About a webtoon

Help Me! I'll Always Be Everybody!

Before we turn out the light, Shirley and I lie in bed and read for a while. I’ve usually got a book in hand—not long ago I reread Melville’s White-Jacket (entertaining and very underrated, if you ask me) and lately I’ve been alternating between Norwich’s A Short History of Byzantium and Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant—while Shirley scrolls through webtoons on her phone. We’re very different people, Shirley and I, but there’s no accounting for who you vibe with.

Until fairly recently, I probably would’ve called the stuff Shirley reads “webcomics” or “manga,” signaling to the world that I’m an old man who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. This stuff was after my time and beyond the periphery of my interests, but not Shirley’s. I have been informed that she’s not reading Japanese manga, but Korean manhwa, and webtoons (a genericization of a brand name) are distinguished from webcomics by their format: a deep column of stacked and usually borderless panels, optimized for touch-scrolling and smartphone display.

At least once a night, I’ll steal a glance at whatever Shirley’s reading and ask her to tell me what I’m looking at—whereupon I’ll get a chipper synopsis of who’s slipped into what kind of role in what kind of otherworld, who’s in love with them, who’s scheming against them, and how the latest twist in the plot threatens or improves their prospects for a happy ending.

It isn’t hard to come to a rough understanding of the whole isekai landscape in this secondhand way, because it’s such a consistent genre. An adolescent male living in a Korean city gets hit by a truck and wakes up with a sword in his hand, monsters scratching at the door, and a glowing blue HUD hovering at eye-level; he’s died and gone to a video game, where losing all his hit points or failing to achieve a mission objective consigns him to oblivion. Or: a young woman collapses from exhaustion during a sustained sprint on a pitiless corporate treadmill, and all of a sudden she’s looking at an unfamiliar person in the mirror—she’s been transplanted into a pastiche of preindustrial Europe where she’s the princess, a glamorous debutante, the wicked queen, or a lowly maid, and stumbles through her role in the drama like an understudy who’s only given the script a passing glance.

But I think this is outdated; at this point the conventions seem to be so ingrained that a lot of new series don’t waste precious time introducing themselves with the protagonist’s mysterious transition from living as a real person on real Earth to their new existence as a character in an MMORPG or light novel. It’s redundant. The audience of all those direct-to-video Batman cartoons won’t be lost if they’re not shown Bruce Wayne and his parents turning into a dark alley at the onset; they already know how the story began. It’s the same with isekai. As long as the first chapter mentions “transmigration” in some capacity, that’s all the backstory most readers need.

What’s interesting about isekai in this regard is that it not only takes as a given its readers’ familiarity with genre conventions, it depends on that familiarity. These comics operate on the recognition that every narrative can be analyzed down to a molecular formula whose possible components are all known and catalogued. So we have comic series with titles like I Fell Into a Reverse Harem Game!, The Male Lead Won’t Let Me Be!, Trapped in a Cursed Game as an NPC, and The Heroine Has an Affair with My Fiancé. (I shouldn’t have to explain to anyone living in 2024 why they need to be clickbaity.)

Shirley must have begun reading Help Me! I’ll Always Be Everybody! in February, because that was when I started the Pensées. I remember nudging Shirley, intending to show her the sublime fragment 121, and getting distracted by what I saw on her phone: a buxom redhead in a bodice dress flying off the handle at a startled young man in epaulettes, all hyperactively exaggerated and sprinkled with emanata for comedic effect.

I asked Shirley what tonight’s story was. She told me—at length.

“Huh,” I said, and retreated back into Pascal.

The next night she grabbed my shoulder and shook me. There’d been a startling development she just couldn’t keep to herself.

“Uh,” I answered after listening to her summary of it.

“Whatever,” she said in a huff. “Go read your book.”

For a few days after that, whenever I got to a stopping point in Pascal I’d ask Shirley about where things stood in Help Me! I’ll Always Be Everybody! in my usual are ya winning son? sort of way. I’d nod along at her explanation and make a few jokes at the comic’s expense, and eventually she’d get irritated and tell me to shut up. “Go read your book.”

The thing is—this time I was actually kind of curious. Kind of. I liked the idea of the comic’s premise. Shirley herself said that Help Me! I’ll Always Be Everybody! was a little weird as far as isekai webtoons go, kind of refreshingly unusual, and she reads enough of the damn things to know.

Three or four nights later I noticed she was reading something else. Not because she’d hit the most recent chapter and needed to wait for more, but because she lost interest. According to her, the plot had gone totally off the rails, and the quality of the art had dipped—which I’m told isn’t an unusual occurrence in a webtoon that’s gone on for a while without exploding in popularity.

