July's manga / #BL(125)

The sex randomly happens and the male lead is completely willing to go along with it, no questions asked. He's a little too chill for me to be realistic. But luckily, there's actual story development with the histories of both main characters, and less focus on the sex. The art is alright for a yaoi manga, and I enjoyed reading the released chapters. It doesn't blow me away though, and the characters are still somewhat lacking. I'm giving it a below average rating, since the ending is crappy.

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.

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.

The prologue is too confusing and complicated, nothing was explained properly, so I didn't like it. I don't know if it was the translation, but it seemed very clunky in the introduction, but it might have been from the original source material trying to be vague and mysterious, and failing. The first chapter is better, but does a poor job in introducing the characters and the world, as well as the system of this Global Examination. It reminds me of the Classroom of Truth in Bakuman, but even that promotional chapter was better written than this was. I'm a little disappointed since it seems promising, and the art is good, but the set up is bad. Maybe the novel is better at establishing the world than this webtoon. Hopefully, it gets better. There's too much going on, and it doesn't slow down enough for readers to process and digest what is happening. Update: Each new chapter gets more and more confusing. Seriously, there's zero effort to slow down and make things make sense in this webtoon. I hope that's not the case in the novel.

Art is horrifically bad. I was completely tricked by the cover art shown here. None of the actual art in the webtoon looks as good as the art for the cover. It's a total downgrade, with complete lack of details in almost every single panel, and very lazy art and coloring. Plot is non-existent, besides some eye patched dude picked up a half dog human, who he promptly abuses because the hybrid human looks exactly like his former lover who had stabbed him in the eye. I hate all the characters and I don't want them to exist at all. They're all either malicious or stupid. Ugh. Avoid.

I don't really like this webtoon. I had pretty high expectations, and this just fell flat as I was reading. The art is pretty decent, so that's a plus. Problem is, most of the characters look the same, since so far, there are only men introduced. Basically, you have to rely on the clothes to tell who is who. The plot is dumb. There's too many names being thrown around, and as you know, Chinese names are so hard to differentiate because you can't tell what is a place, person, or thing, if there's no background explanation, let alone remember it later, when it's brought up again. All I got was these two male characters were friends, but the white clothes guy forgot about their promise, and the black clothes guy went to war to bring him back to his country. The white clothes guy hates the black clothes guy, because he's a complete jerk. They're both royalty from different countries/kingdoms. The white clothes guy is the most inefficient and stupid ruler I've ever seen, but that's probably just to advance the ridiculous plot faster. He also acts super weak and girly, letting the black clothes guy pull him this way and that like a puppet. It's a bit disgusting to watch happen, because it's all so undignified. Although the art was fine, the paneling is somewhat poor, so it doesn't help the story progress smoothly either.

A pianist gets transported to the past after getting yelled at by his father for not being good enough, only to meet a young violinist who's being scolded by his father for lack of emotion in his playing. Only then does the pianist realize he's in the presence of the legendary genius musician that his father had wanted him to emulate. The art is good, the panelling is great, especially in the prologue. The two male characters aren't that annoying but not too distinctive yet, and I think it's a realistic type of reaction after such a strange encounter. Looking forward to more.

The art for this is really good, it reminds me of Eastern Palace Prisoner, which I just read before reading this one, because of the character designs. The passive lead wears white, while the dominant lead wears black. The art is much better in this than in Eastern Palace Prisoner, and it's slightly easier to tell who is who, but still not that much. Unfortunately, the paneling and pacing of the story is crazy bad, so it's difficult to tell what is going on. Chinese names are thrown left and right, without much explanation, making it super difficult to follow. Sigh, yet another poorly written historical ancient China BL. Still haven't found a good one yet... Maybe it'll get better later. The author needs to slow down so readers can breathe. I don't really care for either of the male lead characters. This is better than Eastern Palace Prisoner in every way though.

I don't like this webtoon because it's so nonsensical and inaccurate in terms of detective work. Also, it seems to contradict itself with the prologue. Apparently, the two main characters knew each other from police academy days and were close, but in the next chapter which takes place two years ago, before the incident that caused the blue haired man to be dead eyed and wheelchair bound, when they meet for the first time, they don't know each other. Which is it? You can't be both strangers and police academy rivals at the same time like that. Unless you're going to make both of them have amnesia about their police academy days, which is so lame. It's just basically full of bad tropes at this point. Anyway, I don't know if it's the translation, or if the original text is wrong, but OCD doesn't equate to germaphobe, because you can have one without the other, or both, but it seems the text is saying he's just a germaphobe with implied agoraphobia. He doesn't show any signs of OCD at all. I even doubt he's actually a germaphobe, because he just unnecessarily tore off a dirty business card which was thrown on the ground with his teeth, when he could just have used his fingers to do it like a normal person. Ugh. What was the author thinking? It's not even sexy to do that. And the police chief just outright lied and broke into the other guy's apartment with a hammer, which is classic breaking and entering. He should arrest himself. The so-called psychic detective isn't psychic at all, he's just using observation like a normal detective should be doing, and deducing things based on his knowledge. It's impossible to put a microphone in something as flimsy as a card without someone noticing there's something wrong with the card. The list goes on and on with why this webtoon is terrible. It's clear that the author just wanted to write BL with a detective theme but didn't bother doing research or putting thought into it for the execution. Like why do they have rose-gold handcuffs...? The art is the only reason I gave it a higher rating. Although it's not the best art I've seen, it's slightly above average for a webtoon. Both of the main characters piss me off, and they're extremely unlikeable.

Pretty mediocre BL, but it doesn't dive straight into shameless smut after the steamy opening scene, which is good. It allows some development of the characters at the very least. It's implausible that two CEOs would fall for some plain average-looking dude like the male lead though, since he has absolutely no stand out qualities. Art is decent.