Reverse Harem? More Like Pretty Boys Musical Chairs to Me.

CAUTION: REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.

On my quest to find a compelling female character, I stumbled upon this webtoon. There are quite a few webtoons that feature female war-heroes as the lead character, because being a warrior automatically makes you cool, right? Wrong.

It's funny how people who write webtoons think that adding a little tidbit about the character's past history can be a sweet shortcut to actual character development. Just because your character used to be a top-notch warrior, and is now retired, doesn't mean that they can't grow as people after their wartime activities. This webtoon, as well as "The Emperor and His Female Knight", and "Blinded by the Setting Sun", and probably more that I haven't read, love to just push a supposedly super strong girl as the heroine, but then fail to actually make her strong. Why?!

In this new age of feminism, there's a greater demand for a strong female character that young girls can look up to, but it doesn't seem like anyone actually knows what makes a female character strong. It's certainly not physical strength, at least by itself. Or maybe I just have high standards. My key example is Captain Marvel from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. She's undoubtedly the strongest hero introduced so far, including both male and female superheroes, but she's the blandest character to ever lead a Marvel movie. Sacrificing everything important in a character's growth and development will stunt them irrevocably. In exchange for her awesome strength, she has no personality, and encounters virtually no struggles throughout her 2-hour journey. She even beats up the big bad guy in a single punch. Yawn.

Perhaps people think that the key to a strong female character is removing all emotion, because one of the reasons people cite females as the weaker sex is that girls are unable to control their emotions, or they're overly emotional. By doing that, you've just created a robot, not a human. Can you even call her a female character anymore? Stripping the emotions of a character in an attempt to make her seem strong is reducing her to a flat character on a page, an empty symbol that means nothing. Sure, it's a way to pander to some of the easier-to-please feminists out there, but if you think about it, male characters that show absolutely no emotion aren't all that popular either. Humans are special because of their incredibly wide range of feelings, and if you take that away, it's just not really a human anymore. Readers want characters that they can relate to, can empathize with, and can invest emotionally into during their journey.

So this webtoon here also fails to produce a proper female lead, just like many before it. If you think about the set-up, it's easy to see why this stumbled before it even started. Firstly, it sets the story after the great war, because who wants to see all that dark, boring war stuff (me!)? It tells us that during the war, the female lead's heroic actions have caused four very important men to fall in love with her, but before they could confess their feelings, she disappeared. What's the reason? She thinks that war victors don't deserve happiness, because of the bloodshed they've brought. Okay, let me stop you right there. This is just unrealistic. I can understand why she would feel that way, but leaving a nice cushy place to avoid happiness is not a very convincing way of living. I think it's rather impossible, if you ask me. It's not like she is purposefully going about to live miserably, such as throwing away all her possessions, or going to live in a war-torn area to repent for her bad deeds that she's supposedly committed. She's not even going to work as someone that helps suffering people that are in need, to help relieve her heavy guilt. No, what does she do? She goes to live in a peaceful town where her brother is, and works as an assistant bookstore clerk, while still receiving stipends for the war contributions she had made. So yeah, she's well off and living quite comfortably, with barely any thoughts about her old glory war days...so much for not living happily, huh?

Secondly, we are shown the four male characters who love the female lead, but this is done in the most laziest manner possible. If you want characters to be important, you have to introduce them one by one, and not all at once. While I was reading this, I basically forgot who was who, but it didn't matter anyway, because the only thing distinguishing the four men are their looks and their titles. One's a priest, one's a knight, one's a mage, and the last one is a king. Otherwise, you might as well treat them as the same character, because their wartime backstories and why they love the girl are so boring and lack all sorts of depth, I can't remember what they were. It's even worse because the female lead doesn't feel anything in particular in regards to any of them, she just treats them the same as the way she treats her brother. So we can throw her brother in the mix too, because I'm not even sure if this is hinting at a siscon here and there, with how overprotective her brother is of her. So there you have it, we have five bland dudes chasing after one bland girl, but she doesn't even know it, which is why the whole story falls to pieces.

