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megafighter343 · 9 months

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Cheat Slayer Was Gonna Be Garbage (And Here's Why)

CONTENT WARNING: SEXUAL ASSAULT, NECROPHILIA. READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.

The Boys of Isekai

June 9, 2021

Mangaka Homura Hawamoto, best known for the aggressively horny gambling manga Kakegurui, published a new manga in Monthly Dragon Age. The manga, titled Killing the People Reincarnated into the Other World: Cheat Slayer, promised the story of a fantasy world under the oppression of a group of supposed “heroes” reincarnated into that world and given powers and abilities designed to aid them in battling the Demon Lord who was besieging the land. However, the “heroes” instead use their powers and positions to indulge in their whims, terrorizing the towns just as the demons would. Lute, a youth from a village destroyed by one of the Reincarnates, joins up with a witch to take the Reincarnates down.

In the coming weeks, Cheat Slayer would end up canceled, releasing only the debut chapter.

The reasoning, for those who remember the story, is pretty simple. The faction of reincarnated heroes, the “Rebels Against/Insurgents Of God” were some of the most blatant copying of popular isekai characters, fashioned into grotesque mockeries of the original characters by Kawamoto. Many authors, such as Fuse (That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime) and Rifujin na Magonote (Mushoku Tensei) expressed their disgust at the magna online and even Kawamoto would later apologize.

In the States, there was a lot of backlash against the cancellation, arguing against the unfairness of Japanese copyright law, decrying the authors who spoke against Cheat Slayer as thin-skinned and lamenting the loss of what seemed like a promising manga with a great premise.

But was it?

Don’t get me wrong, a story in which the tropes of modern isekai storytelling are turned on their head, broken down and have their uglier undercurrents exposed is interesting, but that was not Kawamoto’s intent. In their own pages, Dragon Age referred to Cheat Slayer as “a revenge story coated in hate and desire.” And there certainly is no better word to describe Cheat Slayer than hate. This is a hateful little story, soaked in a bitterness toward a genre of storytelling not seen since Garth Ennis’ The Boys. Which is why I titled this section thusly.

But, enough preamble, let’s start things off with a recap of Cheat Slayer’s only chapter.

And You May Ask Yourself, “Well, How Did I Get Here?”

Our story starts off simple, establishing what looks to be the heroes and villains; The Rebels Against God (though the translation I’m reading also translates to Insurgents of God, so it depends on which scans you get for it) and the Demon Lord Troops. For the sake of brevity, I’m gonna go with the acronym RAG for the group. Our protagonist, boilerplate light novel hero Lute, is chatting with his friend Lydia about how much he loves the Reincarnates and how he’d love to serve them in some way, even if it means working as their bag boy.

Within an instant, they see their village engulfed in flames before Lute’s neck is snapped by a surprise attacker. The last thing he sees before passing out is his assailant approaching Lydia. When Lute comes to, he sees Lydia being… Well, I can't get around it.

Lydia, established childhood friend of Lute, is raped by one of the RAG. It’s censored, since this is a shonen manga, but there’s no ambiguity on that front. This is our introduction to Louis Crawford aka “God’s Mistake” and no, that isn’t an editorializing moment on my part, that is seriously the moniker given to him.

Crawford is based on Shin Wolford, the main character of Wise Man’s Grandchild, though people have claimed (most likely due to Rifujin’s objections to the book) that he’s based on Rudeus Greyrat from Mushoku Tensei. I disagree, mainly because Louis looks a lot more like Shin and given the level of creativity seen in the other RAG membership, if he really was meant to be Rudy, he would’ve been called something like Rufus Nakedmolerat.

Anyway, Louis is caught and called out by two more RAG members, “The Undead King” Don Will Dead and “Looper” Honda Yuuya. I’ll get into who these two are based on later since I know there’s a very useful panel to showcase the Rebels Against God in the coming pages. Honda tells Louis to deal with clean-up, with Louis admitting that both Lydia and Lute are already dead.

Yeah, Lydia is dead. While Louis is… god, I can’t even bring myself to come up with some sort of pithy euphemism. This is a story that starts with “we have Shin Wolford at home” fucking a corpse. The worst part is there’s nothing that tells us whether or not she was killed before or during the act, so pick your poison on that one, folks.

