- #1
It's kinda Mary Sue but not bad for a light hearted read.It's not clear whether the original Karentina was so op or not, but the MC after taking over her body is extremely op despite starting off being robbed of most of her magical power. The hardest thing was just getting her extremely traumatized body out of the room she had been mentally imprisoned in, and the rest was just smooth sailing from there.Apparently those in the MC's bloodline can use their power to make & control dolls, & MC has eyes that can see souls. Although the og Karen seemingly died from trying to manipulate souls, MC immediately succeeds in putting a genie demon into the ML look-alike doll after she found his soul in her ancestors bracelet. She then goes on to collect human souls like Pokemon, and after a genie butler & an all-powerful healer rabbit, she also meets an old artist & gets the nation's seamstress cat. I think she's going to fill up the bracelet so there's probably two more soul dolls to come, but just the ones she has already let her cure almost all illnesses & have totally dismantled the socioeconomic power of the Empress (the main antagonist). I'm not sure what other souls she could possibly need to collect at this point, but I'm still curious enough to stick around and see.It really feels like all the evil characters just tried so hard to drive og Karen insane from a young age so that she couldn't use any of her op powers to turn this story into easy mode for the protagonists. Without her, the og story starts in hell mode with everyone he loves in the ML's camp dying, including his baby sister & his best friend. He then slowly goes insane trying to keep his only remaining aide alive.With MC, she easily saves his sister, his dying friends, & his poisoned dad. She exposes the enemy for child s*ave trafficking, giving him plenty of justification for removing the Empress's strongest supporters. She wins over the usually neutral temple with one conversation & she solves his mother's cold case while fending off the crazy stalker girl who tried to drug him in the past. It's a no brainer to fall in love with her because nobody is this good at making your life better except God himself. Even the Empress wants her as a daughter in law after just one meeting with her.ML is the crown prince but not biological child of the current Empress, who ofc wants him dead so her son can inherit. He was a bloodthirsty tyrant & yandere in the og story but is basically just a "that should be me" meme in this current timeline because he's constantly getting jealous of any positive interactions MC has with the look alike genie butler doll. She offered to change the doll's face but he refuses because at least his face is better than someone else's. Still haven't seen the sequence from the description yet, but it should be soon. (Around ch 124) Some things in the novel aren't fully fleshed out yet, & I'm not sure they ever will be. For example, there's no one else from the entire bloodline who seem to make dolls, so why did the abusive uncle know Karentina could? What exactly is the demon who's become her butler? Are there other demons? And if superpower bloodlines run in noble families, why are they so dissimilar? Like ML's power is fancy pyrokinesis but his brother's is just physical strength, and I don't understand why it's not also fire. I guess the powers are just whatever the author needs them to be. The souls seem happy to become cute dolls since they get to keep doing what they loved in life, but if you think about it too hard, this power has a huge potential for evil because you could kill someone & trap their soul in a plush toy, like that one episode of black mirror. Idk, maybe that's just me & my fear of sentient dolls, but at least they do seem free to do whatever they want for the most part.
