What's That About A Female Assassin? All I See Is A Blushing Schoolgirl.

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

I've been meaning to write a review for this webtoon, because it's been getting on my nerves for a while now, but I've been putting off on reading the newest chapters, since I just need a break from this sort of crap. Here is another spectacular failed attempt to make a strong female protagonist, and I'll detail why Aideen is really just a typical shoujo lead wearing an assassin costume just for kicks. You can't fool me.

Alright, in the beginning, I was sold on the "female assassin dies, and gets a second chance at life, so she can conduct her revenge" plot, which seemed interesting enough. And I personally haven't seen this storyline before, so I had high expectations for this webtoon. Boy, was I let down!

As the leader of the stupidly named group of professional assassins called "Owls", Aideen commands three others, one who is a poison expert that also doubles as her lady-in-waiting, and two guys who we don't care about, since she promptly sends them off to do whatever whenever she needs them to disappear. I mean the author does. It's too much of a hassle to actually incorporate two minor characters into the plot, isn't it? Anyway, that already takes away the importance of her leadership position, and we don't really see Aideen command others properly or do anything in a strategic sense, so she's more of a typical ojou-sama heroine, who has that one faithful maid that will do anything for her. Like be her wingman and die for her, blah blah. Sigh. What a missed opportunity for proper character development and showing complex relationships, I'm crying inside.

Honestly, if you were going to make so many characters, and then decide to not put any effort in fleshing them out, don't create them in the first place. The story could have easily been just about Aideen and her maid being an assassin duo, and they both died, so now they're going to relive their lives all over again. I guess the author just wanted to add two extra lives there to make the mission's weight heavier on the lead character. That's very poor writing, and an insult to the very characters they created. I honestly can't remember their names, and only vaguely remember what they looked like, since we only see them when they die, and then when Aideen meets them in a pub to tell them to do some spy stuff.

Anyway, so putting aside the fact that Aideen is not exactly a shining example of a boss lady who knows what she's doing (although that's probably clear, since she failed to protect their lives the first time around), she seems to forget what the hell her new mission is. Yes, she's an assassin, but she hasn't killed a single person throughout the whole goddamn story so far, except maybe in flashbacks, but those don't count. Considering that this is her new life, I'm going to disregard her past life's kills, because they may all just be hasty backtracking on the author's part anyway. All we know is that her most important kill from her past life was one of the enemy country's princes, which got her executed in the first place, and it turns out that the person who ordered her to do so was the emperor of her own country, who did all this to betray her. Now she's back, and she's not going to make the same mistake! She'll kill the man who caused her death!

Not! Actually, the person who personally ordered her execution was the crown prince of the enemy country that she's currently in as some sort of exchange hostage/guest of honor situation. This man is the brother of the prince she had killed in her past life, but currently, since she hasn't killed anyone, she's just under suspicion for being sent as a spy or for some other nefarious purpose. So what does he do? He feels her up (not in the way you're thinking) and then sends people to keep watch on her 24/7...Haha, just kidding. More like they're watching her, and then they're not, whenever it's convenient, so she can go do her own thing. So just pretend that she's basically free, considering that it's not even a big obstacle for her to sneak out of the palace to go find her underlings whenever she needs to.

Do you hear that? That's the sound of my expectations shattering at my feet. Here I thought we were going to have some battle of wits between Aideen and the crown prince where she needs to do cool incognito stuff while under constant surveillance. Basically, like Light vs. L in "Death Note"...But nah, we don't need mind games in a shoujo webtoon. All we need is magic plot armor and we're all set! That's why you fail to break the mold here. Give me that epic clash of minds between a girl and a guy, and I'm sold! Instead, we have some faked illness which was caused by the poison expert maid, a ridiculous illusion cast on her bed to trick the royal doctor, guards that somehow don't hear shit or see anything suspicious, and a chill crown prince who doesn't really care what Aideen is up to, because he has the hots for her. Oh, and I forgot, some magic earring that changes her hair color to black, and not the rest of her, so we have Superman-level glasses magic as well. She even comes back with a wound on her hand that the crown prince saw happen with his own eyes, and he doesn't even question her about it. She was hiding it with a shawl, but seriously, it was so obvious, and there was zero tension and no call-out moment. Readers don't even care if she gets caught or not, due to there being zero stakes here. You know why? Because the crown prince is not the villain, so you don't need to be afraid of him!

