Too Late for Regrets

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Too Late for Regrets is genuinely the worst manhwa I have ever read.

I kept reading purely out of disbelief, waiting for the moment where it might somehow improve. Instead, I found myself constantly thinking, where is this story even going?? I could not understand the author’s vision at any point, and the further I read, the more unpleasant the experience became.

2/10 Plot:
The plot is technically unique, but only because it is relentlessly miserable. The story follows a woman who is the illegitimate child of an emperor from another nation. She is hated her entire life, never shown love or care, and is eventually sent off ... to marry a cruel man. This setup is familiar in many stories, but where those usually offer emotional payoff or character growth, this one offers nothing.

The man she marries is one of the worst male leads I have ever encountered. He is not cold in a tropey, brooding way. He is simply empty. He has no charm, no depth, and no redeeming qualities. His entire personality consists of hating bastard children due to “trauma” that he somehow justifies hating all human beings who are born outside of wedlock. And he is not briefly cruel or emotionally distant. He is consistently vile to the main character, treating her with open disgust for 95% of the story.

He goes off to war, comes back, sleeps with her, and still treats her as something repulsive. He ignores her for years of their marriage. She is so miserable that even after giving birth to his child, she chooses to end her own life. Only after she dies does he suddenly realize that he loves her, a woman he was never once kind to.

His behavior toward her is irredeemable for nearly the entire story, but somehow he becomes even worse after her death. He turns into a monster whose only defining trait is an obsessive fixation on someone he treated like furniture. Something to be used and discarded. His shift makes zero sense and is so abrupt. It's just incredibly poorly written.

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*Spoilers* if you want to know what a monster the ML is.

Through convoluted and poorly explained magic, she ends up bodyswapped with another character. Her husband becomes convinced she is still alive because her body does not rot and because someone steals it. He spirals into madness trying to find her. He conquers her homeland, murders women who resemble her, and leaves destruction everywhere he goes.

At one point, he encounters a woman who runs a shelter for illegitimate noble children and believes she might be his wife. When she is not, he murders her, despite her having no connection to him at all. He continues digging into magical nonsense until he finally finds the main character in her new body.

Despite how traumatized she is and how desperately she wants nothing to do with him, he does not care. He previously forced himself on her during their marriage, and when he meets her again, he attempts to “seduce” her, even making a comment about how he'll do anything she wants of him EVEN going sooooo far as to “service her down there” 😐

This is said to a woman who literally ended her life and left her child behind just to escape him. Yeah, dude, I don't think she wants you to eat her out bro. He is disgusting and pathetic. He gets so many panels of him just talking about stalking her and how much he supposedly lovvessss her now.

This character does not even function as a yandere. He spends most of the story loathing her and treating her horribly, only to suddenly love her with no believable development. The story claims to be about regret and it being too late, but nothing about him actually changes. He does not become a better person. He simply decides he loves someone he never bothered to know.
The second male lead is weak and useless, doing nothing to protect a woman he supposedly cares about from an unhinged duke. The world building is also absurd. This man runs around murdering women who resemble his dead wife, yet faces no consequences. No political backlash?? No unrest? It is completelyyy ridiculous.

I have never hated a male lead or a story more.

Art 4/10
The art is fine. It is not bad, but it is not memorable either. It is certainly not strong enough to justify sitting through such an unpleasant and poorly written story.