For what...do we live our lives for?
Masca: The Tale of the Great Mage of Hessed is a fantasy manhwa written and illustrated by Kim Young Hee and published between 1997-2004.
The story centers on the kind-hearted and vivacious Mascan maiden Asarella, apprentice to the Great Mage Elihue of Sivilla. When her master refuses to investigate the suspicious disappearance of several villagers, Asarella takes the matter into her own hands and heads over to the Demon Lord's castle to save them. However, instead of encountering a monster holding innocent victims imprisoned, she is surprised to find a lonely, bored and depressed immortal teleporting around his gloomy castle to escape the infatuated men and women who pursue him. Slowly, the cheerful Asarella brings excitement back into the Demon Lord's life and captures his heart... but things are not quite as they seem and she finds herself drawn into the machinations of Mascans and Belials and into a very troublesome love triangle...
The manhwa also has a sequel titled Masca: The Kings (2010) and a prequel, Masca: The Beginning (2001).
This manhwa provides examples of:
- Abhorrent Admirer: The beautiful and melancholic Cainen has a few women (and a man) hanging around his castle trying to romance him. He's not interested and keeps teleporting away from them, but they don't get the hint. In fact, if anything, his evasiveness appears to make him even more appealing to them.
- Affectionate Nickname: Elihue calls Asarella "Rell". Rakne calls Hadassah "Haddy".
- All-Loving Hero: Asarella is very kind-hearted and shows concern for every living thing, even for the people who mistreat her.
- Armor-Piercing Question: When Rea despairingly asks Cainen why he doesn't love her, he asks her why she loves him. She doesn't really know what to say.
- Art Nouveau: The main inspiration behind the manhwa's art style.
- Attempted Rape: Frustrated that Asarella only sees him as her father figure, Elihue attempts to rape her. Fortunately, he stops when she slaps him.
- Babies Ever After: One extra story in volume 8 shows Asarella and Cainen married and having seven young children. Asarella is an absent mom who travels for years at a time while Cainen stays home and cares for their many children. He tries to conceive an eighth because Asarella stays home with him for about a year after the birth of each child.
- Badass Adorable: Although only 19 years old and a rather inexperienced mage, Asarella is very brave and clever, managing to outwit Belials infinitely older than her... much to their amusement.
- Badass Bookworm: Cainen has an enormous library in his castle, and is often shown with a book in his hand.
- Although Rakin offers to take Rea away toward the end of the original manga, in the sequel it is shown that he is not the loving partner Rea might have hoped for because he doesn't believe that the resurrected Rea is in fact the same person he lost half a millennia ago. He ignores her, treats her coldly and eventually forces himself on her out of insecurity when Cainen visits unexpectedly.
- The Beautiful Elite: Mascans are this for the human population. A famous race of long lived mages, they are beautiful, gorgeously dressed and glamorous.
- Belligerent Sexual Tension: Asarella has this with Cainen, who tries to court her in a slightly patronizing and snarky way. She won't stand for it, and her defiance and playfulness endears her even more to him.
- Betty and Veronica: Elihue is the nurturing, safe and responsible Betty and Cainen is the dangerous, snarky Veronica to Asarella's Archie. Unfortunatelly for Asarella, over time their negative similarities begin to arise.
- Bittersweet Ending: Asarella willingly ceases to be Elihue's student and leaves her home to look for Cainen. The love triangle remains unresolved, the Demon Lord of the Underworld remains somewhere at large and the Mascans of Edda must reckon with the destruction of their paradise.
- Body Horror: Asarella's love potion (temporarily) turns Cainen into a rotting corpse.
- Cloe suffers terrible wounds on half of her body as a result of her confrontation with Cainen. Her desire to have her body healed is what pushes her into her toxic arrangement with Gatmiel.
