I, The Dragon Overlord Chapter 277 Discussion

Honestly I was surprised while reading this. I started reading just to get some tokens from the site and was planning to at most skim it but it caught my interest. It's a fairly fun little novel to read with an OP and decently intelligent protagonist and some light comedy.

The protagonist is a ever h**ny (yet not controlled by it) dragon with a weird intelligent creature living inside his body that gradually transforms his body according to some experiment by a super advanced civilization, but it's clear it has nothing good in store for the protagonist after his uses are done.

He's acting in line with how a dragon should act, c*cky, arrogant, lustful, loving wealth and valuing face more than a thousand chinese ever could, yet still able to keep some sense and rationality, a lot of these things are actually caused by something akin to instinct, like getting an insane urge to push beautiful females down or to gather and sleep on treasure. He discards his humanity for real, embracing his new identity as a god-like lizard and he doesn't have any real qualms about it.

This novel is pretty much made up of going back to earth to search for energy sources and for resources for his town/future divine kingdom and gathering faith from earth by playing around as a supernatural being and then the bigger part where he's in the other world and focuses on faith building which includes kingdom/city building and getting subordinates and political relationships. Later on a struggle with the gods that has partly already started will take the main light and even further on I bet the advanced civilization will be part of it.

I like how he's ruthless and doesn't get too involved emotionally. He stays quite faithful to his character setting of acting like a dragon should. His focus is and will always be to attain godhood and become the strongest, everything else is secondary and he can abstain from his desires if necessary. It's amusing how things often go back to sleeping with beautiful creatures, recently he even had some fun with an unicorn while transformed into one (dragons can transform into any race and see the beauty of any female, no matter the race). He will actively trick people to get his ways and I've honestly not seen him care about any of the characters more than as a tool or underling, even his harem members are just his property, he doesn't truly love or care about any of them, not even the most powerful one, I'm not sure if he'll ever get into a real relationship but boy does he get laid.

The main issue I have with this are two things. The first is earth. He goes back there every now and then for a while for various goals and honestly you can feel a lot of veiled racism. It's actually nothing that heavy compared to lots of chinese novels out there, but it's still there, mainly in the form of bigoted and prejudiced thoughts about other countries. President trump boy couldn't be more accurate though and he was hilarious, but then he turned serious and we never see that playful s*upid president side anymore. Of course the author set things up so that he could stir up chaos in USA and japan, especially japan while also throwing a few stray punches at korea. Still, it's veiled and not straightforward. In a way, it's actually a pretty accurate representation of what might happen. All in all, it's a minor annoyance, because the protagonist doesn't actually care about china. The author throws a few freebies at them but nothing big, to him china is just another country and he scams them as well to some extent. Sure, china takes a fairly big part in the story but not too much. Japan and china actually seems to end up joining up due the protagonist, which made me hella surprised, the author wants to pin culture against culture or perhaps more apt to say religion and mythology against religion/mythology to get more divinity, so it seems that related countries will end up joining hands. Some people said he just acts in the amazon jungle which is BS, he first ended up there but quickly left the jungle and from the second time on, he will screw around with all countries in the world.

Then to my second main gripe about this story, inconsistencies. The author is one of, if not THE worst, at keeping consistent. The people talking about world building mustn't have read too much or closely. First of all, the world is kinda dull, so is the power system and it hardly makes sense at all. There's little world building or actual explanations to speak of. Everything is quite simple as well, I guess that also makes it easy to read. Well, I lost count on how many times the author contradicted himself. First, he claims that faith can be earned on earth while still there and it actually happens, then he experiments on his next visit to earth and realizes that no, it's impossible. But it's possible for it to pass to the other world. Also, he claims the power on earth isn't there, then says it is, and somehow his spells work perfectly and no mention is made of why he can regain his energy reserves while on earth. When he goes to earth for some wasabi, he suddenly starts causing major chaos and all of a sudden he's not there for wasabi alone but a stable supply chain. An enemy mentioned someone's name as the one who betrayed her, but the next chapter she claims she doesn't know the name of the one who betrayed her and the name previously mentioned was someone unrelated. Author claims his divine authority reaches 100km around the city and he can perceive everything there all the time, even the movements of grass, but 20 chapters later he can only perceive 50km and it gets blurry towards the edges of this radius. Just a few I can remember. Overall, this story can be very confusing and random. The author explains a lot of stuff but ends up saying nothing of substance and most plot developments are clearly pulled right out of where the sun doesn't shine. I have never seen an author so bad at keeping notes and planning ahead, couldn't be clearer he's winging everything.

Overall, I give this a 4/5. I actually think it's more like 3.5/5 for enjoyment I derived but can't give half ratings and I don't want to lower the score even more and give it a 3/5. To be perfectly honest, I am starting to lose interest as of recently. I find the story's potential has been used up already and the author's failure to make the intelligent brain AI creature (kinda system like) a fun character and the MC becoming more and more rigid/serious/boring just ruins things. Sure, cool with a dragon but at this point it's starting to feel like a one-trick pony and that I know what to expect. It's fairly low-level writing tbh. Good to waste some time but certainly not anything close to a masterpiece.