온 어 리시

ON A LEASH

MANGA

STATUS
COMPLETE
VOLUMES
Not Available
RELEASE
June 26, 2024
CHAPTERS
139

DESCRIPTION

Tensions run high on the battlefield as soldiers fight through death. Bombs rain from the sky and bullets pepper the ground. In battle, beasts screech through the sky and tear through the earth. After the smoke clears, the soldiers return to their human forms weary from battle and numbed by death. But amid the explosions and chaos, a spark of passion ignites. Time will tell whether it can survive the horrors of war, or if it will succumb to it.

(Source: Lezhin)

CHAPTERS

REVIEWS

carcar435867
90/100
Furry yuri with surprising representation?
Please bear in mind that what I'm going to say here will include spoilers. Also, unfortunately, due to a conflict between the artist, Aji, and the publisher, Lezhin the series was sadly cut short at 36 chapters with no proper conclusion so I will only be writing about the chapters we got.

One part furry, one part scalie, 100% fucked up. On a Leash tells the story of a war between shapeshifting furries, scalies and avians but that setting is mainly just to serve as the set-piece for the sexual and romantic conflict between the main pair. Our protagonist is Irene Red, more commonly referred to as Red. She's a straightforward soldier who's fiercely loyal to her comrades, hotheaded and often suffers from tunnel-vision. Opposite her we have what we can call the love interest of this manhwa. Ruce Duval is a sadistic, sometimes suicidal doctor who takes great pleasure in manipulating others. Naturally, with such diametrically opposed leads this creates a really interesting and immediately appealing dynamic. Neither one wants to submit to the other and this interplay of power imbalances and pain is the real driving force of its narrative. Both extremely violent and extremely sensual, the interplay between the two is what makes this comic so memorable and unique.

First of all I want to talk about the art. It's fabulous. More cartoony than anime, with bold strokes and a vivid colour palette the art serves the story extremely well. Both the animal and human forms of the characters are recognizable, beautiful and rendered very consistently. The art is simply gorgeous in this series and is versatile enough to convey both the trauma of war and the grittiness of the sexual relationships it explores. In later chapters, the art tended toward using a lot of stylized black lines for the backgrounds (which I'm not sure was a result of deadlines) but it makes some scenes a little confusing since we're left with a lot of talking heads.

On the writing side of things I thought it was extremely solid. Oftentimes taking a non-linear storytelling approach it respected the audience's intelligence enough to not have to explain everything in a stilted way. We're thrown into the story right away and once it gets going it goes hard. That being said I don't think the story was rushed at all. The pacing was great in my opinion, it never got boring and it never felt like things were going too fast to be understandable. There were some mysteries and character motivations that were never resolved but that is a fault of the cancellation of the series and not something I can blame on the author. It did appear that the author had every intention of exploring these mysteries more and we got a taste of it in the few chapters of season 2 we got, but what we did get was still very satisfying to me.

A sexual relationship between two women that starts from bullying is not uncommon in yuri but On a Leash did do something that I have never seen before. What really surprised me was the unexpected asexual representation in a smut manhwa. It is stated pretty explicitly that Ruce is asexual, and that her motivations for engaging in sex with her fellow military members is purely so she can exert power over them. This aspect of the manhwa was something completely unique for me to read and I thought it was handled intelligently. It really made sense and fit with Ruce's character and it's an aspect I would love to see tackled more in this genre.

Overall On a Leash was a comic I could not put down once I started it. The war between the furries and avians was neither deep nor complex but it didn't need to be. It served its purpose as simply being the setting for the story. In fact, the story really only exists on the battleground and there is very little mention of the world outside of it. But rather than being a negative I think this focus was calculated. Fleshing out the world-building and world outside the battlefield were periphery to what the author was really trying to explore with this story which was the dynamic between Red and Ruce and to that end I think it was successful.

Is the story incomplete? Yes. Is it still worth a read despite that? Absolutely yes. If you like dark yuri in a mature setting with delicious power imbalances you'd be hard-pressed to find one as good as On a Leash.
Continue on AniList