Manga Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2026, Week 19]
Another week in the books. Let's chat about manga in the general discussion thread! Feel free to use this thread for questions, comments, recommendations, etc.
Like normal, please be careful with spoilers. I wrote a guide about spoilers in case you need a refresher on how to handle them (also linked in the sidebar).
I'm still continuing my manhwa adventures and this week I'd like to talk about two series with similar concepts but pretty different executions. These series are "I'm Done Being a Hero, Even If It's Retirement" and "Sigrid".
This will be a long wall of text as I have a lot of thoughts and no one to say them to. Things might be a bit messy and incomplete as a lot of these thoughts were written down days after I initially came up with them but I'll try my best to make it readable. Worst case scenario, shouting into the void is still better than keeping this stuff banging around my head so feel free to nod and walk away at a quickened pace.
Both stories are about female knights who die, revert back in time to their younger selves and vow to change their past lives. In "I'm Done Being a Hero, Even If It's Retirement", Adelia (the main character) goes back to when she was 9, few years before her brother and father are suppose to die in battle, leaving her to fend for herself. She was a famous knight and a hero who decided to retire but died shortly after due to overuse of her holy power during her service. As the title suggests, she decides to use her return for rest and recreation, without touching the sword ever again. Things, as you can expect, don't go exactly as planned.
It's a pretty light-hearted and enjoyable story. Adelia bumbles around hard to avoid getting involved with knightly and political issues but when push comes to shove, she does what she always did - acts like a hero and helps people. That doesn't mean her life is the same a previously as she uses her knowledge from the past to avoid misfortune and get close to people she never expected to befriend in her previous life. I just wish the author (dunno if it's an original IP or an adaptation) spread the story a little bit more or went with longer time skips because as is, the whole thing ends up with 9-13 year olds running the show and no one among the adults finding it weird. I'll put some un-detailed examples in the spoiler if anyone's curious what I'm talking about.
::: spoiler Vague(ish) story spoilers Story revolves around the already mentioned Adelia and the Crown Prince, both within 3 years of each other. As kids they manage to:
It's... a lot, in my opinion. None of this ruins the story but it did manage to affect my suspension of disbelief and enjoyment to some extent. There's also Adelia's romance subplot, which wasn't really surprising or necessarily unfitting but I did prefer her and her partner's friendship from their old lives over them being together. That's just me though.
All in all, it was a solid read, even if not something I expect to return to in the future.
Now for "Sigrid". In this story the titular Sigrid (or Sid) returns 5 years back, when she was 20. She's a complete opposite to Adelia in many ways. Her old self was dead set on an outdated idea of an ideal knight - completely loyal to here liege, leading ascetic lifestyle, stickler to the rules and dismissive towards any other knights who didn't subscribe to this way of thinking. Instead of being a hero she became the right hand of an evil emperor, executing his orders (including murdering lots of innocent people) without second thoughts and died betrayed, as a scapegoat for the man she served. Seeing her try to wrestle with what happened and trying to get out of her rigid way of thinking is the core focus of season one and it's great.
It's an mature story - not in regards to erotic content or anything like that but rather in terms of themes and execution. It focuses on personal change, trying new things, relationships. The last one is especially great as, thanks to all of the cast being and acting like adults, a lot of issues between them get resolved not through unnecessary drama but by talking. Genuine conversations about their feelings, thoughts and experiences - it's a real breath of fresh air.
There's a lot of warmth and emotional maturity in general here, leading to a lot wonderful scenes and lessons that could (and honestly should) be applied in real life.
When I got to season 2 things started really well but as I progressed, more and more cracks started to appear in certain spots. Some of the side characters started taking back seat (for understandable story reasons), Sid ended up in a similar (but even worse) position than in her previous life and we got a romance plot that makes me actually uncomfortable. It's not even because the guy Sid agreed to date is evil, he's actually a pretty good person when Sigrid isn't in the picture. When she's on his mind however... dude becomes possessive, has trouble understanding the word "no" (consent is important y'all) and there are multiple times when he says pretty hurtful things to test the waters and quell his worries about Sid's feelings towards him. He might love her, based on how the story presents their relationship, but a lot of his actions are disgusting and would be a huge red flags for any relationship in real life. This is especially disappointing as the rest of the story is pretty good at handling relationships in mature and responsible manner. It's probably the biggest let down in this series for me.
Despite these issues, there's still plenty of really solid content there, enough to keep me entertained just as much as when reading season 1. Then I got to season 3 and long story short, it doubles down on the issues I have with S2 on top of some new ones, because why not?
I'd like to mention one thing that made me realise it's time to check out - not due to in-universe implications but because it made the start of season 3 feel like a soft reboot/retcon and signalled a pretty significant shift in writing for me. I'll put the rest in the spoiler.
::: spoiler Spoilers for the end of season 2, start of season 3 The final scene of season 2 ends with Sid's partner pretty much calling their relationship a sham, leaving her dumbfounded and hurt. It happens due to story reasons and a genuine misunderstanding between the two but it's presented as a serious step too far, especially for Sid who has zero experience with romance and is already struggling with both her feelings towards the guy and what's going in the story at the time.
So how does season 3 follow that up? They kiss then Sid asks the guy to "teach her about physical intimacy". Granted, it's followed by an escape and a little bit of crying after that but things quickly shift towards "you have to win him back" after a short talk with her friends. Reading these chapters in a quick succession gave me a heck of a whiplash, to say the least. It also made me very hesitant to keep reading for a bit which doesn't happen often. :::
In the end, plot went from a reasonably grounded (in universe), to an alright political conspiracy, to a simple wish fulfilment. It might be because I soured on the story as things progressed but by the time I got to the final arc my enthusiasm and interest were rather low and I only finished it because "I already got this far, might as well". I'm not even sure I'll bother reading through bonus chapters (there's 25 of them!) which is a shame because I was super excited when I saw how much side content there is before starting. There were some really good moments in both S2 and 3 but nothing could save my enjoyment by the end.
This series went from something I expected to love quite a bit, to a title I just wanted to finish and move on from. A huge disappointment.
Two somewhat similar stories, two very different reading experiences. "Sigrid" makes me especially bummed because I feel that without the romance (at least in its current form) some of the other issues wouldn't happen. At least both stories managed to avoid typical romance drama despite having multiple guys surround their respective heroines.
I wanted to come up with some conclusion to this rant but the truth is I'm still not 100% settled on my thoughts towards these titles. They were interesting enough to warrant this wall of text at least, I guess.
Valid.
When I started reading the Sigrid section, I became interested, but that quickly faded when you wrote about season 2 and 3. That sucks
There's still plenty of good content in the other two seasons, it's not just downhill after S1. There is also a chance those issues won't be as noticeable or important for you as they were for me. I have an unfortunate problem where if I stumble upon something which annoys me in a specific way I quickly disengage from the thing it happened in and start judging it in a way harsher manner than I would otherwise, often unfairly.
I'd say it's still worth a shot at least. Don't let my mind goblins prevent you from checking out something you might enjoy - a lot of it is a "me" issue.