By Izumi Okido and Jyun Hayase. Released in Japan as “Rekishi ni Nokoru Akujo ni Naru zo: Akuyaku Reijō ni Naru hodo Ōji no Dekiai wa Kasoku suru yō desu!” by B’s-LOG Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Sarah Moon.

She’s not in this volume much, but I will admit I have started to wonder what this series is going to do with Liz. For the most part, these sorts of “the good villainess is balanced by a bad heroine” style books tend to overbalance the heroine into being genuinely evil, or incredibly incompetent, etc. It’s easy to see what’s going to happen to them. Liz is not quite like those in that she’s charming people into loving her, but not deliberately, and it’s basically causing folks to affirm her own misplaced idealism. Unfortunately for her, the rest of the cast really hate her, and I’m fairly sure that exile is probably going to be her best outcome here, and genuinely snapping may still be on the menu. Sometimes you’re just the wrong archetype in a book that’s about someone else. Speaking of what someone else, let’s check in on Alicia.

Alicia wants to investigate Laval, but she can’t simply take a field trip into another country, especially when their own country is chock full of magic users and Laval doesn’t have any of them. So she’s going to have to figure something out. Fortunately for her, Duke suddenly loses all his memories of her, and everyone around says that she’s the one who did it – something which she leans into almost on impulse, because she literally cannot resist trying to be a drama queen. Hey, presto, she’s exiled to Laval so quickly that you’d almost think that it was a deliberately ploy on the part of Duke. She arrives disguising herself as a boy and quickly ends up part of the knights who work for the second prince, who is trying to find an achievement that will let him take the throne. An achievement that may need… magic.

It is sometimes interesting seeing the narrative through the eyes of Alicia, who is living it as if she’s the protagonist of a light novel and to whom dramatic events constantly happen, and the rest of the cast, who are actually part of reality and are forced to deal with the darker bits that Alicia touches upon but rarely stays long. The reunion of the king and his brother is agonizingly awkward, especially when you consider that a lot of the cause of their strife is, well, still around. Alicia may be delighted to be exiled, but for Gill it’s a nightmare, and to make matters worse he’s at Duke’s side through most of the book, so he can’t even pine properly for the girl he loves because the much better love interest is next to him. As for Alicia herself, we’re rapidly finding out that she may want to be a villainess, and has been told to play a villainess, but she has a much more important hidden role. Which, well, Liz is not gonna like.

This isn’t top tier villainess, but it’s solid, and fans of the genre should be quite pleased.

By Izumi Okido and Jyun Hayase. Released in Japan as “Rekishi ni Nokoru Akujo ni Naru zo: Akuyaku Reijō ni Naru hodo Ōji no Dekiai wa Kasoku suru yō desu!” by B’s-LOG Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Sarah Moon.

I’ve said about a lot of light novel series that reach a second volume that they have the same issue that bands have when they reach that “difficult second album” – they struggle to figure out what to do next. I don’t think that’s the issue here, as I think the author has a definite long-term plan in mind. The trouble is that it is a long-term plan, and I suspect they definitely have “Alicia does something so annoying she gets exiled” for Book Three. As such, a lot of this book seems to be treading water a bit, showing us Alicia being gleefully “villainessey”, and Liz still trying to be an idealist even as events are starting to conspire against her. And this is despite the fact that someone appears to be trying to swing events back towards the game by having the Saint attacked by a horrible beast.

Two years after exiling herself to a small cottage on the family property, with no one allowed to see her, Alicia has finally reached Level 91, allowing her to keep up with the Level 100 Liz. She celebrates by heading over to the village where she can use powerful magic to partially restore Will’s sight… by literally giving him one of her own eyes. Feeling proud, she then unfortunately realizes this has taken all her magic, and it’ll be a week before she can use it again. And so she has to hide from her father, who will no doubt test her Level 91-ness. She does this by going back to school, only to find that while she was gone, and theoretically not able to influence anything, her reputation has gotten MUCH WORSE, and she’s almost the boogeyman now.

As I said, a lot of this seems to be delaying tactics, as we see various arrogant noble girls (or wannabe arrogant noble girls) trying to either attack and defame Alicia or try to get her on their side so that they can trick and defame her later. For the most part Alicia is too clever for any of this to work, but it does give her the opportunity to give herself a cool haircut and give a bullied girl a magical crying room (we are even explicitly told said crying girl is gay, though I suspect it’s less for representation and more to show that Even The Girls Want Her in a tropey way.) Of course there’s also her relationship with Duke, where he’s very clearly in love with her, and says so, and she’s also clearly in love with him, but knows that loving him is bad for the country and bad for her plan. She’s too pragmatic to give in to romance.

As I said, all signs point to the third book throwing Alicia into the enemy country she wants to investigate. Till then, this was pretty good, but felt sort of formless.

By Izumi Okido and Jyun Hayase. Released in Japan as “Rekishi ni Nokoru Akujo ni Naru zo: Akuyaku Reijō ni Naru hodo Ōji no Dekiai wa Kasoku suru yō desu!” by B’s-LOG Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Sarah Moon.

This is the 2nd book that’s been licensed from the imprint B’s-LOG Bunko, the first being The Princess of Convenient Plot Devices, also from Yen On, and with a very similar vibe. Taking a look at the Japanese publisher’s page, the imprint is rife with villainesses, disgraced nobles, and young women striking out on their own by opening shops, etc. For all that we complain about isekai harems and villainess books being the only thing that gets picked up these days, there’s certainly ten times more of it in Japanese. We’ve had so many villainess books, in fact, that here we actually get someone who seems to be basing her idea of the archetype from light novels rather than otome games. A typical “villainess” is a shallow, vain bully who exists to get banished and/or killed, to the joy of the reader, right? Why would anyone want to be that?

A Japanese woman gets hit by a truck, and wakes up as a 7-year-old, Alicia Williams, the villainess of the game … actually, I don’t think the title of the game is mentioned by Alicia. She’s delighted, though. She has always loved villainesses, who need to be strong, powerful and caustic so that she could be a perfect match against the pure young heroine. Alicia therefore does a 180 from the spoiled, selfish girl Alicia was before, and asks for sword lessons. She’s told to do 100 situps and 50 pushups first… and does so. Then she goes and reads 100 books a day in the family library. Oh dear. It’s not clear if this is just due to being reincarnated, but it seems Alicia is a Divergent, someone with super special abilities whose presence can change the world. And so the King decides that she’s going to help the actual heroine, Liz, who is, frankly, a bit too idealistic. Can Alicia do that, even though it might mean being hated? She can’t wait.

The author says they wanted to contrast the idealism of Liz’s heroine with Alicia’s pragmatism, and honestly, has stacked the decks against Liz. To its credit, Liz isn’t an idiot like some other Villainess books, and I suspect she’s not going to turn evil anytime soon. That said, the way everyone is taken with Alicia immediately as a child, then all fall for Liz and start to turn against Alicia later on, shows she’s using some sort of heroine power, though it’s unclear what. The most interesting thing here is that Alicia is five years younger than everyone, including Liz. This allows her to become super special in order to catch up, as she isn’t being told “that’s impossible” by anyone till after she does it. That said, be warned: there’s a lot of people falling in love with Alicia when she’s only 7-13 years old (there’s a 6 year timespan in this book), and the book ends with everyone looking forward to her being 15, which is legal in Villainesslandia. Sigh.

This got an anime, which I haven’t seen but which seems to have been “good except the animation quality”. It made me want to read more, creepy love interest obsession aside. That’s almost a given for shoujo these days. Recommended for genre fans.