unORDINARY (WEBTOON comic series)

Are Profound Questions Load-Bearing?

Each narrative work is essentially a response to some “what-if” question.

Sometimes, those questions are profound and interesting, and they lead to high-quality works, such as when The Matrix asks, “What if reality was actually a prison for your mind?”

Other times, those questions are… let's say, “less profound”, as are the resulting works, such as when The Da Vinci Code asks, “What if Jesus had kids?”

Intuitively, you might think that deep question = great story, shallow/silly question = cheap slop.

But consider Naomi Alderman’s The Power - it's a complex tale about physical strength, gender roles, and social influence. And it pulls no punches in asking whether, if women took charge of society, they might repeat some of the worst behaviors of the men who preceded them.

But it's also a response to the question, “What if all these ladies could shoot lightning from their hands?”

This is not, by itself, very compelling (absent some strong weed). But follow it all the way to its conclusions, in a way that feels true to reality, and you get something that makes you forget how goofy the premise was.[1]

And with that, let's turn to unORDINARY, a work that asks us, “What would high school be like, if everyone had superpowers?”

The Preliminaries

unORDINARY[2] is a serialized graphic novel created by Chelsey Han under the pen name uru-chan[3]. It started publishing weekly in 2016 (with occasional breaks), and is up to 346 episodes split into two “seasons”.

In this review, I will focus heavily on the setting and overall themes of unORDINARY, and include a pretty spoiler-rich plot summary. And, in defiance of convention, I will actually review unORDINARY, in the sense of discussing whether or not you might like it.

I will try to keep the main body of the review free of too much comic-book-y minutiae, and instead put those details in footnotes[4].

Also, I couldn’t come up with a natural stopping point for the plot summary - I needed enough to discuss in the other sections, but didn’t want to ruin anything I didn’t have to, so it’ll end kind of abruptly. Mea culpa.

Imagine A World That Kind Of Sucks

unORDINARY is set in an alternate universe where almost all humans have a superpower (“ability”, in local parlance). These are analogous to what you'd see in X-Men: a lot of projectiles and enhanced strength, with the occasional more-exotic thing like psychic powers, teleportation, or time manipulation.

Other than that, the world is like our own in many ways. Technology is basically on par with the US circa 2016, with a couple notable exceptions[5]. The economic structures are the same as ours - people have jobs, shop at supermarkets, and play games on their smartphones.

The social structures, on the other hand, are very different. People's abilities are measured and tracked on a 1-to-10 scale[6] and this rating is given outsized importance in just about every context, even ones where it's hard to see the relevance (such as where people live).

Most of the story takes place in or around the fictional Wellston Private High School, a boarding school known for high-ability-level[7] students. Like at other schools, the top-ranked students get playing-card inspired titles (King, Queen, and Jack, collectively “Royals”) that come with a lot of influence and privilege. Students are encouraged to have violent fights to develop their abilities, and the King and Queen roles can be taken by force, like we’re living in some kind of non-fatal version of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome[8].

Even for students not jockeying for titles, school is a real meat-grinder. Most everybody has someone more powerful than them, and their “betters” demand subservience, force weaker students to do their homework, or just knock them around for fun. Teachers and staff turn a blind eye to all of this.

The general pattern is repeated in society writ large - more powerful individuals are treated deferentially, not just as a practical matter, but on principle.

This also extends to formal civic institutions (which are a little under-specified in the narrative). Characters refer to “the authorities” a lot, and we eventually learn this is actually a specific organization called the “Bureau of Authority”, which is effectively the government[9].

The Bureau is made exclusively of people with high-level abilities (and, from what we see, pretty much automatically admits high-level applicants). No one ever mentions “elections” or some other mechanism of joining the Bureau, beyond selection by its current members. They wield basically-unlimited power[10]: banning books, exerting direct control over Wellston[11], and detaining and even executing people without trial[12]. Some characters speculate that the Bureau directly controls the news media.

Philosophically, the Bureau of Authority is a classic fascist organization in many ways[13], and they’ve succeeded at creating a society obsessed with hierarchy, order, and control.

There is one persistent exception to this - a handful of high-level individuals become vigilantes (referred to as “superheroes”), protecting low-level districts. Most-to-all of these vigilantes are inspired by a banned book called Unordinary, which is basically Superman[14] as a novel. (Although, in unORDINARY, what’s weird about the story is not the one person with superpowers, but the rest of the world with none.)

People have mixed feelings about vigilantes, especially because there’s a terrorist group called EMBER that seems devoted to murdering as many of them as possible.

