It gets somewhat better as you continue the story, FL is very dumb but you can grow to enjoy her character a bit more after the stuff she does. She doesn’t particularly care for the men and just wanted to enjoy being on her own. I would say this story mainly focuses on this type of zombie survival scenario. But I agree with everything you said. Most characters that are introduced can seem kind of compelling but after joining FL, only turn into mindless npc’s. That tree spirit was pretty annoying, although I will say it’s still technically a baby but….why does it expect everything to be perfect. It even shows more respect to every other character but the FL. The men in this story are idiots and despite how dumb FL is, shouldn’t end up with any of them.
I actually really appreciate your explanation of how you see it and how it will go on from this point, but to be honest, that just confirmed my point. It sounds like a mid story at best, even when I try reading your words with as much positivity in mind as possible. All the negative points paired with a "you grow to enjoy her character a bit more" (and I'm sure that "a bit more" may vary, and some enjoy her a lot, that's totally fair enough!) don't sound like a good, enjoyable story to me, but one that can be tolerated and I got too much on my reading list to endure all the crap in this for maybe some future "interesting plot" and a somewhat "enjoyable" brainless FL, surrounded by useless asshole MLs.
PS.: As for the little tree gremlin, I can somewhat tell how it happened. I'm going out on a limb here, but I'd say the author tried to "subvert expectations", since normally, you'd have devoted simps or "children" of sorts around the FL. "Course corrections" like this, however, often end in overcorrection and that's what we see here.
"Not crawling up her ass" and "disrespecting his life saver and lifeline" (because I'm 100 % sure that, given enough time without her around, the corruption would simply return, as it would re-infest itself due to the corruption all around Maron Manor) are two inherently different things. This is, like, the regular attitude the evil mother, stepmother or foster mother (can all be replaced by father as well, obviously) has about starving the child when they aren't "useful", despite them doing most of the work and whatever comes out of said work is not even needed for the child, but for the parent. When the child tries to sneak something for itself anyway, they're berated and accused of stealing.
Does that sound familiar, anyone? I know this is trying to make it look funny with banter, but they don't really banter either. She just laughs off everything that shitty goblin says or does.
Think about it: It's a tree spirit. It shouldn't need to live in a house, yet it demands it. She doesn't get to eat off the stuff SHE made possible to even grow in the first place. SHE started the fire in the house and gets yelled at, when it goes out, when both of these assholes were outside when it went out, so how was it her job to keep it going in that moment? She also doesn't need to eat, as I already pointed out, so he's doing it for himself. He could use the things he farms to "pay rent", because he lives for free in a house that wouldn't be supporting any type of life if it wasn't for her. What else does he even do when we say "chores"? It's not like there is so much to do.
Like, I'm not saying her dumb ass isn't useless outside of being able to purify, which is something she really didn't do jack to obtain. There are free buses everywhere in the "Isekai" genre, no matter if it's from Japan or Korea. But this one takes the cake - she literally purifies in her sleep, and as it sustains her, it would mean it's even a positive thing without drawbacks visible at the moment.
Anyway, she may be useless, but apparently, she does things anyway. So what's with this broken treatment?
I've just forced myself through chapter 3 and as of now I have learned the following:
- The Protagonist is dumb to the point of having Hailey simply lose her fucking memory and showing she's a good person at heart would have made a thousand times more sense than going the cliché "transmigrated from another world after reading a novel"-route.
- OG Hailey was apparently used by others; seeing from that short scene of her crying blood about the mountain of corpses she laid down at his feet, it was Rykard who was especially guilty of pushing her. Does that exempt her from her wrongdoings? Surely not. Does he have any reason to come and try to murder her? Not in the least.
If the story now, after starting very clearly with the knowledge that the MLs were all aware of what Hailey was doing, went on to claim they didn't, that would just be very silly.
And since he clearly did know, whatever happened after he betrayed her was something he had coming. So why, in all fucking blazes, would the FL, who read the damn fucking novel and knows the truth, say that "he's the only real victim"? No, he's not? Not by your own shitty claims, he's not.
Why did he even wait an entire year to come after her? And don't tell me he's been in the damn forest for an entire year, because no way he would have survived that, and even if he had been able to, he wouldn't have taken a year to find that stupid estate. I can only assume he might have been cursed by the real Hailey and lost his family somewhere in between that year. But the Protagonist didn't do anything, so either she did so before the change of souls occurred or it wasn't a curse at all. I mean, I have no clue what that was about his family, so I'm talking out of my ass here; I get it. But she killed people for him, he knew about it, then pretended it was awful and is angry now that it happened to him.
- There's a tree spirit that will yell at the single entity it ever knew that was willing and capable of purifying it's living space and itself. It is alive, ONLY because a single person took it with her, when she walked away. It is alice, because that SINGLE person was not a bad person. Yet it uses every possiblity to shit on that single person and insult it.
It even insults that person for not being able to start a fire well, when she apparently was the only one who could start a fire in the first place. She has to haggle to have some of the harvest they have, due to her freeing up a field, because they don't have enough fields to farm on. They'd have none without that single person cleansing it in the first place.
The tree spirit can only really fucking farm, which is funny, because as a tree spirit, I'd have expected some level of magic. If that's not possible, being somewhat able to know how to treat plants is the literal minimum of what I'd expect. A tree spirit that throws a fit because there's no fire and fights over a blanket, has the nerve to call a regular human, who made this entire place a place supporting life in any shape or form, useless. A tree spirit, that should be used to living amongst nature, no matter the weather.
Since she likes eating, sure, but doesn't really need anything like food in the first place, apparently, I'd have thrown this ungrateful asshole out long ago. There's a line between banter and being a prick, and it's not even that thin of a line, but it's been crossed by miles. I'm not saying he should crawl up her ass, but his attitude it dogshit.
The protagonist is dumb as fuck (who in the world doesn't know what a flintstone is? And seeing how he knows what this house is called, how does she conclude that Rykard has lost his memory??) her "companion" is a douchebag, and the guy, who's problably the ML, is a piece of shit as well. I skimmed through the comments and apparently there's some cool story ahead, but a story is carried by characters and those aren't it.