I think the whole reason authors avoid mls who have children with dead wives, is because they don’t know how to write a proper love storyline between the new wife, the fl and the ml, without having the to overcomplicate the problems of the fl not feeling good enough or just be a replacement if the ml really loved his first wife. That’s why if the fl is the second wife, usually the first wife isn’t loved by the ml either because he was forced to marry her, she was evil or it was just an arrange marriage.
In I become the villain’s stepmother, the son is the ml’s son from his first marriage. The ml didn’t really have any feelings for his dead first wife nor did he care about her. Into the light, the fl’s dad seemed to have loved both his first wife and second wife (I can’t remember since it’s been awhile since I read it)
Is she smart enough to realise the mage was trying to get one over on her, or too stupid to not be insanely suspicious to the ML? Because that intro section where she apparently didn’t tell the villagers to send the knights her way, or told the guy about the tattoo made her seem like a blithering idiot. Which I could live with, tbh, I can go for an idiot protagonist lucking her way through life. But don’t then act like she’s outmanoeuvring high ranking scholars. Pick a lane.
Whilst I’m here, why are there so many of these where the title is ‘I’m the (step)mother’ but the story tells you five minutes in that the kid is actually the child of the ML’s dead sister or brother. Is this some kind of bizarre purity culture? Just give the man a dead wife. Especially since the dead sister ends up functioning in exactly the same way a dead wife would.