Webtoon Spotlight

Spotlight#93:#Killstagram

Have you ever wanted to not sleep for a weekend? If so, then fear plenty because of #Killstagram by Ryoung! So let's start this preemptive Halloween spotlight with the most terrifying webtoon I've ever read!

Trigger Warning

I never thought I would have to say this, but massive trigger warning for what's ahead. Killstagram deals with many themes of violence, sexual, physical, mental abuse, self-harm, and suicide. Heavy viewer discretion gets advised in most of the chapters, and the author himself has posted the phone number for the National Suicide Hotline. So yeah, viewer discretion is heavily advised.

Summary

On the surface, Remi Do has pretty much everything a young girl should be. She's young, pretty, and has an army of followers that can cancel anyone who dears criticize her. Unfortunately for her, though, that same fame is as much a curse as it is a blessing. Because at the end of the day, you don't know who is watching.

Characters

Remi Do: our resident dumb, gullible mc. Remi is a character with a surprising amount of layers. She starts off the series very vain, ditsy, shallow, and gullible. However, as the layers get peeled back over multiple traumatic events, we realize that there are plenty of sides to her. At her core, Remi is a courageously kind woman who finds solace and guidance in social media due to the lack of it she got in her very unlucky past.

Overview

 I've quite literally never seen someone as unlucky as Remi. Like girl, I swear she broke an entire house of mirrors while crossing over a river of black cats in a past life. Which pretty says all you need to know about the webtoon's tone.

Ryong's art style, compared to most of my manwha experience, isn't exactly something to write home about, but I would say that it's the master of working limitations. While most of the series is rather cutesy with huge eyes and undetailed bodies, Ryong manages to go all out of the various adversaries Remi faces.

Horrid features, dark outlines, and inhuman traits get full detail as she manages to craft some beautiful sleep paralysis demons. Combined with the series having more twists than Oliver while having an expert manipulation of tension typical of thrillers and you'll find yourself binging through the series in a couple of hours.

Every pulse-pounding chase sequence is genuinely well-choreographed, always making full use of the environment while giving Remi just enough leeway to stay ahead. It's both depressing and sad that some of the fights get genuinely better choreography than some other action webtoons, but here we are.

However, beneath all the blood and gore galore, Killstagram has many unique traits (besides being the second webtoon I know with a hashtag in the title). For example, many social commentaries are labeled throughout the story, mainly those about the dangers that can come from social media, lookism (not the webtoon), victim complexes, and depression.

I think all of this is handled well within the larger context of the series without being incredibly damaging (though I'm not the best person to ask on that front). It's commentary that will only grow more relevant as we see this new digital world we live in. As someone also trying to build a social media presence, this has made me more cautious.

If there is a moral to all this, it would be that there's a side to everyone. However, we are all people at the end of the day, and I think that the Internet has made us forget a lot about that in recent years.

This is why we should always do better to remember that silly golden rule. Trust me when I say that those words have more meaning than you'll ever know. At least, I would hope so, given what I want my career to be about.

Epilogue

Overall, #Killstagram is a short and very sour horror/ thriller that will go great with the current season. Sorry for the jokes ruining the mood, but trust me, if you read this series all the way through, you'll fucking thank me for not entirely in. While the series isn't officially over, I don't know which direction the story will take in the series, so we'll have to see.

I hope this spotlight is a lot better than my past Halloween spotlights since I genuinely want to improve my reviews while I get back into the swing of things. Unfortunately, lots of webtoons  ended, started back, and everything in between. So I've got lots of catching up to do. I'm hoping that if all works well, I'll deliver another spooky webtoon, but if not, I hope you manage to have a terrifying Halloween and that you'll survive to see where the spotlight shines on next.