I came here for a yandere, and while the ML is a yandere to some degree (not a red flag one), this didn't end up a delicious yandere story I expected, but it did hook me up and I think it did some thing pretty well.
But then everything turns into a thin, cliche, wierd psycho story where I well and truly lost any love for the FL. As I noted in countless other reviews, most manhwa actually have an okay ML but FLs are pretty terrile as far as character personalities go. Dahlia here started of as a boring, stal cliche (orphan, having to take care of her sick younger sister, you know, this is every second FL in any manhwa ever)... But then she did show some backbone and some personality, and I kind of came to like this. Far was she from a well developed, fully pledged character, but she was much better than many other boiler plate FLs. The ML also starts as a cliche, a unloved illegitimate son, but he is later showed to be a much more cunnign and clever, so he also had my attention... But then the story went into some directions I strongy disagree with.
While I enjoy psycological stories, a historical manhwa with a very mid tier art is hardly a place for such an excursions. If you want a proper historical psychological manhwa, you need to go down the route of what Marcel Proust or Flaubert wrote, and that is a tough pill to swallow for most manhwa lovers (myself included), thus it's usually not a manhwa template, which is completrely fine. When a solid bnut not outstanding, almost shojo manhwa turns into a psycho manhwa it just all fell apart. SPOILER: >! Namely, the FL at some point goes completely bonkers and tries to kill herself. I could not understand this at all. Up until then, she was actually an okay character and you understood her motivations and even the reason she left the ML after he became perhaps too much of a yandere. But after all the drama with her little sister, a plot point I strongly disliked she relly goes off the rails. I very much disliked the whole last 15 chapters. Strongly disliked.
This turn of events would only make sense if the author put a setup, and showed FL as a mentally unstable woman only pulled together by her job/friends/sister, and when she lost that, she fell apart. But by that moment she was a typical naive, happy shojo heroine. WTF? So this was a total minus for me. The ML is a yandere, however he displays some semblance of coherent tought, but sadly his best assets were never used correctly in the manhwa. He is a razor sharp chess master, and we get glimpses of that, but is pushed onto the second plan to display more of his romance with Dahlia, which was also okay until the end. I kind of liked that bwefore meeting Dahlia, he had no motivation for anything and how becoming a yandere actually opened as whole lot of potential for him.
The art was subpar. The character design irked me so much. Dahlia looked like an unrula teenager living in 2004, not a maid for what is a pseudo 19th century setting. Her hair was the worst! She also looks too much like a shojo char, and this also grated my nerves a bit. THe ML was fine but it's far from a top tier art. But it is servicable and there are some intrguing panels that left me impressed, so it's far from being all bad.
Overall, this was okay but the end was off topic completely. And I don't rec this to yandere lovers, as except for a few things, the ML isn't really a hard core yandere. But still worth reading.
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