pick me wildflowers instead of roses

wait. fuck. im putting thought into this

male!Gloria wants some kind of revenge for all the Boys Will Be Boys nonsense and so he hires people to find ANY kind of dirt on Peneleos and—

ho...

hohohoho...

so that's how the guards think of their future Duke, eh?

the folder of evidence winds up on Derricka's desk and it's full of pictures of half naked knights homoerotically wrestling with her twink brother in a sailor suit looking cute and pathetic, scratching and biting like a wet kitten, as he is fighting for his life not to be crushed under their full musculous body weight

Derricka *pussy throbbing* I need to teach that boy how to pleasure a woman or he will bring shame upon this family

So you colonized an entire country, forced the people into slavery and then fought in an inheritance battle to drop it at this moment? What???

I know Callisto isn't a ruler like he's a warlord but God that sounds so stupid even for VADD standard. The only good thing I hoped (which won't be true) is both of them die then and we have Delman liberation

That man has no sense of responsibility. Honestly I don't know what the author was going for with his character. If he hated Eorka so much, he should have surrendered to Delman or secretly worked with them. (What was even his plan? Risking his life saving Eorka from the destruction by the "savages" to then destroy it himself? Why not skip the middle step and join hands with Delman? The enemy of my enemy is my friend.). I don't find it impressive when a male lead who barely had any attachment to his life and killed/would have let himself be killed without regrets before meeting the heroine, would now kill and die for her. It's not impressive anymore if suicidal/homicidal are already the ML's default modes. Becoming the Emperor was his life goal that he was working towards since boyhood and he was going to throw it away like nothing. I prefer a complex character whose goals stand in conflict to the female lead or at least don't always align with hers.

I have the feeling this scene in combination with the other also served to show Callisto chosing Cha Siyeon over his mother. In the OI world a male lead is sadly not allowed to put another woman above the female lead, even though it would have been refreshing to see a man valueing platonic love over romantic love and holding onto a promise he made to a dead loved one years ago. Callisto being ready to sacrifice everything he had build up for the past 8 years to join a girl he met a few months ago in death, makes him seem easily swayed. Choosing death instead of life would have also meant disrespecting what Cha Siyeon would have wanted (him living well and becoming a good ruler). That's why I can't read the readiness to commit suicide as romantic. I'm not even sure if it feels like the most fitting action to his character either. I would have expected Callisto to hunt down those who drove Penelope to suicide and given them the most painful death imagineable and then try to resurrect her. If he was just planning on stabbing himself to death after Cha Siyeon was pronounced dead he would let their enemies go unpunished and give them what they wanted. Neither vengeance nor suicide were what Cha Siyeon wanted, but if he was gonna disrespect her wishes either way he should have gone for that option that ensured at least justice was carried out.

Cha Siyeon was against a violent murder but that doesn't mean he couldn't have put every suspect under house arrest and interrogated them separately and given them a punishment like prison time or the seizure of their title/land/slaves. I find it odd that he did not detain them, since every family member is a suspect not just Ivonne. Murderers can be often found in the victim's inner circle. They tend to be the victim's partner, friend or family member. And the arrival of their real daughter would have provided them with a motive to get rid of the fake one. Plus, if Callisto had been politically savy he should have realized that he could have used that excuse to neutralise the threat that a powerful noble house that had not pledged their loyality to either prince in the succession struggle posed. If he had carried out a throughout investigation and uncovered details of Penelope's abuse and put the Eckart duchy in a tight spot, he would have scored more points with me than when he was wasting his time at her bedside and kissing her nonconsensually after she had rejected his proposal. Callisto could have killed two birds with one stone, but the author made him put his other character traits (like his cunning and his ambition, which he must have had possessed to get this far,) on the shelf for the sake of a mid romance.

Callisto says he wants to destroy the Empire but then he does the opposite, he endangers his life to fight a war he doesn't give a fuck about and conquers one of the most powerful neighbouring states and in doing so makes his Empire more powerful than ever. So you could say he's at least a skilled imperialist right? Except no, he was too preoccupied with his love life to care about the news that a rebellion was brewing. So you could say he's at least a good lover, right? Well, then why was he's not accepting Cha Siyeon's rejections, stalking her, kissing her without her consent when she's unconscious and even trying to kill himself without investigating her motives and avenging her?

I hated how Cha Siyeon said Callisto was the one who suffered the most after waking up and how the author suddenly turned a woman's suicide attempt about the feelings of a man.

Callisto was not trapped in a cage. He is the Crown Prince. He is a celebrated war hero. He possessed half of the mechanisms of state power and state violence and in the The Lady's Love Project uses them with a sadistic brutality. At the very latest at the age of 18 he should have been horrified at the genocide of Delman and stopped. His mother is the Emperor's lawfully wedded wife and from a high house. Unlike Penelope, he never had someone attack him for his parent's origins. Existential fears like how to get enough food, clothes and shelter were unknown to him. No family member was secretly lusting after him and torturing him because of their incestuous feelings. He was not abandoned by the people he loved. Callisto was not an uneducated orphan girl who had no choice but to grab the hand offered to them or rot next to their mother's dead and diseased body. From early childhood he received a good education and military training. Had he chosen to run away, he could have lived a carefree life away from the Queen's evil schemes. Inside his army and outside he has supporters and allys. He has enough power to provocate his brother or kill a random noblewoman without second thoughts. When he said they were similar, he spoke with the delusion of a man in love, because really they were not really similar and even Cha Siyeon said so when they talked about their mothers. Callisto is reading into surface level similarities that are actually awfully common (dead parents, children striving to become what their mother's valued) and exaggerating them in order to read a deeper meaning into them.

But right now we aren't comparing their past childhood traumas, we are talking about their suffering during the poisoning arc. Callisto's anxieties were centered around the rejection of a woman he desired (not the safety and the continued existence of the country he fought so hard to "protect" or his life that the Queen targeted) wheras Penelope went through the psychological torment of a death row inmate trapped in a timeloop. She poisoned herself because at least that way she could have some control over her own life, even if it was regarding its ending. And if you turned back to Iklies' parts, you could read her vivid description of the immense pain she was feeling in her last moments.

Callisto did not suffer more than Penelope, his suffering was not even remotely comparably to hers, and for Cha Siyeon to play down her own excruciating pain and feeling sorry because a man felt bad for watching her suffer that pain, is such an awful choice of writing.

(Sorry for trailing off but I had to share this frustration. The poisoning was badly handled.)

INCEST: PART THREE / Death is the only Ending for a Villainess

Just because the older relative chooses not to throw them down and rape them on the spot, doesn't mean the younger relative won't notice the strange energy between them and remain unaffected. It is not as if frustrated desire has never lead to abuse in different forms. The older relative might find a different outlet for this desire. This can lead to psychological abuse or physical abuse or indirect sexual contact. But it could also take on forms that are much more subtile: an adult expressing sexual ownership over their child and preventing them from finding love somewhere else, the erasure of bounderies between them, the refusal to teach their child the necessary skills that would help them become an independent adult and live on their own without the total dependence on their family. Even if we were to go the nicest route and the older relative relinquished control, distanced themself and chose never to touch the girl or boy, then they would still reject a familial role and withold the love and guidance the child needs from their parent/older sibling etc. This can lead to the child or teen in question feeling unloved and neglected and seeking out a closeness to the relative who has become distanced, while trying their hardest to ignore the terrible dread of something unknown that is building up in them.