I went behind her back. I read Help Me! I’ll Always Be Everybody! on my laptop when she wasn’t around, and sometimes when she was asleep. From start to finish.

Like most webtoon creators, the artist and writer of Help Me! uses a pseudonym: “Nistok.” I’ve looked for biographical information, but all I was able to find was a list of publications on the Webtoon Wiki. Help Me! I’ll Always Be Everybody! was their most recent project, and I’ll be surprised if it isn’t their last.

After reading Help Me! to what I thought was the end, I perused the rest of Nistok’s oeuvre. I haven’t yet admitted to Shirley that yes, evidently there are webtoons capable of sustaining my interest. (And since she doesn’t read my Substack, she needn’t ever know.)

Nistok put out their first two webtoon series between 2010 and 2013. Neither got official English releases, but fan translations have since been uploaded to various bootleg “read manga online” sites by fans and pirates.

In the interest of space, I won’t say much about Girls in a Dead City. There’s not much to say, anyway: it’s pretty standard zombie apocalypse fare. A pair of willowy, doe-eyed teenagers (Min-joon is the bold one and the Seo-hyeon the clever one) are in the middle of a wrecked city that’s lousy with flesh-eating undead. Evidently Min-joon and Seo-hyeon are the only people in town who haven’t been eaten or zombified, and they survive by wending stealthily through the ruins, MacGyvering useful tools from scraps, and not attracting attention to themselves.

It’s got pacing issues, and Nistok seems to be figuring out their art style as they go—but for a freshman effort, it’s not unimpressive. I have to appreciate how it tries to set itself apart from the pack by tamping down hard on narration, dialogue, and internal monologuing. Min-joon and Seo-hyeon communicate through terse whispers and meaningful but cryptic looks that suggest the pair has a mountain of unresolved issues they’re too harried to address.

Girls in a Dead City ends with a deus ex machina in chapter 45. Just when the zombies have the girls cornered and helpless on the top floor of a midrise apartment building, a squad of soldiers burst in to save the day and escort Min-joon and Seo-hyeon to a helicopter on the roof. As they fly off into the twilight, Seo-hyeon turns from the black abattoir of a city outside the window to reciprocate one last inscrutable stare from Min-joon.

I get the sense that Nistok rushed Girls in a Dead City to its sudden conclusion because the inspiration had been fleeting. I can relate: there were at least three novels I had to develop for over a hundred pages before I could see how little their concepts had to offer. But Nistok clearly didn’t lack inspiration in general, because their next comic debuted just four months after Girls in a Dead City ended.

Starshine Diaries is a sci-fi adventure and slice-of-life comedy set aboard a starship bound for Tau Ceti with a crew of scientists and engineers who are all child prodigies between the ages of eight and nineteen. Most of the chapters are twee, self-contained vignettes whose humor comes from the juxtaposition of technical wonkiness with the capriciousness and naïveté of small children and the flustered insecurity of teenagers. Though it’s as far removed from the visceral suspense of Girls in a Dead City as Mark Twain stands from William Faulkner, Nistok isn’t any less in their element than before.

And then it gets weird.

At around chapter 50 of 74, an undercurrent of tension begins to run through the wholesome, conscientiously nerdy humor. A running joke about the eldest male aboard the starship suffering from cabin fever grows incrementally less funny. The youngest children’s ingenuous quips about the teenagers become wantonly cruel. In chapters 66 and 67, two female characters, inseparable friends, verbally dismantle each other in a vicious fight that starts off as a humorous misunderstanding and grows deeply, savagely personal.

As the comic skirts the event horizon of a macabre genre shift, an alarm goes off in chapter 70. The spacecraft is pulled into a wormhole, and the crew puts aside its differences in order to steer it safely through the hazardous tunnel through spacetime. As luck would have it, they’re ejected right in the vicinity of Tau Ceti, shaving three years off their voyage. After guiding the spacecraft into a stable orbit where it will serve as the central module of a space colony, the crew celebrates by throwing a party. Friendships are reaffirmed, grudges put to rest, and the love triangle resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. In the final chapter, the crew enters into cryo-sleep to await the arrival of more ships from Earth.

If the handful of comments by English-speaking readers approximate Starshine Diaries’ reception in Korea, Nistok’s maneuver from comedy towards psychological thriller wasn’t well-received—and not without reason. If there’s an elegant method for transitioning from “Nichijou in space” “to The VVitch in space,” Nistok failed to land on it.

I strongly suspect Nistok lost their nerve, but disliked the idea of carrying on under compulsion to preserve the series’ original tone—which might have been a buoyant means to a heavy end from the onset. In any case, Starshine Diaries ends like Girls in a Dead City: with a deus ex machina and a hasty withdrawal to the drawing board.

