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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

You’re saying these comics are for women? Seems like these are for men…

As an expert in this area, I can say that these comics highly resemble manhua for women. The story of the rich man 'buying' the plain but good looking girl is very popular in China. In fact in the title it says "Art: C.C. Chen" which is obviously a Chinese name. I have read a few dozen of these manhua. The general plotline is a rich and powerful man, the plain but good looking girl, and an assortment of competing mean girls who try to kill the feMC and abort her babies. I can tell this will be the general plotline just from the first few panels.

A note for this genre: there are only a handful of basic plotlines in this genre. It is more about the execution of the plotline than the uniqueness of the plot itslef. This is true of manhua in general: it is very formulaic but 1 out of each dozen or so will execute it well while the others will fail miserably. The three largest easily quantifiable factors in this formula are the speed that the story plays out, the way in which one character makes the other one fall for them (generally, the way in which the rich man makes the girl fall for him) and the likeability of the characters.

Gotcha, thanks for the explanation, I’m not familiar with that genre or the gender roles in that culture. Also I’m gay and poly so most of the spicy comics I read are very, very different to this. In particular marriage is significantly less important in polyamorous and gay communities - the quality of the connection between the two individuals is the biggest turn on in romantic content.

Also the comics don’t render properly at all on my iPhone so it was hard to even scan them for their plot lines. The frames were all cut off. But a guy throwing a lot of money at a woman reads as weird and creepy to me - it shows me only that he wants something from her and is rich, but doesn’t indicate at all whether he is actually any good for her, or whether he cares about her as a complete human being or as an object to be acquired.

Edit: Also if the comics are written for women, I hope they are written by women. Otherwise a lot can get lost in translation.

Thanks for the insightful comment. All the above is true! C.C is an artist we recruited from a Chinese manhua app. We're reproducing and repackaging some killer tropes in Asian markets for the west

I was confused by that as well…just looks like a bunch of hentai went into a blender.

It doesn't look at all like hentai, but the art does seem uncanny and stilted. It seems more like obvious wish-fulfillment romance, or at least the first one does; that one focuses on how some really rich guy that's relatively attractive is going out of his way to pamper and stand up for this woman.

To be fair I’m not a hentai expert.

Neither am I, but I've seen at least one hentai, and I think it tends to have a manga art style and be more sexually explicit.

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