Thanks for taking the time to write this, Carrie.
Since its come up a few times, I just want to say some general words on historicity in fiction. This isn't meant as an excuse for ourselves, since there are definitely things we would have preferred to do more thoroughly but couldn't due to time constraints - we started writing for the Webtoons contest in early June with zero experience drawing comics - but rather an explanation of our thought process in case it may be of help to anyone reading this. If it leads to some productive discussion, even better!
While I care a great deal about faithfully representing the era I'm writing about, Flames of Tranquility was never meant to be a historical reenactment of the Three Kingdoms, and I'd imagine most modern adaptations aren't either. I'm more concerned with capturing and preserving the essence, not so much the material form, and telling the story from my own unique perspective (ideally with a little flair!)
For example, Yuan Shu wasn't a woman (in fact, no woman would have held the place of a traditional 'lord'), but just because I wrote it like that doesn't mean I'm not informed on the history; it's a deliberate choice I made with my artistic license to tell the story how I want. I have still researched and read every primary source reference to the character I could find so I can write a personality as close to the real person as possible, only within the parameters I set for myself.
Historical records themselves are actually very dry; the Records of the Three Kingdoms would put most everybody to sleep unless you had a specific interest. They are also full of gaps, inconsistencies and distorted by bias. It's the job of the historian to sort through these. For a writer, they are the opportunities for you to insert your own interpretations and stories to fill the holes. The classic Chinese novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms is often described as 70% truth, 30% fiction, but it's still vastly more popular than the historical version for this reason. Spoilers, Guan Yu didn't actually wield an anachronistic, 50kg 'Green Dragon Crescent Blade', but a lot of people would agree that it's still cool, and much more distinctive and interesting than just giving him a generic polearm!
I'm aware of inaccuracies in our comic. Sun Ce's long, flowing hair is contradictory to Confucian morals of the time. Lu Fan wouldn't have a piercing. We like it, though. It looks good. The long hair expresses his wild, impulsive nature. The piercing is a hint at his extravagant side that nearly gets him in trouble later in his life. And we're not the only ones, either. A lot of Chinese media doesn't strictly follow the conventions of traditional hanfu. We actually referenced things like the popular 2010 TV show San Guo, movies like Red Cliff and various anime adaptations (my favourite is Souten Kouro) to design our characters and scenery. These may not be authentic as accurate depictions of life 2000 years ago, but they are part of the modern culture that shapes our perception. They still have enough resemblance to evoke the right feeling, and generally look better to 21st century sensibilities.
I don't think this looks cool to my eye; it's a traditional style, 17th century illustration.
Another thing to consider is the audience. If I wrote Flames of Tranquility for my eyes only, it would be much more antiquated in style, violent and dark, with vague references and confusing titles. However, we're posting to Webtoons and Tapas, which is mostly a Western audience without a strong background in Chinese history (which is basically Letty; huge props to her for figuring everything out as she goes). Outside of a very small subset of the readership, most aren't likely to notice, much less care about these details. Is the extra time invested necessarily going to make it better? Imho, accurate historicity is paramount in a textbook, not fiction, particularly to a non-enthusiast audience.
Tangentially, here's a conversation with someone concerning the naming conventions I used in the first chapter, with respect to consistency, accessibility and style:
In the comic it will say Lujiang Commandery, but it will say Shucheng instead of Shu Castle. I just found it inconsistent but I do see it written like that in many places. If I were to write it I would either say Liujiangjun and Shucheng or Liujiang Commandery and Shu Castle.
Reply:
Funny you mention the naming convention; I actually agonized over that exact thing for a good while trying to find a nice common ground between consistency, accessibility and style.
'Shucheng, Lujiangjun' would have been my preference, but since we're mostly writing for a western audience who probably wouldn't understand what those suffixes mean without explanation, I thought it would be too confusing.
On the other hand, 'commandery' is also just a really cool-sounding translation, so we decided to sacrifice a little bit of consistency to make it all flow better.
For readers familiar with Chinese and/or the common romanizations in academia, it might be a little bit jarring or unclear (for example, I chose to render 'xiaowei' as 'commander' rather than the more common 'colonel' because of its more neutral etymology). For the most part, I think it should still be easily understandable though, especially for the less knowledgeable reader that's likely to be confused.
Anyway, I may have rambled a bit there, so lets just wrap that one up. I guess I kinda ended up... reviewing my own comic there? I'm interested to know specifically what details from our comic bug people, though. It would help me a lot with my review process, so if anyone reading this has any irksome points they could isolate for me, I'd appreciate it!
re: Kamikaze - Its been running for so long, I'm not sure I can do it justice with the limited time I have at 2.30am. Nevertheless, here are some of my thoughts:
I'm definitely just spoiled, since I used to read manga one page at a time too, but I find it's slow having to click every time to go to the next page. I'm a fan of the continuous scrolling format so it feels a bit cumbersome to me. It seems that most people prefer this length here though so I'm probably in the minority as far as that's concerned.
Letty noted (my eyes are too untrained to notice ) that the backgrounds seem more detailed than the characters, which creates a jarring effect for her. The art looks very polished regardless.
I have no experience with comic books and that style, so I don't know that I have any meaningful feedback to share except to say that your work certainly lends you the credibility you mentioned! Not that you needed it; your critique stood well on it's own.
Again, thanks for sharing, and I hope I didn't kill anyone with this wall of text!