The Fall 2023 Anime Preview Guide

I'm in Love with the Villainess

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Ordinary office worker Rei Oohashi wakes up in the body of the protagonist of her favorite otome game, Revolution. To her delight, the first person to greet her is also her favorite character, Claire Francois–the main antagonist of the story. Now, Rei is determined to romance Claire instead of the game's male leads.

I'm in Love with the Villainess is based on a light novel of the same name by Inori. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Mondays.

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James Beckett
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Every season or two, I find myself face to face with a comedy where I end up asking, “I wonder if this wouldn't have worked better as a short, instead of a full-length series?” Well, I don't have to live in the world of the abstract and rhetorical with I'm in Love with the Villainess, because I can say with absolute certainty that this is one anime that, beyond any shadow of a doubt, would be better off in bite-sized chunks. Twenty-three entire minutes of this shtick is just too much by half.

There have been enough of these “Reincarnated into a dating sim story with some special focus on the cliché villainess character” anime in recent years that the novelty has long since worn off, which means that these stories need to work that much harder to stand out and earn their place on the watchlist. Within a mere minute or two of firing up the premiere of I'm in Love with the Villainess, I was able to grok two fundamental problems with this particular iteration of the formula. The first is that the comedy is deeply shallow and repetitive. Here, let me lay out every single joke of this entire episode, in just two brief clauses: The setup will involve the haughty noblewoman Claire Francois saying or doing something needlessly cruel to our heroine, Rae Taylor; then, Rae Taylor will say something to the effect of “Awwwww, she's so cute!” and proceed to hit on Claire. As you can imagine, this might be kind of funny once or twice. By the time we get to round thirty of the same gag, though, all of the story's charm has evaporated into the ether.

Speaking of charm, the other big issue that I'm in Love with the Villainess faces is the fact that it has none. The visuals are drab, the direction is boring, but worst of all, the two leading ladies that we're supposed to follow along and laugh with/at both just…suck. They're bad, annoying, exhausting characters, full stop. We get a couple of details here and there about the sheer, borderline psychotic degrees of Rae's fandom that are kind of funny; I liked the joke about how she used the power of fanfic to master the game world's arcane arts. But seriously, though, pretty much every other moment of characterization boils down to “Claire is rich, and she sucks. Rae is too gay for Claire to give a damn about literally anything else happing to or around her.” That's the kind of foundation that could maybe produce a decent four-panel gag comic or a two-minute YouTube parody of the Dating Sim Villainess formulas. Otherwise, it becomes very hard to get through.

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Richard Eisenbeis
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Longtime readers will know that I love villainess stories—that I devour them in an unending torrent. I love how each one puts their twist on the formula—be that reincarnation, time travel, or simply starting the story after the “bad end” has already happened. The twist this time around is that our heroine, Rae, is reincarnated as the protagonist of an otome game. But rather than trying to date the various pretty-boy princes, she goes straight to confessing her love to the villainess instead.

Often in villainess stories, the villainess is portrayed as a victim—either the target of a plot or simply ignorant of how her lackeys have made her appear to be a bully when she isn't around. This is to humanize her—to make her seem “not so evil.” What's great here is that Claire is as bad as the original Otome game villainess archetype. She relentlessly bullies Rae and takes every chance to demean her.

The trick—and the key to the comedy—is that Rae likes Claire not despite this but because of it. She loves the overdeveloped sense of noble pride and the twisted way it comes out. She loves the dogged determinedness and relentlessness on display. In other words, being bullied has the opposite effect of intended—it just makes Rae like Claire more.

And so we get an interesting situation. How does a bully respond when their actions aren't doing what they intended? How do they react when the tables are turned on them again and again? And what happens when they realize that their target does love them—that they aren't just messing with them to get revenge for the bullying?

Honestly, it's a great setup for the story and a novel direction to take. I'm sure I'll be enjoying this one in the weeks to come.

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Nicholas Dupree
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I was a lock for this property from the moment I saw it. Call it a weakness, but if you show me a haughty anime girl with drill hair and a domineering laugh, I'll show her an engagement ring. Just as Constance from Fire Emblem: Three Houses. There's just something about that classic ojou-sama mean girl shtick that makes me clap like a carnival seal, and in that respect, this show's heroine and I are perfectly in sync.

