This is amazingly written junk food read.
Definitely scratched that itch of wanting something mindlessly fun. Reminded me a lot of some of my favorite LitRPG series like Dungeon Crawler Carl and The God’s King Legacy.
Some of the complaints about the portrayal of women I felt like were really overblown. There is probably 1 very short scenes of a side character woman being sexualized in a obviously exaggerated scene and weird way that more so added to the plot/tone then anything because of how she then gets killed nearly right away after.
There’s also a Succubus that of course gets sexualized as they do in nearly every medium like video games and movies. This is not news but again the way it’s gone about is clearly meant to be a joke with the over exaggerating of it all. A succubus famously are known to get paired with warlock characters though as they are again for this book, so nothing about that was shocking. None of the sexual scenes ever felt like they were meant to be arousing because it always ended with something very gruesome or completly wild immediately after and were way too short to even attempt to arouse anyone. I felt like this sort of theming with the those scenes were intended to bring back to the old days of games where it was really normal to see some completly silly portrayel of women like this but in this book it never felt like it took itself too seriously.
When 98% of the book though has nothing to do with all that, it’s really obvious some people just got overly sensitive to those short scenes because the rest of this book is amazing.
Its a little slow at first with the world building and getting acquainted with a character who’s figuring itself out. The plot is also clearly aimless because it goes with the whole tone of this idiot character not being smart enough to engage in anything too complex yet.
Overall this is a book that absolutely hooked me. I loved the dark humor with the overly exaggerated violent scenes that remind me how overboard some videogames would go or a particularly wild D&D campaign. I ended up finishing this in an afternoon because this particular brand of humor just sat right with me.
The writing was also fantastic and totally got me engaged to want to see what absolutely bonkers thing happened next. I really liked this concept of ‘what would happen if a completly useless trash mob stumbled into leveling up and gaining awareness’. It was well thought out and felt plausible.
The end was absolutely insane, like, i absolutely have to get the next book immediately now after that.
Totally recommend to those who like this sort of ‘Caverns & Creatures’ type humor to go along with a great world and plot.