The Strongest Dull Prince’s Secret Battle for the Throne Chapter 100 Discussion

The author clearly has no idea how to write a story with political intrigue (or any intrigue in general). The synopsis implies that there's a lot of political maneuvering in the background, but it's all surface level stuff at best. At worst it's so poorly written that you could be forgiven for thinking this is an action power fantasy (because it is) instead of a political story.

Every single arc's main problems are monsters, and the MC easily kills them. Spoilers for each arc to show you what I mean.

Arc 1:Spoiler

The first arc pretends there's stuff happening in the background but doesn't really do anything with it. The real problem is that the MC knows there's a bunch of monsters about to attack a town. There's someone behind the attack, but you never hear about them until they're revealed to be the bad guy at the end of the arc. They show up, explain why they did what they did, and then fail to do anything and is never heard from again despite being a prince. Instead of it being someone who we know about and can suspect, the author chose to just make up another character at the very end of the arc to be the bad guy. That's not how you write a mystery.

[collapse]

Arc 2:Spoiler

Quite literally nothing about this arc involves the battle for the throne. The issue is that there's a water dragon in the waters of foreign countries that are small enough that the empire basically doesn't care about them. So the MC goes over there and kills it. Then those countries are never heard from again. The author tried to do something where the MC had to make it so that the other contestants don't get to be the ones that give the hero's descendant (not the MC) permission to kill it, but it's a s*upid problem to solve that took no effort to resolve.

[collapse]

Arc 3:Spoiler

Again, there's a ton of monsters attacking a town. Except this time there's demons! They weren't summoned by a political rival though; they're there because a random kid freaked out basically. Someone does kidnap a princess, but again, it wasn't for a political reason. It was so that they can experiment on her. It's like the author isn't even trying.

[collapse]

The few instances of political stuff happening are brief and info-dumped. The MC explains who a person is, why they want them, and then immediately recruits them. Then it moves on and pretends it just did something interesting. Anything long term is so in your face with the foreshadowing that the author might as well just tell you who's doing what. For example:

Spoiler

The author tells you that if the sister got the throne then human experiments would run rampant. Immigrants entered the country a while back and nobody likes them. Immigrants are getting kidnapped in the territories where the sister's influence is strong. Gee, I wonder what's going on...

[collapse]

So let's not pretend it's a politics novel and judge it for what it is, an action novel. Does my 1 star still stand? The answer is yes. It's awful. Every single fight is drawn out longer than it needs to be because the MC could immediately slaughter everyone but doesn't for some reason. They're unsatisfying and largely pointless. Minor spoilers but Spoiler

The MC could easily kill every single enemy. But for made up reasons they decide to teleport armies to fight the monsters, even though he doesn't have to. After he's done pretending they were needed for a bit (and probably letting several of them get killed), he finally kills everyone.

[collapse]

It's made worse by how contradictory it is. At one point person A asks person B where a mcguffin is and then runs off to go get it. The problem is that B had literally no way of knowing where it was. B is a random person who doesn't even know what the mcguffin is. And they saw it falling way before it could have fell.

In another fight the MC says he can't kill something because it would take too long to recite the spell. Then he proceeds to have a long conversation with someone while the monster sits there waiting for them to finish. The list goes on.

That doesn't just apply to fights though. Every single aspect of this story has some sort of self contradictory thing going on. One line will talk about someone's house isn't very powerful, right after talking about how they are and the rest of the series constantly tells you how their daughter is the most influential person in the world.

One second that daughter's beauty isn't all it was cracked up to be, the next the MC is completely mesmerized.

One second the MC has no idea someone who has 0 stealth skills is in front of him, the next he's telling us about how he always has a detection spell active.

One second the boss of a company is some mysterious person who's never seen in public, then 10 lines later they're having a meeting with them and no one acts like it's a big deal.

The MC makes a deal for future financial support because he thinks it'll cost a lot of money to fight for the throne. And then he constantly gives tons of money away for no reason. Once it was 10 years worth of a prince's salary all at once. Like, wtf? It wasn't an investment either. He just gave it away.

The list is much longer than this, but you get the point.

The characters are all one dimensional. You have OP bad attitude MC. The good guy good prince. The logical political prince. The war hungry prince. The sadistic mad scientist princess. The knight that's in love with the MC. The beautiful girl (that's her only character trait) who's in love with the MC. The other girls that are probably in love with the MC. The OP butler named Sebastian. Etc.

Edit: I forgot to mention the other terrible aspect of this novel - the other candidates for the throne. As I mentioned, they're all 1 dimensional. But what's worse is that they don't do anything. The politics one has basically no effect on the story until ch. 100. The war one has literally no effect on the story. And the most the sister ever does is send some assassins at the MC and the thing mentioned in the spoiler.

You might think that they're just doing stuff in the background, but they don't even bother to approach the 2 most influential people in the kingdom that we're aware of. The first being the beautiful girl who the author constantly tells you is worth soooo much. And the second is Silver, the most powerful adventurer ever who can wipe out entire armies by himself and can teleport whole armies anywhere he wants. And we know that they don't approach him because Silver is the MC in disguise! You'd think he'd mention it if they ever did.

TLDR: This is a wildly inconsistent action novel with boring, pointless fights and it pretends to be a political intrigue novel. It actively fails to do either one of them and the characters aren't worth reading for.