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#why don't you tax the guy who actually owns the property instead of assuming im well off bc i live in a nice area
understandableparadox · 5 months
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Bottom of the barrel isekai: b-rank adventurer with an evil look becomes a daddy to the protagonist and his childhood friend.
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Well if i'm reading it, that's a goddamn lie, hello! Pull up a chair, drink my tea, piss on my wife, you have the most control in this world because you are the specialist lil fella that can do not a lick of wrong! It's time for another bottom of the barrel isekai review! Today, you can read the title above, go fuck yourself if you think im going write it out every single god damn time.
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Come out boys, girls and some other thing, frogs? Is that what the enbys like these days? Frogs? Anyways let's do the song and dance!
Our titular main character is a dude from japan, they wasted their live away being a disgusting fucking neet and playing video games all the live long day, being a whale in pirates 101 and domeing me from across the map as widow maker on royal!  
Anyways he fucking Dies and gets reincarnated in the game he and his singular friend dearly loved known as bright fantasy, now as we can see in the picture above, perhaps he reincarnated as some sorta giga god, perhaps his party abandoned him because they didnt understand the monumental boon a tax accountant has in another world… perhaps he was summoned by the king to Fuck his wife for him! 
Wait a second… is that a sharp detour…? FU-
Anyways gray is reborn as a Thug Npc, or someone with a dark background, his looks mean, he has a average appearance and some fucking sick shoulder gaurds.  He is a moody lil nobody, which is why it's such an insane hook to see it open with two children begging to be adopted by him in the opening
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Now before you get too scared that we are running into uncharted territories since we haven't had anyone betray anyone and the MC has not turned god inside out, we get to dive back into the cool cocoons of familiar fantasy tropes with the adventuring ranking system. I'm not going to bother to explain it, if you got a letter grade in school then you know what it means. Get close to the A and that means you are the Big Boy adventurer who does the Big Boy quests. 
Now i do appreciate the authors restraint and only making him the Second Biggest boy and attempting to make him Not A Twink
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We almost have a guy who is on a bulk and not a cut, sigh, one day. 
Anyways we pull back ground tall dark and who cares to learn that these two are matchstick kids. Dead broke kids who are attempting to sell flowers they have picked to the people on the street. They were attacked by nobody you are going to remember and get healed by gray. They then decide to beg him to save their ailing parents because I guess wonka isn't around to give golden tickets to get them out of bed or whatever. 
They tell them their names, one of them has the super special name of the Super Main Character. What a coinkyDink. Gray knows that if he is to be a villain (???) then his job is to avoid it. Luckily he went to the Katarina claes school of villainy and decided that ethical action is actually more important than meta narrative logic. 
Cut to Tiny tims lakeside property and we see the rest of the family living the fucking dream!
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I'm so sorry, i have this mental tick where i accidently say “dream” instead of “nightmare”.
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Also Stella is a vampire, why? Fuck you thats why. 
They explain that they have been getting by by the skin of their teeth through a combination of the street urchin grind set of selling flowers and getting church donations. Gray beats up some assumed child abductors outside and gives a somewhat creepy smile. 
Next chapter is about Gray stealing an orcs' balls to create a high end potion (viagra) to nobles so he can get enough money to buy something called a “home”? I'm not sure what that is exactly, i'm not sure what the translator was talking about, i've certainly never heard of someone “buying” or owning one for certain.
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I don't actually have much to say about this guy, this is the guy who makes the ball potion for gray, I just like him, he has a funny face, I like looking at it. He looks like someone I would trade yugioh cards with while he tells me about his super cool oc and I would listen because he is a fun dude. 
But yeah, the manga is mostly about this guy being a slightly more psychotic late stage kratos, being a dad, trying to raise a bunch of random kids he found, trying to give the main character a taste of normalcy before the plot kicks and and shit goes sideways, oh and sometimes he brutally kills people. 
His main goal is to have a family and that's about that. 
So let's start getting into things. 
The title has no interest in creating an expansive world that is original, everything of it is meat burrowed and stitched into its own narrative to support its own plot line and to explain why this happens and why that is occurring at this point. Now I do not believe that this is inherently a bad thing. In fact it's fine. Not every single manga needs to be the next genre defining piece of media. In fact we need things that are average, we need things that build the genre or else we can never have exceptions to the rule.  The magic system, the team system, the classes, the guilds, the plot, it's all what you would expect from something with final fantasy inspirations. Semi (not really) complicated fighting systems that only make sense to pad out the loving tedium of a game. “Complete this many quests of this level to rank up.” “collect this many monster parts to complete the quest” and so on and so fourth ad infitum until god has to pop out and ask what the fuck is going on. 
The art is great in places. Most of it is very bog standard, you aren't going to get that much out of it if you are expecting groundbreaking designs that really make you scratch your chin in wonder at how they made something like that up. But it's very clearly competent and knows how to give each of its characters that needed cover before you read the book. People that need to look like unlikeable thugs look like unlikeable thugs, children that need to look sweet and innocent look sweet and innocent. The artist is really good at goofy expressions but they are a bit few and far between to really satisfy my desire for evil fucked up faces, oh kekegurui… if i didnt hate your plot so much i would be so much more obsessed with you… 
The tropes I've already gone over. It uses every single trope but more so in the way someone would do if they were playing a new game plus. You don't want to do the rigamarole of the heroes rise so you make them overpowered and whatever so they can get to the stuff that you have deemed important, that being fatherhood simulator and housing market simulator. The world is secondary to the plot the author wants so they grab the tropes they want to ensure they can focus on that part of the story with impunity while hand waving some other things and give ol daddy gray his badass moments to make the editors happy that this is infact enough of a power fantasy. You know, to keep those freaks that actually buy the manga happy. 
As for kink stuff, none that I can see. The author only seems to want women to fawn on the main character so they can complete the golden vision of the dead emperor abe of the nuclear family, perhaps hoping to tempt his blessing from beyond the grave… 
This was a little bit of a boreing read. I cant entirely recommend it, but if you want to see some edgy boredline twunk be a dad to a bunch of random kids he adopted then yeah, go for it lmao. 
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