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For My Derelict Favorite manhwa review (liked and hated it at the same time, ending spoilers included)

It’s very popular in romance manhwa to have a villainess going up against the original female lead (OGFL). Almost always the villainess turns out to be not so bad while the OGFL is not so good, so then you’re happy to see the “villainess” (actually a nice person) wins.

For My Derelict Favorite is a manhwa where the villainess is low key a real bitch who actively mounts a campaign to destroy the life of the OGFL who has done nothing to her personally, and succeeds in the end. If you’ve ever wanted to see a villainess act like a villainess and succeed and have everyone paint her as a saint in the process, this is your series.

Summary (from official Webtoon): What happens after the story ends with a “happily ever after”? When Hestia enters her favorite novel as a side character, she happily fangirls from the sidelines. Thinking she’ll return home when the story reaches its end, Hestia finds that the only thing awaiting her is the tragic death of her favorite character. Now miraculously restored to the day of the ending, Hestia decides that she’ll no longer spectate from the sidelines – instead, she’ll save her derelict favorite!

So it’s a series where the protagonist enters her favorite series and takes revenge on everyone who (in her opinion) wronged her favorite character. Everyone who has ever suffered from Second Male Lead Syndrome can relate to her feelings, if not her actions.

Since Hestia was not a character in the original novel, she doesn’t technically count as a “villainess.” Instead she is the ultimate fangirl who goes to great lengths to get “revenge” for her favorite character Cael who starts the series feeling suicidal after his crush Diana cuts ties with him because he murdered two people (!) and then marries his friend Helios.

In Hestia’s first experience in that world, Cael ultimately succeeded in killing himself. However Hestia went back in time and forced her way to become his wife, running his affairs until he gets out of his depressive funk and resumes his normal duties. She also uses her knowledge of the first timeline to pass herself off as a prophet, getting Cael and Helios to trust her by making predictions that come true.

Now, let’s get a few things straight so you can see how unreasonable Hestia was being.

Yes, Cael was in love with Diana, but he never confessed his feelings or even touched her. The whole country knows it, but he never said anything. For My Derelict Favorite paints the marriage of Helios to Diana as one big betrayal, but what were they supposed to do? Just not date each other because Mr. Can’t Speak Up will be hurt?
Diana was absolutely a hypocrite for using Cael’s love to her advantage by accepting a big gift and his service when it suited her. However she did not two-time Helios with Cael or even divide her affections. She didn’t lead him on and pretend they had a future together.
Diana was also a hypocrite for condemning Cael for murder when it is that murder that allowed her to become crown princess. It was a crappy thing to do to a formerly good friend.
However, it is undeniable that murder is a crime and a sin. Cael killed two people without following legal procedures, and got away with it too. As a saintess with deep convictions (at the time), you couldn’t very well expect her to go yay, whoopee over murder, even if it was ostensibly for the sake of the nation. However Diana’s condemnation could have been done with far more grace and understanding instead of coldly cutting him off while continuing to benefit from his misdeeds.
Nobody “owed” Cael marriage, nobody owed him a romantic relationship just because of all the sacrifices and silent service his offered. Nobody “drove him to suicide” except him and him alone. And to his credit, Cael comes to understand that pretty quickly. Hestia is the one who continues to bear a grudge long after Cael has made peace with everything that happened.
It’s doubtful whether Cael ever loved Diana anyway, as opposed to loving his idea of her, and what she stood for. The same goes for Helios. It turns out that none of them really understood her and all her flaws. Instead they painted a perfect picture in their minds, pursued that ideal and then were disappointed and abandoned her when they had to face reality.

All that to say, I really felt sorry for the OGFL Diana in all this. While she was initially presented as a perfect, caring saintess, Hestia mounts a campaign to rob her of her confidence and all her friends, including wooing away her one supporter in high society, while building up herself and Cael as the key figures in the kingdom, eventually inheriting the Dukedom of the people Cael murdered. How that’s for a villainess winning the game?

And of course, as opposed to the flawed Diana and the confused, diffident Helios, Cael is absolutely perfect, can do no wrong, is only ever sinned against, never sinning. So smart, so handsome, so everything. Unfortunately he’s pretty likeable so I couldn’t hate him, but gosh dangit, that’s a Gary Stu if I ever saw one.

