"This hit my radar as being "similar to Beware of Chicken". Which did this a disservice as I was expecting charm, wit, and heart. It has none of these things.

I knew I was in trouble when we started meeting the people in charge. The "nobles" are obese. Not Rubenesque, obese. Morbidly obese and they code that as attractive. Which fine, that can be a thing. Only it makes no sense in the setting. The problem is that nobles, particularly in a feudal society like this one is, are the warrior caste. So having them be not just obese, but desperately venal as well had me looking around for where the power structure lay that would underpin this gross (heh) imbalance (heheh) in privilege.

I wish it hadn't turned out to be slavery of the "cultivators". There's this collar thing that subverts their power, somehow. Because magic or something. And that made everything fifteen times worse because these gross, venal, self-involved, self-indulgent cretins are lounging on the back of super-slaves. And I'm sorry, but that makes every other cue for a light-hearted tone into something desperately tone-deaf. At least for this reader.

And since I had already realized that Fischer's interactions with people were pretty much all surface anyway, and that his version of "charm" is using Aussie colloquialisms non-stop despite nobody understanding them, and that the author's view of how economics works is, in a word, limited, well, it added up to a big fat dnf with a one-star chaser.

Slavery is a big fat hairy deal. And that puts it at odds with the tone/direction of this story at its start. Fischer is defined by his desire to maintain a laid-back lifestyle centered around fishing. Slavery is a hard counter to that tone and in a major way. Even if this story shifts to Fischer becoming a big ole abolitionist and freeing all the slaves, that's tone-whiplash from where we started. And if the story is anything else, it's a stupid travesty and Fischer is a waste of space who doesn't the deserve leisure, rest, or good times that are his chief preoccupation."