First half is great! Second half ruined it.

The first full half of the book is excellent. It’s a story of a man making reasonable choices and decisions based on limited information, making the best of a bad situation, and doing his best to game the system to survive. It’s compelling, it’s not bogged down with the normal ham-fisted isekai tropes, and best of all, he doesn’t play the idiot white knight. I was soooooo relieved and happy to have stumbled on this book and thoroughly enjoyed the first seven hours of this book.

However at the start of the second half of the book, he finally meets up with other characters. Awful, painfully tropey, ham-fisted, 2-dimentional, idealistic, idiotic, white knights with eighth grader syndrome that cajole, threaten, disparage, distrust, slander, accuse the MC, and otherwise make themselves the most unlikable ‘good guys’ imaginable. And he decides to white knight for these jagoffs, sacrificing his own gains for these morons because ‘they need his help’.

I would be hard pressed to come up with a more effective way to make me regret investing in a story or character than this 180 in the direction of the story. The amount of disgust and disappointment that this transition managed to make me feel is impressive.