I probably should have jumped ship and marked this as DNF a while ago, but so many people have raved about this WebToon (and the source material) that I felt the need to stick with it. The art was lovely, the story set up was thorny and intriguing, and the characters seemed promising… but the longer things went on, the more I found the plot over-road the character development, to their detriment. In particular, I found the main romance to be lacking — it moved from enemies to lovers too quickly for me to be moved by any of the later scenes. This really didn’t work well since the characters are separated for so much of the second act, so a rushed romantic development in the first act made the second act a slog for me to get through. Although I’ve never read the original duology, I’m suspecting maybe some of the character depth and interiority was lost in translating and condensing this into a graphic novel. I wish maybe some of the plot had been cut instead — it got repetitive — and more space had been devoted to character development. I found the secondary romances a lot more promising — in fact, I wish Despina and Irsa had gotten more page time. Irsa and Rahim’s romance was the sweetest to me — which made it all the more cutting when Rahim was killed off in one of the very last episodes. One of the more dynamic characters in this WebToon (albeit without a lot of page time), Rahim was lovely and I didn’t find his death to be necessary. Again, this may have been handled better in the books, but it seemed as though he was just thrown away to show that the stakes were high, when in reality the plot had already established that the stakes were high several times over. And then the characters quickly move on without really grieving Rahim (save for Irsa). Given that that was one of the only storylines I was truly invested in, I just finished the rest of this WebToon out of completionism. My original plan was to read this WebToon and then start the duology, but I’m not sure I’m invested enough any more.
I would really love to see more YA novels adapted into WebToons, though, the art was truly lovely and this seems like a great series for reluctant readers to jump into.