The Villainess That's Actually A Villainess

So, every season we get at least one new villainous anime. You know the drill by now. A girl gets reincarnated, she's technically the bad guy of the story, except she's actually kind and generous, and she'll win everybody over with cake recipes, and that's assuming she has any power at all, and normally she'll just go off and be a ditz for a bit, and everybody falls in love with her, and then suddenly it's a reverse harem. But in general, I have found, because I somehow love this subgenre to pieces, I can't explain why I've watched virtually every single villainous anime of the last 5-6 years, but I have, and this subgenre has a bit of a problem. With most villainous animes, it likes to call its protagonist a villainess, without actually making them one. Most villainous protagonists aren't actually villains, oh they'll say they're a villainess, or maybe they took over a villainous character from an otome game or something, but then like the worst thing they do is just minorly inconvenience someone, feel terrible about it, and then spend a whole episode making it up to them. A Vivid Lady's Guide to Getting Even doesn't do that. Our protagonist Elizabeth is not some kind of misunderstood saint. She is not secretly kind. She is, in fact, running a one-woman campaign of economic warfare, psychological torture, and mass murder against the country that she used to live in and love, and she's having the time of her life doing it. This, surprisingly, is a villainous anime that actually commits, and it is so much more interesting for it. Ladies, gentlemen, and others, my name is Arkada, and welcome to Glass Reflection. Let's jam, shall we? Now what is this show, for the uninitiated? Our protagonist, Elizabeth, was the Prime Minister's daughter. She basically ran the entire kingdom's administration on her own, holding it all up with her skills and her cheat-level gourmoires. For her service to the kingdom, she was engaged to the Crown Prince. She was to become the Queen, letting the Prince, you know, be King, and be the figurehead, and yadda yadda yadda, but Elizabeth would basically be running the whole country behind the scenes. That was, assumedly, the deal. Unfortunately for her, the Prince is the Prince, and does the traditional villainous scene thing of falling in love with another girl who claims that his fiancé has been treating her poorly, and then he breaks up their engagement, throws her in the dungeon, and then still expects her to be running the country from the dungeon. She has been publicly humiliated, her reputation is in tatters, her own father calls her a traitor, and so, being a protagonist with a bunch of high-level cheat skills, she decides, you know what? No. And she leaves. She begins alliances with a rival empire, and she starts to systematically dismantle her former homeland, using said magic cheat skill grimoires, economic sabotage, and absolutely zero mercy. I will say that, like, originally when I started watching this show, I was fooled. Like so many other people, I'm sure. We all came into this show expecting a by-the-book villainous story. It had all of the tropes, all of the hallmarks, yes, how dare my fiancé treat this poor woman so terribly. Our marriage is now off, and I'm going to be marrying this poor girl who loves me more than you do. I love you, you are banished. Like, we've seen it. We've yawned, I probably eye-rolled. But then, slowly over the course of episodes, we see that, no, she's the real thing. She wants her vengeance, and she's going to get it, but she's not like a mustache twirling, or in this case, since she's a female, she's not a huhuhuhuhuh or Jeong Sama laughing villain-esque, she is very subtle. What one might consider a downside of her story is that it takes some time to really showcase just how much of a villainess she is, because when we've had villainous characters in protagonist roles before, usually it's very obvious what they're trying to do. Characters like Light Yagami, for example, you can have the long and involved arguments of whether or not he was right in his actions or what have you, but anytime he had actions, the audience knew what they were, because he would have his inner dialogue that explicitly told us all in scene-chewing detail. But we don't have that for Ellie. Ellie doesn't tell us, the audience, anything. And while I'll argue that's part of the charm, I can at least admit that it makes it hard to really understand what she's doing until she starts doing it. She takes a long time setting up her swing, but the follow-through is glorious, because even to us, the audience, she acts like an Ozymandias, where she'll go, I am now telling you my entire evil plan, only because I now know that you have zero ability to stop me from doing any of it. My dear audience, I did it three episodes ago. They spend episodes on what is seemingly pointless drivel. In her quest for revenge, she seems to be going very economically. She wants to help the rival empire basically suck them dry from the outside, and make them learn the error of their ways. And it's not until we get to about episode 7 that the show actually decides to pull back the curtain. Spoilers for episode 7, this is kind of unavoidable, but I'm telling you anyway. Episode 7 is when we go from the quote-unquote dark villainous anime to no, legitimately something dark and interesting. Episode 7 of this show, we deal with Robert the Knight. He and his men have surrendered to Ellie after a military engagement. They are on their knees, their weapons are down, they have fully submitted. If this was any other anime, even any other villainous anime, Ellie would look at Robert You now also know that the prince of your land, my former fiance, is an idiot and probably needs to be taken out. You all seem to agree with this. You all seem to be on the same page as I am. So let us go back to the capital and do something about it. If this was any other villainous anime, that is all that this would be. Robert would get his wonderful redemption. He would be one of Ellie's trusted compatriots and companions for knowledge and military expertise for the remainder of the series, and he would help in his own way in her revenge plot. Here she does help in her revenge plot, but not in the way that we expected. He's on her list. Oh yes, she has a list of people that she wants revenge against, and Robert, the knight who physically grabbed her and threw her to the floor during a party in very public view of the entire kingdom, oh he's on the list too. When she accepted his surrender, we thought that everything was going to be happily ever after, but then we come to understand that no, this is a true villainous anime. Ellie accepts their surrender, waits until night falls, and then murders all of them. But she doesn't murder Robert. Oh no, she has something special prepared for Robert. She wipes his memory, imprints him