I’ve done a post on why I technically have beef with the starting premise of the genre, and another where I explain why I do enjoy some of these shows regardless of that.
But today I want to discuss how the history of this sub-sub genre goes against certain common narratives about the relationship between trend setters and trend followers. It’s a conventional wisdom I often personally disagree with, but I can usually still see why the OG is viewed as above the rest.
Once one big hit is followed up by a bunch of shows doing something similar, it's common to see a lot of talk about how most if not all of the imitators missed the real point of why the original worked. With the implication that what makes them different from the original makes them more generic or less artistically interesting.
The Otome VIllainess genre started with My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! Sometimes called HameFura for short. I liked it, well I liked season 1 but never finished season 2. But it’s hard for me to imagine even people who love it much more than I do, who may personally still like it the most of them, being able to argue in all seriousness that it has a depth its imitators have hollowed out, that by default they are more shallow. No matter how much you love it, HameFura is objectively the most shallow take on this premise.
I stand by my conviction that it was never common for Otome Games or Shoujo Manga to treat an OjouSama character as a completely unsympathetic one dimensional villain. But there is still legitimate social commentary that could be made by exploring this hypothetical archetype. Or even without touching on the politics, just many interesting ways to play around with it.
HameFura is the show least interested in doing that. When Caterina’s memories of her Japanese life awaken her “villainess” personality is just completely overwritten, there is no engagement with asking the question of why that person became a “villainess” or if she were really as one note as she seemed. The story is solely about the Japanese High School Girl who unintentionally stole her life with no acknowledgment of how existentially terrifying that possibility is.
The strictest definition of this genre is it being the Villainess who the reincarnator reincarnates as. Of those, the one I like the most is definitely I’ll Become A Villainess Who Goes Down in History, commonly shortened to Rekiaku from Fall 2024.
I’m The Villainess, so I’m Taming the FInale Boss aka Akulas from Fall 2022 is a show where I liked the first three episodes, but then episode 4 felt liked it rushed to the end of the first LN when this arc should have had six episodes like the adaptations of the first LNs for Haruhi and Index.
Both those shows have in common how in different ways the MC embraces the Villainess role becoming a sort of Antiheroine rather than just being comedically the opposite of who she was supposed to be.
The other two of my personal big three for this trend are adjacent examples where the villainess isn’t the person who's a reincarnation of a player of the Game but completely still herself.
I’m in Love with The Villainess shortened to WataOshi from Fall 2023 (it seems like the gems kept dropping in Fall, yet I didn’t catch any in 2025). It’s a Yuri and is great, it’s the one I most hope gets a season 2.
The third is MobuSeka which I talked about in one of those prior posts. Its second season is about to come out and I know enough spoilers to know things are getting pretty interesting.
