My Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom

Ha! An anime featuring otome + a plucky heroine (villainess!). I was bound to love this one.

Little dude and I are only 3 episodes in, as it's still being released (new episodes out on Saturdays on Crunchyroll), so it's still early days but so far I love this one and he does too. It's an isekai with an otome-loving girl reborn into the world of the game. Catarina regains her former life's memories when she's about 8 and realises a) that she's in that world and b) that she's *gasp* the villainess.

She immediately tries to mitigate this by practicing her earth magic (by farming...which doesn't work, but is adorable and very out of character for who she was *supposed* to be), learning the sword (also ooc) and by acting differently towards the other "characters" from the game. She's also just a joy, even if she isn't the smartest tool in the shed. So this one is obviously going to be a harem-type show...in fact, she'd already enraptured pretty much everyone with her kindness and enthusiasm by the end of the 3rd show...when they finally show her at 15 and about to enter the magic school where she's destined to meet the protagonist.

For the otome love interests, there's Prince Geordo (who she's been engaged to since age 8 and probably my least favourite and who she tells things like "if you meet someone else, I'm fine! Just tell me and I'll back off!" because she knows that if the heroine winds up in his route, she'll wind up either exiled or dead), the younger/weaker/angstier twin brother of the prince (Alan, the silver haired one, who is the fiancé of her friend Mary and in his routes she knows she's relatively safe...but she winds up befriending him after she befriends poor Mary), Keith Claes (her adopted younger twin brother, who in the original game was bullied by her and became a womaniser...so the "new" Catarina instead dotes on him), and Nicol Ascart (the dark haired beauty who dotes on his silver haired younger sister...who is bullied for her albino-like looks...except by Catarina, thus putting him now on her good side).

I do love that Catarina is proactive. She's funny. She is loyal to her friends, both male and female (it's bound to be a total harem...everyone loves her). She's also determined, even if she has to go into exile, to be okay once she gets there. And she'll do anything she can to avoid death!

Anyway, it's great fun and combines two of my favourite things. Looking forward to next Saturday to see what happens next. Also, for an isekai, so far it has been perfectly okay for little dude to watch. We'll see how that goes as they've now gone into the part of the story where the characters are teenagers, but hopefully it'll stay fairly tame. It seems like that kind of story.