- Broken Bird: In the course of less than a year, poor innocent Asarella is deeply traumatized by the unraveling of her life. Her wish is heartbreakingly simple: she just wants to become a good mage and stay with her father figure forever, but his love for her becomes sexual with time and he pressures her into entering a romantic relationship with him. She doesn't love him that way and she just goes along with it because she doesn't want to lose him. The other man in her life cruelly blackmails her into sleeping with him. Overwhelmed and confused, she can't tell whether what she feels is pity, guilt or genuine attraction towards Cainen, and both him and Elihue often take their jealousy out on her. This leads her to feeling like she has no agency in her own life, always at the mercy of men much older and powerful than her.
- Charm Person: Both Asarella and Cainen have this, in different forms. Asarella is kind and can get people to love her and protect her just by being herself. Cainen is very beautiful and alluring, and gets obsessive and infatuated people clamoring for his love.
- Coitus Interruptus: Elihue and a resigned Asarella are trying to consummate their relationship when they're interrupted by Mascan warriors sent to Sivilla to bring Elihue to Edda.
- Costume Porn: The costumes in this manhwa are sumptuous and highly detailed. Characters often change clothes and hairstyles at least once per chapter.
- Contrived Coincidence: Asarella just happens to give Cainen exactly the same names as Rea gave him.
- Crazy Jealous Guy: Cainen is very territorial in regards to Asarella, and sends his dragon Yorg to make sure no man approaches her. Since she is a mage in service of the people of Sivilla, this poses a problem, as Yorg chases away all her customers.
- Elihue is frustrated that Asarella only sees him as her father, and attempts to rape her. He also keeps tabs on her even after she ceased being his student, and refused to get involved when people came to him for help because he was hoping that a young man who had a crush on Asarella would die in the ensuing war.
- Cloe is a female example: Having been in love with Elihue for hundreds of years, and having had to watch him pine after her more beautiful sister Rea, she loses it when she hears that he will marry Asarella. She attempts to poison her, gets grievously wounded in the ensuing struggle with Cainen and ultimately loses all hope and releases the Demon Lord of the Underworld.
- It runs in Cloe's family, since her older sister Rea became infatuated with Cainen and got insanely jealous and began to commit increasingly degrading acts out of desperation.
- Cryptic Background Reference: The Belials are fond of reminiscing or mentioning events or characters long dead or unheard of before, without really showing the reader their significance. Some never come up again, others end up playing an important part in the plot.
- Darker and Edgier: The second volume marks a distinct change of tone in the narrative, which goes from cute and funny to dark, gritty, and outright nightmarish sometimes.
- Damsel in Distress: Asarella gets regularly rescued by either Elihue, Cainen, or the Masked Man.
- Deal with the Devil: Cainen keeps tempting Asarella with various appealing offers in exchange for her agreeing to stay with him. On top of offering his services or letting her out of various pinches, he also claims he will give her the magical power normally accumulated over 1000 years if she agrees to stay with him for a century. Asarella refuses every time, because she dislikes how he takes advantage of the situation and she's not a power hungry person anyways.
- Although he doesn't exactly agree with it, Cainen offers Elihue to end the three years long drought plaguing Sivilla in exchange for receiving baby Asarella's heart in twenty years. Elihue doesn't agree but Cainen marks the baby and acts as if the deal had been sealed. He later changes his mind, of course.
- Gatmiel offers to heal Cloe's disfigurement if she agrees to marry him. Cloe grudgingly accepts, and endures the humiliation as well as sexual assault that come with the deal. This eventually chips away at her sanity.
- Decadent Court: The Mascan court in Edda is shown to be a place of corruption and promiscuity reminiscent of the Roman empire.
- Dreadlock Warrior: The warrior Rakin wears part of his hair in long dreadlocks.
- Dude Looks Like a Lady: Played for Laughs with a very feminine-looking young man who comes to escort Asarella while she was visiting Edda. Asarella tells Yorg to buzz off because her escort is not male so he doesn't need to guard her, only to have the young man affirm his gender.