These first two comics of Nistok’s ran against the background of the isekai explosion in Japan and its spread to Korea. Their next webtoon debuted in January 2014 and caught the wave.

Judging from its selection for an official English release, I Will Seize the Mandate of Heaven was probably Nistok’s most successful publication. It begins with three adolescent males losing consciousness in three separate transportation accidents, and transmigrating into three different corners of a game world where they’re compelled to play as warrior heroes. All three players must complete a series of missions that gradually bring them into contact and conflict with one another.

By the tenth of I Will Seize the Mandate of Heaven’s 180 chapters, I realized it was shaping up as a thinly-veiled adaptation and abridgement of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Each of the boys from the real world is a proxy for one of the Chinese classic’s three iconic warlords: Han-wool functions as the virtuous but beleaguered Liu Bei, Ji-Min stands in for the devious, ruthless Cao Cao, and Dae-Seong acts as the ambitious, hypercompetent Sun Quan. Instead of battling for the imperial throne, they compete for possession of the Mandate of Heaven, an item that gives tremendous stat boosts and behaves sort of like the Zero System from Gundam Wing, if you’re familiar—it expands the awareness of the person equipping it, but the line between “heightened perceptions” and “apophenia and paranoia” is a thin one. Moreover, whoever holds the glyph when the contest ends at a predetermined but unknown time gets to return to the world of the living, while the others simply fade into oblivion with the game world.

For what it’s worth, I mostly skimmed I Will Seize the Mandate of Heaven. It’s not bad, but for most of its run it there’s nothing really innovative or transcendently clever about it.

And then it gets weird.

Somewhere after the series’ halfway point (a big set piece reimagining the Battle of Red Cliffs with dragons, mage brigades, and steampunk mecha), Nistok strains against the source material. After separately coming to the realization that their competitors for the Glyph of Heaven are transmigrators like themselves, the protagonists deviate from the script. With the revelation that the in-universe expy for Three Kingdom’s legendary strategist Zhuge Liang is a “ghost in the machine”—an avatar of the game world with his own agenda—Mandate of Heaven literally loses the plot. We don’t need to go into specifics here, but Nistok tries to play with big ideas about the nature of consciousness and selfhood, and bites off much more than they can chew. Having deliberately blown up the architecture of the source material, Nistok fails to build anything coherent from the rubble.

If comments on a pirate site are anything to go on, Mandate of Heaven’s popularity plummeted as it dragged on. Nistok must have seen the writing on the wall, and once again hurried their series towards a contrived and convenient finale. Long story short, all three players reach for the glyph at the instant the timer runs out, and they all come back to life in the real world. The artwork progressively declines in quality during this final stretch, and in the last two or three chapters it’s tossed off with a palpable disinterest.

I really do see in Nistok a shade of Herman Melville: writing exactly as they pleased, and then feeling disheartened (even betrayed) when their audience howled that it wanted something less against the grain, something more like the early stuff.

So—this brings us to Help Me! I’ll Always Be Everybody!, which made its debut in October 2018.

I don’t know how many readers Nistok thought they could count on after the Mandate of Heaven debacle, nor can I guess at how comfortably—or healthily—they were living. The surveys I’ve seen indicate that most professional webtoon creators work more than eight hours a day. Writing, drawing, and coloring forty or fifty comic panels every week has got to take a toll on a person, and I can’t even make an educated guess as to how much income Nistok was actually earning for it.

Help Me! I’ll Always Be Everybody! begins with a twenty-something named Jin perishing in a train crash on their way home from work. The hazy artwork leaves their gender obscure, and I’ve since learned that “Jin” can be either a male or female name. After waking up in a sumptuous covered bed in an unfamiliar room, Jin recoils at the sight of a stranger’s face in the gilded mirror on the wall. Jin is now Beatrice, the eldest daughter of the noble Doukes family and the most desirable woman of marriageable age in the Seinkeit Kingdom.

I found no definition for “Seinkeit” in a German-English dictionary, so I’m guessing its invention was a collaboration between Nistok and the fan translator. Moreover, I’m trusting that the line translated into English as “th—this body!” says as little about Jin’s original sex as it does in the Korean.

From the cues of servants, family members, and encounters with the city’s haute monde, Beatrice discovers that she has a reputation as a belle dame sans merci, and struggles to adjust to her role. Her parents preach to her about honor and obligation. Male suitors pursue her on every front. Female rivals give her poisoned compliments. The intricacies of Seinkeit’s aristocratic alliances and politics puzzle her.

