I know this said in the tags but also…I have too many to really count so *sighs* I’ll put my whole rec list here since many of the manhua I’ve added are ones I adore ahaha:
Donghua Recommendations
The biggest stars though…:
When it comes to more general stories and ones that have gotten donghua (animated) adaptations, I’m obsessed with White Cat Legend, Beryl and Sapphire, Fei Ren Zai, Lanxi Zhen, and All Saints Street.
White Cat Legend is set in the Tang dynasty and is all about mystery and intrigue, with the donghua adaptation showcasing a lot of incredible action scenes. We also have a main character who is…a literal anthropomorphic white cat due to ~mysterious reasons~ from his past, and it’s a really intriguing one to slowly unlock.
(^ Also all of these characters in the above gif are great)
Beryl and Sapphire is really fun because it’s only drawn in stick figures—even though the characters do have canonical human designs—and can tell a different story every chapter. Some are overarching arcs the author cuts back to, like the Robo-Beryl and Demon King Beryl arcs, but many are just one-off stories. The donghua handles this by having the first season treat the main characters, the titular Beryl and Sapphire, as actors, which you can see in the catchy OP:
It’s a really unique yet adorable experience!
Fei Ren Zai is more slice-of-life, goofy fun, with the main cast being legendary and mythical Chinese creatures (yaoguai and yaojing) and figures (such as gods and goddesses). The twist here is that they now all live—and have to navigate—the modern day lol.
This one updates a lot and thus has many, many good jokes, and even educates people on Chinese mythology a bit through its comedy—you can thank Baize for that, the fourth wall-breaking bookworm who also hosts a trivia segment after many episodes of the donghua.
The entire cast is really charming for this one, and it has some of the best merch out there!
Similarly, All Saints Street is the exact same premise, except featuring Western monsters. It’s also Fei Ren Zai’s sister series, and I’ll always have a soft spot for it and Lanxi Zhen since I was a contributor to my friends’ efforts to translate these manhua.
(^ Lanxi Zhen is also the prequel manhua to the donghua, The Legend of Luo Xiaohei, and its prequel film, The Legend of Hei, which became popular a few years ago due to its gorgeous animation. I’ve connected it here to All Saints Street since both are series I’ve helped translate, but also because the director of Luo Xiaohei, MTJJ, also directed the animated adaptation of All Saints Street.)
Now for shoujo—or in this case, shaonü—manhua, I adored both Once More and Protect My Star due to the maturity they showed behind their themes. I also really like Hidden Love since it’s both cute and because the cdrama adaptation was so so good, which is actually why I intend to read some more shaonü manhua soon…
What I like about them is that we don't always get flat female and male leads or the more stereotypical "I'm a goofy nice girl who falls for the bad boy/boy who's kind of a troublemaker/mean to me" character tropes (which there's nothing wrong with! I myself loved many shoujo manhua with such character settings as a kid).
The male leads for these ones are really goddamn charming and the romance is all so soft. They also have very nice art styles that disprove many manhwa readers' assumptions that Chinese manhua always look "bad" or are "poorly written."
To quickly summarize some selling points: Protect My Star starts off as a goofy "fan ends up with idol" story that on the surface looks like pure wish fulfillment—especially since some readers found issue with the way the main character treated the idol of the story—but it's actually a great set-up for growth that really pays off. This applies to the side ship as well, who have their fair share of issues, but also reach a point that many fans appreciate, and I can't help but also cheer on the male lead of this side couple ship, since he's a classic puppy dog character ahaha. But yeah, all the relationships and characters develop and grow in ways that are pretty fulfilling in this manhua, to the point you can really feel as if the characters have grown up by the end of it!
Hidden Love and its sister series, First Frost (or brother series, since the male lead there is the brother of the main character of Hidden Love), are also just really lovely. Hidden Love is a schoolgirl's romance: a girl falls for her older brother's friend and even though she does miss him due to him only seeing her as a little sister, an unexpected reunion when she's in university sets off a romance that took the world by storm when the cdrama adaptation released (Duan Jiaxu, the man that you are...). It's just really sweet and does have a very beautiful—and cute!—romance, where the male lead actually finds healing in the female lead.
