In the Bleak Midwinter;
www.webtoons.com
With a dead sister and 25 years to go on her soulmate timer, Anya decides to cryogenically sleep away her problems. Too bad she wakes up to an apocalypse full of them. Now stuck in a burnt out landscape full of killers, Anya must decide which she wants to keep: her heart or her head.

Title: In the Bleak Midwinter

Type: Webcomic

Year: 2020-?

Country: Unknown (Western World?)

Genre: Action/Sci-Fi (sort of)

Status: Ongoing (review as of chapter #74)

Platform: Webtoon (read here)

Appropriate for 30+?: Maybe

My rating: 2/5 stars

(Rating scale: 5/5 = masterpiece, 4/5 = quite good, 3/5 = mostly good, 2/5 = bleh, 1/5 = I regret ever being exposed to this series, 0/5 = affront to humanity)

Warning: spoilers ahead

In the Bleak Midwinter has a big problem with expectations: from chapter one it sets up a string of mysteries and secrets, but keeps its cards so close to its chest that it’s impossible to tell if we the audience are ever going to actually be privy to what they are. The series is over 75 chapters and four years in, and yet all we’ve gotten thus far are crumbs. This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if 1) the subjects of the secrets weren’t so fantastical that it’s hard to believe the authors actually have a good explanation, 2) the secrets weren’t so integral to the setting and plot, and 3) the secret-dependent setting weren’t the only thing carrying the series. Elaborating on these three points:

  1. The two biggest mysteries of the series are introduced early on: the first is that (most? nearly all?) people have a timer on their wrist that counts down until the moment that they’ll meet their soulmate, and the second is that the protagonist is apparently immortal for some reason. Being a “sci-fi” series you’d expect/hope to receive some kind of explanation to both of these, but so far we’ve gotten almost nothing for either, and by now it’s hard not to suspect that either there isn’t an explanation, or it’s a wholly unsatisfactory one (strong Lost vibes…). But on top of this there are so many other unresolved mysteries it’s getting hard to keep track: what happened in the “accident” that killed Anya’s sister? How was Delta & co’s mother killed? How exactly did the war start? Why is Anya’s soulmate an android (android hybrid?)? How human are Omega and his siblings? What is the current state of humanity (characters repeatedly say “millions” were killed, but humanity seems to be at the brink of extinction)? How did Anya’s brother come to be in charge? How did they make the air chemically toxic to humans only (and why did it backfire since it was supposed to target androids)? What exactly is Dramaxil? It starts to get overwhelming once you realize the author keeps piling on mysteries without ever providing more than fractional answers to the mysteries that already exist.

  2. The plot, setting, and characters’ personalities and actions are all a direct result of things that happened in the past (all the mysteries listed above). Normally when a series has a mystery it’s something to fill in the blanks, to explain a setting/plot oddity or character quirk, not literally the entire explanation/motivation for everything that happens and everyone it happens to. The series feels empty, similar to a dreamscape where things just are they way they are and just happen the way they do without any underlying rhyme or reason. This makes the series sci-fi in aesthetics only, because if the author has anything to say about humanity’s relationship with technology, it’s completely buried under the ever-growing pile of secrets and unsolved mysteries.

  3. While it appears decent quality at first glance, broken into its components I don’t think the series has much going for it. Hardly any of the characters are memorable or even likeable. The art is mediocre. The action scenes are dull. The dialogue is bland. The pacing is slow. Realism is lacking (e.g. every trained killer insists on talking before taking the point-blank headshot (resulting in their wasting just enough time for something to interrupt it), the weather is constantly snowing yet there’s only ever a few inches on the ground, how are everyone’s hideouts and scouting parties not instantly discovered by their footprints in the snow? etc) All of the sci-fi elements are tropes that have already been thoroughly explored by other series, usually better (The Matrix and The OC just to name two). At a certain point I realized I gave zero fucks about the plot and was just reading out of a (fading) hope that the series would start providing answers to its many mysteries.

While there’s not anything specific in In the Bleak Midwinter that would be off-putting for 30+ readers, I struggle to imagine someone who’s not a teenager actually enjoying this series simply because I’d expect anyone with decades of media exposure to have read/watched too many similar series that were much more interesting/thought-provoking/entertaining, and thus struggle to find any value in this series by comparison. In the Bleak Midwinter isn’t bad so much as unnecessary, with little to say, nothing novel to offer, minimal entertainment value, and heaps of frustration over unresolved mysteries and perpetual secrets.