So back to Hestia, who basically loves and worships Cael so much that she wages a campaign to bring Diana down while elevating Cael and herself. And it must be said that part of the reason why she succeeds is Diana’s own weakness. It turns out the personality traits needed to be a good saintess (purity, strong convictions, backing of the temple) are liabilities when she becomes the crown princess and has to learn to compromise, flatter others, pander to the nobility and so on.

Honestly I blame the King and the Crown Prince Helios for Diana getting into this mess in the first place. She was just a random village girl with special powers. That did not inherently make her fit to be crown princess. At the very least she should have undergone a LOT of training before the marriage, which would have quickly exposed how unfit she was for the position. Instead they rushed into the marriage, and I believe part of this was to take advantage of her popularity the ordinary people versus Helios’ shaky position. Otherwise there was absolutely no reason for the crown prince to rush into marriage with a commoner. They should have known how much opposition there would be to Diana, and yet both Helios and his father failed to provide the necessary support, correction and education to help her succeed, and then threw her out once she inevitably made huge mistakes.

What mistakes, though? Apart from hosting poorly planned lunches and being a bad hostess, Diana doesn’t do any of the evil deeds you usually see OGFLs do. She doesn’t plot against Hestia, doesn’t try to kill her or turn society against her, nothing. Her big mistake is to stubbornly make investments in a fraudulent company with money from the temple and the crown. A huge and terrible mistake, but not one that couldn’t have been overcome if Helios stood by her, kept her out of society’s eyes, and helped fix her mistakes. Unfortunately once her popularity and powers are gone, his love (or “love” shall we say) for her quickly disappears as well, and he divorces her and later marries someone else.

Of course let’s not pretend Diana was completely innocent in all this. The only reason she made that investment was to spitefully stick it to Hestia, who she despised because Hestia made it a point to needle her at every opportunity and point out her hypocrisy on occasion. Diana was even warned repeatedly to not do the investment. She was also the first to withdraw from Helios and even try to get Cael to love her again, so I won’t say Helios was completely unjustified in moving on.

But again it boils down to point #6 I made above, which is that neither Cael nor Helios ever bothered to know the real Diana along with her insecurities and tendencies. Helios and Diana never built up a relationship of real trust, and that is what doomed them and allowed events (and Hestia) to come between them in the end.

In all this, I haven’t said much about Hestia herself. TBH she’s quite annoying, always squealing and blushing over Cael while plotting against Diana for daring to not return her sweetie’s affection. Despite her prophetic powers, she also does not try to save a ship full of people she knows is going to sink but instead uses it in her plot to oust the crown princess. What about all the families that lost fortunes due to the fraud? And what about the people in the capital who died just so she could prove that Cael’s territory had better hygiene? Ha, like she cares about anyone except herself. Hestia is toxic to the max.

And she proves it when there’s a long period where she refuses to accept that Cael is genuinely over Diana and over his heartbreak and ready to move on with his life. It brings up the question, when is a victim allowed to stop being a victim? Sometimes people are so fixed on getting justice for someone that they stop considering what the other person genuinely wants.

The “derelict favorite” quickly stops being derelict and returns to his former self, and Hestia is forced to confront the difference between the pitiable victim she has in her mind and the actual red-blooded male she is married to who has more than a passing brotherly interest in his new wife. Fortunately for her, unlike with Helios and Diana, the ‘real’ Caelus is smart and wonderful and funny and all the other things I listed above, so Hestia gets her happy ending with three obnoxious kids while Diana is sent penniless back to her village to be bullied by random village girls.

Meanwhile the author tries in vain to make us sympathize with Hestia by arguing that the reason she’s so fixated on revenge is because if she lets go and admits her job is done, then she will have no reason for being in that world and being next to Cael. But again, it’s all about her isn’t it? What she wants, what her future is, what her place is in that world. If she has to destroy Diana and hundreds of lives because of her crippling anxiety, so be it. Like I said, Hestia is totally toxic.

