electricballoon's manga / #dumbass mc(37)

awful what the fuck is wrong with the heroine. biggest doormat

FL is the worst example of "clumsy, frumpy manic pixie girl" archetype and she's less self-aware than a 15 year old’s summer vacation assignment essay for english class. it's like the author tried so hard to emphasise how FL's an oddball because she’s a witch (with a curse) and fundamentally different from ‘regular’ people that it's become her only personality trait. 20+ chapters and no solid demonstration of her actual professional strengths as a creative, the so-called “talent” she was hired for. literally all she’s done so far is follow the boss around doing menial tasks like a glorified peon. naive dumbass childlike heroines aren’t inherently bad but it would have been actually interesting to see her growth if it were a simple josei slice of life instead of a romance, because no grown man, let alone two, would wanna date a grown woman with the social skills of a splattered children's birthday cake. there’s this growing subgenre of romance where the theme is to show off the MLs showing saintly tolerance in the face of abject stupidity and incompetence and an insipid disregard of their boundaries, trying to sell a fantasy where the reader can self-insert as a quiRkY FL who can behave like an absolute cartoon for 100-200 chapters and still be able to charm multiple rich good-looking men who have a superhuman capacity of being constantly mature and kind and understanding towards an adult floundering about like an overgrown toddler, so basically a fantasy where you get to be a hot mess and your unchecked ineptitude gets passed off “cutesy” quirks and you can have several men lining up like passive income who will put up with that sort of pathetic behavior; the FL is the child who gets to be a cute little buffoon and the ML is forever the ultracompetent equable compromising princely adult—the *only* adult in the relationship. this level of “qUirKinEss”/silliness/oddball behavior looks cute on dogs, not grown women