Is This Wasn't in My Adoption Plan! Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Quick facts
Format	Manhwa, 70 chapters
Run	2024–present · ongoing
Community score	AniList 6.4 · MangaUpdates 7.0
Where to read	WEBTOON — official

Overview

Aerin spent a decade of her past life cleaning up after Duke Havenik Brauno's mistakes, only to be murdered by him for her trouble. Reincarnated as Aerin Brauno, an illegitimate child of the same family, she's horrified to discover her new adoptive father is the very man who killed her. Determined not to repeat her past life's mistakes, she plans to use her foreknowledge to escape his control entirely — but the duke, to her frustration, doesn't intend to let her go that easily.

What looks at first like a revenge-adjacent regression story turns out to be something closer to a reluctant family drama, with Aerin's wariness and the duke's slow, stumbling attempts to actually parent her forming the real engine of the plot.

What it does well

Aerin's distrust of the duke isn't abstract — she has a concrete, personal reason to want nothing to do with him, and that grounding makes her guardedness feel earned rather than just a genre convention. The story's real achievement is in how it handles the duke's turnaround: rather than snapping into a caring father figure overnight, he stays oblivious and immature for a real stretch of chapters before the story lets him grow, and that growth is shown incrementally rather than delivered as a single epiphany.

That patience pays off. By the time real warmth starts to show between the two leads, it's been built on visible chapters of effort rather than asserted by the plot, and the art does a lot of work selling that shift through Aerin's body language easing over time.

Where it falls short

The cost of that patience is exactly what you'd expect: the duke's early cluelessness is played for long enough — one reader clocked it running through chapter 29 — that it risks testing the reader's goodwill before the payoff arrives. Anyone looking for a faster-moving plot will find the reconciliation arc's deliberate pace working against them.

The wider Brauno family and political backdrop also take a back seat to the central relationship, leaving supporting characters relatively thin so far. And since this is still an ongoing series with Season 2 in progress, the larger mystery behind Aerin's original death remains mostly unresolved — this is a story that asks for patience on more than one level.

Verdict

This Wasn't in My Adoption Plan! trades a fast plot for a slow, believable thaw between a wronged daughter and the father figure who wronged her, and that trade mostly pays off once the duke stops being an idiot about it. Worth reading if you want a found-family arc that earns its warmth — just be ready for some early-chapter frustration before it gets there.