Currently on [Chapter 21]:
Obviously a lot of mixed opinions of people on this manga/series from typical isekai story fans. Not sure if people are just squeamish regarding the some of the subject matter or looking for a quick fix isekai power fantasy and this wasn't really their cup of tea. I appreciate the people who are still translating this despite the mixed bag of reception.
Frankly, it does have the edgy MC trope at the beginning of the series and then follows the sort of harem progression format eventually as all isekai fantasy stories go, but its a little bit different on certain aspect of the typical isekai revenge story format. It does some world building... but for most people that is seen as bad thing considering most isekai go for stories where the plot is always progressing forward to some degree, with either a next big villain fight that gets concluded in one chapter or some crazy or "shocking" thing happening around the MC that further drives them forward. But instead, the MC is sort of just going with flow of things.
A lot of people can't seem to relate to MC either, because he was basically written to be indifferent/emotionless after burning out his initial revenge plot high. I like however that they didn't make him a human and instead made him a "monster" to a loose degree of the word of this story/world, and he interacts with different monsters and species in the world rather than humans and see the differences in their cultures. It builds on the world a bit which leads to obviously slower chapters to explain everything.
I guess another thing of note is the MC's age and the "squeamish material". The MC is a child, plain and simple... sort of, he is still baby frankly speaking but can walk and talk in spite of that because monsters mature faster in this world and he was reincarnated. This story/author didn't do a big time-skip that most isekai fantasies stories do with with their children protags from baby, to young child, to young adult in the first few chapters and instead using that time to detail the MC's growth step-by-step. This slow roll, I guess is even more off-putting to some people making it feel like nothing is happening.
The "squeamish material" is certainly off-putting for people who may or not have already similar manga/anime i.e. Goblin Slayer for some people because that seems to be the most talked about aspect of that series via its "shock factor". They make certain jokes about the MC being a shota here and there, but there is also "other scenes" that people feel share the same purpose of only being shock factor similar to Goblin Slayer kind of ignoring the fact that hey this is a medieval fantasy story, this stuff does happen on a regular basis. Common sense and story settings would get repetitive at some point if all isekai fantasy stories were portrayed in a Magical High School format, or the MC will always undoubtedly win and nothing bad remotely ever happen to main characters but hey some people like that slice of life stuff.
It has some decent things going for it, heck compared to most copy-pasted isekai stories that's not too hard to do, so its at least worth a read or maybe the [WN] instead if the story's pacing isn't enough to keep you happy with how its progressing.
The MC is a child, plain and simple... sort of, he is still baby frankly speaking but can walk and talk in spite of that because monsters mature faster in this world and he was reincarnated.
This is actually not very true. when he was a small baby, it wasn't that he could talk with others, in fact, he couldn't (When he got the 3 idiots that tried to capture him, he had to talk with them using Golem Transformation on sand), however, because he can talk with his soul, spirits and undead can follow his orders. Since that time, he was already about a year and a half and met the Ghouls.
He obviously knows how to speak, read and write, because the language is a slight variation of the Japanese he knows (thanks to the old Champions), so he still has memories on how to talk and doesn't have to relearn everything, you can take it as lazy storytelling, however, the old Champions are very relevant to the story. The reason his face doesn't express himself anymore is because he got so used talking with his soul that basically he never trained his face., but those who know him can understand his body expressions.
So it's not that he is maturing faster "because he is a monster" (because he is not, monster is just what the people from the Amid Empire calls all of Vida's new races, even his mother Darcia is considered a monster of sorts, we say that Humans have Jobs, Monsters have Ranks. Dhampirs have only jobs, undead only have ranks, but Ghouls and Vampires actually have both [They are not the only ones], which is why Vampire [Job and Rank] + Dark Elf [only Job] leans more towards the Human side)
I guess another thing of note is the MC's age and the "squeamish material".
The author likes to play with tropes, Heinz is a super justice guy, but he is the villain of the story, however, as the story goes on, how to you make a "hero" into the villain of the story?
And no, Heinz will not turn into some snobbish bastard that everyone hates, quite the contrary, he is the virtuous type and truly regrets what he did. There are other reasons to hate him though.
The same for the Harem, the protagonist is a child, unlike other stories where the reincarnated baby has full sexual desire, the author here explicitly says that the mind is affected by the body, children will be childish, even if they have more knowledge than their fathers, there is still the affection and childish experiences with those new parents.
He also likes to play with other characters, like having them look evil, but they are actually super nice, and so on.
This is lesser known, but for those who know Tsuki ga Michibiku, the character Tomoki (which everyone rightfully hates) actually helped inspire Vandalieu, the author decided that his protagonist would be respectful to those older than him completely unlike Tomoki.
Another point of influence of the story is that he wanted to make a story where the Main Characters have the powers of a villain. Not like stories such as Overlord where it's all about luck and misunderstandings that the ignorant protagonist passes as evil, all such communication misunderstandings in Death Mage are very short lived, usually only for the sake of a small joke, and resolved soon after.
As you described, the MC is not exactly very human, but more of a monster in regards to his mindset.
https://www.novelupdates.com/series-ranking/?rank=popular
It is the most popular Japanese Novel in Novel Updates by quite a margin, only behind a Korean Novel.
@ssj4maiko That's pretty cool to hear the Japanese Novel is still doing well, I remember burning out after a while when I first learned of the series and never really having time to go back and look into it.
Just of note though, you may want to put some of your reply to you may want to put some of it spoilers area just in-case for areas/points not covered quite yet in the manga.
How can a manga can be dark yet bright at the same time
Almost every notable chara have dark background story yet their current upbringing and lifestyle considerably bright,,
or maybe its the norm in pre-modern society
Plot can be surprising or boring
Since MC just a kid, don't expect much,,
better just wait for translation stack up
Honestly pretty good, I read the light novel before and couldn't get past the dark stuff like torture (since i'm not really into that stuff), I decided to push through the manga and found that it was pretty enjoyable (also less dark stuff later on if you aren't into that stuff). The characters are quite well developed and you can totally get attached to them.
@jetfirejay1 the torture stuff at the beginning? bruh... just skip past it if you don't like it. It's the most brutal stuff that happens in the story. It's good asf to read, i fell like you're missing out on a lot.
MangaSushi seems to have removed this series from their website so another scanlation group has to pick this up so that we can continue reading it. sucks that they dropped it. Great series and was getting super interesting.
I don't think that's the case @superspartan177
They said that their host lost their data, which means that they will have to add everything again manually. Give them some time, they have registered the manga there, it's just missing the uploads for now.