Let that be a lesson to you, Diana. Maybe next time you’ll think twice before calling out murder when you see it, and you’ll marry the guy who never asked you out versus the guy who loves you and who you’ve been dating for a while. Actually it’s a lesson for all of us: everyone in the kingdom knows that Cael murdered Duke Letona and his daughter, but no one says anything, and the only one who gets in trouble and ends up unhappy is the one who calls it out. The moral of the story is, when you’re benefiting from someone’s misdeeds, just shut up and enjoy it. Or else.

Lastly, since I’m spoiling everything anyway, it turns out the goddess of the world is the one who summoned Hestia there, because the goddess was a fan of Cael and didn’t like how things played out. So she wrote it in a book, scattered it in the multiverse, and summoned the biggest Cael fangirl to help her change the ending, and even reversed time to make her try again when Hestia didn’t perform to her satisfaction.

It’s very bizarre that the goddess had the power to do all that but no power to change the ending herself. In fact, I wager she had more than enough power to intervene, but enjoys being a voyeur and spectator much more, watching the characters move around and suffer for her amusement. How very sad for Diana, who even after the ending spends a lot of time praying to a goddess who doesn’t give a fig about her or about anyone except Cael, and who gives and withdraws powers at a whim. The goddess is the real villainess of For My Derelict Favorite, if you ask me.

Long story short, should you read this? If you’re a fan of romance manhwa, absolutely. It’s short, it’s complete, the art is nice (the bishies are suitably fine), and the main couple gets a happy ending (undeserved IMO but whatever). But plenty of series do the same thing. What makes For My Derelict Favorite much better is the complexity of the supporting cast. They’re not black and white good or evil people and that leaves the reader with a lot of “What ifs” and “Why didn’t theys” that ensure the series will live longer in your memory than the usual isekai romance manhwa will. It left a rather bad taste in my mouth but I won’t forget it in a hurry, at least.

The main series is concluded, with ongoing spin-offs, but they’re mostly about Hestia and Cael crowing triumphantly at the reader because of their perfect lives, so I’m done here. It’s a controversial series with readers, so I’d love to hear your thoughts about Hestia (boo!) and Diana (also boo, but kinda… you know?) if you’ve read For My Derelict Favorite. Until next time!

Back to the Small Fishing Village In 1982 Chinese webnovel review – Great until it wasn’t

When you’re reading your slice of life web novel and having a great time and then suddenly the author takes a really bad decision that pisses you off and you drop it but now you’re sad. If you want to experience that, read Back to the Small Fishing Village In 1982.

Summary: Ye Yaodong is a fisherman who falls into the sea in his 50s and wakes up again in his 20s in his fishing village in China in 1982, just like the title said. Having squandered his life and burned all his bridges last time, he decides to live this life a little more sensibly.

And that’s really it. Ye Yaodong isn’t one of those people who go back in time with a system or superpowers or even esoteric knowledge. His memory isn’t even that good, with only major events like his wife’s miscarriage standing out to him. And as an ordinary villager in rural China, he can’t even read until he takes night classes, though he proves to be quick study.

The only thing special about him is his high degree of luck when it comes to fishing. That, and an ability to shmooze. He also knows enough about future events to recognize a pyramid scheme at a time when few have heard of it, and to know that certain things like oyster pearls will go up tremendously in future. This helps him stay out of trouble by working diligently and avoiding standing out too much, while preparing for a prosperous future by making and saving money when he can.

I read up to chapter 77 from a blog that cleaned up the machine translation, but unfortunately the rewrites stopped just when Yaodong had bought a fishing boat and was preparing to become independent from his family. After that I read the brain-melting but still understandable raw machine translation. If you read it, you can look forward to choice lines like, “What kind of mouse meeting last time, didn’t they just not listen to A Dong? You see, they didn’t believe it and didn’t lose. We are too greedy, and the ghosts are obsessed.” It… kind of makes sense in context, but phew!

Not only did the half-garbled nonsense make me appreciate the first blogger, but it also made me think that edited machine translations (a.k.a. post-edited machine translations) are the wave of the future, at least for web novels. But that’s a discussion for another day.

