The Perdel Problem
Hello, I’m the last person on earth who gaf about Daughter of the Emperor by Yunsul, the manhwa adaptation by Rino. I read it years ago and it stuck with me like a tapeworm. I still have thoughts on it, unfortunately, that I never shared before because of a lack of fandom but now I’ve resolved to just unleash them anyway because they still clutter up my mind from time to time. If there are other fans still in existence and I manage to reach them, I hope you share some of my thoughts or reply with your own. If not, maybe it’ll inspire you to read DOTE on your own and be drawn into the brain rot so I don’t have to suffer it alone, though be warned that it’s not for everyone and there have been complaints about the art and slow pacing.
In this post, I’ll address one of my biggest grievances with Daughter of The Emperor: Perdel.
Spoilers below. This thinkpiece is very long and still does not contain all my thoughts/hot takes on DOTE. No, I haven’t been tested for autism, why do you ask?
Something that always bothered me in regards to daughter of the emperor was the late climax, Caitel finding out Perdel’s betrayal. It’s a storyline that I have no objections to whatsoever in and of itself but feels very unearned in the story. By this I mean, most of Perdel’s characterization is the narrative telling us he’s smart instead of showing us and him fawning over Ariadna. And him being a wife guy, they tell us all the time.
However, there’s really nothing I can point to in the novel or manhwa that I would consider a display of his superior intelligence. It gets reiterated by other people but the closest thing we get to in terms of showing us is a chapter where Perdel mentions he’s read every book in the library as a kid and like that’s impressive I guess but he’s a nobleman, literally all he has is the time to do that and also like, yeah I should fucking hope a nobleman would be literate. When Ariadna is being taught by him, Perdel is smug over the fact that he knows more about the world than a child Ariadna who has never left the castle. Does that strike you as the mindset someone who’s a true political genius and a pillar of government by himself? No. Politicians love to flex and look down their noses at people but at very least, few of them need an ego stroke so desperately they need to hold information above a child’s head.
Yunsul, the creator of DOTE, and Rino who adapted it in my opinion run into the common obstacle that is writing smart characters while not being Einstein herself. I don’t say this as shade or an insult because I love DOTE and as far as I know, I’m the only person on earth who genuinely believes it’s better than wmmap writing wise. Yunsul and Rino do interesting and clever things with the trope of the tyrannical father and the perspective that DOTE depicts is invaluable to me, someone who enjoys stories about messy family dynamics. The arc of Ariadna going into her father’s mind and seeing him as a vulnerable child after only knowing him to be almost inhuman reads to me like a fulfillment of that thing a lot of children go through of knowing there’s a separation between parent and person that they can never merge in order to get a complete picture of their parents flaws, vulnerabilities, hardships and secrets. Ariadna and Caitel’s relationship is one of the only times that the protective royal father and princess daughter trope has been taken anywhere interesting. His speech to her about all of his flaws and how being a parent has changed everything for him once she finds him in his dreams is pure cinema.
All that to say, I’m not at all insulting Yunsul’s/Rino’s intelligence. What I’m saying is that they wrote themselves into a corner as is common with authors because they’re not infallible with superhuman intelligence. Caitel is very clearly their favorite character in the story and naturally much of her words and story beats serve to further flesh him out. A frequent complaint DOTE gets is that it’s very slow and there’s really no rising action or climax in like hundreds of chapters. It functions as a slice of life until it abruptly doesn’t. It’s as though while writing a very episodic look into the post war life of a father and daughter, she randomly remembered toward the end that some friction and stakes greater than familial arguments and miscommunications needed to be applied, so…that’s where Perdel comes back in.
His betrayal of Caitel makes sense as a concept, his reasoning and the reasoning that narrative clearly wants us to take at face value, is that he never really cared much for caitel and he was just a hard working, patriotic wife guy who just wanted to be Silvia’s hero, the woman he loves above all else. Fine. But there’s a few problems with that, first of which being that him selling out Caitel and Ariadna is stupid in itself. I promise I don’t say that out of bias, one thing I very much enjoy about DOTE is that it’s comfortable with letting people hate Caitel without characterizing them as completely villainous and irrational for doing so. Yunsul seems to have literally no interest in washing away Caitel’s sins and redeeming him completely and that’s uncommon in this genre, it’s part of why even after all this time, I still think of DOTE. But objectively, it is and was incredibly stupid to sell out a royal family that people have come to have love for with a narrative that makes them popular among people, a princess who is hailed as an angel who softened her father’s heart and protected them from war through love alone— to an emergency backdoor heir who is working with their enemy Pretzia (Preazia? idk), who has no experience ruling, who attacks a beloved princess from a distance and who has presumably spent most of his time outside the empire entirely. There is no reason for anyone to accept him as ruler in the era of hard earned and tentative peace.
