The Webcomics Weekly is back in your life! As for editor Elias’ life, he’s busy playing way too much Tears of the Kingdom and has Link’s quest for a shirt on the brain. Mel, however, read about a different water level this week with “Castle Swimmer.” Can you believe it’s at 150 episode already?!
Castle Swimmer
Episodes 1-16
Updates Sundays
By Wendy Lian Martin
Reviewed by Mel Lake
It’s Mer-May for this week’s Webcomics Weekly! This week, I read the beginning of a sweet mer-fantasy series called “Castle Swimmer.” It’s a long-running series on Webtoon about merfolk that just surpassed 150 episodes. Taking a peek at the recent episodes, I can tell that the creator’s style has remained true even while their artwork has become more polished and clean. So let’s dive in! (And yes, there will be ocean-themed puns ahead.)
The “chosen one” narrative is so common in fantasy stories that it has a hefty TV Tropes page and plenty of scholarly essays written about it. “Castle Swimmer” takes two “chosen one” characters and plays with the trope by not only pitting them against each other but has them fall in love. It’s a great big mashup of tropes, all with mermen! Or, mer-sharks, rather, but I’ll get into that in a second. Our first “chosen one” is a very pretty fish creature named the “Beacon.” He has a beautiful shining tail and was created by the God of this world to fulfill prophecies. All pretty standard stuff, from a storytelling perspective. But the catch is that the Beacon has to not only fulfill one prophecy, but it basically becomes his full-time job to travel from place to place, fulfilling the hopes and dreams of all kinds of sea creatures. He isn’t always able to live up to the high expectations of the mer-societies, however, and starts to hate being the Beacon.
Enter Siren, our second “chosen one.” He’s a shark-like creature that looks like a merman with sharp teeth, who is prophesied to kill the Beacon and save his shark people. When it comes down to actually killing the Beacon, though, Siren fails and falls in love instead. By episode 16, the pair have only started to interact but it’s clear where the story is headed. (Also I skipped ahead.) Siren has a classic character dilemma: he’s torn between loyalty to his own people and his longing to explore the world and his desire not to harm Kappa, the Beacon.
These are all juicy tropes to explore in the webcomics format, which is well-suited to long stories with lots of character development and the room to explore side quests and characters. The creator of the series has a good handle on the format, with a great ability to draw goofy faces as well as ones that are full of sincere emotion. The mer-creatures have distinct and fun character designs, though we spend most of the time with Kappa and the shark societies in the first dozen episodes. Kappa has little fish friends that follow him around and his interactions with the underwater world are fun and full of childlike wonder. Watching him swim around with his shiny tail was just so fun, and it’s interesting to see how the creator has taken a somewhat typical anime-like Webtoon aesthetic and adapted it to mermen and sea life.
My one gripe with this comic in its early stages is that there seems to be, in my opinion, a fair amount of filler panels. My day job is as an editor, so I am always seeing extra words that could be cut to make the content really shine, and here is no exception. Each episode feels like it could be trimmed so that only the most important interactions and dialogue are kept. But overall, this is a minor complaint and one that many readers probably don’t share. Oftentimes, readers of serial stories want more content, not less, so while I have no doubt that as this story matures, the storytelling gets tighter, what comes across as a criticism from me may be seen to many others as a feature, not a bug.
If you’re in the mood for some mer-romance (sorry), “Castle Swimmer” is a cute, tropey fantasy with plenty to sink your teeth into (sorry again). I skipped ahead a little and saw that the future episodes seem to have delved deeper into the lore behind the world and prophecies in it. So whether you want a light romance or a fantasy world with prophecies and magic, there’s probably something in here for you to enjoy.
