I started read this around Chapter 40 when my friend urged me to read this cute webtoon. Few years later, needless to say my friend stopped reading this and moved on, as for me I’ve stopped being friends with them and haven’t moved on because they left me with the dumpster fire that I cannot look away from.
The beginning arc of the story starts in a high school, like a typical shoujo high school manga. The catchy point of True Beauty is that our main girl Jugyeong, she is considered “ugly” and had been bullied because of her looks, later, she learns how to do makeup and turns herself into a “goddess” and everyone suddenly loves her. This includes two very handsome boys, Seojun and Suho. Yes, you know it, it’s a love triangle. Reading the comments section on the app is absolutely eye-opening, nobody is talking about how shit the story has become but rather STILL debating whether they are team Suho or Seojun like it’s the 2000s Twilight team Edward or team Jacob fight.
Let me open the review up by saying how the English translation of the webtoon is misleading, the original Korean name directly translates to “Descent of a Goddess” and not “True Beauty”. To this point in the webtoon I have failed to see how it has lived up to the name. The reason the story gained a lot of popularity is the ability to resonate with its audience with the premise, the chances are most girls probably have experienced what Jugyeong have experienced with society’s obscene beauty standards. In the early days of the webtoon, everyone had hopes that as the story develops in a way that Jugyeong will gain confidence and discover her “true beauty” eventually! Except that did not happen and I’m pretty sure that was never intended to happen but rather the English translation gave it too much credit.
The development or the lack of is really disappointing, literally the same shitstorm happens every week and nothing has changed. Jugyeong was aspirational at the beginning trying to find herself and pursue things she’s interested in. After Suho fucked off to Japan, everyone’s lives just stopped and lived on a loop. Why did he not call/text/email/fax anyone is beyond me, he is also very rich, a flight from Japan to Korea is not that expensive, there is no valid reason why he cut out all of his friends in the modern era just because he moved to a new country. Before you have a go at me saying he has depression, let me start a new paragraph.
Missed opportunities to tackle societal problems:
Suho’s depression was never tackled, it was used as a gimmick to say he sad boi who found out a girl he liked was going out with his best friend and oh his dad was sick or something. None of it was explored, it was just brought up whenever it was convenient for the plot’s sake.
Briefly mentioned above about finding one’s true beauty, Jugyeong never come to terms with herself and she’s still just fucking about every day on Instagram living this superficial influencer life she has created for herself. What’s more hilarious, Jugyeong shows clear dislike at this guy who she went on a date with, the reason, right, you won’t believe this, because he looks different to his filtered pictures, how contradictory. With a story premise like this, it would have been great to talk about beauty standards, how it physically and mentally harms the public, in particular in Korea where the standards are ridiculous.
Tragic back story suicide gimmick. Suho and Seojun have a best friend called Seyeon who committed suicide as kpop idol who received immense amount of hate online. It was mentioned briefly in early chapters and then the details of it were brought back up in a later day. Yaongyi was underfired for bringing this back up during a time where a real kpop idol have committed suicide. Again, it was the perfect time to depict on the Korean entertainment industry, idol and fan culture etc…except it never happened, Seyeon was just a tool used to create feud between Suho and Seojun so they have a reason to be angry at each other about.
The most recent topic is Seojun becoming a kpop idol and how his relationship with Jugyeong will conflict with it. Kpop idols are famously not allowed to date because of this toxic culture of fans taking ownership of their idols, it’s a big issue in the current idol fan culture, not just in kpop, it’s also very prominent in jpop and cpop. Nope, nothing happened, they just broke up, boo hoo let’s move on so she can date the other guy.
Well you might be saying, aren’t you expecting too much from nothing? Sure, I described these topics as interesting points from my own perspective, I just think if Yaongyi have the balls to use some sensitive topics for clout, they should at least do it some justice.
General character problems:
Jugyeong – Judging other people’s looks even though she suffered the same, never learnt from the past, lost aspirations and is now wishy washy with her studies, she couldn’t get into the makeup school she wanted so god knows what she’s doing at university now where there’s more guys hitting on her. All she thinks about is love, her passion for special effects makeup have gone out of the window. She constantly gets drunk even though she knows she’s lightweight and then cause a bunch of trouble. (This would have been another perfect commentary on Korea’s drinking pressure)
Seojun – He’s been alright, probably the only character who have a goal right now, working hard to support his mother and sister. But the story paints him in a bad light ever since he started going out with Jugyeong, he’s insecure about money so he does many part-time jobs to buy gifts for her and do his best for her. Yet she never stood in his shoe and thought about him, all she wonders is why he don’t reply to her texts – arguably that’s communication problem on both parts. He becomes jealous and suspicious because Jugyeong got a little too close to Suho and didn’t tell him, especially when these two had romantic feelings for each other in the past, his emotions toward them are totally valid, what’s more Suho still have feelings for her. Basically, he looked after Suho’s girlfriend for three years in a nutshell.
Suho – He is actually a stale as a brick character, he has the bare minimum of personality, his whole personality breaks down to rich, unemployed and has too much time on his hands to centre his life around Jugyeong. He leaves for Japan and we literally never heard anything from him, he suddenly returns…for what? To participate in this shitty variety show and then hanging around to see if he can bump into Jugyeong hoping she’s single?? All these girls screaming about Suho is really looking by everything because he’s good looking. If you swap his gender to a girl, people will be calling him a sly third wheel bitch. He comes back knowing the other two are now happily together but continuously test the waters with Jugyeong, yeah she’s dense and he is too or? Not saying opposite genders can’t be friends, Suho clearly still have feelings for her, he hangs out with her, he stands up for her when she gets drunk RIGHT IN FRONT OF SEOJUN trying to I don’t know…one up him, come on! Wake up!
Bottom line:
I am not saying you can’t have cute romantic shoujo stories, but the webtoon have just gone bad and superficial, no development of characters, the same plot just keeps repeating, the characters are no longer likeable, the only thing left is the bling bling cover and nothing inside, there is no “true beauty” to be discovered, only a pretty ugly shell.
However, if comes a time when it gets good, I will come back to edit this and eat my own words, until then, annyeong!
