I've gotten the feeling that part of my reaction to True Beauty may be due to unfair expectations from the English title. The original Korean title, which translates literally to The Rise of a Goddess, may give a more accurate impression. The phrase "True Beauty" evokes the cultural concept of "inner beauty": kindness, compassion, strength of will, and self-love, rather than the superficial beauty of one's appearance. I opened up the first volume, expecting it to interrogate the protagonist's obsession with her looks as she learned to embrace more important qualities. That's… not what I got. At all.

I confess, I am less familiar with Korean culture than Japan; besides the bits and pieces I've picked up from my high school classmates, I never felt particularly motivated to learn about it. One thing I do know, however, is that it is notorious for its strict beauty standards and the severe lookism that pervades everyday life. Cosmetic surgery is extremely prevalent, and not being pretty or thin enough or going out without makeup carries a heavy social stigma. Anyone who pushes back against this is perceived as having a feminist agenda and becomes a target for harassment from the country's sizable men's rights activist movement. I hoped that True Beauty would interrogate this, but every time it brushed up against the unfairness of how "ugly" (aka, not sufficiently attractive people, or women who don't wear makeup) people are treated, it shied away.

A story that touches on how beautiful people are treated versus how ugly people are treated but refuses to engage with the unfairness of it inevitably develops the overarching theme, "If you don't put in the effort to make yourself pretty, you deserve to be treated like that, uggo." This may not be intentional – or maybe it is, who knows – but that's the message coming through here. Whenever someone in the story is treated unkindly because of their appearance, Jugyeong contemplates how best to make them prettier and gives them a makeover. If someone gains weight, everyone is crueler to them, and it goes unremarked until they shed the extra pounds. It's not deliberately mean-spirited, but it's the kind of story that reinforces harmful norms in its refusal to question them.

Not that I think I'd be very into True Beauty even if it addressed the harm caused by beauty norms. The story meanders across the pages without any sense of focus or purpose. There's enough "plot" that it doesn't quite qualify as slice-of-life, which has its own charm. Instead, subplots pop up randomly, seemingly whenever artist Yaongyi feels like she needs to inject some drama. Bullies randomly appear and disappear, Jugyeong's mom comes in to yell at her arbitrarily, and a character gets hit by a bus out of nowhere… Things happen, one after another, but there's no real continuity. In fairness, Jugyeong does realize at one point that she wants to be a makeup artist and starts taking steps toward making that happen, but that's fairly unengaging, and most of the plot that happens after that is tangential at best. The plot pays more attention to Jugyeong's makeup routine than anything resembling an actual story.

This could have been salvaged, were the characters even a little bit fun to spend time with. They're very focused on youth culture in the form of YouTube, "Acebook" (aka Facebook), and coin karaoke, but I've rarely seen such a lifeless representation of teenagers. Jugyeong and Suho bond over their love of horror manga, but that withers away as the story takes a more soap opera-like tone. Other than that, everyone's interests seem determined by what adults think the kids are into these days, aka K-Pop, makeup, and social media. Rather than true personalities, characters are defined entirely by their role within the story: the best friend, the bratty younger brother, the mean girl, and so on. Jugyeong herself is utterly superficial, obsessed with her appearance and little else. All she talks about is makeup; all she thinks about in her relationships is how attractive the other person is, and so on. She's not a protagonist I feel like I can root for.

Like the characters themselves, the art is superficially pretty but lacking in substance. It's a bit more realistic than I generally prefer. I can chalk that up to my being used to more stylized manga-style artwork, while this art style reminds me of freemium shovelware phone games that have ads all over the internet. The pages have a ton of white space between the panels, which seem to be arranged almost randomly. I am informed this is common in infinite-scroll Webtoons, but goes against all my training about the intentionality in how comic page layouts are arranged.

One thing I can safely say doesn't come down to personal preference is how stiff everyone looks. There's no fluidity or motion as if everyone was posed using static models rather than references of humans in motion. The exception is the traced-over reaction meme faces, which Yaongyi frequently uses, resulting in what I can only describe as a Pepe jumpscare. This constitutes about 90% of the humor in the comic, which has two downsides: one, it ages the comic badly, since five years later, I can only assume younger readers won't recognize the references; and two, it isn't very funny at all.

True Beauty is the newest addition to the category of media I think of as "I know it's popular, but I really don't see why." It is utterly superficial, as obsessed with appearances as its protagonist while uninterested in engaging with the lookism that pervades Korean culture. There is no truth to be found here and barely any beauty.