#perfect propose I really enjoyed for how it really highlights how toxic workplaces manipulate/exploit workers

[obstinaterixatrix]

I read all of The Honest Life of a Game Studio and now I am obsessed do you have recs for anything like it.

I wish. I FUCKING WISH. but it’s really one of a kind. higefusa really just wrote mundane slice of life office drama with the level of detail that could only be provided by a gamer who has worked in the industry AND he threw in some life or death stakes as a treat. how often do we get an incredibly normal office worker stuck in time prison??? and it’s ONE ARC??? not often enough.

none of these are gonna be just like game-ya but in terms of romances with attention to detail for industry/niche fields… ok all of these are gonna be kind of weird so bear with me.

double section is a BL about an auditor for an insurance company and an insurance salesman, I wouldn’t necessarily give it a blanket rec but I liked how Passionate the main characters were about audits and workplace regulations. a lot of heated drama for the most normal office setting possible. in the author’s note the artist talks about interviewing health insurance salesmen.

ginmokusei is more of a conventional BL but it’s about a guy who inherited his grandpa’s tailor shop and an ex maître d who shows up and demands to help him before he goes bankrupt. there’s a little bit about branding and marketing and bank loans. what has Always Stayed With Me is when the love interest basically goes like ‘you’re using all these flashy ads and being really pushy with discounts. are you selling beef bowls.’ every time I pass a clothes shop that goes really flashy with the discount banners I think ‘are they selling beef bowls…’

panel x magic. okay I said it was going to be weird. so this yuri is about a recent graduate who applies for office jobs and ends up doing image editing for… I guess a brothel? it doesn’t go into critiques of the sex industry, but I thought it was interesting how it takes a really logistical perspective in terms of marketing, advertising, and image manipulation… one of the chapters has the main character going like ‘oh god I’m trying to edit this risqué photo by making the thighs thinner and giving the face a glow-up but I keep making the model look like a weird alien this looks like something from a photo booth’ and gets advice from her coworkers like ‘hey why don’t you look up makeup tutorials to get a sense of what to touch up.’ hasn’t been translated in a while but it kind of hits that… really in-depth look at the logistics of a job.

I think there’s more I’m not remembering at the moment, at one point I think sundry made a joke about rating office romances by how much office work is shown. there’s a couple ones that *kinda* fit but not really… wait. wait wait wait. WAIT. oh my god it has such a h•rny title. okay. so I’m being 100% sincere when I say that the main story for hammered and pounded is a BL with interesting office politics. it’s also incredibly h•rny, but game-ya gets pretty h•rny so whatever. but yeah there’s a whole subplot where the love interest, who works in sales, has actually always wanted to work in R&D, and it becomes A Whole Thing where the head of R&D is in conflict with the head of sales over whether or not a transfer is gonna happen and there’s no romance involved with the conflict it’s all office politics

and in a similar vein, to your right, you will see my boyfriend is about a guy who’s working as a tour guide in kyoto and at the artist talks about how she used to work as a tour guide. I think it’s fun, though I have my qualms. the main character does do studying about how to be an effective tour guide and goes from being like ‘ugh I’m saying all the facts but no one’s listening’ to ‘haha check out this extremely long name of the temple we’re about to see! make sure to remember it, it’ll be the password for getting off the bus ;D’

I have another category of vaguely similar vibes of genre bending mundane office work + fantastical situations

tokusatsu gagaga is a gen series that’s a BIG fave of mine, the main character is an OL who loves tokusatsu so she imagines a lot of scenarios with that sort of vibe. it’s not diagetic, but it’s really fun when it’s stuff like ‘I’M AT KARAOKE WITH MY COWORKERS BUT I CAN’T OUT MYSELF AS A TOKUSATSU OTAKU THIS IS JUST LIKE BEING ATTACKED BY A KARAOKE-THEMED MONSTER EMERJASON HELP ME!!!!’ the eng tl hasn’t been updated in a while but there’s a live action adaption that’s really good

magilumiere co. ltd. is a gen series that’s basically ‘what if magical girls were like… sanitation workers for monsters’ so it’s a lot of company logistics in a fantastical setting. I don’t think I got that far into it before getting distracted, but it was interesting (though perhaps overly generous/idealistic about start-ups as a concept).