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Nov. 10th, 2020 09:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsFor all the obvious reasons I spent a lot of time last week trying to Be Distracted and as a result ended up watching the entire first season of My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!
The title is a bit misleading because really only about half the routes ever lead to catastrophe even at the start of the show, and by the time the action gets going there's really very little chance of doom getting any kind of look-in whatsoever. However, that doesn't stop our intrepid protagonist -- a nerd who died young in a car accident (as I understand is fairly standard for isekai) and then transmigrated into the otome game she was playing at the time as Villainous Mean Girl Katerina Claes -- from prepping with great determination for her Inevitable Tragic Ending.
These preparations largely consist of:
a.) befriending as many of the main cast of characters as she can so she never gets murdered or exiled for Being Outrageously Mean
b.) learning to farm so that when she does get exiled, she'll have a second career available to her in vegetable husbandry
... that's it, that's the plan! Fortunately for Katerina, Plan A is wildly successful and inevitably results in the entire cast of the game, male and female, falling madly in love with her by episode four. Unfortunately for all of Katerina's aspiring love interests, the joke of the show is that Katerina is terminally oblivious to the dedication of her harem and thus instead continues laser-focused on Plan B, 'hone farming skills to perfection.'
It's very cute! It's very silly! The boy!romance subplots cover the full array of over-the-top otome tropes from 'manipulative arranged marriage royal fiance' to 'sulky tsundere rival with self-esteem issues' to 'devoted stepbrother with inappropriate feelings'; the girl!romances, to my mild regret, all fall into a fairly similar mold of 'love to have a tea party with my beloved friend and talk about our feelings!' with a greater or lesser degree of 'TRULY wish she'd get the hint about slamming me into a wall already' thrown into the mix. (Primed by Scum Villain, I was expecting the original game's protagonist to turn out to be the main love interest, but although she's definitely in the mix she really doesn't get much more narrative focus than any of the others.)
Here's the opening sequence, which I think gives a good sense of the vibe:
This is based on a light novel series and I'm definitely curious about the books; if anyone's read them, I'd be curious to know how much they differ and whether it's exactly the same level of fluff.
The title is a bit misleading because really only about half the routes ever lead to catastrophe even at the start of the show, and by the time the action gets going there's really very little chance of doom getting any kind of look-in whatsoever. However, that doesn't stop our intrepid protagonist -- a nerd who died young in a car accident (as I understand is fairly standard for isekai) and then transmigrated into the otome game she was playing at the time as Villainous Mean Girl Katerina Claes -- from prepping with great determination for her Inevitable Tragic Ending.
These preparations largely consist of:
a.) befriending as many of the main cast of characters as she can so she never gets murdered or exiled for Being Outrageously Mean
b.) learning to farm so that when she does get exiled, she'll have a second career available to her in vegetable husbandry
... that's it, that's the plan! Fortunately for Katerina, Plan A is wildly successful and inevitably results in the entire cast of the game, male and female, falling madly in love with her by episode four. Unfortunately for all of Katerina's aspiring love interests, the joke of the show is that Katerina is terminally oblivious to the dedication of her harem and thus instead continues laser-focused on Plan B, 'hone farming skills to perfection.'
It's very cute! It's very silly! The boy!romance subplots cover the full array of over-the-top otome tropes from 'manipulative arranged marriage royal fiance' to 'sulky tsundere rival with self-esteem issues' to 'devoted stepbrother with inappropriate feelings'; the girl!romances, to my mild regret, all fall into a fairly similar mold of 'love to have a tea party with my beloved friend and talk about our feelings!' with a greater or lesser degree of 'TRULY wish she'd get the hint about slamming me into a wall already' thrown into the mix. (Primed by Scum Villain, I was expecting the original game's protagonist to turn out to be the main love interest, but although she's definitely in the mix she really doesn't get much more narrative focus than any of the others.)
Here's the opening sequence, which I think gives a good sense of the vibe:
This is based on a light novel series and I'm definitely curious about the books; if anyone's read them, I'd be curious to know how much they differ and whether it's exactly the same level of fluff.
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Date: 2020-11-21 08:49 pm (UTC)(lol yeah there really is NOT much there to Nicol in the anime. What's his canon backstory?)
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Date: 2020-11-22 01:06 am (UTC)RE: Nicol's backstory(TW for CSA!!):
So this is only referenced a few times in the Light Novels/Manga and immediately dropped for more ANTICS, but Nicol has been suffering harassment and outright assault at noble parties since the time he was a child, causing him to withdraw emotionally in order to discourage his admirers, not that it worked. It's kind of vaguely implied that the reason he fell for Katarina is because she appreciated him without making him feel like an object. It really felt to me that the author realized that they bit off more than they could chew and hastily erased any more than passing comments about Nicol's backstory at the last minute leaving him with "pretty" and "likes his sister" and sometimes "angst about crushing on his best friend's fiancee".