Some people like not growing older, and for them, there are Heart Hunters like Psyche, who will find your soulmate and kill them, by destroying their heart. Takes a special arrow designed by King Marius, who has a heart made of steel, and definitely doesn't want to meet his soulmate. So he hires Psyche, who finds Marius' soulmate has a heart made of gold, which is rather difficult to destroy. Complications ensue.
Mickey George and V. Gagnon (writer and artist, respectively) take basically all the old sayings about hearts and make them literal. Hearts of gold, broken hearts. Marius' soulmate uses pieces of his heart to mend others'. One character has a literally bleeding heart they wear on their sleeve. When Psyche is in danger from an "indifference monster", she pours her heart out to Isaac. By which I mean she pours it out of its jar to him. You get the idea.
Gagnon fills panels with hearts or circulatory-system style background details. Trees, clouds, everything seems to branch like a bunch of capillaries or images swirl into each other like blood mixing. Also seems fond of tall, narrow panels curved at the top, like a church window. There are a few different scenes where characters get a glimpse at someone else's feelings or past and Gagnon opts for a bunch of fragmented, jagged panels to give a lightspeed montage feel to things, like we're seeing it all at once.
There's nothing bad, per se, about Heart Hunter, but I found myself really irritated with the book while I was reading it. Not so much the soulmate thing, or even that the main pairings we see are between characters that spend most of the story fighting, arguing and generally being hostile to each other, which I find tedious. This notion that you may not like someone now, but if you just keep spending time around them, you'll like them eventually. Or maybe you'll hate them even more.
But the notion someone else's compassion is necessary to mend a broken heart, or that time doesn't move for people who feel grief, that bugs me. That you have to take a certain outlook on life or you're stuck in the past, or incomplete somehow. Psyche says early on, and no one disputes it, that some people don't have soulmates. So by the story's logic, they were destined to just be stuck in place, unchanging, forever. Which seems wildly reductive. Maybe the point is supposed to be you have to remain open to the possibility of finding that special someone (and the book does state soulmate does not necessarily mean romantic partner, so that's something), and that means accepting good with bad, but it also seems to be implying you can't make it on your own. Not that you don't have to, but that you can't, which is something different.
Sometimes a story just hits the wrong way.
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