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Beware of the Brothers manhwa review – Another bait and switch

In the post before this one, I posted about a Chinese web novel that promised one thing, delivered for a while then switched it out for something else. Chinese web novels are not the only culprits. Beware of the Brothers is a manhwa based on a Korean web novel that does the same bait-and-switch.

It offers a tale of a woman who goes back in time to her childhood to try and make sense of her difficult and tragic relationship with her adoptive parents and siblings. And it delivers that for a while in sometimes heartwarming, sometimes painful and sometimes frustrating detail. But then… Ugh. Anyway, here’s the summary first:

Summary: Hari, a destitute girl, got adopted by Duke Ernst at 7 years old when she lost her mother. The Ernsts had themselves lost their youngest daughter Arina and sought Hari due to her resemblance to the late girl.

After suffering all kinds of persecution in 20 years of life at the Ernst estate, Hari is about to escape by getting married. But right before the wedding, she wakes up to find herself back to her childhood in that hellish household. Well this time she’s going to live how she pleases and not repeat the tragedies of the past!

Or so she claims, but if that’s what you’re expecting, forget it. While most “back to the past” protagonists use their knowledge and maturity to change things and improve their lives, Hari in Beware of the Brothers isn’t one of those.

So prepare yourself to see a supposed 27-year old acting like a kid most of the time. Sulking, fighting, arguing with her young brothers Eugene, Cabel and Erich. What you won’t see is a former adult trying to prepare herself for an independent life through education, hard work, networking or anything other kind of common sense behavior. When help is needed, she doesn’t even offer to perform basic bookkeeping or writing tasks even though as a former adult she should have been able to do all that.

While she does try and fail to prevent one great tragedy, that’s the limit of her efforts in that regard. It goes to ridiculous levels when she blandly endures physical abuse for no good reason until her brothers save her. What’s the point of the “adult returned to kid” setting if she keeps acting like a kid? The author would have created a better story by simply having this be her first and only life. There are a lot of series like that, where the “isekai” or “reincarnator” setting feels completely tacked on.

Regardless, none of that is my main beef with Beware of the Brothers. For all her clumsiness and helplessness, Hari is still a pitiable figure who thinks her family never cared about her in the first or second life. The slow, frustrating but ultimately rewarding process by which they all admit that they all care about each other, and the brothers explain that they see Hari as their real sister… it was very sweet and heartwarming to read. After all the annoyances, it was like FINALLY! Phew! And the fandom rejoiced…

…until the timeskip…

…which made it clear that the whole “brothers” thing was a lie…

…and Hari is going to end up in a romantic relationship with her older “brother” Eugene.

hari seducing eugene in beware of the brothers — That’s my line, author.

Back up and let’s review. Beware of the Brothers spent the first 30 or so chapters building a warm and solid family relationship. Then after that it apparently turned into an incest romance series. In other words, the author built the family just to have incest – can’t have incest without family right?

I say “apparently turned” because I stopped reading once I saw a suspicious scene. The usual “bump into each other, ooh he’s so cute” kind of scene. I did a quick search for spoilers, saw the Eugene x Hari ending and noped right out of there.

Well it does say “Beware of the brothers” in the title. It just didn’t use the full version: “Beware of the brothers who may be secretly lusting after their adoptive sister who is a dead ringer for their late little sister.” Eugene is nuts for considering it, but Hari is even harder to understand. For a lifetime and a half, over 40 years, she has seen Eugene as nothing more than a somewhat distant older brother. She was all gung-ho about marrying another, very decent guy. And now it’s suddenly “hey, time to marry my big brother”???

If I were a masochist I would want to see them explain things to their friends, siblings and the society at large, but I’m not one so I dropped out long ago. If you still want to read the series after this spoilerrific post, then clearly incest doesn’t put you off, so enjoy yourself. As for me, and hundreds of fans, we’re just pissed off because the author hid her true purpose so cunningly. If that incest tag had been there from the start, I would never have touched the series. Thus this post is here to warn innocent victims like myself.

On to better, less immoral series!

