Akutoku Joou no Kokoroe
The Evil Queen's Beautiful Principles

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I don't really review anything, but some parts of this series made absolutely no sense and infuriated me so much that I just had to for this series. And since this series has no reviews, maybe someone looking at this series will see it and it will save them from sharing the headache this series gave me.
This is quite long and focuses on the romance, so if you want the gist of it without going into the romance part, just read the first section below.

-----Heavy spoilers ahead-----

The story was way too rushed, it should have taken longer to take down the 5 houses, just 2 ... volumes for this story was not enough. The timeframe is also confusing; time is rarely mentioned so you aren't sure whether a couple days or a couple months passed since the last event. Taking place in only 1.5 volumes and time rarely being mentioned, it felt like Luxeria took the throne then took down the 5 houses within just a few weeks. Though in the epilogue 3 years later, it is mentioned that Luxeria took the throne and made the kingdom stable in just 3 years, so it very well might have been just a couple of months or so.
The conflict with Seldin in the last 1.5 chapters is also very rushed. Seldin is scared of Luxeria and her magic after she uncovers their child trafficking plot, so they declare war. The war is basically decided in one very short battle, then there are a few skirmishes mentioned later that we don't see, but they're nothing notable.
There's also one short part where Luxeria has Alicia sneak her out into the capital for a day of fun. There they run into a small boy that was kicked out of his village due to his magic. Luxeria decides to adopt the boy, promising to raise him well and make sure he learns to properly use his magic, returning to the palace with him. This is never mentioned again.
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The political parts were quite fun, getting to see Luxeria outsmart her opponents and get her way was very entertaining. Unfortunately, (for me) this is overshadowed by how terribly the romance was handled. Romance isn't the main focus of the story, but it is still quite important, and none of it makes any sense.
There is so much attention given to Alicia, Luxeria's lady-in-waiting. It feels like the author wanted to make Alicia the love interest, but decided to/was forced to change it last minute. About 60% of vol. 1 is nothing but showing how close Luxeria and Alicia are. A couple characters even comment that they think there is more going on between them than just friendship. Then throughout both books, it is constantly shown how much Alicia cares for Luxeria and how Alicia is the only person Luxeria can truly relax around.
Yet for some reason, Luxeria is in love with Wilhelm, a man she played with for a couple hours when they were like 6 yrs old. She fell in love with him that day and stayed in love with him despite that being their only real meeting. And that's about all you ever see of him because he is absent throughout literally almost the entire story, that is not an exaggeration. Luxeria meets him very briefly a couple times before her coronation, then he is absent for the rest of the series after she "kills" him on her coronation day until almost the very end where he wakes up.

Then there is the part at the end when Luxeria's excessive use of magic catches up to her and causes her to almost die on the battlefield at Seldin's border. Luxeria's magic weakens, giving Alicia back the childhood memory of when she was killed then Luxeria brought her back to life with the Eternity sword and allows Wilhelm to wake up. Alicia can roughly sense where Luxeria is because of the remaining magic from the Eternity sword within her, so Wilhelm uses his wind magic to get him and Alicia to Luxeria quickly. There they find Luxeria on the verge of death. As Luxeria's consciousness fades, Alicia cries over her, then Luxeria comments that she wishes the last thing she got to see was Alicia's smile. And with Wilhelm being Luxeria's Prince Charming, you would think he would be the one to save her, but no. It is Alicia who saves her with the leftover magic of the Eternity sword. Once Luxeria is stable again, Alicia dives into Luxeria's arms and holds her while crying, while Wilhelm is off to the side and says, "welcome back."

After Luxeria returns to the palace and is almost fully recovered, Wilhelm decides it is time for him to leave since he should have died along with his house. Alicia passionately tries to keep him from leaving for Luxeria's sake, but he still leaves. Afterwards, Luxeria reveals she was secretly watching the exchange. Alicia embraces Luxeria in tears and Luxeria embraces her back, saying that Alicia's passionately display made her very happy.
Alicia gets so much attention throughout the story and Wilhelm gets absolutely nothing. Everything about him makes him seem like an afterthought, as if parts of story were hastily rewritten to add him in because someone decided Luxeria shouldn't be in love with her female lady-in-waiting, then they forgot to take out all the parts that show Luxeria and Alicia getting closer.
What sense does it make for Luxeria to have so much chemistry with Alicia only to have her be in love with a character that is in quite literally less than 5% of the series?

Once Seldin is settled and Wilhelm leaves, the story ends since Luxeria has completed all her goals and the kingdom is stable again. It then goes to a *very* short epilogue 3 years later, where Luxeria tracks down Wilhelm to a small village and gets him to come back and have her happily ever after. Not at all does this feel like a natural conclusion to their story, it feels more like it was tacked on at the very end just to reaffirm that Luxeria really was in love with Wilhelm because at this point you still have almost no evidence of it besides Luxeria saying she loved him.

After the epilogue is a short bonus chapter that shows Luxeria and Wilhelm now fully in a relationship and a bit intimate with each other. Here Luxeria asks Wilhelm why he is in love with her. She says that they only saw each other once and the few brief meetings they had when they were older was to talk politics, so she has no idea why he loves her. And to no one's surprise at this point, the answer is a lazy "it was love at first sight." And, of course, she says the same thing back.
Wilhelm then recounts all the things he did after the day they played together long ago, how he searched for her and ended up accidentally witnessing the previous king's assassination. Years later he discovers that his family and the other 4 Great Houses killed the king and vows to make sure his house would fall when Luxeria takes the throne.

All of this is stuff that could have supported Wilhelm's character throughout the story. Even if he was still absent the whole time, the reader still might have had some kind of understanding of why Luxeria fell in love with him long ago if some of this information was giving in the main story. Why is Wilhelm's story relegated to a bonus chapter when he is supposed to be the main love interest? Some pieces of it were mentioned by Oscar Weston, like how Wilhelm helped with his house's destruction, but the rest is not.
This bonus chapter also shows Luxeria and Wilhelm on a secret date in the capital. This also begs the question, if Wilhelm is the main love interest, why is there not a single romantic interaction between the two until a bonus chapter? The only way a reader would even know that Luxeria loves Wilhelm throughout the entire story is because she says so, there is no evidence to back it up. This date and the hugging they do at the beginning of the chapter are the only bits of actual romantic behavior we get from them in the entire story.

It honestly feels like Wilhelm could have been left out entirely and nothing would change. The only impact Wilhelm had was that he made it a little easier for Luxeria to take down House Radford and used his wind magic to get him and Alicia to Luxeria at the battlefield. Besides that, he makes absolutely no mark on the story at all, he could have been left out entirely and the only thing that would have to change is how Alicia got to the battlefield to save Luxeria.

By the end, it genuinely looks as if something like that happened. That Alicia was originally intended to be Luxeria's love interest, then for some reason that had to be changed very late into writing, so Wilhelm was rewritten to be put to sleep rather than die so he could end up with Luxeria at the very end. Either that, or the author is just totally incompetent at writing romance. If the romance was going to be handled this badly, they should have just left it out altogether and spent more time on the political parts.