Doctor Elise or The Royal Lady with the Lamp

Today we have here a prime example of why I shouldn't look up information on shows that I enjoyed. I randomly watched Dr. Elise: The Royal Lady with the Lamp on Crunchyroll and didn't even read comments or anything. It's a combo isekai / time loop time of thing. Basically, we meet the MC when she's a successful surgeon in the modern day world. But it turns out she's that way because she was an evil villainess in her first life and was even burned at the stake. So, apparently, really bad. But in this life she's like a paragon of virtue to make up for it.

Then...on her way to perform a lifesaving operation in another country, her plane crashes. She awakens after the crash, apparently ok, and manages to treat a bunch of fellow passengers before a quick pan down reveals she's bleeding out. She dies as rescuers arrive regretting that she wasn't able to save more people.

Then she wakes up back in her old life, but ten years before, right before her engagement to the prince is supposed to be announced. Her first time around, she married him and (it's very very very unclear what she actually did--later on, there's flashbacks of "bad" deeds, but all they amount to is bullying BUT she was supposed to have been responsible for the deaths of her family and other stuff and gets burned at the stake by her husband...so who knows WTF she actually did). She definitely remembers that, as much as she loved the prince and was totally spoiled, he never loved her and just married her because his father wanted it.

So, new life. Second time around. At a luncheon with the king (prince's dad), she first drops some political knowledge on him that may help save a lot of lives AND diagnoses his medical condition (king died in her first life of complications of diabetes) AND tells the king (with the prince there) that she doesn't want to marry the prince and wants to become a Doctor instead. He makes a wager with her that if she can pass the Dr. exam in 6 months that he'll let her out of the engagement.

She goes off to apprentice to a Dr Graham (of the sexy grey hair) who at first thinks she's just some dilletante court lady (though she calls herself Rose, so he doesn't realise exactly how high up she is) and will run off when he assigns her to the hopeless ward. Of course, she sets right to work, cleans everything, and even performs a surgery (a debridement) on her first day. Anyway, she continues to impress.

Meanwhile, the King's advisor for some reason really wants her as the next empress and convinces the king to sort of half announce but not officially that she's the crown princess even though the king promises her the wager isn't off. And the Prince who I have somehow managed to forget the name of already uses a magical disguise as blonde haired Lord Ron to check out what she's up to. But his guard gets shot...

Okay, this is where I feel like I should address one of the valid criticisms of the book/manga/anime. It's an alternate world, BUT it doesn't feel like the author has any concept of history or when things fit together. There's questionable knowledge about germs...but they have x-rays. There's guns and knights (which, yes, there is some overlap of that in the real world). They know what diabetes is, but then there's other things they don't know that they should. It's all over the place. So, yes, valid.

...and she of course saves him with a miraculous operation that has never been done before (removing his spleen) in the history of this world.

There are some bits where Lord Ron finds more and more excuses to spend some time with her and she's not at all like he expected (she is, after all, kind of a different person due to having lived 30ish years in another life). Meanwhile, she's determined to have as little to do with the prince as possible.

Anyway, she continues to save people left and right. She makes friends with political enemies. She passes the exam, even though the king instructed it should be made harder than ever before--she's literally the only one who passes it. And the story kind of ends there in the anime. She's happy to be saving lives, she technically passed the wager, but says she still needs to prove herself; the exam was just a first step, and the prince is on his way to really loving her. So a lot of things were unresolved, making it feel like, maybe, the first character arc was complete and that's about it.

So then I looked it up because I was interested to see if the source material completes the story. And a billion people were bitching about the anachronisms (yeah, okay), that she was a Mary Sue (I don't totally agree, but I can see why they say it), and that the isekai/time loop stuff wasn't well done but it was an early one so there's some excuses. I dunno. I didn't think that stuff was awful. They also complain about the male lead, but, again, I'm not sure why. He seemed okay to me. 

I did find it on a website and have read some of it (not from the beginning) and I do see some differences--like a scene where a secondary character got sick, it was actually her getting sick. And there's a whole war thing that's not in the anime where she goes off to be a war doctor (so presumably after her exam). And...I don't get the hate for it. 

Like, I enjoyed the anime. I wouldn't have said it was groundbreaking (though apparently since it's old, it was sort of when it was released) but I have seen MUCH worse that do less. The art was fine too. Is it just one of those that people love to hate on for some reason? I dunno.

At any rate, I mostly enjoyed it and will probably finish reading it.