Sincerely I Became a Duke’s Maid (2019 -2021) - :|

Compassion and empathy are beautiful things, but many people are encouraged to embrace this to the point that they can be consumed and burned out by it. Isekai manhwa like this trope of a hyper empathetic person being drawn into a story for one character in particular because it feels like romantic destiny, even if it’s an unhealthy complex. This runs the risk of swallowing the heroine’s personality as well, limiting their world to a single point of focus. Clever writing can sidestep the trap, but to do that the author has to work actively against the traits that brought the protagonist to the world in the first place.

Evelina, our isekai heroine, is transported into a story she felt passionately about because of the tragic fate of her favorite character Liandro. Cursed and miserable, she knows that the novel fated him to have a painful and lonely childhood and an equally miserable adulthood. When she finds herself as a maid in his household she does everything in her power to make his life better, platonically, and as a consequence becomes the only person he wants to keep in his life, romantically. I’m not going to lie, the beginning of this manhwa made me really uncomfortable because Liandro is so young and drawn to look even younger. Thankfully, the romantic feelings are one sided on his part until they both get older (even though their ages aren’t actually that far apart), and only after both of them have time away from each other. Once they are a couple, I quite liked their interactions. The romance in the story comes across as genuine.

The main reason why I can’t give a wholehearted recommendation for this story is how passively the female lead allows her life to slide from one bad situation to another without ever having an emotional connection. By the end of the story Liandro felt like a person who suffered and loved and matured at least a bit, and Evelina… wore progressively nicer dresses? Every chapter was compelling enough that I wanted to read more, but characters that could have been used to help round her out didn’t get much screen time. The only deeply personal connection she had was with Liandro and all of her efforts in life still ultimately put him first; while that was enough for her it wasn’t quite enough for me as a reader.