Title: Lout of Count’s Family

Author/Story: Byeol Narae (adaptation) and Yu Ryeo Han (original novel)

Artist:  PAN4

Rating: All Ages

Genre: isekai/transmigration, fantasy, found family, strong male lead, NO romance

Hosted On: TappyToon

Official Link(s): English

Official Summary:

Kim Roksu has one life motto: “Let’s not get beat up.” But after dozing off somewhere midway through the novel “Birth of a Hero,” he wakes up as Cale Henituse – one of the minor villains in the novel who gets the beating of a lifetime from soon-to-be hero Choi Han. Only time will tell how much longer he has before that dreadful encounter. Can Kim Roksu change the course of this story so he can enjoy a long and lavish life free of the soon-to-be hero?

My Thoughts:

TikTok has been really good for getting me into new series… and really bad for my budget.

Lout of Count’s Family had me interested from the second I saw a TikTok showing the main character cuddling two little kittens. Once I actually started reading the series? I was hooked. I was sat.

The thing about Lout of Count’s Family is that if you’re super familiar with webtoon tropes, it looks like it’s going to be one of those male-gazey incel-adjacent male power fantasy series that populate the webtoon sphere. You know the type. Where a scrawny sad normie becomes a tank in a fantasy world and gets all the bitches even when the plot doesn’t make sense. Think of them as the same kind of story as the original Proud Immortal Demon Way (the work that Shen Yuan disrupts by being transmigrated in The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System) but serious. (Because there is no way that Shang Qinghua was actually playing/taking that seriously.)

However, Lout of Count’s Family immediately upends all genre expectations beyond some traditional fantasy tropes. Kim Roksu as Cale Henituse has the clear potential to be an actual lout, however, he’s clever and self aware. He knows what genre he’s in and he plays with the tropes, using them to his advantage along with his partial knowledge of the original story. Dropped into the world of the original novel, he immediately decides that he won’t be living Cale’s original life… because his motto from his first life (“Let’s not get beat up”) is still perfectly in play.

It’s that refusal to get his ass beat that leads Cale to get more and more involved in the story, surrounding himself with literal plot armor (an ancient power that gives him a strong shield, in fact) and lets him borrow the power of the protagonist’s halo. As much as Cale wants to live a peaceful richboy life, his need to micromanage parts of the original plot to secure his future… lead to him getting way more involved in politics and action than he expected. Even though he starts the series out trying to be a loner who uses people, he ends up with a loyal found family – on top of fixing his relationship with Cale’s blood family – and his begrudging complaints end up being charmingly meaningless.

Lout of Count’s Family is a fantasy series so there are great action scenes. However, the real draw for me has been watching Cale collect people who respect him and come to care about him. He’s not even trying to be liked. In fact, I think he thinks he’s standoffish and hard to link up with. However, his charm points are through the roof!! So far (90+ chapters in) there’s no romance – which sucks because there are so many hotties that I want to ship Cale with and canon won’t toss me even the tiniest of crumbs. Normally, with this sort of main character and genre, we’d be well on our way to a harem, but here he’s planning a summer home for himself and all of the kids he’s adopted so far. It’s… wholesome. (A word I normally hate using but that does fit here.)

Anyway, the series is currently on a very long hiatus, but you can read the first two seasons on TappyToon and uh… get invested. Because Cale is a fantastic character supported by really wonderful characters and the art of the series is gorgeous. Also, his dragon bestie (child?) is a Night Fury. Like unsubtle as hell. That thing is TOOTHLESS.