Then for Once More, there's a maturity to it that's refreshing. Like we do get misunderstandings and the characters do make stupid mistakes, but they tackle the issues and communicate the way adults should. It also explores a lot in terms of what makes a romantic relationship and how backgrounds—and trauma—can create boundaries that couples have to navigate together. The male lead is also really compelling in this one! He's soft and gentle but playful and occasionally firm, and the way he pursues the female lead is really refreshing. Plus the side ship is cute too!!
There’s quite a few in my donghua/manhua recommendations list and I have a feeling I’ll like quite a few of them, such as My OTP Is So Sweet That I Want to Fall in Love and My Star and I, aka My Lucky Star. Even without having read them yet, I'm already really charmed by their art styles, which has a watercolour-y feel to it that I've picked up is pretty popular in these shaonü manhua! I've also checked them out a little bit and like the three shaonü manhua I described above, My OTP Is So Sweet and My Lucky Star also seem to contain pretty compelling stories with gentle romances and character development, with the male leads all being quite charming.
As for a shaonü manhua I really like with a donghua adaptation, the body-swap story, No Doubt in Us, is a great one, and its writer is even behind the popular danmei (boys' love) novel (which also has a manhua), The Wife Is First.
Now if we were to switch gears to the ones that I go really feral over... They're admittedly danmei/boys' love manhua ahaha.
The biggest contenders and the ones that you could actually make a case are my "true" favourites are I Ship My Rival x Me and Kiss the Abyss. The former is based on an equally fun novel with an equally hilarious audio drama adaptation, and the latter is an original manhua but has a really great vomic adaptation.
If I were to explain the charm of the above two...
Well, the main characters for I Ship My Rival x Me are just refreshingly adorable, and the entire thing is pretty soft but also just very funny. Wei Yanzi's brain circuit makes a frightening amount of sense despite its zaniness, and I don't think anyone can fault him for falling for the charming puppy and greenest of green flags to ever green flag, Gu Yiliang. They also both make some really stupid assumptions that lead to some really stupid but actually really harmless—and thus hilarious—misunderstandings. 😂
This manhua literally fulfills the age-old imagination of fans who end up shipping their favourite actors together—as the entire reason Wei Yanzi and Gu Yiliang get together is because Wei Yanzi starts shipping him and Gu Yiliang too...except he's only shipping it because their fans (who call them the Niangzi ship) are the only ones who don't view them as rivals! Wei Yanzi totally doesn't actually have a thing for Gu Yiliang himself...right?
(Spoiler alert: he totally ends up having a thing for Gu Yiliang 🤣)
It's just a super feel-good and squee-worthy story, and the manhua's art style and pacing are all so *chef's kiss*. The manhua has an adorableness to it that's perfect for this story.
In contrast, Kiss the Abyss is darker, as our main character—and my personal gender envy icon—Wang Zixin (aka Wangzi or "Prince") transmigrates into the video game he made after being killed by its main character come to life...and the video game features a death game (think Squid Games) that its players must survive. In comes the very main character that killed Wangzi for putting him through such hell, known as Abyss, an experiment of super-strength that has only known a lab his whole life, except now he's a teenager who hasn't yet darkened to the point of no return or suffered the very death game that made him snap.
So thanks to a pretty absent System—a popular trope in Chinese transmigration stories that control things like a video game and hands the transmigrator protagonist tasks—Wangzi has to protect Abyss and make sure he doesn't suffer the same dark fate as the original Abyss.
I love this one because of the main characters: Wangzi is very smart and level-headed—but with both charm and humour—and a complete bi icon. He's suffered a lot himself in his past, but he picked himself up due to reasons we find out as the story goes on, and he's just a really interesting main character to follow. Then Abyss is very much so the puppy/wolf trope, which I fell in love with after reading both The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System and Erha. It's hard not to love Abyss when he has much of the same charm as Luo Binghe and Mo Ran from those other stories I mentioned.
Also, the author of Kiss the Abyss is behind some other manhua I really enjoy, such as the popular I Have to Be a Great Villain and the more underrated but still quite "darkly" interesting I'm Sick!
I've actually done some translation work for the Kiss the Abyss vomic here, here, and here.
Don't Say You Love Me is also another really cute one that I think I can argue as a favourite of mine—to the point I myself even translated some of the original Chinese chapters (for example, here), along with a few clips of its vomic adaptation (for example, here and here), to English lol. It's a time travel story (also called transmigration in Chinese even though the character doesn't transmigrate into another world/story): Lin Yutong is confessed to by his best friend, Qin Weiyun, and in a drunken panic, he runs away...only for Qin Weiyun to be hit by a car while chasing him.
