Mar 10, 2023
This story has great promise and stumbles on every great building block.
Plot:
Super Scifi [Watch]!
The scifi is mostly untouched besides making the MC overpowered without much more than 'super science watch!' as an explanation. She learn about natural events, the location of people or objects are, or certain knowledge/interests characters have.
The MC's soldier past life has no bearing on her strength, personality or adaptiveness, which is most disappointing. As a chronically ill person, I was pleased to see a once-healthy soldier trapped in the body of a weak kid, and I wanted to see how their identity and skills might be maintained or grow with her
...
new condition. Clearly, my mild interest held more thought than the author's development somehow... The worst part is that the author tried to work on these two subjects but did so in a lazy, unconvincing way. The story indicates that she's able to adapt and survive (and adapt), which presumably is meant to be linked to her soldier history, but instead, all evidence of her adaption is her 'super science watch!'.
[Negative] Adaption Stats.
Her adaptive skills are so bad they're actually backwards. Imagine being an in-debt soldier used to scraping by, then becoming super wealthy to the point one piece of clothing could buy a house. Imagine getting so used to being wealthy that you think nothing of spending money worth multiple houses and then being upset you're poor and confused about how you could ever survive without money.
If she was content with being poor because she was used to it, I could forgive her overspending (some people don't learn how to handle money if they've never had it) but I don't think a captain would have such little future planning for one.
[Bribelical] Respect
This leads to my second point; she acts super spoilt like she is used to being rich and manipulating people. I don't count that as an adaption to the richness, and I think most people around her would find it obvious, brazen, and embarrassing to just throw her money at people to gain lackeys. Especially if she does so to the point she keeps running out of money. But we're supposed to believe everyone is just so in love with her money they have no concerns about her leadership skills, forward planning, priorities, respect for them etc. All that makes me think of is a child who was so used to having money they never learnt how to handle people besides handing out money. It doesn't make me think of a competent adult captain who is now adapting to a new world with limited resources besides financial...
Characters:
Romance
The attempt at a slow-burn romance between the two characters is lacklustre. I think it tried to go with the 'opposites attract, but also they have some unexpected similarities', but they're basically the same personality at different volumes. It's actually interesting to me how similar they are but are coded so differently due to physique (gender, stature, eye shape lol). They're both unsociable (despite having loyal friends), selfish, blunt and competent. They'd be more similar (and probably have better chemistry) if the story didn't forget that the woman is a soldier, much like the guy is. It'd make more sense for an adaptive, scifi soldier to calculate his strength into their plans and work to make him a strong ally. Instead, she gets scared every time she's reminded of his strength and doesn't know what to do with the information.
[Bad] Bad Guys. (Really, Really Bad)
No nuance to the bad guys so you don't have to work hard to know who to route for. No one seems to represent complex ideologies. Want to kill someone because they're cramping your style? Checks out; you're platinum blonde... I mean, evil. :)
Overall:
I feel like this falls into the reincarnation genre I've been avoiding and I don't really get the point. The story would work fine with a fantasy woman having memory loss this double death, and unilateral body swap nonsense (like how is she alive in a corpse?). Her poorly established original personality has no bearing on the current time besides the excuse to have her shun traditional femininity and misogyny and be a comparatively unrivalled badass for wearing trousers. These things could have been accomplished without the trope, and part of the expectations are dropped (like this physically unwell ex-soldier not bothering to engage in fights).
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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