[CW: Homophobia, Bullying]
Having learned more about the plight of the commoners, Claire decides to make it to the church on time. Enter the young cardinal, Lilly, who immediately has designs on Rae. While Rae being Lilly’s jam has Claire jelly, it’s a prelude to the story of Rae’s first love and all the damage that came in its wake.
It is as official as I can make such things - so, not very - this is the best version of this story. The best. It gets its points across, has fun, and the artwork is absolutely stunning. It isn’t perfect, but that’s down to the source material it’s working with.
By this point in the light novels, things were admittedly getting a little into baloneypants nonsense territory, but we haven’t seen anything yet. And, at any rate, this maintains the core of Rae and Claire with the social commentary the story does fairly well.
I will say, the art once again makes Lilly about twice as tolerable and three times as entertaining as she was in the LN. Her clinging to Rae endlessly is fairly lame, as gags go, but her foul mouth makes up for it.
Rae has a fantastic argument with two other sisters about homosexuality that is a lot more reasoned than any you’ll find in the real world, sadly, between people on two sides of that argument. As always, this series is about loving who you love (is it ever) and that remains the case.
The commoner movement gets its due, amidst all this, as Claire begins to see how badly the system is, but things go a whole other direction when she and Lilly get whiff of Rae’s backstory.
I barely remember this section from the novel, but it lands with a wallop here. Rae’s not always been the happy-go-lucky character we see and this shows where the edge that has mostly stayed buried underneath came from.
Knowing that this won’t end well even before it begins is the epitome of a slow-motion car wreck, as several characters twist together in a colossal mess of hurt feelings and snide comments about lesbians.
It goes to some dark places and pulls very few of its punches, although it does sort of let things work out to a degree by the end. Watching Rae’s joy implode as her sexual awakening turns so savagely awful is both great drama and truly sad.
Naturally, this then leads to dodgeball. Which I absolutely do not remember and who cares, truly, because there’s no way it was done this well outside the manga. The art and uniform design is frigging great and it lets off a ton of steam from all the feels of the previous chapters.
Claire’s minions have been very well served by the manga, honestly, turning out to be way funnier foils here than their original incarnations. The brief shot of Loretta’s abs is hysterical, as is Pepi’s bourgeoisie concept of ‘helping’.
This is such a fantastic interpretation of the source material and, while it can’t take care of all the original’s problems, it sands down way more than you’d think and brings out its best sides. This volume does an especially great job of showing off all the things that it does well.
4.5 stars - this one is a hoot and also makes for some fine, fine drama. As a whole, this story has always had some issues, but volumes like this remind me why I loved it to begin with.