The horror genre has expanded beyond simply jump scares and gore. One of the genre’s more terrifying forms is psychological horror, which is more subtle but no less scary. Take, for example, Mike Birchall’s webtoon Everything Is Fine.
If you look on the cover page on Webtoon, you might mistakenly think Everything Is Fine a cute story about cats. In reality, it’s so much more terrifying.
What Is Everything Is Fine About?
In a nice and peaceful neighborhood, a couple named Sam and Maggie live with their dog, Winston. On the outside, everything looks normal — except, Sam and Maggie aren’t quite normal. Everything from the neck down looks like a man and a woman, but instead of human heads, they possess enormous cat heads. It’s never explained why the characters look like this; it’s simply accepted as the norm, making it deeply unsettling.
And that’s only the beginning. Reading on, you discover everything is decidedly not fine in Everything Is Fine. They pointedly ignore that Winston has been dead for a long time. Seemingly innocuous and joking statements carry a dark undertone: One wrong step, and Sam and Maggie’s lives are in danger.
Everything Is Fine Shares Elements With 1984
The Everything Is Fine webtoon has some similarities to George Orwell’s 1984, a dystopian novel in which society is being led by a mysterious leader named Big Brother. The governing body, known as the Party, uses a variety of surveillance methods to keep a close eye on its citizens, from two-way telescreens to hidden microphones. But the most dangerous of all is the Thought Police, which punishes those whose thoughts do not align with the political ideal of Ingsoc.
That’s exactly what happens in Everything Is Fine. There are cameras outside, and although it’s not explicitly shown, it’s clear Sam and Maggie have to be careful how they act in their own home. Their perspectives are being controlled, so they see what the system wants them to see. Their emotions are repressed to the point where things that should be upsetting are met with only bland interest.
There’s also a character named Charlie who, like Winston in 1984, tries to rebel against the system. He builds a place in his house to escape from the watchful eyes of the surveillance cameras and his neighbors, and tries to find a way to help people like Maggie break out of the system’s control.
In 1984, when the Party finds someone who poses a potential threat to Ingsoc, they’re secretly killed and erased from society, becoming “unpersons.” What happens to Winston is much worse: He gets dragged to Room 101, where he is tortured to the point that he betrays his lover, and declares his love and devotion to Big Brother.
What occurs in Everything Is Fine isn’t so different. Anyone who is labeled as a rebel conspiring to “undermine the optimal functions of society” is deemed “red-status.” Besides their eyes turning red, the individual appears to suffer immense torture of reliving their worst memories. Once they’re red-status, nobody is supposed to acknowledge they ever existed.
Why You Should Read Everything Is Fine
The drawings in Everything Is Fine are simple, but this only adds to how disturbing the story is. One of this webtoon’s most terrifying aspects is how there are scenes in which a character says something ominous, but, because of their cat head, their expression remains completely unchanged, with only a slight shadow casting on their face.
What makes Mike Birchall’s Everything Is Fine so good is how subtle the webtoon is. There’s such a disquieting nature about the story that makes readers uncomfortable, paralleling the experiences Maggie feels in the comic. Everyone knows there’s something wrong, and things aren’t as fine as they seem on the outside. However, nobody can pinpoint what it is. With so much mystery surrounding who is behind the totalitarian system, and whether Maggie and Sam will break free, it will be a while before everything is trully fine.
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