I went into this thinking it'd be just another city building manga like a dozen others, but with the theme of being a demon lord. Instead I got a genuinely jarring narrative about challenging norms, darkness making you easy to manipulate, what it means to love someone, and many other very great ideas that are sadly all only really decently done. It's one of those manga you read and go "This would have been better if you did maybe three extra volumes to really flesh things out", and then put out of your mind, and there's something rather sad about that. Because there's so much really greatmaterial here, from the MCs relationships with his subordinates to the concept of giving up a piece of yourself to power up your main troops, to things like economic and cultural warfare, but they're all given mostly surface level detail and then discarded. It's this conga line of interesting idea after interesting idea that never fully gets fleshed out, and that happens right up until the last book where the author gives actual time and strength to their character writing in the finale that leaves you just wishing they'd done that the entire time.

It is undoubtedly a good read, I do not deny that, but it's all a but too surface level and I doubt many people will retain much after it's done beyond a couple major plot points and a funny scene or two. There is a lot of great ideas here though, so I'll definitely be looking into some of the authors other works.