Even if I look at this from the lens of just shrewd, cutthroat morally grey king advisor, Caitel’s older half brother is more reckless and less easily controlled than Caitel is. Though we don’t know his actual age, or at least I can’t remember it being mentioned exactly, he’s older than 40 and has one heir he sent to Caitel, comfortable with the notion that Caitel might just dash his head off his body like he’s done before with supposed heirs. I don’t think the boy was receiving some great education to be heir, even if the half brother rebel whose name I lowkey forgot because it’s so unimportant (I think they mostly call him the 13th prince?) was planning on marrying and having a legitimate heir, that still opens up succession wars whether he fails or succeeds because his previous child who would be the oldest son, was born from a princess who very obviously has every intention of garnering power through him. Perdel seems to only have the throne to hold over the prince’s head and if he had succeeded in getting it, how can Perdel keep him from doing what he wants? How can he stop him from doing what Caitel did and simply killing everyone who was once loyal to the previous ruler? He’s a mama’s boy, we know that from Caitel using her as leverage but even so, it was weak leverage. Ariadna is Caitel’s weakness, she’s ended massacres and wars with tears alone. Perdel often condescends to her about her talent as a ruler but my own opinions on her writing aside, Ariadna is demonstrably kind, goodnatured, clever, persuasive and well loved. She trusts Perdel and holds his opinion with a level of regard. Practically speaking, she’s the perfect person to prime as a figurehead while having significant influence on her so he doesn’t have to worry about keeping her from destroying everything. To be frank, it’s utter foolishness to throw that away for a man with his own army who is shown to be nothing but untrustworthy, apathetic, greedy, reckless and unscrupulous. Ariadna, time and time again, tempers Caitel into making more sound decisions. Who does that for the prince? Who can keep him in line? Perdel, who apparently didn’t even have the forethought to even try to hide his family for a bit even though he knew Caitel was always going to figure out his betrayal and has no qualms whatsoever about murdering entire families over less? Of course not.
Perdel mentions that Caitel doesn’t care about the country but what exactly makes him think his other choice does? Obviously, it’d be nice if Caitel was some huge patriot with a heart full of disinterested love but most political figures aren’t, what’s more important than that is action. Caitel is shown to be consistently working late and this is shown to us in tandem with his reasoning in one of his POV chapters, that he doesn’t want to neglect his duties like his father, who mostly just whored around with concubines, leaving his job for his main mistress to do. Caitel learns a nobleman fled from his people in an attack, leaving them to fight with inferior weapons and got genuinely angry on their behalf. He obviously has some care for his people even if it’s not to Perdel’s vague standards.
Ironically, though Perdel is the one who apparently we’re meant to believe cares more about the country, we never see an instance on par with the scene I mentioned from him. Referring back to Yunsul’s love of Caitel, many of the things Perdel needs to be for this little climax to happen are things that we’re only told he is but that Caitel is shown to be. Caitel is fleshed out painstakingly through hundred’s of chapters that Perdel is only a minor character in. He and Ariadna are kinda the only people we see do much of anything important for the most part. We’re told Perdel works hard but even Asisi sacrifices his health, body and sleep doing his job, actually, he seems to have more sleepless nights and he suffers them without any complaint. He considers it a privilege and happiness to guard the princess, although it’s not because she’s the heir apparent, it’s much closer to a show of patriotism and love than anything we ever see Perdel do. They quite literally couldn’t keep Asisi from doing his job and as he ages, he doesn’t retire, he trains the next generation of knights. Perdel literally leaves his position as chancellor without having even primed a suitable replacement, something that in reality is criticized within politics. After being fired, he works for a little more (doing what? the vague concept of work and “documents” as always) but this is just another instance of Yunsul’s flaws as a writer in telling us he’s important and irreplaceable rather than showing us. The new chancellor works alongside Ariadna, we’re supposed to believe Ariadna is just not smart enough as a politician (Ariadna mentions that Perdel told her she only has the luck of being born royal which is wild to say given his own position) and the chancellor is much too inexperienced but things don’t go crashing down when Perdel isn’t holding them together. Minor hiccups ensue but even when she is married off, there’s no whisper of concern that with the heir apparent gone and the apparently hyper-competent chancellor retired.
