The story starts with the heroine Lyu-Jin, angry that her parents and older brother are off to a trip to Hawaii while she stays home with a cold, and wishes that the plane would have an accident before it arrives. Promptly, the airplane explodes mid-flight and Lyu-Jin is left alone and an orphan.
She heads over to a man called K, a magician who supposedly fulfills his client's any wish and gets their client's most treasured possession in return. K can't revive her family, since he cannot fulfill wishes that involve life and death. Due to the rule that nobody who sees his face can leave without wishing for something, Lyu-Jin now works as a housemaid for him and an unofficial helper for his "work" until she can think of a wish to ask of him.
The story mostly follows Lyu-Jin and K, the various clients and their wishes brought to them and reveals how many magical races or beings there actually are.
Not to be confused with the movie I Wish which is something entirely different.
I Wish contains Examples Of:
- #1 Dime: The payment that is the client's most treasured thing at the moment. Could be anything. It's generally useless stuff like egoism, greed, somebody's piggy bank filled with little money or other worthless junk. Hits pretty hard when it turns out that said treasured thing is your father or lover.
- Bandaged Face: Wye uses bandages to cover his face, arms and hands to keep the Sun from finding him.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: The manhwa is full of these, as the wish will be fulfilled, but you lose your most treasured thing in exchange.
- Belligerent Sexual Tension: Dee and Wye. He scolds her when she messes up, she snaps at him when he's around. But they obviously do love each other.
- Sickening Sweethearts: They turned into this after they stopped bickering and got married.
- Big Bad: Seven is the closest to what can be called a main villain in this series.
- Bittersweet Ending: It looks like this is how the story will end, before making a swerve and resulting in a Happy Ending. K dies peacefully in his sleep and his clients get all their treasured things back. We see Byeong-Hui, still happily dating Byeol-Nim, Jeong-Hwa getting along better with her resurrected father and Seven says farewell to Jin, looking for Lyu-Ui, in hopes of getting to him, before he dies again. Only Jin is still in the house, now alone. Then she remembers what her most treasured possession was over the years... and K returns, with the two embracing.
- Brought Down to Normal: Wye hands his magic powers off to Dee, which makes him as close to human as possible. Though still very, very old.
- This happens to people of K's race, if they happen to fall in love with humans. Because they assimilate themselves to their loved ones, they begin to lose their magic powers.
- Chubby Mama, Skinny Papa: Min's father is tall and thin, while his mother was chubby, to the point of fat. Subverted, when his father marries the model Arisu, who is super thin herself.
- Crazy Jealous Guy: K, when he's in love. While under Dee's Love Potion, he attacked Lyu-Jin's English teacher for calling her his "goldchild" (because of her good English pronunciation). Late in the series, he destroys several of his possession and a room because some guy went and took Lyu-Jin out on a date.
- Curse: Seven put a curse on Lyu-Ui ages ago: Lyu-Ui will be reborn a million times, but also die a million times. Never will he grow old, but always die before his 20th birthday and each death will never be peaceful, he'll always die in a matter so excrutiatingly painful that he'll wish he'd not be reborn. The curse is actually the cause of the drama in the final volume.
- Defrosting Ice Queen: A girl in Lyu-Ui's school was literally called the Ice Princess. She's frosty because every person she loves ends up dying, although she does warm up to Lyu-Ui over the course of a brief relationship.
- Disproportionate Retribution: K put a curse on his real name that harms anyone who mentions it out loud. Why? Some kid made fun of the name.
- Edward called K 'Uncle Wizard' and K, furious over that insult, sent him to walk the streets at night, to get his wish of 'becoming special' fulfilled, which resulted in Edward being turned into a vampire.
- Dude Looks Like a Lady: Seven. Upon his first appearance, it wasn't clear if he was a man or a woman due to very fine facial features and long hair.
- Embarrassing Nickname: Lyu-Jin's classmate Gyu-Yul is called "Gyul" (Mandarine) by her boyfriend and she hates it.
- Equivalent Exchange: Along with Balancing Death's Books, Lyu-Ui got his sister sick so that he could board the plane that he knew was going to explode and kill his family, so that she could live.
- Seven offers this as a suggestion to Lyu-Jin when she blames herself for persuading her friend to make a wish to K, which resulted in her father's death. Seven says that one soul can be exchanged with another that way.
- Expository Hairstyle Change: K starts off wearing his hair pulled back by various hairties into an almost sun-burst-like hairdo but gradually wears them less and keeps his hair down as he begins to warm up to Lyu-Jin. When Seven removes his love for Lyu-Jin, he reverts back to wearing the hairties.
- Fantastically Indifferent: Lyu-Jin, which she lampshades after a 150 year old vampire admits his true nature to her. She says that a vampire is kind of not that weird considering she had already encountered a flower-person that grants eternal life if you eat it, a thumb-sized sprite and a wizard who is being stalked by the sun.
- Foreshadowing: Wye uses what little of his future-sight powers remain, to see what Jin will wish of K and we see a short shot of Jin, crying, beginning to make a wish. After she leaves, Wye says Jin wished that K wouldn't die. It's a
lie. The shot we see is part of the Happy Birthday chapters, where Jin cries and thanks K for becoming her family, now that both realize that they love each other. It's in the last chapter, where Jin wishes that K doesn't die. It doesn't work. - Half-Human Hybrid: Uyeol is the son of a human and a sprite, though he doesn't seem to have any sprite-like attributes.
- Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action: Averted with Uyeol's parents. While his father is a human and his mother a sprite, they fell in love and had him while his father was shrunk to the size of a sprite himself.
- Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Extreme example with Uyeol's parents. Justified, his mother is a sprite and the size of a thumb and his father is a regular-sized human.
- Interrupted Suicide: When K tries to kill himself by jumping off the building of his home following the wish of wanting death as the dearest thing fo Li-Hun Lyu-Ui's ghost appears and grabs him mid-fall, then throws him back onto his balcony.
- Lyu-Jin's attempt at suicide gets interrupted by K.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: Gyu-Yul wishes to be nothing more than a regular housewife, who lives a normal life with her normal husband. This is contrary to her previous life's wish for adventure and not-normal things.
- I Just Want to Be Special: Edward, who was repeatedly rejected by Gyu-Yul's previous incarnation for 'being utterly normal', wished to become special. He became a vampire. He wanted to be special.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: K certainly seems like a blunt, mean jerk most of the time. But he does value the few friends he has and even refuses to use his magic to fulfill their wishes, because he doesn't want to take their dearest thing away.
- Literal Genie: When K first started out as a wish-fulfilling magician, he was this. Client wants to never see idiots again? K makes him blind. Client wants to become so thin that "only bones remain"? K turns her into a bone.
- Lookalike Lovers: A trait of people of K's race. When they are in love, they begin to emotionally link to their target of affection, and assimilate to said target in terms of clothes and hair style.
- Love Epiphany: K has his epiphany when Lyu-Jin yells at him for not coming for a sick visit when she had a fever and K retorts that he, too, had a fever... and realizes that he has started assimilating to her.
- Lyu-Jin gets hers when, after a fight with K, she goes to him and he asks her if she's hungry, pointing to a table full of food that he cooked.
- Seven realizes his love for his master when the master dies, causing his heart to break.
- Love Hurts: Quite a lot for people of K's race. They assimilate themselves to their partner physically and emotionally, so however their loved one feels, they feel the same way. Their lover is sad, they are sad, too. Their lover dies? ...their heart literally breaks and they die, too.
- Love Potion: Dee's initial appearance has her giving a Love Potion to K, which has hilarity ensuing when he falls for Lyu-Jin, and it's later revealed that she's been experimenting said potion on her entire servant staff until they became a mob obsessing over her.
- Dee also created a Love Potion back when she and the other students were still studying under Lyu-Ui, which K drank.
- Mutant: Seven. He's from the same race as K, but since he's a mutant, he doesn't assimilate to the person he falls in love with and, while his heart will break if their loved one dies, his heart can regenerate itself.
- My Greatest Failure: K refuses to fulfill a customer's wish of having her love removed because he is personally against the idea of doing that. It results in said customer killing the man she was having an affair with and herself, which K blames himself for, thinking he could have prevented this, had he fulfilled her wish.
- Nice Guy: Byeong-Hui Park, a friend of Lyu-Jin's, is this. He's polite, helpful, gentle and always takes responsibility for even potential consequences for his actions.
- No Body Left Behind: The non-human people in this series die by simply leaving behind a small pile of ash.
- One-Letter Name: Lyu-Ui's students are phonetically named after letters of the alphabet, except for Seven. K is the only proper one, but it's stated to be a name taken on, because his actual name is cursed.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: In the final volume, K treats Lyu-Jin nicely, eats ice cream which he's never done before hinting that he's willing to die by reviving Lyu-Jin's family (which he is forbidden/actually incapable of doing) and does the things he's always wanted to do before dying.
- Ordinary High-School Student: Lyu-Jin is one, as are her (non-magical) friends.
- Reality Warper: Seven's power. He has the power to figure out your worst fear and make it come true.
- Really 700 Years Old: Several characters, due to their non-human nature.
- K is at least 10.000 years old.
- Li-Hun is the same age and immortal.
- Wye is hinted at to be even older than Lyu-Ui.
- Lyu-Ui himself is over 10.000 years old and said to be a deity who came down to earth.
- Finally, Seven says he's older than Lyu-Ui since he refers to him as a "young greenhorn".
- Reincarnation: Due to a curse put onto him, K's master gets reborn repeatedly, always looking the same. His latest life was as Lyu-Jin's older brother.
- Seers: Wye had this ability when he still had his magical powers. After he hands them off, they still remain on a much smaller scale and he uses it to see what Lyu-Jin will eventually wish from K.
- Self-Made Orphan: Lyu-Jin is worried that someone may have taken her angry thought of wishing the airplane her family was on would explode a little too seriously.
- So Beautiful, It's a Curse: Wye took a Love Potion that worked not just on men, but also women. It also worked on the Sun.
- Spoiler Opening: The covers and backcovers of the manhwa tend to spoil the fact that K and Lyu-Jin fall in love, often depicting K with his hair open instead of tied back with a lot of ties as he initially appeared.
- Talking in Your Dreams: Lyu-Jin has a dream that her family is alive and are about to celebrate her birthday when her brother shows up in her dream and tells her to "not be deceived by K" just before she wakes up.
- Theme Naming: The master's students are generally named after letters of the alphabet. We have K, Jay (J), Dee (D), Wye (Y)... and Seven.
- Too Dumb to Live: Byeong-Hui Park. He doesn't want to hurt anyone's feelings, so when Lyu-Jin gave him some chocolates for Valentine's Day, he ate them despite being allergic to it. He survives, but was in the hospital for some time.
- Wham Episode: One late chapter has Jeong-Hwa take a wish to K on Lyu-Jin's suggestion. Things seem fine until the last few pages reveal that her dearest was her father.
