I Became The Childhood Friend of the Obsessive Second Male Lead Chapter 44 Discussion

If you treat this as a story about familial love, or childhood best friends-turn-romance, then it's an alright story. The writing lacks any meaningful detail and seems to give vague impressions of characters' attitudes (aside from the main character, whose inner thoughts are a part of the narrative). Things just kinda... happen? And even the thoughts of the MC are bare bones. Her insights are, in fact, not very insightful and pretty surface-level if anything. The story HAS fluff though. So, if you don't mind the lack of emotional depth and only want fluff, this story will serve your interests well enough.

But about the whole "second male lead" part...

Spoiler

This is one of those stories where I don't see the point in having the MC have knowledge of her past life. It's mentioned early on, and so briefly such that I even forgot it was ever mentioned, that the MC's thoughts and mind regress over time to match her age more closely. So, even though the MC knows that the Duke's son is a second male lead in a novel she read before, she can't actually do anything with that knowledge except be a bit more tolerant and patient with the boy. Like... that's it? Okay, she wants to teach him how to "properly" show affection to his lover, but... she just treats him like a normal friend as a child does also he's like 10. Where's this "teaching" you speak of? Why do we, the readers, need to know that she knows he's a novel character? What's the point of this layer of narrative framing? This knowledge serves little to no purpose to the story. Though I suppose this will come up later down the line, when the "novel's female lead" comes in, but that's not happening any time soon.

You know, at one point, during ~ch30 or so, I got annoyed with the MC because I knew that she was a reincarnator. I forgot that it was stated her mental state/age deteriorated as time went on but, again, it was mentioned just once. Instead of taking on a metanarrative storytelling about fighting fate or whatever, the story just focuses on a neglected child experiencing familial love with a foreign noble family. And that's a fine story premise! Just, what does that have to do with the fact that they're in a novel world that only the MC knows about? She doesn't do anything with this knowledge. It's just... a fact? A statement? That goes absolutely nowhere for this first arc of the story?

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I'm reluctant to give it a rating, since they're hard to adjust later and it's still so early on in the story. But I'd give this a 2.5/5 for fluff, and docking it heavily for the "we're actually inside a novel" schtick that goes nowhere.