Jan 08, 2026
Well, that was fun.
If I had to say which out of your stories has been my favorite so far, I think I'd choose this one. However, I'd say that the "best" one so far is the harmonic future one.
Something I think applies to all of your stories is that it really feels like you're having fun, which, at least to me, makes any work of fiction inherently more enjoyable than the alternative. There are many works in this contest alone that I've and think, yeah, this person knows what they're doing, but it also feels like depressingly joyless competence if you get it.
Because of this, I also feel like I myself am having a good time while reading. Yours are some of the few stories on this site where I actually laughed, and I think this one is the funniest so far, admittedly on a meta level to some degree. Somehow, you manage to write complete insanity without making it feel like you're trying too hard or that it went over the random XD limit. I don't know, that alone is an impressive level of internal consistency, and I mean this in the best way possible.
Like other people commented, it does feel like conflict is very nebulous, though I also think this one is your best plot-wise in a sense that, no offense, there's actual cause and effect for once. The issue I see here (and in a lot of other stories I quite enjoy, and I'm pretty sure my own writing too :P) is that it takes way too long to get started. My guess is that the first few chapters were intended to be the honeymoon period where zane and chika are frolicking around and falling in love, but like Kaze and Oreoless said, it's TOO smooth.
At first, I thought the rabbit-chan element was fine because the story allows for a sillier antagonist, but she was too incompetent to feel like a real threat, and since there's literally nothing else going in, it feels as though the story is "going nowhere". Chika and Zane do have their chemistry, but the instalove kind of works against it. It doesn't help that the concept itself is overidealized to the point that it breaks any suspension of disbelief, which weirdly feels worse because of the internal consistency I mentioned earlier.
In this "world", it IS possible for a NEET to win a webnovel contest, go to Japan, and have higher creative control than 99.9999% of published authors in history, and that's including self-publishing. I think we all know that winning a contest doesn't mean anything when, even in a best case scenario where your work were to be licensed, it's likelier than not that (speaking in general just to be clear) said work will be canceled within a few volumes. Even native creators face a strong uphill battle, let alone us. But sure, this happens in this story. The fantasy is part of the appeal, obviously, and that's fine. The issue is that, added onto what's probably the most shameless fetish plug that I've seen yet, the levels of self-indulgence transcend language.
If you think about it, the story really is "weeb gets to love their dreams with little to no opposition" for tens of thousands of worth, and the thing is, at least Zane DOES have character to him and legitimate traumas and motivations. I think that along with rabbit-chan, he gets the best closure in the sense that there is a clear beginning and end for both of them, and an ARC.
Meanwhile, Chika... well... I won't say that she has no character or personality because that's just not true. I actually like how shamelessly horny she is. The story is very male-coded in the way it's told, so it's refreshing to see a love interest that actually uses her own agency to chase what she wants without it feeling like the usual LN trope of passive shy uwu boy whose patience is rewarded by a girl with no ambitions outside of getting (his) fucc. In a vacuum, I could see a story told purely from her perspective with her legitimately going through obstacles to get the man she loves, and that's based.
BUT.
Even with both leads having sustained, clear motivations and actively pursuing each other, their relationship itself is flavorless. I felt nothing after the HEA. This is one of those cases where I feel like a couple is individually more interesting than when they're together. If they have no internal friction, it feels like I'm sitting on a train with a couple cuddling next to me and going 'I love you I love you more' for 2 hours in a row. I'd say I want to rip their hair off, but Chika would moan.
I would think that since you have certain fundamentals down by now, it might work to try tackling weaknesses for your next work. You've been a finalist before, so imagine if you fixed common complaints. I get it's fun to be self-indulgent from beginning to end and I'm 100% guilty of it, but I also think it would work, for both of us, to try and work on a proper structure to avoid the meandering allegations. I do think that especially Zane is an improvement from past works, as well as rabbit-chan, so there's that.
To be honest, while I think you're nowhere near as guilty of this as 98% of webnovel writers, I also think that especially the friend characters tend to kind of blend in together. My litmus test for this is 'if I were to swap the mcs for this story with the mcs from another story of the same author, would the story significantly change?'. Writers in general tend to have clear patterns with their characters, and there's nothing wrong with that, but there's a line between similar tropes and ctrl+ving the same people with different names over and over again. You're not quite there yet, but I'd tread carefully. I think a strong writer's voice helps assuage this to some degree, but ironically, there's a lot of stories, even published, where said voice is so strong that it feels like it's possessing the characters.
About rabbit-chan, I think her getting radicalized and the subsequent fallout was realistic in a surreal way, but it's as out of nowhere as her subplot in general. I guess it would've landed better if she'd had some kind of corruption arc rather than just be unhinged 24/7, I don't know. Maybe that's what you were going for, but if so, I personally couldn't see it. Also, while I think the resolution works in a vacuum, the antagonist's own plan imploding with (basically) NO INPUT FROM THE MAIN CHARACTERS could work and might be pretty interesting, but due to what I mentioned before, it just sounds like another non-issue for zane and chika's hornyposting. This kind of dramatic irony works great... if it feels like it's been set up and not accidental.
tl;dr plot
I kind of felt like I was eavesdropping rather than being part of the story at first, but I thing I got the hang of it. This is also the first entry I've read where they're currently in a relationship, so that's interesting. 
