Review of a Chinese novel: Quickly, male lead dote dote dote review

Quickly, male lead dote dote dote review

Title: 快穿：男主宠宠宠

Author: 白夜青

Chapters: 528

Date of completion: 9 Aug 2017

Instead of translating, I decided to write a review on a novel that I was reading. It’s a novel that I briefly considered translating after WNSYM finished but the ending is awful and abrupt. It also has too many 18+ scenes and I am a very pure baby. (ha)

It’s an interdimensional travel novel that starts really abruptly. You’re thrown straight into the fray instead of getting your usual info dump about how the female lead gets her system, how she was betrayed by her boyfriend/husband banging her best friend, killed by her sister/best friend, vows revenge, etc etc. But having it start too abruptly wasn’t good either because there were no stats given or any other info about how the different worlds work - this was probably the first red flag about the novel. If the author doesn’t care about world building and properly introducing the novel, she’s probably half-assing the novel.

The rules don’t get introduced until a bit into the story. Here, the MC has to do stuff to make the story female lead or female side lead, hate her. So there are hate points/100 which also make up the completion % of the mission. So the more she does stuff like flirt with the male lead, the story female lead would hate her more and do evil stuff like drugging the MC. This increases her hate points and once they reach 100 points, the MC can then die to leave for the next arc and get points.

The first arc is about an autistic girl (the MC) and her cruel older sister. The older sister, is of course, perfect on the outside and the perfect example of a socialite. This is set in a modern world where their parents are dead and the older sister is now also her guardian. Without their parents, the two sisters are living in the home of the male lead’s family. Their father saved the male lead’s father and broke his leg so he promised to have his son marry his daughter. This naturally falls on the older sister and she’s smitten with the eldest son (male lead). However, when the female MC is first dropped into the world, she sees her older sister banging the male MC’s younger brother in front of her hospital bed, promising him that he’ll be able to marry the MC. The older sister even jokes later that she was just ‘trying him out’ for the MC and that he’s good in bed, so she’s not losing anything. Gross.

So the MC has probably suffered some sort of trauma where she doesn’t like to speak and doesn’t like interacting with people other than her beloved sister. Our real MC obviously is nothing like that. She’s crass and very outspoken but one of the rules is that she absolutely cannot break character. This means that no matter how in love she is with the male lead, if the person she is playing wouldn’t have fallen in love yet, she has to hold it in and pretend to not be in love.

Anyways, the male lead doesn’t get introduced until later. He’s the heir to the company (of course) and is cold as hell. The older sister is falling over herself to please him but he rejects her. It turns out that he’s also pretty gross. He got drugged one night? and saw the female lead huddled in a corner. He then proceeds to bang her (r*pe her because she’s not even of age at this time, the monster). Anyways, it’s so great that he waits for her to grow up to marry her. The male lead sees through the older sister being fake as hell so under the guise of “treating her”, because the older sister’s also been substituting her meds with vitamins and other stuff, he hides her away in a love nest.

Cue romantic development when our domineering CEO slowly kisses her and basically Pavlov’s her into liking him by making her kiss him every time she wants to eat his cooking. So as our female lead lusts over him, she still has to pretend to be a shy girl who only likes him because of his cooking. It’s funny reading about how she’s basically begging him to bang her (inside) and outwardly, super shy. The system is also super sarcastic and hides in a black box every time something 18+ happens. I think the system says that it hid in a box ~130 times in a month haha.

So because the older sister is the one that’s engaged to the male lead (because of his father and her father), once she finds out that the MC has been banging the male lead on the low, she decides to spill it to the media. She spreads rumours about how the female lead seduced her brother-in-law etc etc. In retaliation, the male lead spills photos of the older sister with other men oops. Also surprise, it turns out that the older sister isn’t her blood related older sister and she even caused the MC to be traumatised to get the MC’s family’s assets and money. This obviously means that the MC should be engaged to male lead and it’s all happily ever after.

Except that the older sister bribes the cook into drugging the MC and kidnaps her onto a boat. She threatens to harm her and when the male lead finally arrives, threatens to kill the MC. The system helpfully reminds the MC that her completion level is at 100% so she can die now. The MC falls onto the older sister’s knife and dies, saying for the male lead to forget her which drives him insane. The last chapter is how he fails to accept her death and he’s practically a living husk of his former self. He also has captured the older sister to torture her, and continues to torture her until she’s like 80 something and dies of old age with not a clean patch of skin on her. The male lead also dies of old age but before he does, he takes out the MC’s ashes and slowly eats them so that they’ll never be separated.