Circling back around to Silvia, who is his apparent motive for doing this, her wish for a better future for new generations to live in is incongruent with the means Perdel took, as the narrative would have us believe, to achieve it. Getting her cousin, Caitel who she already has a report with and obviously cares for and his daughter who she dotes on like her own child killed and usurped by a man who is objectively chaos and instability in a human form, is not a fulfillment of that wish. And Yunsul clearly understands that because she chooses to affirm Perdel’s actions by having her come to bring him food and him vaguely speaking about how they could potentially lose their titles because of something he did. The truth is never dealt with. One of the twins is the only one who knows full truth and he’s pissed about it, but even that is waved away quickly. With the way Silvia is characterized, there would be no way of writing her as being any less horrified without upheaving what we know about her character entirely and that takes chapters that Yunsul was running out of. So for sake of tidying the story up, she leaves the money on the table. She talks to him vaguely about how much better the country is and she believes in and supports him blah blah blah. Very sweet. But…that doesn’t work. It’s anticlimatic. It’s dull. It’s simple. Yunsul clearly had some reluctance to hit the story beats this plot point necessitates to be explored fully and rightfully so, considering it comes up so late in the story with barely any build up. She wrote herself into a corner and then when she suddenly realized that not much has really happened as far as rising action and stakes, she had to neatly square away the betrayal twist in a few chapters so she could finally fit the big happy resolution in. For that to happen, she had no choice but to skip over the natural beats you’d expect this plot to serve, the tension of Silvia finding out and the strain it would put on all of their family, really. Ahin is also related to Perdel through one of his unnamed sisters, though he was adopted as an heir to the holy empire. He’s also madly in love with Ariadna to the point where he can even get slick at the mouth with Havel, who Caitel’s older brother was planning to “give” Ariadna to. I can’t imagine that being already distant from the Vitervo family by necessity of duty and then finding out his uncle risked the princess he’s loved for years would go over easy. It might have political implications reaching so far as the holy empire. Perdel’s treason should have caused a huge conflict in all the dynamics he has but it doesn’t, it lays there like a dead fish.
Don’t even get me started on the assertion that Caitel can’t kill him because that just ties back in to telling and not showing why Perdel is irreplaceable. There’s also a scene just before Caitel finds out where he kills a knight while trying to find the daughter he loves so much it can push him toward violence easily, Perdel doesn’t speak up to prevent that from happening even though he admits it was inevitable he’d find out. He simply thinks that he’ll have to send flowers to the man’s family…I’m sorry, that’s who I’m supposed to think put his all into a more peaceful future? Even from the angle of this vague yandere thing of only doing what he does for sake of his promise to Silvia because he loves her so much more than anyone else and is only loyal to her, her life, her title, her children were all in danger because of him. The only one who really succeeded in bringing about even a slightly brighter future was Caitel, or technically just Ariadna. Perdel struggled to keep Caitel’s homocidal streak under control, he’s shown to get around taxation so it’s not as though he’s selfless when it comes to his own benefits (typically elites, am i right?) and Ariadna can free prisoners just by complaining. Perdel didn’t put an end to Caitel adding to his long list of war crimes, Ariadna did by giving Caitel as reason to stay put, to care about the way he presents himself. Perdel just rattles off exposition and acts generally smarmy to say nothing about Rino’s apparent fondness for having him act weird about garnering the affection of child Ariadna and wanting to spend time with her without Caitel’s consent, but that’s another thinkpiece entirely.
Another thing worth noting is that when Perdel sees the close relationship with Ariadna and advises her not to be so friendly with them. Though I supposed in and of itself, that makes sense for the setting and especially so since there are spies but I get the sense that Perdel in that instance is mostly just speaking to the dignity of her position as a princess. It always irked me a bit, since Ariadna’s relationships with “the help” have saved her life countless times. It’s won her loyal subjects, one of her maids told her she wanted to serve her dutifully for the rest of her life even rejecting the idea of marrying and leaving the palace. Elaine and Serira both have been willing sticking their necks out for her. Serira damn near lost her life protecting her. That loyalty is invaluable and the notion that she shouldn’t nurture it isn’t shrewd, it’s just wasteful. Though that’s admittedly more of a nitpick.
