@lioslin @icarushector
That's an interesting gendefluid theory!
Personally I read it as Chloe crossdressed/pretended to be female for survival and either
a) the cancelled novel just never reached a reveal (Chloe was still going for survival/revenge/manipulating MLs?) which still doesn't solve what you said about stories not usually trolling you that hard, which brings me to
b) the real-world novel/manhwa never thought about the cancelled novel that realistically, just used it to set up discrepancies in MCs expectation/reality
(also, since the manhwa is already an adaptation maybe something got lost in translation?)