- His self-deprecation is a way of acting submissive. He starts out genuinely insecure due to his innate circumstances, but that won't last. After suffering too much, he'll climb toward the light as soon as he gets even a little sweetness. I'm terrible at writing blurbs, and the blurb isn't the whole story. The main text takes precedence.
- My take on Western fantasy. The author likes plain, straightforward prose.
Blurb:
In this kingdom, when people hear the word "wizard," they think first of filth, darkness, and ugliness, like rats crawling out of a sewer.
Yet in a small, remote town, there is a wizard whose appearance is nothing like a wizard's. He looks more like an apostle of the light.
He has a handsome face, eyes as still as a lake and a captivating, deep blue, and hair as white as snow.
His personality, too, is nothing like that of a selfish, self-serving dark wizard. He is resilient and kind.
If it weren't for the conspicuous, pathetic black magic he performs every day in his crude thatched hut, people might almost doubt that he was a wizard.
People also discover that this male wizard is destitute. He has to take jobs every day just to scrape by, and he's young, with no family or support.
It's not as if he hasn't tried doing other things, but whatever else he does...
It's really hard to describe.
Even harder to describe is how, despite being earnest and even working hard, he somehow never manages to do anything well.
...The only things he can truly master are a few simple spells of black magic.
It seems that he became a wizard simply to... find a way to survive.
Everyone is at a loss about the situation.
It would be going too far to condemn him outright.
So they turn a blind eye.
Besides, his simple, pathetic dark magic has never hurt anyone.
The remote town tacitly accepts the presence of this male wizard.
Blurb from the submissive's perspective:
A stroke of luck amid his misfortune: orphaned as a child and left destitute on the streets, he was discovered to have some aptitude for dark magic, and a kind old dark wizard took him in.
Though he had only a little aptitude. Not much at all.
But for someone as useless as him, learning a bit of black magic was the first real survival skill he'd ever acquired.
As a good-for-nothing, he once thought his life would always be like this.
Having experienced what it was like to have nothing, he was already quite content.
Life was hard, but it was full and peaceful enough. Though it was full of petty troubles, small moments of kindness and little successes could always give the faint happiness in his heart wings to fly into the sky.
Until a letter from the imperial capital arrived in this remote town.
Having grown up in a dark swamp, he had long since accepted that life was full of thorns.
He had never imagined that someone who lived in the light could ever dare to think that one day he would become so, so... enamored with the light.
That person's golden hair shimmered in the sunlight, and his golden eyes were like a flawless, bright moon.
Amid the cheers of the crowd, that person gave a faint smile.
Though they were only a few steps apart, the beauty and goodness felt like an illusion.
Only then, in a daze, did he realize that the dark magic that had "saved" him, the magic he had always been grateful for, had also become part of the root of his cowardice.
It had sunk deep into his chest, taking root and spreading wildly.
He knew that the person he gazed at so longingly was separated from him by the distance between two worlds.
Notes:
1. A groveling romance with a bittersweet flavor. The love interest in the blurb has the most scenes and is the default lead, but there will be other love interests at different stages. All love interests are sexually pure.
2. A handsome saint who seems to love all humanity but actually looks down on everyone (the one with the most scenes) x a handsome male wizard who survives by scrounging for food and knows how to read people; the submissive.
I can't guarantee whether this groveling romance will end with the love interest who has the most scenes being sent straight to the crematorium. In any case, the submissive will get a happy ending.
Theme: Breaking through the thorns
