Transmigrated Into the Violent Boss’ Little Mermaid Chapter 20 Discussion

1 star: "Transmigrated interstellar healer-mermaid x violent boss fluffy romance? Sign me up!" I thought and enthusiastically began to read. And as I read, my enthusiasm slowly drained away like water from a bucket with an increasingly big hole in it and within 20 chapters not only was my enthusiasm bucket empty but I felt like I needed brain CPR from how s*upid and illogical this story is. The translation is fine but the story...

I have to agree with the other reviews that say there's zero chemistry between the two extremely flat main characters. I'm not looking for deep psychological character studies as if I were reading Tolstoy but by reading 20 or so chapters of this before dropping it, I've realized that (supposed) fluff alone can't buoy a story when the characters are so completely bland and one-dimensional with no personality, backstory, or history that it's impossible to care about or know anything about them, the plot points are mind-bogglingly s*upid even for the interstellar BL romance fluff genre (what a combo of genres into a single genre), and... I mean, THERE'S NOTHING THERE. I can't stress that enough. I love fluff and this isn't even fluff because I don't give a sh*t about the MC or the ML! It's almost astonishing to me how much I don't care about them at all.

It's also very annoying how repeatedly emphasized it is that the ML is a violent boss, crazed and brutal and cruel and cold, over and over and over, it's literally in the title, and by chapter 20 there is absolutely zero evidence of this. He's just a boring bland indifferent guy. He doesn't even seem particularly cold, maybe aloof at most, but calling him cardboard would be a character compliment that he doesn't deserve. He exists. And that seems to be all he does.

The MC is extremely annoying. He just wants to take care of the ML and make sure he doesn't turn into a villain, and so he acts cute and is super devoted to the ML and cares about him so much because... for what reason beyond changing the original plot (and why does he even care about that so much?), idk. They have no connection and no understanding. The MC pretends like he can't talk in order to hide his intelligence (lol like he has anything to hide) and only goes "eeeeeee", which grated on my nerves even though it was just reading it and not actually hearing it, because it was super annoying how cutesy he acted. Never have I wanted so badly to tenderly scoop up a tiny mermaid MC into my palm... and hurl him into a wall.

For an example of the extreme s*upidity of some plot stuff, the palm-sized mermaid MC transmigrator has a magic space (of course) into which he can fully teleport inside and in which can grow maaagical fruits and vegetables and such, and he wants to feed them to the ML to replace the flavorless nutritionally deficient shriveled bad produce of the interstellar era. How does he do this without alerting the ML by replacing his withered produce with luscious ripe stuff? Why, by juicing of course! And by acting all cutesy and like he looooves juicing like it's playing! And the ML is totally fine with letting this hand-sized mermaid play unsupervised with a giant hardcore blender/juicer that's like 3x bigger than he is.

And how does the MC replace the vegetables and fruits? By cutely pantomiming to the ML that he wants to select the produce himself from the fridge, so the ML holds him and sticks his arm into the fridge to let the mermaid root around in the back and somehow the ML can't see what he's doing, while the MC secretly pulls a tomato out of his space and the ML only absently thinks, "Wow that's a really nice tomato, didn't think there were any that good in the fridge."

So the MC waits until the ML goes to take a shower before jumping out of his aquarium and hopping his way over to the juicer conveniently left on the table, and then somehow manages to fill it with his magic produce and push a glass under the juicer and make a full glass of nourishing juice for the ML all while he's in the shower. Remember that the mermaid MC is hand-sized. And the ML doesn't find it strange that he comes out of the shower and the MC is all proudly presenting him with a glass of juice, he just thinks it's cute and that the mermaid sure enjoys playing with the juicer.

I dropped the story because I realized everything in this novel annoyed me: the MC, the ML, their lack of relationship, the lack of plot, the lack of characterization of the actual characters, the lack of basic intelligence, etc. Yeesh. Even other stories I dropped weren't this bad as far as characters go—the characters might have been one-dimensional or s*upid or annoying, but at least they had personalities and motivations, even if they were generic. I literally don't know why either of these characters are doing anything.