English Dub Review: My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! “I Became Engulfed by Desire…”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

While avoiding studying, Catarina runs into Prince Alan, which alarms Mary, who has apparently been doing her best to keep Alan from being aware of his feelings for Catarina. Later at a group study session with all of their friends, Catarina finds an odd book called “A Tale by the Name of Desire” that ends up sucking her and everyone aside from Mary and Maria inside of it. When they open the book, they notice that Catarina is inside its pages, but each page has her romantically paired with one of the others stuck in the book. While Catarina is perplexed with how she got their, each other person she’s with seems only focused on courting her. This corresponds with a saying within the book: “When one’s desire is fulfilled, those captured may be saved”.

Mary becomes increasingly distressed the more she sees Catarina with others, but she deduces that they just need to find out CATARINA’S desire to help her and everyone escape. Eventually they find it, which is unsurprisingly focused on food, as she wanders towards a gingerbread house and starts eating it until her desire becomes too great and everyone is ejected. But after everything is explained, everyone feels embarrassed and leaves. In the aftermath, Alan and Catarina share a special moment on a tree, so Mary goes and interferes again.

OUR TAKE

Looks like we still have one more filler episode (maybe one after?) to deal with before we get back to the regular plot aaaaaaand it’s not a great one. This time we get to play around with the fantasy aspects of the series by throwing a bunch of the characters into a space where their wildest desires can flourish and be on display for all to see. This could be potentially interesting, if not for the fact everyone’s desire is painfully obvious and has been for several episodes now. Everyone wants Catarina, except for Catarina herself who wants to eat junk food. This MIGHT have been a good chance of exploring things about these characters that AREN’T beaten over our heads every week, but it’s a filler episode so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.

Instead, we mainly use this device to tell what I guess is a Mary focused story since she’s the one who goes through the most emotional impact because of these events, even if everything is set back to status quo by the end. But I gotta say, even if I have no idea who to root FOR in this seven harem pile up of a show, I know that I am rooting AGAINST Mary, mainly due to her manipulation of Alan that has apparently been going on for years now. We’ve seen at least a few times where she’s gotten in the way of what could have been special moments between Alan and Catarina, but she also seems to have done a bit to make him misread his own feelings and be in the dark about how he actually feels. Which is kind of reprehensible and probably boarders on gaslighting. Not to mention she’s not exactly doing anything to better her own chances in this, so why even stop Alan from trying if she’s not going to do anything anyway? Basically what I’m saying is that it was actually pretty enjoyable to see her squirm while watching just about everyone else be with Catarina instead of her and I hope she ends up alone.

One third of the series left to go and hopefully this means we can finally resume with the main story, which would be much appreciated even if it’s not that interesting anyway. There’s only so much spinning of wheels I can deal with as we just go through the same motions of everyone only thinking about getting with this one dumbass girl and nothing else of consequence or importance happening because of it. With only four episodes left, I doubt we’ll be seeing any conclusion to that aspect of the show, but at least it will be A conclusion.