REVIEW: The Disabled Tyrant's Beloved Pet Fish: Canji Baojun De Zhanxin Yu Chong, Vol. 4 (book) by Xue Shan Fei Hu, translated by Mimi and Yuka, illustrated by Ryoplica

The Disabled Tyrant's Beloved Pet Fish is Chinese m/m (danmei) fantasy romance. I bought my copy of this volume new.

Review:

This final volume in the series picks up where things left off during the hunting party. The sixth prince makes a last ditch effort to snatch power away from Prince Jing. Things, of course, don't go the way he planned, but that's definitely not even close to the end of all the palace drama - there are hidden enemies still to be uncovered, more relationship developments, and all those secrets that the System could have revealed to Li Yu ages ago if he'd just used those System rewards earlier.

Li Yu had a more active role in the story this time around. It was nice that, for once, the solution to his problems wasn't always "wait for Prince Jing to fix things." It turns out that even Prince Jing can't fix everything.

It's amazing how much drama the author managed to cram into this last part of the story, although, on the whole, this series was the very definition of fluff. There were no problems that Li Yu and his husband couldn't conquer together, and when they were finally to a point where all the hidden enemies had been dealt with, Li Yu started happily started working on things like improving the rights of widowed women. 

The series that this most reminded me of was MXTX's Scum Villain's Self-Saving System, what with its System, original plot vs. altered plot, and panicked main character having to deal with developments they never saw coming. Personally, I feel that SVSSS is a better and more emotionally complex story, but I did at least appreciate the lack of explicitly described horrifying sex (my brain involuntarily trying to figure out how the merman stuff worked doesn't count). 

Although this didn't end with bonus stories the way MXTX's work did, there was a similar-feeling fan-service-y development that resulted in Li Yu and Prince Jing getting a brief trip to modern China. The author really tried to wrap everything up here. 

Extras:

A couple color illustrations, black and white illustrations throughout, a few cultural footnotes, a glossary, and an appendix with character names and very brief descriptions and a pronunciation guide.