I'm In Love With The Villainess (Anime) Review.

 

 

CW: SA, Incest, Implications of Underage Sex

 

Holy fuck.

 

There is a problem with the approach of things to demand art meet some sort of puritanical edge that denies complexity to art and asks it to meet ideas or standards that mean something might not tell a story it needs to. And this argument does need to die; art does need to sometimes provoke and tell something difficult. And we do need pieces that do that.

 

Well. Do that. Well. That do that -WELL-.  It is okay to provoke a reaction if you're telling something with nuance. It is alright even if to forewarn, that you are a telling a story with difficult themes if you handle them with the weight that deserve. It is okay to be soap operatic and melodramatic as long as you understand what tone you're trying to deal with.

 

I'm In Love With The Villainess is an anime about a woman who is gay who dies, playing a game she loves for the villainess character, Claire. She becomes the main character, reincarnated as Rae, the central protagonist, a commoner at a noble school. And this show is ostensibly about even addressing as such, the fact this woman loves this woman and wants to be with her, even if she's a bully and hates her and appears to get off on that fact.

 

This show has great positives and moments of interest to me. Perhaps you've seen out of context a scene from this anime where there is a frank discussion of the double standards sometimes presented to pervy masc and femme characters in anime and the bigotry we internalize against gay people, even using terms like that? A moment that feels perhaps something the author wanted to speak out on with knowledge. I respected that moment and the show did a good job of presenting a charming if sometimes eye rolling journey of someone winning over someone they love and making each other better people as they do so.

And now, SPOILER WARNING; this next bit must, absolutely must, discuss the nature of the second half of the show, with detail for it must be seen to be believed and I understand that for some, anime deals with dark themes. However, when a show handles them as carelessly as this show did, it's important to know how a show can be dark, and how a show can come across as 'edgy'. The idea of using a dark theme in a place it does not belong to simply generate drama, have no weight and handle a subject matter poorly. It is not that the art should not exist but for goodness sake, say it right. So.

 

The second half of the season begins with Claire's maid and Rae's friend, Lene, being part of a plot to kill students and potentially Claire and Rae, alongside her brother, because they are in love with each other, also being biological siblings. There are narrative threads, comparing homosexuality to instinctual relations as comparative 'forbidden loves'. This plot thread is incorrect factually; incest is categorically not the same as queerness and to compare both is to equivocate something that is wrong for reasons based in fact, with something that is hated for pure antagonistic bigoted reasoning. The anime wants us to empathize with the character and it fails by going back on its argument of queerness being something misunderstood and failing to understand it; there is a degree of understanding that I am watching something from a differing culture and I will not get a one to one on my viewpoint which is where my grace falls. But; this is something that by doing this and people accepting that narrative, creates the idea there is a trueness to this which feels more like someone's private fan fiction or taboo play then it does a narrative I'm meant to take seriously as a moral perspective.

 

Then the final part of the show is about a Princess from a different kingdom who Claire sees as her 'sister' in a sense, coming in to woo Claire and come between her and Rae which whatever, sure, we're in the mines of whatever this is now; and then, after pushing Claire and Rae to both engage in behavior that can cause each other harm, engaging in borderline incestuous play and goading Rae to treat Claire as an object to be won, they then drop a moment where after engaging in a duel whereby they nearly murder Rae with the strongest spell in the game for reasons that feel flimsy at best and start some sort of odd cuckoldry bit? The Princess reveals she was doing this to push Rae to be more possessive of Claire, to fight for her love because she had someone she loved who she felt she could not be with, a maid who worked for her, who the anime implies she then assaulted. And then discusses how this broke her down and sent her in disguise to brothels and sex workers to find some closure, before pushing Rae into another competition for Claire whereby the loser will not only give Claire to her, but make Rae hers too and at this point, we can say this is definitively someone's private erotic roleplay between loved ones, sure.

 

Exploring themes, exploring dark themes, exploring sexual ones, is fine. And despite all I've said, if you're going to write and explore these themes, there are places people can and people you can talk to about these ideas. But when this is thrown in after what seemed to be a story with a charming framework, an interesting spin on the transported into an villainess situation theme and some good character work and dialogue, this happening threw me for several dozen loops. I will never forget it; for if this exists, it does not have to -not- exist but I do not have to like, especially learning that the assault it creates for the 'narrative drive' is not true and apparently is an invention of the anime and manga, so, fuck it.

 

You don't have to write something edgy to write a good story. Just write something good.

 

And leave gay people alone, I'm beggin ya.

 

Picture taken by me.