Synopsis
When Pollyanna Crenbell was just a child, her noble family sent her to die on the battlefield. Now, she has served six years in the endless war between her home nation of Ehas and Cucda. Just when she’s resigned herself to the grind, she discovers that Acrea’s handsome king Luxos is planning to attack Ehas—but nobody believes her! Kidnapped after helping her men escape the slaughter, she begs Luxos for an honorable death. Instead, Luxos realizes her great promise, and knights her. Thus, she becomes Pollyanna Winter: a rising star within Acrea’s military hierarchy and the key to Luxos’s imperial ambitions.
Prestige
The Knight and Her Emperor was recognized in 2024’s Today’s Korean Comics awards. This ceremony has run since 1999 and honored such series as On the Way to Meet Mom, Whale Star: The Gyeongseong Mermaid and The Boxer. But despite the award’s prestige, only a handful of winners have been translated into English. That just made me even more curious about The Knight and Her Emperor, especially considering it was an adaptation of a novel, rather than a story first conceived as a webtoon.
After reading through Inklore’s first print volume collection, it’s clear to see what made The Knight and Her Emperor a hit. At the same time, I think the series has fundamental weaknesses that I’m worried are too deep-rooted to be resolved. Whether you’ll love or hate The Knight and Her Emperor depends on what you want from a story and what you’re willing to excuse.
The Knight
Pollyanna is the heart of The Knight and Her Emperor. Tall and strong with short red hair, her profile distinguishes her immediately from the sea of interchangeable webtoon heroines. Every step along the way of her military career she is scorned for being a woman, yet she never gives up on her ideals or takes her anger out on the soldiers in her care. In fact, she sacrifices herself to save those soldiers, despite knowing she might be killed, or worse.
Her selflessness is complicated by the fact that she betrays her country of Ehas to Acrea. Yet we learn that while Acrea is not free of misogyny, it is at least more egalitarian in its structure. There, Pollyanna has the chance to make a difference that she never had in her home country. The harder she works, the more that her colleagues respect her. And if they respect her, might they one day respect all women?
A Canny Fusion
The Knight and Her Emperor is a canny fusion of progression fantasy and feminist agitprop. Unlike countless other underdog heroes in this genre, Pollyanna faces discrimination rooted in something anybody can understand: institutional sexism. Her rise to power delivers all the lizard-brained pleasures you might expect (winning over her superiors, embarrassing her enemies, being rewarded for her hard work) while simultaneously arguing that no, there is nothing wrong with a woman keeping her hair short.
This high concept also does a lot to paper over cracks in the narrative. Are Pollyanna’s superiors unrealistically evil? No, they’re just misogynists. Why did Pollyanna’s father betray her? Because she’s the child of her father’s previous wife, and so her father wants her gone. It’s easy to cheer along with Pollyanna as she smashes the patriarchy.
Reservations
The Knight and Her Emperor features an appealing lead, a universal theme, and a simple, yet effective, underdog narrative. So why do I still have reservations? While I believe in Pollyanna, I don’t believe in the world around her. In this first volume, it feels less like a lived-in place and more like a vehicle to prove Pollyanna and Luxos’s greatness.
There’s a scene early on when Pollyanna returns home after spending time in the army to visit her sister Ryanna. Rather than commiserate with her sister, Ryanna flatly refuses her, even blaming Pollyanna for coming the day before her birthday. A sympathetic reading of this scene would be that Ryanna has been conditioned by her father’s hatred to despise Pollyanna as an outcast. What I can’t help but worry, though, is that Ryanna dislikes Pollyanna simply because it would be more convenient for the story.
Straightforward
There’s a K-Comics Beat interview with Kakao Entertainment’s Global Story Business head Jayden Kang where he says that since “readers might not remember what happened last week…webtoon characters need to be straightforward.” This formula might work in some cases, but it is not sufficient for a story about institutional sexism. Positioning characters like Ryanna as ontologically evil directly conflicts with the comic’s efforts to prove that people share a common humanity. Also, the deck is stacked against Pollyanna enough in this volume that the author doesn’t need to rely on cheap tricks to win the reader’s sympathy.
The fact that the author relies on such cheap tricks anyway speaks to a strange lack of confidence considering how much else this series has going for it. My hope is that later volumes pivot away from these excesses and treat the cast with more respect. The end of this volume is already shifting in this direction with the introduction of a few characters who don’t fit into the “for Pollyanna” or “against Pollyanna” rubric as neatly.
Medieval
It doesn’t help, though, that the art in this series is rather generic. Don’t get me wrong—it’s functional. Luxos is as pretty as he needs to be, and Pollyanna’s emotions are always legible. However, the style looks indistinguishable from other webtoons set in medieval Europe. Battles take place on flat plains. Medieval towns and castles share the same architecture regardless of what country they are meant to represent. Most characters have similar faces and body types; aside from Pollyanna, the clothes they wear don’t say much about their particular perspectives or cultures.
On the flip side, The Knight and Her Emperor’s lack of artistic ambition was a boon for its transition from vertical strip comic to print volume. There was never a moment reading through this book when I felt as if the story or its paneling had been compromised by its new format. I also appreciate that the book condenses multiple webtoon episodes into 80-page chapters, resulting in smoother pacing. As a result, I’ll happily call this volume the best conversion from webtoon to graphic novel that I’ve seen thus far.
The Verdict
The first volume of The Knight and Her Emperor is tough for me to grade. It’s a series that has a lot going for it, from its compelling female lead to the way it treats sexism and misogyny seriously. On the other hand, I found myself missing other aspects that I look for in fantasy and historical narratives: a lived-in setting, attention paid to character psychology, and a sense of holistic consistency.
Right now, I think this series is too willing to sacrifice these aspects at the altar of deadlines and audience satisfaction. I’m willing to believe that this could change as Pollyanna’s story develops. Even so, I can’t help but be frustrated at a comic that, despite doing so much right on paper, is too skittish to give its readership the benefit of the doubt.
You can purchase The Knight and Her Emperor Volume 1 from Bookshop, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.
If you liked The Knight and Her Emperor Volume 1, you might also like…
- Her Tale of Shim Chong by Seri and Biwan
- Basara by Yumi Tamura
- Alanna: The First Adventure by Tamora Pierce
Credits
Story: G.M.
Adaptation: Heyum
Art: Winter
Translation: Somin Parker
Lettering: Jeanthrix Andres
Designer: Bones Leopard
Editor: Katellyn Hemmeke
Production Editor: Christa Guild
Production Manager: Erich Schoeneweiss
Managing Editor: Paul Gilbert
Published in English by Inklore
Thank you to Inklore for providing an advance review copy of this manhwa. Receiving an advance copy had no impact on the reviewer’s opinions.
Article edited by: Anne Estrada
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