The Pitiful Girl She Picked Up Turned Out to Be a Cruel and Vicious Beauty Chapter v24 Discussion

Up until the point I've read to so far (vol. 2 ch. 4) there have been some steps towards a potential romance between MC and FL, but there's still some ways to go. Nevertheless, as Eeria mentioned in their review, it is much more appropriate to be called a yuri/GL than genderbender. GB aspects are sparsely relevant and probably could've been done without entirely with little to no overall impact. It seems it's another classic case of GB being added in purely as justification for GL. A shame.

That said, I quite like the setting of the novel. Basically, high radiation levels in the world have caused non-human creatures (animals and plants namely) to mutate and makes it both difficult to gather food (high radiation resources are inedible) and dangerous to live in the wilderness. This forces humans to live in a base that seems to act as a sort of center of human civilisation in the novel world. Our MC transmigrates to an orphaned girl who lives alone in the Mitigation Zone which is just outside the protected Safe Zone.

Spoiler

When trying to scavenge for food or other valuables at the scrap yard, MC stumbles upon our FL in horrible condition and decides to bring her back and live with her, so she's not alone for long.

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To continue living, Spoiler

and to provide for and care for the FL

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Especially in the first 70 to 80 chapters of volume 1, you can really feel MC's struggle as she tries to gather resources while fighting off various dangers in a post-apocalyptic world with only her wit and the lottery-esque system on hand (which often likes to force her into debt and put her organs down as collateral if she fails to pay lmao) The MC isn't OP and the items she gets are also rarely OP and often has good balance through various drawbacks and caveats.

As a result, you end up really rooting for MC and every bit of success (no matter how small) she has. Unfortunately, towards the end of volume 1 and continuing to volume 2, it seems the author realised that the pacing would be too slow if the MC continued to only get the small wins she previously had and ramped up her luck significantly. She starts to get a ton of money and items (granted, she did earn at least some of it from her deeds) and it feels like it's a bit of a deus ex machina to progress the plot along quickly.

Spoiler

She needed 1 million Points minimum to buy a house in the outskirts of the Safe Zone. Starting around chapter 80 or so, she starts getting rewarded hundreds of thousands of Points for saving mercenaries and other similar level deeds. This after struggling to even save up a 5 digit number of points for the entire story up to that point...

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While I do understand the author did it to prevent the story from dragging on, I feel they could've paced it much more naturally than they did.

Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to seeing more of

Spoiler

the FL getting closer to MC now that she is practically fully healed though not yet back at full power in the beginning of vol. 2. Also how their daily routine will change now that they live in the Safe Zone.

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While I admit the story isn't perfect, I'm giving a 5 star rating (actually 4.5) because I really like the setting of the world and look forward to the contents of vol. 2.