I'm quite saddened by the standards of storytelling that we have these days. It's so predictable, and honestly, it's quite boring. Perhaps the problem is that people are churning out webnovels and webtoons without proper editors, which explains why there's such a lack of thought and creativity in plot development. Or maybe people watch too many Disney movies and think that everything must be so black-and-white. There's a reason why "Death Note" is so beloved by many, simply due to the brilliance of the duality of the protagonist and antagonist. Who is in the right here? Is it Light, or is it L? You cannot side with both, but both of their standpoints have their own merits. That's why it's so thrilling to see who will outsmart who first, and to see how a trapped mouse can bite back to make its escape. Aideen could have done that with the crown prince, but the story just opted for the crown prince to not give a crap and let her go, without even trying to corner her first. That's a seriously huge missed opportunity in my book.

Here's a small breakdown of why this could have been a key moment in story, but unfortunately, ultimately wasn't. Honestly, this didn't need to be a full-out war between Aideen and the crown prince like it was between Light and L, because the stakes are not quite as high, but just even one turnaround by Aideen would have cemented her as an intelligent, strategic female protagonist worth emotionally investing into. We know she's being monitored since she's from an enemy country, and they're wary of her intentions, but she needs to go outside so she can communicate with her fellow assassins to get information on the whereabouts of a key person in her life. So like in "Death Note," both sides have their own reasons for doing what they do, it's not clear that one of these parties is in the wrong here. Even more so when you know that the last time Aideen was here, she did kill one of their princes, so it's not like she's a completely righteous, good person. When she was out snooping around, she was caught by the crown prince, but he didn't recognize her due to her meager disguise, although he did manage to see the wound on her hand, yet she escaped before he could do anything. This is all good setup, but what fails is the impact of these events when she's confronted by him in her room. It's clear that he suspects her, but she feigns ignorance, saying that she's been lying sick in bed all day. He notices her hidden hand, but then he doesn't ask her about it. He doesn't even demand her to show him her hand, and doesn't forcibly grab her hand to see it, either. Instead, she falls on him, and he catches her by the wounded hand, and she draws back before it's pulled out of her shawl, and then he sets up a garden date with her. What the hell?!

Several things are clear here. Aideen is ridiculously lucky to the point of unbelievability. She always happens to get out of confrontations without getting stopped by someone who could stand in her way. For someone who's supposed to be a skilled assassin, you'd think she'd have back-up plans, but even if she did, none of them are necessary, she doesn't need them due to her strong heroine plot shield. And if that doesn't work, she can always faint or get sick, and all is forgiven. It's okay to pretend to be weak, but it's not okay to outright lie, I suppose? Is that the standard we have for female protagonists these days? Because I'd love to see what kind of excuse she made up for the injury on her hand, but we never get to see it, since the crown prince is a useless wuss who only likes to chase after red-headed girls. Instead of investigating why or how the supposedly frail honored foreign guest in his palace snuck out, he constantly hits on her and calls her beautiful, pretty, etc. Talk about priorities. But hormones are more important than the safety of your country, I suppose. I'm not kidding, there's even a time skip of a week, where he made zero moves to oppose her or restrict her movements within his own territory. Maybe that's why she was able to kill his brother so easily before, it's clearly obvious that he's a skirt-chasing idiot.

But I'm getting off-track. What should have gone down in this scene instead was either one of these two scenarios. One, she lies about her hand injury, and he buys the story, which doesn't change his suspicion of her, and the guards continue their shitty job of monitoring her. Then the story continues on its normal path. In that case, we can see a female protagonist who is able to outwit the prince, and look forward to other ways she will slip past his guard, which I guess includes being pursued by him as her love interest...ehhh. Two, which would have been far more interesting, is that he doesn't buy her story, and his distrust deepens, and the security around her room is tightened, and she must then come up with a more ingenious way of sneaking out. Hopefully something that relies less on hocus pocus magic artifacts, and more on her careful planning and the use of her lauded skills. That would truly show how she has changed as a character from the moment she was able to redo her life, besides her only swearing her vengeance on the wicked emperor. The latter is something you resolve to do, but the former would show an internal growth, a newfound wisdom and ability to refocus when things don't go her way. But I expect too much of a shoujo webtoon. What we ended up getting is option three, which is him lowering his guard for no freaking reason, and she gets a free pass to do whatever she feels like doing, and the guards that were an inconsequential problem before have completely vanished as well. With that, so has her raison d'être.

