Review: Always Human, by walkingnorth

[Russ Allbery]

Always Human
by walkingnorth

Publisher: LINE WEBTOON
Copyright: 2015-2017
Format:    Online graphic novel
Pages:     336

Always Human is a graphic novel published on the LINE WEBTOON
platform. It was originally published in weekly updates and is now
complete in two "seasons." It is readable for free, starting with
[1] episode one. The pages metadata in the sidebar is therefore a bit
of a lie: it's my guess on how many pages this would be if it were
published as a traditional graphic novel (four times the number of
episodes), provided as a rough guide of how long it might take to read
(and because I have a bunch of annual reading metadata that I base on
page count, even if I have to make up the concept of pages).

Always Human is set in a 24th century world in which body modifications
for medical, cosmetic, and entertainment purposes are ubiquitous. What
this story refers to as "mods" are nanobots that encompass everything
from hair and skin color changes through protection from radiation to
allow interplanetary travel to anti-cancer treatments. Most of them can
be trivially applied with no discomfort, and they've largely taken over
the fashion industry (and just about everything else). The people of
this world spend as little time thinking about their underlying
mechanics as we spend thinking about synthetic fabrics.

This is why Sunati is so struck by the young woman she sees at the
train station. Sunati first noticed her four months ago, and she's not
changed anything about herself since: not her hair, her eye color, her
skin color, or any of the other things Sunati (and nearly everyone
else) change regularly. To Sunati, it's a striking image of
self-confidence and increases her desire to find an excuse to say
hello. When the mystery woman sneezes one day, she sees her
opportunity: offer her a hay-fever mod that she carries with her!

Alas for Sunati's initial approach, Austen isn't simply brave or
quirky. She has Egan's Syndrome, an auto-immune problem that makes it
impossible to use mods. Sunati wasn't expecting her kind offer to be
met with frustrated tears. In typical Sunati form, she spends a bunch
of time trying to understand what happened, overthinking it, hoping to
see Austen again, and freezing when she does. Lucky for Sunati, typical
Austen form is to approach her directly and apologize, leading to an
explanatory conversation and a trial date.

Always Human is Sunati and Austen's story: their gentle and
occasionally bumbling romance, Sunati's indecisiveness and tendency to
talk herself out of communicating, and Austen's determined, relentless,
and occasionally sharp-edged insistence on defining herself. It's not
the sort of story that has wars, murder mysteries, or grand
conspiracies; the external plot drivers are more mundane concerns like
choice of majors, meeting your girlfriend's parents, and complicated
job offers. It's also, delightfully, not the sort of story that creates
dramatic tension by occasionally turning the characters into blithering
idiots.

Sunati and Austen are by no means perfect. Both of them do hurt each
other without intending to, both of them have blind spots, and both of
them occasionally struggle with making emergencies out of things that
don't need to be emergencies. But once those problems surface, they
deal with them with love and care and some surprisingly good advice. My
first reading was nervous. I wasn't sure I could trust walkingnorth not
to do something stupid to the relationship for drama; that's so common
in fiction. I can reassure you that this is a place where you can trust
the author.

This is also a story about disability, and there I don't have the
background to provide the same reassurance with much confidence.
However, at least from my perspective, Always Human reliably treats
Austen as a person first, weaves her disability into her choices and
beliefs without making it the cause of everything in her life, and
tackles head-on some of the complexities of social perception of
disabilities and the bad tendency to turn people into Inspirational
Disabled Role Model. It felt to me like it struck a good balance.

This is also a society that's far more open about human diversity in
romantic relationships, although there I think it says more about where
we currently are as a society than what the 24th century will
"actually" be like. The lesbian relationship at the heart of the story
goes essentially unremarked; we're now at a place where that can happen
without making it a plot element, at least for authors and audiences
below a certain age range. The (absolutely wonderful) asexual and
non-binary characters in the supporting cast, and the one polyamorous
relationship, are treated with thoughtful care, but still have to be
remarked on by the characters.

I think this says less about walkingnorth as a writer than it does
about managing the expectations of the reader. Those ideas are still
unfamiliar enough that, unless the author is very skilled, they have to
choose between dragging the viciousness of current politics into the
story (which would be massively out of place here) or approaching the
topic with an earnestness that feels a bit like an after-school
special. walkingnorth does the latter and errs on the side of being a
little too didactic, but does it with a gentle sense of openness that
fits the quiet and supportive mood of the whole story. It feels like a
necessary phase that we have to go through between no representation at
all and the possibility of unremarked representation, which we're
approaching for gay and lesbian relationships.

You can tell from this review that I mostly care about the story rather
than the art (and am not much of an art reviewer), but this is a
graphic novel, so I'll try to say a few things about it. The art seemed
clearly anime- or manga-inspired to me: large eyes as the default, use
of manga conventions for some facial expressions, and occasional nods
towards a chibi style for particularly emotional scenes. The color
palette has a lot of soft pastels that fit the emotionally gentle and
careful mood. The focus is on human figures and shows a lot of subtlety
of facial expressions, but you won't get as much in the way of
awe-inspiring 24th century backgrounds. For the story that walkingnorth
is telling, the art worked extremely well for me.

The author also composed music for each episode. I'm not reviewing it
because, to be honest, I didn't enable it. Reading, even graphic
novels, isn't that sort of multimedia experience for me. If, however,
you like that sort of thing, I have been told by several other people
that it's quite good and fits the mood of the story.

That brings up another caution: technology. A nice thing about books,
and to a lesser extent traditionally-published graphic novels, is that
whether you can read it doesn't depend on your technological choices.
This is a web publishing platform, and while apparently it's a good one
that offers some nice benefits for the author (and the author is paid
for their work directly), it relies on a bunch of JavaScript magic (as
one might expect from the soundtrack). I had to fiddle with uMatrix to
get it to work and still occasionally saw confusing delays in the
background loading some of the images that make up an episode. People
with more persnickety ad and JavaScript blockers have reported having
trouble getting it to display at all. And, of course, one has to hope
that the company won't lose interest or go out of business, causing
Always Human to disappear. I'd love to buy a graphic novel on regular
paper at some point in the future, although given the importance of the
soundtrack to the author (and possible contracts with the web
publishing company), I don't know if that will be possible.

This is a quiet, slow, and reassuring story full of gentle and honest
people who are trying to be nice to each other while navigating all the
tiny conflicts that still arise in life. It wasn't something I was
looking for or even knew I would enjoy, and turned out to be exactly
what I wanted to read when I found it. I devoured it over the course of
a couple of days, and am now eagerly awaiting the author's next work
([2] Aerial Magic). It is unapologetically cute and adorable, but that
covers a solid backbone of real relationship insight. Highly
recommended; it's one of the best things I've read this year.

Many thanks to [3] James Nicoll for writing a review of this and
drawing it to my attention.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-05-11

  1. https://www.webtoons.com/en/romance/always-human/1-i-guess-thats-why-i-admire-her/viewer?title_no=557&episode_no=1
  2. https://www.webtoons.com/en/heartwarming/aerial-magic/list?title_no=1358
  3. https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/do-what-you-do

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>