I Don’t Want to Be Turned Into the Female Protagonist by the System Chapter Completed Discussion

I very much enjoy the setting and premise of this story. Set in the modern day, a university student H artist and game developer suddenly becomes attached to the [Female Lead System] and transforms into a beautiful girl. The story is about this process and her ensuing life. It's funny, it's exciting, it's somewhat (quite) le*d sometimes, there's a lot of great elements about the story. However, I think this falls squarely into four significant tropes that a lot of novels fall into, tropes that I personally am not a fan of. If you are, this may be a good story for you, but I find it quite hard to keep reading when these tropes are present, even more so when they are present together.

1. 1. Naive protagonist who doesn't seem to get any wiser throughout the story. I don't mind naive protagonists in and of themselves if they show growth over the story's course. But when "naive" becomes less of an starting point, and more of a "character designation", that's where the writing loses me. Even more so when the protagonist is clearly quite intelligent in other aspects, but have a huge blind spot in thinking about the consequences of their actions or coming up with long-term plans or solutions to their problems. It just feels like a character designation that holds back the storytelling much more than it propels it. In this novel, the protagonist is supposed to be very intelligent. However, she never seems to consider the consequences of her actions, especially when it comes to other people, nor does she seem to have any long-term planning capability, leaving everything up to the whims of fate and/or her system. This is indeed partially explainable due to her social anxiety and somewhat asocial personality, but I feel like it's a bit too much. It's more to the extent of "the author wants her to act this way so they can write scenes that they want to write". I feel like if she learned from her mistakes and adjusted her perspective like a character of her intelligence probably would, it would be a much more enjoyable read. But she doesn't. She doesn't seem to think about anything. But she's intelligent though (lol).
   2. Humiliation/bullying. This usually comes tied pretty tightly to the naive character designation, especially for female leads in romance media. She's naive => people want to tease her => she gets flustered => people want to bully her => she gets bullied and humiliated. Of course, this is usually in a romantic/s*xual sense, not in a physical/mental sense. But I still don't like it. I think it's because - since we're exposed to the protagonist's experiential perspective the most, the protagonist being constantly bullied by the people around her just makes me pity her a lot. I feel like the world is so unfair to her. Not only is her money constantly being eaten up by her system, the girls around her are constantly looking for ways to tease her and/or humiliate her. If you have a humiliation kink this might be the best thing you've ever read, but I don't have that strong a leaning towards being humiliated. At least, the constant bullying and humiliation just makes me feel really bad for her. Whenever she tries to take any revenge on anyone who's bullied her or treated her unjustly, there's ALWAYS a scene where she suffers again because they're so much stronger than she is.
   3. Denying the body (Gender Bender only). Let's skip over discussing whether the characters in gender bender novels are trans are not, and cleanly discuss it in terms of the text. Usually, gender bender characters go in one of two ways - "I see I became a different gender" and "no way!". The first direction usually covers characters where it doesn't matter if what gender they were before the switch, since they accept it relatively quickly and go on with their lives. The second direction usually covers characters who have a stronger sense of their initial gender and often struggle with accepting that their body has been transformed. This usually leads to an adjustment process and certain kinds of character developments that play into the overarching plot. This is the direction this novel's main character goes in. Even though her body has been transformed into a girl, she has a strong attachment to her previous male identity. But please. Don't take every possible opportunity to assert your male identity. It just keeps causing problems. This somewhat ties into the naive character designation, but this novel's protagonist will, at random inopportune and inappropriate moments, assert her male identity for no good reason. I think this is the author's idea of a gag, but seriously. It's cheap, it doesn't move the plot, and it makes no sense. There are times where it's so much better to just drop the topic and be like, yeah, I'm a girl, rather than create some weird scene where she asserts her male identity and people think she's being a goof. In fact, she actually seems totally okay with being a girl physically. She just subconsciously thinks of herself as a man. So there's even LESS reason to randomly assert these things to random strangers. Just skip over the trouble, get through what you need to do, and then just go on with your life, please.
   4. Misunderstandings as plot fuel. There are some novels that use misunderstandings very well, such as Gospel of Blood, The Vampire Princess' Rose Coloured Glasses, and I'm Really Not the Demon God's Lackey, etc. These are stories in which misunderstandings are part plot fuel but more so an interesting character dynamic. This story is not one of them. This story uses the misunderstanding that the protagonist is a man (but is now a woman) or that the protagonist is a woman who has been dressing up as a man to drive a significant amount of plot points, character interactions, and character motivations. I don't like it because it's cheap, because it's easily resolvable but doesn't get resolved easily, and because it's more complicated than it has to be. Like for example, she could easily use the documents that her system gave her to come clean to a BUNCH of different people and institutions and have a lot of problems pre-solved that way. Instead, she insists on taking the hard way out - insisting to people she's a man, getting an apartment outside of campus, missing classes, lowering her voice, avoiding people, etc. Why make your life so hard? You're having a hard enough time dealing with the system, making money, and managing personal relationships on top of having been transformed into a girl, just clear up the major misunderstandings in one fell swoop and then have the people that care about you block the paparazzi while you get your sh*t together.

Anyway, these are my four major criticisms of this novel. I'm only about a sixth through the novel and I will keep reading on to maybe about halfway to see if any of this changes, but I'm not hopeful that it will since this seems to be what the author likes writing. I'm giving it a 3/5 because while I don't like these things, objectively speaking it's still a pretty good novel in terms of the various relationship dynamics and plot threads that can be explored. I just hope they do get explored well.

