- #1
Not that good. The premise could be interesting - gender-role-swap stories aren't that common, but it's really hampered by terrible characters and a complete and utter lack of worldbuilding. The key point in role-swap worlds is how the author makes it feasible. There's an actual evolutionary/physical reason why gender roles existed, primarily dealing with how women have to give birth and are thus weakened during the final months before and after. Unless the new world aren't human or have extreme s*xual dimorphism, there has to be a plausible reason for the role swap. So yeah, it doesn't have to be a concrete reason, but the author has to give us SOMETHING in order to suspend disbelief.Well here, there's literally nothing. No world building, no reason, and it doesn't even follow the 'original novel'. The MC doesn't even realize he's in a novel until he's 20 because the original novel didn't have the gender swap at all - it was a pretty standard otome-game like setup, with one female and multiple men in power (and a dragon, vampire, etc).Completely lack of worldbuilding aside, the characters are also terrible. The MC, who's now 40-ish mentally, you'd think would be fairly masculine because of his memories of his last life - and he does remember it, including his military service and adulthood. It's even remarked that he's odd to his parent, calling him kinda feminine (aka, masculine, outspoken, not demure like a good husband should be, etc, because the gender roles are swapped). Except the MC is actually more like a shoujo heroine than anything. Completely passive, utterly dense, apparently doesn't understand anything about social cues despite being a 20 year resident of this world. Also, for a guy with his life experience, he's a whiney little sh*t. He literally whines like a kid when he gets less than 9 hours of sleep and has to get a job. Also, despite being pretty good at magic, being self-taught, he's UTTERLY lazy. Has zero drive whatsover.Then we get to the heroines. As per the summary, THEY'RE the ones who regressed, and they're all "Men of Power" (but, you know, women). Like we have the second princess, the admiral of the navy, the northern duchess. All pretty much standard tropes, just gender bent. Except they're suddenly not? Considering what the norm is for female vs male, they're fairly 'masculine' in our sense in terms of personality (but of course attractive and feminine appearance wise), but they're ALL super blushing virg*ns. The millennia-old Dragon, with multiple lifetimes of experience of being a human (it's a thing all dragons do) ? The 200+ YO True Ancestor vampire? Yeah, they're also super virg*ns, who are afraid of holding hands, much less touching, much less anything else.Also, 4 of the 5 heroines completely unnecessarily don't tell anything about the regression, even though they all instantly realize they're not alone in regressing. The 5th, the vampire, straight up tells the MC she regressed, and EVERYONE panics. There's no reason, logical or otherwise why it's 'bad' to tell they're regressed, either them or the MC knowing. And yet the MC 'tries to salvage the situation'. Salvage it? from what? Honesty? As if it wasn't plainly odd that the 2nd princess, the admiral, the duchess, a dragon and a vampire are all overly nice to the MC who's from Podunk, Nowheresville. What's worse is that the MC finds out he died, and that was the reason why they regressed (although no one is sure of the mechanics), and he doesn't show any care or curiosity besides 'oh I should probably try to find that out... hmmm... later....".So yeah, you get b*tchy aggressive women who all catfight constantly, and yet turn into super blushing virg*ns the instant the MC talks to them, and an absolutely moronic, dense, whiney MC who has no curiosity.The characters are awful. Hard pass.