I didn’t get far in this. Maybe an hour.
I need a certain level of competence in my protagonists to not hate my time with a story, and Charley was just criminally incompetent too many times to forgive.
Competence is important not just for self inserting reasons though. When the clown sees a group of hostile alien slavers capture and brutalize his crew mates, not only does he not go in guns blazing, he goes in telling them all to freeze (despite knowing they don’t speak his language), and without knowing where the captain is.
Naturally, he gets slapped down like the clown he is. And this is why competence is important, because there’s no way I’ll believe this naive idiot will survive whatever you throw at him. He doesn’t have the ability or nous to.
The final straw was shortly after, where after having several inexplicable phenomena shoved in his face, he arrogantly shoots down the idea that the magic he saw was… magic. Without gathering evidence to form a hypothesis, he just ignores what he sees and ridicules it.
No thanks. This story makes a terrible first impression, one I intend to heed. I’ll be returning.