Lily of the Valley - Ch. 5

[MangaDex]

 

[mangaburner1979]

anna: foolproof plan to prevent the woman i love from being corrupted by the impure love that destroyed my life. step 1) maintain close skinship at all times. step 2) tell her I love her constantly. step 3) deny all sexual advances. step 4) everything stays exactly the same forever.

several years later...

lily: (radiating toxic levels of lonely depressed horny energy from every pore, borderline melting into puddle of woman)

rose: (making carmilla eyes) i can see you are also lonely, depressed and incredibly horny. i think your maid hates you...would you like to have sex

lily: (melted) could you please bite me mistress? also i love you.

anna: (mind breaking from seeing a living manifestation of her mommy issues seduce her first love) i think i need a new plan

 

[thesupremextream]

This chapter was dropped on the 11th of May, 2024, on Temple Scan's website. If you wish to read these chapters early, please go and read the series over there. In accordance with Temple Scan's wishes, while I will still upload the series here, I will do so 5-7 days after it has dropped on Temple Scan's website. Chapters will always be released early on their website and, by bringing more traffic to their site, you can keep this series going, otherwise it will be abandoned. Thank you all for understanding and I hope everyone has a wonderful evening.

Edit: Chapter 6 is up on Temple Scan's website now. It will be uploaded here 5-7 days from now so if you guys want to read it early, go and read it there and support the creators. Increased traffic to the website will keep the scanlation going. Otherwise, it will be abandoned.

 

[seseagain]

anna: (mind breaking from seeing a living manifestation of her mommy issues seduce her first love) i think i need a new plan

well, her original plan kind of sucked tbh

 

[mangaburner1979]

every lead in this series is a lesbian disaster too blinded by horniness and trauma to make good decisions so i fully expect her new plan to be even worse.

 

[seseagain]

@mangaburner1979 it's going to be a trainwreck and I'm here for it

 

[Marci]

How can Lily profess her dying love to Ana and get rejected, then go straight to having sex with the Duchess. That's actually crazy

I'm really hoping Ana ends up finding someone else but I doubt that will happen.
It's a messy plot but I can't help but read it, as I apparently like these kinda plots.

 

[Ichaivalrose]

How can Lily profess her dying love to Ana and get rejected, then go straight to having sex with the Duchess. That's actually crazy

I'm really hoping Ana ends up finding someone else but I doubt that will happen.
It's a messy plot but I can't help but read it, as I apparently like these kinda plots.

It's just a rebound she's coping fine and totally normally smile

 

[EmeraldGreen]

I see only the NTR gang is left. Well, makes sense. This is just NTR smut. It's not really a serious story.

For those who blame Lily, in this porn driven "plot".

Lily almost kissed Rose twice before any manipulation occurred: the night she arrived and the next morning during breakfast. She also sneaked out during the night and lied to Anna about it to visit Rose in her bedchamber. Lily is presented as a character who lacks agency, but the first and only real decision she makes during the story is sneaking out to visit Rose. This character was so ready to cheat, it wasn’t even subtle. She is super horny. And that is because Lily is portrayed like a typical hentai story protagonist.

Heck almost after one night, it was only the orgy that scared Lily away. No one sneaks out during the night to visit someone else in their bedchambers without knowing what they were doing. If there hadn't been a orgy ongoing Lily would probably have had sex with Rose the very first night. What, a couple hours after meeting Rose for the first time?

And next is just going to be braindead misunderstandings and Lily sleeping around. It's not a toxic story. It's just NTR smut with a porn like plot.

 

[Scyllae]

The art style is insane, its somewhat blurry while still being very detailled, I am not sure if I am explaining myself correctly.
But damn its pleasing to the eyes.

 

[Loner210]

How can Lily profess her dying love to Ana and get rejected, then go straight to having sex with the Duchess. That's actually crazy

I'm really hoping Ana ends up finding someone else but I doubt that will happen.
It's a messy plot but I can't help but read it, as I apparently like these kinda plots.

