Posted in Recommendation

The Scum Shou’s Survival Guide

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Mature, Romance, Yaoi

Summary [from NU]

In the spirit of love and in order to help his ex-boyfriends walk out from the shadow of heartbreak, every time before Ye Ming leaves after successfully completing each world’s romance mission, he will ‘kindly’ (ruthlessly) break up with with his boyfriend.

After transmigrating to N different worlds he had finally gained enough experience. At this time the system informed him that because the accumulation of his ex-boyfriend’s grievances had exceeded critical levels, leading to the failure of all his missions…. So he needs to return to each world to eliminate their grievances if he wants to complete his missions!

Ye Ming: This is an outcome I didn’t predict.

System: I tried to tell you before that if you did this you won’t have a good end.

The ex-boyfriends all laughing coldly: He He. That despicable scum that ran away after deceiving my feelings is finally back. This time don’t even think about running away!

Ye Ming: ……

System: Since you “zuo” yourself to death, even if you kneel you have to go to the end!

Ye Ming: Luckily I have a special “scum cleaning” technique ^_^

Personal Thoughts [spoiler free]

Disregarding the overarching meta story, which is the fast transmigration part, each individual arc of this story is a great standalone tragic love story in its own right. (At the time of writing this, there are 3 translated arcs thus far.) Romeo and Juliet ain’t got nothing on this dog blood drama.

The MC, Ye Ming, is a real tool. After completing the romance mission of each world, he cruelly throws away the love interest. Karma comes biting him in the butt, but just when the audience thinks they can laugh at his comeuppance, he struts through his troubles with a calculative gleam in his eyes. Some people might find this type of character off-putting, while some, like me, find him interesting and want to see how he pulls off his reversal of fates. Ye Ming is not meant to be a likable character. He’s the type of character whose story you follow because you want to see how and what makes him tick, although there are hints that tie his callousness with events in his hidden past, much like the MC of A Wave of Exes Came Looking for Me. What to Do?! So I think we’ll get a justification for all his actions by the end.

Finally, another reason that you should read The Scum Shou’s Survival Guide is because the translation quality is superb. The first two arcs and a part of the third arc was translated by White Sky Translations, who is a super fast translator with a good grasp of both the Chinese and English languages, resulting in easy to read translations. After that, Syeki (Deep Dream Translations) took over translating the story. She’s a translator that I’ve worked with on Let Me Shoulder this Blame! and she’s also the translator of The Strategy of Washing Clean a Slag Shou (another story that I recommend)She has a fluid understanding of the translation material and her works are always so smooth, making them a joy to read and very easy to digest.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *