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Love Me to Death is a webcomic published on the Webtoons app. It is updated weekly and the latest three chapters require payment to be read.

The story follows Victor, a necromancer who is desperately trying to stay hidden from the Church of the God of Life, which has outlawed Necromancy and whose doctrine states that only the eradication of all necromancers will allow for the return of their god. He gets the opportunity to escape when Enrique Olivarez, one of the richest men in the city, offers to help smuggle him to a place where his magic is still legal.

Enrique's help won't come for free, however. His wife Mercedes mysteriously died not long after they were wed, and he's desperate to be reunited with her. He's found a spell that can bring her back to life, but it's useless without a necromancer. All Victor needs to do is enact the spell and bring her to him and Enrique will help him escape. However, their carefully laid out plan begins to go awry when Victor realizes that the spell Enrique gave him might also be a love spell.


This work contains examples of:

  • Abhorrent Admirer: Mia is Enrique's former fiancee whom their parents tried to push into an Arranged Marriage to consolidate their families' fortunes. Mia is beautiful and seems to genuinely love him, but is extremely pushy and inattentive to Enrique's emotional needs. She immediately tries to make a move on him within days of Mercedes' death and doesn't register at all that her constant mentions of marriage are bothering him. He has no romantic feelings for her and only puts up with her in hopes of securing a boat out of San Guadario.
  • Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Gender-inverted with Victor. Despite living on the run for years as a child and barely scraping by with what food he can scrounge up or pilfer, he grew up to be a tall, broad-shouldered, and muscular Clueless Chick-Magnet with flawless skin. He has no scars at all from being doused with holy water repeatedly despite him describing the sensation as being like swimming in acid. This is in contrast to his love interest Mercedes, who believes herself to be hideous because of her discolored skin and stitches despite his and Enrique's assertions to the contrary. This is even lampshaded by Enrique, who notes that Victor's physique is impressive for someone who regularly has nothing to eat.
  • Blatant Lies: The Church insist that Mercedes was killed by a necromancer, but all signs currently point to members of the Church having assassinated her.
    • Enrique will resort to this to get what he wants, but so far what he's wanted has been mostly selfless.
  • Blood Magic: Necromancer blood is the key to their magic. It has a golden glow. This is the reason the Church requires people to prick their fingers for most legal documents and in wedding ceremonies.
  • Brick Joke: In chapter 3, Victor takes off his shirt in front of Mercedes, who says "Oh no he's hot" to herself many times. Later, in chapter 15, when Mercedes gets wet from holy water, and as she fixes her hair, Victor thinks "Oh no she's hot" to himself in a similar manner.
  • Butt-Monkey: In spite of his efforts and how seriously he takes his job, Ignacio keeps getting delayed from kidnapping the necromancer, whether by Enrique's importance, the church/bureaucracy getting in the way, or the protagonists simply outsmarting him.
  • Cast from Hit Points: A necromancer using their Blood Magic leaves them feeling extremely drained and showing symptoms similar to that of anemia. Mercedes also needs to draw energy from Victor through physical proximity and contact, and if she draws enough from him it can knock him out.
  • Corrupt Church:
    • Having necromancer blood regardless of if you're hurting anyone or not is a punishable offense by the Church, and they also treat the city's wealthier residents with far less suspicion than anyone else. Victor's existence alone is living proof that their teachings of how necromancers are inherently evil is wrong.
    • They'll gladly let a man matching a necromancer's description go, even when he's walking together with a woman who looks suspiciously like a walking corpse, if a known member or employee of a respected household says they can be trusted.
    • On top of all of this, they insist that a necromancer must be behind Mercedes's death, butcher her corpse to confirm this, and continue to insist on it even after finding no evidence of such. All signs also point to Mercedes having been murdered because she discovered something the Church wanted to hide.
    • The Church instituted a law stating that any families caught practicing necromancy have their entire fortunes forfeit to the church, regardless of if it was only one family member involved.
      • As an extension, they will also jail anyone that was caught simply talking to one.
  • Crystal Dragon Jesus: The Church is clearly based on the Catholic Church, right down to their regalia and architecture. There's also the fact that they impose their strict religion on a Latin-American style culture and outlaw religious practices surrounding death that contradict their teachings.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: Have even so much as a short conversation with (unknowingly) a necromancer? The Sacred Order will jail you, as Gabriela and Mia can attest to.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?: The Church of the God of Life is clearly designed to resemble the Catholic Church.
    • On a related note, necromancer magic is heavily associated with gold, which held great cultural significance in many Mesoamerican societies. Later discoveries of their culture show that it's clearly Mesoamerican themed.
  • Eating the Eye Candy: Mercedes gets an eyeful of Victor's well-toned abs while he's taking off his cloak to lend to her. Seeing this embarrasses her as she can't help but call him hot for it.