My Fantastic Chef Wife – Not fantastic at all! (Chinese web novel review)

Just like Japanese isekai series often have the hero winning the natives over with superior Japanese food, Chinese time travel/other world romance series often have the heroine cooking her way to riches and/or her man’s heart. My Fantastic Chef Wife by Di Qiu is just one of many in the cooking isekai genre and doesn’t do much to stand out. However the fact that it had over 180 chapters translated made me try it in hopes of getting a long and satisfying read out of it. Rapey start aside, it could have been really good if it had wrapped up early. As it is… well, I will explain in a bit, but first the usual blurb:

Summary (from Flying Lines):

The five-star chef unexpectedly caught up with the debris flow… When she woke up again, she found herself become a peasant’s wife… Aunts constantly came to bully her families, and there were crazy relatives seeking troubles. Did they really think her strong husband was just a decoration or something?

Her “decorative” husband: “when we get everything done, how will my fantastic chef wife thank me?” “Braised chicken, stewed eel, sesame butter roll, fried meat with fermented bean curd, roasted pheasant…just name it!”

He gave her a smirk and said, “Tonight, I want something different…”

Content warning: As I said, like 80% of Chinese “romance” manhua, it starts with a rape. Worse than that, it starts with the original body of the MC Ye Xiaoxian dying of a drug overdose after being drugged with a pig aphrodisiac by her mother-in-law. I think it’s the novelist’s way of weeding out intelligent and conscientious readers. “Can you make it past this hurdle? Then welcome to the show.” Check your brains out at the door and dive in.

The male lead Xiao Baoshan was also drugged by his mother and thus was a rape victim as well. And he feels much worse about it than Ye Xiaoxian does. That’s the reason I gave this series a pass and decided to keep reading. If he had turned out to be one of those creepy, abusive “You are now my woman” kind of guys, I would have high-tailed it out of there. For her part, Xiaoxian just gets up the next day, dusts herself off, says she understands why the mother-in-law drugged them (?!). Then presto, the story moves on.

In fact Xiaoxian doesn’t even understand why Xiao Baoshan feels guilty and uncomfortable about the whole incident. Even though it’s normal for him to feel bad, seeing as he was DRUGGED BY HIS OWN MOTHER and ended up sleeping with the woman who was originally supposed to be his sister-in-law before his brother died. It’s a really weird and unnatural situation, but if you’ve made it past chapter 2 then you already left common sense behind, so keep moving! Full speed ahead!

First the good parts of My Fantastic Chef Wife

-Once you get past the first two chapters, there’s not much objectionable content. Just FYI.

-The series is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s about a chef and she’s fantastic at what she does. You will see all kinds of people totally bowled over by her fantastic cooking skills, and there are a lot of different foods cooked in almost every chapter early on. Later on she trains others to cook her dishes and innovates less because she has a busy business, but she still cooks often.

-The MC and her family are very hardworking and entrepreneurial. They wake up early to sell food in town, try new ideas, take advantage of gaps in the market, etc. The story is a bit idealistic and there’s a lot of luck involved, but eventually they move from a small roadside stall to their own little restaurant in town.

-Ye Xiaoxian is pretty and talented, but not a complete Mary Sue. Not everyone loves her, not every idea she has is successful. It’s plain that she’s good at cooking and has a decent head for business, but is bad at personal relationships. She lets things slide when she shouldn’t, doesn’t pay enough attention to potential danger and isn’t diplomatic when she should be. Her willful ignorance about how business and bureaucracy works later leads to disaster.

-Unlike most “face-slapping” novels of this sort, her extended family is not that bad. They’re greedy, selfish and stupid, but not actually evil. That leaves room for future reconciliation. While they never become very close, they do eventually develop a mutually respectful and even helpful relationship. Special props go to the mother-in-law Li Hongmei, who is Xiaoxian’s biggest supporter despite being her straight up murderer. She’s also one of the smartest, kindest and most perceptive characters in the book. My Fantastic Chef Wife is weird like that.

