grace juice's Topics (1022)

I think you missed the entire idea of this story. The whole story is portrayed as her being an asshole and paying the price for it. She constantly undermines everyone around her because of her own issues ╮(￣▽￣)╭

the entire idea is taking an outspoken woman to the extreme. by choosing to portray a “sexually free” and “outspoken” woman as crass and anti-woman, the author is definitely pushing a funky idea about their ideal of womanhood.

we all know she’s an asshole and a freak, but it’s interesting to see how the author characterizes her. it’s almost reminiscent of the 2016 anti-SJW “feminazi” portrayal.

I think it’s more a satire on personal experiences. The characterization and overdoing the mannerisms is giving “I cant punch you like I’d like to so I’m going to draw you pregnant”. Like we alllll have met a coworker who needs to just shuuuut up and who doesn’t love office gossip.

This is a nice marriage of “revenge story” and “office gossip” without the danger of real life consequences ~ it’s a great combo Im livin

I couldn’t have worded it better than this, thank you!!!

I agree, it feels a little lacking. It is cathartic to see someone shitty get their just deserts but the character being a sexually open and larger gives it all a bad taste. Weight and sex are already used as hammers of morality when someone is outside of the conventional lines, especially women and it feels odd to tack those things on to her when she's already offensive in regards to personality.
I'm not sure how long this story but some sort of character development or at least an explanation as to why she is this way would be interesting. The worst pick me you know still has personhood and a storied history with the society that's molded us all and shaped her into the person she is.

agreed, it would be great if we could get a glimpse of her childhood past

I think the character isn't really the image of "sexually free" and "confident" you may be thinking about.
We can see as the story shows that sex is more of a physical proof of validation for her mindset. ""If people are willing to fuck me then i must be real hot stuff!!"" And thus feeding her illusion that the ones in the wrong must be everyone else around her. She's not expressing her sexuality in a liberating open way, she is using it as a lever to her sense of superiority and with her own words attaching sexual freedom to man hood. "I'm more open to casual sex, i am manly like that, having hookups is a manly trait, i'm just one of the boys" isn't a harmless declaration, it's actually detrimental because it feeds the concept of "purity is feminine" instead and she puts herself at the evaluation of her "value against other women" by her male coworkers.
Now, this is mostly my own perception, i may be wrong, in regard of the issue about her being a 'non conventionally attractive' character, on most office settings the usual person behind this kind of personality is a conventionally attractive woman, it's sad but usually this kinds of behaviors are often overlooked because "she has the looks to get away with it" and thus perpetuating the problem with the brush of "she's pretty so she has a free pass", having her be " ugly" takes away that shield that people unconsciouslly give to beautiful people.
I believe this manga is aiming for the realistic consequences without the "pretty privilege" and show the true experience of the people around a person with this kind of mindset.
If this was a typical pretty girl the story would not progress the way it did, she would probably keep being an awful person, and besides, the issue with most impact to her career wasn't her body but her underestimating of the people around her and devaluating the job she already has, although she works in a female targeted fashion magazine she evaluates the fashion choices of her coworkers while elevating herself for choosing comfort, using even the price of her clothes to rank herself higher against other females in her office in her search for superioeity, and more so her mistake for failing to take seriously journalism and refusing to investigate and in representation of the same female targeted magazine she criticized the clothes of a designer for "not appealing to men enough" and at the same time saying "they were made to seduce men", when the designer asked for ways to improve, she once again used herself as a role for him to follow, even though she doesn't know the target of the brand, the background, the artistic vision, the inspiration; the most basic knowledge to understand a brand, she basically said that none of that matters, that the best he could ever amount to was making comfortable expensive clothes. If she was a beautiful girl she would be called quirky or ,even worse, the designer might consider the suggestion even if it was an insult to his craft, because we give that much value to beauty that we are willing to overlook the root problem that actually exists in this for of thinking.

She is not ugly, her behavior makes her ugly.

Sorry if i'm too serious in my reply, i had a fashion related job for years and this is my take based in my experience in the field and overthinking lol

I also wish to get to know her further aside of her job and men, i think she has a lot of potential and could be a very interesting story of empowerment.

