When you overthink it, this is, in a lot of ways, the most meta show to review.
So, this episode was largely focused on the fantasy world of MagiKoi, with fewer interjections by Endo and Kobayashi and no real progress on their world and story, the way the previous episode developed them. On the other hand, this episode did do a decent job of just showing us the progress along the secret “trans-dimensional guidance” route of MagiKoi.
All in all, things seem to be going quite well – Fiene gets invited to spend summer with Lieselotte, Seig is utterly enchanted with his fiancee. Fiene is being awkward with Bal, but that’s a lesser and resolvable matter. Everyone has a good time, Lise teaches Fiene to be more of a proper lady and hears out the trouble with Bal, and Seig even, on advice from the playboy priest bachelor, diverts his schedule of touring the realm in order to come and visit. Just when, by the end of the episode, you’re thinking this is all going too well, Lise’s father arrives on scene locked in mortal combat with a figure bearing a not insignificant resemblance to Fiene’s missing mother.
A good number of the developments in this episode, mostly getting more of the story and setting and where the characters came from, is probably needed, but it’s still an episode with only a minimal amount of conflict to talk over. This means two things: first, that I’m expecting episode 5 to step it up now that the first bit’s wearing a little thin, and second that I’m going to take a little time in this write up to go after a question. Namely, why do we seem to like the Otome Villainess archetype.
Now, I have not exactly sunk much time into Otome games myself (shocking, I know). In fact, the closest I’ve probably seen all the way through would be Long Live the Queen which is much more a survival adventure raising sim in pretty pink frosted clothes. So understand that I’ll be synthesizing this from a good deal of secondary rather than primary sources, something I would avoid doing if this were one of the full series reviews and not an addition to a week-by-week entry that felt a little light.
So, first of all, some basic research suggests that the characters in this show are, on their surface level, about the characters you’d expect to see in any given Otome game – you have the player chararcter, a cute outsider introduced to a new scenario where she’ll meet her eligible bachelors; You have those bachelors, a cast about as colorful and yet archetypical as your average harem; in contrast to Harem setups you more often have one particularly plot-magnetic headliner (Not that some harem material doesn’t do that. Makise Kurisu much?); and of course you have the villainess, a haughty bully who exists to make the poor, sweet, innocent heroine’s life more miserable, and who often has claim real or imagined on the headliner bachelor.
In general, the genre core that’s being parodied here is a lot like what you’d get if you crossed Cinderella with a proto-feminist gothic romance novel like Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre, wherein a young woman goes from nobody to somebody and ultimately finds love despite society, as represented by a fellow young woman of superior station but poor character (the Ugly Stepsister or rather Otome Villainess), trying to push her back down. It’s a pattern that, just like its gender flop of the loser hero who turns out to secretly have the most awesome powers of all that combine with basic kindness to win the attention of every girl who lays eyes on him, wants the player to empathize with the lead on a “that’s so me” sort of level and feel good when their trials are overcome.
In this setup, the Villainess, who has no real counterpart in your usual Harem setup, functions as a hate sink character. She’s everything that’s wrong with society, putting a name and a face to what the heroine has to struggle against. Like Cinderella’s Ugly Stepsisters, she’s not meant to be empathized with, she’s just a cruel bully to despise, so you can feel good when at the end she inevitably gets her miserable comeuppance (with apparently many an otome going ahead and killing off the character to end her reign of terror, or at least enough that it’s considered a genre trope).
Why, then, do we have more than one recent show that takes the idea of an Otome Villainess and makes her the main character, giving pathos to her role? In addition to this show there’s also been “My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!” and “I’m the Villainess, So I’m Taming the Final Boss” which feature isekai-style reincarnations into the role of an Otome villainess who, like Lise, is doomed to die if things go according to script. Suffice to say, there seems to be something there that people latch onto.
I think Lieselotte shows us one reason – just because the Villainess role is by necessity an antagonistic one the player can hate doesn’t mean that every Villainess has been written purely as a a bully too flat even for a hamfisted Steven King adaptation. And once you give a hate sink character an actual personality and some reasonable motivation for why she does what she does, the unthinkable can happen: someone can come to like her and root for her despite her role as the natural opponent of the character the players are supposed to see as themselves.
Because, when you get down to it, the typical Otome heroine can, as is described, be kind of a homewrecker, a force that inevitably (even deliberately) sows discord and tries to steal another woman’s fiancee away from her because oh poor pitiful little Cinderella archetype needs a handsome prince for her happy ending, and the lady who was already on course for one? Screw her. This is, naturally, far too mean a way to put it to be generally applicable, but if you’re looking to turn things around because you like how the Villainess was written and think she was kind of robbed because nobody loved her and she got executed despite being a complex and tortured person, you can find ways to hate the orthodox read.
And, authors in a specific space are always going to want to subvert expectations. I would not be surprised in the least if there actually were an Otome game just like (canon) MagiKoi, where the “Villainess” is legitimately just misunderstood, isolated, and suffering but because of plot and genre expectations is fated to die a miserable death anyway – something that would normally be a passing “ah, how sad” before “and now onto the happy wedding of the player couple” but that at least a subset of players would latch on to.
And then some writers are going to latch onto that. They’ll want to tell that character’s story, more than the one of the milquetoast self-insert heroine. But it wouldn’t do to just turn it around and make the “heroine” a legitimately awful person, nor would it probably play well to have a dating sim where the player character starts engaged and wants to keep some bubbly idiot interloper from ruining everything, because part of the appeal and pathos is the fact that the script is literally against the Villainess. Essentially, she’s fated to lose, to suffer and die, whether that’s cosmic mystical fate or just because the event flags say so. Thus, we get the Villainess reincarnation stories and Lieselotte, where it falls to a character who knows what’s coming to try to fix what should be set in stone.
Those are just my extemporaneous thoughts on the matter, attempting to derive from what I know and what I can research without playing hundreds of hours of dating sims, and extrapolate how this came about. If I’m right, Lieselotte has done a good job of balancing the titular character so we can understand how she looks to other people in setting and orthodox-friendly players, but also how her depth gives her a strong fanbase and a very redeemable nature. We’ve got a lot of show to go, though, so it’s going to be interesting to see how it progresses from here.