Tales of Greed
is a Korean Webtoon anthology written by Juin Lee and illustrated by the Taejun Pak Webtoon Company. It was released in English from May 14, 2021, to January 21, 2022. It consists of seven stories about what happens when a person gains the use of magical technology that improves their life, only to take it too far.
The arcs include:
- "Face Correction": A girl is bullied because of her face, so she opens up a photo editor on her phone and finds that the changes she made to her picture affect her real face.
- "Calling": A boy finds out that he can swap bodies with people by calling them on their phones.
- "Stomach Fridge": An overweight girl finds that a fridge can contain the food she eats if she licks her lips first.
- "Neighbor's Toilet": Two college students have to endure an hours-long commute to their respective schools until they find that flushing their toilets multiple times will transport them to each other's houses. Since each student lives closer to the other student's college, this greatly cuts down the commute time.
- "1 Minute": A boy steals someone's watch and finds out that it can rewind one minute up to three times. Going over that limit, however, induces a "Groundhog Day" Loop.
- "Bully Controller": A bullied student gets a game on his Switch that allows him to control the bully. After the bully finds out, they team up to conquer several gangs.
- "Human Leather": A fat boy goes on a date with a pretty girl and finds out that she's wearing a skin and trying to kill him for his. Once he escapes, he kills his bully and wears his skin, living as him.
Tales of Greed includes examples of:
- Accidental Murder: Areum accidentally kills Mihyeong by applying a zombie effect to her face with the photo-editing app.
- And I Must Scream: The protagonist of "1 Minute" is kidnapped and killed while wearing the glitched-out watch, trapping him in one minute of being killed over and over again.
- Attractiveness Discrimination: The protagonists of "Face Correction" and "Human Leather" are bullied for their looks; the former for her face and the latter for his weight.
- Big Eater: Sojin, aka Mely, makes a career from eating large quantities of food in "Stomach Fridge".
- Bound and Gagged: The protagonist of "1 Minute" is kidnapped and hung upside down. When he gets too noisy, the kidnapper shoves a rag in his mouth.
- Bully Turned Buddy: Dorong befriends his bully Daebal after they conquer several gangs together.
- Call-Back: The last episode of "Neighbor's Toilet" has a one-panel gag of the couple looking at the fish with Areum's face in the aquarium.
- Central Theme: The running theme with the stories is how people get ahead of themselves after gaining a reality-altering power.
- Facial Horror: "Face Correction" is about a photo-editing app that also changes the person's real face. Vandalizing a face has painful consequences.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: When Hunnam gets asked out by a pretty girl, he thinks, "So this is how people get robbed of their organs". In that same episode, the girl tries to kill him for his skin.
- Friend or Foe?: Hunnam, the protagonist of "Human Leather", kills his bully and lives as him, but his best friend didn't get the memo and kills who he thinks is the bully for ruining their lives.
- Formerly Fat: The protagonist of "Stomach Fridge" rapidly loses weight by licking her lips to redirect the food she eats into the fridge.
- "Freaky Friday" Flip: "Calling" involves a phone that swaps the bodies of the caller and the recipient.
- Genuine Human Hide: "Human Leather" has people wearing the skins of other people as disguises.
- Gonk: The protagonists of "Face Correction" and "Human Leather" have exaggerated ugly facial features.
- Grave Robbing: Hunnam hesitates to kill people at first, so he starts by stealing dead bodies for human leather.
- Greed: The Central Theme is that people will get greedy with powers instead of quitting while they're ahead.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: "1 Minute" is about a watch that can turn time back by one minute. However, after three rewinds, the minute will repeat itself until the wearer takes off the watch.
- How We Got Here: "Bully Controller" starts with Daebal about to take on a gang before rewinding to the start.
- Instant Humiliation: Just Add YouTube!: In "Stomach Fridge", Sojin is livestreaming when her boyfriend puts cabbages in her stomach fridge, causing her to vomit them all out. While it gets a lot of views, she believes her streaming career is done for.
- Ironic Name:
- The protagonist of "Face Correction" starts out as a Gonk and is named "Areum", which means "beauty".
- Likewise, the protagonist of "Human Leather" is an overweight guy named "Hunnam", which means "attractive guy".
- Kill and Replace: In "Human Leather", most users live as the person whose face they wear after killing them.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Most of the protagonists suffer a fate similar to what they have brought upon others. For starters, "Face Correction" ends with the protagonist getting her face swapped with a fish after she had used the app to disfigure and kill her bully.
- Licking the Blade: In "Human Leather", Hunnam's date licks a butcher knife before she moves in to kill him.
- People Puppets: "Bully Controller" is a new game on Dorong's Switch that allows him to control Daebal's movements.
- The Schlub Pub Seduction Deduction: Briefly foreshadowed in "Human Leather". Hunnam goes on a date with a pretty girl and finds out she's wearing other people's skin. She wants his skin as maintenance.
- Tap on the Head: Hunnam gets knocked out by a bowling ball to the head. Justified, as the girl intended to kill him and is surprised that he survived.
- Thematic Series: Each story follows different characters but typically follows the same beats of the disadvantaged protagonist coming across magical technology that makes them greedy, leading to a karmic ending.
- Time Loop Trap: In "1 Minute", Sucheol is stuck in a minute loop when he uses the watch again after three rewinds. After going through the loop so much that he can defeat his bully, he realizes that taking off the watch ends the loop. When he gets kidnapped by the watch's previous owner, his captor kills him and triggers the watch's glitch, trapping him in a cycle of being killed with virtually no hope of escape.
- Time Master: The watch in "1 Minute" will put the wearer into a "Groundhog Day" Loop after exhausting the three rewinds. The protagonist takes advantage of this loop to hone his skills or to wreak havoc that can easily be undone.
- Toilet Teleportation: A variation occurs in "Neighbor's Toilet". Two people's bathrooms are connected such that flushing the toilet multiple times transports them to the other person's house.
- Unsettling Gender-Reveal: Near the end of "Human Leather", Hunnam's girlfriend turns out to be a man wearing a woman's skin.
- Unwilling Suspension: At the end of "1 Minute", Sucheol is tied and hung upside-down from the ceiling. It makes escape nigh impossible and is part of the kidnapper's plan to gut him like a pig.
