Hi all, I’m Luce, back with a look at this new Yuri isekai manga, The Fed-Up Office Lady Wants to Serve the Villainess, by Nekotarou.

Natori Midori works in an office, trying her best to help everyone out with their tasks… and ends up getting let go over it, as she accrues too much overtime. Feeling lost, she turns to her favourite mobile game, “A Fairytale of Jewels,” for comfort – only to find herself in the middle of a familiar summoning ritual, the summoner being Lapis Tenebrae, the commoner-hating antagonist of the mobile game! Is this where Natori can find a place to belong? And in the name of her own job security as a familiar, can she steer the story such that Lapis doesn’t die at the hands of her fiancé, the crown prince?

Natori is one of those relatable protagonists in a way that’s appealing to an adult audience. Stuck in a low paid job, trying her best so she might get promoted, although it ends up backfiring. Envious of friends who are doing better than her, feeling like she’s tried and tried and gotten nowhere at all. We’ve probably all been there at one point or another. However, she also succeeds as a protagonist because she has personality. She’s not meant as a cookie cutter human shaped character to put your wishes onto, she interacts with the story. Moreover, it’s relatively novel to have an adult isekai-er, rather than kids.

Which brings me neatly to Lapis. She starts the mobile game story as a friend, then betrays the main character Diana, as she is extremely classist and wants to wipe out all peasants. A motive I honestly don’t understand – if you wipe them all out, who’s going to work for the nobility? I’m pretty sure society would quickly collapse in a world with only nobility, but then again, she is a villainess in a mobile game, and clearly not meant to win. Just struck me as an odd thing to want. She is cold and aloof… in general. However, she’s also very prideful and observant, leading to a cute moment where she recognises the thoughtfulness behind Natori’s actions.

The elephant in the room, then, is that these two are clearly being paired up. And it’s really cute! I hope that Natori can mellow Lapis out and start to enjoy their time together (once she works it out…). Something that might turn people off is that Natori is 25 and Lapis is 15/16. It doesn’t really read as an age gap to me, mostly because Lapis acts in a very mature way befitting her station, and is also drawn as looking older, while Natori is a bag of nerves a lot of the time, but it is there, and I thought I’d warn people in case that’s a big nope for them.

Aside from that, Lapis’ in-game friend, Diana, is a good example of how the characters aren’t acting on the rails of the story, but reacting to the events happening. Natori is concerned to a degree that she’s changing the story, but to keep Lapis alive, she will need to. I’m very interested to see where this goes, whether Natori can change Lapis’ mind about commoners in time to save her, and how things will evolve between her, Lapis and Diana, who has latched onto Natori instead of the prince.

Ratings:

Art – 7
Story- 7
Characters – 7
Service – 5, as Lapis has the typical ‘villainess style’ body, i.e., huge breasts and very flat stomach. The camera doesn’t leer too much, but it’s present
Yuri – 8

Overall –  8

Volume 2 will be hitting EN shelves in December, so we’ll se where this goes.

In Rainbows After Storms, Volume 4, Chidori and Nanoha are still dating…and still keeping it from everyone. ^_^

Summer has arrived and there is a LOT going on for these two – sleepovers and a day at the beach bring our to lovebirds closer, even as they are trying to keep their relationship hidden. On sleepover night, it seems obvious that their friends are trolling them, about it, but not so obviously that they notice. 

Then the school festival arrives and with it, that troubling piece of Chidori’s history allude to in the last volume. Because, as we see, Chidori wasn’t her first love. The story is a familiar one in Japanese media, Chidori’s sempai initiated an affectionate that she then withdrew when Chidori returned the emotion. We’ve seen this story before, most notably in Bloom Into You: Regarding Saeki Sayaka. Here, when Igarashi snidely asks Chidori if she and Nanoha are really an item, Nanoha throws the truth in sempai’s face, in what they will later remember was their first coming out. In my review of Volume 4 in Japanese, I name Igarashi a “fairly stereotypical Yuri villain” who “realizes that she might well have made a terrible mistake with her life.”

Chidori had already been admonished by Nanoha to open up to her and rely on her a bit more.  At this point, Chidori has nothing left to hide. On the night of the fireworks festival, they kiss.

We’re only a third through this series, so there’s a lot more of Nanoha and Chidori yet to come, but be warned…they will still imagine that they are hiding their increasingly obvious feelings for one another.  ^_^

I did want to mention that one of the folks over on the Okazu Discord noted that every chapter tells us this same thing, but the words themselves are always a slightly different. “The two of us are dating…but its a secret…from everyone.” “Chidori…and Nanoha… They’re keeping it a secret from everyone… but they’re dating.” Each chapter begins ever-so-slightly differently. It’s an interesting touch and one that I admit I never noticed. So thanks to akatsukinoluna, for noting that. 

Viz Media has done nice work with this volume. David Evelyn’s translation feels true to the tone of the original and to the characters. The lettering by Annalise “Ace” Christman is outstanding. I always will like it when full touch-up is used, since it allows us the time to just “read” the story.

Ratings:

Art – 6
Story – 6
Characters – 6
Yuri – 6
Service – 4 Bathing suits and showers. So…ugh

Overall – 6

As I said of the Japanese volume, “For a series which, until this moment, had climaxed with hand-holding, this was a big volume.”