If you’re thinking about getting into this series, and you’re someone who cares deeply for plot and character development, do not go into 19 Days with high hopes at all.
With a fantastic start and a very humorous plot for first maybe 200 chapters, you would think it would be like that to the end, but the series’ fall off is… insane!
The plot of 19 Days used to be centred around being a flashback to Zhan Zhengxi’s and Jian Yi’s past since before Jian was kidnapped and became changed by that experience, and became a lot more angstier. And in this flashback (the main plot), there were heavy themes on accepting sexuality and the feelings around that. However, this has been completely dropped as the author has become a money-grabber and changed the future plot to service your average old fujoshi, and it sounds insane, but if you read you can see the quality drop and if you’re unbiased, you’ll know why.
Zhan Zhengxi is a forgotten character, and any depth in Jian has gone to becoming a comedic cupid character for the side pairing. The ‘future’ that had been promises for years in concept arts, has been dropped to further entertain the awful side pairing which involves SA and toxic behaviours. The main ship is canon with lots to explore, but we are instead given the same filler slop every monthly update with seemingly no light at the end of the tunnel, so we don’t even know how they get together from how they are now, and it’s been this way since the series started.
Zhan Zhengxi as a character is the saddest thing to witness in this story, as he’s such a complex guy who clearly struggles with his sexuality/masculinity, and as much as Old Xian has said she’ll explore this, it has been six years since she said so and nothing. There is even a chapter of him confessing that he likes Jian to a classmate, and he draws he and Jian in a ‘love umbrella’, but despite knowing his feelings are reciprocated, he does nothing about it, and no one knows why, and will never know why, because Zhengxi is only not explored because he’s not He Tian or Mo (aka, popular). It’s just disgusting. As he acts now vs. how he acts in Xian’s future arts of them together, you can’t even accurately make a story in your head how it would go and get to that point, and it’s so infuriating.
The art is good, humour is great, but the fans are the worst, and the storytelling is awful and inconsistent; changing at any whim for an extra buck to Old Xian. It’s truly a shame for me to write such a negative review as someone that has been following this series for almost two years now, and as someone who say 19 Days as a wonderful read compared to other BL, but it is insane how every single chapter is the same premise repeated with no growth, and no growth where it matters. It has become like every other BL in the genre. Just nothing worth looking at as you’ve seen the story told 1000 times before.
The author is a money hungry liar, and it does harm the story, and this has no signs of changing as the fans don’t care; happy to get their fill of sewer water as a fujoshi does. So, if you are one to care about characters deeply, and you don’t like SA or abusive relationships portrayed in a positive/romanticised way, I don’t recommend 19 Days at all.
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