Sneezy Loves Webtoons: The Sea in You By Jessi Sheron

O hai! Hello there! Come join the webtoon emporium that’s been helping me keep content and mellow. Towards the end of the Hell Year, my brain decided to tell everything other than web toons to fuck off. Even *gasp* novels??? What is this buffoonery??? However, I’m far enough on my mental health journey that I didn’t fight this and oh GOD did I fall into a rabbit hole.

Which is why I will now take you all with me. Because I care. I’m going to be featuring some of my absolute favorite webtoons like the one below, linking to sites where you can read them, and, if you feel like paying to read ahead, sites that support the artists directly. There are SO many different webtoons, so if you’re looking for new, delightful, and fascinating stories to read, here’s a place to start!

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The Sea in You by Jessie Sheron

Twitter: @JessiSheron
Instagram: @JessiSheron

Shout out to Baked Bean for their excellent help pointing out what our LGBTQ+ fam would like to know about a series!

Content Warning: Abusive and controlling partner, gaslighting, depictions of food and eating.

This webtoon is a lesbilicious retelling of the Little Mermaid, and it is adorable!!! Skylla, our mermaid, and Corinth, our environmentally conscious goth princess, meet when Skylla saves Corinth instead of making lunch out of her. At time of writing, Corinth is still in a relationship with an abusive dick who I want shanked. So far the story has been beautiful, clever, and has several seeds planted for a happy ending. Corinth may be in an abusive relationship now, but she has a supportive family, a great community, and Skylla.

And if they don’t have the hots for each other…

I’ll eat a habanero. In fact, I’ll eat TWO.

Uploads are more like a scene than a chapter, so it’s very nice to flip though and isn’t intimidating at all to start from the beginning, though the flow can feel a smidge disruptive if you’re reading on Line Webtoon. Tapas lets you continue scrolling to the next installment, but Line Webtoon’s structure can interrupt the reading flow. Because of the way Line Webtoon is set up, and how Sheron sections her installments, sometimes I feel like the emotions of the moment I’ve been steeped in aren’t over yet when I have to come back to the real world to fiddle with buttons. And if I’m on my phone, they’re tiny buttons. Line Webtoon kiiinda lets you scroll onto the next chapter, but there’s more scrolling than I have the patience for, and you have to really ‘yank’ up the screen for the app to know yes, you do mean to read the next chapter.

Either way, the story’s great! The art is wonderful, and climbs rapidly in quality at the start. We learn about Skylla’s mermaid culture and magic as much as Corinth’s life in the beginning. Having the additional dimension of understanding where Skylla comes from and a bit about how magic works for her adds a robustness to the original fairy tale and grounds the paranormal elements. The art also has a vivacious palette and excellent sense of where to lavish attention on the details. I love how ethereal the magic in this world looks and how well the world of mermaids is built.

The Sea in You also gifts us with a plethora of body shapes, and I especially appreciate the emphasis on shape. Rather than a generic body type replicated in two, maybe three sizes, the cast of characters are all lovingly and individually rendered to show the wealth of variety human bodies come in. Add a healthy range of skin tones and fashion as self expression, and you get goddamn GLEEFUL EYE CANDY! More than eye candy, it made the world in the story feel familiar to me. I instantly felt a connection to these characters, and I would be so sad if anything happened to them. They look just like the people I grew up with and the communities I’d been part of.

Corinth’s mom is Deaf, and sign language is part of her daily life. Teaching Skylla sign language was an incredibly cute part of the story that melted me and worked so well narratively. Besides giving Skylla a way to continue communicating when she leaves the seas, it showed how curious and assertive Skylla is without leaning on tired manic pixie dream girl tropes. It’s always great to see more disability rep, and I particularly enjoy seeing sign language being used in a webtoon. Two visual forms of communication being melded together. Perfect!

Skylla’s curiosity and eagerness to learn highlights the stark contrast between her and Corinth’s shit head boyfriend, who henceforth will be referred to as dickface. Sure he has a name, but who cares? Dickface refuses to learn sign language nor does he engage with Corinth’s family. Skylla respects Corinth’s boundaries, despite coming from a culture where might makes right, while dickface always twists everything around to be Corinth’s fault. Skylla hates dickface because he hurts and upsets Corinth, and dickface hates Skylla because he is a possessive fuck who can’t bear Corinth having anyone other than him in her life. The story illustrates narratively and visually the different types of abuse besides physical, and the ways in which abuse damages people.

I also love that we see Corinth as her own person who, while hurt by her abuse, is not defined by it nor by her abuser. The story fleshes out many sides of her rather than fixating on her struggles. Corinth consistently reads as a whole ass person instead of a character being inconsistent for Plot Reasons, or to manipulate the reader into having a certain reaction. It feels to me like the story has a lot of affection for Corinth. There isn’t judgement of her for being in a toxic relationship, and it doesn’t fall back on the tired stereotype of what ‘type’ of person gets in an abusive relationship. Corinth is smart, outgoing, creative, assertive, kind, generous, and cares deeply about the people close to her. Being abused has hurt her, not changed who she is.

I really appreciate the story for showing this part of Corinth’s life with gentleness and honesty. The story undermines the harmful myth that if someone is good enough and smart enough, they won’t be hurt or tricked, let alone abused. This lie first makes individuals more vulnerable to harm, then too ashamed to seek and accept help. I’m so glad the story digs into the complexity that someone with Corinth’s strengths is not automatically precluded from harm. She doesn’t instinctively know how to deal with toxic behaviour, and that issue is addressed in the story in such a loving, judgement free way.

Another thing I appreciated, though in this your mileage may vary, is how the story handled Skylla getting the name Skylla. Her mermaid name is essentially a sonic wave that a human cannot reproduce. Of course in the immigrant communities, having a ‘hard to pronounce name’ is a sore subject, but since Skylla is actually a different species and her name was a sound meant to travel underwater, I was fine with the direction the story took. Skylla chose a name that she liked, and we also see Corinth trying her best to learn Skyllas mermaid name. Corinth was terrible at it, and Skylla told her so. It was one of the many cute interactions between the two of them, and gave me something funny to cheer myself up with the next time I see someone being an idiot about a non-English name: “Yet another mortal succumbs to a supersonic wave.”

While the series is still ongoing, the tone and setup of the story is such that I’m expecting a happy ending for our princesses and a shanking for an abusive turd. The loving way the story addresses the challenges Corinth and Skylla are working through, combined with all the cute moments they share, makes me trust that the story will care for them and give them their happily ever after. There’s a lot of heart in the art and story, and I can’t wait to see where it goes.

You can read The Sea in You on Tapas and Line Webtoon.