The Spring 2021 Manga Guide

I Swear I Won't Bother You Again!

What's It About? 

Succumbing to long-simmering jealousy over her younger sister, noblewoman Violette snaps and does something terrible. As she languishes in prison, something unexpected happens: time is rewound, sending her back to the day she first met her sister! Armed with the memories of her disastrous first go-round, Violette is determined to take the script in a different direction this time.

I Swear I Won't Bother You Again! is based on the light novel by Reina Soratani. The manga is drawn by Haru Harukawa and Seven Seas Entertainment is releasing both the light novel and manga in digital and print.

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

If there's a single thing that disappoints me more than anything else about the manga adaptation of I Swear I Won't Bother You Again!, it's how watered down it is. The original light novel is dark and, while it is on the surface a reborn-villainess story, at its core it's about how an abused girl learns to find coping mechanisms and to trust that some people will be there for her even if her family will not. That's not the case with the manga. Most of the emotional abuse Violette suffers at the hands of her parents is completely left out or toned down, huge chunks of her past are ignored, and Yulan is practically neutered as a character.

To be clear, it's not that I want Violette to suffer or that I particularly enjoy dark stories. Rather it's that the source novel stands out in its crowded fields – it's also a loop story, where someone gets to go back in time to correct a mistake – and this version takes away so much of what makes it special that it ends up being just like any other story in its subgenres. Since the author mentioned in her afterword to the novel that she had started out to write a rom-com and then something happened, this could be done to recreate the original vision she had for the work. But sometimes stories evolve past our original ideas for a reason.

In any event, the manga version of Violette's story opens with her starving herself in prison after having been convicted of the attempted murder of her half-sister, Maryjune. Shortly after Violette's birth, her father fled the ducal estate and moved in with his mistress, and then when Violette's mother died, he came back, bringing his mistress (now his second wife) and their daughter with him. It's clear that he favors Maryjune, and this time Violette is determined not to let that bother her. She's going to stay away from her family and in two years, when she's eighteen, she'll join a convent and live out her days peacefully. Naturally things can't work out quite that neatly, and she's soon ended up functioning as Maryjune's de facto protector in her attempts to avoid her doom, and THIS catches the attention of the one boy she was desperate for her first time around and now is equally desperate to avoid, Prince Claudia. What's a reformed villainess to do?

Okay, look. This is fine, really, but to see Violette go from a person with legitimate trauma and emotional issues to a bog-standard reborn villainess is a major step down. To have Yulan become a nonentity instead of a driving force is likewise a detraction. Even Violette's father isn't as striking as he was before, and all of this adds up to an adaptation that's simply less than. This is a case where I'd emphatically suggest reading the novel over its manga version any day.