Thanks to the machine translation, me and my surviving brain cells were able to read up to chapter 466 of Back To the Small Fishing Village In 1982 before giving up due to a very disgusting action on the part of Ye Yaodong. Before that, there’s a lot that happens, but for the most part this is a slice of life about a fisherman in a fishing village, so he goes fishing, catches fish, comes back and sells it, rinse and repeat. Whole arcs can revolve around catching spawning squid (sustainability? what’s that?) or picking up scallops on the beach after a typhoon. Here are major events I recall:

In his last life, his wife Lin Xiuqing miscarried a daughter, but this time they are able to hide the baby until it is almost due (barring one person who finds out and tries to blackmail them). Lin Xiuqing goes into labor just when inspectors come round to check, but the villagers are able to delay them until the baby is born. The truly horrifying implication is that she would have been forced to abort the almost full-term baby if she hadn’t given birth right then, which is too cruel to think about but was a reality in China’s draconian one-child policy days.
Ye Yaodong quickly upgrades from his small wooden boat to a mid-sized iron boat. He hires his father as his deckhand and sells (IIRC) the wooden boat to his friends. His two brothers take over the dad’s old boat, and everyone is happy.

Ye Yaodong makes a lot of money through different bursts of luck, such as finding pearls in oysters, picking up and selling a beached oarfish, taking rich men fishing, and finding a reef with plenty of abalone for the picking. He buys a diving suit so he can pick up expensive seafood like sea cucumbers from shallow waters, and comes to a profit-sharing agreement with his friends to let them borrow it.
He also has occasional run-ins with unfriendly people at sea, such as a guy who later incites someone to rob him, and a gang of pirates from Luzhou island. So far he has successfully fended them off every time.
There is a long drawn-out and boring sub-arc where his friend Ah Guang tries to woo his sister Ye Huimei and eventually succeeds. Every reader breathes a sigh of relief once they are finally married and out of the picture.
He successfully mends and improves his relationships with all those who knew him as a ne’er-do-well in his previous life, such as his long-suffering wife, his children, and his in-laws.
For example he goes foraging in the mountains and rivers with his in-laws and helps them make a lot of money, he helps his mother get a job as a village cadre, and he builds an extra room in his new house for his doting grandmother – which indirectly saves his life because she’s around to give him advice during a typhoon.
He saves a whale and gets his picture taken with it.
He picks up a box of treasure while diving and hides it in his garden for the future. He also picks up a tripod that he places in the local Mazu temple, then the government comes sniffing around after it. Long story short, he comes up with an idea to rebuild the temple using donations, and he also makes valuable connections in the army and the government.
He finds out that stores are being sold in a new market that he knows will be prosperous in the future, so he borrows money from his friends and buys two stores without consulting his wife. He later persuades his brothers and some acquaintances to do the same.

This is where the trouble came. He bought it without discussing it with his wife, who keeps the money in the house. When he went to get the money from her to repay his friends, she was understandably upset. So… how does Ye Yaodong persuade her? He doesn’t. He rapes her instead. Uh… yeah. When that fails to persuade her, he tries plan B: rape her again. Which works this time. The writer tries to play it off as nothing, but the magic was gone after that.

I kept reading a little longer and other things happened like Ye Yaodong making tons of money through a squid fishing trip, and picking up boxes dropped by smugglers in the process, or ordering an actual fishing ship at the shipyard (his wife doesn’t bother to oppose him any more, I wonder why) which will be ready in two years.

However, once I lost the will to support Ye Yaodong, I didn’t want to slog through the bad machine translation for his sake any more. I give kudos to the author for making a series about fishing in a Chinese village really interesting and compelling even when he’s just picking up fish on the beach, but maybe try not making him a rapist next time, yeah? I’m done here.

Beloved by the Male Lead’s Nephew manhwa – Nonsensical but very charming (some spoilers)

Manga / Manhwa / Manhwa is a largely visual medium, so it follows that lovely art and designs go a long way towards giving a series popularity. I firmly maintain that Solo Leveling wouldn’t be anywhere near as popular as it is without the slick art.

