There's all sort of female-led fantasy stories to choose from these days, isekai or otherwise. Sadly they can't all be good, though.
MAIDEN OF THE NEEDLE (Hariko no Otome), based on the light novels by Zeroki and character designs by Miho Takeoka, with art by Yuni Yukimura. First published in 2019 and first published in North America in 2023.
PLOT:
For as long as she could remember, Yui could always see fairies. She used her innate sewing skills to mend their appearance, but that wasn't enough to impress her wicked, imperious family. When she showed no talent for their particular brand of magical weaving, they locked her away, worked and beat her like a slave, and kept her at the edge of starvation. It was only after she was sold to the handsome nobleman Rodin that her true talents could shine. Not only can she see fairies, but she can use their magic to seal powerful magic into her sewing. That will come in handy as her skills attract the attention of both the abdicated king as well as her former birth family.
STORY:
There's a new breed of lady-oriented light novel popping up among the villainesses and reincarnated office ladies. These are basically magical Cinderella stories, where demure young ladies with secret powers are plucked away from their abusive families and given all the adventure and romance they would ever desire. Maiden of the Needle is a prime example of this nascent genre...and a prime example of the failures inherent to it.
First of all, despite the fact that I've never read the source light novel I can tell that this manga is blazing through it at record speed. This means that Yui doesn't so much learn about herself or the world around here so much as it is explained to her by the men around her. This breathless pace leaves Yui feeling adrift in her own story and it really doesn't help that Yui isn't much of a character to begin with. Beyond her magical abilities and her obsessions with sewing, there's nothing to her. She's a blandly pleasant cipher, which only makes the praise heaped upon her by the supporting cast feel all the more false. As you might expect from that description, the supporting cast fares no better. Yui's family are mustache-twirling panto villains. Meanwhile, her savior, his bevy of servants, and Argit the abdicated king are just as kindly and empty as Yui herself.
While reading this, I had the most dreadful realization: Maiden of the Needle is basically no different from the cheat-skill-wielding, slave-harem-possessing dudes that have been cluttering up most isekai stories for years. Like all those Potato-kuns, Yui exists not to be a character in her own right but to serve as a void all but marked as a reader self-insert. They both seemingly possess useless or negligible magical skills which turn out to be incredibly rare and powerful. At every turn they are rewarded and praised purely for existing. Any trauma Yui might have suffered from years of systematic abuse, malnutrition, and isolation is basically waved away by a few square meals and a two-month long nap. She even gets something of a harem, as she surrounded by handsome men who exist as eye candy for the target audience while they literally explain the plot to her. The whole thing is a frustrating, even intellectually insulting experience and God help us if this is the standard for this Big New Trend in Light Novels.
ART:
From what I can find of the light novel artwork, it's not particularly distinct but has a certain delicacy in the coloring and linework. Yuki Yukimura copies the designs from the light novels just fine but loses that delicacy in the process, leaving just a very average-looking manga. It doesn't seem like Miho Takeoka gave them much to work with, as there's no consistent sense of time or place in the character designs. Yui's family dress like Elizabethian nobles, the people around Yui dress vaguely like Victorians while Yui wears a prairie dress and apron that wouldn't look out of place at a maid cafe. Meanwhile, the backgrounds are nothing but a parade of boring interior rooms with little to no character to speak of.
Like most light novel-to-manga adaptations, Yukimura's art is competent on just about every level. The only notable thing is how Yui is typically drawn without pupils which only serves to make her look and feel even more colorless than she already is. That competence is a double-edged sword, though. The story is weak enough as-is and without cute art to dress it up its flaws are laid bare for all to see.
RATING:
This series is licensed by Yen Press. This series is ongoing in Japan with 4 volumes available. 1 volume has been released and is currently in print.
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You did kind of pique my interest (probably not what you were going for, but alas), and my library had it, so at least I didn't waste any money. It's a shame when I look at stuff like this, cus I was thinking "maaan, there's a few enticing ingredients in here, namely, an interesting magic system" and it's just absolutely squandered.
ReplyDeleteI also can't think of a more pointless isekai need than here. Why did this need to be an isekai? It added absolutely nothing. If anything, it seemed like an excuse to fast forward childhood without exploring the magic system (the one singular interesting point). At no point was this better as an isekai than just a regular fantasy series. This seems like the sort of thing the author should've done a rough draft of when she was just starting out writing, then come back in 4-5 years and go "oh damn, I can make this actually good now, past me!" before releasing it to the public.
I can only give it one isekai point and that is that they don't seem to have slavery, but damn is that a low bar.
Ironically, I think I still liked this one more than my second read of 2024, Cheeky Brat (which I only got cus I was at a library sale and it was for 25 cents for vol 1). Needle had nothing going for it, but Cheeky Brat made me hate the dynamic of the two love interests together in a shojo romcom, so that seems the bigger offender to me in terms of a good way to waste time whilst fighting off a cold.