- Driven to Suicide: Rea created a powerful poison and wanted to kill both Cainen and herself because she could not stand the idea of him falling for another woman in the future. Cainen slapped the glass away from her lips but the small amount of poison she had managed to ingest killed her over the next hundred years, and she eventually died from it.
- Dude Magnet: Asarella is beautiful and pure hearted as well as brave to the point of foolishness. This makes her a target for the affections of Cainen, Rakne and Elihue. Even Hadassah and Gatmiel admit feeling attracted to her.
- The Empath: Asarella was born with the ability to feel other people's emotions - early in the story, it's how she can tell that Cainen doesn't really love her.
- Even the Guys Want Him: One of Cainen's admirers is the beautiful Mizar. This became a problem to his father, who wanted him to marry the woman he was originally engaged to before meeting Cainen.
- Every Scar Has a Story: Both Cainen and Rakne have scars inflicted on them by an angry and desperate Elihue during Rakne's rampage in Silvilla. Cainen was stabbed close to the heart and bears the scar (although he prefers to cover it up) and Rakne got half of a Glasgow Grin. Since the dagger Elihue used was a magical weapon, both scars still need about 600 more years to heal.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Cloe is willing to poison an innocent girl entrusted to her care, sacrifice an innocent Mascan warrior and unleash a terrible Belial upon the world, but even she draws the line when the Belial comes up with the idea of using her deceased sister Rea's spirit.
- Expy: The tall, beautiful and blonde Mascans are dead ringers for elves.
- Femme Fatalons: Cainen and Rakne both have exceedingly long, elaborately painted and ornamented nails. Together with their free floating hair, it makes them look rather threatening and otherworldly.
- Fetishized Abuser: Both Elihue and Cainen qualify. Elihue knows that Asarella only sees him as a father, and yet he selfishly emotionally blackmails her into agreeing to marry him. Frustrated that Asarella doesn't return his romantic feelings, he comes close to raping her in a terrifying scene. Cainen on the other hand takes advantage of Asarella's love for Elihue and blackmails her into losing her virginity to him, leaving her traumatized and confused. Neither are good people - even the author believes Asarella would be better off with Hadassah instead.
- Fisher King: Implied to be the case with Cainen, who has the power to control the weather. Because of his despression, it hasn't rained in the area around his palace for a long time, allowing nothing to grow.
- Foreshadowing: A monster who had eaten Asarella's mother is decapitated by Elihue before it gets the chance to eat baby Asarella. With its dying breath, the monster curses Elihue's love for the baby to become tainted. The curse comes true as years later, Elihue begins to lust after his adoptive daughter.
- Cainen is turned into a hideous corpse by Asarella's love potion. Later in the story, we find out that genuinely falling in love leads to a slow death for Belials.
- Future Badass: Asarella is called "the Great Mage of Hessed" and is narrating parts of the story through her memoirs. The implication is that she will eventually become a powerful mage.
- Girlish Pigtails: Asarella used to wear her hair like this when she was a little girl.
- Half-Human Hybrid: Asarella's mother was a Mascan and her father was a human. This is a secret only known to Elihue, who refuses to tell Asarella anything about her parents. Since hybrid children are killed by the Mascan race, it's imperative to keep the knowledge a secret.
- An exception is Gatmiel. His mother on was human and yet he is begrudgingly accepted in Mascan society.
- Heroic Sacrifice: When Asarella feeds Cainen a love potion, she is horrified to witness his transformation into a rotting corpse, as love potions are extremely harmful to Belials. When none of his other supposed adorers offers to take his suffering upon themselves, Asarella steps up and gently performs the ritual. This also acts as a Secret Test of Character for her, as Cainen would have eventually recovered after three days (Belials being immortal and possessing strong, if slow regenerative powers). Asarella was not aware of it, and truly believed that she would take the hideous form forever, thus highlighting her compassionate nature.