Don't question logic here my friend 😂

 

[seseagain]

@EmeraldGreen how is it cheating when Lily and Anna are clearly not a couple? She is free to fuck whoever she wants. Like yes, it is smut, it is a love triangle, NTR tropes and whatever and Anna and Lily clearly have emotions and a relationship that crosses the lines of a typical maid and baroness relationship but they are not married, they are not dating, Anna rejected Lily (as we see in the flashbacks in this chapter more than just the one time in chapter 4) like so how exactly is Lily doing anything wrong here morally? For all she knows Anna is a straight girl who says "I love you" to her platonically.

She could go and fuck every single side character and join into orgies and as long as no one mutually agrees to be an exclusively dating couple none of it would be cheating or morally wrong in any way. Like people aren't obligated to be faithful to someone who may or may not return their romantic feelings and sexual desire.

@Scyllae She wrote and drew Finding Assistant Manager Kim which is a GL oneshot and also did the art for Bad Thinking Diary (which was written by someone else though, she only did the art), likewise she also did the art on two hetero smut manhua written by different authors one is called Run Away and the other is called Friends, havn't read either of them (and have no interest in reading them, either), so idk if they are worth looking at for people who like hetero stuff

Friends was axed after she tweeted something that made Korean men who were reading Friends upset, like some kind of derogatory term for men akin to "incel" or something like that? tbh it sounds like the same kind of stuff that makes Korean video game companies fire women for being feminists but I don't really know. She also openly identifies as lesbian and South Korea does have some sort of gender war with a whole ass movement of young women deliberately avoiding all contact with men so all of that might have also something to do with her being seen as a controversial artist over there.

@Loner210 @Marci never question logic in GL in general

 

[crate90]

Anna I hope you find your happiness

 

[Sun-Yoo]

This was a strange choice for the story. Flashbacks can't make the reader care about a broken relationship when it's already shattered. You can't start caring retroactively when the relationship fell apart before it even had a solid foundation. Why should I, as a reader, care about Lily and Anna? This is why you need a proper buildup.

I had to laugh a bit after reading the chapter. It seems like every single trope is being squeezed into the narrative. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if Anna's father turns out to be a rich and powerful man.

I expect the next two chapters will focus on flashbacks. The first covered Anna, the second will likely focus on Lily, and the third on Rose. So, I'll stick around to see whether the story takes a typical vulgar NTR route where Lily is reduced to a plaything for Rose, or if it attempts something more intriguing. But honestly, it's hard for most readers to care much about who Lily ends up with or even why they should stay engaged and buy the next chapter unless you have a specific fethish. I think the author intended for us to feel sympathy for Lily in this chapter, as she didn't get the intimate relationship with Anna that she wanted. But considering how easily she gave up her affection, the story still feels more like porn than any sort of erotic thriller.

And if I hadn't known in advance that the writer was a woman, I might have guessed the author was a man.
I notice many common negative tropes about women that are all too prevalent in Korean media. I also see the beginnings of a plot about the nature of love that is as vulgar and shallow as one would expect. But that seems to fit her audience just fine.

It was pretty clear from the beginning that Lily and Anna's bond was romantic in nature. So regardless of whether they affirmed that physically, Anna and Lily were still romantically involved emotionally. Anna has always been supportive, has always told Lily she loved her, has been affectionate (despite not being physically intimate), and has remained loyal. The fact that Lily couldn't translate Anna's actions into true romantic love is honestly a problem with communication between these two. But interpreting deeper themes can be challenging, especially for the average reader of such stories.

 

[Loner210]

@seseagain nah, lots of GL have comprehend and logical plot. For this one, I guess the author chose visual to be the selling point instead. Given that before this she only ever did an oneshot with mediocre plot, it's understandable.

