This is a very likable manhwa for the first 20 or so chapters, after which the Endless Parade of Himbos trying to woo our protagonist started to wear on me. I'm on Chapter 68 now and I'm really not sure what to make of any of this. Nothing's really happening, it's pretty clear who the Chief Big Himbo is for the purposes of the story, and the others are mostly treated as comic relief or plot foreshadowing. The protagonist is genuinely cool and the author seems to be quite educated on the workings of what seems to be (as far as I can tell) an early modern state currently in the process of transitioning to a centralized meritocratic bureaucracy, while the old guard of the first estate do their best to keep the pecking order.
And then for 40 chapters we enjoy Wacky Hijinks with a brief interlude of actual story now and again. It's clear that the author is trying to write each himbo in to do something useful, but at this point it's reading like an actual otome game with constant "events" with these men who act like caricatures of their dating sim stereotype. I'm not necessarily against this, but every time the story's gotten serious and actually given Raeliana an enemy to overcome or a goal to reach she.... kind of just solves it. She's great at everything, a chessmaster (god bless that chessboard, that was the first warning on how uneven the quality of writing could be), a great shot with a gun, perfectly versed in noble ettiquette and capable of holding her own if not overcoming groups of Trained Attack Ojousamas in verbal combat, her fiancee pretty clearly unconditionally loves her, her robot himbo bodyguard likes her, her "drinking buddy" likes her, the king likes her (as a brother-in-law), the literal actual pope likes her, and so on.
I was actually expecting a lot more conflict, or at the very least some kind of progress. Instead it's just character interaction (god help you if you're in a pope chapter where he's just kramering around like a jackass the entire time) and then Raeliana muses about how the story isn't going according to plan and she has to fix it, or Raeliana and her Chief Himbo get horny and then Raeliana denies that she likes him because it feels like the story would have absolutely nothing going on if they ever actually got married.
There's potential for a good story here and I'm most likely going to keep reading this but the pacing is like the 2nd arc of an isekai webnovel, the one where the protagonist inevitably just up and leaves the entire setting behind to go do stuff with completely new characters in a different setting, to the point that you question if the author didn't just want to write a new book but was too scared to let the success of their initial work go. It just meanders, and it feels somewhat familiar but the magic isn't there.
