Feb 6, 2025
‘Not Your Typical Reincarnation Story’ was recommended to me as a rather atypical ‘ reincarnated as a villain story’ - OMG A MANHWA TITLE THAT MIGHT MAKE SENSE?!
Manhwa (Korean manga), manga or anime have the stupid habit of giving themselves names that are far too long and often inappropriate despite or because of this. That's not the case here, which is the first HUGE plus point.
Apart from that, we accompany Edith Rigelhof here, whose soul has of course been resurrected from another world. Remaining tropes are also fulfilled - for example, she knows the book and so wants to make everything better or everyone hates
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her as the villain of the story. But the hope of being able to make everything better is quickly dashed: a mysterious force pushes the other characters and also Edith into the course of the story! But apparently this force is not omnipotent - so will Edith manage to defeat it?
So what exactly is unusual about this story? Roughly speaking, EVERYTHING. What starts out as just copying all the tropes of the genre soon gets more and more twists, big and small, which quickly makes the story feel unique. E.g.: The mysterious force that pushes the story into its course is nothing unusual in such works. But Edith soon realises that there is a person with an ego behind the force. But who? A ‘fight against fate’ quickly turns into a ‘fight against an unknown enemy’. Edith is also simply another special feature. Normally in such works we get planning protagonists who use their knowledge to mould the world to their will. Edith tries to do this at first, but it soon becomes clear that she is a very emotional character. As a result, the story develops not because she planned it that way, but because she was simply a nice, emotional person. Instead of ‘I know the story, I can fix it’ out of thin air, we get so many emotional moments here where it just makes sense for characters to help Edith.
The only criticism, which for me is very serious, is the system behind the power mentioned above, which is not dealt with in detail. For example, the protagonist has to fulfil three conditions in order to break the influence of the person mentioned, but she has no idea of the conditions except that they exist, which means she only has the choice of stumbling into them by accident. Obviously this ‘I'm the protagonist, I accidentally fulfil everything important’ comes across as annoying, although admittedly there's a bit more to it than that, which I won't spoil. This unawareness runs through the entire manhwa. Every time this power plays a role, the protagonist has no idea and the reader has far too little to fully understand the scenarios. This is always annoying, also because the power plays an increasingly important role in the later chapters and seems more and more unnecessary or even like breaks with the actual plot.
All in all, my praise may seem rather meaningless to people who are not so familiar with the genre or type of story. It's great that a ‘fight against fate’ quickly turns into something else, but how is that special? Well, because ‘Not Your Typical Reincarnation Story’ just starts out so typical and consistently very self-consciously and seemingly intentionally adapts and then slightly breaks with typical tropes of such stories, you get something familiar that still feels new and refreshing. Compare it to a pizza: you'll have eaten pepperoni pizza far too many times to find it extremely tasty, but then you enter this one restaurant that makes it slightly different and suddenly you have a new taste experience. Apart from that, the manhwa as a whole, especially the characters, is simply well written.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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