- #1
I felt stopping one and a half volumes into the English translattion wouldn't do the review justice, so I MTL'ed to c136 to complete the second arc. In short, the novel has an interesting premise, but IMO the author focuses excessively on how the MC stereotypes all his friends into their "roles" and how the MC forcibly counteracts any deviations of the characters from their roles. This is shown particularly in Arc 2, where the author basically writes themselves in as a new character, whose sole focus is to write a romcom story where the supposed "harem protagonist" gets NTR'ed. In that vein, IMO the NTR tags are valid, especially considering the author's original intent writing the novel. The author retcons a LOT throughout the novel, anything from a chapter where the MC tries to say he loved his sister and two female friends but didn't love love them so it's technically not NTR because NTR only applied to love love and not, you know, love, to a chapter where the MC goes on and on about how the heroine is indifferent instead of hateful of to the harem protag, only for the heroine to actively proclaim her hate for the harem protag under multiple occasions in subsequent chapters.TLDR, interesting idea and the actions the characters take aren't horribly unrealistic or unideal, but the novel drags on for way too long in the MC's low self-esteem, judgy behavior, self aggrandizing speeches, and retcons. 3/5 for me.