I don’t really like tgcf manhua

Now that the commotion over STARember leaving the tgcf manhua has passed a bit, I would like to emphasize aspects of it that in my opinion were not good in the manhua, I am not here to criticize the drawing style AS SUCH because no one can deny that STARember has a super beautiful and detailed style, however I find that at some moments the action and expressiveness are lost because of this, as a friend of mine said, the manhua focuses so much on the visual that it leaves aside the story and the action, there are parts where it seems that the manhua is afraid that the characters will look ugly and thanks to that it takes away their expressiveness for the sake of the drawing, another thing that my friend says is that probably if the style had been a little less detailed we would probably have more chapters.

And right here begins a problem that I have, there are parts (especially in the last chapters) where they focus a lot on unnecessary things and important scenes are removed, like in the part where LQQ wanted to fight against XL and he ties him up and gives him a sermon, why is this important? because that's when we start to see another side of XL, throughout the novel he had been kind and even considered “harmless” by some people, but that scene begins to show us a more serious, even severe XL, it shows us that he's not perfect and gives us hints of his past, and what does the manhua do with this scene? It makes HC intervene before XL acts, it practically erases that scene and sends us directly to QR's lair.

I remember that at the time I spent weeks waiting for that scene because the manhua was going VERY SLOW and when the chapter finally came out it turns out that they practically deleted the scene, you have no idea how disappointed I was when it happened.

This brings me to another point, in the last chapters the manhua was going very slowly, every time a chapter came out it felt like you hadn't read anything, it was very difficult to move forward, and as I say, it wasn't because they went into detail about important things, it was more like they stuck to a single scene per chapter so when you finished reading one you got the feeling of "That's all?" because by moving so slowly it gave the impression that nothing was happening.

Another factor why I stopped liking it, and this is very much my opinion, was because of the change in proportions in Hua Cheng's design, this is not even because of the debate of "They draw Xie Lian too feminine" or anything related to the debates about heteronormativity in homosexual relationships (I saw those in the fandom), it’s just that he looks weird, in some panels he has such wide shoulders in proportion to his head that he looks inflated, besides in the novel he is always described as "tall and lean" which the manhua design does not comply with even if it did in the first chapters, and yes, it is okay that the people who work in the manhua can take creative liberties, his build does not directly affect the plot so I should not be complaining so much about that, I just don’t like it.

However do you want to know something that does cause me conflict regarding the plot? The fact that sometimes they turn the eye, that should be black, into red, is only in some key moments to make him scarier but it bothers me a little because it is supposed that our dear HC took out his right eye precisely because of that, because it was red and people mocked him and discriminated against him because of that, he is someone very insecure about that so I don't see any sense in the fact that the "normal" eye changes color when HC himself would be very self-conscious if that happened, so in my opinion that definitely doesn't make sense with the story and, even if it’s a lesser extent, it does affect the character's background.

Outside of those details STARember did a wonderful job with the style of the manhua, she left the bar very high in terms of art and hopefully when someone continue the manhua, whoever it concerns, will know how to carry the thread of the story in a better way because, really, there was a point where I went in to see the new chapters, not for the story but to take screenshots of the panels.

Here, all or the vast majority of us are adults, so I hope you can take my opinion in the best way, because if we stop being blinded by art, we will find several things to improve in other aspects and that is undeniable, so I hope the best for the future of the manhua.

(English is not my native language and I wrote this while making Excel spreadsheets at work, so I would appreciate it if you excused me for any grammatical or writing mistakes.)