But What Actually Happens Though

unORDINARY largely follows the life of John, a student at Wellston who, we are initially told[15], has no ability - he's referred to as a “cripple”[16]. He spends a lot of time trying to avoid getting bullied, escaping fights, or occasionally winning them (thanks to a lot of martial arts practice). John is sometimes protected by his best (and only) friend, Seraphina, Wellston’s highest-level student[17].

Seraphina (or, Sera) was previously the Queen at Wellston but stepped down after she became friends with John, and began questioning her place in the school’s rigid hierarchy. Arlo[18], Wellston's King, takes issue with this and starts looking into John. Meanwhile, Sera learns that John’s father wrote Unordinary, and borrows a copy from him.

Arlo becomes convinced that John is hiding a high-level ability, and plots to expose him, on the premise that John is shirking his responsibilities and defying the appropriate order. Arlo gets Sera suspended (for reading Unordinary), and has a couple other students deliberately break John's phone to isolate him from her. He then waits as increased bullying starts to wear on John’s mental state.

Eventually Arlo feigns some concern for John and befriends him, only to drag him out to the middle of nowhere and have two other students attack him, while Arlo monologues about how this is all part of his evil plan.

John loses it, and we finally see him use the ability that of course he has[19]. Specifically, John has the classic “can copy other people's abilities” ability. And he is very good at it[20]. John easily beats Arlo’s two lackeys, almost killing one, and then defeats Arlo as well.

John and Arlo both do their best to cover this up, and for a while they succeed. Things get more complicated when an as-yet-unknown organization attacks Sera, injecting her with a drug that permanently disables her ability. When Sera drops from “most powerful person at the school” to “basically helpless”, she quickly becomes the target of the same violence John has been subject to, and he does not take it well.

John starts getting revenge on Sera's attackers, wearing a mask and getting dubbed “Joker” by the other students. Each of his attacks is unnecessarily brutal, regularly leaving victims unconscious in a pool of their own blood.

As this unfolds, we see more of John's past, and start to get a sense of why he's like this, and why he hid his ability in the first place.

Those Who Remember The Past Way Too Much

John, we learn, initially thought he didn't have an ability, and was therefore at the bottom of the pecking order at his old school (in “New Bostin”). He had a couple of low-level friends - Claire, who occasionally and randomly saw the future[21], and Adrion, who had a modest strength boost. They got beaten up a lot.

One day, Claire gets a vision of John using his ability, and he manages to work it out, and rapidly improves. But, by this point, John has a pretty big chip on his shoulder, and he’s a little too eager to get back at people in general[22]. He starts to go increasingly overboard in his fights, continuing to attack already-defeated opponents. John alienates his friends, but also becomes King of New Bostin High School.

By this point, his fellow students are terrified of John, and in turn he lashes out at anybody who looks at him the wrong way. Claire finally rallies the school against him, and when they confront him, John goads the other students into a brutal melee that puts most of them in the hospital. Adrion calls the authorities and John is arrested.

The Bureau sends John to “re-adjustment” classes, which are exactly as Orwellian as you're thinking. His instructor is a man named Keon who can force John to relieve his memories, and Keon does this to an absurd degree. John watches himself beat up his only friends and brutalize his classmates, and also witnesses Claire turning on him, hundreds or even thousands of times.

The excessive replay etches the memories into his brain to the point that he basically has artificially-induced PTSD, complete with anxiety attacks, frequent flashbacks, and an abiding paranoia about people plotting against him.

Thanks to this, John concludes that he is a monster (one of the last words Claire ever said to him), and enrolls in Wellston as a “cripple” specifically to avoid a repeat of New Bostin. But, of course, experiencing powerlessness is exactly what drove him to violence in the first place, and he ends up walking through all of the beats of the same story again.

During his “Joker” rampage, he doesn't forget the “lesson” of all of this - he tells himself that he's a bad person, but rationalizes that his fellow students are no better, and deserve what he's doing to them.

Enough About Past Violence; Back To Present Violence

Arlo confronts John about the Joker business and tries to insist that John take his rightful place at the top of the hierarchy, but John counters that he'd rather tear the whole thing down. He starts climbing the ranks anonymously, defeating all of the top students in ascending order.

An increasingly large number of people work out his identity, including Cecile[23] (head of the student newspaper), Remi[24] (Wellston’s current Queen), and Remi’s friends Blyke[25] and Isen[26]. Cecile (who sucks) decides to help John, while Remi tries to make peace, but John refuses.

