M's Media Menagerie

PLEASE BE MINDFUL OF THE TRIGGER WARNINGS.

Finally.

I finally finished this story.

Once, eons ago, I started reading this while it was updating. It was one of those services where you need to unlock chapters with money each time so I (as usual) fell off the horse.

Now I have finally read the whole thing.

It’s a tragic romance, terrible and awe-inspiring. Every panel and every word is constructed around people struggling against trauma. Trauma inherited. Trauma made. Trauma that quietly reared its ugly head and put the thumbscrews on the characters while dragging the reader through their downfall.

First and foremost— the setting is awesome. So many manwha styled after fantasy influences in a romanticized era of pre-industrialized Europe take things into a beautiful route of privilege and untouchable circumstances. Hardship is touched upon by women, but nothing like this. Lady Devil is a medieval fantasy with medieval sensibilities.

It describes the era where even the most privileged of women are nothing but objects. Women are for sex. Making alliances. Making babies. They are worth little more and by the hand that is supposed to protect them, they are crushed down into a shape that will bow her head and accept her fate. The desire to protect themselves while being chased by the desires of men is the background of the whole story.

Because when Anette’s mother needs to produce an heir, she wishes for a son from the devil. Because when her fear of her husband drives her to go back again and again to the devil and beg to keep her son human and make her husband happy, it trickles down. Because when Anette’s brother, John, grows to love and lust after her, he destroys her life, and she is blamed for it. Because when Griselda wants to raise the boy she calls son, he runs and returns to destroy her life. Because when Anette is bartered away once again, another man tries to destroy her and her husband’s possessiveness nearly kills her. Because when a long time ago, Xavier wanted his sister to have a new dog, he picked a boy instead and trained him to be a dog. Because when that dog-boy’s father saw the woman the dog was in love with, he grew to obsession and set into motion a curse in order to worship the ground she walked on.

It’s no mistake that Anette’s few friends are those who are women, and common ones at that. They see her and they care for her. They meet her in odd ways and tell her time and again: you said once you were imprisoned, why is it that you are going back to prison?

The characters are so fluid. They’re at first pathetic, evil things, but as the story gets woven tighter and tighter, you find yourself sucked up in the horrible little lives they built. I read so many comments on the story as I read, and what stood out most was, “I know it’s not incest anymore (or is it???) but honestly the siblings are the healthiest relationship they could have”. That’s what the story does to you.

Annette and John are a lover’s ouroboros, going back and forth in a self-destructive spiral until they disappear forever. Through the pain they inflict on each other and then the apologies, the tears, the actual loving conversations they have, they find themselves. They’re both in a prison built for them by their families, by their births, and by the constraints of society itself. John’s father, his true father, cursed him in a fucked up way. The trauma was expanded upon over and over again as no one looked at him as a child, not really, and he got sucked up into some really fucked up longing for the woman his sister resembled.

Meanwhile, she was protected while also abused— the love she is shown is a prison, over and over and over again. She is confined and kept away from others, kept away from the world outside, and she is ashamed for it. She’s ignorant and uneducated and there is little she could do. She tries so hard to escape it and envies her brother to the point of taking her anger out on him. She loves him and hates him and loves him all over again.

It’s so many chapters of watching people descend into an abyss and begging desperately for the world to cut them a break. They’re fucked. Just by loving one another, they are fucked. Beyond comprehension.

(massaging temples)

It’s a very literary comic, with some truly beautiful composition and visuals. I would write more about Anette’s sexual and mental liberation and her madness coming home to roost, but I think I would need a whole reread. Plus there is a novel out there as well! The only sore spot I have is the ending, which in light of the slow spiral over months and years of the story, feels abrupt.

And yet! And yet it’s a decent one in the end! The pair decide to renege on the lust for power and go quietly by themselves out there. “If this way of life isn’t easy, then we will try again to find a path that will make us happy”. They leave. They simply leave. They decide that the curse is not all-knowing. It doesn’t need to hold sway over them. And for the child they have together, well. The child will never know how hard the road is.