This triggers his transmigration/time travel back to before they graduated high school, where he hasn't met the reticent but polite Qin Weiyun yet. They still meet, except now Lin Yutong has to navigate all these other things: living this period of his life over, his feelings for Qin Weiyun—and Qin Weiyun's potential future (romantic) feelings for him, the future accident, and so on.
Similarly, the aloof and distant Qin Weiyun is kind of on-guard with this Lin Yutong, who acts weirdly nice and open to and interested in him, and who seems to know him bizarrely well. To someone that prefers to keep everyone at a distance, Qin Weiyun finds Lin Yutong suspicious in multiple ways.
Still, this is a very cute slice-of-life story with a pretty refreshing romance between its leads, since Lin Yutong isn't your typical boys' love protagonist. He's silly and goofy and a bit childish, but it's exactly that sunny charm that draws in the seemingly cold Qin Weiyun.
Plus the author's other manhua, Beware of the Dream Demon, is also quite popular!
Pixiu's Eatery, No Way Out aka Pixiu's Bistro is also great! It's like Fei Ren Zai since it has mythical Chinese yao and gods in the modern day, but this one's a danmei. Our titular Pixiu ends up taking in a male ghost named Wen Xi who doesn't have many memories due to reasons™️, and a hilarious yet heartfelt romance ensues. I've also loved this one enough to translate a clip from its vomic as well here, since this scene in particular always gets me cackling when we reach it lol.
It's a very "we kind of need each other but we start off very unwilling" relationship that snowballs into a "we spend so much time together and help each other so much that no wonder we fell in love with each other" ship. And even if you know nothing about Chinese mythology, a lot of the jokes work anyway. 😆
But like Fei Ren Zai, this manhua similarly plays with the identities of these Chinese mythical beings and how they'd be affected—comedically—by the modern world. Like Pixiu, a creature of fortune, is now a penny-pinching, grumpy restaurant owner who bears a severe grudge against the mysterious Taotie.
I don't think I can really do justice for this one if I were to keep trying to describe it, since comedy often has to be experienced for yourself. But if you like danmei and/or Fei Ren Zai and/or Chinese mythology and/or comedy, then this is the story for you!
A few others that I really like that float between being known and unknown are How'd I Get a Heroine's Script and Wo Jia Dashixiong Naozi You Keng, both transmigration stories.
For the former, I like it for its cute, soft nature—and the way it plays with transmigration clichés. Specifically, we first meet Chao Yi, who transmigrates into a harem and is told he needs to get close to the polite and smiley but actually very cold seventh prince, Gu Yunheng...which means he does plenty of silly, "embarrassing" romantic gestures to try and get close to the reticent seventh prince.
Except throw in a few twists (there's one I really like that I won't spoil, but I think it's a "you'll know it when you see it" twist) and a mystery and some court intrigue, and you get a story that ends up a pretty endearing romance and interesting, if not understated, palace drama.
This one's also another one with a vomic adaptation too~
Then for Wo Jia Dashixiong Naozi You Keng, aka My Dashixiong Has a Hole in His Brain, it's a hilarious transmigration story that also involves reincarnation...which makes it like SVSSS and Erha kind of mashed together.
I wrote the Pinyin version of its name, which probably looks daunting for a non-Chinese speaker. And this is because its poor English name has been through a lot. For example, the donghua's official English title is just What's Wrong With My Big Brother, which I feel like misses a lot of the goofy and, of course, cultural charm of the original.
It's a little harder to recommend I think, since it relies on you being familiar with both wuxia (Chinese martial arts fantasy) and transmigration tropes: for example, our protagonist, Dongfang Xianyun, thinks he's just an NPC, so he lazes around for the first bit of the story while bothering who he thinks is the protagonist: Yin Feixing.
What he doesn't know though is that Yin Feixing is actually living this life over, having reincarnated. Because his last life ended so poorly—he became a demonic sect cultivator and was condemned by society, including his upright and stoic dashixiong (elder martial sect brother), Dongfang Xianyun... So in this life, he intends to push every bad thing that happened to him onto Dongfang Xianyun, including becoming a demonic sect cultivator.
