One Thousand and One Nights

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Story 10:
Story to be divided into 2 parts: the real life & the stories.
Real life: twist on the 1001 Nights classic. You have the crazy sultan, but Sahaar is a boy instead of a girl who took his sisters place to be sent into the harem. Sahaar calms the sultan with his stories. Besides their relationship, there's also the history of the Sultan that made him the crazy ruler he is now, which is also really interesting.

The stories: the irony is that this manga is a twist within a twist.
really good and interesting, and I believe some, of not all, are real ... historical stories with a twist. And since they're stories, the twist is okay (I usually get annoyed when seeing people twist history). I'd rate those stories really high if they were seperate mangas.

Characters:
A lot of development on the Sultan's side. He starts of as this crazy dude, and you'll slowly discover what made him that way, and you'll see him deal with his past and become a better man. For his kingdom and for Sahaar hihi.
Sahaar kinda stays the same. The only thing truly developing is his feelings for the Sultan. He's very likable: smart, pretty, capable.
Also that guy with the lamb omg read it and you'll know.

Ooh this is a difficult one to rate! First off, the art is lovely, full of absolutely stunningly beautiful men (especially as the volumes go on) - sadly the historical real-life characters on which some of the stories are based probably didn't look quite so stunning....

There are some gripping stories in the mix here too although this is a bit more uneven IMHO. You're not always that invested in the characters of the stories - kind of inevitable when they're of short duration - and I found myself a little impatient at times to get back to the main story.

Sehara is a very sweet character, ... but I found it really hard to get invested in the relationship between Sehara and the Sultan, Shahryar. This is after all someone who is chopping off a girl's head every night....and the reasoning/explanation eventually given for why he's gone off his trolley and started this mass killing spree does not seem nearly sufficient enough to redeem him/make him more sympathetic at all!

At one stage I was going to give up, but then would come along a story I really got into. I especially enjoyed an absurdly complicated story set in ancient China that's based on an historical text and would presumably be a lot more accessible to an audience more familiar with the main historical figures (Clamp's Gate 7 suffers from the same problem) - I spent some time backtracking to try and work out exactly who everyone was and how they fitted into the rather complicated timeline and feel like I have an enhanced knowledge of Chinese history as a result (albeit a rather madly constructed shoujo-manga alternative universe version, but hey).

So overall it kind of annoyed me in parts, kind of lost me in parts, but then gave me a huge amount of enjoyment in parts - one of *those* kinds of manga/manhwa!

First of all, I would like to note that although this is marked as a BL, that is but one of the elements of the storyline, not strictly the main focus. So, even if you happen to dislike that genre, that doesn’t necessarily mean you will dislike the entirety of this manhwa.

One Thousand and One Nights is inspired by the namesake tale, and retains the format of telling stories within a story. One major change to the “main”, overarching story would by that, you’ve guessed it, the position of a princess is overtaken by a man, giving it a yaoi-ish vibes. Fortunately, it doesn’t go ... much sexual so rather than being very explicit – which usually doesn’t end up well for the quality of the work, One Thousand and One Nights stays on the fanservice and teasing level.

This format is why I found it a bit difficult to rate – because the inside stories, while themselves varying in quality, mostly weren’t bad. However, the main storyline didn’t interest me much. The character of a sultan was unsympathetic right from the start (though understandably so), but has stayed uninteresting to the end, with the little progress feeling undeserved as the story blamed his situation and others for the sultan’s fault. This ended up causing fluctuation in enjoyment, depending on which part the story currently focused on. The story within a story format also started being a bit confusing with later volumes, as not just tales, but also historical events (though not entirely historically accurate) and even contemporary, modern age stories were woven in.

This paired with final volume that seemed like it’s taken out of a completely different series with its sudden shift in the plot made me lean more towards the rating of 5 rather than 6. After all, adding up the 6/10 of the inside stories and 4/10 of the main story does have a simple mathematical answer.