Life is not easy for Cordelia. The daughter of a noble in the kingdom of Liobern, Cordelia isn’t so much unremarkable as she is less o...
Life is not easy for Cordelia. The daughter of a noble in the kingdom of Liobern, Cordelia isn’t so much unremarkable as she is less outwardly beautiful than her younger sister Priscilla. Spoiled from day one, Priscilla has always coveted what Cordelia has – and she always has the blessings of her parents to take it, to the tune of three fiancĂ©s. When the story opens, she’s just taken away fiancĂ© number four, Lord Topach, and Cordelia is resigned to it. She wasn’t in love with Topach, anyway, but she was ready to marry him for the good of her family…and maybe to get away from Priscilla, although she never says as much either out loud or in the privacy of her own head. But now Priscilla once again claims to be in mutual love with a plainly infatuated Topach. Cordelia doesn’t see that she has any options but to break the engagement and start the political process of separating herself from his family.
While plenty of heroines find themselves in a similarly bad situation in manga (and light novels, which this is based on), few of them are quite as resigned to their fate as Cordelia is. She’s got a very level head on her shoulders, and she’s been watching her parents allow Priscilla to take whatever she wanted from Cordelia for a long time; this is a scene she’s seen played innumerable times since her childhood, and now at age eighteen, there’s a sense that she never actually expected her betrothal to Topach to go anywhere near an altar. Her role in life is to give things up to her sister and then clean up the mess afterwards because by all indications her parents are so busy doting on Priscilla that they can’t be bothered to help their elder daughter. Volume two reveals that their treatment of her is largely her mother’s doing; despite being her biological parent, the woman despises her elder daughter due to her resemblance to her own mother. It’s a miserable way to live, and Cordelia knows it; she can’t figure out how to change her circumstances. But she doesn’t whine about it or even lament it all that much, which is a saving grace for the story (it doesn’t wallow in her misery) and a very sad statement on Cordelia’s life overall.
But we know based on the title that Cordelia is not going to suffer forever, and what better venue than a very public event to start changing up her life? Balls are the site of choice for major shifts in story dynamics for these faux Europe-set stories, and this one is no different – only instead of the usual denunciation scene, we get an honest-to-goodness villainess in Lady Katricia attempting to harass both sisters. It’s unclear which sister Katricia dislikes more at first, but by the end of the ball, it’s Cordelia, for one obvious reason: she’s the one Prince Leonhart rescues from Katricia’s planned humiliation. Cordelia can’t figure out why he stepped between her and the flung glass of wine (she, for her part, had stepped between Priscilla and the wine, although her stated motivation was to protect her sister’s expensive ballgown, not Priscilla herself), and the one thing she can’t bring herself to believe is that he did it because he admires her.
This usher in one of Cordelia’s most defining traits in volume one: her astounding mental gymnastics to find any possible reason for Leonhart’s attention other than him being attracted to her. It’s not hard to see why she’d do that – Cordelia has lost four suitors to Priscilla and arguably her parents’ love, so if she allows herself to dream, she risks serious heartbreak. So, she subconsciously decides to protect herself by coming up with other reasons for Leonhart to step in, most of which do him exactly zero favors. She knows that she’s being ridiculous, which is a saving grace; Cordelia isn’t a fool, and a piece of her recognizes that she’s trying to protect herself by pretending that Leonhart just has a glove fetish and that’s why he wants to take her wine-stained handwear. Poor Leonhart tries to get through her defenses, which not only makes for one particularly good line when he declares to her, “You are my catnip!”, but also shows both how earnest he is and how he’s starting to figure out that just being a prince is not going to help win over this lady. And he does want to win her affections: he may have appeared to be solely attracted to her looks and act of stepping between Priscilla and Katricia, but as the second book lets us know, he’s recognized how smart she is and how fully aware of the political and social scenes she is for some time. Leonhart’s fine as a character, but Cordelia is the whole package.
He does have that whole description from the title going on too, of course. Although it takes most of the first volume to become relevant, he does have the alternate form suggested by the cover illustration. The first book doesn’t do much with it (although the catnip comment is more on point than Cordelia realizes), possibly indicating that this is a more faithful adaptation of the source material than other light novel to manga titles. It’s also where the writing loses ground because some of the fantasy elements don’t feel as well put together as Cordelia’s character and situation. The founding dynasty from which the royal family is descended involved beastmen, or at least lion shifters, which explains Leonhart but there’s now a prejudice against beastmen in the kingdom, and shifters seem to be unheard of, or at least not talked about. This doesn’t feel like it makes sense given the history of the royal family. It may be fixed in later volumes, but as of these two, the abrupt introduction of magic and shifters feels a bit out of place, like someone decided that the story wasn’t interesting enough as is.
Volume two ups the stakes quite a bit, delving deeper into Leonhart’s relationship with his older brother Zayd, about whom Cordelia has some serious doubts. Zayd appears to hate Leonhart with an unreasonable passion, despite not knowing about his lion-shifting abilities, and there’s a decent parallel drawn between the brothers’ relationship and the sisters’. Regretfully, volume two turns into a ridiculously fast-paced melodrama very abruptly at about the middle of the book; suddenly throwing kidnapping, attempted sabotage and murder, and a slew of villains at us. All of it makes sense, but it feels incredibly rushed, and the artist’s statement that these two volumes comprise the adaptation of the first novel makes me wonder if things weren’t pushed a bit to fit the storyline neatly into two manga volumes.
Still, this is a fun read. It also benefits from a very good translation that went out of its way to find the best words for a situation; Katricia at one point in the first book calls Cordelia a “trull,” which is an archaic (as in no longer used) pejorative for a sex worker, and the old-fashioned word choice fits Katricia and says a lot about her as a person. There’s a mildly old-timey feel to the language choices, and that gives the translation an edge over other, similar titles. With art that also does a good job of setting a time and place while clearly showing that Cordelia isn’t as beautiful as Priscilla, this is just a nicely done series overall.
My Sister Took My FiancĂ© and Now I’m Being Courted by a Beastly Prince is off to a solid start. It may not be wholly innovative, but Cordelia is a good heroine and nobody’s fool, except when it comes to herself, and she’s wholly cognizant of that. If you like your heroines intelligent and your heroes adoring, definitely check this one out.
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