As this progresses, John manages to keep Seraphina relatively in the dark. Arlo tells her the truth, but, because he’s kind of a garbage person in the first place, she doesn't believe him. Meanwhile, John gives her hand-to-hand combat lessons to help deal with her frequent attackers. Sera is, with great dramatic irony, inspired to see how strong her “powerless” friend can be.

Eventually, John-as-Joker reaches the top of the school’s hierarchy[27] when he ends up defeating Remi, Arlo, Blyke, and Isen simultaneously. Sera, watching the fight, recognizes John using the moves he’s been teaching her, and is crushed to realize he’s been lying to her, about both Joker and his ability.

John’s victory quickly destabilizes the school. Other students follow his lead and seek revenge on each other in Joker masks (and there’s plenty of revenge to seek). Sometimes this works, other times the attackers lose, but either way more students wind up in the infirmary. Remi, frustrated by this, approaches other high-level students to form an anti-violence club called Safe House.

John remains incognito for a while. Cecile tries to get himself to reveal himself and take over the school, but he refuses (and occasionally lashes out at her physically).

Eventually, Sera confronts John, and he tries to deny things again. She tells him that she’s dug up some of his past history as well, and John has a pretty extreme breakdown, screaming at her, calling her a “cripple”, and refusing to let her leave. Arlo intervenes, and, in his agitated state, John takes this as a sign that they’re plotting against him. He tells Sera he never wants to see her again.

Isen finally reveals John’s identity, and he claims the King title, but his only allies are Cecile and an even-worse suck-up named Zeke[28]. Isolated again, John spirals out of control, and in his paranoia becomes convinced that the Safe House club is just a plot to rally the students against him. He has an escalating series of fights with its members, eventually prompting a rare intervention from the school’s Headmaster, a man named Vaughn[29].

While John’s busy destroying everything around him, Sera does her best to figure out why. She pieces together more of his history, identifies Keon as his “instructor” from “re-adjustment” classes, and tracks down Claire. Eventually, the group that took away her ability contacts her and offers to restore it in exchange for her future cooperation, and she agrees.

Back at full strength, Sera confronts John (who she finds in the process of attacking Arlo and Remi again) and both literally and figuratively knocks some sense into him. John, humbled by his defeat but also Sera's refusal to give up on him, accepts her help and confesses his self-loathing.

After their fight, John gets a month-long suspension, which he spends with his father, William[30]. John also runs into Adrion, and apologizes to him. He also intervenes when some loan sharks attack Adrion, although John gets carried away and Adrion has to tackle him to end the fight.

John also reaches out to Claire, who is less receptive - he apologizes to her as well, and she says she’s glad he’s doing better, but also that she never wants to speak to him again.

Eventually John returns to Wellston, where he’s welcomed back warmly by Seraphina (and former lackey Zeke), but everybody else remains terrified of him. By this point Sera is working with the organization that attacked her (“Spectre”). She tries to keep this from John, but he manages to piece it together, and insists on helping her get free of their control.

As promised, this is where I abruptly stop summarizing stuff. Sorry!

Would You Enjoy Reading This

I don’t know! I really like it, as you probably guessed from this review. But my tastes are not universal, so below are some things that you might like and/or hate.

The Pacing: I saw somebody describe the pacing of unORDINARY as “glacial”, which I think is fair (and the most common complaint about the series[31]). For example, we first see John use his ability in episode 54, published over a year after the story began.

On the flip side - when we first meet John, he’s an upbeat guy who gets himself through some tough scrapes. He criticizes the world he lives in, where he’s at the bottom rung of things, but he’s idealistic about how it could be better.

The version of John we see fighting Arlo is none of those things - he’s cold, vengeful, and sadistic, and shows very little concern about whether somebody dies because of his actions. This only works because we see the abuse he suffers, his isolation, and evidence of his past trauma[32], all drawn out and in detail.

Without that, it wouldn’t feel real. Or it would feel like some cheap “split personality” thing. But it’s not that - John has a dark past, but it doesn’t just snap back into place. He literally gets beaten up almost every day for weeks, knowing he could avoid it, before the stress finally grinds him down.

All the character development is like this. Arlo eventually appreciates how terrible he was, but it takes him a lot of repetitive rumination[33]. Remi and Arlo have a series of arguments that go in circles about the same things. More than one character makes progress on some flaw of theirs, only to backslide repeatedly.

This sort of thing can seem weird when you read it, but that’s because narratives typically have absurdly crisp, coherent, plot-advancing dialogue and epiphanies. But, in the real world, people suck at working things out! We are not efficient communicators[34] or clear thinkers.

