The Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess

Episode 9

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The Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess ?

Community score: 3.6

The first order of business this week: Crunchyroll seems to have gotten its shit together with the subtitle situation. Unlike at the start of the season, when large swathes of on-screen text went completely untranslated, they've done a thorough job making sure every text-based gag is legible to English-speaking viewers. Not only that, it's about the same caliber as their old practices: the subs are next to the text being translated, with an effort to match the Japanese fonts in style and color. How rare and wonderful it is to see such a degradation in quality reversed! I hope this continues to be the trend for their subbing practices going forward.

“Self-Evaluations are Unreliable” closes out the Bloody Rosa arc with the Hydrangea Guard bursting in and capturing Lady Amaryllis just in time. They were able to find and capture her thanks to a sudden burst of intuition from Konoha, which led them to the secret basement, where witnesses said she was “like a saint.” Could this be… foreshadowing? We saw Konoha weeping in bed last episode, but this episode seems to confirm it: she is destined to awaken to her saint powers, with or without Ginoford being rendered comatose. It makes sense – even if Iana managed to stop the inciting event, that potential still lies within Konoha. The matter of the Demon Lord awakening remains completely unaddressed as well, with Iana so focused on her immediate survival.

And it does take a degree of savviness to survive! Other than getting herself into trouble to protect Konoha from the Situations she dreamt up as a 14-year-old, she is almost universally hated outside of her little clan of Konoha, Ginoford, and Yomi. Up until this episode, she had yet to realize there was actually a fourth member, because in previous versions of the story, he was the number-one threat to her survival. That's right! You guessed it! Sol is super-duper mad at Iana for running off and almost getting herself killed, but if you have half an ounce of audience comprehension, you've probably figured out that he's completely in love with her himself. You and I know why he's acting frosty toward her after the whole ordeal, and I was extraordinarily relieved when Iana managed to figure it out as well at the end of the episode.

With a touch of downtime, Iana gets an opportunity to do some self-reflection. Well, maybe not downtime, considering she's hunting down a giant monkey she suspects of stealing a wrapped package from Konoha's carriage, which she's getting blamed for. But going for a walk in nature is a great time to look inward, isn't it? She contemplates how The Dark History originated in a middle school art class assignment, when students had to draw portraits of one another. The pretty girl who was her partner presented her with something less than flattering, shattering her self-confidence and her inflated self-image.

This feels like the start of the feedback loop that led to her becoming weirder and weirder. She created a character based on her ideal self that bore little resemblance to her real-life counterpart. As she immersed herself in this character and her world, she lost track of who she was and how to interact with people in the real world. Over time she incorporated a variety of elements of otaku media, which also tends to have very little to do with real life, and used the fantasy to cope with the frustrations she encountered in her everyday life and… well… here we are.

The hunt for the giant monkey ends with her finding it, only for Sol to appear from the bushes and tell her that oh no, it was actually a monster! Turns out the missing package was a monster egg that had been gussied up to look like a normal egg and gifted to Konoha. Which is… kind of a weird gift? Sol only caught on because it was part of his own toolbox as an assassin, and was able to track it down just before Iana met with disaster.

The two make their way back to the mansion and are greeted with a terrible piece of news: despite Iana jumping in and stopping her at the time of her arrest, complete with a pretty speech about washing away her sins, Lady Amaryllis died by suicide in prison. Even if Iana mapped out these characters' personalities and actions, they still make their own choices, and she can only influence them once things change, not dictate their choices.

The Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.