Beatrice’s what is this feeling? *heartbeat* attitude towards the gorgeous young noblemen seeking her hand is a genre cliché, but her past life as Jin puts her hesitancy and bewilderment in an ambiguous light. Was Jin an inexperienced and chaste heterosexual woman? Or was Jin a hetero male whose orientation began tilting towards men as the result of becoming and being Beatrice? Again, if the fan translation can be trusted for its accuracy and doesn’t filter out any cultural or linguistic indicators of one or the other, it could go either way.

When Beatrice flouts the role she’s expected to enact, surprising all and sundry by treating her admirers with warmth and openness, she learns in short order why the old Beatrice unpredictably alternated between coquettishness and iciness. Marriage is a cynical power game in the Seinkeit Kingdom, and showing favor to any particular swain can have dangerous ramifications.

In the end, Beatrice learns to make the role truly her own, balancing a calculated sangfroid with a gentle decency. The handsomest and most virtuous suitor prevails. The schemes of the wicked are foiled and their perpetrators justly punished. I am to understand that by webtoon standards, the arc is astonishingly concise, and not at all lacking in the romantic melodrama that Shirley craves.

The day after Beatrice’s storybook wedding (and the implied consummation of her marriage), she indulges in a contented afternoon nap, reflecting on how much has happened and how much she’s changed since her mysterious arrival in the Seinkeit Kingdom.

She wakes up on a hard mattress and in a different body.

Beatrice has become Gideon, a young gendarme known for his hot-bloodedness, womanizing, and combat talents. The uncharacteristically confused and sheepish Gideon begins to lose the respect of his comrades, and a cabal of corrupt officers is emboldened by rumors that the man that’s been striving to root it out has lost his edge. Once again, our protagonist must find a way to succeed in acting out an unfamiliar and uncomfortable role. Nistok also shifts gears, and Help Me! I’ll Always Be Everybody! swerves from a romance novelette into a detective thriller.

Before too long, Gideon reasserts his authority, surprising friends and rivals alike with his newfound talent for patient ratiocination. His foes set a trap which the old impetuous Gideon probably would have fallen for, but the new Gideon sees through it, turning the tables on his would-be assassins and exposing their patrons in the officer corps.

In recognition of his service, Gideon is made the guest of honor at a royal gala, where one of his superiors introduces him to his cousin-in-law, who happens to be none other than Beatrice. (This, by the way, is where Shirley said “oh my god” and shook me while I was reading Pascal.)

Beatrice is about two decades older than when we saw her last, and an exceedingly cautious Gideon probes her for information about her much-discussed change in personality during the months prior to her engagement. She coolly explains her change of heart as being precisely that: she’d found a better way of navigating the fraught field of marriage politics. When Gideon’s curiosity gets the better of his discretion and he inquires if she experienced anything like missing time, he is pulled aside and reprimanded for his discourtesy.

Then comes the kidnapping plot: someone abducts Beatrice’s teenaged daughter and holds her for ransom. Gideon, who can’t help thinking of the girl as his own, works feverishly around the clock to find and rescue her. Though the clues credibly point to a notorious criminal gang, it all seems too neat for Gideon’s liking. Applying his recollection of Beatrice’s private affairs, he twigs one of her spurned suitors as the real culprit. He sets a trap for the kidnapper, saves the girl, and restores her to her profoundly grateful mother.

Finally able to rest after after a spate of long days and sleepless nights, Gideon dozes off as soon as his head hits the pillow—and opens his eyes as Gilbert, a teenaged orphan living in the city’s remote slums and surviving as a thief. This is no peaceful awakening: he finds himself desperately sprinting through crowded and narrow streets with a small pouch of coins in his fist, chased by armed men shouting his name.

He's in for another surprise: having eluded his would-be captors by slipping unnoticed into a cellar, the panting and sweating Gilbert loosens his garments to cool off—and realizes “he” is a young woman in male garb.

We needn’t dwell on the twists and turns of the comedic “Gilbert” arc. You see where all of this is going: the protagonist repeatedly body-jumps from one denizen of the Seinkeit Kingdom to the next, and each transmigration is an opportunity for Nistok to dabble in a different story genre.

For nearly four years of publication time, Help Me! I’ll Always Be Everybody! plays out like an anthology. As soon as our hero/heroine completes one arc in the role of some archetypical figure in fiction—the aloof beauty, the rowdy soldier, the thief with a heart of gold, the foreign ingenue, the wealthy himbo, the oppressed stepdaughter, the apprentice wizard, the king’s bastard son with a sinister reputation, etc.—another begins. While webtoons’ plots tend to spiral and sprawl (I understand this is part of their appeal), Nistok boils down stories that might run for forty chapters in most webtoons into a brisk romp of only fifteen or twenty chapters.