 

[seseagain]

@Loner210 while there definitely is GL with logical plots and characters who act like rational human beings a whole bunch of it can be boiled down to "all these problems could be solved by talking it out for 5 minutes", like so much of it is pointless drama based on misunderstandings and tired tropes like "out of nowhere a rival shows up that makes one character realize her true feelings through the power of jealousy". As a genre it is full of cliched plots and tired tropes (to be fair that is true of the romance genre in general, not just GL)

All that said: Rangrarii is known for drawing smut manhua so that is basically all I expected from this 😂 her art is also really good. I don't think that the story will be super deep or have any really surprising developments, it's just going to be telenovela levels of entertainment with gorgeously drawn spice.

 

[Scyllae]

@EmeraldGreen how is it cheating when Lily and Anna are clearly not a couple? She is free to fuck whoever she wants. Like yes, it is smut, it is a love triangle, NTR tropes and whatever and Anna and Lily clearly have emotions and a relationship that crosses the lines of a typical maid and baroness relationship but they are not married, they are not dating, Anna rejected Lily (as we see in the flashbacks in this chapter more than just the one time in chapter 4) like so how exactly is Lily doing anything wrong here morally? For all she knows Anna is a straight girl who says "I love you" to her platonically.

She could go and fuck every single side character and join into orgies and as long as no one mutually agrees to be an exclusively dating couple none of it would be cheating or morally wrong in any way. Like people aren't obligated to be faithful to someone who may or may not return their romantic feelings and sexual desire.

@Scyllae She wrote and drew Finding Assistant Manager Kim which is a GL oneshot and also did the art for Bad Thinking Diary (which was written by someone else though, she only did the art), likewise she also did the art on two hetero smut manhua written by different authors one is called Run Away and the other is called Friends, havn't read either of them (and have no interest in reading them, either), so idk if they are worth looking at for people who like hetero stuff

Friends was axed after she tweeted something that made Korean men who were reading Friends upset, like some kind of derogatory term for men akin to "incel" or something like that? tbh it sounds like the same kind of stuff that makes Korean video game companies fire women for being feminists but I don't really know. She also openly identifies as lesbian and South Korea does have some sort of gender war with a whole ass movement of young women deliberately avoiding all contact with men so all of that might have also something to do with her being seen as a controversial artist over there.

@Loner210 @Marci never question logic in GL in general

Looks like I hadnt read Bad thinking diary yet, fixed, just shrinked my time sleeping by a lot.

 

[North87]

I find it interesting that a lot of fans of this series struggle to grasp the concept of a deep emotional bond that doesn’t involve sex—one that Lily acknowledged just moments before her mental breakdown.

Moreover, all the sex scenes so far have been tainted with human trauma and anguish. The most recent scene, in particular, features Rose taking advantage of a woman during her mental breakdown. Not exactly what I'd call sexy. But that's pretty much what you would expect from an NTR story.

 

[helloxo-hell]

🫵😂🫵😂🫵😂

 

[seseagain]

I find it interesting that a lot of fans of this series struggle to grasp the concept of a deep emotional bond that doesn’t involve sex—one that Lily acknowledged just moments before her mental breakdown.

You mean friendship? Like the type of relationship that doesn't imply sexual fidelity?

Like I see how all of these going ons suck super hard for Anna, absolutely no argument there. But really how often is Lily supposed to be rejected by Anna and how long does she have to wait before having sex with somebody else for it to be considered acceptable by people who hate her character?

This story is dumb drama and not deep, also no argument there, I am just surprised at the amount of hate Lily gets both here and elsewhere, because I genuinely don't get why people feel that she betrayed Anna when they are clearly and despite their feelings are not in a relationship that implies sexual fidelity. I just don't get it. Was she rebounding pretty fast? Sure okay but that is fine. Was she believing Rose way too easily? Also yes. She is dumb and naive.

Was she just sold by her parents and had her whole life turned upside down literally a day or two earlier and is in a super emotional and vulnerable position? Also yes.


I think she is acting understandable. Like I am surprised that Lily gets more hate than Rose, I would think that the manipulative rich bitch is more hateable than the naive girl who gets taken advantage of. 🤷🏻‍♀️