honestly I think that in your last post about LP you’re just missing the fact that LP is meant to be like an old fashioned romantic shoujo animaga, like Candy Candy, Lady Georgie, Ashita no Nadja, Wakakusa no Charlotte, Lady!!/Hello! Lady Lynn, etc…. That sort of corny, sad yet happy stories, where the young MC suffers a lot, has a melancholic and/or tragic childhood and faces trials but eventually becomes happy and everyone loves her. (Expect we know Jennette didn’t truly become happy.) Athanasia’s story also follows that sort of idea. You can’t just swap one genre for the other, because it would lose its purpose: this is a Rofan/shoujo, after all. Hope you don’t mind the message
You seem to be new. Sorry, I don’t think my blog is for you.
I enjoy analyzing and diving into canon elements the story presents its readers, especially in regard to wmmap—which I’ve gone on to do this with for six years. Not once did I try or mean to change the genre, nor did I suggest the story or events change in any major way that wasn’t already revealed or implied to us in canon. (Even if I did, shoujomanga is notoriously very varied in subject matter and progression—flawed yet heartwarming found families with darker undertones is quite common and popular in shoujosei, seen with AkaYona and Furuba. Ashita no Nadja also contained darker elements and found family if memory serves, in your provided examples. Hell, the most popular rofans in the recent years have been dark and nuanced with elements of found family straying from blood relations—from The Fantasie of a Stepmother/A Stepmother’s Märchen, Roxana, My Mother’s Contract Marriage, more recently with How to Win My Husband Over, The Count’s Secret Maid, etc.)
LP is still a novel in the perspective/focus of Jennette, who in the end becomes beloved by all after trials and tribulations and melting the cold frozen heart of the tyrant emperor that ends in a ‘happy ending’ for the female lead. Except now, I was trying to figure out the true LP story that both the manhwa and novel haphazardly wrote with inconsistency, because LP wasn’t a novel. It was real, and it continued to live on somewhere sometime. And what we canonically know about LP (which, Manhwa Athy even acknowledges herself at one point) is that it wasn’t actually a perfect happy lighthearted ‘novel’, and that there were things going on behind the scenes which led to unhappiness after the ‘happy ending’.
The whole point presented by WMMAP and the novel, was that their stories aren’t fairytales or perfect. That everyone was a real, nuanced person, and that affection isn’t instinctual or guaranteed, but built upon and earned. The climax/ending of the novel has Lee Jihye forcibly confronted with the fact that she’s been dehumanizing people close to her by seeing them as romance-fantasy characters and tropes while they were suffering, and that not everyone will be happy because they’re living in ‘reality’.
Which, I’m criticizing because if the point of wmmap is as you claim, that it’s supposed to be a ‘classic, lighthearted and feel good shoujo/rofan’, these messages and story elements completely go against that intent. Wmmap’s setup itself is already dark: starting with death and bloodshed, debauchery, depression, the protagonist’s implied suicide, rebellion, human experimentation via black magic to a degree (which, Athy and Lee Jihye brings up from reading LP—and not to mention the sapping and decline of wizards and magic due to a one-note-last-minute villain who dies peacefully in the novel after being single-handedly the cause of Novel Jen’s spiraling), and later on clear signs of mental deterioration and another suicide attempt via the secondary female lead. My frustrations with the novel stem from the obvious darker story elements that should’ve added depth and intrigue to the story, yet the author uses them as convenient excuses written without the proper weight or intent—which reflects on the halfhearted depiction of LP that is barely explored nor explained even in the sidestory that actually takes place within that setting. Intriguing concepts hinted at with solid clues and foundations already set, yet nothing is done with them.
Since it’s the only one I’m really familiar with, let’s take Ashita no Nadja for example. The story starts off with Nadja leaving the orphanage full of hope to seek out her family who she comes to the knowledge of is possibly alive out there, and along the way finding a found family in her new friends and meeting new people and experiencing the world while also witnessing corruption by those rich and in power. In the end, she chooses not to be with her mother or live as an aristocrat, choosing her found family. She starts off naive and unaware, kept in the dark, and full of hope and determination that keeps her head up high, even among trivial adversity—yet what we see in the world of LP, and the snippets of LP spread through the main story of the novel, is that LP Jennette is the opposite. Because LP Jennette knows things already, things her ex-guardian Duke Alpheus doesn’t even know, and is acting specifically based off of what she knows (being that, she’s pretending to be Claude’s daughter because he took away her real parents from her, so he has to take responsibility by taking care of her which ISN’T THAT DARK AT ALL. I WAS SAYING THAT IT MADE HER LP CHARACTER INTRIGUING YET NOTHING WAS EXPANDED UPON OR DONE WITH IT). I was also deducing how she would respond to events via her characterization in the main story—being that she reacted awkwardly and uncomfortably silent and at a loss of words whenever noble ladies would question or make snide remarks to and about her. And then we have consistent canon information presented about Claude across all worlds and media that I wove into my previous post, being that he knows Jennette’s identity the moment he sees her every single time across both medias (coupled with his canonical character traits of being bloodthirsty, apathetic, yet also paranoid and unafraid to act on his paranoia if he’s unsatisfied).