In the reader comments, fans praise Help Me! as a kind of sample platter representing the best of the isekai scene. Questions as to why it never got an official translation aren’t uncommon. On that account, my best guess is that there was some arbitrary threshold of popularity that it consistently came shy of crossing—and the genre shifts worked against it. Webtoon readers appreciate consistency, and the comic’s very premise is that it’s not consistent.

One of the main gimmicks of Help Me! I’ll Always Be Everybody! is how “Jin” retains and uses the knowledge he/she has gleaned from previous transmigrations to overcome obstacles. But there are times when being able to approach a problem from multiple angles becomes a hindrance. Some of the middle chapters of Help Me! occasionally remind me of those intervals in Peter David’s second run on X-Factor where Jamie Madrox is wracked by indecision because he’s been too many different people to settle on a single viewpoint and commit to any one course of action. I wonder if it’s a coincidence that the chapters in which this comes to a head constitute the “James” arc: having become a knight who must make snap decisions in the field, James suffers a worsening case of analysis paralysis after flubbing a sequence of judgements by choosing the wrong well of prior experience to draw from.

It would be remarkable if Nistok actually was giving a nod to X-Factor, not the least because of its comparable subtlety. “Jin” constantly references popular real-world media in his/her interior monologues. An odious character might prompt a recollection of a villain from a well-known anime or a Disney movie; an unusual occurrence might call to his/her mind a plot beat from a manga, Korean film, or American TV show—and so on. (The translator’s annotations are most helpful when an allusion to Eastern media would probably be lost on a Western audience.) Some readers in the comments section found it grating. I don’t suppose any of them are old enough to be reminded of Secret of Evermore’s protagonist, as I occasionally was.

In any event, “Jin” also comes to learn that there are certain rules the protagonist is expected to follow. If he/she behaves too wildly out of character for a given role or explains to anyone else how they’re privy to facts they shouldn’t know, they transmigrate the next time they go to sleep.

By and by, the protagonist’s original identity as “Jin” saliently loses its significance as a reference point. Even in the original Korean, “Jin” starts appearing in quote marks after the fourth or fifth arc. The protagonist observes that his/her core identity unaccountably fluctuates. Beatrice sometimes looks out at the world through the eyes of the womanizing rake Cecil; the sorceress-in-training Penelope catches herself thinking that she’s really Gideon on the inside.

The Seinkeit Kingdom, however, remains constant. Over four centuries have passed since the protagonist woke up as Beatrice, and yet history appears to be at a standstill. There has been no cultural or technological development to speak of. The monarchy and aristocracy remain secure in their leadership. Despite occasional saber-rattling on its frontiers, the kingdom’s borders are secure. “Jin” starts to wonder if his/her purpose in being brought to this world and made to guide certain people through pivotal moments in their lives is to perpetuate the stasis.

After the James arc, “Jin” transmigrates into a position where he/she can test the theory. As Justin, a young nobleman involved in a plot to betray the royal family and install a duke from the Northern Lands on the throne, he has a chance to upend the order of the world. He speculates that the “author” of the world expects him to find a way to bring down the conspiracy from within, and decides to do the opposite. He lets it happen.

The coup succeeds. The Seinkeit Kingdom falls under foreign dominion. Justin is mortally wounded in the melee between the insurrectionists and the royal guard.

He wakes up as Edith, the unmarried eldest daughter of the ruling regent, and runs through more or less the same arc she did when she was Beatrice. Her inner monologues repeatedly call attention to the familiarity of her situation. She’s been here before—and the readers have been here before, too.

What’s amazing to me is that Nistok must have planned this from the very beginning. In the early chapters, the comments sections are full of remarks along the lines of “ok this is pretty good but what’s with the title lol.” Nistok waited almost four years to let the shoe drop, and I’ve got to admire them for playing the long game.

After a condensed five chapters reprising the essentials of the Beatrice arc, Edith wakes up as Carlos, a teenaged manor servant who catches the eye of a tomboy duchess with a tsundere personality. Then Carlos becomes Eustace, a young court mage who’s been too deep in his work to notice that a jealous rival plans to murder him. Then Eustace becomes the peasant girl Juliana whose good looks catch the eye of an aristocratic painter who asks her to model for him. The pace radically accelerates. Chapters contain episodes from two, three, or four different lives.

In the meantime, the Seinkeit Kingdom regains its sovereignty. Three centuries later, the place is exactly the same as it was when Beatrice (now long dead) was first shocked by the face looking back at her in the mirror. As Rosa, the beautiful maiden queen to an elderly monarch, the protagonist learns that Edith’s descendants thought of themselves more as children of the Seinkeit Kingdom than representatives of the Northern Lands, and eventually married into Seinkeit’s royal bloodline. The North lacked the military power to maintain its territorial claim, and accepted the Seinkeit Kingdom’s secession as a fait accompli. Rosa recognizes an authorial handwave when she sees one.

