Webtoon Winter Woods, like splendid fusion cuisine

It's successful fusion cuisine, making a good harmony from a variety of different kinds of cuisine, still keeping the taste of its materials. And its materials can be narrowed to ‘sentimental romance’ and ‘mystery thriller’.

The webtoon begins as a man, codename EL-01, gets a name, Winter, from Jane, a comic artist who was suffering from short of fresh materials. The name is from the winter woods where she gave him the name. EL-01, or Winter, is a non-human existence from the age ancient enough to be hard to guess, made by the Alchemist who missed his son. He doesn’t feel any emotion or pain. By the given circumstance, it seems he’s found by humans around the Second World War.

Humans tried various experiments on him (against every code of conduct related to an experiment), but it seems all of them ended up as a failure, to speculate that they deployed Jane. The Group connects them and waits for Winter’s reaction, watching them with surveillance agents. And this rebellious girl slowly changes Winter, as the Group wants.

 

The structure of the story is very familiar. 

It’s the story of an artificially created man lack of emotion, and him becoming a real human. But it’s very hard to describe the process of learning the emotion properly. A person grown up enough to write a story would have their emotion and won’t be remembering the past they were learning how to feel.

An indirect experience won’t make up for it, too. A newborn baby is not like an existence without any feeling, and even if you assume they are similar, you can’t raise a baby from the start only to draw a comic.

Thus, the process of a human-looking otherling becoming a real human with feelings has to depend solely on the author’s imagination. Either directly of indirectly, it’s impossible to experience that. It can’t be an easy work, but in Winter Woods the author shows the amazing ability for making the readers enjoy the process while he still keeps the process very persuasive.

That Winter learns the human feelings one by one from Jane is very similar to that a baby learns words one by one from their parents. Of course, it won’t be compared to parents’ feelings of the time their baby starts to talk and walk by their feet, but it could be similar to what the readers would feel as they see gradually changing Winter.

 

The experience of understanding a feeling and feeling the feeling  

The process how Winter recover his feelings, from his inner conflicts from living with common people as an artificial human with a hole in his chest, and the way how he empathizes with others, and to the way how he expresses his feelings, are described very delicately and tenderly. The readers came to empathize with Winter and Jane like parents do, when a part of the process is finished and they realize the change as a result. 

The reason why this comic is a sentimental webtoon and a romance webtoon at the same time is that Winter’s learning curve is so steep that it can’t be compared with that of children, and one of the feelings he came to learn, love, has the most gravity among the feelings.

Meanwhile, the reason why it’s a part mystery thriller is the structure of predestined catastrophe. Jane and Winter did not meet by chance, and even Winter’s change, the main storyline of season 1, is intended result of the Group. In addition, from the facts available for recent episodes, the Group didn’t send Winter to Jane in good intention and they’re watching them 24/7.

 

Growth of Winter, like being able to feel, was the very thing the Group wanted the most

And in spite of their low gravity during season 1, now we can expect the foreseen, dark hands of them are going to hunt Winter and Jane. Ironically, their lovey-dovey life and touching growth are moving up the time of the end of their relationship. Besides humans, other non-human beings are watching Winter and Jane, but the two are not properly aware of the threats they’re going to face.

Season 1 was completed some time ago, even it provides so much fun only with the season 1, but what the more to come is more expected. I dare to recommend this one for you.