- #1
MC's father dies when he's 8, afterwards his mom abandons him to get a better life for herself and he gets taken to an orphanage (later he meets her by chance and she doesn't even recognize him). In the orphanage he meets a fallen noble girl who is supposed to become her uncle's concubine when she comes of age to preserve blood purity in her super duper magic family.
Said girl falls in love with MC, becomes extremely possessive of him and basically forces MC to be in a relationship with her.
She's pretty annoying, but when put into the context of they're both 8 year old's and she's a former noble with a sense of entitlement+MC is too young and lonely to realize how toxic this relationship is, it's believable.
When they are 14 she drags him on a journey to get something that will let them escape from her uncle... MC almost dies protecting her and later wakes up to learn she was forced to go back to her family after the incident. Since he's just a normal person he can't do anything.
2 years go by and she finally returns to the orphanage as a proper noble lady now and a new knight boyfriend. She tells MC her new boyfriend is from an even more super duper family then hers. He saved her from her uncle and she fell in love with him. She realized her and MC are too far apart and could never be together even if they wanted to.
Now she's definitely terrible, but the way all of this is handled is great.
The way they got together, and why the two of them become so codependent on each other is realistic because of they're upbringing. Even the way she ends up breaking the relationship with him isn't done in a b*tchy way, she tells him as kindly as she can that it's for the best for both of them to go their separate ways (Which honestly is the truth).
You don't need to like her (no one would), but you can get where she's coming from and how all this came about.
It's a very realistic breakup situation that doesn't feel cringe for the sake of making MC such a miserable and sympathetic guy.
[collapse] I really like MCs origin story, it's sad but not overly tragic where it just feels pandering. It works for establishing MC as someone who struggles to trust people. The author didn't feel the need to turn him into a complete emotional cripple as a lot of novels often do. Instead he just becomes a person that is very devoted to his work and tries to establish a better life for himself while struggling to form relationships due to his trauma. The writing quality is very good and every character has different and realistic motivations for doing the things they do and the beliefs they hold. I also liked that there is a significant amount of time before MC actually goes to the academy and we get a pretty meaty training arc to set up the stakes. The main part that detracts from this novel for me is that it is entirely unoriginal+fast harem. We have: A magical sword of light, a beautiful master character with a dead younger brother who the MC reminds her of (but she's also just young enough that it's not weird to get with MC), a childhood friend who's indifferent to everybody except MC and uses ice, a pretentious noble girl who falls for MC and starts changing her entire view on life after spending 2 hours with him, a princess that needs saving, this beautiful girl that has a different hair color and needs saving.... You get it. This novel definitely starts falling off once we get to the academy (like c50~). Just too many love interests start getting introduced. We go from 1 girl to 6 in the span of like 20 chapters. It's not to the level of they instantly fall in love with him but it definitely feels like it's heading in that direction faster than you would like. Plus it uses your generic bad reasoning logic of 'I saw him doing one nice thing' and now I'm fixated on this guy and his motives for no realistic reason even though I should probably have better things to do with my life. (Ofc this is also the point we start getting about a million mentions on how handsome MC is) Finally there's this 'MC needs to hide his identity' plot going on once he enters the academy that becomes just a convoluted mess. He needs to hide his identity so people won't target those close to him but there's several people in the academy that know his identity even before he enrolls so what's the point? As it goes on even more people find out and it's a complete mess to keep track of who does and who doesn't or how in the hell this information hasn't leaked?... Plus, it's known that he's the disciple of the strongest archmage who's shrouded in mystery... While at the same time there's a guy with a mask who runs around being super strong. Logic anybody?.... This is one part of the novel that asks for a huge amount of suspension of disbelief out of you and I have no idea why it's even happening... Other than the author thinking that masked heroes are cool.*Someone else here tried to say I misunderstood the novel if I thought this part was badly written. To that person I say go read the comments on the chapters and you'll see your probably the only person in the world who thinks this plotline makes sense.*I read more until c90, the harem element becomes really extreme out of nowhere, dropped it (very promising start but falls off dramatically past c50-60). P.S - if you're looking for the MTL it's under 'Damn Academy'.