And then it gets weird.

In chapters 221 through 224, Help Me! I’ll Always Be Everybody! crosses the Rubicon. Across dozens of transmigrations, “Jin” (illustrated in the internal monologues as the silhouette seen in the first chapter) meditates on the tedium of immortality. He/she has been a benevolent queen and a wicked despot. She has conquered and he has been deposed. He has played the part of reactionary and revolutionary, hero and coward, concubine and priestess, introvert and extrovert, constable and criminal, ingenue and shrew, clown and paragon, triumphant and tragic. There is nothing she hasn’t done, nothing he wouldn’t do, nobody she hasn’t been, nobody he won’t ever be again. And the world is still the same.

In chapter 224, “Jin” theorizes that he/she has somehow been reborn in a realm of the collective unconscious, a world populated by living archetypes of human fictions. In other words, the protagonist realizes at last that is is an isekai.

Down below, the most upvoted reader comment says: “I knew it was too good to last. He [sic?] did it AGAIN.” Embedded in the comment is a variation of the old “Two Buttons” meme. The left button is labeled “keep doing a quality comic;” the right is labeled “all aboard for crazy town.” The sweating, indecisive figure in the second panel is labeled “Nistok.”

The revelation prompts “Jin” to embark on a grand project to document the Seinkeit Kingdom’s narrative laws of physics—the powers that preserve its apparently immutable structure. He/she produces a trove of documents in secret, working on them whenever a moment can be spared while playing his/her latest role in the endless transmigratory cycle, and stashing them in places where they can be retrieved after the next body jump.

The documents focus on the Seinkeit Kingdom’s people, and are apparently like Aristotle by way of TV Tropes. Everyone is a stereotype, and their functions in the fixed world-narrative are eminently legible. “Jin” composes exhaustive catalogs taxonomizing every variety of hero and heroine, every possibility for male and female sidekicks, frenemies, rivals, and villains, every template for nobles and knights and servants and orphans, and every way a transmigrator placed in any of these roles might conceivably choose to play them.  We get glimpses of abstruse kabbalistic charts delineating the intersecting layers of nominal, ordinal, and ratio data, which in their totality determine who a person is, what they do, and what fate must befall them—as though the Seinkeit Kingdom were a computer simulation governed by a complicated but predictable algorithm.

By this time Nistok is openly playing literary critic, and for about three chapters Help Me! I’ll Always Be Everybody! becomes something like an illustrated manifesto espousing a variation of the stuck culture hypothesis. When I look at it again, I can’t help but empathize with its author. I’m a hobbyist with a blog, not an expert. I dabble in matters that people much more intelligent and better educated than me have spent exponentially more time thinking and talking about. Any theorizing or philosophizing I do here is vulgar by definition. Nistok’s reflections on postmodernity and media reads like a treatise on socialism written by someone who’s never cracked open Das Kapital and has no background in economics, but who’s worked in the service industry for over a decade and has ample firsthand experience of being taken advantage of. It’s clumsy and not articulated very gracefully (and I doubt this can be blamed entirely on the fan translation). However well the author is served by their enthusiasm and intuition, they merely graze topics that others have worked out systematically.

After the manifesto chapters, the action halts on the protagonist’s latest incarnation as a student named Lucas, who’s tormented by a gratuitously tsundere classmate named Helen. Lucas needs the university’s library and laboratory to further his research into the Seinkeit Kingdom’s narrative metaphysics, and understands that he has no choice but to roll with the “boy meets mean girl with repressed a crush on him” plot if he doesn’t want to get transmigrated somewhere else and lose the opportunity. Helen bullies him to displace the possibility of acting on her romantic feelings for him; Lucas goes through the motions, having learned even to feign even the internal monologues of an exasperated and puzzled young man.

One night, Lucas arrives at a breakthrough, assembling a magic-powered device that can open a gateway into a more “refined” layer of reality whose workings determine the shape of events in the visible world. Lucas provides a highbrow analogy in Plato’s realm of ideas, and a lowbrow one by mentioning the Backyard in the Guilty Gear games, which he distantly recalls playing as “Jin.” After entering the portal, Lucas navigates a nebulous space of classical statuary, apparitions of starry cityscapes, ghostly faces, and free-floating icons.

I’m aware of how kooky this already sounds, and it gets kookier. After floating through a marble garden of character archetypes, he approaches Tsundere—the Platonic ideal of tsundere, a luminous, twelve-foot caryatid of a woman with a conspicuous resemblance to Asuka from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Tsundere yells at Lucas, calls him names, walks back her criticisms, gets flustered, and then renews her attack.

