Wait wait wait. It sort of starts off that way, but it just wants to recap that so you can see Jugyeong (which I'll refer to as Barbie to make it easier on my english native brain) hanging out with some cute boys in their love triangle. As romances go, having the romance of the story be the focus makes sense. There's a lot of tropes that get used in romances and this is no exception but besides your main three characters, who cares about anyone else? (genuinely for a romance, that's fine!) Well.... Once the dating begins we start the next phase of the story, self discovery and getting over trauma! But something seems off. Perhaps it's because of how the story is told through a webcomic with limited panels and time? Well, maybe, but stories like I love Yuu, Make up Remover, No Longer a Heroine, Your Throne, Surviving Romance seem to be able to show character development and growth through their stories, and have a whole cast of consistent characters.
Why does True Beauty feel so off with it's story telling?
My problem with the series is the villain of the week trope. There were so many characters that also dealt with their own issues that could have been touched on especially with how long the series is, but there came a point that every introduction I thought "Are they going to be secretly pure evil or a sweet friend who is ABSOLUTELY nothing but a sweet friend we won't see or hear from again indefinitely. We rarely saw the friends, we know barely anything about them. None of these other characters mattered. None of them. Dealing with past trauma, realistically, would mean communicating with people and being able to cope together, but the story just didn't have time for it. It was about the villain of the week. Who was going to make Barbie look like an angel? And who was going to be this cartoony evil person out to get barbie and friends? And then POOF dealt with like a sailormoon villain. On to the next introduction that won't matter.
This happening once or twice would have been fine, but it happened all the time!!! I ended up dropping the series because it was predictable and and not very interesting. I started reading TB because the romance was cute, but after that part of the story ends I wanted to see Barbie develop. As stated before the story just didn’t have time for her to really sit and learn with her friends THEIR traumas and be able to grow with them. The story was just too busy introducing characters that were saturday cartoon evil villains. The story is so long and it’s sad to see how much time is wasted when the IDEA is good! By the end, and all of a sudden, it happens.
****spoilers**** MC accepts herself because of some old ladies SHE JUST MET said "appreciate your youth". Out of all the time spent with characters close to her, constantly not having time to deal with that trauma because she had to fix other people's problems and be this savior for others... she doesn't talk to anyone close to her that can give her the right words to help her approach all this trauma as they'd been watching and growing with her. No. It's some little old ladies that helps it click with her.
After the old ladies, Barbie sees all the people who were like "hey Barbie helped me!" through stories posted online... They squeezed out one last villain, the manager, that ends up being portrayed as 'evil' in the end too. Even though 1. it was her job to get Barbie views, and 2.People mess up. It would have been nice to see at least in the end as Barbie is now out of her “I’m ugly and useless” phase that she doesn’t see everyone as a good guy and bad guy. I just wish they showed the complexity of people since getting over trauma is the main theme (besides the romance which has been on the back burner). It was a romance, but once the romance ended the story kept going, and without the romance being the focus, why couldn't they have just taken their time giving their past characters more love.
So in the end, the romance was cute, and as someone who has dealt with trauma (and also anorexia which they upset a lot of people with their nonchalant approach on how to lose a lot of weight really fast) it felt absolutely frustrating reading this story play out. The only reason I finished was because I had already invested so much time into it, and yes, I did drop it for a long while once I got sick of the villain of the week but picked it back up hoping it would develop a bit more. It did not. If you love the story, I hope you gained a lot from it, but as for me- I just think they really dropped the ball and I hope you can see why I think so.
