Title: Everfallen
Type: Webcomic
Year: 2022-2023
Country: Unknown (presumably the English-speaking Western world)
Genre: Fantasy
Status: Cancelled(?)
Platform: Webtoon (read here)
Appropriate for 30+?: No
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))
Everfallen is a bit of a mess. The art wavers from mediocre to distractingly bad, the pacing is uneven, the plot is confusing at points, and worst of all, the predominantly adult characters all talk like they're desperately trying to sound smarter than they actually are (and bombing badly at it), while acting like a group of high school girls hopped up on energy drinks at an anime convention. There's a lot of cringe and not a lot of maturity here, but unlike most cringe young adult works it doesn't read like it's written for teenagers so much as by a teenager.
However, the real tragedy is that the series actually had potential. Somewhere in the mess is a surprisingly intriguing setting and premise, and with a better artist and an actual dedicated editor (not the overstretched rubber-stamp "editors" that Webtoon provides) to help rewrite the dialogue and clean up the more confusing chapters, this could have been an okay if not good series. Everfallen is definitely weird and at times off-putting, but at least it feels somewhat original. By the end of the series the author had dangled enough unsolved mysteries and incomplete lore that I found myself thoroughly plot-committed to a series that by all accounts I should have dropped chapters ago without a second thought.
Unfortunately, it would appear the series was cancelled by Webtoon; there was never an official announcement from either Webtoon or the author, just a cliffhanger final chapter with "series finale" stamped on the title. Rumor has it that Everfallen suffered in popularity and engagement from the get-go following a marketing flub on Webtoon's part where they tried to compare the series to Fullmetal Alchemist (which apparently enraged FMA fans and gave the series a bad reputation before it had even started). So now we'll never know if the author was actually building up to anything worthwhile underneath Everfallen's many flaws, or if we were unknowingly spared from another 1-2 seasons of sub-par quality culminating in utter disappointment of an ending.