Actually went through a lot of the web novel between this and the last chapter. For a bit, I hated the mc. He's kinda a manifestation of everything that makes an isekai harem mc shit, turned up to 11 in that version. Only felt better about him after reading the web novel for From goblin to goblin god. Don't know why that author thought a revenge story about a human reincarnated into a goblin against adventurers who killed him would make sense when his initial reaction to his reincarnation was to look around, see women being raped by goblins, acknowledge that they are being raped and that's bad, and then say 'well might as well enjoy it too. Even has a goblin slayer expy later as an antagonist.
Well, anyway, that made be feel better about this guy, because it could be so much worse, but I still hope the editor ironed out some of his worse traits. He took some of the common tropes to the point of being offensive or parody.
a small example:
He gets into a conflict with the guild when he tries to sell magic stones. They think he's trafficking for banned adventurers. This is treated like a big offense to him. However, the problem was that, because he wanted to hide his abilities, he never reports his accomplishments. He wanted the respect and profit from his accomplishments but refused to ever tell anyone about them to hide his abilities.
a bigger example was an entire arc (lots of spoilers):
it comes after his three wives(the little robed girls) are sealed in the game and he needs to do a quest to get them out. He wanders and fucks around on a job where he's escorting someone to investigate why the elf country disappeared (he knows the reason why, he was there). Also I DO mean 'fucks around' as he intentionally impregnates 6 or so different women and then leaves them and the child. He finds what he's looking for as a prize for a tournament. HE tries to buy it off of the likely winners, a friendly spearman and the queen of that country in disguise, and they refuse, being warrior types who respect challenges and those who overcome them. The spearman also wants to propose to the queen, whom he sees through the disguise, after their match and tells mc this. Mc also sees that an elf knight woman who caused problems when he country disappeared and recognizes that she's plotting something dangerous in the tournament. However, he openly states that he'll ignore it because he just doesn't want to bother with her anymore. So mc and the elf woman join the tournament and the elf woman turns into some Akira style amalgamation of flesh during her fight, which mc, the queen, and the spearman have to team up to fight cuz mc is still not going all out. The elf woman also starts taking cues from the thing in Still Wakes the Deep and starts shooting out tendrils to catch the fleeing audience and absorb them to restore her biomass. Eventually, mc decides to just kill her and it ends. He then states (I kid you fucking not) that though he needs to rescue his trapped wives, he must weight that against the moral imperative of remaining humble and maintaining a low profile. He gets the prize anyway, even though the tournament was suspended, and the queen says to impregnate her with his strong seed, much to the spearman's horror, and then does so before he leaves with some legend about how he occasionally shows up when his descendants are in trouble but that's it.
Sorry, it's just that it was so bad but so enlightening that I needed to talk about it somewhere. I consider Issei from Highschool DxD to be a good but rare example of a good harem protagonist. On the otherhand, in the web novel, this mc was a concentration of all the things that make for a bad harem protagonist, so much so that you could clearly define what makes it bad with clarity. The essence is that he's selfish, demanding everything from everyone but unwilling to inconvenience himself with even just attention, let alone actual effort, for anyone else. The previous generation of light novel protagonist, before narou, would risk life and limb for a new girl every volume. Issei would do that for pretty much anyone he cared about, potential harem member or not, fighting to help his male friends with their problems or romances. However, now we see harem protagonist who are just a manifestation of wanting love and devotion from others while not being capable of giving love and devotion in return. I so hope that the editor curbed some of this, atleast don't have him explicitly say such stupid things.