Like what I present isn’t trying to change the genre or characters or anything—it’s trying to collect together, analyze, and make sense of the little story and characterization the author has ALREADY fed to us. The original story that makes more sense, given what Lee Jihye seemed to know as a fan and parrot back to the reader, being darker specific details pertaining to Claude’s past and Jennette’s origins that realistically the novel wouldn’t have explored if it was following “The Perfect Lovely Princess’ Shoujo Journey on Being Beloved By All”.
You’re right about how LP was setup by Athy/Lee Jihye as something that’s “supposed to be like an old fashioned romantic shoujo”. But you know what else is true? That the novel and manhwa both DIRECTLY twist and oppose that as the story goes on. Let’s analyze WMMAP’s protagonist for a moment, to set this up. Lee Jihye and Athy are biased narrators who fall victim to their impulsive thought and immediate emotion, and are prone to claim things that aren’t necessarily true. She already romanticizes the real people in her life as such—the same would go with LP. Hell, her dehumanization STEMMED from her romanticization of LP. Of course the sappy and corny romance novel for middle schoolers, so she claims, isn’t actually sappy and corny and meant for middle schoolers (she was literally a fully grown adult, claiming it was a crappy book for kids, yet read it in its entirety and got invested in it when it was only left behind one random day at her job/a cafe(?),,, you don’t have to be a genius to figure out she’s exaggerating or being dishonest about something, especially when coupled with the fact she became so obsessed over the ‘crappy and cliche’ romance novel enough to affect the way she perceives every living person she meets). And the careless scraps I’ve pieced together I’ve concluded are much more interesting than what our biased protagonist claims it was, as well as what the author is lazily trying to convince you of. Other than Lee Jihye’s initial claim about the story in the first about five chapters describing it as a corny and cliche book for middle schoolers, there has never been any actual evidence to assume it’s actually what she says it is. (Also,,, you can totally read into and take middle school-grade novels seriously. Even the supposedly lighthearted and simple ones have layers of depth and meaning if you actually allow yourself to look past the surface.)
And this isn’t the first or last time I talk about things like this. So if my perception and interest and criticism isn’t lining up with your perception, then feel free to ignore and leave me be. As I said at the beginning, I’ve been talking and exploring this stuff in this manner for years. I’m quite assured in my view, and I’m sure you are as well. I don’t need anons in my ask to imply that I’m misunderstanding and basically wasting my time. I enjoy expanding upon and reading deeper into media I consume, digging past the surface and trying to make sense of it, even after the fandom and media has died. That’s how you keep these things alive, by continuing to read into, draw conclusions from, and question the author’s writing choices—whether they’re intentional or not—and creating things anew while provoking further thought and discussion. And you clearly aren’t looking for discussion, so this isn’t the place for you. (I honestly didn’t even know how to respond at first because I couldn’t figure out what you wanted or were trying to achieve, in addition to,,, being completely confused as I had no idea what your point was and how you came to the conclusions you brought up).
Additionally—I don’t believe that wmmap would change with my last post. Because even with everything I wrote, LP is still a story where the lovely protagonist going through trials prevails happily in the end with her fiancee and father with the sudden and needless death of Athanasia. The fact that in the end Jennette gets the love she always wanted from the most unrealistic loveless man is still true, and arguably was the biggest thing in LP that Lee Jihye seemed to make fun of as cliche and corny. Jennette still melts Claude’s heart, her relationships start out rocky (canon—Lee Jihye tells us that Jennette was uncomfortable and had trouble adjusting at the palace and around Claude initially) and she faces jealousy trouble with other noblewomen (Lee Jihye confirms, and we get this affirmed later on in practice when Novel Jen is put in uncomfortable situations by noblewomen who are jealous), before eventually having her too happy ending at the random suffering of Athanasia (still true with my last post). All the main details and information Lee Jihye uses and tells us in wmmap is still there. The LP of my last post still serves its purpose in canon. In fact, I wrote it specifically to fit canon.
