My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!

Episode 10

Well, it's finally happened: After literal years of anxious anticipation on Catarina's part, the “All Routes Lead to Doom!” part of My Next Life as a Villainess' title has come to fruition, though not in the way she expected. We begin with where last week's post-credit teaser left off, with the gaggle of Academy Mean Girls announcing to the whole student body that they will be revealing Catarina's heinous misdeeds to all. Despite her lifelong doomphobia, this is a little confusing even to Catarina, since the most nefarious thing she ever gets up to is throwing toy snakes at Geordo. The scene is playing out very similarly to how it went down in Fortune Lover, though, so when Catarina's harem arrives, she has to wonder if they will possibly betray her in the end after all. Could her fate truly be so bleak as that?

Of course not; this is a ride or die bisexual power harem, after all. Besides, in one of the few gags in what is a surprisingly serious episode, every single one of Catarina's friends is quick to acknowledge that she's way too dumb to fill reams of paper with evil schemes. It's funny (and just a little sad) to see all of our heroine's loved ones so readily proclaim her dimwittedness to the heavens, but at the end of the day, it only makes sense that Catarina would be temporarily saved from her doom through a combination of the love her harem has for her and her own obliviousness.

This is, after all, the girl whose craving for food is so powerful that she can idly munch away and thank her lucky stars while the Catarina Corps holds council to try and figure out just what in the heck is going on at the academy. Not only were those mean girls acting aggressively in a way that's weird even for them, but all of Catarina's friends just so happened to be called out on “student council business” before the other girls pounced. To make things even stranger, Maria keeps getting hints of some nebulous dark force that's creeping its way about the campus, and when she goes off to investigate it on her own, she doesn't return…

The stakes are surprisingly high this week, with less emphasis on jokes and more on exposition. As Geordo explains in detail, it's possible that dark magic is being used to amplify other students' rage and spite, which would explain the girls' behavior from earlier, even though dark magic is practically unknown to all but a few in the kingdom. It's also not something one is born with; those desperate to meddle in the forbidden ways must seek it out on their own. So, what we have is an intelligent, capable magician who is hiding within the walls of the academy, one who would have a vested interest in disappearing Maria since her skill in light magic is the only thing that could give away the presence of dark magic. Who could it possibly be?

If you guessed Sirius Dike, then congratulations, you've been paying attention to the one named character that has barely been given anything to do all season, despite popping up frequently so we remember he's around. Folks have been predicting his role as the main focus of Fortune Lover's dark secret route, so the surprise isn't actually all that surprising, which is my main complaint about the reveal. It's not only obvious, it's a little boring. We don't know anything about the student council president other than the fact that he's supposedly super “nice," but that describes basically every character in this show, so it isn't like his heel turn inspires a lot of sadness or terror.

The show gives him the ol' Anime Crazy Eyes routine once he decides to spill the beans and confess to Catarina, who has remembered discussing the Dieke route in her previous life. Of course, even though she knows that the Sirius Dieke of the game goes on to kill Maria and all of her friends, Catarina goes the route of trying to empathize with the dude, and so on. It's about as basic a villainous reveal as you can get, which I'm not necessarily holding against the show — it isn't like My Life as a Villainess has ever pretended to be ambitious or subversive — but so much of the episode is devoted to expositing some last minute magic lore and putting the pieces on the game board for Maria's disappearance and whatnot. We know this won't be some kind of one-and-done conflict, too, since the title of the episode is “The Moment of My Doom Arrived… Part 1." As far as “getting serious” is concerned, this show is doing a perfectly average job, though we'll have to see if the remainder of the storyline can prove to be more exciting overall.

Rating:

Odds and Ends

• Shipping Wars: Geordo makes a surprising amount of headway in the Best Boy category simply by virtue of being very helpful during this whole investigation. Plus, he's really the only member of the crew to get much screen time this week. Maria is shaping up just fine as one of the Best Girl finalists, naturally, what with being so determined and brave in her attempt to protect Catarina, even if she ended up getting kidnapped for her troubles.

• A hearty mea culpa from me for missing the after-credits scenes in the past weeks — I honestly just completely neglected to see the discrepancy in runtime for those episodes. To my credit, nothing exceptionally important happened in the ones I went back to watch: In Episode 2, Little Catarina gets all excited about her snake pranks for Geordo; in Episode 8, there's a kind of cute scene with Catarina and Alan that sets up Mary's jealously in the next episodes; and in Episode 9, we get a bit of setup for the conflict here at the top of this week's episode. I honestly don't think I missed any mission-critical context or character development here, but I'll make sure to keep an eye out in the final weeks of the season.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.

My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.