This week for Light Novel Thursday I’m covering a series that is most definitely not for children as it has some very gruesome scenes. It’s time for Monster no Goshujin-sama, or The Monster’s Master translated literally, by Higure Minto!
Plot Synopsis: An entire school has been tossed into a fantasy world without knowing what happened. Suddenly monsters attack and kill a lot of students, but then other students started to fight back with cheat-like abilities. A few days later, everyone has been divided into the Stay Home Group and Exploration Group. The exploration group wanted to see if there’s anything else to find and take care off in the forest that they are in. They are armed to brim with cheat like abilities and makeshift weapons. The Stay Home Group doesnt have cheat abilities…. after the Exploration Group leaves, the stay home group gets split as a riot ensues. Student killing student, girls getting raped by their fellow classmates… and our protagonist, Mashima Takahiro, starts to run towards the forest. After running, evading lots of monsters… he winds up in a cave, exhausted and almost ready to die… when a Slime approaches him. It first tried to eat his hand and all he could do was “…please… someone out there… help me….”
Plot: So uhh yeah, the plot is pretty dark and that’s just what happens in the first few pages of this story. Needless to say that it gets worse, and while I found the plot to be engaging it is definitely very, very dark. I won’t go into much spoilers, but if you can read the title you can probably guess that Takahiro is a monster tamer and tames that Slime. One other thing of note that should be mentioned is that rape scenes are in this series, but never perpetuated by Takahiro thankfully.
Characters: I love that the main character isn’t stupidly overpowered, nor does he gain stupidly overpowered abilities through happenstance. That being said some of the characters we encounter are absolute scum and you just want to bash them their heads in. Lily is probably my favorite character, although the why of that I’ll not discuss.
Art: The art is great, but I wish I could have found more of the illustrations.
Overall: If you don’t mind the plot being incredibly dark, you’ll love this series.
For those who like: Fantasy, Alternate World Transportation Stories, Magic, Dark Plots.
Not for those who don’t like: Any of the above.
Wow I’m pleasantly surprised to see someone regularly posting about various Light Novels and Web Novels in an English news site. Light Novels are primarily a Japanese/Eastern thing so it’s great to see it brought to more attention. I’ve read through most of your posts and caught up on the available fan-translations I could find haha.
Monster no Goshujin-sama is one I particularly like. The whole “transported into another world!” setting is very overused in Light Novels, but I really like the dark twist MoG gives. The main character is clearly not a hero of any kind, and instead relies on his monster family to survive. The world they’re in sucks and everyone is in a desperate battle for survival.
Out of the translated chapters I’ve read, Ch 14 really stuck me. It’s the first chapter that has a different PoV, following Lily instead of the MC. In this chapter we really see the inner workings of Lily’s mind and it’s quiet fascinating. One of the problems with Web Novels is sometimes they go overboard on the whole harem aspect, replacing quality with quantity in an attempt to reach for a broad audience. This leads to an unfortunate symptom of female characters being cute little things that lack characterization. In MoG ch 14 though, I could really feel Lily’s emotions and character. Little things like how she feels about her master and the way the people (or rather, the person) she absorbed affected her mindset really brought the character to life for me. I hope MoG continues to flesh out the various characters in this way. Needless to say Lily has become my favorite character in this LN hahaha.