An Actual Friendship: If I’ve learned anything from r/books, it’s that a lot of people hate stories that could have been resolved by a ten-minute conversation, but aren’t. And it never seems to matter how well the characters knew each other before the story began.

John and Seraphina’s relationship is the exact inverse of this trope. They’re best friends for a while, and then he completely goes off the deep end, terrorizing the whole school and putting her friends in the hospital. Sera sensibly gets some distance from him, but also spends a lot of effort piecing together his past. And when she finally gets the chance to stop his rampage, she also tells him that he’s not an irredeemable monster and that she still cares about him.

Again, this seems weird - because most narratives put almost no value on long-term relationships! Just looking at superhero stuff, Captain America: Civil War[35] has the Avengers break out into a violent conflict after they’ve prevented an alien conquest of Earth and an AI apocalypse. Black Panther[36] has a character who betrays his own wife to side with a random murderer who usurped control of his country! If we actually watched their decades of marriage leading up to this, we’d realize that it’s batshit fucking insane.

This Guy Is Kind Of Terrible Sometimes Though: As noted, a significant chunk of the story involves John beating people senseless, and then hitting them some more.

He pushes away his only friend. He screams at and attacks his own (sycophantic) allies. A lot of people try to engage with him in calm and reasonable ways, and he consistently rejects them.

Even after Seraphina gets through to him, and he goes on his obligatory personal growth journey, he’s just kind of less bad. He still has a crazy temper! He still, when pushed into fights, loses it and goes way overboard! He just goes from “I’m going to beat this person half to death and there’s nothing you can do about it” to “I’m going to beat this person half to death but I’ll stop if you pull me off of them”.

As with the “pacing” thing above, I think this makes more sense than the alternative where he’s suddenly a perfect angel. And his actions need to be considered in light of the hyper-violent dystopia that he’s a part of, and the literal torture he experienced. But your mileage definitely may vary with this one[37].

Does Humanity Suck Or Not: There are a lot of stories about ordinary people doing terrible things: Lord of the Flies[38], Yellowjackets[39], Squid Game[40], Alice in Borderland[41], etc.

These works often imply that humans are garbage, and that only society/the police are holding us back from a giant murder-fest. But… is that true?

I always think of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, where a rugby team crash-landed in the Andes, without supplies or any hope of rescue. (You should read the whole story, because it’s amazing.) In short, they banded together, took care of one another, and two of them hiked 33 miles across a mountain range (at an elevation over 12,000 ft.) to get help[42].

So, no, I don’t think humans are just a bunch of barely-restrained monsters. Even under extreme stress, we’re pretty cooperative - that’s kind of our whole thing.

And, despite the violence in unORDINARY, on some level that’s how it presents its characters. The structures of their society discourage empathy - the fascist government, the Thunderdome schools, even the shadowy terrorist group murdering vigilantes. But these things are all fighting the tide of human nature. All it takes is one book suggesting you don’t have to be such an asshole, and people jump on board.

Even without that, some characters are altruistic, although the conflict with their indoctrination is obvious. Particularly in the first season, a lot of high-level students do step in to protect somebody. But they never say that’s what they’re doing. They always give some plausible excuse as to why the aggressor is inconveniencing them. Maybe the fight is too loud first thing in the morning, or wasting somebody’s time by blocking off a hallway. Arlo in particular likes to complain about “making the rest of us high-rankers look bad”, as though the real victim of an asymmetric beating is his reputation.

Generally, the people who witness this don’t actually buy these reasons (as we can see from their thought bubbles), but they know better than to question them out loud.

Also What’s Going On With This Society: As the story advances, it slowly expands from Wellston to broader affairs - we see more of the Bureau of Authority, we learn about EMBER, and we get increasingly detailed looks at Spectre, which is a sort of revolutionary group gone wrong. And the motivations of Vaughn, the school’s Headmaster, start to look a lot more complicated than “raise a new crop of fascists”.

All of this seems to be building to some larger reordering of society, although it’s very much unclear how it will play out[43]. If you start reading, be prepared to suspend disbelief when superpowered teens save the world from totalitarian rule, like in Animorphs[44].

Concluding Thoughts

Overall, I would describe unORDINARY as a well-made, slow-burn character study of citizens in a violent, fascist dystopia. With superhero fights.

It defies a lot of standard writing conventions, but in ways that make it feel strangely realistic, despite the supernatural premise.

Seasons one and two are available on WEBTOON. Season three will begin in July.

[1] Or, I guess, makes you realize that the Simulation Hypothesis is also some stoner shit.

[2] I wish I didn't have to type it this way every time, but it will become important later.