I think this little sequence alone is where I knew that this story was doomed to fail, regardless of concept. We are given next to no time to develop any characters before being dropped into a scene of shocking sexual violence designed to get over just how depraved and evil the villains are. It’s the sort of blunt force approach to morality you would see, ironically, in the sort of bog standard isekai this manga is supposedly deconstructing. There is little that differentiates Louis Crawford from some like Duke Uglybastard from High School Prodigies. That’s not even getting into how sexual violence is just a throwaway evil act, the gross, edgy equivalent of a heel wrestler insulting the local sports team. Or the issue of having a character that is basically a repaint of another, more recognizable character who no doubt has his own fans who would not like seeing him depicted in such a manner.

We continue onward with the introduction of the “Best Nine” the nine executives of the RAG and our fine cast of expies, who have come together for a meeting.

Look at them all. Drink in the absolute lack of effort to hide just who these punks are ripping off. The only thing I can enjoy is calling the Subaru expy Honda and the choice of Flamescans to translate Kiruto into Kilt.

Flare reiterates the mission of the RAG to take down the Demon Lord, but Louis says he doesn’t care about all that and just wants money, power and women. Imerda takes time to taunt Louis, claiming he was ugly in a previous life (which, admittedly, does track with the claims this is also a dig at Rudeus) which results in him unsheathing his “magic tool” (and no, despite what the previous scene and the quotes around the words would imply, I am actually talking about Louis’ sword.)

Kilt quickly defuses the situation, Louis leaving the meeting to do “business” which I suspect is some sort of metaphor for engaging in depravity. You know, I’ve never seen Wise Man’s Grandchild myself, but I imagine Shin Wolford is nowhere near as disgusting as Kawamoto has decided to depict him as. From what I’ve come to understand, the dude doesn’t even have a harem in his story, so I don’t get why he’s our designated evil rapist.

Lute finally comes to, believing the events to be a horrible dream only to be greeted by a body on the ground. A nameless witch arrives behind Lute and tells him that she was the one who healed him and gives Lute a refresher course on what happened before offering to help Lute in killing the Reincarnates. Lute refuses, believing the task to be impossible, but the witch explains to him the nature of the Reincarnates.

She explains that one of them (it’s not explained but based on his appearance and the fact that he’s a gamer, I’m guessing it’s Kilt) was a complete shut-in loser who played games all day. She calls him and the other Reincarnates trash that should die, but instead were brought back and given cheat skills that they live off of and they aren’t real heroes. That they did nothing to earn their strength, just luck. That without their powers, they’re nothing and oh my God, Kawamoto, I get it. You hate isekai where the MC is given a special item upon going to the other world. Take a number and get in line, my dude.

Our mysterious witch once again offers to aid Lute in killing the Reincarnates, an offer he accepts off-panel, though he has his doubts as he sets off after Louis. We’re told about his cheat skills, which are basically being a Minecraft enchantment table and this picture.

So direct confrontation is out of the question. The plan is for Lute to bring Louis to the Witch, where she plans to sneak attack him with magic, probably before he can even activate his anti-magic skill. Lute heads into a fancy building where Louis is getting frisky with two nameless women. One of them tells him off for getting handsy with her, but then he rips off her top and threatens to kill everyone in the building if she and the other lady don’t blow him.

During this lovely bit of nope, he and Lute cross eyes and Louis jumps him, wondering how Lute is still alive. We get the one moment of anything resembling amusement as Louis holds Lute by the throat and lifts him into the air and I begin hoping for a chokeslam. Look, I’m a simple man, I see a one-handed chokehold, I want chokeslam.

Anyway, Louis is demanding to know how Lute is still alive instead of, I dunno, just killing him again and putting a bit more effort into getting rid of the body? He eventually does decide to kill him, but then Lute calls him a “NEET bastard” which I guess means he’s the guy the Witch was talking about earlier, but it also raises a problem. Maybe it’s just the scans I’m reading, but the Witch never uses the word NEET in front of Lute, so how the hell does he know it? That doesn’t seem like a term a lot of fantasy village types are gonna use in their lingo, ya know?

Louis stops at this, allowing Lute to reveal he knows what Louis used to be, which rattles Louis as even the other eight in the Best Nine don’t know this about him. Lute offers to tell him if Louis comes with me and that’s it. Yep, leave the first chapter on the cliffhanger and we’ll see you next month… or not.