- Hot-Blooded: Asarella is often impulsive and gets angry fast. Elihue's father Elias also qualifies.
- Intimate Hair Brushing: Upon seeing that Asarella is unsuccessfully trying to pin her hair up, Elihue takes her hairpin and helps her. It's a sweet moment that underlines their close relationship.
- I'm a Humanitarian: A Tannan claims to have eaten Asarella's mother.
- The Demon Lord of the Underworld takes a bite out of Asarella's arm.
- In the prequel, Cainen eats a human baby's heart.
- Lovable Sex Maniac: Hadassah keeps (only half-jokingly) trying to seduce Cainen, shows interest in Asarella and overall has a very flirty attitude.
- Lovable Rogue: Elias, Elihue's father, is an incorrigible flirt who doesn't shy away from teasingly hitting on his son's fiancée.
- Love Triangle: The series has three:
- Both Elihue and Cainen profess to be in love with Asarella. She feels very attracted to Cainen and doesn't feel anything aside filial love for Elihue, but agrees to marry the latter out of fear that she will lose him if she refuses.
- Cloe is in love with Elihue, who was in hopelessly love with her sister Rea. Later, Elihue shifts his affection on his adoptive daughter Asarella, much to Cloe's dismay.
- The King of the Demon Lords Rakin was in love with Rea, but she had feelings for Cainen, who did not return them. At the end of the original manhwa, a resurrected Rea chooses Rakin.
- Mayfly–December Romance: Asarella, who is only 19 years old (and expected to live a maximum of 1000 years), is involved in a love triangle with Elihue, who is a little over 600 year old and Cainen, who is over 10,000 years old.
- Mundangerous: The reason why Cainen, an insanely powerful immortal, doesn't use chairs and prefers to sit down on the floor is because he once accidentally fell from one and broke his neck.
- Nightmare Fetishist: Gatmiel is not only not put off by Cloe's deformity, he actively enjoys it and they have a very active sex life. The reason why he enjoys it so much is because he likes seeing someone so highborn and previously beautiful being humiliated and coerced into an engagement with him.
- "Not If They Enjoyed It" Rationalization: In the sequel, Rakin unexpectedly visits Rea one night and carries her off to her bedroom. Rea is angry and clearly states that she doesn't want this and slaps him repeatedly, but he overpowers her and she is shown to enjoy their coupling tremendously.
- "Not So Different" Remark: Cainen curses Rakne for always using extreme measures to get what he wants, only to immediately admit to himself that he too behaves this way.
- Opposites Attract: Hot-blooded Elias and his wife, the diplomatic Proper Lady Romalla. Genki Girl Asarella and the gloomy, sarcastic Cainen.
- Our Dragons Are Different: Cainen's Stygian dragon Yorg, who guards his palace and runs errands for him, is a vegetarian. Asarella manages to win him over by regularly summoning fruits for him.
- Parental Incest: Although Elihue and Asarella are not related by blood, he raised her since she was a baby and she sees him as her father figure. In time however, he began to lust after her and one of the main conflicts in the series is his pressuring her to marry him.
- Parental Neglect: Of the emotional kind. Cloe's mother doesn't seem to care about her at all, not even bothering to inquire about her safety following the fall of Edda. On top of that, it's heavily implied that she's involved with Gatmiel... even after he becomes engaged to Cloe.
- Parental Substitute: Elihue is Asarella's father figure, having found her as a baby. Over time however, their relationship becomes more complicated.
- Petal Power: Cainen will sometimes dissolve into a cloud of petals.
- Physical God: The Belial race are this. They are immortal, physically perfect, can heal from anything over time and their power only grows with time.
- Posthumous Character: The lovely Mascan lady Rea, Elihue's first love. She is revived towards the end of the story by the Demon Lord of the Underworld.
- Prefers Going Barefoot: Cainen is always barefoot. When he finally wears shoes for Asarella's wedding, she makes a point of mentioning it.
