The Fall 2023 Manga Guide

Revenge: Mrs. Wrong

What's It About? 

Beautiful, charismatic Mitsuki has it all. She's got so much, in fact, that she sends her more timid sister Tsukiko on dates disguised as her so Mitsuki doesn't miss out on other things. But one such body swap backfires after Mitsuki gets engaged: Mitsuki asks Tsukiko to stand in for her at a wedding planning meeting, and Tsukiko ends up falling into bed with Mitsuki's groom-to-be! Tired of playing second fiddle to her beautiful sister, Tsukiko decides to take something for herself for a change. In this startling tale of intrigue and romance, revenge is a dish best served steaming hot!

Revenge: Mrs. Wrong has a story and art by Gou Tanabe. The English translation is by Amber Tamosaitis, adaptation by Matthew Birkenhauer, and lettered by Carl Vanstiphout. Published by Seven Seas Entertainment under its Steamship label (November 7, 2023).


Content warning for sexual assault. This manga contains sexually explicit material that should only be read by mature (18+) readers.

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

This manga is twisted. Not necessarily bad twisted, although that depends on your tolerance level for people doing terrible things to each other, but plot twisted. It starts out with how younger twin Mitsuki constantly uses her older twin sister Tsukiko to cover up her many indiscretions, taking advantage of Tsukiko's low self-esteem for her own benefit. But then Tsukiko goes to a wedding planning session with Mitsuki's fiancé Akito and sleeps with him, which infuriates Mitsuki when she realizes not that Tsukiko had sex with her fiancé but that her fiancé liked it better with Tsukiko. When Tsukiko starts talking about keeping Akito (while still pretending to be Mitsuki, which indicates how weird this story is), Mitsuki sets Tsukiko up to be raped by another one of her boyfriends. And it just keeps going from there.

Part of the issue with this volume is that it quickly loses anything remotely resembling a sympathetic character. At first, Tsukiko feels like the “good twin” because her sister is bullying her. But her almost instant attack of insanity after she sleeps with Akito starts to negate that, as does how she resorts to bribery and other nasty little aggressions after her sexual assault. It's uncomfortable because the story takes away a lot of her trauma by turning her into her sister rather than allowing her to deal with her pain in any other way. Does Tsukiko have the right to be enraged? Hell yes. Does the story do a good job of showing her coping with that? Not so much, especially when Mitsuki appears to have learned precisely nothing from her bad behavior and is just mad that Tsukiko is trying to destroy her social life, giving the impression that Tsukiko is just acting like Mitsuki.

This could be on me, trying to find more meaning than was ever intended in the story. Revenge: Mrs. Wrong is not intended to be anything more than an enjoyably trashy tale of twin sisters gruesomely one-upping each other. And if you're in the mood for a hot garbage story, this is it. But once Mitsuki sets up the rape, this lost me, and even the attention paid to Tsukiko's outfits didn't help. This is for a specific romance niche, and I must say it's not mine.

MrAJCosplay

Rating:

Oh man, I don't even know where to start with this one. If there is one major compliment I can give to Revenge, it's that I genuinely had no idea where anything was going from the jump, and when you consume as much media as I have to for my job, that is something worth praising. Revenge is a story of two twins who are awful people. The book kind of tricks you into thinking that one is clearly more awful than the other but then asks, “How far can we trench these people through the mud for the sake of over-the-top soap opera levels of drama?” This book made me feel uncomfortable, and while I can praise it for fulfilling its obvious intention, I don't want to because I feel like the story goes too extreme too quickly for me to appreciate whatever groundwork it's trying to lay out.

This entire story is predicated on the idea that a young woman always picked second to her identical twin sister is finally taking charge of her life by stealing her sister's fiancé. All of this was decided from one night of sex that he arguably didn't consent to since he didn't know that the two sisters had switched places…but something is different now. Too bad we know next to nothing about this guy outside of the fact that he's just your usual drop-dead gorgeous pretty man that women kill themselves over in a typical soap opera. I don't know who I'm supposed to root for in this story, and I genuinely want bad things to happen to almost everybody involved. There can be some novelty in reading a story that is probably akin to watching two trains crash into each other in slow motion, but I'm not in the mood to read something like that. I'd rather drama be extrapolated from believable character interactions than spite or inspiration coming from nowhere.