-The male lead Xiao Baoshan is a very decent sort who is much more concerned for Ye Xiaoxian’s comfort than she is for his or even her own. He’s neither overly pushy nor overly distant, doesn’t interfere in her business but doesn’t ignore her when she needs help. While he’s no romantic, he still does his best to do what he thinks Xiaoxian will like. This makes it all the sadder to read when she pushes him away and gives all kinds of confusing signals early on. Just talk to the man, woman!

Then the bad parts that made me stop reading (MAJOR SPOILERS)

🚩A hard reset of almost all progress is going to occur around the chapter 180 mark. Due to the combination of a corrupt official, an evil business rival, Baoshan’s own dark past and a looming war, Ye Xiaoxian is separated from her husband and loses her restaurant, her property and her reputation as a good, safe cook.

-This wouldn’t be annoying if it had happened very early, but to hit the reset button after so many chapters of watching Xiaoxian struggle from scratch and build her relationships, that’s just too much. I went and checked to see how many chapters the series has and it turns out there are over 450 out now! In other words, a story which could have been very nicely wrapped up in 200 chapters is being artificially restarted with more drama thrown in just to keep us reading. NO WAY.

Btw, thanks to My Fantastic Chef Wife, now I always check the chapter count of a series before starting. If it’s over 500 chapters and not fully translated, sorry, not reading.

-Since the title has “Wife” in it, you might expect a lot of romance, but you won’t get much. Early on Baoshan is too shy and uncomfortable, then once he warms up to the idea, Xiaoxian is too tsundere. She knows he’s shy and not smart about these things, but she still acts like a kid around him. If he pays attention to someone else, she gets jealous and snippy. If he tries to get affectionate, she finds him clingy and annoying. He runs, she pulls, he comes closer, she pushes him away. The poor man doesn’t know what to do. The reader doesn’t know what she wants. Even she doesn’t know what she wants.

Eventually, and it takes a while but eventually they work through their misunderstandings. They find their way into each others’ hearts (and beds) and things seem to be going well. Then the author forces the reset. Baoshan has to run away and leaves Xiaoxian a divorce note so his enemies won’t bother her. And instead of understanding his intentions, Xiaoxian gets mad and upset and says she doesn’t want anything to do with him any more. Which means we’re going to have to endure another 100-200 chapters before they meet again, and another 100-200 till they work things out, and so on. NO WAY.

-While it can’t be helped due to the way the story plays out, it is clear that as the series progresses there will be much less cooking and much more drama, war, political intrigue, etc. If that’s your kind of thing, sure. But if you just wanted to read a simple countryside romance with some cooking and business – like the series originally promised – then you’re outta luck.

And so for all these reasons, I decided to quit reading My Fantastic Chef Wife. The main character seems to have a screw loose with how quickly she jumps to conclusions, but that’s how she has been since the first chapter so that much would have been bearable.

The bigger problem was the bait-and-switch the author pulled. It’s like getting offered a steak, digging in, and having the plate snatched away and replaced with a salad. Nothing against salad, but that’s not what I ordered. If you give me 180 chapters of the cooking romance you promised and then expect me to read another 250+ chapters of political drama then no, I’m walking away.

TL;DR

Read My Fantastic Chef Wife if you’re looking for a rather frustrating experience (here’s a link to the series btw). Things take a while to go well, then when they do, reset! Back to square one. If you like slow buildups and many challenges in the way of a romance, go for it. Me, I’m out!

Ascending, Do Not Disturb web novel review – My kind of slow romance

Ascending, Do Not Disturb by Yue Xia Die Ying is a Chinese web novel that comes up very often when you ask for suggestions for romance with supportive, non-crazy, non-rapey male leads. Fans call that genre “fluffy” romance, but even then not all fluff is genuinely fluff all the way through. I’m happy to report that Ascending, Do Not Disturb is one of the good ones, though. Not perfect, but really good and fun to read, worth the time to try.

