English Dub Season Review: My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! Season One

Harem comedies in anime have often been maligned, even amongst anime fans, as being some of the most exploitative trash in the medium, often with good reason to think so. But there are those who see value in the genre, with possible ways to perfect its storytelling style of multiple guys and/or girls going after the same person. I’ve watched quite a bit of stories set in this style, often for the good and bad reasons that it has continued to thrive. Yes, it is inundated with fanservice out the wazoo, but it also comes from having many dynamic and interesting characters aiming for the same goal. When My Next Life as a Villainess first started coming out, I heard quite a bit of hype about it being an opportunity to truly make use of this for many of its unique qualities. And while it does make use of some of those to an extent, it actually ends up stumbling a bit too much to call it a triumph.

The plot follows Catarina Claes, or rather, a girl who has been reincarnated into the character of Catarina who has played the game Catarina is from, Fortune Lover, a dating sim where she is the rival/villain and eventually meets her doom for her bad behavior. This girl knows this game very well, and so uses her knowledge to avoid her scripted fate. What she doesn’t count on is that, instead of the game revolving around the designated heroine, Maria, Catarina ends up inadvertently seducing all the main men and women in the game. So in what is probably close to a record, she obtains seven, later eight, love interests, that she is too dumb to notice because she is so focused on avoiding her character’s doom, even long after said doom is no longer a remote possibility.

This ends up being the main joke of the show, that Catarina is too dense to notice all of her potential suitors because she’s so wrong genre savvy. But as this misunderstanding drags on, even until the end of the season, it starts becoming more of a detriment to her character than a charm. She learns how to make meaningful friendships and bonds with all of these people in her new world, but she still seems to view them as unshakable robots who are on their way to an inevitable conclusion, because if she didn’t, she would have realized that they had changed as people from the ones she knows from the game. So it becomes difficult to tell if she is just choosing to not understand their feelings or simply doesn’t see them as humans with free will, and by the end of the season, I’m surprised some of them aren’t so fed up with her stupidity that they give up on her entirely. Which ironically might lead to her doom in a different way, though they may save that for Season 2.

And the members of her harem all pretty much get the short end of the stick because of this, as well as some unfortunate story decisions. Including the main four “conquerable” boy characters, Catarina also ends up hooking the rival female characters AND the expected protagonist, Maria, making her harem up of seven characters (until the last episode anyway). With only twelve episodes, that doesn’t leave a ton of time to develop any of them past some surface details…which are then impacted by the changes that Catarina makes, so they’re moot. Maria, being the original main character, ends up getting a bit more focus, and Sophia gets some surprise twists that don’t really add to her character, but they’re still left at the same place in the race for Catarina’s heart as everyone else. So what we end up with is half a dozen characters who are all basically the same character with a slightly different gimmick. We could have been taking time to go into Geordo’s expectations as the third prince, Alan’s inferiority complex, Mary’s kind of obsessive feelings, or Keith’s conflicts with being adopted, but that all gets tossed aside. The show instead decides to use most of its time on filler episodes and then show main villain, who only gets to really have focus in the last few episodes, that could have been used to actually focus on THE ROMANCE.

So in the end, while this series has some novel ideas in its premise, this first season (and yes, there is another coming) just ends up feeling like a fumble of what it might have been trying to hype up as its main edge amongst the dozens of thousands of harem comedies. I guess that, with a second season coming sometime next year, there’s a chance that it could make better use of these ideas, even though I doubt they’ll really dive into the weirder implications of everything that happened in this one. Ultimately a series that seemed like it could herald a shining example for future harem shows ends up just being a shame and a bunch of wasted opportunities. And there’s enough of those out there to fill the entire planet, so we really didn’t need any more. I guess this route did lead to doom in one way or another.