July's manga / #Webtoon(264)

The translation is a little off sometimes, it needs a better proofreader. It's mostly understandable, but I feel the urge to fix the grammar in my head as I read. Sometimes it doesn't make too much sense, but the plot is a little weird right now. I don't know if her family is alive, she mentioned her grandmother is dead, but there's no other signs of her relatives. She's only 18 so is she living by herself? Who runs the incense shop when she's at school? This confuses me. Also bullying is not ok for any situation, especially at school. It's a common trope to bully the person you like, but that's just stupid to do in real life, and I wish people will stop accepting this as normal behavior. The art is alright, pretty acceptable on webtoon standards.

A famous actor wakes up in the middle of the night and is attacked by a woman in black. Like basically most men, he uses his raging hormones instead of his brains, so he asks her for her phone number, which she doesn't give him. They're doing some kind of surveillance of his neighbor who's involved in drug smuggling. Not sure where this is going, since she seems to be a terrible spy or secret agent to have been discovered so quickly. He even uses "charismatic" to describe her... Dude, that's like one of the worst traits for you to have to be a successful spy slash secret agent slash thief since the whole point is to NOT get noticed. Also, it seems her physical strength is below his, even though he's not trained, because he easily pulls her towards him several times. By the way, this webtoon is from the perspective of the male actor, and not the female agent person, so ignore the tags for "Strong Female Lead" people are putting up, because she's not the lead. She's more like the female love interest, to be precise. The art is weird. The backgrounds and other inanimate objects are drawn beautifully, but the actual people are not drawn in an aesthetically pleasing way. There's too much use of thick solid lines and the faces are too angular to be considered beautiful. But overall, the art is quite good. Update: Completed at 60 chapters. Was awful.

I really enjoyed the art for this webtoon, it has clear, precisely drawn lines, beautiful shading and coloring, and easy to understand flow of panels. It's not the most beautiful art I've seen in a webtoon, but it's way above average. The plot is slightly different from most current popular webtoons involving reincarnation, instead of going to the past, it goes from past to present. Honestly, that's how most reincarnation stories used to be until isekai become popular. Anyway, it is great there's finally a new chapter, and I'm looking forward to more. The female lead isn't a pushover either, so I expect good things from her!

Wow, this looks promising. Even as a child, the female lead is intelligent and mature, which is rare to see in lots of other webtoons that feature small children as leads... "Pomegranate Blooms in Spring" comes to mind, where they tried but failed to make the child character appealing in any way at all. Although the female lead character in Yue Chen Yin hasn't really talked much yet, she's very outspoken in her thoughts, and she's very cool-headed and analytical, which I greatly appreciate. The art is good, but the people look a little weird due to the overly pale color palate, everyone looks anemic. But it's still quite nice to look at overall because of the darker palate of the backgrounds and objects. I'm hoping for more good things to come. By the way, I'm super happy that the translation is much better in the second chapter, compared to the previous chapters. The first translator kept too many Chinese terms and it doesn't read fluently in English, sometimes you need to have creative license when adapting into English for the reader's sake! Update: Sadly, the clever female protagonist has been reduced to a constantly blushing clumsy girl who keeps tripping in front of her crush, Garam. I preferred the crown prince of Qing more between the two male leads, but it's already pretty clear who she likes. I don't like the Korean names and terms, because it's not easy to remember, but it can't be helped as the translator is working off the Korean version. Wish it could have kept the Chinese names...

Blackmail x Stockholm Syndrome BL. It's utter crap, both the plot and the smut. The male lead is pathetic and weak, and falls for the abusive male love interest, despite the latter not showing any form of affection towards him. There's a weird livestream angle about this to make this kinky or something, but it just doesn't work. They're underage (still in school) and they film everything without censoring their faces. Basically, in real life, these two people would probably get kidnapped and sold to sexual slavery or something, since it's easy to identify someone based on facial recognition. Plus, their viewers know their names. Also, I have no idea why they talk so much while streaming, since everything they say can be heard by the viewers, obviously. And they talk A LOT. Saying things probably no one wants to know or should hear if they're keeping up the pretense that it's consensual. I'm surprised the police haven't busted them down. Another thing, the laptop camera is only pointed in one direction and there's no freaking way that it can capture everything they're doing from such perfect angles. It's a little insulting that the artist thinks their readers are so dumb that they wouldn't notice that inconsistency and impossibility of what is happening. Honestly, they shouldn't even have used a livestream plot since it's not possible in the way they're using it, and it brings nothing to the table to make it interesting. The art is average, but the smut is so boring, I was just skimming to finish reading. Avoid.

