Full Anime Name: My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!
Age Recommendation: 12+
Genre: Isekai / Comedy
# of Episodes: 2+ Currently airing new episodes on Saturdays (Stream on Crunchyroll.com)
Synopsis: “Wealthy heiress Catarina Claes is hit in the head with a rock and recovers the memories of her past life. It turns out the world she lives in is the world of the game Fortune Lover, an otome game she was obsessed with in her past life… but she’s been cast as the villain character who tries to foil the protagonist’s romances! The best ending the game has for Catarina is exile, and the worst, death! She’ll have to find a way to avoid triggering the flags of doom and make her own happy future! The misunderstanding-based screwball love comedy now begins!”
Commentary:
As you can probably tell from my recommendations lately, I’m pretty big on isekai anime! It’s been such a popular genre these days and there’s such a wide variety of them that I can’t help but get sucked in.
My Life as a Villainess is a different take on getting reborn into a video game world. This time it’s an otome game, Fortune Lover, instead of the usual MMO. Otome literally means “girl or maiden” and from wikipedia, an otome game is “ a story-based video game that is targeted towards women. Generally one of the goals, besides the main plot goal, is to develop a romantic relationship between the female player character and one of several male characters.” In other words, otome games are dating sims primarily aimed at women.
Another difference between this and most isekai is that the main character, Catarina, is the villain, rather than the heroine. It gives us viewers a different perspective and some wild hijinks ensue on how she can escape her fate of ultimate dooooooom.
What surprised me most though is that the main characters seem to be around the ages 8 to 10 instead of teenagers. Which makes the anime (at least the first episode) as a sort of prequel to the otome game that Catarina played in her past life. It’ll be interesting to see if the decisions she makes throughout the series, if they do stay at this age past the first episode, affect the personalities of others around her. Will they grow into the same people she knew from Fortune Lover? Will it be enough to divert her doom? Only watching more will tell!
My Next Life as a Villainess is very very new, so I’ve only seen one episode so far, but I’m absolutely loving it. As someone who has played otome games, it’s really amusing seeing the tropes come alive on a screen bigger than my laptop. Some of the common tropes (spoilers at that link) can already be seen from just the first episode! Below is a list of common otome tropes that my friends and I compiled and which characters fit these tropes already!
Common Tropes Seen
- Beautiful Man is Actually a Jerk (Geordo Stuart)
- The Ladies Man (Keith Claes)
- The Siblings (Geordo and Alan Stuart)
Common Tropes Yet to be Seen
- Heroine with No Personality
- The Two Guys that Hate Each Other
- Serious One is a Sweetheart
- The One with Glasses
- The Depressed Loner
- The Athlete
- The Dangerous One
I can’t wait to watch more and see if the other cliches are fulfilled!