Summary: A deposed young princess named Kong Hou is picked up by an old cultivator and taken to the world of cultivators to cultivate. Blessed with supernatural luck and natural talent, she quickly begins to make waves not only in her sect but in the cultivation world at large. The series is fully translated and can be read here: Ascending, Do Not Disturb.

Cons:

– The chief problem is that the main character, Kong Hou, is a complete Mary Sue. Just total, perfect, almost entirely without flaws, loved by almost everyone except the baddest guys. She also has supernatural luck, which is one of her character definitions.

The drawback of all this is that it’s impossible to get under her skin. You can see the falling in love process and sympathize much more closely with the male lead, Xuan Zhong (Xi) than with the female lead. This is not enough of a problem to ruin the series, but if you want to read about a female cultivator’s love adventures, you’ll be a bit disappointed.

The second drawback is that her supernatural luck takes a lot of the tension out of things. If they need a certain herb, whoops, the grass she just happened to pull up is the herb. The random flowers she looked at are super rare once-in-a-lifetime blooms. The fish she bought is the best in the world. Etc. etc. So although the story is supposed to be a journey of adventure and struggle and hardship, in practice almost everything goes Kong Hou’s way, which is rather boring.

-This Mary Sueness also extends to Kong Hou’s sect, the Splendid Cloud Sect. They’re the smartest, happiest, secretly the strongest. It extends to their city, Harmonious City as well, where all the citizens are so bright and happy and prosperous and clever. You get sick of the endless praise for Kong Hou, Splendid Cloud and Harmonious City, especially in the last few chapters.

– While the male lead isn’t the crazy type, he is still a bit possesssive, and inclined to be extremely cold and unfriendly to any male who even looks at Kong Hou funny. Which is a lot of males because she’s Mary Sue. It’s a bit annoying the further you get in.

– Huan Zhong lies a lot to Kong Hou throughout the series. They’re mostly “white lies” that don’t hurt anyone, but it gets uncomfortable because of its high frequency.

– Misunderstandings occur galore, but not of the series and dumb type. They’re usually humorous. Like people misunderstanding Huan Zhong’s and Kong Hou’s actions of sending fish home – they’re just sending random fish, but it turns out to be super expensive and precious fish. Or people think they’re lovers, wait no they’re not, no wait they are. Even they misunderstand their feelings towards each other before they finally come together. It’s a con because I usually hate misunderstandings that aren’t quickly resolved, but it’s not too bad in this series.

-The last thirty or so chapters were a slog. First you have to read a ton of PDA between the two lovers. You’re so handsome, kiss kiss, you’re so beautiful, hug hug, I love you. Then all kinds of characters come out of nowhere with their centuries-old romance that gets dragged up, then there’s a long period of separation, blah blah, finally the confrontation with the final boss, THEN the end. Seriously tedious stuff.

Pros:
– It’s a slow romance, but it’s not really that slow. Most of the time I dread series with the “slow romance” tag because either the characters meet at a very young age and take forever to get together, or they meet once and then only very very sporadically until poof, suddenly they’re in love. In Ascending, Do Not Disturb, the characters meet early, start travelling together, and have lots and lots of interactions that show them getting closer. That means it’s not a mystery what they see in each other or what brought them together like it often is in other series.

– The characters support, respect and care for each other throughout the series with only one big conflict, which is quickly resolved. This isn’t one of those series where they bicker and banter and hate each other until suddenly they don’t. You won’t have to feel bad rooting for a nutcase married to a doormat like often happens.

– It’s short and complete at 158 chapters. That’s my kind of series. The chapters are also long and meaty, none of this “dividing one chapter into 3 for more views” nonsense. None of that reading 2000 chapters only for the author to drop the series nonsense. Plus because it’s short, the story is also focused – gather ingredients to cure Xuan Zhong, and develops rapidly.

– It’s clean. By clean I mean no sexual assault (kissing or holding a character against their will), no rape or attempted rape, no dumb aphrodisiac storylines, no other sexual content. It takes the main characters a long while to even hold hands, and then everyone’s like “GASP! THEY’RE HOLDING HANDS!!!!” I’m occasionally blindsided by series that start out normal and eventually turn into smut, like The Lady’s Sickly Husband, or that one with the runaway ninja. They should tell you upfront if that’s the case. Happily enough, Ascending, Do Not Disturb is suitable for even young teens to read.

