“Friends don’t let friends work with Naoya Zenin.”

Title: Office Conduct (The Un-Feminist Guide to Screwing Your Career)

Rating: Explicit

Pairing: Naoya Zenin/Reader

Fandom: Jujutsu Kaisen

Author: HangsangBangtan

LINK

Summary:

Career-focused, ambitious, and hard working, you have done everything you reasonably could to do better for yourself. You find yourself in a difficult place, and you try desperately to fly under the radar, but there’s only so long that you can hide.

Transcript:

(lightly edited)

0:00:01.3: So my first Fic Friday content is gonna be about, HangsangBangtan’s Office Conduct-The Un-feminist Guide to Screwing Your Career. This is an explicit Jujutsu Kaisen reader-insert story where the protagonist is in a relationship with Naoya Zenin. It’s got enemies to lovers. It’s a no curses AU, like there’s no magic whatsoever. It is filthy. It is everything. The summary is: “Career-focused, ambitious, and hard working, you have done everything you reasonably could to do better for yourself. You find yourself in a difficult place, and you try desperately to fly under the radar, but there’s only so long that you can hide.”

0:00:55.1: This story is why I now have, I don’t wanna say feelings for, but why I am now not neutral towards Naoya Zenin. I’ve read a lot of reader-insert stories over the past couple of months because I find them incredibly fascinating. They don’t gender for me usually. It just feels like I’m reading a romance novel most of the time. I’ve rarely seen myself as the reader in any of these stories. I think Rodiror, her stories come closest for me, and I think LilaestheticHope, but this is really good. Like there’s no problems with the story. I’m just saying, what I get out of reader-insert stories is not that I am the reader, but yes.

0:01:47.9: So this story has had me hooked. The second I started seeing it get posted, I was like, “Oh, what’s going on here? I like this a lot.” Because it is just so ridiculous. It is a workplace sexual harassment romantic comedy. As in, Naoya Zenin is the heir to the Zenin family probably, and he is the reader’s boss, like he is in charge of her and she’s in charge of a team. And everybody hates him a lot because he’s rude, he is a dick, and like the rest of the Zenin’s, he’s a fucking misogynist. This is Cannon Jujutsu Kaisen, that the Zenin family really has no use value for women outside of like, “You’re gonna have my babies and be a trophy object.” And so, carrying that over to a workplace setting with no curses or whatever, that mentality of misogyny like systemic is really obvious.

0:02:55.8: And so, it’s one of those situations where the main character is like, “I don’t like this guy. He’s really shitty.” And he grows on her and she hates it initially, but it lets her see that he has all these different sides to him. And I thought it was a really good story because of that. Because usually, there’s this black and white mentality, like you’re sitting there and you’re like, “Oh, this guy’s a fucking dick.” The end. But here you’re seeing why he’s a dick, and he doesn’t stop being a dick. At no point are you like, “Oh, well this author really likes Naoya.” So she’s defanged him. He’s defanged because the narrative doesn’t let him use curses, and so he has no reason to, or ability to kill, but he’s the same. It’s like what would happen if you plucked him out of Jujutsu Kaisen and plopped him into a drama, like a workplace drama.

0:03:53.8: And so, the reader essentially does battle with him, but also herself. So the evolution of the relationship is that Naoya Zenin is really shitty and he has a crush on the reader. But he’s Naoya Zenin, so he has no idea how to verbalize that or engage with it in a healthy manner. So one of his cousins, Ranta, moves her up to being his secretary. And that’s where everything comes kind of to this collision, because she has an actual job, she has a team. And he plucks her from that and moves her to being his right hand, right hand three steps back. And the enemies to lovers relationship develops because he really does sexually harass her. That’s a whole thing. Like eyeing her butt, touching her butt I think at once, and it’s very much like you know how people, when you’re younger, will be like, “Oh my God, he’s just bullying you because he likes you.”

0:05:06.4: And I was like, “First of all, that’s why a lot of guys get punched in the face when they’re children.” That’s why I punched a lot of guys in the face. You’re not bullying me ’cause you like me, but I’m punching you in the face ’cause you’re annoying me. But it’s that sentiment, like pulling pigtails. He is annoying because that’s the only way he’ll get attention. And I guess it’s like how to train your annoying but kind of cute boss into seeing you as a person. It’s a lot, and the whole thing is, is I think that it does the dang thing. It’s a really reasonable re-articulation of Naoya Zenin as a character in this new setting, positioning him so that you understand why he’s like this and you understand that it sucks. But you also understand why the reader wants him, begrudgingly at first and then actively, ’cause he’s hot, he’s rich, he’s annoying, and there’s this like gooey softness.

0:06:13.4: They’re the parts of him that he doesn’t want anybody else to see, that only the reader sees as she handles him. There’s a part really early on, relatively early on, this is like a 93,000 word fanfic, relatively early on where he tries to woo her, and he’s so clearly bad at it. He’s trying to woo her and he can’t figure out how to talk to women, especially women that he likes. And it’s just like, you’re kind of like, this shouldn’t be darling, but it kind of is. There’s something charming about his failure to people. And I went into it kind of like, “Oh, well, I don’t really go here. I don’t have any Naoya Zenin feelings.” And then I left it with Naoya Zenin feelings. Usually, stories for Naoya Zenin and Reader really kind of doubled down on the misogyny on the Breeding Kink. And again, not complaining, because there is something about that.

0:07:41.1: But Hangsangbangtan wrote this story that feels like it could have been a reasonable Josei Manga plot. This could have been a light ero Manga on the same kind of vein as like Sweat and Soap. There are very funny moments, there are some sad-ish moments. There are lots of very spicy moments. And their Naoya Zenin is complex and appealing, Like I get it. I’m sitting there reading this story and I’m going, “Hear me out about him.”

And prior to that, the only Zenin that I cared about was Toji, and this actively made me want to read more stories in this vein by this author specifically, but also other creators who are viewing him through their specific lens, something that I didn’t expect to happen.

0:09:03.8: The first thing I heard about Naoya Zenin made me go, “Oh, yikes.” And I really do have this image of him. This image of him is like this little inbred, misogynist, spoiled rich boy. And that is kind of what he is, right? But Office Conduct shows potential to other sides, right? And it’s just such a good story. I waited. Every week, she would update and I would be there, just forget everything I had to do for like an hour just to read a chapter, and I didn’t expect that, and I love it. I love it so much. 10-10, will be reading again.