The Spring 2025 K-Comics Guide

Stuck in My Sister's Dating Sim

What's It About? 

It's been 5 years since Jinsoo Lee was transmigrated into his sister's dating sim game. He's done well to survive this long but, despite his inside knowledge of the game, things are quickly veering off course! Not only is the female lead no longer pursuing the male cast, all of the supporting characters in the game, the male lead included, are suddenly vying for Jinsoo's attention!

Manic Desires has a story and art by Mongdo. English translation by Jeongmin Lee. Published by Tapas Entertainment (April 8, 2025). Rated OT.

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

We've all read trapped-in-an-otome-game stories before. You may even have read either BL or yuri ones. But have you seen one that has both BL and GL in the same book? Okay, maybe, but it still makes Stuck in My Sister's Dating Sim particularly fun. Protagonist Jinsoo earns his sister Jina's ire when he picks up her game and finishes the route while she was doing laundry, and the resulting beatdown she gives him sends him into the game itself. Now stuck as minor villain Maythan Jean Knox, he'd very much like to avoid the plot points that will destroy him and villainess Rosie Grace, but little does he know, his adjustments are having an entirely different effect on the story.

Or at least they will. The series opens with a flash-forward to five years after Jinwoo awoke as Maythan before going back to the beginning, so we know that by that point, Maythan will be being courted by all three male leads while Rosie and original heroine Yuriel are a happy couple. That last does start to happen in these first eight chapters – when Rosie goes to try to find Maythan at a masquerade, she bumps into a sobbing Yuriel instead, and the two girls immediately begin to bond. Presumably this is an event that was supposed to happen with one of the romanceable men, probably Carsen, because he shows up where Maythan is hiding out, suggesting that roles have swapped. Also alarming to Maythan is the way that there's a literal spark every time he and Carsen touch, although since Prince Kael is also currently smitten with young Maythan, this may not be as final as it seems.

Despite sounding like a pretty typical melodrama, Stuck in My Sister's Dating Sim is actually written to be light and silly for the most part. There is one serious scene in these chapters of Jinsoo unlocking some of Maythan's traumatic memories, which explains how he originally became a villain, and the series is prefaced with some heavy content warnings, including sexual assault, so this lightness right now may be deceptive. But these chapters are largely concerned with Maythan trying to figure out what the hell is going on and his sister Regina dressing him up like a girl for the masquerade, leading to him suddenly becoming irresistible.

The art for this series isn't terrific when it comes to people, which is a shame. On the plus side, it looks different from most other webtoons out there, but there's something uncanny about the faces, particularly the eyes, that drags it down. Backgrounds are lovely, though, and there's a nice sense of color and pattern, so it's not all bad. There are one or two typos throughout the chapters, but on the whole the translation is fine and very readable. This may get darker down the line, but so far it's really entertaining, so if you're looking for some BL with a special yuri bonus, this is worth checking out.