So now that we’ve gotten a look at the one chapter, the piece designed to hook the readers in (and to be fair, it did succeed somewhat) let’s talk about why this really doesn’t work.

First, there’s the fact that for something meant to parody/deconstruct isekai, this does really nothing to make it stand out from any other isekai. Lute is the sort of generic dark-haired teen boy you see in a lot of these. Lydia, until her fridging, is your standard childhood friend. At most, you have the Witch, who is drawn in some panels to look sinister and knows a lot about these Reincarnates, but she’s the only standout.

And the villains….

Let’s Talk About the Villains

For this section, I’m gonna go from each of the members of the Best Nine and break down whether or not they were good choices for this faction of evil isekai protags, using two sets of criteria. One is the book’s own description of the Best Nine as being a bunch of NEET losers who reincarnated into the world and were given a cheat weapon or skill. The second is going to examine if the character is worth deconstructing or presenting a villainous iteration of. For fun, I’m gonna alternate between left and right until we hit the creamy middle.

“Looper” Honda Yuya

And first off is our boy Honda, based on Subaru from Re:Zero. At first, he seems to be the most fitting of them all as he is a NEET, he did reincarnate into his world and he does have a special skill. But, look at Re:Zero as a whole and the choice hits a major snag. See, Re:Zero is, for lack of a better word, a deconstruction of isekai. Starting over in another world doesn’t do much better for Subaru and his cheat skill of rewinding events is more of a curse than a blessing. He suffers and dies repeatedly as a result and his own character is written to be flawed, so there’s not much Kawamoto can really do with Honda as a result. It’s a really redundant choice.

“The Undead King” Don Will Dead

Based on Ainz from Overlord, Don already fails the initial criteria since Ainz was a salaryman in his past life. He did reincarnate, sure, but most of the skills he acquired when he landed in Nazarick were basically ones he acquired from playing, so I’d hardly call them cheats. Along with that, Don’s probably more redundant than Honda. See, Overlord is a story about a guy who reincarnates into the body of his villainous player character in a VRMMO. Basically, it’s like if a Horde player got isekai’d into Azeroth. While Bone Daddy does at first try to keep from being evil, he basically becomes a straight up villain. So what the hell was Kawamoto going to do differently with Don?

“God’s Mistake” Louis Crawford

Louis got the most focus out of any of the Best Nine, but I wanna give this my due diligence. Shin was also a salaryman, did reincarnate and his cheat was… he knew physics in a past life which gave him a leg up on spellcasting. Besides once again not really getting the hat trick as far as Cheat Slayer is concerned, I honestly don’t even know if I should consider whether or not a deconstructive, villainous version of Shin is a good idea because this isn’t really Shin Wolford. I started this post thinking that people saying this was Rudeus were mistaken, but I’m walking away with the idea that Kawamoto may have really wanted to slam Rudy but completely forgot which series he was from and just kind of guessed.

“Otherworld Restaurant” Yukiko Shijo

So, this character is based on the character of Aletta from Restaurant to Another World. Now, full honest disclosure, I’ve only watched one of these isekai, so a lot of what I’m getting is from TV Tropes and other wikis on these subjects. So, imagine my bafflement in looking up Aletta and finding out that she’s not even the protagonist of Restaurant to Another World. That’s a dude called “Master” (or “Tenshu” in the original Japanese, which is a term for chefs and bartenders.)

The thing about Restaurant to Another World is that it's not a person going to another world. It’s a building. The restaurant is like some sort of TARDIS, with doors to it just showing up wherever. On Saturdays, it goes to a fantasy world, where Aletta is from. So, the choice for Aletta completely shatters the entire criteria as she’s a native of the fantasy world, not someone brought into it. I can’t even call her a NEET because she got a job as a waitress.

I remember seeing a tweet, Reddit or maybe even a forum post claiming the reason for Yukiko’s addition was because Restaurant to Another World was beating Kakegurui in the ratings. If true, then that is disgustingly petty of Kawamoto. This dude was writing manga for 7 years by this point, what is this FF dot net style sniping?