And the same goes for Beloved by the Male Lead’s Nephew, a romance series with a largely senseless plot that is all over the place, but with art that is so nice that fans are willing to forget everything and just revel in the art. I mean, look at the very first page:

Sasha-kun, so cuuuuute! So cute I almost forgot to include a summary of the series.

After being reborn as a stalker villainess destined to die for trying to kill Archduke Calix Elluiden’s lover, Charlize Lienta fled from the capital to stay away from the archduke at all costs. But her plan goes awry when she returns a year later and rescues a poor boy on the streets… because he turns out to be Sasha, Calix’s long-lost nephew! Given her infamous reputation as Calix’s stalker, will Charlize succeed in returning Sasha without raising the archduke’s suspicions?

…Of course she will. Okay, basically you should throw all logic out of the window and check your brain in at the door when you read Beloved by the Male Lead’s Nephew. In the first place, the timeline isn’t clear. At first she says the world she is in is from a novel where “Charlize” was executed as a villain. But then we get a flashback to her past life and she was a poor orphan in a medieval era who presumably never learned to read. So when and where did she read the novel?

And at what point did she become “Charlize”? At first it seems to be recent, but then she talks about being in the academy together with Callix. Has she been in the world for a while but unable to control her actions, or did she just reincarnate into Charlize’s body but somehow their memories have merged into one?

There’s a lot that suggests that Charlize is an unreliable narrator – for one thing, she says in chapter one the original Charlize was executed, but then she later remembers committing suicide. She claims that Charlize was an unwanted stalker who never spoke to Callix in the novel, but then remembers that they spoke once and original Charlize never forgot it. Plus in recent chapters, it seems original Charlize’s affections weren’t completely unwanted after all…?

Stop thinking so hard and just focus on Charlize’s ultra-long nails that change color with her outfits. I love them so much!

Honestly, the thought that all this timey-wimey stuff will make sense one day (and the gorgeous art) is what encourages me to keep reading, because the rest of the story is all over the place and makes no sense. First Sasha is the legitimate prince and is supposed to take his place on the throne… but nothing happens and the usurper is still there, scheming against him (or actually doing nothing and the Empress does all the scheming). What’s the delay? Why a delay? First he’s confirmed to be the late Emperor’s son, then there’s an artifact that says otherwise, then no, actually the artifact was reacting to his divine power… it’s a huge mess.

Speaking of divine power and messes, there’s a divine beast that forms a contract with Sasha and supposed to protect him… then it suddenly loses all its powers off-screen and is reduced to a stone which is tossed in a lake and only shows up once to be a deus ex machina. What even is the point of its existence?

And speaking of more powers and messes, Charlize has the power to see flashes of the future when she looks into Callix’s eyes…? Or gets closer to him? She also experiences it with a side character, but it happens once and never again, another mystery. The plot is powered by these flashses, where Charlize sees something, works to prevent it, sees something else, etc. But the power has yet to be explained and is just kinda… there. I’m sure they’ll tell us why she has these powers eventually. Maybe.

I already mentioned the ineffectual Emperor and Empress who have their own thing going on, but mainly do… not very much to anyone. The Empress is easily fooled by the fakest acting even though Charlize has thwarted her plans over and over and over again by “coincidentally” being in the right place at the right now. The Emperor is presumably usurping the throne but barely appears and doesn’t seem aware of the Empress’s plans. He’s just kinda… there.

The Empress is in a hurry to have an heir, but that’s pointless until she gets rid of Sasha, but she doesn’t try very hard to get rid of him, just minor things like pushing him into a lake (where you can’t drown because it’s magic) and setting up a fake artifact. She rather spends her time terrorizing minor nobles… I told you, it’s a mess. I like her design though. The art really carries this series.

Okay, so we established that Sasha the nephew is adorable, Charlize has something interesting going on in her backstory, the villains are a joke, the story is a wash… what am I leaving out? Aha, the romance! And the male love interest! It’s easy to leave him out because while he is very handsome and a very nice guy (no yandere stalkers here), he’s also very flat and boring. But boring is good when it comes to manhwa male leads. Some of them can be completely insane, so a relatively normal guy is lovely. It’s just that he really needs to not be so passive because there’s a lot going on around his passive, good-looking head.

