Sweet Home Character Guide: Every Survivor and Antagonist

TL;DR: Sweet Home character guide: Cha Hyun-su leads a Green Home survivor roster of eight named allies (Yoon Ji-soo, Lee Eun-hyuk, Pyeon Sang-wook, Han Du-sik, Jung Jae-heon, Lee Eun-yoo, Park Yoo-ri, Ahn Gil-seop) plus two recurring antagonists (Shin Joong-seop, Jo Yi-hyun). Every name here is verified against Wikipedia and the official WEBTOON credits, not copied from a fan wiki. The Netflix show adds at least one character, Seo Yi-kyeong, who doesn't exist in the manhwa.

I went into this Sweet Home character guide expecting the roster to be smaller than it is. It isn't. Kim Carnby's apartment-siege horror runs a genuinely large ensemble across its 141 chapters, and enough of them get real page time that a plain "main characters" list undersells the cast. This guide is the roster piece: who everyone is, what they do, and where the Netflix show's cast quietly diverges from the source. If you want the rating and verdict, that's the Sweet Home manhwa review. If you want the full arc-by-arc breakdown of how the story unfolds across those 141 chapters, that's the Sweet Home reading guide. This one just answers "who is that."

Key Takeaways

• Cha Hyun-su is the protagonist: 18 years old, already suicidal when the outbreak starts, and one of the only characters who half-transforms without losing himself entirely
• Eight named survivor allies get real arcs across the 141-chapter run, not just background faces in a crowd scene
• Two named antagonists, Shin Joong-seop and Jo Yi-hyun, function as recurring human threats rather than one-off monster encounters
• The Netflix adaptation keeps most of the core manhwa cast in Season 1, then adds at least one character (Seo Yi-kyeong) who has no manhwa equivalent
• Every name in this guide is checked against Wikipedia's sourced character list and the official WEBTOON series credits, not a fan wiki summary

Overview

Sweet Home was written by Kim Carnby with art by Hwang Young-chan, and it ran on Naver Webtoon from October 2017 to July 2020 before completing at 141 chapters (140 numbered chapters plus a prologue). The English WEBTOON release, which is where most readers outside Korea encountered it, carries the same 141-chapter count and had reached 2.4 million subscribers by early 2021. The story is set at Green Home, a rundown apartment complex where residents begin transforming into monsters shaped by their own suppressed desires, and where the survivors who don't transform have to figure out who they can trust before the building itself stops holding.

What this Sweet Home character guide does that the review and reading guide don't: it treats the cast as the subject, not the plot. Eleven names below, each checked against a live source before being included. Nobody made this list because a fan wiki said so.

Sweet Home Character Guide: Cha Hyun-su, the Protagonist

Cha Hyun-su is 18 when the series opens, and he's already decided he wants to die. His family was killed before the story starts, and he moves into Green Home with a plan to end things there. Then the outbreak happens, and his relationship with survival gets complicated in a way most horror protagonists never have to deal with: he isn't fighting to live because most of him doesn't want to.

That matters for how his transformation works. Everyone infected in Sweet Home eventually becomes a monster shaped by their strongest desire. Hyun-su half-transforms instead, developing healing and electrical abilities while keeping his own mind mostly intact, and the series treats that resistance as connected to how unresolved his desire actually is. He isn't reaching for anything specific enough to fully crystallize into a creature. The tension between the human Hyun-su and whatever is trying to take over runs the length of the manhwa.

Key Survivor Allies in Green Home Apartments

The ensemble is where Sweet Home earns its runtime. Here's who actually gets tracked across the 141 chapters, verified against Wikipedia's sourced cast list.

Yoon Ji-soo is 20, a bass guitarist and composer who lives alone in Room 1510. She's one of the first residents to form a real connection with Hyun-su, and her arc develops into something closer to a genuine relationship than most survival horror bothers writing. She isn't sidelined once the plot gets busy, which is more than some of the cast can say.

Lee Eun-hyuk is also 18, and he becomes the group's strategist almost by default: the one who runs the numbers other people flinch from. He's the older brother of Lee Eun-yoo, another named resident, and that relationship gives his colder decisions a personal cost the plot doesn't let him ignore.