The way Rae articulates that affection is what won me over after the elevator pitch. It's not (just) that she likes being needled by Claire and then enjoys her flustered expressions when the villainess' bullying doesn't work. She also appreciates the nuances of Claire's attitude; she never delegates her bullying to others out of a sense of pride, or she'll inconvenience Rae but never seeks to harm her outright. She's not exactly a nice person, but she has principles and integrity – as well as personal flaws that can trip her up just as much as Rae's adoration. She's cast as the villain by the story, but Rae appreciates – and is attracted to – the human side of her personality beyond her role in the game's narrative. That's the exact observation an obsessed fan would make about their problematic fav, much like Endō. & Kobayashi Live! last winter. Seeing that sort of fan perspective articulated so well and used for such modern humor is endearing.

It certainly helps that the central pair are just hilarious together. Rae's 100% right: Claire is adorable when she's angry, and watching her pompous attitude flounder in the face of aggressive gay flirting is a joke that never got old for me. I hope this continues to escalate as Claire has to construct elaborate new ways to bully her prey, only for Rae to steamroll past it all through sheer love. It'd be like Wile E. Coyote vs. the Roadrunner, except the Roadrunner is a lesbian who loves to be stepped on. I also love that Rae aces the in-universe exam because she did tons of research for her own doujinshi back in the real world. So many game-based isekai use the premise as an excuse to give their main character foreknowledge of the narrative, so it's refreshing when we establish just what kind of superfan our protagonist was. Also, with how many women I know who play otome games and always beg for a same-sex romance option, the idea of an unapologetic lesbian living through a straight dating sim is hilariously familiar.

Admittedly, I don't know how well this will work for people who don't have ojou-sama brain worms. The central joke is infinitely funny to me. Still, I can easily imagine it wearing thin immediately, or for Claire's mean girl outer shell to be too offputting, or folks finding Rae's singleminded devotion annoying. However, if this dynamic tickles your funny bone, it knows exactly how to keep doing that.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

One particular thing marred my enjoyment of both previous iterations of this story, and it's also present here: in her quest to create a romance route for villainess Claire, heroine Rae mostly succeeds only in making her uncomfortable. It's played for laughs – we're meant to see Rae's deviations from the presets of game and character as something ridiculous within the neatly scripted game world she's reborn into, and Claire's attempts to bully her fall goofily flat. But that undercurrent of Claire not being comfortable with Rae attempting to touch her or reframing all of her attacks as acts of love (or at least loveable acts) reads more as mean than funny to me. I'm almost certainly an outlier here, but it's something to be aware of.

That said, this episode does an excellent job of orienting us in the source light novels' world. Rae, previously Rei, was utterly obsessed with a particular otome game in her previous life because she had a thing for the bad guy, so when she dies while playing, she's delighted to find herself in the game's world. Unlike many other protagonists in a similar situation, Rae seems at least tangentially aware that this isn't a game anymore. She can still ace exams thanks to minigames, but she also recognizes that because this isn't the game, she now has a chance to romance Claire. Her forgetting that there are three guys she's supposed to be pursuing is pretty great, and their attitudes toward her indicate that she's not entirely free of the game's script just yet. She's walking a fine line between the characters having agency and being stuck in a role, and that's one of the more interesting angles of this episode.

This title is getting the simuldub treatment, so I watched half of the episode in English and half with subtitles. Both casts are good, but I preferred the sub a little better, mainly for Rae's delivery, though it must be said that Rod's English VA brings the sleazy very well in a limited number of lines. Claire is good in both languages, and the simultaneous release means that it's easy enough to figure out which one you prefer; I think Rae will be the deciding factor for most people because she has the bulk of the dialogue. The episode also looks good, although there are moments that are merely serviceable; the magic exam isn't exactly going to blow anyone away.

If you're already a fan of the series from the novels, manga, or audiobook, I think you'll be pretty happy with this adaptation. It isn't perfect, and Rae can come off as at least a little predatory, but there is a reason that this is so popular in book form. Give it a chance to build up to that point.