The Fall 2024 Light Novel Guide

The Villainess and the Demon Knight (18+)

What's It About? 

Being reincarnated as an otome game villainess is hard enough, but fate sure didn't hold back on stacking the odds against Cecelia. Her engagement is broken off, the heroine is harassing her, and she's forced to work in a brothel! To make matters worse, her first customer is none other than the heroine's childhood friend and debaucherous leader of the Imperial Guard, Duke Lucas Herbst. Terrified, Cecelia finds herself relentlessly pursued, only to wake up the next day in his mansion—marked as his fiancée?! Bound to this unhinged knight, the troubled villainess must endure his obsessive love. But is his intoxicating affection a curse…or is it a blessing in disguise?

The Villainess and the Demon Knight is adapted from an original manga series of the same name with a story by Nekota and art by Asahiko. Adaptation by Arisia Santiago and English translation by Christina Chesterfield. Published under Seven Seas' Steamship imprint (October 29, 2024).

Is It Worth Reading?

Gentle reader, how do you like your racy romances? Do you prefer a kind tone, a loving hero, and a heroine who willingly and enthusiastically consents to his touch? Do you like her to have agency and to be able to talk things out with the hero? Do you enjoy tasteful sex scenes that understand how subtlety can enhance them? If the answer is yes, then please take my advice and stay far, far away from the original light novels for The Villainess and the Demon Knight, because it does the exact opposite of virtually all of those, with a bonus lack of understanding of female anatomy. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this book is the reason why we need sex ed.

This book was preceded by its manga adaptation, and that in itself was one of Steamship's more risqué offerings. Let me be the first to assure you that its original is even smuttier – chapter one, which is seventy-three pages long, is mostly made up of a sex scene. And what a scene it is! Lucas, or “Lord Lukie,” as he prefers Cecilia call him, has zero compunctions about announcing his intent to hurt her, feels that it makes her more likely to be “his,” and makes her fear that she will be, in her words, fucked to death. She says stop, and he goes harder, all in exhaustive and highly suspicious detail. (I regret to inform you, dear reader, that you cannot hear the hymen tear, no matter how girthy his penis is.) While this is no surprise in the subgenre of romance fiction popularly known as “rape romance,” it's excessive even by those standards. Even romances from the 1980s and 90s had twenty-page sex scenes at most. And all of this is before he puts a Promise Mark on her, which he has no trouble admitting he did when she was in no fit state to coherently consent. Apparently, “showed physical arousal” is good enough for him and the spell.

What's a Promise Mark, you ask? Why, that's a magic sigil that a man can put on a woman (with her consent) that prevents her from getting within three feet of a man who harbors sexual attraction to her and is not her husband/fiancé. As you might imagine, this severely limits her social abilities, because all the guy has to do is think about how attractive she is and BAM! The barrier engages. And yes, this is only put on women by men; there's no masculine equivalent. Men have needs, you know.

I'm not going to shame anyone who finds the so-called rape romance appealing. There's nothing wrong with liking any kind of fiction, and under other circumstances, I think fans of the subgenre might find this book appealing. But the final nail in the coffin here is how abysmally written it is. While I appreciate an attempt to use synonyms, somehow using “vagina,” “pussy,” and “honeypot” all in the same paragraph just doesn't work, especially when only “cock” is used for his organ. I won't even get into the weird rhyming thing that happens when “slit” and “clit” are used in the same sentence, but my biggest linguistic issue is the excessive use of the word “slurp.” It's just not sexy, and if I can tell, it's really not. I'm not sure who's to blame for its overabundant usage, but it just doesn't work. And that, really, is the best way to sum up this entire novel.

Lauren Orsini
Rating:

“The author's barely disguised fetish,” is how the joke usually goes, but there's no disguising involved in The Villainess and the Demon Knight. The author is not coy about it: they want to self insert as a textbook haughty villainess who is railed by a handsome but brutal man— seemingly without a choice. Nonconsent is the fetish here, but it's only an illusion. As much as protagonist Cecelia whimpers and gasps “No! don't touch me there,” there's no doubt that she's enjoying every minute. This old-fashioned bodice-ripper is a salacious twist on the villainess isekai genre.

After you get past the sex scene that encapsulates the first 70 pages, the plot is an amorphous, nonsensical thing that only serves to provide more opportunities for villainess Cecilia to have sex with Lucas, the formidable leader of the royal knights. The story assumes the reader's familiarity with the tropes of both the otome game villainess (engaged to the prince until the heroine wins his affections instead), and the demon knight (captain of the guards, often a second male lead). Precious little explanation is dedicated to why the two have been brought together, and there are plot holes that you could drive Truck-kun through. The bulk of this text features a lady who doth protest too much as she affects disinterest while obviously having the time of her life. For one reason after another, Cecelia is put into positions where she is “forced” to have sex with the insatiable demon knight “against her will.” Some people are into that, as this book will remind you again and again.

I believe the term for Cecelia is “a total bottom.” Throughout the entire book she has a comedic inner commentary running that's the equivalent of a flustered keyboard smash. Unrelated, this book contains a notable number of distracting typos, and the background hum of comedy doesn't quite rise to the intensity of its gratuitous, multi-day sex scenes (One recurring joke is that Cecelia is so gorgeous, her allure will incite a political incident). Nonconsent is the word of the day, and even though it isn't my kink I can see how the exploration of “forced” and “nearly to death” sex in the bounds of a safe, loving relationship will curl some pleased readers' toes.