– It’s not all sugar and light. It’s mostly sweet , but there are dark undercurrents and some dangerous moments. These mainly revolve around evil cultivators who go around doing some pretty gnarly stuff, mainly to mortals but also to cultivators. It never descends into horror, but it does have some moments of danger.

-It’s mainly a romance series, but it does have a decent amount of cultivation discussion and action. It’s not one of those “female cultivator” series where she either doesn’t see the guy for 1000 chapters because she’s too busy adventuring, or one of those where she immediately abandons her sect to chase a guy. There’s a mix of everything that was promised when you read a romance cultivation manga, so that’s great.

-Shoutout to the translators at Dreams of Jianghu for an excellent translation that was very smooth and easy to read. I deplore the current trend of people publishing unedited or barely edited machine translation for quick views and cash. This is a well-made and edited translation that made the reading experience much more pleasant.

Summary

Ascending, Do Not Disturb is a short, fun romance manga with a loving, respectful relationship between the two main characters. In the world of Chinese web novels, it’s like a flower planted in a heap of manure, as the Chinese proverb goes. As I listed above, there are a number of problems with it, most notably Kong Hou’s Mary Sue nature and the sluggish nature of the last third.

If you want a good romance web novel, though, this is a satisfying read that will keep you busy for a few days in a row and leave you happy. Give it a try if that’s your thing!

Isekai de “Kuro no Iyashi Te” tte Yobarete Imasu review (complete at 49 chapters)

Isekai de “Kuro no Iyashi Te” tte Yobarete Imasu reveals one of the biggest flaws of Japanese isekai manga: they take too long to complete! This is a simple story of a girl who goes to another world, finds out she has special powers and falls in love with the lovable but slightly crazy male lead. It’s the same as hundreds of other series in the genre, but it took almost five years to tell because of the monthly release schedule of isekai manga. By the end, I honestly didn’t care that much any more.

Summary: One day, 22-year-old Kanzaki Misuzu is suddenly transported to a strange world. Based on the pop-up screens she can access, it seems she’s entered some kind of RPG as a magic user! Luckily, she can use the gaming skills she acquired as an otaku to make her way in this new world. But before she knows it, people start calling her “the Black Healer”!! (from mangakakalot)

In short, the heroine is reincarnated as a healer in another world. The world is full of cute guys, but naturally she will end up dating Noche, the handsomest and most powerful and craziest. Nothing but the best for our baby girl.

Kuro no Iyashi blah blah (the long title just means “In another world I am called the Black Healer”) has some decent background explanation, i.e. an explanation of why things work the way they do, and how Reene/Misuzu (she goes by an alias for reasons I can’t remember) got there. And even why she and the male lead are drawn to each other, which is often lacking in a lot of series. The explanation is “it’s magic, and that’s just the way the world works” but at least it’s an explanation. Their chemistry isn’t the best either, but he’s decent and treats her well, and after reading one too many crazy Korean and Chinese “evil prince/duke/CEO” series, this is amazing.

As a bonus, Reene doesn’t immediately fall head over heels in love with Noche, and she agonizes for a long time about whether to go back to Earth right away or not. Even though we know what she’s going to choose ultimately, it’s still nice to see some wavering, versus the usual trope where the character forgets all about her home world once she spots a bishie. On top of all that, there’s a super-happy development where she will eventually get to go back to her world once she’s done with living in the other world. Nice.

Other pluses: the art is nice and easy to follow, Noel the demon pup is adorable even though he doesn’t get to do much, the story has its dark moments so it’s not all saccharine sweet, and things don’t drag on forever – and not just because the series got axed.

On the minus side, I think the story went on for about 10 chapters longer than it needed to. Yeah yeah, we know Reene and Noche are going to end up together, why add unnecessary rivals and kidnappings and extra drama? It really would have been better to wrap it all up with a fluffy happy ending since the last-minute drama bombs involving Guzherban and Viola went nowhere. Obviously cancelled series was obviously cancelled.

