Review: AMID THE CHANGING SEASONS will not change your life

Amid the Changing Seasons

Story: RYO
Art: YABOMI
Publisher: WEBTOON
Localization: WEBTOON
Genre: VSC (S. Korea), Webtoon, Romance

This review contains spoilers for Amid the Changing Seasons. 

Amid the Changing Seasons is a vertical scroll comic on WEBTOON by the creative team RYO and YABOMI, which caught my attention thanks to a social media post describing its relationships as complicated and often one-sided. (This review contains spoilers, as it discusses these in detail.) I like complicated relationships in fiction, and the art looked cute enough! So I clicked.

“This comic will be a Daily Pass comic on the 24th,” said the little banner at the top of the episode list.

“Oh dang, I guess I gotta read the whole thing now,” I said. And so I sat down and read the entire comic in about two days so I wouldn’t forget about it as soon as it went to Daily Pass (as I often do with Daily Pass comics I try to read. Apologies to Her Tale of Shim Chong, which I’m now doing this to.)

I love slice-of-life stories, especially in manga and manhwa. I love Skip and Loafer and Hirayasumi, and really grounded love stories like When the Day Comes. So when I started reading Amid the Changing Seasons, I was sure it would be a slam dunk for me.

It was not a slam dunk.

At first glance, the art style is cute, clearly more influenced by Japanese manga than Korean manhwa aesthetics (which makes sense, given that this was originally created by Japanese cartoonists for LINE Japan). I appreciated that the backgrounds appeared to be drawn instead of 3D-modeled, as many manhwa and manga are these days. But the more I read this comic—and the more time I spent looking at it—the more the panels and characters all blended together in my eyes.

The illustrator uses the same light blue color on multiply to shade everything with a wide brush, and the color palette is very muted, desaturated, and limited. There’s very little aesthetic expressiveness in the color choices: no bursts of bright red for anger, or golden joy, or black grief. This desaturation leads to the whole comic feeling kind of one-note and unmemorable. The lack of contrast in the colors makes it harder to pick out what’s important, and key moments don’t stand out as clearly as they could. The soft colors of the art make the digital speech balloons and black-on-white lettering seem pasted on, which they probably were, but it shouldn’t be so obvious! At least use the “hand-drawn” balloon CSP presets you definitely have access to, or change the text color to the dark gray of the panel borders, or something!

More egregious than the color choices, however, are the character designs. They are cute, don’t get me wrong—but most of the major female characters have medium-length brown hair (the exact same length! And the exact same shade of brown!), and two of them have similar enough names (Akari and Akane) that I was fully convinced they were the same character for about ten episodes. Their cute faces are also very similarly drawn, as is often a hazard of stylization, and they wear similarly simple, muted clothing in similarly muted colors. Toward the end, two characters (Akari and Mika) put their hair up in ponytails, and I had to reread the episode several times to figure out which of them I was looking at.

At times, it felt like I was looking at a storyboard for a live-action drama, where having a bunch of characters with identical hairstyles is less confusing because their facial features, voices, and mannerisms help distinguish them more. It also feels like a storyboard for live action because there’s very little exaggeration—no cartoony “chibi” versions of characters to accentuate a joke. Also, not many jokes. Comics are not live action. You don’t need to buy wigs or hair dye for an illustrated character. You can just draw them with pink or blue hair, and it won’t cost you any more money, but it will make things easier for your readers. There’s no reason for every single girl in this comic to have brown hair!

On the subject of the many characters, the way the story juggles them only adds to the confusion. Amid the Changing Seasons follows some characters who are friends, some who are strangers going to the same café, some who are high school students taught by another character, some who are coworkers—and it bounces from focal character to focal character with little to no warning. This is where binge-reading helped me, because I could still remember where a character’s storyline left off when it picked back up again a dozen episodes later. Many commenters on the WEBTOON episodes read the story as it was updating, and the top comments on a lot of the episodes were quick summaries of who a character was and when they were last seen. A story aesthetically designed to be relaxing and easy-breezy should not require this much mental energy just to keep track of who’s who.

But after all of that, is it worth it?

No! Because the absolute worst thing about this comic is that it’s ultimately just not very interesting. Amid the Changing Seasons follows a lot of different relationships over the course of about two years: high schoolers who date and break up over long distance in college, high schoolers who start dating and stay together despite hardships, childhood friends who finally get together in their mid-twenties, a guy who strings along his situationship for way too long before finally dumping her in a letter, and a girl quietly pining after a guy she saw in a café but didn’t know anything about. Some of them are connected; most end with at least one person brokenhearted. None of them is particularly interesting to read about. The café mentioned in the WEBTOON description is not actually very relevant to the story, and because the art is so hazy and faint, I don’t think I even picked up on the fact that there were multiple scenes set at the same café—if there even were any, because the café doesn’t, in fact, matter! The café is at most a backdrop for the most boring romantic problems anyone has ever had!

A viral tweet about slice-of-life asked (disparagingly), “Does the grocery store arc hit different?” The purpose of slice-of-life is to highlight the beauty in the mundane, to use subtle character work to make the everyday seem magical. To make the grocery store hit different. In Episode 2, Yumi is introduced when she decides to make pasta for her “stray cat” (what she calls Souta, her one-sided situationship), and goes out to buy milk bread buns as a side. In a slice-of-life manga, there would be a sequence showing her cooking the pasta and making the sauce, but in this comic, that’s just one single panel. Amid the Changing Seasons tries to have it both ways: to avoid the easy satisfaction of romance stories by having most of its romantic plotlines end unsatisfyingly, and to avoid detailing the mundane, everyday parts of life by focusing entirely on its romance. But skipping those details made the characters feel incomplete. I found myself wondering what Kouki even teaches, what Yumi even does for work (Does she have a job? We only ever see her chilling quietly at home!), what Kouki’s students end up studying in college. Everyone’s thoughts, feelings, hopes, and dreams revolve entirely around the objects of their affections. They don’t seem to have anything else going on. There is no grocery store arc to “hit different” here.

At a certain point, I found myself wondering: in a comic about so many different types of secret pining love, why are all of these attractions heterosexual? What about this constructed world does not allow for queerness? Is it because they’re trying to depict what they think is normal, everyday love, and gay people aren’t part of that? Most likely, it’s just because they didn’t think about it. But it did bother me. It bothered me more because everything else about the comic was so deeply unsatisfying to read.

Amid the Changing Seasons is ultimately a bland and confusing mess that is not worth binging in two days or reading an episode a day on WEBTOON Daily Pass. If you like multiple intersecting and complicated love stories in a grounded slice of life setting, read When The Day Comes instead.