Spotlight #3: Ultimate Venus

English Title: Ultimate Venus
Japanese Title: Kyuukyoku Venus
Author: Shigematsu Takako
English Publisher: Go!Comi
Anime?: No.
Summary: Yuzu is poor and her mother just died, so she does what any sensible homeless teenager would do and starts camping out in a playground. Kagami, Yuzu's rich, estranged granmother's all-purpose employee/servant, picks her up and takes her to her grandmother's honest-to-goodness palace, where Yuzu is basically kidnapped and forced to start training to become the Shirayuki heir, or at least one of the main candidates for this position.

Now, there are a lot of rags-to-riches stories where some loser kid gets picked up and whisked off to some amazing life of wealth and luxury only to whine, moan and cry about missing the good ol' simple days, and these stories can be tough to take. And Yuzu moans plenty. With Yuzu, though, the whining is actually pretty understandable: after kidnapping her and locking her up in a room that's basically an opulent jail cell (Seriously: it has bars and everything. Those wacky rich people!), loving Grandma Mitsuko and Kagami proceed to confiscate all her possessions, and (deliberately) try to throw out everything that reminds her of her deceased parents. Not to mention that Kagami slaps her within the first thirty pages of volume one.

This goes on the femdom list because, even though Yuzu herself gets pretty much manipulated by the household staff, Kagami and the rest are technically, at least, responsible for serving her and looking out for her welfare. It also goes on the list because Yuzu's grandma has her own freaking harem. That's right: a bonafide harem of pretty boys who lounge around being pretty but (of course) double as an equally pretty security force of elite bodyguards. Oh, and her palace is maintained by a staff of pretty young boy "maids" (sadly without any frilly apron cosplay; their uniform, while not screeching of masculinity, is more or less 'boy-appropriate'). So . . . I gotta say . . . good for Yuzu's grandma. I have to wonder what that hiring process is like, though.

Obviously, the strict, cold, 'Kagami-san' is destined to be Yuzu's one true love, and I suppose it's a relief that he's more reserved with her than ever actively mean (despite the aforementioned face-slapping). It comes out fairly early on in the series that the poor boy (He's older than her but younger than me; it's weird that I'm older than even some 'grown-up' manga characters these days.) harbors secret affection for Yuzu and wants more than anything to help her and protect her, but can't tell the recently-orphaned young girl that he gives a damn about her for some Mysterious Reason (TM).

I like this series for two reasons. The first and most obvious reason: Mitsuko's harem. Shoujo titles with harems of lovely guys in them are the necessary counterbalance to all those loser-guy-gets-the-girls shounen titles. Or so I declare. The other reason I like this series is that, despite her obvious destiny to become the romantic interest of about every significant guy in the series, I actually quite like the protagonist. Yuzu can be pretty intimidated by Grandma and Kagami, but every so often she snaps and says or does something a bit 'aggressive' and 'inapprorpriate' (at least for a high-class-lady-in-training, I guess). And, despite this being shoujo manga, she is not always punished for such displays of unladylike temper. And a manga that lets girls know it's okay to get angry is not a bad thing.