[3] Don't worry, people already know this.

[4] With apologies to those of you who can’t resist reading all of the footnotes, even if you don’t actually care.

[5] Unsurprisingly, there's some research into abilities. Also, medicine is much more effective, with trained chemists able to make “tonics” that dramatically speed up recovery from serious injuries. My assumption is that this comes in part from studying people with healing abilities.

[6] Based on events, the scale seems exponential. The highest value for any major character is an 8.0.

[7] There's a formal “tier” system where ranges of levels are denoted as low-, mid-, elite-, or high-tier, but I find “elite” being below “high” to be confusing. For simplicity, and to minimize jargon, I will refer to low- and mid- tier ability users as “low-level” and elite- and high-tier users as “high-level”.

[8] “What if people killed each other for your amusement?” - arguably also the inciting question for every action movie.

[9] Side note, it’s not totally obvious if there are multiple countries in unORDINARY, or how big the one we’re in is. So far the only reference I see to this is an offhand mention of the French language. This is in an early episode, and I wonder if it was essentially an accident by the author.

[10] By at least three possible meanings of the word.

[11] Despite it being a private school.

[12] Occasionally people mention “warrants”, although these seem to be issued by the Bureau, for the Bureau, so they’re more of a fig leaf than anything else.

[13] Nearly everything on the Ur-Fascism list, if you analogize “social class” to be “ability level” and “foreigners/immigrants” to be “people with weak (or no) abilities”.

[14] “What if one guy was just, like, the best?”

[15] Foreshadowing!

[16] I suspect physical disabilities are basically eliminated by the advances in medicine / presence of healing abilities. So far there aren't any characters with one, although we do briefly see someone remembering a possibly-bedridden hospital patient.

[17] She's the aforementioned 8.0: super-speed, can freeze other people in place, and can “rewind” her injuries, effectively healing them instantly. People regularly comment on Seraphina being “pretty much a goddess”.

[18] Level: 6.0. Can generate some kind of spherical barriers that harm anyone who strikes them. Also has enhanced strength and innate “armor” even without his barrier.

[19] Technically this is proven a few episodes earlier - people's eyes glow when they use their abilities, and John's eyes light up briefly when he gets attacked by four students, but he chooses to “power down” and get beaten up instead.

[20] Level: 7.5. He can simultaneously copy and combine up to four abilities, and amplify them beyond the level of the person he copied them from.

[21] So I guess you could say she's Claire-voyant. I'm not sorry for that joke.

[22] Regardless of whether they are the specific people who wronged him in the past.

[23] Level: 5.2, can summon and control some kind of magic energy vines.

[24] Level 5.4, shoots lightning from her hands (i.e., she has The Power).

[25] Level: 4.5, fairly versatile energy-projectile ability. Also Wellston’s Jack.

[26] Level: 4.8, with a complex ability (“Hunter”) that makes him faster and stronger, but also enhances his senses and lets him see people through walls.

[27] Other than, technically, Seraphina.

[28] Level: 4.2. Can switch between an “offensive form” where he’s strong and fast, and a “defensive form” where he’s extra-tough. Also, his level of sycophancy is practically supernatural.

[29] Level: 7.8. Telekinesis.

[30] Who it turns out is actually really sweet and thoughtful! To, frankly, the surprise of most of the people who meet John first. Level: 1.0, no ability (for real this time).

[31] I’ve seen readers suggest it’s worth waiting several years for a season to end, and then binging it, like it’s a series of novels being published at a pretty normal pace.

[32] And also Arlo’s stupid, stupid face. God, he’s such a dick.

[33] Even this realization is pretty on brand - Arlo’s thinking about how John is so terrible that he shouldn’t be allowed in a position of authority, and then abruptly realizes that John wasn’t going to be until Arlo forced him to.

[34] Said the author of a 4,000-word review.

[35] “What if Batman v. Superman didn’t suck?”

[36] “What if the most advanced society on Earth also had a terrible, archaic government structure?”

[37] The author also found this part of the story emotionally draining.

[38] “What if we admit that British schoolchildren are just little monsters?”

[39] “What if some kids got stuck in the wilderness and ate each other?”

[40] See Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, above.

[41] Ibid.

[42] And, okay, they ate some of the people from the plane. But only ones that were already dead!

[43] And, admittedly, it will probably be several years before we know for sure.

[44] “What if a group of kids had to fight a secret invasion of mind-controlling alien parasites, and their only weapon was the ability to turn into animals?” (Animorphs is surely the global maximum for “high story quality, low question quality”.)