I think slogging through some bottom-tier novel nobody else will touch is something that ought to be praised, not a crime that deserves punishment.
That’s my problem with the so-called possession-story cliché. If a novel I’d practically been following all by myself came to a complete garbage ending, then the perpetrator was obviously the author, and the victim was me. This body, right here.
If it had ended as nothing more than a complaint about clichés or narrative devices… if I had been in any position to let it end there, I couldn’t have asked for more.
The web novel I enjoyed reading, “The Young Lady Files Suit!”, also known as “Young Lady Lawsuit,” had a rather bizarre premise: a duke’s daughter at the academy physically bullies the heroine, a commoner scholarship student, and when that stops working, she sues her in the academy’s special court to have her expelled through legal procedures.
Was it honestly fun? I’m… not sure.
If it had been fun, it wouldn’t have remained some bottom-tier novel I was following all by myself. To be honest, I was only reading it because I was interested in the yuri romance between the heroine and the imperial princess who served as her attorney within the girls’ school academy setting, and in the lingering resentment between the villainess young lady and the imperial princess, who were supposedly childhood friends. I never really thought it was a well-written novel.
No matter how I looked at it, the premise was a miss, and the progression was iffy…
Even so, I endured it all because I wanted to know what would become of those three, and I paid for a full three hundred chapters. Even if I wasn’t completely satisfied, I thought I at least had the right to an ending that didn’t feel utterly absurd.
But that ending was…
“Therefore, this court changes the defendant from Elena Keru to Maria von Letiaponk.”
…What kind of court does that?
“After which, I shall proceed immediately to deliver the verdict. The defendant, Maria von Letiaponk, is found guilty of the charges against her. The sentence is… death.”
…And why is the imperial princess, who was supposed to be the attorney, reciting that?
Where’s the plausibility? Until now, the setup was that the academy professors sat as the jury and the headmaster served as the judge, wasn’t it? If the imperial princess could just arbitrarily sentence the duke’s daughter to death in the final chapter without any foreshadowing or explanation, then why did they spend three hundred chapters finding evidence and arguing in court?
Weren’t those two old friends? So why is there suddenly no conflict when she sentences her to death like that, no psychological description, no counterattack from the person on the receiving end? Even if I conceded a hundred times, a thousand times, and accepted that this development was possible… no, it isn’t possible, but still, the heroine’s inner thoughts, or the young lady’s inner thoughts, or the professors’ reactions…
Shouldn’t there have been at least one of those?
It was slapdash to a ridiculous degree. It had never been that entertaining of a novel to begin with, but at the very least, it hadn’t felt like the author was writing with their brain turned off, like some display of sheer stupidity, which made it all the more dumbfounding.
If it had been any halfway decent ending, I was going to let it slide. No matter how much I disliked the ending, I was going to give it a moderate round of applause and move on. Even if everything had turned out to be a dream, it wouldn’t have been this absurd. I might have even felt some sympathy, thinking, I guess they just couldn’t clean up the plot they’d created; it must have been hard dragging a tiny no-name novel this far.
But this, truly, this alone was hard to endure. Frankly, I could have more or less accepted an ending where the professors, who were originally the ones meant to issue the verdict, condemned the young lady. But the fact that the author had gone out of their way to ruin it like this, with no plausibility whatsoever, was hard to forgive.
So I clicked the email address listed on the author’s profile and wrote a complaint email that stretched over seven thousand characters.
From the plausibility of the events that had taken place from chapter one to chapter three hundred, to the foreshadowing that had been scattered throughout and the list of things among them that had never been resolved, to the unexplained emotional arcs and background settings of the characters, I wrote a long petition crammed full of it all, along with my rage.
After completing my great undertaking, I figured I hadn’t done anything that could count as a personal attack or defamation, so in the worst case, my email would end up shoved into their spam folder or trash. Thinking that, I flopped down onto my bed.
“It was still kind of fun, though…”
Well, I had kept saying it wasn’t fun, but that was probably how I really felt.
Would anyone follow an uninteresting novel for over three hundred chapters and even write a complaint email just because the ending was terrible? I had enjoyed it. I definitely had.
It was just that, after reaching an ending like this, I had to say it actually hadn’t been fun… I had to convince myself of that, or else I’d feel too wronged over all the time I’d poured into it…
“I was kind of looking forward to the ending, too…”
Thinking there was no point in muttering any more, I quietly closed my eyes. Not even knowing whether I was hoping for a reply or hoping one wouldn’t come, I quietly sank into a lonely sleep.
Starting tomorrow, I could just forget about a trash novel like this and go back to my everyday life…
Come to think of it, everyday life? What everyday life was that again…? Lately, I couldn’t even really remember what productive things I’d been doing with my time…
For now… once I opened my eyes, I’d be able to sort out my thoughts again. Once I opened my eyes….
When I opened my eyes again, I had become a beautiful blonde girl with drill curls.