Title: Your Ultimate Love Rival

Author/Story: Sol Leesu (Original Story), SaJeog (Adaptation)

Artist: Matte

Rating: (Older Teen)

Genre: transmigration, romance, drama, fantasy

Hosted On: Tapas (ENG)

Official Link(s): English

Official Summary:

Naturally charming, Irene attracts women like a magnet, even when she doesn’t mean to. Enter her best friend, Claudia, who refuses to marry any of her three suitors because of her affection for Irene. As a result, these powerful and mentally unstable men declare Irene as their rival in love and threaten her life. She knows none of them deserve to be with Claudia, but she doesn’t want to die! To save both her friend and herself, Irene must prove she’s their ultimate rival, but will she succeed?

My Thoughts:

First of all, this isn’t a Girls Love series. I need y’all to know that because I’d actually assumed it had been a GL series at the start and when the female lead started linking up with the OG!FL’s brother… I got so pissed. Do not end up like me. This is not a series that’s for the gays… unless you suspend disbelief and bank your own rage.

Second of all, this is one of the few series with yandere second leads/villains to make me go “oh… maybe I don’t like yandere character types”.

The three male leads of the novel Irene that is sucked into are hot stinking garbage. I love a good bad guy, but the male leads of this webtoon are simply just trash. They’re the crown prince, the leader of the criminal underworld, and a paladin with as much authority as the pope. They trample over Claudia’s boundaries and destroy her family in the original novel. Never feeling an ounce of remorse. Now that Claudia and Irene are close – with Claudia even rethinking her previous stance on marriage because she just wants to be close to Irene and a husband would get in their way of their deep friendship – the three men turn their manipulative shenanigans towards Irene because with her out of the way, surely Claudia will bend to their will.

Beyond how these men don’t seem to understand that there’s three of them, one of her, and they’re not in a “reverse harem” novel… there’s also the fact that even if they weren’t absolute freaks about Irene and Claudia, I wouldn’t see it for them because they’re just… shitty prizes. If you’ve read “The Beloved Fake Saint”, the male characters in this series kind of parallel those guys… except they’re even more terrible and less valuable? They also don’t seem to understand that they’re bad love interests?

Like why would Claudia want someone who is actively trying to kill off the remains of her family – including her dear best friend? I actually stopped reading Your Ultimate Love Rival thirty chapters in. I got so stressed out by the way the stories developed and how Irene was being tossed about as an obstacle to the male leads (in the original novel).

This is not me saying that it’s not good. It’s me saying “Oh… I’ve finally found a yandere I’m unwilling to climb like a tree” and considering how much I love the murderous hottie from I Failed to Oust the Villain, that’s saying something. Because that man killed every single person in the female lead’s mansion.

Even the ones that technically didn’t deserve it. Unlike other webtoons I gave up on, It’s not because the series is problematic in some way. Of course it’s problematic. It’s a Korean webtoon with Yandere antagonists and a yandere male lead. But I have loved books like that before and I’ll love them again.

This book, however… There’s one mini arc where the Male Lead is harmed by the “jilted” love interests and thus becomes a vector of harm for the female lead. In the original novel, they’re able to make him slaughter the people in the castle/manor, leaving Claudia alone and ripe for the plucking. In this, thanks to Irene’s interjections due to her knowledge of the original novel, he doesn’t go mad with blood-fever rage and he doesn’t kill anyone… but he does get a rapey AF inner voice?

And that’s the thing… this series does too much. It does way too much. Hopefully it mellows out as it develops because think about how over the top a series has to be to make me stop reading it!

Anyway, if you read this series, did you like it? Did you hate it? Do you think you can do better? Let’s dish!