It was only 49 chapters but between the monthly manga schedule and the infrequent scanlation releases, it feels like it took a lifetime to come out. Just as an aside, I really hate it when a translation group picks up a ton of series and then releases them in drips and drabs? I’ll leave it at that to avoid wading into scanlation drama, but let’s just say a lot of groups are lucky my Korean and Mandarin aren’t very good… for now.😏

Back to Kuro no Iyashi tte, by the end I couldn’t remember the most relevant things like why Guzerbahn’s king kidnapped her, or what was going on with the church and the white healer. The most important thing was that she was brought over to that world to be the soul mate of the demon king. And she waffled a bit, but eventually she became his soul mate. And maybe they all lived happily ever after, maybe they didn’t. The rest is left to the reader’s imagination.

Overall, it’s not a bad series to read if you’re looking for a complete romance shoujo isekai. There are so few of them out there anyway. Even though the ending is abrupt, the real ending came several chapters earlier and the rest was just sloppy tying of loose ends. So if you want something short, fluffy and complete, try Isekai de “Kuro no Iyashi Te” tte Yobarete Imasu. This is the best time to do it now that it’s finally over.

Spoonfed Chinese experiment on hold

You may remember I said two months ago that I was going to try learning Mandarin Chinese with the Spoonfed Chinese Anki deck and very little else. If you don’t remember, refer to that post here. I said I would provide an update every 10% of the way, which is approximately how far I’ve gotten with it now. However I’m going to have to put the experiment on hold for a very simple reason:

Mandarin is interfering with my Cantonese.

The two languages have some significant differences, but they’re ultimately very, very similar. This will be great for me when I finally get round to learning Mandarin seriously, but right now my Cantonese isn’t quite good enough yet.

I’m just stepping into Advanced now and picking up more key vocabulary. When I learn to pronounce something one way in Cantonese, then right away step into the Spoonfed deck and learn to say it a different way, it honestly messes with my head. The net result is I don’t learn it in either language. With enough repetition it sticks eventually, but it’s frustrating and makes me dread learning instead of look forward to it.

All hope is not lost, though. I don’t want to lose the gains I’ve made with Mandarin so far, so I’m going to set the deck to give me only 1 new card ever day. That way I still get to revise what I know already, and still continue to learn at a drastically reduced rate.

Eventually, once I consider myself proficient in Cantonese, I’ll be able to return with more seriousness. It will be like my Japanese levels, where I can comfortably read 結果 as “kekka” in Japanese and as “gitgwo” in Cantonese without any problems. I’ve heard of people working on both Mandarin and Cantonese at the same time, but I don’t have the background they do (or the resilience and intelligence, shrug) so I’m not going to force myself.

Brief comment on the Spoonfed Chinese Anki deck though: it’s really good. Some might consider it repetitive, but it’s great for me. It gives a new vocabulary item, hammers it in with some examples, then moves on to the next item. And it frequently incorporates other things you’ve learned in the past so you don’t forget them. You’ll just be building your Chinese reading skills brick by brick, sentence by sentence. And speaking skills too, if you did like I did and sounded each sentence out loud.

So if you’re learning just Mandarin or if you’re made of sterner stuff than me, I recommend it all the way. Other languages have sentence decks as well, but at least for Cantonese and Korean I haven’t seen anything as systematic and easy to follow. That’s all the more reason why I don’t want to quit entirely but merely sloooow down to a crawl for now.

Any Cantonese progress?

Things are looking up on the Cantonese front. I recently found a great tool which is just what I need to push me over the Intermediate plateau. It’s the Reading tool on Languages.io, specifically the Cantonese Conversations course. 100 native-level conversations with full audio and written Cantonese. Amazing! I’ll write a fuller report once I’ve fooled around with it a little more, but I’m seeing great progress already just from listening to each one. There is light at the end of the Cantonese tunnel at last!