When I read Master of Monster, the protagonist reminds me of Shinji Ikari. Not the new, revamped versions of the character but the whiny pathetic wimp of the original series. I honestly didn't hate him and felt he worked as a good foil to the more confident but blustering Asuka or the much more passive Rei. Its his character interaction and not his personality that made him interesting. Master of Monster fails to understand this completely.
Master of Monster is about an entire school that gets transported to another world and the roughly 1000 students that have to survive its harsh and dangerous environment. Among these students are humans that have developed special powers upon entering the new world. Accounting for roughly a third of the student body, these Cheat Users must balance power with the normal students as they seek for civilization or a way home. That's what the story would be about if that was what it focuses on. Instead, it opts to have any form of society or civil understanding almost immediately collapse as the main character vaguely narrates how everyone turns on each other and rape and murder is brutally. There is no gradual descent, no specific events that cause the sudden rioting, just everyone suddenly hates each other, and violence destroys any semblance of humanity
The main protagonist, Majima immediately throws himself into this misanthropic mindset of judgmental scorn toward other people, angry that society could collapse like this. It's impossible to become sympathetic to his situation as the audience knows nothing of what caused this collapse in the first place. Judging by how little he was involved in the situation, the narrative makes it sound like he didn't do much work with the group in the first place and is just getting angry because events are now affecting him specifically. While the story would be darkly amusing to read if it focused on whether he would either first starve to death or go mad from his twisted ideologies, the author gives him a third option when he is able to befriend a slime, suddenly realizing that his power is to befriend monsters.
Truly, this is the worst power the author could give the main character. It allows him to continue to whine, bitch, and moan about how humans are trash while letting his monsters servants do all the dirty work for him. Its not as if the monsters disobey or challenge him. They obey him without question and are blindly loyal to everything he does. As if to try and up the squick factor the two monsters he initially befriends Lilly (a slime) and Rose (a magical doll, think living mannequin) try to feminize themselves.
Upon discovering a dead human girl that was likely raped post mortem, Majima orders Lilly to consume it and use it as a form with which they can communicate. Not only is this a gross disrespect to the corpse but Majima's creepy lust for Lilly's new body underlines just how utterly depraved an individual like Majima truly is. His discovery of the corpse switches his thoughts from survival to avenging the dead girl even though he didn't hesitate desecrate her dead corpse and have Lilly make a mockery of her lifelike state. His switch flips from whiny self pity to brutal anti-hero with little middle ground.
After his "vengeance" (Lilly does all the work and he credits himself as a rescuer of a girl they kept captive) Lilly tries so seduce him and eventually they have sex. Ignoring that Lilly has had a human brain for at best two days, Majima seems unaware that he is essentially as close to performing necrophilia as he can without having the actual corpse. The irony is apparently lost on him. Also Rose conveniently creates a voice box that can "she" can use to produce a feminine voice that he finds attractive. The likely raped living girl also seems to share his creepy ideology to add to the warped characteristics of this harem.
What really gets me is how Majima keeps saying "This is the real world" as if to deconstruct "trapped in another world" genre. Yet the story tightly grasps the worst cliches of the genre.
"This is the real world" Yet you have a unique extremely rare power
"This is the real world" Yet you have a harem that is devoted to you.
"This is the real world" Yet your viewpoint is the only one that matters.
This really shows that if a deconstruction doesn't understand the flaws of its material can be worse than the flaws its trying to point out.
Still there is a fascination by how bad this story can get. Maybe Majima finds a way to turn the token human girl into a cat girl which somehow recovers her virtue so he can take it himself. Maybe the Agricultural club of the school turns into a cult that worships a cow trophy they won in a previous competition. Maybe the entire male student body are serial rapists and Majima's destiny is to repopulate this world with the female student body creating a master race of whiny, self-indulgent, hypocrites, The possibilities are endless!
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