Honestly, this webtoon was only good until maybe the second or third chapter. It went super downhill from there, and now I think it's dug itself into a hole so deep it can't even get out of it. The author wrote themselves into a ditch, apparently. Then decided to go ultra magic! on this story, and now it barely makes any coherent sense. The art is alright, but if you look closely, the artist is lazy at drawing everyone except the female lead. Only the female lead is carefully drawn, with constantly changing hairstyles and clothing. Everyone else is just bleh and sometimes, the art quality can decrease a lot in a single chapter, if it doesn't feature the female lead. The artist is also not that great at establishing shots or backgrounds, and draws far too many headshots and characters from the waist up. What really irks me is the constant freaking gushing of how handsome the male love interest is in nearly every single chapter. It's like the author doesn't know what else to make the female lead say when she's thinking to herself. Shut up! I am a reader and I have eyes, so let me be the judge, thank you. By the way, with my very eyes, I don't see him as that handsome that you feel the need to remind me every single time you see him. It also makes the female lead sound stupid and shallow. Basically, this does nothing to advance anything and it's a waste of panels. The male lead also thinks to himself about how beautiful the female lead is quite often, but not to the irritating extent the female lead does. Honestly, a lot of the chapters are just spent with the two characters praising the hell out of each other in their heads. What happened to "Show, don't tell?" I really detest it when the authors think their readers are so stupid that everything unimportant needs to be spelled out for us, instead of focusing on plot and writing actual believable conflicts. You know what, this webtoon is basically Twilight. You heard me! Except instead of vampires, everyone's a god. She's a god, he's a god, the maid is a god, and there's another random god wandering around somewhere. Uhm but maybe at least Twilight had some conflict with the werewolves, I have no clue where this pile of steaming trash is trying to go. There's some weird plot line about how he's a supposedly evil god, and then absorbed the other gods, and the last god ran away, but then he reincarnated and ... Yeah no clue. Why is that even important, since obviously he's not a threat to the last god if he doesn't remember he killed the other gods? Or maybe the conflict is that all the other gods are going to kill him, but then they made a point somewhere back there that he's super OP, so it's not like that's a real concern. Yeah, just avoid this. It sucks.

This BL webtoon was only good for maybe the first 20ish chapters. After that, it went downhill really quickly. It was more of a pure boy's love and then degraded into shameless smut starting from Season 3. But even before that, the main problem of this webtoon is that the male lead and his love interest have barely any issues or conflicts at all. Nothing much happens once the two of them get together. Everyone is miraculously supportive of them and they don't ever get challenged or encounter obstacles. It's so boring. Also, a lot of the pretend obstacles that were set up get quickly knocked down in the most unsatisfying and anticlimactic manner, which made it so pointless to read. An absolute waste of panels. I don't come to care for any of the characters because they have no growth at all. The male lead is whiny and always worrying, while his love interest is super perfect and rich. They completely lack depth, and the story could have gone in a better direction to demonstrate growth and maturity. Instead, they're basically the same from Season 1, except now they're together and not avoiding each other (as much). I had a higher rating for this until Season 3 hit, when the author just went with sex every chapter. The only reason why I liked this initially was that I appreciated it taking its time with their somewhat boring romance instead of jumping straight to shameless smut like all the other BLs out there, but nope. It appears the author was simply on a leash for the first two seasons and now she's raging hard without restraints anymore. Basically, this devolved into the generic mass of BL webtoons that are plentiful and un-unique out there. Shame. Additionally, the art is lackluster and dull. It's not offensive, but it's very plain Jane in terms of art style and presence. Not memorable in any way.

Male lead died and reincarnated to redo his life. He becomes super OP because he already knows all the best materials and ways to get them, etc. The translation killed the story. With each chapter, the story makes less and less sense because the translation gets even worse with each chapter. It's like someone tried running the lines through Google Translate multiple times and then changing back to English. The art is not bad, but it's very hard to tell what the heck is going on.

