A Spell for a Smith

Tall kings need not apply in this tropey, comfy witch/dwarf romance.

Ivy, a shy witch, spends her days peacefully brewing beneficial potions and taking care of her animals in a cabin buried deep in the forest. It would seem like the idyllic cottage-core lifestyle…if it weren’t for the fact that she is shunned and despised by her only customers, the inhabitants of the nearest village. But Brahm, a stoic dwarven blacksmith laden with his own baggage, doesn’t have much patience for backwater superstitions. He’s repulsed by the town’s cruelty. Instead, he finds himself drawn to this sweet, isolated young herbalist. Kindness begets kindness, and even as Ivy tries to protect herself, she can’t help but begin to fall for the first person to treat her like a human being in a very long time.

One of Webtoon’s newer releases, ArtSasquatch’s A Spell for a Smith is a quiet, comfy, and exceedingly gentle romance. The art is soft and pleasant, almost story-booklike, and fits the subject matter and tone perfectly. Ivy and Brahm are also both very likeable leads—Ivy is a very normal girl, which stands in stark and strange contrast to the way everyone treats her. She’s overwhelmingly lonely, and talks to herself, but she’s fine, right? Right.

Then there’s Brahm. He’s a fantastic smith, a city man with no patience for country bumpkins. He reacts to a remembered image of himself in glorious dwarven armor with sadness and fear, and it’s hinted his beard is strangely small and short for a dwarves. He has some memories and thoughts he’d like nothing more than to drown with alcohol. And yet he pounds out a mundane life behind his little forge, day after day after day. What, exactly, is he doing in this little village?

And each emotion and character beat, whether they’re tentative fumbles at early conversations or panels devoted to a Ivy or Brahm thinking or reacting, has the same care and attention to detail. I especially love a scene in Chapter Two; the day after Brahm’s first encounter with Ivy, he works at the forge. But his mind won’t stop going back to what he witnessed. He hammers, sparks flying, faced shadowed and hard. “This town…” he thinks—a flashback to people kicking Ivy’s basket away from her hand— “…constantly surprises me with its cruelty.” His expression softens into something considering, melancholic, a little bit hopeless, a little bit bitter. It’s a sentence not surprising so much in its harshness as in the vivid despair he has already reached. This is not a man who harbors any illusions about the true nature of the world, but who has, to a certain degree, given up. It’s a harsh note in such a mellow story.

And despite all of the above, if A Spell for a Smith suffers from anything, it’s that same-y, fluffy mellowness. The story’s almost too cozy. Plot beats putter quietly along, hitting their expected tropes. Ivy and Brahm are so sweet a not-couple, and so tentative in their overtures at romance, that they haven’t dealt with any real interpersonal conflict yet. The comic also lacks emotionally impactful side characters; Brahm’s smithing buddies are a nice Greek chorus, but they lack the nuance or subplots to come across as real people, and the townspeople themselves are otherwise faceless, mocking silhouettes. But with no other new information or character dynamics to stir things up, the story begins to flatten. Nothing has happened in the first 25+ chapters of this webtoon that couldn’t be predicted after reading the first few chapters.

Still, A Spell for a Smith is a human, simple story, conveyed with heartwarming care for the characters and a sincere desire to tell their story faithfully, and that carries it through to be more than the sum of its imperfect parts. If you like the aesthetics, the honey-sweet slow-burn, and the cottage-core/blacksmith-chic romance, you’ll find an enjoyable read in what ArtSasquatch has created.