Aideen seems to have completely forgotten her whole goal after this ridiculous missed moment of potential kick-ass, and now it's time to dive deep into pure romance territory instead of the promising assassin vs. future (or is it past?) executioner that the story had set up. You can tell that it was heading for this direction just from the cover art alone, which features Aideen and the crown prince facing each other in an almost-embrace. She quickly dissolves into some blushing schoolgirl character around her crush, but acts like a tsundere for no reason. Maybe it's because tsundere-type characters are in vogue right now. Like how the crown prince keeps addressing her by her name which she does not like, and bugging her, and she does nothing, besides complain in a noncommittal manner before relenting to his pressure. And how she doesn't want to dance, but ends up dancing with him anyway, because it's so romantic to dance with someone who previously killed you. What happened to the determined girl whose utmost priority was to avenge herself? Eh, who cares? Romance FTW!

I find it troubling that it has been an increasingly common trope to have female leads fall for people who've killed them in a past life, such as in this webtoon and in "The Abandoned Empress". I know the latter received lots of flak for it, but in that particular case, I think it is more acceptable than in here. Why? In "The Abandoned Empress," it was made clear that the female lead was in love with the crown prince in her past life, and despite her repeated attempts to avoid him in her do-over, fate pushed them together again. She struggles with her conflicting feelings of fear, agony, and her persisting love for him, despite knowing it likely won't result in a happy ending. I think that is realistic to that degree, because she had been deeply in love with him before, and no matter how much you resolve your mind to not do something, it's still difficult to actually achieve this in practice. While the crown prince in that story had been terribly abusive to the female lead, you can argue that he's different in her new life, so that makes him a different person. One shouldn't be punished for something that hasn't happened, even if it had happened in a different timeline or universe. It's also abundantly clear that the new crown prince is not the same one who tormented her in her past life, by the virtue of her re-doing her life from a young age where her decision to actively stay away from him impacted his own development as a person. He no longer resents her because she's chosen a new path this time around, and that consequently changes everything for everyone around her.

However, it's completely inexcusable in "Aideen," in my opinion. Aideen is presented as someone who has a far more important goal besides simply surviving, since it's not only her life that's at stake here, but her assassin compatriots' lives as well. When you're the head honcho, you have to carry a lot of weight on your shoulders, so that brings me to the point of her falling for the very man who ordered her execution, and brought about the deaths of everyone else in her cohort. While the crown prince is not presented as the big bad guy like the one from "The Abandoned Empress," he was directly responsible for ending her first life. It's rather forgiveable for him to do so, because she was the one who killed his younger brother. In that case, she's clearly in the wrong, and deserves to be executed. But she never loved the crown prince in her past life, so it makes no sense for her to love him so quickly and suddenly now. Why is it that she was able to execute her mission perfectly like the skilled assassin she was supposed to be the first time around, but the second time, she's forgetting everything about being a proper assassin? You know you're not supposed to have feelings for the enemy, and to not get too close to people that you already know can harm you. Did she get downgraded in her do-over? Aren't you supposed to be wiser and more cautious now that you know how future events unfold? That's the whole principle behind the isekai genre, and its cousin, the "second chance at life" genre. What's wrong with you?! But what's even worse, not only does she fall in love with the crown prince herself, her maid doubly falls for the head of the guards who killed her too, at first sight, no less. And Aideen approves of their spontaneous relationship, fully knowing how the maid was mercilessly killed by the head guard, when there were so many other things she could have done, like firmly reminding the maid to remain focused on their key mission. Instead of plotting her revenge against the evil emperor, she's playing matchmaker for a couple that had previously been doomed before it could even start. Let's just throw everything we were supposed to be doing out the window, and be gushy-gushy with the hot guys of the enemy country, because we're not going to listen the orders of the emperor anymore!

