Reviews with content warning for Toxic relationship - The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System

Reviews tagging 'Toxic relationship'

The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu

10 reviews

caladbolg's review

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slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

0.5

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daisy923's review

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adventurous dark funny lighthearted medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

PREFACE if there’s anyone that for some ungodly reason goes to my profile bc of this don’t expect many long reviews like this unless I have a fit of madness in which I can actually tolerate writing for longer than 5 minutes, this one is just here bc it’s basically copied and pasted from a previous fit of madness on my tumblr the night before I got surgery so it’s like??? I don’t normally write coherent things I have adhd and almost failed 11th grade English bc I had a breakdown during the poetry and personal essays units. Anyway:

I told myself i wouldnt read it bc i hate teacher/student relationships but I did end up caving and like read it so I’d at least have some idea what ppl were talking about bc I do like a lot of the fanart of it I see. Basically it was so incredibly mid that I couldn’t tell you like anyones names off the top of my head except the main ones, or like 60% of what happened and I just never had the motivation to write a review about it, but I do now ig and I love complaining/reviewing things so yeah.

Like tbh 80% of it was kind of boring or made me uncomfortable so really I did just skim a lot of it but I did have fun with the other 20% lol ig.. but to start with the bad.. like as i said I hate teacher student relationships so for really a lot of the bingqiu scenes I was skimming and pretending that all it was was just platonic. Like I do like sqq I think he’s funny and I know he’s too dense to figure out that he’s not straight but reading him call lbh (his 14 year old student!!!) a little sheep all the time and babying him and then knowing how it goes just! Makes me uncomfy! Like not everything has to be a romance and it would be much more interesting and not weird to me if this wasn’t a romance between them, even if they only get together when they’re both adults. And don’t even get me started on lbh. Like again. I like him. But he is just a walking red flag like I don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing characters who aren’t like. Healthy perfect people obviously but just idk I don’t like, think it’s cute or funny or whatever to have a character be like you’re mine and no one else’s and that possessiveness is just treated as a joke and something for sqq to just have to accept in the end. just kinda wish that were addressed. And a lot of the scenes that didn’t make me uncomfortable I was just so incredibly bored. If you asked me what happened in any given arc I could honestly not really tell you 80% of the time.

Now let’s get into the ✨misogyny ✨ like I know that’s a given with this genre and author but it’s still annoying. Like I was prepared to really like the little demon girl and the girl with the veil and the other girls but they were just like. There ig. Like HONESTLY….. the best female character imo was lbhs mom and she wasn’t even PRESENT in the actual story. But anyway. One thing that annoyed me is, that they only have one (1) female sect leader, and one (1) female head disciple in the 12 peaks, but they don’t even have the dignity of competing against men to gain these positions, mxtx does the cowardly thing and just makes them heads of an all female sect. All the other sects, which are presumably coed (tho iirc nyy is the ONLY female disciple of sqqs sect and I don’t remember there ever being any female disciples of Jiang cheng 1.0’s sect) are all led by men and their best disciples are boys. It’s so incredibly lazy and annoying. And this female sect isn’t even ranked highly on the peaks either. Like what’s the ranking criteria and why are they ranked so low? Huh? Mxtx? Like I get this is a satire of a really bad stallion novel but seriously? Mxtx? You couldn’t even include one female character in a position of power without also being a servant/subordinate/lower ranked to some dudes? even in sqq's fix-it version? Bc the whole point of the book is to fix pidw but neither mxtx or sqq as an extension of her seemed interested in fixing the rampant misogyny. Anyway and bc like that demon girl was

leader of that demon invasion or whatever but the impression I got was that she was impulsive and stupid to do that anyway and she’s just a subordinate to like lbh and mbj

like I didn’t even get the impression that she was that important. And I’m not saying with this that all female characters have to be ~girlbosses~ like I know that’s not the pinnacle of feminist writing and I don’t WANT everyone to be “girlbosses”, like I love Jiang yanli in mdzs, despite her not being “powerful” and I think what little story she had was very nice

up until her fridging

, but like it’s just showing that the only female leaders there are are leaders over other women ONLY. But like basically. None of these female characters had any like story to me they were just THERE. (Except lbhs mom she was rly cool but even in that case still). Oh also like the funniest 🙄 thing was when they

went into so much detail during that little tournament thing they had during the demon invasion of the male fights and then they made the two girls fight against eachother (because god forbid a girl fight against a guy and win) and all that was said about it was like.. it wasn’t interesting at all so moving on. sqq your interest in the ladies is OUTSTANDING.

Also the constant feminizing of sqq. Like again. I know that’s a given with this genre but it’s still so annoying.

Now the WORST offender. That™️ sex (read: rape) scene. No. Bye. Completely skipped as soon as I realized what was going on. Spiritually barfing the entire time.

While I do think Getting Possessed By Evil Sword And Slowly Being Corrupted And Goingb Crazy is extremely fun to read YOU DID NOT HAVE TO MAKE IT SEXUAL.

. Anyway. Moving on.

