepare him for being neurodivergent in a neurotypical world, but the way most people simply write him off as a freak isn't great.

All of this means that part of the romance plot is Jaeyoung learning to understand Sangwoo and to adjust his own attitude if he truly wants to be with him. It's a slow process, and one we don't really see kick in until the end of the volume, although we can see him taking steps towards it. Sangwoo's journey is also about adjusting his worldview, but in his case it's a much more internal process. Before he can learn to treat Jaeyoung differently he has to learn that it's okay to change up his rules and routines and to adjust to another person. While he makes some physical progress on this front, his internal journey is much slower and more difficult, and he spends a lot of the book in various states of emotional distress.

If this doesn't sound particularly romantic, that's fair. For all of its popularity (along with the comics, there's also a TV drama), Semantic Error isn't an easy series, and it certainly doesn't adhere to what we tend to expect from romance fiction. But it's also well-written and translated, and its presentation as a book is excellent, with chapters from Sangwoo's point of view titled in binary code and chapters in Jaeyoung's titled by CMYK colors. I don't love it, but I also can't stop reading it, and having read both versions, I'd suggest that if you're curious, starting with the novel is the way to go.