My Husband Was the Master of the Magic Tower Chapter 34 Discussion

1.5 stars: Initially flipflopped between giving this a 3-3.5 stars and possibly marking it as a 4-star, but after a certain point, ugh, dropped it to 2 stars because the story before that point was readable and inoffensive with some cute parts but at the same time wasn't particularly interesting or investing. Tried reading a little more and nope, decided to drop another half star and also drop the story. I don't get all the 5-star ratings unless the story does a 180 and drastically changes tone with super improved writing, plot, and actual character development later on. The translation is decent at least.

The heroine Ei's first-person narration is kind of monotone and she has little interest in building or maintaining relationships because of her immortality, has no desires, goals, or hobbies, and doesn't dwell on the past or let it affect her, so she comes across as having little personality. More than once she remarks that her emotions are dulled due to her dimension-shifting and immortality and occasional violent deaths—and somehow despite how intriguing those things sound, nope, she's just a boring person drifting through life. She thinks the ML Dante is hot at first sight and continues to think he's hot but doesn't really seem to care that he showed up near her house in a bloody near-dead state or that he somehow blew up her house upon waking—her reaction is basically "eh, oh well, how inconvenient". Even when she supposedly falls in love, it's more because he fell in love first and she knew it but didn't say anything and eventually decided well, he's pretty hot, and I guess I'm used to him being around now since he's been living here forever, and I suppose I'd miss him if he were gone, so I guess I have feelings for him, maybe we should get married even though I don't know that much about him but that's fine.

The story will sometimes switch to Dante's third-person POV, and he has more character and personality than Ei even if a lot of it is generic. He reads like a tsundere shoujo manga lead, grumpy and not sure why he's so into Ei, then realizing he loves her, but is also frequently puzzled/confused by how indifferent she is to so many things. He's more complex and interesting than Ei, but that isn't saying much considering how uninteresting Ei is in the first place. I'm not sure why he's into her and together they don't have much chemistry—it feels like he's in love with her and she blandly accepts that without really reciprocating.

The story also has intermittent chapters from random third person POVs. They don't add anything to the story except to pad its length with boring exterior observations of Ei and Dante, generally admiring or envying one or the other or both for whatever reason, or as pure plot devices to move the story along.

Still, there was enough low-key fluff and interest in seeing the summary-promised "village bomb-death" thing to keep me casually reading until I hit the Immortality Plot Point and its presentation is enough to make me want to tear my hair out because even though I know Not Communicating and Holding Back Information and Dumb*ss Misunderstandings are the bread-and-butter of romance stories—

Spoiler

I just COULD NOT EVEN when Ei undramatically finds out that Dante is, in fact, also immortal and then... she just decides not to tell him she is too. WHAT THE ****. She doesn't have any reason not to tell him except some super vague "well, I've never told anyone before, it seems like it's kind of hard for me to bring up because of that, I guess I'll just put it off until it comes up, we should be fine together anyway for some years, maybe someday I'll tell him I'm immortal and can't die and will eventually revive if I'm killed... "

All this after her previous emphasis on living a calm loner (if not necessarily lonely) life because of the endless emotional exhaustion involved in having any kind of close relationship with people whom she will always outlive.

Literally, this woman finds out that her super hot husband that she's supposedly so in love with is ALSO IMMORTAL and declines to tell him about her own immortality and how it works. Because of no particular reason.

Not to mention that her whole "dimension-shifting" ability is revealed off-screen to Dante, unless I somehow missed reading it—it's, like, token mentioned off-handedly that oh yeah he was surprisingly accepting of her telling him about the dimension-traveling thing and didn't question it at all, and yet she felt that she just couldn't bear to follow that up by telling him about her immortality/resurrection ability because she had vague negative feelings about it.

Naturally her violent bomb-death occurs immediately after she promises to tell him a secret when he gets back from work i.e. tell him about her immortality, and then she revives 10 years later. And she still lacks any kind of emotion or personality, instead calmly walking around to find out where she is (there are weird rules about her dying so if she dies in a fire or by drowning she'll revive in a random location for whatever reason, and this time she revives wearing our-world-modern-day-clothing for whatever reason), and then blah blah, convenient plot stuff happens so she finds out about Dante being the Master of the Mage Tower and going "mad" and seeking bloody vengeance on those responsible for her death for the past 10 years, and her reaction is basically to decide, "Oh. Poor Dante. Too bad I didn't ever get around to telling him about my immortality thing. I guess I'd better try to go see him."

We also get a couple of brief Dante-POV scenes where he's beyond melodramatically mourning Ei, like, literally standing in pools of the blood of his enemies while angsting over her death 10 years ago. He did not seem that obsessed with her when they were together and although her death was unequivocally violent and horrible, his behavior and actions are so hyperbolic I can't take him seriously. There was no setup at all for this level of reaction from him, no indication that he had any particularly obsessive, vengeful, or extreme personality, or that he was passionately, deeply, wholly, insanely in super-love with Ei.

All this is around chapter 34 or so, and there are 147 main-story chapters total. What the **** happens for 113 more chapters.

Oh, and if you're curious, the bomb-death thing was a declaration of war by an enemy country because it makes a lot of sense to declare war by brutally magic-bombing a small unknown village on the border clean off the map and killing everyone. I don't know if there's going to be some Secret Reveal that the village was tactically important somehow or maybe they were targeting the village because they knew Dante and/or his wife was living there (though apparently him being married was kind of a secret not known outside the village?), but it seems like maybe not because the Magic Tower was supposedly a neutral entity until Ei's death, when Dante went batsh*t and went out to eradicate the enemy country's forces in alliance with their home country.

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I don't really like Ei and don't care about her at all, Dante is okay at first but after Ei dies he turns into a cartoon of the Mortal Agony of Endless Grief and Thirst for Vengeance, and everything just got too dumb for me to continue reading—and I read a lot of shoujo, josei, and yaoi manga, and BL and romance novels. My capacity for tolerating dumb misunderstandings as pivotal plot points is huge. And yet I'm still dropping this novel. Ouch.