I think we’ve all had that friend who is unashamedly thirsty. Who will point out a hot person over and over again and somehow maintain the same level of lascivious admiration for their target’s form or voice or actions. I very much appreciated that friend in high school who brought me endless hours of entertainment from their creative thought patterns and inevitable hijinks as they tried to garner some of their target’s attention in increasingly bizarre ways. If you also had that friend, or perhaps were that friend then I think you’ll find a kindred soul in the heroine of this manhwa.
Ginger Torte is a little bit in love with love. She wants someone to love her, but somehow she’s always coming in second to her rival Larazie Atlanta. When she happens on a romance novel that seemingly predicts the future, with her cast as the villainess, Ginger seizes the opportunity to try to change her fate. Meanwhile, our sad male protagonist Izana is a newly minted king with emotional walls a mile high after years of isolation. However, armed with knowledge from this weirdly prescient romance novel, Ginger starts her bumbling campaign to win Izana’s heart before Larazie can capture his attention. If Ginger were more competent, this story wouldn’t be half so entertaining. Nearly all of her schemes fail, but she throws herself into them with such gusto that they don’t get old. For every silly failure, I was right there with Izana feeling oddly charmed.
The jokes that hit the best for me were the recurring ones: Ginger’s cooking, how she’s always the more physically forward one in her relationship with Izana, and her bullishness in the face of truly half cocked schemes. Ginger as a person seems like she would be delightful and entertaining to be around, and I doubly appreciate that the author told the story they wanted to tell and then didn’t try to drag things out. What diminished the story for me was the epilogue, which did in fact feel rushed and a bit half baked, but the sum of the whole was still a great light romance. I think more people could use a bit of Ginger Torte in their lives.
One of the biggest problems with isekai romance manhwa lies in the timeline. How do you reconcile dropping an adult into a child’s body and still have a romance develop between them and a peer in the story? There are various ways to navigate the issue, with some being more plausible than others, but the only way to make the plotline feel like it’s not being exploitative is to scale the story over a long period of time. The isekai stories that work the best seem to span decades in the life of the characters. Survive as the Hero’s Wife works on a couple levels, with the first being that the leads spend long periods apart and together at formative moments; and the second that their emotions run on an enemies to friends to lovers arc.
Canaria, our isekai female lead, is dropped into the preteen body of the villainess of a novel she had read. The character she is supposed to inhabit is the ill fated first wife of the crown prince, to whom she is already married when she joins the palace as a child. Cesar, the prince, is hounded by his step-mother the Empress who wishes to dispose of him and install her own son as the crown prince, and Canaria was intended to be one of the tools by which the Empress torments Cesar. Naturally, Canaria understands that as a child she needs to somehow leverage that relationship with the Empress and yet still protect Cesar in order to make sure when he grows up and comes to power that her head is not separated from her neck. Watching her befriend the prickly Cesar over the course of a decade or more in the story is a joy, and I liked the trust he shows in Canaria even when she is forced to have an ambiguous relationship to his enemies. Their romance, when it evolves, feels authentic–partially because it wasn’t what Canaria intended in the first place.
One of my favorite things about this manhwa is that Canaria does things methodically, but she isn’t a superwoman. She’s not a genius at business, or politics, and she’s no great warrior. The female lead is presented as a calm, caring, intelligent woman who is making logical choices in an illogical situation. She’s not always in control, and she gets help from others when she needs it. By being vulnerable to the schemes of others it made me invest in the real danger of her position, and that made this a much more enjoyable read. Canaria obviously needs Cesar, and he comes to rely on her as well; the partnership they established was almost more satisfying to read than the romance, which is rare.
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.
