Or a pretty decent one at that. I know that trying to find a perfect one can be hard. What I mean by this is that the manga/manhwa/novel must have enough story elements to balance itself out. Where it cannot be too depressing, filled with mostly stupid/airheaded characters, too much comedy without enough substance to back it up, not too centered around cultivation all the time, etc. Here are some examples of settings I've come across, if you're interested in finding out more: Spoiler Setting One: Say the initial premise of one novel was the ML underwent massive grief, and spends their childhood training like hell in order to enact revenge against those who wronged them. But the tone of the novel cannot be forever dark/depressing, always 100% of the time letting readers know of the ML being trapped in their dark thoughts. I must be able to see some great character development from them, where somewhere along the way they come to terms and become mentally stronger for the better, eventually developing a clear level head. Some examples of series that I loved: Hundred Blossom Palace | Hero? I Quit A Long Time Ago | The Last Human Setting Two: On another hand, a novel cannot have too much stupidity and fluff as in my classic otome novel I absolutely detest: Bakarina. Katarina is an absolute airhead, and from where I dropped it, she never ends up developing any awareness that she lives in an actual world where she can easily die at any given moment, and still faithfully believes in the setting of the otome game. I found it ridiculous to see the capture targets fall in love with someone like her, to a FL who doesn't give an actual effort in strengthening herself physically or magically, or even intellectually to become skilled in noble politics. Like, she DOES know that she has to eventually... get married... at one point in life? Where's her awareness as a woman? Meanwhile we have Burikko Villainess, an otome novel with a FL that actually comes to terms with her second life, and dedicates her new life into magic. Plenty of romance and game world setting introduced too. It's a pity this novel got axed by the publisher. Setting Three: Novels that have too much grinding, Too much grinding, and you'll bore readers half to death. The novel version of The King's Avatar had too many arcs and chapters dedicated to character levelling, where I just wished at times time skips happened. Kumo Desu-ga literally had the FL trapped inside a dungeon for over its first 100 chapters without no human interaction what so ever, focusing on her monster evolution in 100% detail. Even I found myself to be surprised as to how I managed to last 100 chapters of boring dungeon grinding. Release the Witch then introduced too much technical engineering terms which frankly, I gave zero shit about. Anyways, yeah. So in your opinion, what series do you think has a perfect balance? I have some novels I've recently hold dear to, listed on my signature. And also a rather... long... PTR list, but let's ignore that for the time being. In terms of my ideal protagonist, is that they have a Heroic personality. Meaning that despite whatever shit they've gone through in the past, they're still able to hold up mentally well in front of others and influence the people around them in a positive way. They can still crack under pressure, sure. But most of the time they won't let anything stand in their way. And that's about it from me. I'd like to say no GL/BL since I don't find myself reading those, but why not? If they have a good balance story wise, I'd like to hear it!