Also, what kind of jerk ass elementary kid call their classmate “slut”

Real sixth graders may shock and dismay you.

Seriously, grades 6-8 were when all my classmates got really obsessed with sex and losing their virginity, while of course shaming everyone who managed to do it, reflecting our split mind about sexuality. Haha you're an ugly loser who can't get laid, how dare you have had sex that's awesome you shameful slut. In classic precocious kid fashion I thought everyone was crazy. I was like you don't move into a different ontological category when a penis touches you for the first time, this is all made up nonsense, but they thought I was the one who's crazy lol.

last edited at Feb 9, 2025 9:53PM

Extremely understandable backstory

"Lesbians are not good with communication" is just a trope and not a real thing, right?

"Most people are not good at communicating their feelings" is not a trope, unfortunately, but a harsh reality. That's why romance fiction is all over this topic...

I briefly dated someone where it started pretty close to this manga. She really was flirty with everyone so I didn't think anything of it whenever she flirted with me, and I didn't respond. So she got more forward with it and slipped my hand into her cleavage one day and I was like "uh, this doesn't feel like innocent flirtation anymore" and she was like "it never was!" and I was like "but you're flirty with everyone???" and she was like "... what? Oh. But not this much! I wouldn't say all this to someon unless I was serious"

Anyway the manga is completely and ridiculously unrealistic of course.

last edited at Jan 28, 2025 1:49PM

Oh the city is Lübeck huh

Famous historical backwater, heh

Girl's like I don't u-haul I refrigerated van haul

The real problem with the wish is that it's granted to the team, so Diana ostensibly has to convince her team to go along with her personal wish and it's not like she's friends with anyone so what would they care lol

yoo ^ what's that avatar from, reverse image search isn't pulling up anything lol

in retrospect this was a brilliant example of foreshadowing

Aww I kinda ship her with the ex this time to be honest. I usually don't in stories but come on Meguru is a child and she needs someone to heal not someone to groom her. Kasane's mental age isn't far from a teenager though. But I think the ex isn't over her.

I was earlier, but now I'm like Mimei go find someone else, you can do better lol

I really like the Imouto-Lapis Switcheroo theory.

I don't. When I saw that line from Rubeus I was like ugh, are doing this haha

But also if it's true it just adds like a whole other psychological dimension to her suffering. Like imagine having to become someone else, to cease to have your own identity. That's gotta just like, lock in that trauma, you can't process watching your sister get murdered and heal a bit if you have to walk around pretending to be her. If at any point in the roleplay you ask yourself "what would the real lapis do?" when trying to figure out how to act, "take revenge on the people who killed me" is a nonsensical but real thought that comes out of that scenario. Mixes with the grief real nice, chase closure by making your sister kill the people who killed her.

May I be wrong to my own satisfaction, may all of that have been a wild red goosering chase

I've been kinda thinking this for a while, but the child's bedroom being shown brought it back to mind: What if Lapis is not the original Lapis, and is in fact Aurora; making the original Lapis the one who died for her sake. And then she, for political reasons, was induced to take her place while everyone was told that she herself had died. It would explain the estrangement between her and her apparent father, and the vibe the story puts out whenever events parallel something between Aurora and Lapis in a flashback.

Or maybe I'm reading too much into the fact we never see little Lapis's eyes, but the glimpse we get at Aurora's show them to be not dissimilar to Adult Lapis's.
https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/the_fed_up_office_lady_wants_to_serve_the_villainess_ch04#1
https://dynasty-scans.com/chapters/the_fed_up_office_lady_wants_to_serve_the_villainess_ch13#11

I thought that was confirmed by Rubeus lol. There's a flashback to the killing and he says "when a noble is killed"; aurora was a commoner if I remember correctly, implying that Lapis was the one who died. There's other hints too, "parent and child" is in quotation marks when she's talking to her father, plus all the stuff about her existence being an act and wouldn't it be nice if she was who she pretends to be.

edit: ok yeah I'm remembering the flashback from the first chapter where Lapis is killed. She says her younger sister is a commoner which I took to mean Aurora. Something that never made sense to me about that flashback is how she derisively calls her sister "that thing" when the whole story is her wanting revenge, she obviously holds her in high esteem. It makes more sense she's talking about herself in that moment since she was the younger sister and she hates herself.

edit edit: I kind of want to know who reprimanded Rubeus to shut up in that scene, I can't tell who that speech bubble is supposed to belong to

last edited at Nov 27, 2024 2:20AM

This seems backwards, if he were still a duke he'd have land to worry about keeping in the family and would need to worry about his family's social standing, but they've already lost all that.

