Survive as the Hero’s Wife (2018-2021) - :)

One of the biggest problems with isekai romance manhwa lies in the timeline. How do you reconcile dropping an adult into a child’s body and still have a romance develop between them and a peer in the story? There are various ways to navigate the issue, with some being more plausible than others, but the only way to make the plotline feel like it’s not being exploitative is to scale the story over a long period of time. The isekai stories that work the best seem to span decades in the life of the characters. Survive as the Hero’s Wife works on a couple levels, with the first being that the leads spend long periods apart and together at formative moments; and the second that their emotions run on an enemies to friends to lovers arc.

Canaria, our isekai female lead, is dropped into the preteen body of the villainess of a novel she had read. The character she is supposed to inhabit is the ill fated first wife of the crown prince, to whom she is already married when she joins the palace as a child. Cesar, the prince, is hounded by his step-mother the Empress who wishes to dispose of him and install her own son as the crown prince, and Canaria was intended to be one of the tools by which the Empress torments Cesar. Naturally, Canaria understands that as a child she needs to somehow leverage that relationship with the Empress and yet still protect Cesar in order to make sure when he grows up and comes to power that her head is not separated from her neck. Watching her befriend the prickly Cesar over the course of a decade or more in the story is a joy, and I liked the trust he shows in Canaria even when she is forced to have an ambiguous relationship to his enemies. Their romance, when it evolves, feels authentic–partially because it wasn’t what Canaria intended in the first place.

One of my favorite things about this manhwa is that Canaria does things methodically, but she isn’t a superwoman. She’s not a genius at business, or politics, and she’s no great warrior. The female lead is presented as a calm, caring, intelligent woman who is making logical choices in an illogical situation. She’s not always in control, and she gets help from others when she needs it. By being vulnerable to the schemes of others it made me invest in the real danger of her position, and that made this a much more enjoyable read. Canaria obviously needs Cesar, and he comes to rely on her as well; the partnership they established was almost more satisfying to read than the romance, which is rare.