Lazy Dungeon Master

If it wasn’t immediately obvious, this is an isekai. And a power fantasy. Those usually aren’t good signs, but this is surprisingly readable novel series. Not a masterpiece, but it has pretty steady entertainment content. So let’s start with the good parts. Given that the protagonist is more of a manager/dungeon master, the encounters and action is told through strategical point of view. This makes things interesting as there usually aren’t asspulls – instead you can see the planning, usage of resources and real-time tactical decisions. What I really have to praise is that of the plot devices that are used for victory, not onlyare all introduced beforehand, but many are also later reused instead of being just one-off plot solvers. That is a style of writing that is present throughout the whole plot, not just in battle tactics – same as the devices, many of the side characters serve the plot beyond the arc they are introduced in, unlike how it is in many other LNs as my pet peeve. While we’re at the characters, let’s backtrack to the protagonist figure. He is the archetype of “lazy but secretly clever and efficient” that we frequently see for self-insert MCs. But he is way less annoying than those characters tend to be. Firstly it’s because it’s true, he simply loves sleeping, its not just some cope for not being social or something. Secondly it is actually thematically relevant to the worldbuilding. The secondary characters are fairly nicely done too, with plenty having distinct memorable personalities, even if it’s based on some character quirk. Going back to the story, I appreciate that there aren’t really fillers and the volumes do actually build onto themselves. Even things like the cliché beach episode are actually remade into plot-forwarding sequences. With some LNs you could skip whole volumes and even arcs and not miss anything important, but that’s not the case here. I know this sounds like something that should be obvious and the bare minimum, but yeah that’s just how bad the state of LN market is now that I need to point this out. I’ll also point out that I really enjoyed how battle sequences are written, it’s not boring, it has a flow, it’s not just describing events in monotone as is the trap many authors fall into. It’s also nice that for once the romance part of the plot actually progresses continually instead the classic “token pretty girl likes oblivious protagonist and they finally officially get together at end of the last volume with no step in between”. Also nice that it’s actually reasonable for the girl to be attracted to the protagonist in the plot instead of being paired together just for existing. The worst part of the novel is undoubtedly the “stock” part of isekai fantasy. Mainly the slavery fetishization. Slavery especially at the beginning is a source of a lot of fanservice as it tends to be in works like this. Initially the world is described as cruel and violent, where it’s accepted that people just have little to no value and it’s perfectly acceptable and in your right to treat your slaves as a literal trash. The novel has one of the most disgusting descriptions of misstreatement of slaves, such that it wouldn’t be out of place in some dark fantasy work. That by itself isn’t wrong, but it’s a huge tonal whiplash compared to rest of the novel which is mostly easy-going and even humorous. It doesn’t even make sense for the slavery to exist in this world to such extent given that magic gives quite decent technological advances to the society and also given the huge cultural impact the “Heroes” (who are isekaied people from Japan) had on the society of this fantasy world throughout literal centuries. Surely some moral values like “guys maybe we shouldn’t be using slaves as literal meat shields or as a torture stress ball” would imprint at least a bit given the high status given to Heroes. It makes sense for the Demon Realm to treat lives like shit, but it just doesn’t fit in with tone of rest of the world and really feels like something that was thrown in from the start as a “staple” and only realizing later that it wasn’t the most thought out addition. But talking about Demon Realm, and as to not end on a negative, another achievement of Lazy Dungeon Master writing is to come up with a culture that actually feel alien. Not just a perversion of human culture, but a whole separate thing with their own traditions and mindsets that feels incompatible with human understanding of world but doesn’t feel contradictory to itself. Also it’s not demon as in “devil” but as in “monsters”, so it’s not the overused le morally grey characters/le demons are actually the good guys trope, it’s just actual culture of a different, fantasy world. So to summarize, this was entertaining to read, although it’s no masterpiece – it’s simply some popcorn fun. It’s basically more light-hearted Overlord. However I would only recommend reading this if you are able to tolerate some hijinks typical for the isekai genre. If you really hate isekai, this will not change your opinion. If you hate most isekai, give it a try but if it doesn’t interest you by the second or so volume, don’t force yourself to continue, it won’t be some hidden gem for you.