Seriously, he doesn’t really do much except dote on Sasha and be nice to Charlize every chance he gets. I’m very interested in Callix’s relationship to the original Charlize in the previous timeline. He seemed to merely tolerate her stalking out of pity for an abused girl who was pushing everyone away. But later on he seemed to feel more than pity for her. And we get a flashback showing he was crushed at her death, but was it because of love or just more pity? Will the series ever address that, or am I hoping for too much?

I’d also like to see what he plans to do with Sasha, because as of chapter 42 he just spoils him rotten at home. Which is cute, but doesn’t get us anywhere. I’m guessing he wishes he could just keep him safe and let him grow up as an ordinary child, but unfortunately the Empress won’t allow that. That’s why Callix needs to take a stronger stance about pushing for the Emperor to step down and Sasha to take the throne. But no, he would rather go on playdates and slowly get closer to present Charlize… Yeah aight, you do you, I guess.

TL;DR Beloved by the Male Lead’s Nephew is a series you read when you want to go “awwww,” and “kawaiii” and just have fun without thinking about things too much. I think it’s called “fluff,” though most fluffy romances do attempt to make sense. Also read it when you want to see nice art. I love Charlize’s nails, though fans have mixed feelings about those talons, haha. If I read to the end – and I have no intention of quitting anytime soon – I’ll write a follow up post explaining how things turned out. Until then!

The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious manga review (ending spoilers included)

Japanese authors may not have invented the isekai “going to another world” genre, but they sure come up with the most interesting spins. The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious (Kono Yusha ga Ore Tueee Kuseni Shincho Sugiru) by Light Tuchihi takes the usual trope of a summoned hero saving the world, then cranks it up to eleven by giving him a hilariously pragmatic and cautious personality. It’s extremely refreshing, at least at the start. It’s also short and complete at six volumes, so even though the final twists were garbage (more on that later), it’s still worth a read for what came before.

Summary: Can a neurotically overprepared hero and an underachieving goddess save a parallel world together?! When the inexperienced goddess Ristarte is tasked with the daunting mission of saving the S-ranked world Gaeabrande, she thinks that summoning Seiya Ryuuguuin, a Japanese teenager who has utterly broken stats as a Hero, will finally turn her luck around. Seiya’s abilities (and good looks) are all she has ever dreamed of, but she soon wishes she had read the fine print about his “overly cautious” personality… (Yen Press)

It’s a fine comedy series – not ROFL hilarious but very amusing as we follow Seiya’s efforts to always be perfectly prepared in any scenario. I read the first three volumes, took a long break and read the final three, so I don’t remember every single antic, but there were things like buying tons of potions, suspecting every single person of being an enemy, insisting on being healed for the tiniest scratch, and escaping from battle to train more if he felt he couldn’t win.

Page from the manga The Hero is Overly Cautious — 999,999,997… 999,999,998… 999,999,999…

His antics are set off against the naive, noisy and largely useless goddess Ristarte (Rista for short) who exists mainly for fanservice, to be the butt-monkey of jokes (think Aqua from Konosuba), and to play the straight man to Seiya’s deadpan but crazy antics. Since she gets the most screentime, and it can be argued that she’s the actual main character, whether you enjoy The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious or not will depend largely on how much you can stomach Rista. Personally I found her a wee bit irritating, but the series didn’t last long enough for her to truly grate on me.

There are some other characters here and there as well, but most of them, especially the enemies, are fully forgettable. The vaunted Demon Lord only gets a few pages in the end, actually.

As the series goes on, it turns out that Seiya is right to be cautious, as the enemy is just that wily and dangerous (corrupting his allies, destroying the weapon and armor he needs, etc.). It’s a refreshing difference from those isekai series where the hero is just overpowered and there’s nothing the enemies can do. If Seiya is overpowered and overly cautious, so are they. It’s a constant game of oneupmanship, and it is interesting to see Seiya being proved right time and time again.

Unfortunately the series begins to fall apart towards the end in two ways. Firstly, the initial “normal” fanservice begins to slip into vulgar, softcore hentai of the kind I can’t even screenshot here. The scenes with Valkyria and Mitis in particular were completely gratuitious and added nothing to the series.