(づ￣ ³￣)づ Best response ever. I loved reading your comment.

no worries i thought i was being too serious LMAO

totally agree with her behavior being ugly! it’s made pretty clear that she is not meant to be a liberated or empowering character.

my main critique is not meant to be a character analysis, but rather with the author and why they chose to portray these traits together in a character. in an already fatphobic and sexist society, writing a fat character to be sexually involved and posing them in opposition to a more agreeable, conventionally attractive character is a choice that left a bad taste in my mouth. ms saba saba is almost used as a foil to everything that a woman should embody. she’s wildly sexist and freaky herself, but this creates almost a caricature that reflects weirdly on the rest of the story. there is no shortage of instances of outspoken fat women being cast in this sort of unflattering light, so this manga didn’t do anything for me in terms of subverting old fatphobic tropes. i think a more nuanced manga might have done something better with this setup, but this just reads as another run of the mill office drama with an extra annoying and horrible character in the saba saba girl.

i think your point abt the manga being a sort of exposée of pretty privilege is interesting, but i do think the saba saba girl’s actions would still make her villainess material in just about any other story. i don’t know if i’d chalk that up to the mangaka? but it’s super interesting to hear ur pov as someone who’s worked in the industry!!!

(〃∀〃)ゞ thank you very much, in all honesty i'm a little hopeful for a self discovery story where she can find her own strength, but maybe i'm reading a bit too much into it :(´◦ω◦｀):

yeah i agree! would love to see some more nuance in this story

i love the convos going on here lmao but just to clarify: i’m not writing this from an uncritically sex positive perspective. unconditional sex positivity is so 2016… it’s 2024, i think we all know that sex is not always empowering, and it certainly is not as used by the saba saba girl in this story.

i’m writing this as someone who never sees fat women in manga unless a mangaka is making some sort of societal commentary. fat women are invisible in the typical shoujo/josei story. for a fat woman to suddenly be represented here as a caricature of a brash, insecure, freaky deaky pick me is weird as fuck in the context of the genre. it’s contributing nothing to the much needed conversations surrounding working women, fatness, and sex. it’s just a revenge porn story that casts a fat woman in the unflattering main role.

we did not fall out of a coconut tree! we exist in the context of all in which we live and what came before us this manga is a little freaky!

Yeah! I totally get it, there are barely any manga with overweight main characters that are not used as a gag or, as you say, a caricature of what a "fat person is supposed to be" It might be an unconscious relation made through the cultural difference of how fat people are treated in japan. You made a very interesting point and if the roles were reversed and the conventionaly attractive person was the one to act that way and get the consequences instead of the overweight woman, i would probably love this manga more lol
It would totally subvert the pretty privilege concept, i belive, but would probably not be well received by Japanese audiences, we also have to consider that all the people working in this story are japanese and have a lot of internalized misconceptions, i agree that it does end up as a childish caricature of a fat woman, but at the same time that is exactly what the japanese society expects of her "either lose weight, be a meek mouse or a nasty woman", it also reminds me of the phrase "femininity is a performance, being a woman is to constantly perform" and in a way it is exactly what "saba saba" is doing, proclaiming her "character role" every chance she gets, as if it was a playpretend and she needed to be filling that role, but as she grew up it stopped being amusing to those around her and now she has her world view shattered against reality.

In my experience, I absolutely love working with professional models, I had the misconception that they would be nasty or treat me badly as a backstage worker. Surprisingly i was wrong, they were very nice girls, we chatted along with the makeup artists and the stylists, they complimented each other and helped to fix shoes or jewelry as i tried to check everyone was ready to go. The real HORROR was the girls or to be more accurate, grown women that were friends with a brand owner or knew someone and had been allowed to walk the runway, they were the most nasty, rude and would literally pick a fight with the MUAS over eyeliner. They would treat us like peasants and would try to change accessories as if this was a shop.
That is something i couldn't help but notice in this manga aswell, regardless of her looks, her being a model really spoke to me because it was really how i remember it to be, having conversations around the themes, the brands, the work and craft and them being proud to be part of the brands' vision, however, the ones with absolutely no passion, no interest in anything but the recognition were the most difficult and disrespectful,, and also one old lady that was in the runway because she was the mother of a designer stole jewelry from a show. I'm still pissed for that lmao

FR DO YOU HAVE ANY MORE RECOMMENDATIONS LIKE THIS

https://www.mangago.zone/read-manga/our_relationship_is/?HYbe
this one is a classic

https://www.mangago.zone/read-manga/childhood_friend_complex_eunhi/
and this one is newer and rlly fun

i'm always on the hunt for more love this trope so bad

i read them both (im a sucker for this trope)

RIGHT OMG i’ve gone through so many pls lmk if u find any others too