I think this poor setup could have still been salvageable if it had focused on the right things, but it doesn't even try to. Honestly, it seems like this is some sort of wish fulfillment story where a pretty girl is surrounded by hot guys, and that's all there is to it. But for fear of confusing the reader with too many dudes at once, the guys rotate their appearances every couple chapters. They'd randomly show up for several chapters, have a chat and some weird interaction with the female lead where she usually ends up injured so she can be a cute damsel for them to save, and then disappear, to be replaced by another guy. The guy that leaves always has some internal monologue about how he is so glad that he has met the female lead, and for her to have played a small, but precious, part in his life. And that made all the difference.

This kind of storytelling is the basic principle of what NOT to do when telling a story, which is show, don't tell. Each guy that winds up in the female lead's village in search of her is always telling the reader about how they care about her, and how their pasts have intersected on the battlefield. But there's nothing that comes out of that, because they don't really treat her like a person that they love. They don't even seem to understand what love is even, since they avoid any showing of real affection towards her. They go out of their way to look for her, but then don't confess their love to her, and just leave. What's the point of even coming to see her then? If the author's answer is "To make sure that she's safe", that's just ridiculous, because they don't all need to go. Just send a servant to look for her or have one of the main guys go, and then report back to the others. I'm suspecting it's because the author realized they messed up with the setting up of the reverse harem, and decided to re-introduce the males all over again to the reader. Most reverse harems usually start with a girl picking up more and more guys along the way, like collecting Pokémon, and they follow her around like an entourage. Here, she already has four guys, but they already know her, so they need to be introduced again, one by one, for the readers to figure out who is who. And that's why I said the time placement of this story is all wrong, it should just have started from when she met them in the war instead. Also, it's more impactful since war is far more eventful than being set during peacetime, where she's just tending an unpopular bookstore.

Then we have the problematic female lead. She's supposed to be a veteran knight, but you'd never think that, because she's so passive. She doesn't have any strong motivations at all, and nothing to protect or strive for. She's supposedly laden with guilt, but we don't actually see any flashback scenes of her killing someone or something like that to help us understand why she feels so strongly about avoiding happiness. In fact, it seems that she's perfectly fine living an uneventful, but comfortable life with her brother, and she is really happy there, so I don't understand what all the fuss is about. But because she's so honored for her militaristic contributions, we can't have her act as an actual damsel in distress for people to save, because that'd weaken her strength as a character. We need her to get hurt every time, but only just a little, and then have all the guys carry her bridal-style to somewhere safe to bandage the wound, because that's so much more dignified, obviously! Furthermore, let's make her have zero monologue (thought bubbles) because that'll make her more mysterious and appealing!

No, just no. You can't have the main character exhibit zero internal thoughts, and then expect readers to understand how she's feeling. To me, it seems like she's more of an object that all these guys are chasing after, and she's just sitting there for them to flock to her. That's basically her whole role in this story, or lack thereof. It just makes it that much harder to see why all these guys like her so much, because she does nothing at all. Even her expressions are limited, and she's almost always in neutral, except when speaking to one of the five guys in her life, and then she smiles at them. I'd rather see the tragic heroine she's supposed to be, who's trying to live a better life after the war by actively changing other people's lives, but that's not what we get here. She might as well be a holy grail, and all the guys go to the town to look for her, find it and take a sip, and go back to their lives, because that's essentially what happens for the 40+ chapters that have been released so far.

The one good thing about this webtoon is the art, which is quite good, especially the close-ups of the female lead, with very stunning work on the details of her face. The art in the prologue/oneshot is awful though, I guess they hired another artist for the serialization of this story. What a shame that the art is wasted on such a pointless, uneventful, and meaningless story.

Overall Breakdown:
Characters: 1/10
Story: 1/10
Art: 7/10
Lore/Worldbuilding: 1/10
Enjoyment: 2/10