Now, let's examine Aideen as a character. So I've presented to you how she fails to be a leader, fails to learn from her prior mistakes, and fails to remember what she herself had sworn to do when she got her precious second chance to live. She's the daughter of someone important in her own country, but her own father was killed by the emperor, yet she had been faithfully loyal to this evil father-killer man in her first life, to the point of unwittingly playing into his hands to be sacrificed like a useless pawn. She did everything the emperor asked her to do, without questioning it at all, because she owed him her life, or so she was lead to believe. That's not exactly an attractive quality in a character, but it's somewhat forgiveable since she claims autonomy as her first resolution when she starts her life again. What's more unforgivable about her character is how weak she is, when she's supposed to be strong, and was presented as such in her introduction. Besides being an outwardly reluctant, but internally gushing shoujo heroine, she is always fainting or falling down. You can argue that she's acting, but I believe some of this is supposed to be real, because she always falls down at the most inopportune moments when it's time for the crown prince to swoop in to save her. When he felt her up in their first encounter, the first thing he noticed was how skinny and frail she was. You can't fake that. Unless she has some magic artifact that does that too, but that seems like an oddly specific thing to do, which doesn't seem to be all that helpful. And even back in her own country, she's known for being sickly, so she couldn't attend balls and other formal gatherings because of her weak constitution. That beggars the question of how she can possibly act as the best assassin in the group of highly-trained killers when she's so physically unfit for the job. She's not even the type of assassin that kills by seduction or poisoning, or some other passive type of assassination -- no, she's shown to be an athletic fighter who can do effortless flips and dodge attacks better than the rest of them. Exactly how can she do that if she's basically skin and bones, and passes out whenever she gets a little stressed? You tell me, because I'm completely mystified myself.

It's one thing if a weak character decides to become stronger to fix their own shortcomings, it's another if a supposedly strong character is consistently using their physical weakness as an acceptable excuse to get out of everything sticky. It's not even questioned by other characters when she suddenly faints, because she does it so often. If she's faking it, it's disgraceful and I can't take her seriously because it's lazy and requires no effort on her part. If it's real, she shouldn't have been an assassin in the first place, because she should be dead long before she managed to become a top assassin. Either way, you can't convince me that she's a strong female protagonist, because she's clearly not one. She doesn't possess the proper combination of physical strength, mental acuity, nor emotional growth and maturity that a true female protagonist should have. What you have here is a typical shoujo cutout female lead who gets everything to go her way because the guys are going gaga for her looks, and she's cruising through everything effortlessly due to heroine plot armor. And uh, she's supposed to be an assassin or something, but she's not going to kill people anymore, except maybe the emperor when she remembers to get her head out of the clouds for once.

Finally, I'd like to address the art. I think the art of this webtoon is decent overall, and it's obvious that the artist put extra effort in drawing the female lead as beautiful as possible. Everyone else is not drawn with such attention to detail. The paneling is fine, but not noteworthy. It's not creative in any way, it just plods along with the story that's currently moving at a snail's crawl. It doesn't make much use of backgrounds, instead opting for close head-shots of characters, because all they do is talk, talk, talk. Nothing gets done, but that's not the artist's fault, that's the author's. The anatomy is very wonky though, and that is unnerving at times. The male characters are drawn with very long necks, and there's a weird fixation on drawing everyone with teeth showing. Almost every panel shows a character's pearly whites, even when it doesn't need to be there, and it's just a strange stylistic choice. The female lead's eyes are overemphasized, and gets disturbing to look at, because they're incredibly big, yet soulless. No one else has eyes drawn like hers. I don't know if she's supposed to be a human or a doll. Hmm...

In summary, we have a female lead that was initially introduced, with all intents and purposes, as a strong warrior, but in reality, is a frail, incompetent not-assassin who learns nothing, has no focus, and chooses love over revenge for absolutely no reason at all. It's so out of the blue, you wonder what the hell was the author thinking when they wrote this. One moment she's doing espionage-type stuff, and then in the next chapter, she's dancing and chatting with the crown prince, doing typical shoujo stuff with him after he didn't out her one and only secret trip outside the palace. She rewards him for this by just going up to him and telling him that she's betraying her country, and he believes her immediately, and they infiltrate some shady place together like old partners in crime. How utterly ridiculous is that? Not to mention, she lets the crown prince walk all over her, calling him by his first name when she didn't want to, and just letting him come into her bedroom through the window like they're clandestine lovers. Ugh.

You should just throw the whole concept of her being an actual professional assassin out the window. She was never one to begin with.

Overall Breakdown:
Characters: 1/10
Story: 1/10
Art: 6/10
Lore/Worldbuilding: 1/10
Enjoyment: 1/10