Is Whale Star: The Gyeongseong Mermaid Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

Whale Star: The Gyeongseong Mermaid is a Korean webtoon written and drawn by Na Yoonhee, and it's a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" set in 1926 — when Korea was under Japanese colonial rule. Su-a is a young handmaiden who spends every spare moment swimming in the sea. One day she finds a wounded independence fighter, Uihyeon, washed up on the shore, and nurses him back to health. From there it becomes a romance shadowed by danger, in a time and place where simply choosing who to love can be costly.

If you know the fairy tale, you already have a sense of the emotional shape: this is a bittersweet love story, not a breezy one. The colonial setting gives that ache a real, historical weight.

What it does well

The art is the headline. Na Yoonhee's panels are lush and painterly, with gorgeous color and a real eye for the sea, traditional hanbok, and the streets of 1920s Gyeongseong. It's one of the best-looking webtoons you can read, and the visuals do a lot of the emotional work on their own — a single quiet seaside page can hit harder than a chapter of dialogue elsewhere.

The romance earns its feelings. The leads are sympathetic, their connection builds naturally, and the Little Mermaid framing adds a constant undercurrent of longing and sacrifice. It's the kind of story that makes you care and then squeezes.

The setting matters, too. The independence struggle isn't just backdrop — it shapes what the characters can and can't do, and it raises the stakes of the romance in a way a generic period setting wouldn't. And because it's complete in six volumes, you get a full, shaped story with a real ending rather than an open-ended serial.

Where it falls short

This is a melodrama, and it commits to it. It leans into sadness and tragedy, so if you want something light, funny, or guaranteed to end happily, this isn't it — it can be a genuinely heavy read.

The pacing is also deliberate. It lingers on quiet, emotional moments, which is part of its appeal but will feel slow if you want a story that keeps moving. And because it's a known fairy tale at its core, a few beats are easy to see coming if you're familiar with the source material.

Verdict

Whale Star is a gorgeous, deeply felt historical romance and one of the best-drawn webtoons out there. If you love period romance with real emotional weight — and you don't mind a story that's willing to make you cry — it's an easy recommendation. Just go in knowing it's a slow, bittersweet melodrama by design, not a light or upbeat read. For the right reader, it's a standout.