English Dub Review: My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! “A Prince Challenged Me To a Fight…”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

A few months have passed and Catarina has been hard at work learning how to garden, though with debatable results. Luckily a tea party invitation allows her to meet the Hunt family, specifically the youngest daughter Mary, who is engaged to Geordo’s brother Alan, another potential game route, and has her own gardening skills. The two bond over gardening right away, with Catarina giving great compliments to Mary’s green thumb. But upon remembering her relationship to Alan in the game, she realizes the “green thumb” line was actually meant to be Alan’s first way of bonding with Mary, a moment that Catarina has now accidentally taken from him. It’s probably fine, she tells herself, as surely only one line shouldn’t throw off their relationship that much. After all, Catarina isn’t involved in Alan’s story and Mary is safe either way!

But it seems that Mary is now rather smitten with Catarina instead, which has now begun to annoy Alan. He confronts her over this, accusing her of seduction and challenging her to a duel but allowing her to pick the game, so she picks tree climbing and beats him time after time after time. In fact, he starts focusing more on challenging her than anything to do with Mary. Geordo starts marking his territory as Catarina’s fiancé, though that just drives up Alan’s inferiority complex. To make him feel better, Catarina pranks Geordo with a fake snake, but that just leads to Geordo blabbing about it and her tree climbing to her mother. But hey, now she has a way to avoid being killed by him in a bad end, so it’s all good!…right?

OUR TAKE

We continue the childhood segment of this series by introducing a couple more key players, Mary and Alan. Catarina is making good use of her opportunity to avoid death flags by steering clear of her character’s usual spoiled nature, but it seems that her obsessive knowledge of this game has already started to push certain important backstory moments out of alignment. So while she’s kept Geordo and Keith from being resentful of her, she’s also accidentally put unintended focus on herself in Alan and Mary’s storylines. And that’s only going to snowball further as we meet more characters. It highlights a bit of an oversight in Catarina’s plans, as while she is hellbent on avoiding being exiled or killed as would be initially expected for her, she doesn’t really have a plan for how she WANTS this story to actually play out.

I guess a lot of that comes down to what Maria ends up choosing, but as she won’t meet Maria for several years, Catarina can only work from her own knowledge of the game. She knows lines from it that have leaked into her own way of talking, which is part of what led to her sniping Alan’s crucial line to Mary by accident, and now she’s become a major interest for Alan by treating him as an equal in challenges (despite still beating him every time). Essentially, as the only one amongst these characters who has some initiative and an open kindness towards her peers, she’s inadvertently turned a lot of attention on herself whose consequences she’s not fully aware of quite yet. Though I guess you can’t blame her since her priorities are simply to not get an awful fate of this deal, AND it’s been established she’s quite the idiot, but it’s easy enough for someone like me to spot where this is going.

Which I guess is what makes this episode a bit harder to find stuff to talk about, since we know where this is going from the last episode and there isn’t any clear sense of that direction changing in any significant way right now. And we still have another couple episodes of just meeting more characters, so I don’t expect much to change on that objective in the meantime. Still, this show has managed to be a pretty fun watch in the meantime, so I look forward to seeing where it’s headed for the moment.