Ah, another one of those c-novels that can divide the reader. I can say that I understand both perspectives, so I'll get into both here. I'll say it's 3/5 stars on plot and 5/5 on humour, so I'll settle with 4/5.
The Initial Premise: a woman from some zombie apocalypse dystopian future who was an army drillmaster and field medic* who woke up as a young princess in ancient-China analogue dynasty. Her old life is a tough world to live in and she hasn't got time for manners and fancy words. When she woke up, she received a full flashback (flash forward?) of what the princess' life would've been if she hadn't transmigrated in; the princess would grow up to be an empress that was mad with power who was burned in her palace. So, Yu XiaoXiao wants to avoid any bad end and watch out for the scheming people she remembered seeing in her flashback. Pretty straightforward.
*Considering that she managed to operate on someone successfully in her new life, I consider her more as a field
surgeon.
Suspension of Disbelief Critical Points: Another thing you should know is that the beginning is built on a grab bag of c-novel tropes, and there are some latter plot developments that can break one's suspension of disbelief. I'll try to address that in general first before going into the specifics:
- C-novel zombie apocalypse often involve people mutating along with the zombies to get superpowers. She's the equivalent of Wonder Woman there and that power was carried over.
- The novel doesn't explain how the heck she was still her mutated/evolved self, but I'm writing that off as her spiritual/superpower core transmigrating with her and calling it a day. If this is too much unexplained power for you, skip this story.
- Following the above point, the MC is not just OP, but hella OP. I'm pretty sure she can barrel through a regiment of imperial guards, throwing them left and right without breaking a sweat. She's at demigod levels of strength here. The story is thus mainly built not on the suspense of survival in a cutthroat court, but on the humour of culture shock and confused people trailing on the wake of the chaos she left behind.
- She derailed many of the plots of the Zhao family (the family of the imperial concubine trying to get her out of the way). It does look a bit like deus ex machina, though in terms of tropes, I think it can also be considered as Xanatos Gambit Pile-Up. Imagine if you will, five people in a Mexican stand-off (guns pointed at each other), the situation is tense but nobody dares to shoot. Yu XiaoXiao would be the sixth person carelessly shooting one of them from a distance. Somebody gets shot and then everyone starts shooting everybody else without realising she did so and chaos ensues.
If the country wasn't so weak and the balance of power being balanced on a knife's edge, her mere interference wouldn't have easily triggered that level of chaos. That the country is weak is canon; it's the weakest of the six kingdoms of the mainland, with Zhuri being the strongest and the other four of medium power.
Yu XiaoXiao's motivations: If she's superpowered (hence the word 'heroic' on the title), why would she even bother with the kingdom, the palace and all the political crap? Why not leave this hive of scum and villainy and just live her life freely in jianghu, you ask? It's not like anyone could even reasonably stop her if she didn't want to be stopped. Especially when you take into consideration that she's a
princess, and anyone trying to catch her would be too afraid of killing her to do anything untoward.
If you want to know why she does the things she do, it's because
she actually cares about people. She remembered that the original (OG) Princess' fiance'was from a military family who was wrongly accused of treason. She heard that Gu Xinglang was a good guy and that was all she cared about. No need to break off her engagement. It wasn't like all the guys the OG princess slept with later were anywhere close to good. The other officials in the court took the momentum she began to praise the emperor for being wise and broad-minded into still upholding the engagement because they wanted to save the faithful family which had raised generals. The foolish emperor couldn't find it in himself to go against the wave and acquiesced.
Post-wedding, given half the chance, she'd have dragged her currently-injured husband and her baby seventh-brother and just ran away from the kingdom. But then someone told her that it would leave the Gu family exposed to their enemies machinations; they've been stripped of their military post, the only reason they have any face at all and protection from consort Zhao's schemes is because the third son is now the prince-consort! So she stayed.
She probably thought she could fight off anyone trying to kill her new family easily. (She's not exactly wrong there...)
Is It s*upidity or...?: Even outside topics of battles and fights (which she certainly knew a lot about) I don't think Yu Xiaoxiao is actually that s*upid, even is she's not versed with the subtle jabs in court language or other related courtesies. She has her particular kind of low cunning in play.
Notice that she does realise that Consort Zhao is too wily and has her imperial father wrapped around her little finger that anything she say against Consort Zhao would just slide away like water off teflon. What she said at the time the Zhao family was in hot water was something like 'You have many women waiting on you, aren't you bored pressing yourself against the same woman over and over?' Just because she's crude doesn't mean she couldn't jab back and try to redirect the emperor's attention from Consort Zhao to other women. Of course, she succeeded better than expected because her brother-in-law was present here and could easily translate her sentiments into court language that everyone present could understand.
When she was consoling her brother that was about to be sent away as hostage, she didn't give him platitudes like 'everything's going to be alright'. She told him that he had to hang on to the thigh of the most powerful person taking care of him, which was the prince from Zhuri who was taking him hostage. It was actually a good survival strategy, especially since he can't depend on the protection of anyone in their home country. Considering that the hostage taker wanted to raise a prince that's more predisposed to him, he'd certainly be nice.
Whether Yu Xiaoxiao raised an enemy or an ally this way is still something we'd see much later in the story. What it does, though, is make the Zhuri prince thinks she's friendly to
him, and thus make him friendlier to her (not that she notices that much...) and more intent on moving against her enemies.
TL:DR: Woman with superpowers from zombie apocalypse wakes up as a princess, gets married to a wounded general and kicks the ass of anyone who annoys her/tries to cross her. She creates chaos just by reacting to other people's plots simply because the way she thinks is so different as to be an out-of-context problem for many people in-story.
Her in-laws try smooth her movements by guesstimating what she means and moving themselves politically with her. She picks up male admirers without realising it (not that surprising since they were usually the original princess' lovers). Her enemies gets frustrated because mere force isn't enough to stop her (or even keep her out of their houses! She jumps over the palace's walls without blinking, even), to the readers' entertainment. And yes, she probably has a godly level of luck too.
Basically, the entire story sounds like one Stephen Chow's crazier comedy movies. If that sounds too much like a farce than something entertaining to you, skip this story. Otherwise, it's an amusing ride.
