- #1
Thoroughly irritating. At first it starts off fairly basic: lady gets reincarnated into a novel where she's destined to die bc of the male lead (not because she's a tragic villainess or heroine, but bc she's a powerless extra), but gets powers and finds that the male lead is less tyrannical than just plain cute. Fine.But the way the story progresses... This is not a kid, but a supposed adult in a kid's body. You can't convince me that any self-respecting adult would be attracted to some cute preteen boy. And the whole plot with Kashuel... He acts so much like a 6-year-old that I honestly forgot that he's around the same age as Cedric (ML) and Ciel (MC). The whole plot where she's plot-mandated to help him after he calls her a friendless loser and then Cedric gets jealous because she was holding Kashuel's hand while fixing his sword stance felt s*upid.I feel like Cedric just made a huge leap from sweet, insecure boy to conniving yandere, just because of a few words from his aunt. The change felt so sudden, and his behavior felt more laughably cliche to me because of ciel's shoehorned attraction. "She knows about his feelings and tries to redirect them"? Maybe in later chapters, but in the earlier ones she's blind to the point of NOT EVEN COMMENTING ON THE HEART-SHAPED COOKIES he made and instead focusing on the ribbon he gave her that's the color of her eyes.Whoops that turned into a rant about ciel but honestly. I'm not gonna comment on how she handled the orphanage director or how she faceslapped the as*hole knight tutor, but the way she makes promises to Cedric and then forgets about them is annoying. She's attracted to his body but doesn't respect him enough to really commit to or think about what she's promising in exchange for short-term gain. She randomly gets promotions and powerups as the plot mandates, and it doesn't feel like she really earns them. But most of that is because of the author's writing style.The author seems to hate building a solid foundation for the characters so we can appreciate their growth or get attached to them. She mentions or introduces characters randomly, only to banish them once they're not needed. Don't bother wondering about the emperor; he gets killed within chapters because the timeskips (yes, plural) are so fast. In the same chapter Ciel gets the as*hole knight instructor chastised by the emperor, she joins the knights AS A FULL MEMBER. Not as a squire or page or anything. Why? Because of some heretofore unknown connection with the head of the knights that we've conveniently never known about until now. And we only get information on Cedric's mom and some dangerous guy that menaced Cedric during his childhood WHEN HE'S AN ADULT AND THE EMPEROR instead of, I dunno, taking about it during the childhood arc.It feels like the characters are more flat, paper people to be moved around on a game board than ACTUAL people. Would not recommend.