So random mindless entertainment impulse buy at WalMart turns out to be slightly less mindless than I’d assumed. My Gently Raised Beast v.1 is about an orphan girl discovering she’s a princess when her emperor father has her brought to the palace, but given her peasant upbringing and non-noble mother, no one is nice to her. She makes friends with a kitty, who turns out to be pretty special etc.
Besides the pretty standard plot, the MC’s name doesn’t get much more cliché: “Blondina” may or may not be the translator’s fault but it reeks of basic princess on a fundamental level even Disney wouldn’t sink to. In spite of her name, Blondina is actually far more modern and individual than any Disney princess cliché. She knows people are talking and scheming behind her back, and she knows some of their likely motivations; she actually tells the young duke who invites her to his birthday party and sends her an expensive gift with the invite that she knows his inviting her was probably designed to get a rise out of her younger sister (and succeeds mightily well), Princess Adellai, who might worry about losing her social standing etc. Blondina just want to have a safe place to sleep and food to eat; she’s not out for the high society stuff. That’s also probably why she has the self-confidence also to politely tell off her imperial father about his guess at what her mother Lily may have done after he left. Needless to say, the 11 year old princess makes an impression on both the young duke and her dad to the point where the set up for volume 2 seems pretty obvious but hopefully will allow Blondina to still stand on her own.
She’s not exactly by herself; the beast of the title, who looks like a kitty and acts like one most of the time, can talk and also is actually a Divine Leopard, a mythical supernatural being who can turn into a human, and whose ancestors have had a role akin to being the gods of the realm in the past. In spite of being a power magical being, Amon is also a 9 year-old kid as well as a cat (he’s totally into the story world’s version of catnip). He’s pretty protective of Blondina as they get to be friends, and he even gets a little jealous a few times. This too is clear set up for further adventure, but it would again be nice for him to hopefully maintain and develop a bit more personality of his own.
Walmart getting into Webtoon publications seems to be a pretty good thing so far. Hopefully this continues.