Review:
Li Yu is an 18-year-old guy reborn as a carp in the danmei novel he read (called "The Tyrant and His Delicate Concubine," I think). It's some kind of gamified rebirth - something called the System tells him that he must either change Prince Jing's personality or he, Li Yu, will die. To accomplish his task, he has to become Prince Jing's beloved pet fish and fulfill various other quests and subquests.
In this particular volume, Li Yu must somehow save the life of Prince Jing's cousin and only friend, Ye Qinghuan. In return, Li Yu will get to spend increasingly longer periods of time as a human, which will make future tasks much easier, but could also make things more complicated if Li Yu is thought to be a yao (if I remember right, some kind of dangerous supernatural being).
The title makes me wince (by the way, Prince Jing's disability is that he's mute - he communicates via writing and a servant who understands him and his wishes very well), but I'm so glad I took a chance with this series anyway. It's delightful and, so far, pretty fluffy.
There's court politics, but it's relatively uncomplicated and features a smallish cast of characters, compared to some other historicalish danmei novels I've tried. It's a clash between princes. The second prince is the unacknowledged Crown Prince. The third prince wants that spot and is being helped by the sixth prince. Prince Jing, due to his muteness, can't be the Crown Prince, although he's a favorite of the Emperor's. Prince Jing's love interest in the original book, the "delicate concubine," happens to be the person the third prince is in love with.
The setup is paper thin - there's no real reason why Li Yu ended up as a fish in this book. He's not a superfan of the book, he just happened to have read it, is all. There also isn't really a whole lot of info about Li Yu's sexuality - we know he read a danmei novel, but that doesn't mean he's gay or bi. That said, he recognizes Prince Jing's attractiveness without any particular inner turmoil. Still, at this point in the series he has no real reason to expect that he's going to be matched up with Prince Jing, because, you know, fish.
Particularly at the start, Li Yu doesn't have a lot of tools at his disposal to get things done. He's a fish. He can swim around, interact with Prince Jing in a limited way, and do his best to look cute. He finds his new existence mildly embarrassing but gets over it pretty quickly. All of the System talk reminded me of MXTX's Scum Villain's Self-Saving System - in SVSSS terms, personality-wise Li Yu is basically Airplane Bro, cheerful and kind of cute.
Prince Jing is the smart one in this series, which helps make up for Li Yu's limitations. He figures a few things out pretty quickly, not that Li Yu realizes it.
Overall, this was so much fun that I immediately went on to the second volume after finishing the first. Li Yu is dumb and adorable, and I'm enjoying the fluffiness of it all.
Extras:
A couple full-color illustrations (one of which is just the cover illustration), black-and-white illustrations throughout, and an appendix with a character, name, and pronunciation guide, as well as a short glossary (which I realized, while writing this review, doesn't include the word yao).
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