I Abdicate My Title of Empress

This is one of the stories that genuinely left me feeling the most conflicted. Because I can clearly see the seeds for a good story, and most of all very interesting characters (though the leads are unfortunately the least), but the story just... doesn't deliver on that. At all. Dianne, the mistress, is pretty much the only one who gets a little bit of justice, but even then her arc is just super rushed. And it drives me CRAZY. This genuinely could be a gem of its genre, but unfortunately the writer excels at coming up with interesting character ideas much much more than actuallywriting them. So in the end, I only recommend reading it if you want to consistently feel like flipping your keyboard thinking about all the ways this could've been great. Or if you like seeing crying men. The art is pretty and that is one area where this story really ends up excelling at: beautifully crying men picture book. I've never been less sure on how to rate anything because the delivery just isn't it and it isn't even entertaining about it (I just skimmed through most of the end because I just found the leads so boring and didn't care to read more of their romance or what they were doing at all...) but I also can't bring myself to rate it low simply because of how much it tickles my braincell with what Could be... If you're looking for a story where you just get some faceslapping for the antagonists, this definitely isn't it at least.