Rebirth: Monarch of the Dead

This slop, despite the setting in western medieval fantasy (more like Victorian/Napoleonic age since the interior look much more modern compared to true medieval age), bear all the tropes you will typically find in a modern day Manhua with the familiar rigid power rankings of a cultivation novel and superficial/shallow political drama. The only exception here may be the younger sister being swapped to an older one.

However, instead of continuing to yap about the Manhua tropes that everyone have known to death, I am going to hone in on one of the least talked about (but still illogical and tiring) tropes within this genre, something I call “Regression of Power”: when a character is heavily hyped as a legendary assassin, veteran warrior, renowned expert, etc., but conveniently turns out to be only around the MC’s current power level when they finally appear (e.g. Renny or even the instructors). Their reputation and supposed experience imply that they should be vastly stronger, yet their actual strength mysteriously regresses to whatever level is necessary for the MC to fight them.

A related problem is that higher power levels practically don’t exist as actual threats until the MC reaches them. The story can establish entire realms above the MC (Such what we have in this story for Legendary, Saint, Sage, and Grandmaster) as supposedly inhabited by overwhelmingly powerful beings, but those people conveniently never become relevant until the MC is strong enough to fight them. Instead, every antagonist the MC encounters somehow sits just above his current level, making the world’s power hierarchy feel less like an actual hierarchy and more like a difficulty slider that moves upward alongside the protagonist. This is even more ridiculous when MC is surrounded by noble houses with supposedly strong reputation and hundreds of years of history.