Secondly, and more importantly, the author tried to give a logical explanation for Seiya’s overly cautious traits. Major spoiler: he had actually been summoned before in the past but failed to save the world. At the time he was the usually genki hero who relied solely on his talent and the power of friendship. As a result of his lack of preparation, his whole party was wiped out and he died. When he was summoned again, his memories were gone, but vestiges of the traumatic experience had manifested in the form of his “Overly Cautious” trait.

To be honest, I really didn’t need a logical explation of his personality. It’s a comedy series, and I was okay with him just being that way naturally. And I liked Seiya being “a hero with actual common sense for once” instead of “a hero with common sense only because of trauma.” But if an explanation had to be given, then it’s as good a one as any, so I took that in stride.

What I had an issue with was Ristarte’s backstory. Turns out she was Seiya’s companion and lover in the past world. EWWWW. As the volumes wore on, she had engaged in increasingly explicit and inappropriate fantasies about Seiya while he treated her as a portable healing herb. Then suddenly the series claims, “Oh, they cared about each other all along because of the past”? Yeah no, I wouldn’t buy that for a dollar.

You sign up for a comedy isekai and then the author decides to change the genre tags to “romance, reincarnation, tragedy” at the last minute. It’s their right to do so, but I don’t have to like it. If the The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious hadn’t ended shortly afterwards (was it cancelled? It was popular enough to get an anime) I would have dropped it. But since it’s only 6 volumes/36 chapters, it makes a good short read and ends before it would have gotten really bad, so I finished it, and I recommend it with some caveats. Give it a try if you get the chance.

Small Shop Owner in the 60s Chinese webnovel review (spoilers)

You ever read a romance web novel for dozens and dozens of chapters, only for the translations to run out just when the male lead confesses to the protagonist? No? Then you haven’t read Small Shop Owner in the 60s (六十年代小店主), and you’re better off for it.

Summary:

Xu Nannan, the owner of a Taobao shop, wakes up and becomes a rural girl Xu Nannan in the 1960s.

Every day they only eat a wild vegetable chaff dumpling. Working from dawn to night, she carry a hoe and went to the field to exchange for workpoints.

Fortunately, her Taobao shop followed her back to the 1960s, and she was finally able to do some sideline work. (Novelupdates)

I mentioned last time that there wasn’t enough face-slapping in Raising Babies in the 70s, which reduces half of the fun of reading back-to-the-past Chinese novels (of which there are many, many). Usually the setup is for them to introduce truly infuriating family members, neighbors and in-laws, whip up the reader’s outrage and then deliver catharsis in the form of consequences, or verbal/physical beatdowns. It’s a satisfying formula when done right, and indeed the soap opera, dare I say much of entertainment, revolves around unpleasant people getting their due comeuppance.

If that’s what you want, Small Shop Owner in the 60s delivers in copious quantities, slowly ramping up from small infractions to much more serious ones. But at the same time there’s a healthy (?) mix of bad and good people, so it’s not a complete crapsack world where everyone is out to get the female lead and her sister.

For example her immediate family is cold, greedy and scheming, and many of the villagers are indifferent, but the main authority figure is reasonable, there is a kind family that helps them, and when they report serious issues to bigger authories, action is taken swiftly and thoroughly.

In fact, on the balance of things there are more good and helpful people than bad ones. The first people she tries to sell illegal milk powder to turns out to be so honest and friendly that he and his wife even adopt Xu Nannan and her sister. Her first boss loves her so much he takes her under his wing, and almost all of her co-workers love her. She never gets caught or into trouble for black market dealings or buying antiques, and so on and so forth.

However the scumminess, clinginess and sheer persistence of the antagonists, particularly Grandma Xu and the rest of the Xu family, more than make up for the niceness of the other characters. They prevent the series from being too saccharine sweet and ensure that we get regular doses of face-slapping scenes to keep our morale high.

Now, on to the romance. In a change from the usual, Xu Nannan doesn’t magically wake up with a husband, and indeed the male lead (Lin Qingbai) doesn’t show up until like 50 chapters in, maybe more. And neither character instantly falls in love with the other, but rather they start out with a friendliness that develops into something deeper as they keep finding excuses to spend time together.

