毒を喰らわば皿まで

Protagonist Andrim is a prime minister who’s been having his way with the country for the past couple of decades. When the crown prince breaks his engagement to Andrim’s daughter and sentences her to become the holy sacrifice to a dragon, Andrim remembers his past life as a Japanese man, including playing out the events of this world in an otome game his daughter got him into. Now he’s determined to use his (newly recalled) knowledge to make sure they survive and get revenge.

To be clear, this IS a revenge isekai. Andrim is out to save his daughter and ruin her enemies, and he’s not concerned about other people getting hit in the crossfire. If you’re someone who thinks protagonists shouldn’t hurt innocents, this book is not for you. Shortly after the halfway point I suddenly started to really dislike Andrim and wondered why I was reading this book. It’s not like I didn’t know he was clearly bent on revenge, and I’d been wondering where the scheming would lead. But this scene crossed a line for me. (Warning: innocent people suffer forced bestiality due to the protagonist) Oh yeah, it made me dislike the ML too. I was about to rage-quit at this point, but then I went and read reviews on chiruchiru (like, “should I be looking here for content warnings from now on?”) and there were so many reviews from people who liked it that I started to second-guess myself and wondered if the end would make up for the middle. Upon reflection, I suspect that reading speed is a factor here — Japanese readers who can finish the book in a day probably zoom through that section so quickly that most of them don’t care. (But also, there were actually some users who left warnings that some people will find parts of this problematic)

If it wasn’t for that part, I would have considered this a 3.5 star book.

Once I got past that part, the rest was okay. The end of the main plot went as one would expect based on the setup. What happened after was a surprise.

The BL side of this book seemed weak to me. The first half has basically no BL, and then suddenly there it is having had only the faintest foreshadowing. To me it seemed like there was almost nothing about how or why the couple fell for each other. There are explicit scenes but little romance. Also, as a native English speaker, I found the use of katakana English in those scenes somewhat awkward. :(

I found a ton of new vocabulary here, so I’m glad I read this digitally instead of on paper.