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YMMV Tropes in the webcomic
- Alas, Poor Scrappy: Hyein is a world class jerk and hypocrite, no doubt about it, but she didn't deserve nearly getting raped by a recently monsterised Gapsu. Similarly, her eventual death was regarded with sadness instead of joy in spite of how much people were asking for it beforehand.
- Catharsis Factor: Gapsu dying at Hyein's hands couldn't have been more deserved, karmic, or satisfying.
- Complete Monster: Gapsu Seo is a violently unstable murderer whose first act in the apartment is to defy Joon's orders to befriend Dusik, instead attempting to kill him just because he could. Gapsu's also a Serial Rapist, and it's hinted that one of his victims was underage. After transforming into a monster, Gapsu tries to do just one thing: rape Hyein, showing just how much he enjoys his crimes. An utterly insane and remorseless sociopath, Gapsu may have the least focus of all the criminals but his actions are far and away the most disturbing in the entire comic.
- Diagnosed by the Audience: Hyuk is incredibly smart and is usually able to understand people very well, but he has No Social Skills, his filter is nonexistent, he can easily get distracted, and he's very set in his ways once he's committed to something, making it seem as though he's somewhere on the autism spectrum.
- Designated Hero: Within the prologue alone Hyun yelled at his mother, insulted a popular singer and threatened the lives of anyone online who may disagree with on of his requests all while text appeared talking about his computer. Though he quickly develops past this and shows to be quite heroic underneath his bitterness.
- Fan Nickname: Look in the comments section of any page with the beefcake in it and you'll see him being called Thomas the Tank Engine or more rarely buff boi
- Harsher in Hindsight:
- Hyun yelling at his dead family at their funeral for not leaving him enough money is typical Jerkass behavior, but with the reveal that his parents told him to accept the bullying he was facing at school because his father could lose his job if they go public and his sister considered him a waste of space, all of his anger and resentment towards his family makes perfect sense.
- Hyein originally seems confident that she could kill someone if she really needed to, but when she finally does, it serves as the final chip in her Sanity Slippage and she completely loses her mind.
- Jerkass Woobie: Hyun and Hyuk both seem to just be assholes for no discernible reason, but as their backstories get revealed, it's clear that this is really what they are.
- Magnificent Bastard: Hyuk Lee is the pragmatic leader of the survivors. After discovering the monsters' weakness to fire, Hyuk leads a rescue mission for Hyun, intending to utilize Hyun's half-monster status to use him as bait. Telling Hyun to consider the children expendable if it means rescuing Dusik, he reveals that it was actually a test to see how ruthless he is, a test that Hyun passes. When Joon Shin and his criminals arrive, Hyuk plays dumb until the best possible moment, escaping his imprisonment and knocking Joon out despite his monster infection. When the monsters break into the lobby, he unleashes his master plan to get everyone out of the building, and when Hyun finally gives into his infection and transforms, Hyuk transforms as well, imprisoning him with his monster form so that he can't kill anyone else.
- Memetic Badass: The general consensus is that if Dusik had both of his legs intact he'd be the most efficient monster killer in the setting.
- Moral Event Horizon:
- The criminals all crossed it when Hyuk realizes that they've been using cut up human body parts to distract the monsters from their bus, which is how they got as far as they did. Joon then crosses it further when he murders Sangsu for basically no reason.
- Hyein had the moral high ground when she killed Gapsu, but her attacking Yuri to stop her from potentially telling anyone else what happened (even though Yuri is in the middle of saying she won't tell anyone) makes it clear the her sanity is gone and there's nothing left.
- Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: After Character Development, Hyun, while not actually loathed, quickly gathered a good deal of sympathy from the readers.
- Signature Scene: Whenever someone gets a nosebleed. It is the series's unique way of identify the infected, and whenever it happens you just know things will go downhill from there.
- Take That, Scrappy!: Hyein getting slapped across the face by Gapsu was fairly deserved. The Attempted Rape, on the other hand, was not.
- Unintentionally Sympathetic: The brutal death of Gapsu at Hyein's hands, courtesy of a slashed throat, is clearly meant to be unnerving, but it couldn't have been directed at a more deserving target from a more karmic assailant, so it's hard to hold it against them.
- Viewer Gender Confusion: Byeong-il is easily mistaken for a woman until the epilogue where he's shown to have grown some facial hair.
- The Woobie: Myeong Ja-Lim. In the backstory, she looked away from her child's baby stroller for a moment, and in that moment the stroller rolled away and was hit by a car, killing her child. The trauma of this moment causes her to hallucinate her dead baby as still being alive, slowly driving her mad and alienating her from everyone else around her. When she finally gets a chance to make up for this moment by saving the children in the apartment, she succumbs to her monster infection immediately afterwards, leaving her locked in the paradise of her own mind... until Jisu is forced to burn the cocoon she mutated into, meaning she is officially gone for good.
YMMV Tropes in the miniseries
- Complete Monster: Hwang Seung-jae is a mild-mannered tenant in the apartment with a dark secret. Seung-jae is in truth a manipulative pedophile and Serial Killer who abducts little girls, molests and kills them, taking photos as trophies in turn in a twist that disgusts even hardened assassin Sang-wook.
- Fan Nickname: "Batgirl and Swordsman" has been spotted on Tumblr as a nickname for Yoon Ji-su and Jung Jae-heon, because Ji-su uses a baseball bat as a weapon and Jae-heon wields a katana.
- Friendly Fandoms:
- With Kingdom (2019). Makes sense; they're both Korean horror series about an apocalypse turning people into monsters, and Kim Sang-ho plays a major character in both.
- With Alice in Borderland, another horror series that aired on Netflix in December 2020.
- Harsher in Hindsight: Had Ji-su and Jae-heon not made that gigantic SOS banner, Hyun and Sang-wook wouldn't have needed to go up to remove it in the first place, meaning they would've had more hands on deck when the infected security guard showed up and Jae-heon probably wouldn't have had to die in such a horrific manner.
- Hilarious in Hindsight:
- This is the second time a character played by Kim Sang-ho has been caught in an apocalypse. In Kingdom (2019) he played Mu-yeong, who fights zombies. Here he plays Du-sik, who fights monsters.
- Lee Do-hyun and Go Min-si play siblings here. A year later they played lovers in Youth of May.
- Jerkass Woobie: Eun-yu reveals to a devastated Ji-su the reason for her lack of parents is because she pushed her adoptive parents to go to her ballet recital even though her dad was tired, leading to a fatal car accident.
- Narm: The very, very questionable music choices. In particular, certain scenes (particularly the fight scenes) are scored with "Warrior" by Imagine Dragons, with unintentionally comical results.
- Narm Charm: Some fans like the monsters' designs in spite of the dodgy CGI. And even though some of them are obviously special effects, they're all still terrifying.
- Shout-Out: After waking up, the manhwa Eun-yu is reading is Bastard, another work from the creator of Sweet Home.
- Special Effect Failure:
- The CGI for the monsters is... underwhelming.
- Hyun-su's black eyes in the last episode are very blatant CGI.
