Review Detail of Scoutside in Vampire's Slice Of Life

Alright. This is the third novel I've ever taken the time to review, but hopefully people who are considering whether or not to read this come by here and see my assessment and have some help in figuring out whether or not this is their kind of bag. There are obvious spoilers, so if you don't want that, you shouldn't continue reading. I am 600 chapters in, and there are several hundred that I have not read, though I intend to do so. If at the end of those chapters I feel that this review was unjust, unfair, or incomplete -- I will edit it appropriately, or remove it entirely. The story starts off pretty amazingly. For people like me, who love OP MC's, this was a great thing. He had everything handed to him in the first few chapters and was set up for a golden road experience. Unfortunately, around one to two hundred chapters in, the quality in my opinion takes a turn for the worse. There are several contributing factors for this, but the major problem is a lack of actual follow through on any of the things that are set up. There are numerous examples of this in the novel, but the two most prominent ones are the Pet he gets in the beginning, and the Elven Continent arc. He gets an insanely rare wolf breed in the early chapters and it's set up to be his growing companion throughout his adventures, and then you never hear anything about it until five hundred chapters later when the author goes "Yeah, I changed my mind about that, so you won't see her again." The Elven Continent was set up to be this sprawling adventure arc where he would make insane amounts of money and grow independently alongside his best friends. Instead, he gets kidnapped by a friend of his mothers when he gets to the continent, gets tortured for a few days so she can "teach him a lesson in morality", then he goes to sleep for like a year, skipping everything that happened to his friends and their project. Why did he go to sleep, you ask? I am glad you inquired. Because despite being told he had literally limitless potential and the fact it took him like three hundred chapters to get out of the starter ranks of cultivation, he did so slightly faster than his friends and put too much strain on his body and was forced to NOT cultivate for one hundred years. ... So apparently being gifted in cultivation in this novel is a bit of a curse, because if you do it too well, you end up having to slack off while everyone else catches up to you. Admittedly, he'd still be one or two ranks above the norm by the time he can begin again, but that's still a weird choice to go with just because you didn't want to write about cultivation for a while. So yeah, narratively the author has some pretty severe attention spam problems. But beyond that, the most important characteristic is whether or not his fits your definition of a true harem or not, or what you consider acceptable in it. If you think of harem like I do, where there is a central figure managing multiple honest and open relationships with different people who are all dedicated to him and only have intimate moments with him, then this novel will frustrate you. The wives do in fact mess around with one another when he is not present, despite the fact the author repeatedly asserts that they are all straight as an arrow. That's .. not how heterosexuality works, but whatever. Similarly, the MC talks about his devotion to his wives and how he has no reason to seek anyone else out, but he ends up fingering his aunt within two chapters of meeting her because he doesn't want her to think of him as a baby. ... Yeah. Similarly, there is plenty of general smut that just has nothing to do with the MC. Other characters fucking random other characters, loads of Yuri-centric content in a novel that repeatedly asserts there are no gay or bisexual characters, etc. If this isn't up your alley, I'd dip. Obviously there are plenty of justifications that can (and I am sure will be) made regarding the things I've brought up, but it is an objective fact that they all occurred the way I've said, and if you're not interested in those qualifying reasons then I'd recommend you look elsewhere. But if you're into a novel that has plenty of violence, torture, hypocritical "anti-hero" worship, and open smut for the sake of smut while there is a shocking lack of Slice of Life in a novel *named* Slice of Life, then this is definitely for you. I will say, if there is truly one redeeming quality of this novel, it is in the characterization. All of the women are genuinely unique and appealing and have their own traits they lean into, and are not the copypasta cut-outs that a lot of harems rely on. Well, at least until Lucifer shows up. She's kind of the worst.