like sure still a valid concern if you have plans to claw your way back to power and he's rationalizing to disapprove of the relationship but this feels like we're supposed to take the logic at face value

last edited at Nov 26, 2024 12:39AM

can't recall seeing two smiling eyes characters shipped together before, wonder how the idolization will work out with this pair

Are people still enjoying this? Because at this point it's just sunk cost fallacy that keeps me here

I'm enjoying it but I think I'm enjoying the freak out comments every chapter more than the actual manga lol

last edited at Oct 17, 2024 12:01AM

oof

the author likes her twists, I think I'd be more surprised if that was played straight

Minimalists have to be really chill I think, because I can't imagine someone that is happy with so little also being an asshole (unless they are preachy about their lifestyle)

I don't call it minimalism but this is how I live
can confirm am pretty chill lol

...I'm lost. What caused the turnaround? Did the other woman have powers too?

I think so. Or at least she knows how to deal with it. Katsmata seems to suspect Anno has powers, meanwhile Anno thinks her power is useless because she's only seen it manifest when she's anguished and it destroys things, but it can do other things and she never learned to channel it, which she learns from Katsumata once she stops hiding it (or rather she fails at hiding it I guess).

It is kind of vague
that's my read on it

last edited at Apr 29, 2024 2:32PM

Wakaba not realizing that Komaki is just into her and really jealous/immature sure is a dynamic lol. I'm not sure who's the less mature one between the two of them at this point

Two characters, both alike in dignity, which is none

So she fell off a building, got hit by a car and drowned at the same time ? xD Is this the secret to time travel

Rereading this after going full time as an artist was interesting. The characters are all personifications of the conflicting motivations you have as an artist and the need to balance them to be successful. Mangaka writing about making manga is always a bit funny to me because, as Tudou says,people don't care about the process or how much you suffer for it but a bit of homosexual realism and a romance plot carries you through the whole thing without the series feeling like just navel gazing by the author. I think this is one of the better series that explores the artistic process because it's more grounded about it too, a lot of these manga about manga series are terribly romantic about what we do. Every group of people has some self flattering story about how they're the centre of the world and what they're doing is the highest good, as do artists, so the acknowledgement that making manga isn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things was kind of nice.

There's a lot of nice moments in this story, very worth rereading

This is clearly destined for a het ending. When Diana starts slaughtering commoners, Lapis is gonna be like "oh damn, I don't even need to steal your jewel lets just team up and crush these people." Diana accepts, this shocks Natori out of her "I can fix her" trance and finally makes her wrestle with her moral conscience over serving a villain. She teams up with Gran instead who gives her a job she can be proud of without moral guilt. Lapis is shocked that the person she thought accepted her doesn't, and finds comfort in Diana's simpful arms, before they are both killed by Gran. Natori and Gran get together in the end.

0/10, terrible manga, Neko Tarou why would you betray me like this, remove the yuri tag

(this post is a joke please don't get mad at me)

Rubeus also dies because once he realizes Gran is terminally straight his depraved homosexual heart decides he'd rather kill him than see him with someone else

OK, so hang on . . . in the absence of Elsa being there at that time, the curse would just have gone to Yvonne. And OK, the curse gradually eating her up could turn her into a villainess, fine, fine. But as far as I can tell, in the timeline before we did the time shenanigans, there was no particular sign of either of them bearing this curse, although the future-Elsa, or, um, the Elsa from SOME future, plausibly maybe did. Well, unless the curse manifested to isekai-ed Yvonne as the game villain system (remember that?).

So now we're going to try to change the timeline so one of them DOES have the curse? Or what's going on here?

I dunno. The feeling of the earlier parts of this story being connected to the more recent parts of this story is getting more and more tenuous for me.

The way I read it, in the original story line her mother dies, she gets the curse, and turns into the villainess. Then in the first isekai timeline, the same happens, and then time travel shenanigans are pulled and she goes back in time and takes the curse on voluntarily, sparing her mother. Second Isekai timeline (the one the comic started in) has yvonne growing up in the timeline altered by the first time travel.

but hell if I know. Time travel is always a headache of causality and I've never seen a story not strictly about time travel that has been improved by its introduction

Not everyday you see Arabic in a manga
But it has the typical problem when people who don't know the language try to copy paste a bit of text, the letters are unconnected and backwards
اعتقدت انها كانت قطة لكنها كانت كيساً بلاستيكياً
^how that bit of text is supposed to look
the meaning is sound though it sounds like machine translation, which kind of works with the joke tbh

Cute and nice to see another work from this artist.

last edited at Nov 25, 2023 2:38AM

[extra 3] that door does not open the right way to shut it in her face, she'd have had to shove her out of the doorway to do that lol