The male lead Lin Qingbai is not the usual cold, unapproachable face-paralysis kind of guy either. He is a bit distant from the ladies compared to his disgusting playboy brother, but that is appropriate for the times. And he can smile, he can laugh, he has normal emotions, he doesn’t touch her inappropriately, he doesn’t get violently possessive when other guys show interest in her, he doesn’t try to restrict her movements, he doesn’t fantasize about locking her up… man, when did my bar for male leads get so low?

Random picture of couple on bikes because Lin Qingbai woos Xu Nannan by picking her up on his bike.

The main downside is that he smokes. Normal for the times, but really icky. Also the 10-year age gap is off-putting not because of its size but because she’s 17 and he’s 27, and the difference in maturity is a bit much. 27 and 37 would be a-okay. Plus he comes with an annoying family, especially his brother, but then again so does she (and how!).

In all, it’s a healthy and relatively fast-moving romance, which is helped along by the prevailing attitude of the 60s, which held no truck with this “male friend/female friend” stuff. As soon as you guys are seen together more than a few times, everyone starts asking when the wedding is.

And so, after being together for a while, others start asking questions and Xu Nannan tries to put some distance between them. But then she misses him terribly, she runs into him with his family, he introduces her as his “partner” and takes her away. Then he asks… “So do you agree?” … AND THEN THE TRANSLATIONS END BEFORE WE CAN HEAR HER ANSWER!!!! NOOOOOOO! No updates since August 2021 is just too cruel :’-<

I always worry about the translator/site owner in such cases. Anything can happen to any of us at any time, after all. The cause of a sudden translation stop can range from benign or even positive (won the lottery and moved to an island resort) to very bad. Fans can always machine-translate the rest of the series (in fact the “translation” of Small Shop Owner in the 60s is barely-cleaned machine translation anyway) but a life can’t come back. Stay safe, wherever you are.

So as I said in the beginning paragraph, we get a build up to a confession and then nothing unless you want to MTL the rest. Which I can’t be bothered to do because raw MTL hurts my brain. Engines like DeepL have made great progress, but it’s still hard to read. It’s easy to figure out that Xu Nannan and Lin Qingbai will marry and live happily ever after, but what about all the side characters?

From Novelupdates reviews, I learned that Lin Qingsong rapes Xu Hong and gets away with it, and that Xu Nannan’s birth parents get divorced and her mother dies miserably in poverty, but what about everyone else? The Xu grandparents? Liu Qiao and her scheming daughter Xu Meizi? Xu Nannan’s neglected sister Xu Ling? Her mine worker friends? Teacher He? Etc etc. I’m quite curious, but I already decided to put the series behind me, so I’ll just paper that curiosity over with the next series and move on.

I recommend Small Shop Owner in the 60s if you want a balance of characters and drama in your face-slapping novel. Not too crazy, not too boring. Also if you want non-pushy actually kind of decent male leads because the bar is set in hell these days.

Lastly, a word on the “twist” in this series, which is that Xu Nannan has access to her Taobao (think eBay or Amazon) shop and can buy and sell things there. This does not make as much of a difference as you would expect, mainly because a 15 year old girl splashing around large sums of cash would attract all kinds of questions and lead to horrible consequences.

The level of scrutiny and lack of privacy in those days also means she can’t buy or sell anything too modern, or even use such things in her personal life. However the shop does play a role because taking out useful items like milk powder here and there helps her befriend her benefactors, and more importantly keeps her and her sister from starving to death before they finally get out of the Xu family’s clutches.

So if you’re expecting some dramatic business shenanigans with the Taobao shop, nah, at least not at chapter 89 where translations stopped. The female lead doesn’t use her ability to shop from the future to buy history books and find out what’s going to happen next either, though she does stockpile antiques. It’s implied that she’s avoiding standing out too much or rising too high because of the Cultural Revolution that is coming in 1966-76 (I’d find a way to escape to Hong Kong if I were her), but either way she doesn’t do anything too flashy in the chapters I read. Just FYI.