Unlike a lot of other MC’s, this MC is particularly heartless and moves from arc to arc without a second thought for the male leads. (I’m used to prolonged epilogues and lingering male and female leads). Once we get to like 90% of the novel, it turns out that the MC, in her original life, was a cultivating fairy who went down to earth to undergo a tribulation. She falls in love with a human man and when he dies, she leaves her heart with him. So while she goes through all of these different worlds, she has no love to give them and she only obsesses and craves their, ahem, “cucumbers”. There are some really crazy 18+ scenes and one BL arc where she travels into the body of a male performer who catches the eye of a strong general. That arc is the shortest at about ~20 chapters and it was very kinky. Our shameless MC gets ravaged and when the system was about to make fun of her, she just gloats about how good it was to do it with a ‘cucumber’ and that she wanted to thank the system for letting her know how it felt to do it as a man. No shame. It’s the same male lead every time anyway and it’s obvious because the name is always a bit similar.

In the BL arc, the story female lead is a socialite who fell in love with the general and crossdressed as a soldier to be near him. She’s disgustingly naive and when she first meets the MC (as a man), it’s after she was ravaged by the general (male lead). She has bruises all over because he’s rough as hell and the story female lead is shocked. She’s convinced that the MC is bullied and wants to stick up for him. The MC mocks her and tells her about all of these other women who are also being ‘bullied’ - army prostitutes in a brothel nearby. So the stupid story female lead foolishly goes off and tries to lecture them into freeing them from the brothel. The prostitutes shoot back and say that they’re living very well and it’s all consensual, they’d rather do this than starve to death. Story female lead is shocked. She’s even more shocked when she finds out that the MC is banging her dreamy general, shocked that men do that to each other. In the end, she gets caught showering by the general and tries to guilt the general into taking responsibility because he’s seen her body. The general is taking none of that bs, drags her out and under the offence of crossdressing and sneaking into the army, gets her thrown into a nasty brothel. But the story female lead poisons the MC and the general watches helplessly as the MC dies.

The arcs are very interesting. The second one is about a princess who tries to flee her marriage and nearly gets assassinated. A kindhearted blacksmith who finds her very familiar (ha, hello male lead), saves her and takes her to his place. He’s super sweet to her and because of her character, the female lead has to act like a posh and stuck up little kitten. The male lead finds this adorable as hell. The real MC is salivating over his muscles and wants to sleep with him ASAP but she can’t break character so she just tries to seduce him as much as possible. This one would’ve been smooth but it turns out that the character’s ‘father’ emperor is actually a crossdressing woman and she’s not actually of royal blood, even though she’s a princess.

The real princess is the story female lead’s daughter, she was lost as a child and grew up without knowing her real parentage. The daughter is the MC’s love rival and has been in love with the blacksmith since she was like 10. The story female lead is the empress dowager’s daughter so she wouldn’t have been emperor either way. It all becomes messy when her ‘father’ swaps the groom for another man on the day of her wedding. The blacksmith is swapped out and sent to the bed of the story female lead’s daughter. It was all a conspiracy.

This then forces the blacksmith (who knew martial arts and fought his way up to become a martial official so that he could marry the MC) to storm the palace and stage a coup. A loyal guard to the real royal bloodline then steals the MC from the palace and uses a body double as a corpse so that the MC can flee. The blacksmith is devastated when he learns of her ‘death’ and kills the old ‘royal’ family.

The other arcs are pretty fun, pretty stereotypical. There’s a zombie arc where she gets adopted and gets to call the male lead ‘daddy’. She dies and gets the chance to come back and save the male lead from destroying the world for an hour. But then she decides to bang him which shortens that hour to half an hour and she comes back very frustrated. Ha.

There’s an arc where she turns into a puppy. I skipped that one - not to my taste. There's another arc where they’re award winning actors. The MC bangs him one last time before disappearing, just as he was planning to propose to her. Cruel. There's another arc when they’re in some sort of primordial setting as shapeshifters. The males all can shapeshift to another animal, e.g. wolves, snakes, eagles but the females are all human. Super kinky because the men are like 2m tall as well and very open about procreating. The MC can’t wait to jump the male lead’s bones and is practically drooling all over him, but she has to keep up her prudish character who’s time travelled from modern times. Females are rare so she gets treated like a queen here. Another arc has a nearly incest theme but her big brother turns out to not be blood related. Again, super kinky because you don’t find out until near the end. She crawls into the male lead’s bed super quickly.

All of the 18+ scenes were very nice (I’m a perv) but the ending was god awful. It felt super abrupt. She get coerced into buying an egg with all of her accumulated points and because she only has like 10k points, she gets a very dull and boring egg. The egg hatches and surprise, it’s her heart. She gets her heart back which means that the real male lead is nearby because she left her heart with him.

It turns out that the mortal male lead was also a god undergoing a tribulation and he created two systems. One for the female lead to be reborn and rise again. The other to torment the story female lead as punishment for killing the female lead or something. Then it’s happily ever after. I felt super betrayed after reading the A+ arcs.

The novel hasn’t been translated into English yet (I checked novelupdates). Apart from the ending, it’s a fun and kinky novel if you’re into that kinda stuff. 3.5/5 from me, minus points for the bad ending and shitty continuity between the arcs. I’m too spoilt by the nice introductions and epilogues after arcs.