This story is what you get if The Admiral's Monster Wife and Disobey the Duke If You Dare had a baby, and it was lobotomized.
12 chapters in: It's not completely terrible - but the art is the main selling point. There are cliched parts, but that is okay, because cliches are popular for a reason. But neither the FL or ML appear to have much of a personality 12 chaps in. They both come across as apathetic/emotionless most of the time, and so far ML is passive to the point where he seems like a prop rather than a male lead.
The notable signs of FL's personality showing through are:
- when she first arrives in the east and decides to focus on
beautifying the garden, rather than, say, the local infrastructure or the literal criminals in her own home (ch.4-5) - I'll give her some credit for standing up for her maid & helping out with the manual labor
- when her heart starts to go badump-badump after
seeing her husband's face... while he saves her from the staff members who had broken into her bedroom at night (and who had planned to steal her valuables and sexually assault her) (ch.7-8)
(As I said, she has literal criminals living in her own home - butler previously warned her that's the only place in the building that's safe at night is her own bedroom!!)
and 3. when she repeatedly
fusses over the eastern food.
Yeah... there are 4 scenes in the first 12 chapters where she internally complains or cringes when she's served eastern food.
Wait, I lied, I forgot about the times she complained about the flavor of the butler's tea, so make that a minimum of SIX scenes (ch. 3, 5, twice in 6, 9, 11).
She makes such a big deal over the eastern cuisine tasting awful because it's gross stinky fishy seafood. Side note: the eastern territory is in low-key shambles, this is explained in the official synopsis & mentioned by the chef & butler early on in the story - the east doesn't have access to better food and they need to source everything locally from the river, making do with what they can. This is mentioned to FL and she starts fussing about the food after this point (stuck up much??), by ch.11 she straight-up called the food disgusting in her head.
There are SIX!! scenes like this in the first 12 chaps. It's like the FL has 2 modes, 95% emotionless doll and 5% brat (imo, this is poor writing).
There's NO excuse for making such a fuss over food & TEA of all things. Imagine being so spoiled like the FL, that you complain about the food served to you, paid for someone else, at a restaurant because it doesn't suit your taste (it doesn't matter if the food is from a different culture - imagine someone complaining about curry / tikka masala, soba, kimchi, salceson - that's just plain rude & bratty).
She also thrills the duchy's chef with her magical sandwich making skills because apparently people in the east have sub-room temperature IQ, since it never occurred to the chef to ever put vegetables in a sandwich. Nevermind that they somehow have vegetables conveniently lying around when it was juuust established that the east is a watery food desert without access to fresh produce.
ML has the personality of a cardboard box. Thus far, there is no banter, no arrogance, no partnership, no friendship, nada. He's nice to FL though I guess. We got the whole money-throwing cliche (at the garden center), which is an inconsistency considering the abysmal state of the territory, duke's own home, etc.
Bottom line: story started out ok (if a little bland) in chapters 0-3 and then steadily went downhill. I'll reconsider my rating after ch20.
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