with commands, and then basically gives him a code word to go back home by himself, disgraced, and once a certain amount of time passes, he gets to go on a murder spree, killing everyone, including his own family, and he can't control it. And that leads to him having to be publicly executed. And she masterminded it all. And the reason why that episode, and that plotline, is so well crafted is because the show knows that you're watching a villainous series. It knows the tropes, it leans into the tropes, and then it rug pulls you at the last minute. And it works so well because otherwise the show takes itself very seriously. The world is very serious, and we spend a lot of time kind of doing its own version of a spoonful of moe helps the tragedy go down. So many of these episodes are kind of more slice-of-life-ish than anything else. Even the most recent episode that I watched, after all of this wonderful dark stuff, we had an entire episode about making perfume, about realizing that beastfolk don't like the smell of most human perfume, and they are like 20% of the market from nobility. And you know, maybe we should market to that. It spends all of this time on this light merchantile stuff that we forget that Ellie is fully planning to murder everyone on her list, and do it in gruesomely public ways. We have this entire quick beat on this combat nun. There's a character named Tita. She is a nun. You think she's some kind of religious character, but no, she follows the great tradition of a lot of anime nuns in actually being heavily combat-focused and degenerate as hell. She'll beat bandits to death with a staff, she'll loot their corpses, she'll buy booze, and she has a necessary tonal device to showcase, yeah, she does violence, but she does it in a humorous way. We laugh when she beats the ---- out of bandits with her staff. It's funny, because the other murders we see are not funny. And we need a bit of a balance there. Tita is violent in a way that is comedic rather than cruel, which then makes Ellie's violence hit so much harder by contrast. And as I said, the show loves to be subtle. You want to know another way the show likes to be subtle? On the topic of slavery. We love talking about slavery in Isekai, and by that I mean we don't. It's not a great topic most of the time. We get so wrapped up in the moralization of whether or not an Isekai protagonist should buy slaves, the meta discussions of whether or not the writer of this work should have even included slavery to begin with, all these wonderful things. There is slavery in this show. And a lot of people probably got fooled, and as I did, to a point. And you think that it's very similar to everything else. Mostly because, yeah, Ellie buys a slave, but she treats her slave very well. She trains them to be essentially a loyal employee for her new trading company. She doesn't force loyalty through violence or threatening or anything else. But, at the same time, that character is still a means to an end. When she went slave shopping, she went slave shopping. She walked into the slave market like she was going to buy a new car. She didn't buy this slave because of some moral reason to pull somebody out of slavery. She bought this slave because she needed a worker. Someone who could be loyal and extremely trustworthy. She's not going to come in and be like, oh no, slavery bad, like some kind of main character Jesus. This show allows Ellie to be a villainess. A true and proper villainess. There have been several of her plots or traps to her political or economic enemies that have dealt civilian casualties, and she doesn't care. The church nearby is corrupt, but that's okay because she's paying the money not to get in her way. Nobody is going to stop and deliver a modern moral lecture here, because Ellie and everyone around her is not moral. And Ellie is not overpowered because she has her grimoires. In fact, her grimoires don't even come into effect all that often. Most of what she is capable of is her own intellect and intelligence. The grimoires are the backup in case everything else fails, and usually it doesn't fail. Ellie is more overpowered in the, I understand the systems of this world, and I will use every one of them as a weapon against my enemies. Can she use her grimoires to help her? Yes. Does she? Also yes. But largely they are secondary to everything else. And so when her revenge gets going, when her revenge is moving, this also becomes a secondary thing. This isn't just like the first proper villainous anime that we've seen in a long time. This is also a very narratively satisfying, banished from the hero's party anime. Because that's what it is. It's just that she was banished from a kingdom and not a party led by a hero. The prince of her former land, her ex-fiancé, is the quintessential quote unquote hero character from banished from a hero's party tropes, and everything else is the same. Their kingdom is kind of falling apart without Ellie, and normally this would be the situation where they would realize that oh no, she was actually quite useful, and they would backtrack and partially grovel. Or they may double down, that's fine, but we see that a lot too. But now that kingdom is actively crumbling, and it's not just because Ellie walks away. In fact, arguably if she did nothing, they might recover to a point because they found yet another noblewoman who's been stepping in and trying to handle the mess. But it's not working as well as she wants, because you know, Ellie is actively pulling everything apart from the outside. In most banished shows, the collapse just kind of happens, the party can't cope without their healer or their strategist, but here the collapse is an active act of war. Ellie is not waiting for them to fail, she's making sure they do. And that is why this show has been amazing. The subgenre has been coasting for a while, the subgenre has been defining itself on characters that aren't actually villainous, and we've kind of gotten used to that, and we've kind of been fine with that, but this is a show that reminds us that no, we can actually have villainesses as our main character, and it can still be great. It makes your narrative more interesting, more tense, more surprising. We don't know what Ellie is going to do next, she doesn't tell us, and she won't until all of the seeds have been laid and the rug can be once again pulled out from under us. If you've been sleeping on this show, stop, because it is the first villainous anime that is brave enough to be what it actually says on the tin. And that's our discussion today, hope I convinced you. Thank you to our patrons, without whom these videos would not be possible, your names are scrolling next to my head. And lastly, a special thank you to patrons Gikwig, Siri Yamiko, Aiden, Ross Emerson, Omar Shoman, and Raifen Bonaparte for being especially awesome. And until next time, watch this anime and stay frosty.