  • Eye Scream: Sombra, the Cartel Enrique hires wears an eyepatch.
  • Fantastic Racism: The Church's official doctrine is that the continued existence of necromancers is the reason mortality exists, and that wiping them out will not only end death but bring back the dead. This racism runs so deeply that even festival food is named after ways of gruesomely killing necromancers, such as "Steak in the Heart" and "Blood Necromancer with Angry Mobb Salad". Children are also given toy figurines that represent necromancers to be killed, cheerfully stomping them under foot with a burst of sparkles and smoke.
  • Forgotten First Meeting: When Viktor was young, he was kept in a cell and only brought out for "treatments" in an attempt to "cure" him of his powers. The only person to show genuine care for him during this time was a girl his age who slipped him books to read and food beneath the door. On the night of his escape, she gives him a hooded coat she wove to keep him warm and hide his face to help him survive on the streets of San Guadario. He never learned the girl's name and held onto the coat even as a grown man in hopes that she'd recognize him and they'd see each other again. Unbeknownst to Victor, Mercedes was that girl and he'd been in love with her ever since. She'd forgotten him too upon his resurrection and them realizing their feelings for one another helps Viktor become comfortable with starting a tresalma with her and Enrique.
  • Genre Savvy: When Victor and Mercedes have been caught by the Church, he knows better than to directly vouch for them with so many witnesses around and instead comes up with a much more believable lie (that Victor is sick and Mercedes is pale because they have a blood disease so it's too risky to do the blood check) which buys them precious time.
  • Green-Eyed Monster: She doesn't do anything rash, but Mercedes is not happy when she sees how flirtatious La Sombra is with Victor.
  • The Heavy: Captain Ignacio, of The Sacred Order. He makes sure they protagonists have a difficult time with their goals.
  • It's Personal: Ignacio wants to hunt down the necromancer, especially after Recognizing that Mercedes, his sister, was reanimated by The necromancer.
  • Navel-Deep Neckline: Enrique lends Victor some clothes after Victor and Mercedes escape from the Church. The shirt has a neckline that goes down to his navel, leaving his chest and most of his abs bare to his embarrassment.
  • Orphanage of Fear: Victor spent some of his childhood in a Church run orphanage, where the staff didn't realize that their holy relics were the reason for him constantly being sick and that treating him with things like prayer and holy water were only making it worse. It seems like they knew he was a necromancer and were trying to get rid of his powers. When Victor escaped, even though he was still a child at the time, they said to capture him dead or alive.
  • Phony Psychic: Subverted. A self-proclaimed psychic that the protagonists meet at a festival claims to be able to send messages to and from the dead. Mercedes tries to judge the psychic by asking if she can hear her, but the psychic is clearly unable to. Mercedes is frustrated by this, especially after the "psychic" gives Mia bogus reassurance that Mercedes whom Mia likely murdered with poison forgives her for their arguments in life. However, the psychic then provides what amounts to couple's counseling for Victor and "Milagros" that is eerily on point, even alluding to a shared past that neither of them remember as Mercedes is the girl who helped Victor escape the Orphanage of Fear and gave him his coat.
  • The Power of Love: Late in Season 1, love is shown to be a metaphysical force of great import. Namely, necromancers need to recieve love to use their magic, less they run themselves dry and inflict Rapid Aging on themselves until they die. The only way to reverse this is to show true, unabashed love for the necromancer in need through anything from singing to them to kissing them. La Sombra notes that the Sacred Order wants necromancers to be feared and hated to prevent necromancers from using their powers.
  • Reused Character Design:The Fortune Teller that Victor, Mercedes, and Enrique meet at the festival is identical to Nephythys, a character from the author's previous work, Room of Swords.
  • Those Two Guys: The two soldiers that accompany Captain Ignacio are a man and woman, who don't seem to take their roles as seriously, notably trying to enjoy parts of the festival, much to Ignacio's irritation
  • Ungrateful Bastard: Near the end of the first season, Victor saves Father Santiago from a Disney Villain Death when the latter pleads for mercy. Later on, Santiago tries to order Victor's execution without hesitation. When Victor calls him out on this, Santago claims that it is simply the God of Life's will and taking Victor's help was a test of his faith.
  • Villains Want Mercy: Father Santiago pleads with Victor to save him after the latter is left clinging to a creaking plank above shallow waters filled with sharp rocks. When Viktor asks why he should help his would-be murderer, Santiago reveals that Viktor would not be alive without him, as Santiago attended to Viktor's mother and tried to have Viktor "cured" rather than killing him as an infant. Although Viktor isn't moved by this, he saves Santiago anyways.
  • Would Hurt a Child: In Victor's backstory, the Sacred Order had no problem with dunking holy water on Victor, which amounted to torturing a kid, since he was a necromancer. It was heavily implied that their plan to "cure" him was meant to be lethal and that they planned to kill him by "returning his heart to the God of Life" before he escaped.

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