I Was Reincarnated as a Marquis in Another World Chapter 9 Discussion

TLDR; The protagonist is only clever and cunning because everyone else's IQ is below room temperature, and the author's knowledge of medieval Europe is a joke.

This is a bad cookie-cutter story that is interesting as the color beige, the translation is alright, but either it or the cadence of the author is very poor so the writing structure is annoying to read. The protagonist is just awful, and it isn't because of his personality, but because the protagonist is supposed to be "cunning" and "clever." Which the author accomplishes by making every other character s*upid, clueless, or some combination of the two.

The author has also spent very little time actually researching what ancient and medieval technology existed, which is very disappointing for a novel based around magic-less kingdom building.

Spoiler

To put it in perspective, the protagonist (who has a literal degree in "how a modern person can survive in medieval Europe") enacts their first brilliant idea to create a winch to draw up water from a well. Something that has literally been commonplace since the Ancient Greeks and Egyptians, and then he critiques the horse drawn plow. Listing problems that said plow literally revolutionized, horse-drawn plows caused an explosion in farming because they could plow more land faster and cut deeper furrows than ox-drawn plows. They were literally so good at helping people farm that there was enough food and free time for peasants to develop seed drills, reapers, and threshers.

Another example of the protagonist's brilliance is spending less than one day drinking and discovering that a bailiff was embezzling taxes, something which would get you punished or executed real quick back then. He also thinks that peasants are owned by their lord and not freemen, feeding into the ineptitude of all the characters and cheapening the overall setting.

The author doesn't even understand how feudalistic nobility and aristocracy works, much less lèse-majesté, portraying it as some form of catchall need for recognition of noble status. And actually says that there is a tax for "right of first night, " also known as "jus primae noctis, " which is an anachronistic myth.

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