By this point in pop culture history, we've probably all sat through as many villainess denunciation scenes as we can stomach. The story beats are as familiar as the back of your hand – the prim and proper, highly-ranked fiancée of a prince or similarly highly-placed nobleman is accused of having been a vicious beast to the prince's true love, a woman of the lower class (relatively speaking), in whose mouth butter wouldn't dare melt. It's all a dreadful misunderstanding, of course: the fiancée was just trying to help or living up to social expectations, and the other young lady is doing her best to climb the social ladder in a conniving way. Usually, the fiancée quietly slips away (in an isekai version) or is forced to take the fall. But what if she didn't? What if, instead, she stood up and punched the smug bastards right in their smarmy faces?

If you think that sounds like a good time, then welcome to May I Ask for One Final Thing?, the villainess story where the villainess takes no shit from anyone, especially not her jerk fiancé and his girlfriend. It's violently cathartic, because really, sometimes you just want to see a perfectly prim Victorian-style lady haul back and beat someone's face in, all safely within the realm of fiction. It's pure escapism with a side of genre parody.

The lady in question is Scarlet, the daughter of a duke. As a child, she discovered her love of punching things to the point where she became known as The Mad Dog Princess, a moniker that her father and older brother Leonardo despaired of. Eventually, she learned to keep her feelings inside, schooling her beautiful face to cool expressionlessness, but underneath, she still yearned to hit people. (She refuses to hit animals, she reveals midway through the book.) Her chance comes when she becomes the subject of that villainess denunciation scene I mentioned, and suddenly Scarlet is notorious – for all the right reasons. That's because it turns out that those she pummels are incredibly deserving, making her a hero to the common people, even if her brother despairs of her.

If this sounds like a story built around a fairly thin premise, well, it is. “The shoujo version of One-Punch Man” may be the best way to describe it, although it's not entirely true. But the entire volume encapsulates the idea that Scarlet loves beating people up, does have scruples, and really would like to get away from the royal family, something that seems unlikely since her erstwhile fiancé's brother, Julius, finds her fascinating. Still, that doesn't mean that it's devoid of plot and worldbuilding aspects. One plot point that deserves mention is that the book understands that slavery is bad, full stop. It's mentioned that some of the nobles in the former fiancé's faction trade slaves, which is illegal in Parristan, and one of them sends a beastkin slave to kill Scarlet. Horrified, Scarlet simply uses her blessing (gods-gifted magic) to remove the slave spell and brand. There's no offer on his part to be her slave, no cutesy attempt to frame it as a benefit, nothing. Slavery is bad, the end. That shouldn't feel revolutionary in a manga from 2023, but here we are.

The series is also setting up to be a parody of the villainess genre, and it does so with decent success. Scarlet may be fighting for good, but she's mostly doing it because the other guys annoy her; she's no deliberate heroine of justice. Her brother is in a perpetual state of scandalized horror at her antics, and Prince Julius spends most of the book laughing like a ninny while he watches her go berserk. It's a punch first, ask questions later take on the genre, and there's definitely humor involved in watching a pristine noblewoman beating the crap out of people.

It does, however, wear a little thin. While there are clear efforts made to throw new reasons for beatdowns Scarlet's way, they don't all end up working perfectly, and there's still a feeling of non-parodic familiarity to the book; I read it shortly after a different villainess story (Kill the Villainess) and at times felt myself getting the two series confused because of marked genre similarities. There are also times when the violence, or Scarlet's first resort always being violence, doesn't do the book any favors. She's not always the easiest protagonist to get behind.

Still, there's more than enough to recommend this series to those tired of the villainess genre, even if you still enjoy it in its regular form. The art is very pretty, and if the school uniforms are annoyingly anachronistic compared to the rest of the costumes, well, it's not the only series to do it. The translation is a little rough in places, with words occasionally missing, but it's easy to read nonetheless. So if you're tired of supposed villainesses taking the high road, give this a try. Sometimes it really is enough to see a guy get punched in the face.