And to the things I liked. in no particular order:

1) lbhs family and backstory: I rly liked the story of his parents. not sure if some of this counts as spoilers but ill just put it all under spoilies just in case.

Tho the dad is. A really bad dad if you can consider him a dad at all, but he’s interesting due to his relationship with lbhs mom and his love of humans in the past, (and also how he cares for snek guy hehe) which turned into bitterness when lbhs mom seemingly betrayed him, but then it was revealed that she really did love him and sacrificed herself to save lbh. Like I’m not a fan of the dead mom trope in general but I did really like her and idk this particular story just clicked with me more than others ig idk why. I liked it. And also since the dad demon was so absent from lbhs life up until then to me he just seemed like another antagonist instead of another Abusive Dad™️ Character, who I generally always hate lol. Kinda like how I see darth Vader you know? He wasn’t a good dad but I wouldn’t really consider him a dad at all tbh? Anyway yeah I liked those two they were cool.

2) mobei jun and shang qinghua. Okay I went into this liking moshing from all the fanart and the idea of god marrying the dude he created in the image of the perfect guy while being a weird little hamster of a man himself is super funny, also the demon tits. anyway idk where I was going with that, but! I was rather disappointed that they were barely in the book.

I was ALSO disappointed but not surprised to read that mbj was actually physically abusive towards sqh. Though, and I’m gonna be honest because I might not have read this super in depth and I might be misremembering things, but! There’s a but. The impression I got? Was that that’s just how demons treated subordinates? So it wasn’t really something personal at the time? It’s shitty of course but it didn’t have the same connotations to me as two people in a relationship would have and one was physically abusive then. And after sqh finally said enough and walked away, it seemed to me that mbj realized he fucked up and tried to be better? And I feel like all this happened before there was any feelings exchanged on mbjs end. which was pretty? pleasantly surprising? so still kinda have a bias towards them. also because hulking powerful intimidating demon man marrying a weird little guy™️ who also happens to be God is SOOOOO funny to me

punishment protocol - that was fucked up bro. Next

4) system and sqq - hilarious. Next.

repairing relationships that were originally sucky in the pidw thing. Idk it makes me feel good. Like sqq stumbling across Jiang cheng 1.0 in qi deviation and accidentally saving him and now Jiang cheng 1.0 is like. I Will Now Die For You. Idk I like stories of loyalty and where people are able to get along.

going deeper into the pidw characters and how the sqq just totally ended up fixing what was wrong with the pidw book and with his fix-it, it ended up being something that sqh could be proud of and what he originally wanted to write but didn’t because of the pressures of the audience. I thought that part of the ending was very satisfying and meta and wrapped up nicely

the chase/fight in that tomb and the coffin thing. The suspense of that part was fun

8) snek!! He was cute

9) and of course.. airplane bro and cucumber bro. I love them. Everything about them. They’re such clowns.

Anyway 4/10 at best probably bye

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0karxnii's review

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dark funny fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

This book is so dogshit but I love it to death, honestly one of my favorite DANMEIS.

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illiteratenerd's review

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adventurous dark emotional funny tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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nalu_oops's review

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adventurous dark emotional funny medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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jujubs's review

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challenging dark medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.5

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breemeup's review

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dark funny lighthearted tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

ultimately, scum villain is an answer to the age old question: what if we gave a giant overbearing demon puppy man acute separation anxiety and a crippling Oedipus complex and set him loose on a milfy repressed redditor who is assigned final girl at rebirth?

Joke's aside, here are my messy thoughts about the novel:

1. I think that if people had made it more clear that scum villain is a dark comedy psychosexual horror story rather than pretending that it's a romance novel, I probably would have gotten into it a lot sooner.

2. By giving shen yuan so much agency and such a rich inner voice, mxtx builds such a fun exploration of like the inherent horror found in so many heterosexual romance novels and the ways in which we take for granted the mistreatment of female love interests in these novels. I adore binghe but his love is so monstrous and all consuming and terrifying in such a classic bodice ripper romance novel kind of way!!! mxtx masterfully uses framing and the protag's awareness of romance tropes to subvert/satirize this romance dynamic that women are subjected to

3. And that's not even getting into shen yuan's epic genderification arc and how the fact that he's subjected to this horror both makes him feel trapped but also gives him the liberty to experiment with and explore his relationship with gender and feminity and sense of self. (Transfem shen yuan real!!)

4. the way women in this novel become their own people/are given the freedom to be less classically "feminine" and instead become selfish/brutal/even a bit ugly because of their exclusion from binghe's desire? WOW... liberty from the inherent horror of compulsory heterosexuality methinks.

5. This book is about gender!!!!! It's about the complex intersections between sexuality and gender identity and it's absolutely incredible. I was NOT expecting that a AT ALL. I'm blown away. Like you know how that dude gave a copy of undertale to the pope? im gonna do that except it's gonna be Judith Butler instead of the pope and im giving them a copy of svss instead of undertale

Anyway, I really thought that this was gonna be my least favorite mxtx book I thought I was gonna be put off by the romance but oh my god the fact that the romance is DELIBERATELY off putting has made this one of my favorite novels ever. I'm going to be thinking about it for a long long time

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