I don’t know when the “she stole my first time” trope started in manhwa, but I can see why it’s compelling. The idea that there is this femme fatale (or more often just really drunk protagonist) seducing a super hot absolutely pure like fire dude who then immediately doubles down on this idea that she must be special. I mean, it’s also deeply creepy when you think about it too hard, but at first blush it’s a hilarious conceit. It sets up a power dynamic early on where the woman is the one on top (pun intended). The other thing manhwa usually do with this trope, however, is pull the bait and switch where now that the main characters have slept together you get to watch them dance around the possibility of holding hands for another fifty chapters rather than allow them to continue to enjoy each other. Not so with this manhwa!
Yunifer is our isekai heroine who has fallen into a novel where she is the villainess, but instead of spending undue time worrying about it she has been leading a relatively normal life. Already, the fact that she had not bent herself in knots trying to avoid a bad ending was refreshing. When she ends up falling into bed with Ishid, she spends a bit of time writhing in angst about it, but ultimately what they establish is a decently healthy and harmonious adult relationship. Plus sex. This manhwa actually had sex scenes in it, which thank everything someone is allowing their grown ass protagonists a guilt free sexual connection. Because lord knows, modeling a healthy sex life is something manhwa could use more of! Ishid treats her well, and Yunifer truly enjoys his company in every capacity.
The plotlines circling around Yunifer and Ishid had a bit of fantasy, a bit of action, and a bit of royal intrigue, but what stood out to me was the treatment of Yunifer’s friend and the prince. Their relationship is called out as toxic and it’s never romanticized even when more context is brought in to explain why it’s so toxic. The author knew the message they wanted to convey, and I’m here for the call to embrace healthy relationships and give people space to heal from trauma. I would definitely recommend this one because even if it isn’t necessarily breaking new ground, I thought it had some fresh feeling takes.
Doctor Elise (Queen with a Scalpel) ( 2017-2021) - :(
Genre mashups can be a delightful and refreshing change of pace. When it comes to medical dramas, I think that there is plenty of room for romance, comedy, mystery, and many long running series out there prove that point. However, when I picked up this isekai/medical/drama manhwa it became very apparent to me that in embracing so many elements that were so disparate that they were not meshing well. One exception is the arc where the protagonist went to war as a field nurse, as that seemed to blend the fantasy-like nature of the setting with her skillset much more naturally.
Elise, the titular character, is our isekai protagonist which is how they manage to pack a lifetime of successful surgical knowledge into the body of a teenage aristocrat. As it so happens she also has knowledge from a different previous life in this world so this is an exercise for her in trying not to repeat the same mistakes twice and save as many lives as she can along the way. Great? Great. However, the isekai story and the medical story never actually mesh with one another. The romance is lackluster, and the protagonists lack chemistry to the point where I am hard pressed to remember the male lead’s name. The medical portion is presented more like a procedure focused drama, where there is some high stakes reason why Elise needs to perform a risky surgery that no one has ever conceived of before and yet this seems to happen over and over. It starts to really fray at suspension of doubt, even more than the standard isekai.
The thing that frustrated me the most about this series is that I think it could have been solid if it had focused on either patching up the relationships that surrounded the prince and the succession battle or on the hospital where Elise worked. By trying to give each item equal time, it really fought itself. The strengths of this story should have been with Elise making her way in the medical world and the relationships and insider drama inherent to a hospital, not with the handsome prince and his sad familial back story. If only this could have been two different manhwa, I’d be able to recommend it.
TROPE: “I entered the world of a novel! Seeing how the young male lead suffers, I’ll make sure to take care of him until he meets his female lead! But… why does he seem so attached to me?!”
TROPE: “I died after getting betrayed by the people that I trusted the most before. Now that I am given a second chance, I’ll definitely live differently this time!”
TROPE: “Losing my status and turning into a maid/servant, I will not give up and still work hard! However, why does this person keeps me so close to him!?“
TROPE: “I suddenly died and just when I thought that everything has ended, I was reborn as the Princess of an empire! With my new overprotective family, will I be able to be happy in this life?”
TROPE: “All I want is a normal high school life, but I can’t believe I met such a strong, cool, and attractive girl! What can I even do to make her notice me?!”
