If thou speakest not I will fill my heart with thy silence and endure it. I will keep still and wait like the night with starry vigil and its head bent low with patience.
The morning will surely come, the darkness will vanish, and thy voice pour down in golden streams breaking through the sky.
Then thy words will take wing in songs from every one of my birds’ nests, and thy melodies will break forth in flowers in all my forest groves.
I’m giving Your Highness a solid 4.5 out of 5 stars, despite the horrendous quality of the available English subtitles and a bit too much bathroom humor for my preference.
(Yes, seriously horrendous. “Double repair” when the actual translation should be
“dual cultivation”, for example. If you’re familiar with wuxia and xianxia at all… facepalm time, indeed.)
Two reasons I’m sold on this series anyway, and will rewatch. First - it’s an isekai into what was a wuxia MMORPG, what’s not to like? Second, and even more important - the main character Qin Zhan is a bona fide, dyed-in-the-black-silk Good Guy. Despite being shoved into the role of a Demon Lord.
He is a very relatable Good Guy. Game nerd, been playing the same character in New Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils for 10 years, leveled up to the max, really not good with people. (As seen when he has an awkward interaction with a cute newbie, Yuchen, including bringing her to a cherry blossom forest.) But this server’s going to be closing down soon, he just wanted to have a reunion with his guild… and only one person shows up, briefly, mostly to tell him to get a life. He’s lonely.
And then a thunderstorm hits when he meant to log off….
He is very surprised to wake up and realize things have turned real. And he appears to have been the only one transferred over. (Later he finds Yuchen, and much later someone who is… a problem.) But the moment it sinks in, with all the demonic power at his command, he switches to mostly using nonlethalstrikes.
(Mostly. There are some real nasty Bad Guys he doesn’t hold back on.)
This is the key thing that cements him as Good Guy and a loveable character. Once he knows NPCs are real, he treats them as real people. He has near-unstoppable demon powers, he could be an overlord of the whole world if he wanted… but he doesn’t want to. He wanted friends. The NPC guards of his guildhall are now real, breathing people; he works to befriend them, protect them, and figure out as much as possible of what’s going on. He’s awkward at it, he’s still a socially inept nerd, but he’s trying very hard.
…He’s also kind of accidentally-on-purpose taking over pieces of the world near his Evil Sect’s headquarters, because the local soldiers and officials were robbing and murdering people. And he wanted them to quit that. In one of the first encounters, he tried to order his subordinates to take one alive… and ended up ordering, “Leave none alive!” As you do, when whatever power makes a game real shoves you into the role of Demon Lord.
(Poor Yuchen ended up as a Hero, with similar problems, and part of the humor is watching those two swear to duel to the death when what they actually mean is, “OMG so glad you’re alive here too.”)
It’s cracky, it’s melodramatic, it’s loaded with tropes and poking fun at same. But it’s great fun, and I’ll take all the nice Good Guy characters I can get my hands on!
Huaisang: I knew you could kill the dire owl, Wei!
My brother: He didn’t kill it though. He just sort of held it badly until it decided to stop being alive and then kicked it. It probably died because he mishandled it. He killed it with his ineptitude!
