The Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess

Episodes 6-7

For all the criticism that Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess isn't actually doing anything new with the villainess genre outside of using it for meta-commentary, I don't know if there are any that quite follow the formula the same way. There are generally two subtypes: isekai, in which the main character wakes up in a familiar story and realizes they're inhabiting the body of a resident mean girl; and persecution, in which the protagonist is picked on for being too beautiful and competent. In the former, the story generally starts well before she earns her reputation for villainy, and she's trying to avoid flags in a world where everyone loves her. In the latter, she's basically being bullied.

Rarely do you see cases like Iana, where her reputation as a mean girl before the protagonist's awakening was well-deserved. Konoha Satou didn't wake up in the body of a bratty six-year-old and go on to do good works and become beloved before the protagonist shows up, nor is she unfairly ostracized for being intelligent and driven. So, when Cheneau, the third boy in the series' theme song, corners her and accuses her of kidnapping his sister and other pretty girls around the kingdom, can anyone really blame him for suspecting her? Especially when in the first episode, he was the leader of the squadron of guardsmen that failed to capture her right as she opened the cursed book and overwrote her personality.

While the story focuses on Iana's mortal peril caused by her past deeds and plots against her sister, it has another consequence: social isolation. Konoha Satou, as weird as she was as a teenager, is always shown as having friends. Maybe she wasn't interested in beauty products like her peers – a fun little bit that shows up in these episodes that goes a long way to show her disconnection from “normal” girl interests – but she shared her interests with people she had things in common with. She watches anime with other girls her age, gets game recommendations, and trades manga. Even if she wasn't getting invited to dance, she had a social life. But now she has so few people: Konoha and Ginoford, who are family; Sol, who she's still convinced wants to kill her; and Yomi, who is. Well. Like that.

That's why she gets so excited to meet a girl her age – her current age, that is, and not her pre-reincarnation age – who doesn't know her or her reputation. Menoa is the daughter of a count and his mistress, but when her mother died, her father took her into his home, much to her sister's resentment. She's a stranger to the world of nobility, with no friends to protect her from her sister's bullying. When Iana helps her after her sister dumps wine over her head, the two bond quickly.

When originally writing The Dark History, Iana remarks on how her internalized misogyny was so strong, and how she saw any female characters as potential rivals, that she filled any traditionally female roles in the narrative with feminine boys. When she said this, I practically guffawed as all my memories of Nuriko from Fushigi Yugi came flooding to mind. Fushigi Yugi is, after all, the series that Dark History always makes me think of most: raw and messy, written by a young writer who I suspect was channeling many of their own anxieties into the narrative. While I believe Nuriko was at least partially Yu Watase working through some gendered feelings, considering she's since come out as x-gender, there was likely an element of internalized misogyny at play as well.

While these sound like the words of an extremely heterosexual woman, Iana's adoration of Menoa doesn't seem entirely platonic, though. She poses with a suit of armor, imagining herself dancing with Menoa, along with other fantasies of going on outings together, chatting, and spending time together in different ways. Sometimes, refusing to give the female self-insert and homosocial relationships is a kind of subconscious avoidance of one's desire for homosexual relationships. If there are no girls, you don't have to think about any subtext that may crop up between them, after all!

Perhaps that latent lesbianism is what birthed Lady Suselina Rose Amaryllis in young Konoha's mind. In a series chock full of truly baffling costume design, thanks to having been conceived by a middle school girl, Lady Amaryllis appears at her ball wearing a gown with a cutout that exposes her midriff from her ribcage to just above her pubic mound. She immediately zeroes in on Konoha, who herself is in a dress that just barely covers her nipples, leaving the rest of her bazongas exposed.

With this in mind, I'd call it unrealistic that it took two whole episodes for Iana to figure out the identity of Bloody Rosa, but there are two mitigating factors. The first is that Iana isn't very smart. Creative? Yes. Resourceful? Sure. But as a teen, she deliberately avoided developing her intellectual abilities, using the excuse that knowledge from the real world would be forbidden when she woke up one day as Konoha Magnolia. She's even observant at times, considering she noticed Sol had hurt his arm during the duel, but her deductive skills leave a lot to be desired.

She's also using her knowledge of The Dark History as a crutch. The world is now populated with people with lives and histories that are independent of what she wrote. Even if Bloody Rosa only showed up at the end of her story, she now has a whole life that's occurring before she enters into the narrative. A whole life of kidnapping and torturing beautiful young women. But she's out of context! She's not supposed to be here yet! Instead of looking ahead, Iana is just thinking about what she wrote, and that doesn't work when events have changed as dramatically as they have. Thus, Iana is blind to even the most shockingly obvious clues about who Bloody Rosa could be, such as a shared middle name.

But it's okay that you're kind of dim, Iana! I forgive you!

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