IDK, there isn't enough of it so far to even make any sort of judgment, and whatever judgments I do have to make are largely rooted in Rachel's past work because... well, because we've seen this project at least twice before in the past already.
Like so far the only strong opinion I can make about it is "same shit different day". It's kind of like a fusion of Lore Olympus and The Doctor Foxglove Show, because evidently she's only been able to write and draw the same character dynamic and romance plotline for the past decade. All we've seen is the art and it's honestly fine, I think at the very least it's a great sign that the corporate Webtoons burnout is finally starting to lift and she's creating art that doesn't look like that anymore. I can at least acknowledge that as a refreshing improvement.
That said, it's still a far cry away from the stuff she used to create back in the day (in the Foxglove era) and above all else, the art at this point doesn't really matter to me, it's her writing that's always been her weakest skill and evidently one that hasn't improved at all over the years, both on account of her apparent refusal to learn but also what seems to be an incredibly limited perspective that's influenced the severely problematic undertones of her work and its messaging.
The reason these issues were so apparent in LO was because it was the first time she ever had to complete a story (and also the fact that she and WT's alike marketed LO as something it wasn't - a "feminist retelling" that was trying to "help people"). It's why LO was so enjoyable for many of us in the beginning, just for it to fall apart by the end of S2 which made us even more aware of the cracks that were always there from the very first episode, we just didn't notice them or were more forgiving of them because the story was still "setting up" and Rachel clearly "had something planned". That feeling of betrayal and frustration that's shared among everyone within the antiLO community largely started with the creeping and eventually explosive realization that Rachel did not in fact have anything planned to resolve all the questions and loose ends she had created, she was writing by the seat of her pants the whole time and she had finally flat on her face... but with the added arrogance of blaming the "haters" for pulling the seat out from under her.
Credit where credit's due, she's always been pretty good at coming up with fascinating premises and concepts, both of which are present in her pre-LO stories like The Doctor Foxglove Show and Woman King. But they never lasted long enough for us to see how they would have played out from start to finish, and so all we have to judge them by are their foundations, not the completed house.
We were able to judge LO by those metrics, though, and the way it turned out in the end proved that having a good idea doesn't automatically make for good writing.
Maybe Eleanor's Deathbed will improve upon those problems, but considering most of what I've seen so far of the 'writing' through her mini comics, eh, just looks like it's gonna be more of the same "uwu cinnamon bun girl who's casually racist / classist" x "creepy death man who's competitively racist / classist" shtick. And at the end of the day, when so many of her writing issues are rooted in - as mentioned above - her limited perspective of real world problems and over-inflated ego, I have zero reason to believe that ED isn't just gonna be LO with a new coat of paint, with all the same amateur writing, poorly developed characters, self-indulgent soapboxing, poorly disguised trauma dumping, and problematic messaging disguised as "feminism".
When I said a while back that I wasn't interested in following Rachel's work post-LO, I meant it. At the end of the day, what made me fall in love with LO originally was LO, not Rachel herself. My interest in her work died with LO, only extending to the stuff she did before as a sort of morbid fascination with where it might have all gone wrong. And I think the simplest - and most disappointing - conclusion I've ever come to is, "Rachel has always been like this, the downfall of LO just made us look."
The characters, art style, etc. of ED so far are just not compelling to me in the way LO once was, they're not even compelling to me in the way that Foxglove was in hindsight once I knew of its existence (because at least looking back at those pieces, all I could do is wonder how the beauty of those pieces was lost).
If I do ever read ED in the future - assuming it ever even materializes beyond her social media doodles - I want it to be because I'm genuinely interested in her future work, not because I entitle myself to haunting her like a ghost. I'm already surely haunting her enough as it is by not letting her live down LO, but at least I actually liked LO at one point (and still kinda do, if you count my love-hate relationship with it LMAO). I'm not at all interested in Eleanor's Deathbed on account of what I've already experienced of Rachel's work through LO (and through our deep-diving of her pre-LO career) and because, like I said, what I've seen so far is just not really all that compelling. So I just really don't have any reason to invest my time or care into it.
She, like anyone else, has the right to try and move forward from the tire fire that was LO, even if that tire fire is still worth pointing out and discussing in many ways. Maybe Eleanor's Deathbed will succeed upon LO in ways that it failed. Maybe it won't. I'm not compelled to follow along and find out. I'd rather just cut my losses.
Plus if I really want this woman to fade into obscurity the way I think she deserves, well, the only thing I can reliably do to manifest that reality is to not pay her future work any attention whatsoever LMAO Such an individual effort doesn't mean she'll just suddenly disappear, she's clearly got a support network now through Inklore and Webtoons to keep force-feeding her relevance down people's throats, but hey, we all have our own gardens, and I don't have to keep planting her in mine. The carnation that was LO still thrives on, and I care for it through Rekindled and the odd analysis post / rant about LO whenever I happen to think of something new worth discussing. But whatever Eleanor's Deathbed is or will become, it's just not something I want in my garden.
