- #1
Am I missing something?The main character does not make clever use of his meager strength. He hasn't done a single clever thing since the very first fight in the story. Every fight since then has increasingly been "drown my opponent with a massive, overwhelming quantity of water because I forgot every single one of the other literal hundreds of applications of the most versatile classical element". Even something as simple as the high-velocity water bullets are off the table, and you better forget about optical refraction, body puppeting, manipulating poisons and other liquids, weaponized osmotic pressure, rapid phase change, sound generation, expedited healing, combining mist with optical refraction and water clones for convincing fakes, complex ice sculpting, forcing water into a target's lungs and then creating ice blades from the inside, maximizing flow friction to generate massive heat... even the mildly clever things he did at the start of the story (mist, icicle spears, chilling a target) haven't been used in over a hundred chapters. As a theorycrafter, it's frustrating.The haremettes are likeable and relatively three dimensional, but the main character is so aggressively donkan that his relationship with them hasn't changed in any way since they joined his party, in spite of their best efforts to the contrary. Worse, artificial and contrived coincidences have started appearing to maintain the status quo, which is a pretty clear indication that the author has no intention of changing this and also one of the hallmarks of bad character writing.It's to the point where I legitimately do not understand what all the 5 star reviewers are seeing. Am I missing something? Does a massive plot twist happen in (another) 100 chapters and the protagonist suddenly becomes five times smarter, learns how to express his emotions like a normal human being, and decides to actually acknowledge the feelings of all the girls falling in love with him?Don't get me wrong, this story is pretty well written, and the characters are at least less flat than you'd see in most Isekai. In fact, I would actively recommend this story if you just removed the current MC and had his childhood friend or merchant friend take that role instead. I just don't understand what people are reading the current story for, given the absolute lack of anything resembling romance, a villain worth mentioning, or an even mildly creative fight scene.