- Really Gets Around: Cainen is shown several times in a pile of exhausted naked men and women, with the implication that he goes through periods in which he indulges in orgies.
- The Reveal: The kindly masked stranger who witnessed Elihue bringing Asarella back to life is revealed to be Gatmiel. It's a bit more complicated than that. Gatmiel was stealing the identity of someone else...
- Running Gag: Asarella throwing her sandal at Cainen's head, and him placing it back on her foot.
- Sequel Hook: The manga is very open-ended and sets the scene nicely for the sequel, Masca: The Kings.
- Shameless Fanservice Girl: Hadassah often wears extremely revealing, see-through clothes or straight up walks around naked because for someone as old as she is, nudity isn't a taboo.
- She Is All Grown Up: Elihue leaves Asarella in a Mascan orphanage for three years because of work, and when he comes back he's surprised to see that she has grown into a beautiful teenager.
- Sleeps in the Nude: Hadassah claims Cainen does this.
- So Beautiful, It's a Curse: A mild example. Cainen gets regularly hounded in his own castle by people who are infatuated with him. He's sick and tired of them, and would like nothing more than to be left alone.
- Spanner in the Works: Gatmiel planned for Asarella to become pregnant with Cainen's child, which would allow the Mascan race control over a powerful hybrid who could kill Cainen. Gatmiel wanted to exact revenge on the Belial for killing his father during one of his insane rampages. However, the jealous Cloe poisons Asarella and renders her infertile, therefore ruining Gatmiel's plan. He does not take it well when he finds out.
- Spell My Name With An S: Cainen or Kainen? Elihue or Eliwho? Hadassah or Hadatsa?
- Stripperriffic: Cainen and the other Belials have an... interesting sense of fashion.
- Strong Family Resemblance: Elihue is very similar to his mother in appearance and personality. This fact is lampshaded by Cainen several times.
- Supernaturally Young Parent: Elihue's parents look to be around the same age as him due to the longevity of the Mascan race. All Mascans who have a child will eventually fit this trope.
- Really 700 Years Old: The Belials have been around for thousands of years. Elihue, a Mascan, is over 600 years old.
- Stalker with a Crush: What Elihue turns into at the end of the original manga. Asarella ceases to be his student out of her own will, and yet he still keeps tabs on her, spelling out his intention of making her unaware that he's still keeping her in a cage.
- Unwanted Rescue: Cainen's infatuated admirers aren't prisoners, as Asarella initially believed, and they certainly don't want to leave the Demon Lord's palace.
- Wife Husbandry: Elihue didn't intend to raise Asarella to become his wife, but at one point in her adolescence began to see her as a woman rather than a daughter. Asarella does not reciprocate, to his anguish and jealousy.
- Weather Manipulation: One of Cainen's many powers. He promises to help Asarella's vines survive if she kisses him, and he keeps his promise by making it rain.
- Wedding Smashers: Cainen crashes Asarella and Elihue's wedding to confess his feelings. He already known what Asarella's answer would be, but he wanted to tell her anyway. This action has far-reaching consequences: the wedding itself gets postponed, and because Elihue teleports away the ten thousand guests to ensure their safety (a feat of incredible magical power), the corrupt Council members decide that he is too powerful and imprison him.
- Who Wants to Live Forever?: Belials can't ever die, and once every thousand years, their boredom drives them insane and they wipe out the lands they lord over, indiscriminately massacring every living thing they encounter. Some accept it as an inevitable and natural part of life - others such as Rakne try to find ways to avoid the rampage.
- World's Most Beautiful Woman: Rea constantly amazes the people who see her through her almost inhuman beauty and perfection.
- Wrong-Name Outburst: Cloe always says Elihue's name when she is having sex with Gatmiel. Since he is essentially extorting her with the promise of restoring her beauty, she does it on purpose. At one point, he threatens to kill her if she does it again.
