WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Episode 1 of The Genius Prince’s Guide to Raising a Nation Out of Debt, "The Prince Who Would Sell His Kingdom," now streaming on Funimation.
In The Genius Prince's Guide, Prince Wein is the heir of the tiny Kingdom of Natra. His advisors, generals and family are all quite fond of him and genuinely think of him as a virtuous prince and master strategist. That's the facade he maintains, but in reality Prince Wein is an emotionally immature lad who has no interest in ruling his own kingdom.
Without any real resources to capitalize on, Prince Wein wants nothing more than to sell his kingdom off to the highest bidder and disappear from the public eye. Only his childhood friend and personal advisor Ninym Ralei knows this truth. With the discovery of a gold mine near the border of Natra and the Kingdom of Marden, the latter decides to launch an attack against Natra. This translates into an opportunity for Wein to be rid of his kingdom once and for all.
While his general prepares for war, he asks Wein to offer some encouraging words to their small army, knowing they're greatly outnumbered by the Marden king's army. Wein offers some run-of-the-mill words of encouragement and wings it for appearances' sake. In reality, he's strongly confident his words will be meaningless because his own army has no chance of succeeding against the larger Marden army. Unfortunately for Wein, his run-of-the-mill encouragement works a little too well -- his army ends up defeating their foes.
Marden's defeat catches both Wein and the Marden army's general completely off guard; such an easy win for a small army in a kingdom that has no real resources is quite a shock result. This causes the Marden general to launch a different, more aggressive attack in a last-ditch attempt to win the battle. Unfortunately for both Wein and Marden's general, Ninym had planned an ambush of her own. This strategy is what ends up securing a victory for the Natra kingdom, with Ninym herself beheading the Marden general.
With Marden's unexpected defeat, the Natra generals grow more confident and ambitious in their goals. Wein, however, is not aware of this, so he makes what he thinks is an absurd proposal: instead of going after Marden while their army is down, he proposes going after a gold mine located in another country. This surprisingly turns out to be the generals' very same idea and they mistake Wein's absurd proposal as evidence that he had studied their plans. Once again, the joke is on Wein as his own army moves forward with the absurd goldmine plan, much to his chagrin.
While The Genius Prince's Guide shows that Wein is in fact as smart as he's reputed to be, he also doesn't invest that intelligence into his own kingdom. Instead, he purposely comes up with absurd plans he knows would crush any other small kingdom, but keeps getting support for those absurd plans. To further bring down his spirit, his ideas are often successful. As such, Wein's "genius" is accidental at best and detrimental to his kingdom at worst. Even with the Prince's desire to abandon his kingdom, his ability to make enemies through dumb luck still leaves his own citizens vulnerable to political unrest and socioeconomic instability.
