real af, nice to see isekai where society and class distinctions matter, rather than being window dressing for the plot. it's cool to see a heroine who understands how hellish living at the bottom of early modern aristocratic society is.
these dudes act fucking weird though, i don't have any experience with BL but the female characters here feel much more like actual human beings than mio or klein (not even going to mention evans and yurgel/yurigel). the seemingly "good" male characters are all competing for ash's attention like this is an otome game setting and the bad ones might as well be regina george for the sheer amount of petty bullshit they're constantly involved in. this was nice for a realistic feeling at the start (the scene where ash witnesses the execution of the other maid and has blood on her outfit for the entire day was a nice detail), but i started losing interest in the story after realizing that all the nuance of the initial chapters had given way to watching ash try to dodge boys like a professional harem manga protagonist. is mio gay? is he bi? why is he so weirdly possessive of ash? why does he flip from being an innocent maiden to a Cool Guy shoujo manga protagonist doing cringey shit like putting his hand on her face and telling her to "sleep more" while sitting on her bed? shouts to klein, the saddest bastard alive, sitting in someone's darkened room for an entire night while they're out on a date with someone else.
it's cool if none of the characters are likeable, if that's the way the story's supposed to go. this author does a great job of constructing extremely hateable characters with very little shock value needed, and indeed the banality of yurigel & evans' psychological abuse hits harder than if they were just threatening to kill the protagonist all the time like ive seen in a few other otome game isekais. however when it comes to the characters that are ostensibly on the protagonists' side (we're only up to ch23 so far so who knows maybe mio's actually just a robot with a sword and klein's actually just a creepy stalker), there's nothing to really go off of. it's not like mio's been deprived of screentime either, he just seems to legitimately have nothing to say or feel aside from a vague sense of affection for ash and IMMEDIATE HORNY MODE for yurgel.