Actually, I didn't like this webtoon in the beginning, because the male lead was so unlikeable, as typical of OP heroes. Even worse, he gathers a small harem of beautiful girls in the first five chapters (it only gets bigger from there). But it does improve slightly with recent chapters, although not by much~ Well, at least he's become slightly more likeable, because he cares about upgrading everyone mostly equally. Also, he hasn't shown any signs of favoritism or romance towards the girls, which is a plus for me, since it's so, so easy to devolve into mushy lovey dovey crap that doesn't make the story any better, and leads to pointless arguments or something. It's still somewhat interesting to see how the story will unfold from here, but I'm guessing he will not really encounter much way of obstacles besides his own teammates dragging him down. He gets lots of beautiful girls in his harem but they're all basically useless in the end since he always ends up having to save them.... Sigh. The art is decent, not the best, but it's serviceable for this genre of webtoon. His ring is OP and it can store infinite amount of items. I'm not sure why he's so good at fighting since his skill is actually forging. His girl companions are all idiots who are incapable of defending themselves, even against fodder enemies. He also picks up two trash guys as team members, and they're also extremely weak. I think this webtoon has potential, but it's definitely hard to see through the pile of plot armor crap the author has surrounded the male lead with. I'm hoping that he will have to actually face some strong difficulties instead of wiping the floor effortlessly every time, but I won't hold my breath about this actually happening. The translation gets worse with the newer chapters, and there's lots of grammar and spelling mistakes. Don't read if you don't want a headache.

Hmmmmm, I'm a little mad about this webtoon because I feel like I was tricked in the first chapter. It focuses so much of the panels in the chapter on the red haired mage, only to have him killed at the end of it. And as the readers, we got to listen to his thoughts and see mostly his side of the battle, as if he were going to be one of the protagonists, but nope, gotcha! The sidekick is likely going to be the blue haired dude who killed him instead, and we know nothing about him, except that he's super strong (and he barely speaks in this chapter). It feels like we got traded an interesting character for a less interesting one...My feelings are mixed about this. It's like the author purposely tried to mislead the readers with the very first chapter, which is usually the chapter you want to make a good first impression on, so that people want to continue reading. Seriously, it spends so much time analyzing the mage, and he even has a backstory and some random girl who wants to save him, but it was all for a cheap shot at the readers to twist up their expectations. I don't feel that is a good move for a first chapter. As a writer, you should also want to make the readers trust you with what you're presenting them with, and instead, you've basically lied to them in the very beginning about who will be important, to make a shocking turn of events for the sake of novelty. It's not a good move to me, but maybe some other people like being hoodwinked like this because it's cool and different. I just feel it's dishonest and a waste of panels if you're just trying to shock for shock's sake like that. It would have been more acceptable later on, once the readers are more familiar with the characters, but as the first chapter, it shakes up the foundation of the story way too much. It makes me doubt what the author is presenting as a whole, if we can't even trust what is happening as we think is happening because the presentation is actually a big lie. Anyway, the art is also not my preference either. It's too bold with solid color palettes and looks extremely European in style, which I guess is what the author is going for, but I'm not a fan of this style myself. Hopefully, the author doesn't pull any more cheap tricks like this again soon. Otherwise, the overall idea and set up for a quest-type adventure is promising, but I think the explanation was a little clunky, and they could have spent more time establishing the more important characters like the princess and her family better, instead of wasting it on this unwelcome twist. Okay, after reading the second chapter, my rating has gone down even further, because the female lead is not likeable and abusive. She doesn't come off as a strong female protagonist who I would like to read about, because she is cold and uses people like pawns. Maybe it will be expanded on, but I'm not quite warming up to her at the moment. It doesn't help that no one likes her at all. The boring male protagonist we got switched up with is the basic male character you find in everyday adventure reading material, a kind-hearted boy who was forced to fight for survival, wants to have a better life, and is fighting in the memory of a loved one, etc. I really preferred the other guy in the first chapter before he was killed off, he seemed like he wouldn't be so complacent and obedient towards the princess, which would be a far more interesting dynamic. In fact, the introduction of that character was so much more compelling than the character we actually end up getting. I'm still salty about it.