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The Webcomics Weekly #228: This Webcomic Wants to Be Good (4/11/2023 Edition)

By | April 11th, 2023
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

The Webcomics Weekly is back in your life, bringing you another webcomic twist on that genre we love to rag on: isekai. But does this one stand out among the pack? Mike’s got the answer as he finds out just what it means if “The Tyrant Wants to Be Good.”

The Tyrant Wants to be Good
Episodes 1-5
Schedule: Tuesdays
Written by Ramguel
Illustrated by KAKON
Reviewed by Michael Mazzacane

At first glance “The Tyrant Wants to Be Good” is the sort of Isekai “I Got Reincarnated as X” stuff I loath. After usurping the throne and becoming the titular tyrant Emperor Dorothea Millanaire is eventually overthrown and executed. Only to be reawaken as herself swaddled in a blanket. She has been reborn into her childhood and this time she’s going to be Good! The Moira McTaggart reincarnation gimmick does slightly move the strip away from traditional isekai. What it does is allow writer Ramguel to have a running quasi-omniscient commentary by Dorothea as she relives the indignities of everyday life and the everyday challenges of living up to her promise of being good. Which pushes it more into the realm of Groundhog Day. At the same time these indignities offer up a chance to ruminate on the reasons that drove Dorothea to become the titular tyrant by murdering her older brother in the first place. She just wanted to be loved and is the byproduct of an environment that offered the contradictory impulses of constant, immediate, material satisfaction and with perpetual denial of emotional and psychic satisfaction. All she really needs to be good is friends and an honest relationship, not a transactional one based on her station, and this second go around in these first five episodes highlights the inability for that to sprout.

The aesthetics and setup for all of this is fairly generic. Artist KAKON has a bit of same face syndrome with all child characters, except for the color of their hair. While it doesn’t do anything new the opulent 16-1700s style House of Bourbon is well done. Their panel design and overall strip layout tends to be in that traditional webtoon pattern but when they do environmental work it exudes detail and with the exteriors tends to just disappear into a vanishing point that playfully disrupts the readers sense of space giving it all a dream like quality. Maybe the characters all look the same because Dorothea cannot tell them apart, the older brother she murdered and the unrequited lover she drove to suicide are functionally the same in her tyrannical past life. It also reinforces that dichotomy of instant material satisfaction and a hollow emotional life.

That tension of wanting to develop meaningful relationships runs throughout these strips and both makes for some solid sibling comedy and effective melodrama. Ramguel does a surprising job of turning Dorothea into an effective protagonist, I actually care about her emotional struggle to be good. Except at the moment that mission to be good results in her being just as isolated as she was before, because this time she thinks she is the reason it all fell apart and it better to not get involved. Meanwhile all of her old friends are right there trying to be her friend in a highly regimented environment that is purposefully isolating. While their character design isn’t that diverse KAKON knows how to pump up the melodramatic imagery if that emotive aspect of the art was off this strip wouldn’t work nearly as well. These fits of melodrama are also nicely balanced with moment sof chibi comedy forcing the reader to remember oh right these are all kids – who are perhaps all fated to die tragically one way or the other.

The Isekai style setup might put some people off, if I hadn’t gotten a recommendation on this one, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. And I’m glad I did because it’s doing the sort of recriminations based emotional storytelling the best time travel stories are built on. This is asking big existential questions about nature versus nurture juxtaposed against a childrens story. The existential questions aren’t to overbearing and it is balanced out with enough humor and sincerity that the arch nature of the genre and everything do not force it to collapse on itself. If you’re sick of isekai stuff I can’t say this is for you, but if you’re curious for something that uses this genre to do actual character work it is worth looking at.


//TAGS | Webcomics

Michael Mazzacane

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