Yvona Bote, the title character, was sold into a marriage by her hedonistic father. Try as she might to make her husband love her, all he did was abuse her and steal the credit for her summoning prowess, pushing her harder and harder until her body fell apart. As she was about to die, she caught him cheating on her with her male cousin, who was exploiting both of them. When she dies, she is sent a year back into the past, but this time, she intends to do things differently, and comes up with the plan to marry herself to a higher-tiered noble who has a reputation of being aloof and distant with women. Her abusive fiance and father don't like it, and she responds by telling them to go to hell.
But that isn't even the beginning of the tribulations she has to overcome. She has to deal with terrorist attacks, knights in her kingdom who rightly hate her [summoner] occupation, and at the end of it all, a demon king her kingdom barely defeated in the last timeline.
This Korean Webtoon is written by Jin Sae-Ha and drawn by Han Jin-Seo. The official English translation can be found on Tapas here
, and the original on Kakao here.
The Soulless Duchess contains examples of:
- Abusive Parents: The parents for both members of the main couple were horribly abusive. Yvona Bote's father is a violent drunk who drove her mother out of the home with extreme violence and then turned on Yvona herself, happily selling her off to Baron Gieze to cover his debts and prop up his hedonistic lifestyle. Duke Claude Azentine's mother was a Troubled Abuser who repeatedly threw him into the jaws of death to try and force him to "be accepted" by a holy sword because her own father beat her around for being born a girl, when he and his house were "destined" to produce a holy sword wielder to save the world, and her son was his last-best chance to pull that off, the abuse even continuing post-humously.
- Cosmic Retcon: For reasons Yvona doesn't understand, she was hurled back in time when she died.
- The Dog Bites Back: When Yvona wakes up in the past, the early chapters show that she made it her life's mission to tell her Abusive Dad, abusive boyfriend, and evil cousin that she is not their property and to go to hell.
- Domestic Abuse: So far, the only on-screen marriage that is even remotely happy is the one involving Claude and Yvona. Yvona's mother was driven out of the home by her father's extreme violence, to the point she fled in the middle of the night in fear for her life, and it just gets worse from there.
- Fantastic Racism: Demi-humans have to go completely unnoticed because if they're found, they're bought, sold, hunted like animals, and their souls are stolen, shoved into magic crystals, and used for heinous summoning rituals.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: Yvona winds up marrying Claude Azentine. There's no point in putting a spoiler tag here as the wedding shows up in the credits page of early chapters.
- Past Experience Nightmare: Yvona and Claude are shown tossing and turning at night as their traumatic childhoods, and the memories of the past time-line haunt their sleep.
- Peggy Sue: Yvona died the first time and ended up in the past. She's not alone. Chapter 114 reveals that the pope is a regressor too, and actively wants the Demon King to roam the earth, reasons unknown.
- Security Cling: Yvona and Claude wind up hugging frequently in fear of loss. In fact, Yvona spends her wedding night hugging Claude in her sleep, completely unaware she was doing it until she wakes up the next morning.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: A huge early and ongoing theme is the fact that Yvona is desperately trying to spend her new life preparing to face the demon king on much better terms than the last time-line and not letting her abusive father and fiance push her around.
- Sickening Sweethearts: When Yvona becomes Yvona Azentine, Claude dotes on her so, so much, and she gets so flustered in response that the reader is going to wind up in a diabetic coma, drooling sugar all over the floor.
- Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: Not only is slavery illegal but still practiced, but the one time we see a slave auction, the merchandise is not only clearly abused but slapped with death-curses that can be triggered remotely if any attempt at rescue is made. Although Claude and Yvona manage to defeat and kill every last person on site capable of tripping the curse on the slaves, including several small children, the parent organization that provided the slaves tripped the curse anyway, rendering their efforts moot.
- Summon Magic: Yvona's specialty, and while the magic itself is mostly beneficial, there are groups who twist it to summon demons, which is what brings the demon king to the world in the first place.
- A Taste of Their Own Medicine: The instant she woke up in the past with her previous time-line memories, contracts with her summons still intact, she started giving her abusive father, equally abusive fiance, and her manipulative cousin the exact same taunts, insults, and condescension they are fond of giving her. They view her as a madwoman as a result.
