Viewed through a critical lens, the ending of our story fails its female protagonist. Despite the plethora of power she had accumulated over the course of the novel, in the end she is set up as the passive object around which the men in her life perform a ritual of great complexity. They are the ones who set up and defend her and negotiate the terms of her bond. The female Catalyst of story’s end is also its Reward; rather than being the architect of the solution to her personal dilemma, she demands of no one and chooses only to agree to the terms already laid out for her in the biggest choice she gets to make in the entire story. She is set up on a pedestal, revered, even worshipped, and in the end, made powerless by the devotion of the men around her. It’s all a symbol of empty empowerment.
There’s this really pretty cover for this series of novels. It’s a woman in the center and she’s surrounded by these gorgeous, glowing men. Some of them have animal features but they’re all really pretty. The books are all really pretty too. Every now and then I look at the cover of Spoiled by My Nine Beast Husbands and start to imagine the story. My imagination for the story of Spoiled by My Nine Beast Husbands might even be better than the actual story. That would be the ultimate free version of the book – just making it up as I go along. I could make up whatever I want – the plot could go however I want it to, the pacing could be whatever I want it to be, and I could make up the personalities of the nine husbands to be whatever I want them to be. There’s no paywalls to get in the way or bad translations to get in the way of my imagination. Maybe my desire to read this for free is just my desire to play in this one woman’s fantasy world and I don’t need the text of the book for that.
This book is a story of a hero getting a second chance at life to fail. The reborn alpha's slide down into illness isn't immediate. It's a slow descent into a clumsy attempt to build a life that is only partially successful. He's fine in one scene, celebrating with his pack at a feast, and then he's growling at his reflection in horror in the next. The role of the sister who helped break the curse and is trying to help her brother is especially sad. Her 'gift' can't fix this, it can only delay the inevitable. At one point she finds the alpha, alone and somewhat ruined, scratching at his own skin with the same expression she's seen on his face after he's died. The pack is torn between seeing him as sick and seeing him as weak. In the end, the alpha's howls are not lupine. They are raw and unbridled pain. It makes one wonder if the whole rebirth story isn't just another prettier way to relate the same old tragedy.
If you are familiar with anime/manga then possibly Fruits Basket is the comparison that comes to mind. The Sohma family are afflicted with a curse in the form of animals of the zodiac. The central female protagonist Tohru is something of a ‘queen’ to them and cures them of their zodiac altering one of them into a cat. However the tone of the work is very different to Missing Links and is far from a romance harem, more of a heart warming work that focuses on the emotional healing that the main character brings to the group of ‘monsters’. There are 12 Sohma members plus Ofune the cat, rather than 9 main males that the central female leads to transformation in this work, which is much more wholesome and less focus’d on steamy moments than Missing Links.
The Manhua has an artist's style that is very detailed and intricate. Each panel can be spent for minutes admiring the linework and shading. The anime no doubt simplified many things for the purposes of animation, but they retained the core of the character's designs and costumes. The detail of the costumes were certainly retained, and one can tell that the anime's animators had a great deal of respect for the source material. Often adaptations can take too many liberties with the characters and they are left unrecognizable. But here the characters all move about as themselves. And that is great for fans of the comic. It's a true adaptation, not some re-imagining. So if you are starting with the anime and loving it, the Manhua will be a natural progression in terms of visual detail and not a drastic change in style between two very different forms of art.