Here's what it would take to raise it to a 4-4.5 in my eyes:

1. 1. She wizens up and gets into less trouble.
   2. Her girlfriends stop bullying her so much and take care of her more
   3. She stops blurting out "I'm a man" randomly and instead shows more caution
   4. She clears up the many misunderstandings
   5. Her mother becomes very protective and caring for her
   6. The hostility of the campus calms down
   7. The thirst of her online groups calm down

edit (c400) : I've read more and most of the problems I listed earlier have indeed been cleared up a fair amount. The problem now is still that she doesn't learn from her mistakes and is still naive, and she gets bullied. A lot. Also... she doesn't consider the consequences of her actions. Half the time I'm like wow amazing she's growing and learning and becoming a more well-rounded person and the other half of the time I'm like. Girl. Can you clean up the mess that is your personal relationships? And can your girlfriends stop bullying you so much? See here's the thing. She's super afraid to talk to her girlfriends about other relationships that sneak up on her because of how much they bully her. So it builds and builds and she lies because she's afraid of the punishment. And then of course it gets found out and she gets punished real bad for it. But that's the problem right? As the saying goes, strict parents raise sneaky children. You don't get honesty from punishment, you get lies, deception, sneaking around.

She's not afraid of hurting her girlfriends. She knows they won't be hurt. They'll just get angry and take it out on her. I feel like that's really problematic on both ends. Because while they care about each other a lot, I feel like it overall gets overshadowed by the fact that they want to control her and she is afraid of them. That's not a healthy dynamic. If she can't talk about the fact that she's catching feelings for other people and they can't establish their possessiveness in a proper manner, it's going to be a terrible vicious cycle. Possessiveness isn't necessarily a bad thing in a relationship. It's fine to want your partner to be yours and yours alone. But when it gets to the point that your partner is terrified of being honest with you, it's a problem. Similarly, it's fine to catch feelings for other people when you're in a relationship. But you have to be able to talk about it with your partner (s) and establish how you all are going to approach it. That's what keeps relationships strong, not this... vicious cycle of anger and punishment.

Plus the misunderstandings wrapped up in these messy relationships are just... frustrating. And they even stop making sense.

Spoiler

In the current section I'm reading, Su Qi gets into a relationship with a girl called Xiao Xiao. Because she's been sick for years, she's both a social recluse (very innocent) and very small for her age (same age as Su Qi). So her girlfriends think she's a lo*icon, and keep warning her not to lay her hands on her. But Xiao Xiao actually masterminded the whole process of getting close to Su Qi and creating positive feelings in her. But then when Xiao Xiao comes clean, her girlfriends somehow think Su Qi is STILL the one who masterminded everything. Seriously? You think your girlfriend has such incredible skills? The one who was, not too long ago, pretty much the same as Xiao Xiao in terms of her exposure to society?

[collapse]

I feel like the author is just creating misunderstandings to make problems bigger and repercussions harsher for Su Qi. If I'm being very honest, I feel like the plot could seriously end in 50 chapters if everyone just sat down and had a proper, serious, and honest conversation, as opposed to these tangled misunderstandings, people not being believed, people making things up in their heads, all of this anger and punishment, all the fear and anxiety. I think the author also maybe made an awkward choice to make this harem novel in the modern day setting. Like, polyamory intersecting with modern day queer discourse would actually be pretty okay, but there's no proper queer discourse in the setting, neither is there proper polyamory discourse in the setting. It makes the whole yuri-harem condition very complicated, very messy, and extremely difficult to resolve. This is also why I have complex feelings about it. Like, I find the condition of yuri-harem in the modern day setting completely fine, but under the conditions that the author has set up, I find it very difficult to resolve and unnecessarily complicated.

Don't get me wrong though, I'm still thoroughly enjoying other parts of the novel. A lot of the other stuff I mentioned as problems in the earlier portion of the novel have been resolved and cleared up, and I absolutely LOVED the summer vacation arc. I just feel like the last part of the novel that I find really hard to interact with is her messy relationships, which come down to basically her naivete and being bullied. Frankly in the next few chapters if there's a proper, mature, healthy conversation that clears that sh*t up I'll be a very happy reader. And I must say, part of the reason I have so many complicated feelings about this also has a lot to do with the author's ability to use relatively "cheap" (in my opinion) writing crutches to create much more compelling writing than they have any credit to achieving. I will definitely say that the author is pretty good at writing emotions, emotional states and emotional scenes.

edit 2: Having completed the novel, I can say that I enjoyed it overall. I don't like the author's fetish for constantly have the protagonist be bullied, which continues all the way up till the very end, and I can't help but feel bad for her regarding the fact that she can't talk to anyone about the system and everything she had to go through. However, one thing I will give the author massive, MASSIVE props for is their ability to write the afterstory. I have many opinions on afterstories and I believe they're critically important to any good webnovel. In the context of this novel, this afterstory was PERFECT. Literally perfect. Not too long, not too short, good timeskip, very good resolution of various character dynamics and emotional states, as well as overworld conditions. It also really helped to relieve the tension of the final chapters of the main story, since those were (in my opinion) unnecessarily tense. The afterstory was like having a soothing glass of milk tea right after a spicy meal. Rating upgraded to 4.3 (but I can only vote 4).