“I’ve heard it before,” Lucas says with a smirk, and then plunges a magic dagger into the heart of the very concept of Tsundere. With an explosive scream, she shatters like glass, and the shards evaporate.

Giddy with iconoclastic triumph, Lucas barely has time to contemplate the ramifications of his actions before the caryatid rematerializes in the likeness of his earmarked love interest Helen. With the new Tsundere’s taunts ringing in his ears, Lucas finds his way back to the portal and returns to the upper layer of the Seinkeit Kingdom. It’s already morning, and he’s running late.

On his way to class, he asks a friend if he’s seen Helen. “Who?” his friend answers.

When he sits down at his desk, a classmate gives him a ribbing about a girl named Artemis, who has evidently been teasing Lucas since the start of the school year. This is the first time he’s heard of her.

After getting through the day (and enduring a comedically emasculating tiff with Artemis), Lucas paces his room, dizzyingly contemplating the old philosophical problem of universals. In a bizarre moment of clarity and despair, Lucas (or perhaps Nistok) thinks of the climactic chapters of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, in which a sentient archetype of human experience is killed, and then returns to life by selecting a person from the human world to become its new persona. Lucas is no iconoclast after all. He’s an imitator.

The fan translation on the pirate site Shirley frequents stops here, at chapter 245. I was reading in February 2024, the same month the last batch of translated chapters debuted to the groaning vestiges of Nistok’s readership.

But in June, after I’d read Nistok’s earlier comics, I looked again at the entry for Help Me! I’ll Always Be Everybody! on the Webtoon Wiki. It consists only of a few blurbs, nothing very descriptive at all, and the plot synopsis hadn’t been updated since one of the mid-series arcs. It lists the comic’s end date as February 2024—and puts the number of chapters at 259.

I had to do some sniffing around to find the stuff that didn’t get uploaded (maybe that particular fan translator lost interest?), which is how I stumbled onto the Nistok subreddit. A pinned thread has links to three different Imgur-hosted fan translations of chapters 246–258—all technically clumsy, using either Times New Roman or Comic Sans, and differing pretty substantially from one another—and to chapters 246–259 in the original Korean. According to the sub’s founder and head mod, none of the three translations should be considered definitive; there’s just too much wordplay, too many neologisms, and too many terms with double meanings. She suggests that readers can get a rough sense of what’s there by reading all three, but in order to really get it, one must learn to read Korean and actually live in Korea for a while. (She claims to be a Korean expat living in California; her user history is limited to the Nistok subreddit, which she created in September 2023.)

If you’ve ever tried reading Finnegan’s Wake, you’ll have a rough idea of what it’s like to peruse the last chapters of Help Me! in their English translations. The text is sing-songy, abstract, and nonlinear to the point of incoherence. Oftentimes it’s redolent of the deliberately opaque theoretical discourse of the French postmodernists.

I mentioned earlier that it’s common for webtoon artists to start half-assing their illustrations when a series lurches toward a visible finish line, but that’s not exactly what’s happening here. The visuals of Help Me!’s final arc remind me of early twentieth-century primitivist art by the likes of Paul Klee and Fernand Léger. At times they’re rather reminiscent of Basquiat. In their succession, they seldom suggest much in the way of continuity.

There are no English translations of chapter 259. Colorful splatters approximating Jackson Pollock, fractal patterns, and tricolored grids comprise the strip’s thirty or so panels. The text is rendered in a squiggly alphabet I’m guessing Nistok invented. If there are any codebreakers or linguists in the Help Me! fanbase, apparently none have cracked the code—if there’s a code to crack.

The Nistok subreddit has about 110 subscribers, and its activity occurs in sporadic bursts. The most recent post is already over a week old, and the conversation (such as it is) revolves almost entirely around Help! Me! I’ll Always Be Everybody!

Going through the threads, I felt a bit like a middle-aged square reading On the Road in 1959 and scratching my head as to how its contents could possibly be so mesmerizing as to turn my kid and his friends into beatniks. In my opinion, Help Me! isn’t especially brilliant—but it nevertheless struck a chord with this little pocket of young readers. Fan analysis abounds in the Nistok sub, as do discussions of the comic’s philosophy. In one thread with nearly fifty replies—a very high number for the sub—there’s a pretty interesting back-and-forth about whether the character types of twenty-first-century media can or do fundamentally differ from those of earlier periods, given the new patterns of human life. Like: is the underachieving but smart and sensitive twentysomething gamer who lives in a tiny, messy apartment someone new, or is he merely a variation on an old theme that was previously instantiated in the cash-strapped bohemian aesthete of nineteenth-century novels?

