It's feeling like there's not much continuity? With this author's previous thing, each chapter had a new couple starting at like, 5/10. Here, it's the same couple, starting at 8/10. But she was like, clearly going to finger her already?? Are we jumping back to kissing now?
That's because, see, the maid is charmingly shy and demure, and so while she might do lewd things in the heat of the moment, afterwards there's a partial reset to charming reluctance and oh-no-we-mustn't. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
In terms of Zanka's tropes, I think that's exactly right (or rather, the only way to make sense of the apparent repetition-compulsion of each chapter.)
Although the mistress/maid trope is built on a power imbalance, it's striking to me that, of the five Zanka series here, the three non-fantasy (not cat-girl or vampire) series position the Mistress as not the person at the top of the implied power hierarchy who can act on her own desires as she wishes:
- Mistress and Maid: "from a family of status"
- Mistress and Maid Couple: "daughter of the head of a large business conglomeration"
- This one: "heiress of an esteemed family."
On the one hand, that just serves to explain why there's a servant in the first place, and why the young mistress seems to be left mostly on her own (except for the maid, of course). But it also implies that it would be a bad thing if any intimate mistress/maid relationship were to be made public, suggesting that the maid's "no, we mustn't" is motivated by the fear of the rest of the family finding out.
So the repetitive structure of Zanka's works becomes an implied critique of the way that the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy serves to repress sexual desire between the classes. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
last edited at Nov 6, 2021 4:01PM
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