Pyeon Sang-wook, 32, is a former police officer, and he's the character Green Home leans on when a problem needs to be solved with force instead of a plan. He's blunt, he's effective, and his backstory as a cop gives him a different read on the criminals who show up later than the rest of the group has.

Han Du-sik is a former engineer who uses a wheelchair and spends the outbreak building weapons and rigging the building's defenses. He's proof the series doesn't equate usefulness with physical combat ability, which isn't something every survival horror manhwa bothers to write.

Jung Jae-heon, a Korean-language teacher and devout Christian, wields a long sword and holds onto his faith through a situation clearly designed to test it. He's one of the more quietly interesting characters precisely because the series doesn't mock or valorize his belief, it just lets him hold it.

Lee Eun-yoo, Eun-hyuk's younger sister, rounds out the sibling dynamic that gives her brother's arc its stakes.

Park Yoo-ri, 28, acts as caretaker to Ahn Gil-seop, an older resident, and fights with a crossbow when the situation calls for it. Ahn Gil-seop, 50, is the resident under her care, and their pairing is one of the series' quieter examples of found responsibility inside the siege.

For the same "is the person still in there" question asked without any monster mechanic at all, Kim Carnby's Bastard manhwa review covers his other major series, a serial-killer thriller with a completely different premise but a recognizable authorial fingerprint.

Named Antagonists: Sweet Home's Human Monsters

Sweet Home doesn't rely purely on monster-of-the-week threats. Two named human antagonists recur across the run and carry actual arcs of their own.

Shin Joong-seop leads a gang of escaped prisoners who exploit the outbreak to seize control of vulnerable survivor groups, arriving on a stolen bus and controlling the food and generator that other survivors need to live. He's the series' most straightforward villain, driven by opportunism rather than anything more complicated, and he eventually transforms himself, becoming the manhwa's final major antagonist.

Jo Yi-hyun is the stranger case. He's a half-monster outsider with multiple personalities, and his monsterization can only take hold of one of them. The result is a character who seems like one of the more decent people among the criminals he's aligned with, until the personality the monster actually controls surfaces. It's the series' most direct statement about how thin the line between the transformed and the untransformed really is, closer in spirit to Hyun-su's own half-transformation than to Joong-seop's straightforward villainy.

Want more manhwa where the antagonist is this morally tangled instead of purely evil?

Manhwa Like Sweet Home →

Manhwa vs Netflix: Sweet Home Character Guide Differences

If you came to this Sweet Home character guide from the Netflix show, a few things are worth flagging before you start reading, because the cast isn't a one-to-one match.

Season 1 keeps the core manhwa ensemble more or less intact: Hyun-su (played by Song Kang), Sang-wook (played by Lee Jin-wook), and the rest of the Green Home group track closely to their manhwa versions, at least in outline. Where the show adds something the manhwa never had is Seo Yi-kyeong, a nurse character introduced in Season 1 who has no equivalent anywhere in the source material. She isn't a composite of an existing manhwa character or a renamed version of someone else; she's a Netflix-original addition, and her role expands considerably across Seasons 2 and 3, which are themselves largely original stories once you're past the first season.

That's the practical takeaway: if a name from the show doesn't appear in this guide, it's very likely because that character doesn't exist in the manhwa at all, not because this list missed them.

Step-by-Step

Eleven names in one sitting is a lot to hold onto, especially with a cast this size arriving inside the first act. Here's the order that actually makes the roster stick.

1. Start with Cha Hyun-su before anyone else. Everything else in Green Home gets filtered through his half-transformation, so his rules become the baseline you measure every other character against.

2. Track Lee Eun-hyuk and Pyeon Sang-wook as the group's operational core. One plans, one executes. Most of the group's early decisions run through this pairing, which makes them the fastest way to understand how Green Home actually organizes itself.

3. Watch how Yoon Ji-soo's role shifts once the initial panic settles. She starts as a peripheral resident and becomes central to Hyun-su's arc specifically, which is easy to miss if you're only tracking the siege logistics.

4. Note which allies double as caretakers. Park Yoo-ri and Ahn Gil-seop, Lee Eun-hyuk and Lee Eun-yoo: Sweet Home keeps pairing survival responsibility with an existing relationship, and it's a pattern worth noticing once you see it once.

5. Hold Shin Joong-seop and Jo Yi-hyun as two different kinds of threat. One is simple opportunism, the other is the series' most direct philosophical question about what monsterization actually takes from a person. Don't read them as interchangeable "human villain" filler.

6. Save the Netflix-only characters for last, or not at all. If you're reading the manhwa specifically because you want the original version of this story, characters like Seo Yi-kyeong aren't part of that version. Knowing that upfront saves you from wondering where she went.

Sweet Home is one of the more demanding completed reads in its genre. For more finished horror and thriller manhwa with real endings, see

Best Completed Manhwa →

Tips

Read the prologue before Chapter 1. It's labeled separately on WEBTOON and easy to skip past, but it establishes who Hyun-su is before the outbreak, which changes how his half-transformation reads once it starts.

Don't assume a character's Netflix casting tells you anything about their manhwa arc. The show reshuffles fates for several characters across its three seasons, and the manhwa's version of events is frequently the more restrained one.

Pay attention to which characters get named rooms. Yoon Ji-soo's Room 1510 and Han Du-sik's Room 1408 aren't just set dressing, the series uses specific spaces to anchor who lives where inside a building that stops feeling stable fairly quickly.

If a character's psychology is what's holding your attention more than the survival mechanics, the same thing that makes Hyun-su and Jo Yi-hyun interesting runs through more of the genre than just this one series. Our best manhwa psychological thriller list covers more of that specific register.

Related Reading

• Sweet Home Manhwa Review: the rating and verdict, if you're deciding whether to start.
• Sweet Home Reading Guide: the full 141-chapter arc breakdown and where the Netflix story splits from it.
• Manhwa Like Sweet Home: recommendations sorted by which quality of the original you want more of.
• Bastard Manhwa Review: Kim Carnby's other major series, same psychological register, no monsters.
• Best Completed Manhwa: more finished horror and thriller series with real endings.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the protagonist of the Sweet Home manhwa?

Cha Hyun-su, an 18-year-old who moves into the Green Home apartment complex after his family dies. He's already suicidal before the outbreak starts, which is what makes his half-monster transformation different from everyone else's: he retains his human consciousness and develops healing and electrical abilities instead of fully turning.

Is Yoon Ji-soo a real Sweet Home manhwa character, or only in the Netflix show?

She's in the manhwa. Yoon Ji-soo is a 20-year-old bass guitarist and composer who lives alone in Room 1510 at Green Home. She develops feelings for Hyun-su over the course of the series and is one of the more consistently written survivor arcs across all 141 chapters.

Who is Lee Eun-hyuk in Sweet Home?

Lee Eun-hyuk is an 18-year-old Green Home resident who becomes the group's de facto strategist, the one making the calculations other survivors won't make out loud. He's also the older brother of Lee Eun-yoo, another named resident, which adds a personal weight to some of his more ruthless calls.

Does the Sweet Home manhwa character list match the Netflix show's cast?

Only partly. Season 1 keeps the core manhwa cast, Hyun-su, Ji-soo, Eun-hyuk, Sang-wook, and the rest of the Green Home group. Netflix also introduced Seo Yi-kyeong, a nurse character who doesn't exist anywhere in the manhwa, and gave her a substantial role starting in Season 1 that expands across Seasons 2 and 3.

Who is the final antagonist in the Sweet Home manhwa?

Shin Joong-seop, the leader of a gang of escaped prisoners who exploits the outbreak to seize control of survivor groups before he himself transforms. Jo Yi-hyun, a half-monster outsider whose monsterization can only override one of his multiple personalities, is the series' other major named antagonist and its more psychologically unsettling one.

How many named characters does the Sweet Home manhwa roster include?

This guide verifies eleven: the protagonist Cha Hyun-su, eight named survivor allies, and two recurring antagonists, all confirmed against Wikipedia's sourced character list and the official WEBTOON credits. Sweet Home has a larger unnamed ensemble, but these are the characters with enough page time to track by name.

References

• Sweet Home on WEBTOON (official English release)
• Sweet Home (webtoon) on Wikipedia
• Sweet Home on AniList
• Bastard on WEBTOON