In the most inspired threads, Nistok’s fans share ideas about how to break patterns. How to transcend tropes in art, the ordinary in life, and ingrained habits in thought.

Down toward the bottom there’s a thread where a user explains their insistence on using ar/ars/arself pronouns, and others were quick to point out that ar is merely defining a new sort of category that can be framed in binary terms as “ar” or “not-ar.” The most upvoted response suggests that pronouns ought to be discarded altogether, and every entity should be referred to by a proper or generic noun, no matter how unwieldy it might be in actual speech. This same user wrote a couple of half-baked posts recommending a kind of radical nominalism (though they don’t call it that) in which the individual should train themselves to regard everything in the world as something absolutely particular to itself.

One of the three mods (whom I suspect are also the three translators) has transhumanist leanings, and apparently took advantage of his perms to temporarily pin a short essay he wrote about the necessity of reaching the technological singularity as soon as it can be done. Only when consciousness is digitized and the fundamental formats of experience are made variable will we witness the inauguration of truly new narratives and aesthetic experiences. The third mod is an accelerationist oriented in the opposite direction: once civilization collapses, the descendants of modern humanity surviving in a low-tech environment will retain only the stories which are real to them—those of a historic or religious nature—and their sacredness will preclude the disintegration of their heroes, tyrants, queens, and gods into trivial and movable components.

There seems to have been some debate between these two mods as to whether the problem that Nistok identifies in Help Me! is the imprisonment of human experience in stereotyped patterns, or rather in the disposability and transparent artificiality of commodified mass-media narratives. (The latter view takes narrative patterns to be inevitable; they’re only a symptom of alienation and cause for despair when they’re recognized as self-referential constructs.) Certain users took one side or the other, and some expressed strong opinions, but the sub is too low-temperature for the controversy to ever approach a boil. The head mod never weighed in.

One user who started upwards of ten threads in the span of a week and then deleted their account was on the side of the acceleration-collapse mod. Without paragraph breaks or spellcheck, and repeatedly citing the webtoon Omniscient Reader’s Viewpoint, they worked out a scattered argument that isekai presupposes the banality of modern life reaching such a pitch of intensity that the formatted unreality of media has become the only place where human drama and interest can properly reside. After being embroiled in a dispute where an opponent pointed out that the logical conclusion of their ideas was to unplug, get offline, and touch grass, they seem to have taken it to heart and disappeared.

Two dozen or more of the non-theory posts read like experiments in Dada poetics or decadent fin de siècle prose—composed all in earnest by people unaware of the existence of either and who don’t realize they’re exploring trodden ground. In this, they may take after their common guide and absent guru.

While I was thinking about the last chapters of Help Me! just now, I remembered my copy of Paris Peasant on the nightstand. On the back cover is a quote by the author:

I was seeking…a new kind of novel that would break all the traditional rules governing the writing of fiction, one that would be neither a narrative (a story) nor a character study (a portrait), a novel that the critics would be obliged to approach empty handed…

Louis Aragon published Paris Peasant in 1926. I wonder if Nistok knew the book existed, and that a French writer from a century ago, from a different world, had already pursued the same experiment they attempted in the delirious final chapters of Help Me! I’ll Always Be Everybody! For that matter, I wonder if they could have anticipated an English reader comparing their attempt at pure originality to Finnegan’s Wake, or that someone would look at the illustrations, categorize them as “primitivist,” and dilute them through a comparison to Swiss, French, and American painters of the previous century.

I don’t suppose there’s anything left to say. What have I done here but clumsily approximated the premise and outline of The Beginner’s Guide, or maybe Pale Fire? Even now, by acknowledging the fictitiousness of the preceding narrative, I merely ape Jorge Luis Borges and his short story “Averroës’s Search;” the gimmick of Help Me! I’ll Always Be Everybody! was borrowed from “The Immortal.” Borges executed both with more elegance and economy than I was able to realize here.¹

1. Full disclosure: I had an idea to pepper this thing with AI-generated “screencaps” to help make this account of a few fictional comics more convincing, but lost my stomach for it after asking a robot to spit out the image at the top. (I’m sure the hallucinatory clock face and weird elbow gave it away for anyone who looked closely. The hand I cropped out at the bottom was holding some incomprehensible poiuyt object.)

As you probably guessed, this was a short story I’ve had sitting around for some time. (For the most part, all I did was change some of the dates.) I’ve been kind of burned out on submitting stuff to lit magazines, so I didn’t even try with this one.

I’ve got a new gig which I expect will require a period of intense adjustment, so updates might be sporadic for a while. I’ll probably dust off and post some old stuff in the meantime.