“The Fallen Goddess” Flare

So, as I mentioned before, I only watched one of the isekai being mocked here. Guess what? It’s KonoSuba! So, I didn’t need a wiki to tell me about all the ways picking Aqua for this were wrong. First, Aqua is not a reincarnate, she’s a goddess who is tasked with reincarnating people and giving them the cheat weapons to fight the Demon King. Hell, she is the cheat item in the series, being chosen by the actual protagonist Kazuma after she pushes him to pick something.

As for deconstructing her character? KonoSuba is a comedy! Aqua is notoriously the worst; selfish, narcissistic, bratty, fiscally irresponsible, lazy, stupid. All those and just so much more! And it’s not just her, everyone in KonoSuba sucks. It’s like a fantasy adventure headed up by the Always Sunny cast! You can’t really deconstruct or vilify Aqua because she is already so awful, and honestly, playing that character for horror would probably just make for a miserable reading experience.

“The Named Slime” Roro Sendiger

Based on Rimuru Tempest from That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, we once again have another case of two out of three ain’t good enough. Rimuru was reincarnated and gained a number of powerful skills, but he was a middle manager in his previous life. Rimuru, Ainz and Shin were probably dissatisfied with their lot in life, but they were at least functioning, contributing members to society and not the useless trash that the Witch decried in her monologue to Lute.

Weirdly, this is some merit to presenting a villainous Rimuru. From what I gather, he has committed the occasional war crime in his own series. Hell, Fuse even expressed disappointment in not being consulted over Cheat Slayer since he had thought of evil Rimuru and could’ve offered ideas to Kawamoto.

“The Daughter Villainess” Imerda Pinata

And once again, an entry that leads to me scratching my head. Imerda is based on Catarina Claes from My Next Life as Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! This one’s another comedy series and Catarina only fits the criteria of being reincarnated. She was a high-schooler when she reincarnated and has no cheats other than the fact that she knows the world of the game she reincarnated in, an otome called Fortune Lover, but the whole plot is about Catarina avoiding the bad ends that she would end up in during the game’s story progression.

She’s super ill-suited for the standard isekai fantasy world setting that this story is set in and honestly, it feels like a step backwards to have Imerda being a villain when the whole premise of the original novel was Catarina trying to avoid the dire fate of a villainess.

“The Young Demon” Anastasia Melokva

Anastasia is based on Tanya from… The Saga of Tanya the Evil

You know, I almost feel like I don’t have to explain the problem here. Like, the title of her home series calls her evil. What did Kawamoto think he was gonna do differently here? Also, she was another salaryman before reincarnating. Like, what else do you want from me? Tanya the EVIL!

“The Dual Wielding Black Knight” Kilt

And here we are! Straight in the middle, the perfect example of not landing any of the criteria!

Okay, so I said I only watched KonoSuba, that was a bit of a lie. I’ve watched a few episodes of Sword Art Online, read the first two novels and the first Progressive novel and have watched Sword Art Online: Abridged. I have a relatively good idea on Kirito and can tell you he was a terrible choice for this.

Look, I know I’m gonna be the minority opinion here, but SAO is not an isekai. Kirito is still in his home world throughout the entirety of the series. Sword Art Online and all subsequent games are not separate worlds, they’re just a bunch of lines of code in a souped-up Virtual Boy. This isn’t the Digital World of Digimon. He’s just playing a video game.

He’s also still a high schooler, so not a NEET and finally comes the cheat skill issue. Kirito’s dual-wielding is not so much a cheat as it is Reki Kawahara not understanding game design. It’s a unique skill only he can do in the game. But, he wasn’t given it so much as in some way obtained it and even he admits in a later volume that Yuuki Konno could’ve easily gotten it if she had been playing SAO instead of him.

So, probably one of the worst examples of Kawamoto’s understanding of isekai cheat characters.

But… I also can see why Kirito got selected.

Much as he isn’t from an isekai, Kirito is pretty much the template for all light novel protagonists since his introduction. No doubt a number of isekai mains pretty much took after him. In fact, one of them is Shin Wolford, which again makes me wonder why Kawamoto decided to pick Shin if he was gonna just use Kirito as a target as well.

But anyway, Kirito is still emblematic of the larger issues of isekai, forming a lot of the tropes that would oversaturate the market in his wake. Despite him not being an isekai protagonist, he’s basically the one who molded the genre to come.

However, that wasn’t why he was chosen as the leader of the Best Nine.