What he can't foresee is that his dashixiong has changed a lot. Gone is the calm and collected dashixiong he came to see as a hypocrite in his last life. Now he's...weirdly goofy and shirks responsibility at every turn. At first, Yin Feixing is constantly yelling and chasing his dashixiong (classic tsundere behaviour lol), but his dashixiong's newfound warmth is weirdly off-putting in the sense that it lowers his guard...but also means that no matter what Yin Feixing throws his way, Dongfang Xianyun now seems capable of changing the narrative?
It's...admittedly a manhua that has a lot of fanservice, as it's not explicitly a boys' love/danmei story, yet it is very, very queer-coded. The original manhua also features costume designs with quite a bit of skin, and it's been going on forever.
I'd recommend it for those who a) like wuxia and transmigration already, b) who can enjoy and tolerate bl tropes and tones and fanservice, and c) who like the premise I just described above.
If you are intrigued but can't necessarily handle a manhua that's hundreds of chapters and not even fully translated and has those bl/fanservice overtones, I'd recommend the donghua adaptation instead! It's 3 seasons so far, and it tones down a lot of the fanservice, but still retains much of the other things, including its hilarity and its charm.
Oh, and the donghua's seasonal titles are really clever and cute, since it presents the series' narrative arc within itself!:
Season 1: Wo Jia Dashixiong Naozi You Keng: My Dashixiong Has a Hole in His Brain (the title of the original manhua and its title overall)
Season 2: Wo Jia Dashixiong Shi Ge Fanpai: My Dashixiong Is a Villain
Season 3: Wo Jia Dashixiong You Dian Kaopu: My Dashixiong Is a Bit Reliable
Final one I wanted to showcase is The Silver Wolf...because it's really f*cking cute and I really like it but no one knows about it!!
If I had to promote it in a way that generated interest, I'd liken it to The Legend of Luo Xiaohei—which I have before—since both feature a young girl with pink hair taking in a boy who's actually a yaojing. Both boys thus have animal features (cat and wolf ears!) and both girls also have mysterious "older brothers" who are related to the world of magic somehow.
Specifically, for those who like The Legend of Luo Xiaohei and actually ship said pink-haired girl with said-yao boy, while Luo Xiaohei doesn't exactly make that romance canon, The Silver Wolf does!
Its romance is admittedly very subtle, and this can be counted as a great series for younger audiences as well, but I still really like and recommend it due to its very nice art style, its dynamic action scenes, its compelling writing for the characters and plot and relationships, and because it's as cute as it is interesting~
I also didn't mention a lot of girls' love aka baihe manhua since I admittedly haven't read as many of them, although Straight Girl Trap and Baili Jin Among Mortals and Tamen de Gushi are really cute. I've been meaning to check out more as well! For example, the dark I'm More Dangerous Than You and the popular Miss Forensics are both series that have gotten my attention. I've also noticed quite a few baihe manhua take place in the entertainment circle genre, which is a genre I like!
And man, I could just keep going and going and going...
Like right now I'm really enjoying a lot of manhua, including See You My King; Blemishing the Contaminated; The Film Emperor, He Insisted on Being My Patron; The Trapped Beast; It’s Not That I Want to Wear Women’s Clothing; Salt Friend; and many others. Quite a few of these are ones that are actually adaptations of existing danmei novels, such as the mental health-aware Jie Yao, the police story Poyun and its sequel, Tunhai, the beautiful Little Mushroom, and the thrilling Bing Xing Xia Deng (commonly known as Inferior By Nature but also The Selfish Gene).
For Bing Xing Xia Deng, the manhua is how I started it, but I'll admit if you want to experience it best, the original novel and its amazing audio drama adaptation on MaoEr FM are the ways to go—I'm kind of obsessed; especially since the audio drama adaptation adds a few short scenes from the male lead's POV that don't exist in the original novel, which is both first person POV and stars an unreliable narrator.
But I'm getting off-track. I will say though that Little Mushroom's manhua is actually a great way to experience its story (so far, at least!), if only for its super, super stunning artwork. Of course I'd still recommend the original novel (and it also has an audio drama adaptation!), which its fans also adore to death, but we almost lost the Little Mushroom manhua artist due to them originally wanting to give up after dealing with haters, but thankfully they stayed on and we now still get to enjoy it as is!
So to end this long ramble of a reblog off, I'll include my list of more boys' love (danmei) and girls' love (baihe) manhua!:
While I can't necessarily list all of the ones I've mentioned later as my favourites, like not every manhua in the danmei/baihe list is in my "top ten," many of them are still stories I enjoyed a lot and do recommend!
