This author is incredibly talented with character interactions, and I implore you to give the story a try if you like character focused stories. The romance is on point and realistic, the characters are well developed and all make sense, they're all consistent, and we have a waifu war between the readers and it's awesome.

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Shiddedpant

Status: status (that's the ch name)

Dec 4, 2024

My first guess would be that the author completely tagged the novel wrong, the protagonist was exactly 0 of the things mentioned in the tags except male, every single other one was so blatantly incorrect he was basically the polar opposite. The closest one could be "hated" but he had friends, everyone kinda knew him and nobody bullies him since I'm guessing they can't get him to leave them alone so I can't say it's honest either.

My second guess is that I hadn't been introduced to the protagonist yet by the time I couldn't continue reading, Ishi is basically that cringe and annoying jock character crossed with an edgy wannabe emo kid who thinks constantly bugging people while simultaneously talking about how "he's just too mature for people his age" and "too numb to all this youth stuff to care". This theory makes more sense than the first since the protagonist would have to be introduced later on as some unseen, antisocial, cold, hated, honest, reluctant and underestimated guy while Ishi is basically mocking him by using his personality as some sort of goddamn "quirky behaviour" to hit on the new girl.

Both of these theories are almost certainly not true though, the most likely and probably true option is simply that the author doesn't know what any of these traits look like.

Spoiler

The ONLY examples of this kind of behaviour that even exist in the novel are the explicit statements that basically exist to try to force it in. For example, some strangers move in next door and our MC being the nosy social butterfly he is goes to help them move in. Yes that's right. HELP. THEM. MOVE. IN. A family of complete strangers that are new to the area and he just inserts himself into their home, sure his whole family acts like this so it's likely a consequence of bad parenting but that doesn't change what happened. Not only does he do this, he constantly talks to them while he's there, starting up chats about the new girls school life etc to people who he's just met and realistically should be either calling the cops or trying to push these sh*tty neighbours out of their new home.

Then what happens? We go into like narration/thoughts and the MC just "thinks" about how he's so anti-social and doesn't wanna be here and wants to just go home (which he doesn't, he even stays for f**king dinner with said strangers). Every single case of the tags being utilised is like this, he acts like a total extroverted, loud, jerk and then the author basically tries to tell us hes totally apathetic and introverted through the thoughts. It's very clear that Ishi is both the intended protagonist and the intended antagonist wrapped up in one, unfortunately it's not written in any of the ways that make this work.

If you wanted to have the character be like this, the two most obvious ways I can think of it working are either a mental disorder like bipolar/split personalities almost moon knight style OR making the novel much darker and going the abusive family/friends route which we almost did on accident. During the frustrating "move in" episode the MC says that he can't just go home like he wants to because his parents would STARVE HIM as punishment for not being an annoying socialite. This novel could very easily have taken the path of a tragedy or a comedy depending on the authors preference but it just... doesn't...

[collapse]

I'll try to end on a positive note, these sorts of romance stories about an anti-social boy being adopted by an extroverted popular girl are always going to be some of my favourites (if actually done right) so I don't want the author to give up on this genre entirely because their first attempt fell through. The translation is well done and the interactions between characters are actually pretty impressive for a scribblehub work if you ignore the personality problems I mentioned. Realistically if I had to give a summary on what I liked, I'd say this novel feels like the latter half of what it was intended to be but the romance hasn't developed to that point yet.

The MC at the start of the novel has already come out if his shell and become a confident, noisy, jerk which makes it feel like we skipped all the character progression straight to the final product. The romance is not at the final form though since he's just met the female lead, which means we unfortunately won't ever get to experience the development of our antisocial quiet MC falling in love with a noisy idol girl who won't leave him alone since she never got to meet that guy. Honestly a quick way that would probably fix alot of the start of this novel is shutting him up, then you could add different motivation to certain actions he takes early on. Changing the motivation for the move in for example, the MC could just decide "my parents want to go meet the neighbours to be nosy and if I stay home it'll draw more attention to me than if I go and don't speak" rather than "I have to go socialise with these strangers or my parents will starve me".

The way these romance novels work is that the "shell" our MC has must be worn down or chipped away at by the bright, extroverted love interest. He can't just suddenly become super social and chat to everyone he meets entirely on his own or her entire existence loses its purpose or atleast becomes far more shallow. Instead of a cheery social girl seeing something more in a quiet isolated boy and deciding to invest the time into bringing him out into the world a bit more to "smell the roses" he's so disinterested in, it's just a popular girl who gets followed around by some annoying jerk of a jock character until eventually she gives in and gives him a chance.

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