somnia's manga / #Strong Female Lead(152)

Plot in a nutshell: FL was abused by her family both in her first life and now in her 2nd life as a minor side villain of a fantasy "biography"/novel. She was killed by her own husband for poisoning his sister. But now she is set on gaining everyone's favor, or at least her hubby's, to hopefully not be framed for anything and get away from her abusive family for good. Kind of spoiler, literally just me ranting: I love this so much, but I lowkey hurt from the angst that we got going on sometimes. At first it felt random for Ruby to be yeeted away by monsters so randomly, but in hindsight it was needed stress-relief for the readers. It wasn't that out of no-where too, since Ruby seems to have some kinda connection to monsters. Gotta praise the author too, it would've been very easy to find Ruby's insecurities annoying were it not for the amazing writing. I never doubted Ruby and never will, I feel.

So basically, FL is a famous prisoner who managed to escape a few times. When she's captured again, ML (also a war hero and the opposite of FL's anti-hero sort of reputation) ends up "escorting" her to a high security prison island. Of course, she's trying to get an advantage by lying and what not, but ML never falls for any of it. But there's more to their relationship than that and that's where the story really hits good. Ngl, all characters so far felt like they matter and are a part of the whole thing, and also have interesting relationships and backstories. They all tie into questions and different perspectives regarding death, life and justice in a post-war setting. We're still not that far into it all, but it's super promising.

A good shoujo, but one of those that start falling off the longer they're going. There's basically one main villain here as of now, which is a wealthy, jealous hag with no depth or other traits worth mentioning, literally just a log placed specifically there so FL has an obstacle. At first her whole spiel is ok, but for some reason the story's stuck there giving her more spotlight and credit than is worth my time.

Honestly, so far it's very good for a harem type reincarnation story. The translations are mid. If you're shoujo harem trash like me you'll have a lot more fun with the story on another site with better translations (mangadex for example). The lore in the story itself is also not bad. Really like the idea of holy guardian type dragons that basically work for god type of setup. Though I do not understand how the hell this whole descendant thing works for the guys of the church. (I guess this is a spoiler if you haven't read this yet, but honestly this kind of stuff is very on the nose in shoujo isekai, so let's not act like it's a real spoiler) How come the Duke's family and the Imperial bloodline inherit their dragon ancestor's characteristics, but with the church it's like "whoever has the biggest holy magic dick works." Eh? Maybe it's still gonna be brought up or I misunderstood something, but for now that's a plot hole in my book. Adding onto that a few cliches in this type of shoujo, such as the famous: "I met this important character during their childhood days, or before the novel began, and made an important impact in their life, so later we have a base to build a relationship on"- but this time around it's literally all the important characters, aka FL's entire harem. That's just one of the typical tropes I was kinda well-well about. Honestly, I'm just thankful that FL isn't a total Mary Sue. Well, she at least doesn't feel like one because you always see her struggling, injured and anxious about her sister.