He was chosen for being so popular. As were a lot of the characters who were picked. But therein lies the rub, in trying to be the iconoclast and tear down the mold of the isekai power fantasy that has led the genre to grow stale, Kawamoto chose to target characters and series that broke that mold. That made fun of it, that deconstructed it, that did things differently from its brethren, that created and popularized variants of their own. He chose the characters who were popular, the easy picks despite how little they work for his plans.

Take Aqua. I have no doubt Flare only exists because Aqua became a hugely popular character among otaku. From what little I saw of Flare, she acts like a generic Genki Girl type and nothing like the character she’s based on. Aqua would probably be downing a stein of ale while Kirito tries to get her to even pay attention to a word he’s saying.

If Kawamoto really wanted to critique the problems of isekai, he’d pick characters more representative of the commonly disliked tropes of the genre. Maybe pick guys like Naofumi from Shield Hero (slavery and the constant narrative twisting to justify the choice), Yuuto from Master of Ragnarok (harem owner, three members of which are children) Youji from Gate (have a go at the author’s nationalism if he’s feeling spicy) or Keyaru from Redo of Healer (actual rapist) instead of taking out his frustrations on a demon-horned waitress and little slime guy.

Why Is There a Demon Lord?

Bringing it back to the problem of how little Cheat Slayer has of its own identity, there’s also the fact that the RAG are still fighting a Demon Lord on top of being the over-the-top villains for Lute to take down. Why even bother having this element if the selling point of the whole manga is that the Reincarnates are the bad guys? Like, if I were being generous, Kawamoto might have planned to reveal there was never a Demon Lord Troops and that it was propaganda perpetuated by the RAG in order to keep up their status as heroes. An engineered threat they can protect the people from. The problem is that in a room where the Best Nine are behind closed doors, nothing of the sort is even implied. It’s made pretty clear that they are still fighting the Demon Lord.

But again, why even bother? The Demon Lord is a trope that mainly exists to give isekai heroes a Big Bad to fight at the end of the series. It has no use in a series where the Big Bad and the Hero have been clearly established from the beginning. For all that Cheat Slayer seems to be propped up as some sort of deconstruction of isekai, it really is no different from its contemporaries. Whatever potential there is in the premise is snuffed out by the fact that its creator isn’t willing to put in any real effort into following through on it and so he just paints by the numbers and within the lines.

Conclusion

So, what was the point of all this? Well, I mostly just wanted to vent about how badly this whole manga botched a great idea, but maybe it’s also a good chance to impart some truths of writing that people will need if they ever want to try something like this.

Spite is a decent motivator, but it burns hard and fast

Take it from someone who has tried to create works out of spite for another work. You can feel a good deal of motivation from it. That feeling of “Yeah, I’m gonna make my own and it’s gonna be so much cooler and better than the original!” But that rush of endorphins will go up faster than you’d think and once it’s gone, you’d better hope to have some actual investment in the thing you’re writing or else you’re just gonna be stuck with a WIP you don’t care enough to really see through.

You have to truly know the forest before you burn it down

Hating something is easy. You don’t need to understand something deeply to hate it. But if you intend to tear something down, to expose its flaws, to build something new from its wreckage, you need to actually understand it. To be able to articulate what it is that is so wrong with it rather than just it being the popular thing. The easy target. Anyone can take a metaphorical hammer to a bad piece of fiction. To take that bad fiction apart and then reassemble the pieces takes a knowledge of what really goes into making it. So, if you really want to make something like Cheat Slayer (and really, I wouldn’t blame anyone for trying, it’s a good idea) then it helps to know your enemy.

Anyway, I think I’d better stop rambling and let you all go along. Thanks for reading if you actually bothered to read. Hope you enjoyed it.

Edit: Long, long after posting this I realized that maybe I should include some more tags. So, I'm also throwing in tags for all the series that Cheat Slayer had a go at so fans of them could have a look at this and maybe even reblog or reply with their own thoughts on this dumb, edgy piece of crap.

#cheat slayer #re zero #restaurant to another world #isekai #konosuba #the time i got reincarnated as a slime #tensura #tensei shitara slime datta ken #my next life as a villainess #my next life as a villianess all routes lead to doom #the saga of tanya the evil #youjo senki #overlord #sword art online #sao #mushoku tensei

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