Volume 8 of Precarious Woman Executive - I'm not typing the rest of that. Anyway, Volume 8 picks up after the failure of the Hero League and Villain Leagues to stop the "Organization". Both groups feel pretty humiliated and want to up their game so they're better prepared for the inevitable rematch.
With the Hero League, Jin goes the route of bringing in three of the founders to show these young pups how it's done. Except one of the old heads is basically Master Roshi from Dragon Ball, in that he's a bald old turtle-man with whiskers, who is a notorious pervert. He's there to be the butt of jokes, or try and grope various female characters. That is all Jin uses him for. Jokes about how ugly or how much of a coward Master Turtle is, or "jokes" about Master Turtle trying to grab boobs. This is mixed in with discussions of how the hero League can more efficiently organize and disseminate information and resources. That's right, it's an organizational efficiency review! Sigh. Jin is seriously overestimating how much I care about the Hero League.
The Villain League's efforts are more entertaining, in that there isn't as much bureaucracy, and more mad science. This where the manga shines, as usual, with the shorter one-off chapters that focus on a few characters. The General gets herself an upgrade, after several attempts that were declined for being indecent. The various seconds get together for a largely unproductive chat and Secretary-san eating a lot of pudding. The Robot Yakuza agree to take RX's latest invention a maid/secretary/guard robot out for field testing, which results in some awkward conversations with the police. Secretary-san takes the General's philosophy about not risking letting someone else take what she wants to heart, and gets a little forward with their boss.
The most significant development is that we see the moment Braveman decided to become a masked hero, when he saved someone from being crushed by a falling girder and they expressed fright at his face. Later, we see the moment when the General became infatuated with heroes, when a guy with a scary-looking face saved her from being crushed by a falling girder.
The coincidence isn't exactly a surprise, and since neither of them knows they met that day, it doesn't change the dynamic between them in the present. Although Braveman does express a level of relief when the General reappears to harass him after she'd been sick for several days, because he finds routine comforting. But later in the volume, he expresses frustration with her unwillingness to give up, because he feels he needs to grow and become a hero everyone can trust, whether he wears a mask or not.
What is interesting, and probably foreshadows a future development (or re-foreshadows it, given what happened in volume 4), is that the General's remark about her savior's face wasn't meant as an insult, so much as in surprise. As she narrates it, he looked how you'd expect a villain to, but he became a hero and saved her. She wasn't appalled by his looks, but impressed by his actions. It matches how Jin wrote them in an earlier interaction in the series, when the General met Braveman in his civilian identity, and remarked that he might look scary, but he should have confidence in himself.
It feels like there's a real face turn coming for her, as a character who admits she spends 10 minutes on villainy a year. But it hasn't happened yet.
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