Tiararose is a noble lady engaged to Prince Hartknights. The shock of seeing her fiancé with another woman causes her to collapse and regain memories of her past life. She realizes she’s the villainess in the world of an otome game she played, and it’s the day before the end of the game. Exactly as she expects, Hartknights dumps her publicly and hurls various false accusations at her. She takes this surprisingly well, confident that with the support of her parents and friends, she’ll get through this. Then ol’ princey boy says she’s to be banished from the kingdom, cutting her off from her support. At this moment, Prince Aquasteed (I’m not making up these names!) from the neighboring country suddenly appears in a cloud of rose petals and asks Tiararose to marry him. She recognizes him as the main character of the sequel game that she never got to play.
Wow. In the words of Darth Vader, “Impressive. Most impressive.” I’m still kind of in shock at how utterly generic this opening episode was. Every story beat, every character, every line of dialogue—I’ve seen it before in another villainess story. The biggest variation on the Standard Villainess Formula that I can think of is that Tiararose is the daughter of a marquis rather than a duke like usual. The only interesting question this episode asks is how or why Aquasteed is in love with Tiararose, given that she doesn’t seem to have met him before. I honestly feel compelled to watch more because I need to find out if the series has any hook or if it’s really as bad as it seems! I’ve found that villainess series are actually surprisingly good at having some sort of twist that sets them apart from their fellows, but said twist is MIA here. Maybe we’ve reached the genre’s saturation point? Well, I’ll be checking out at least the next episode to find out if the series has something unique to offer that just didn’t fit into this opener. But I can’t recommend such thoroughly bland, derivative show to you based on the episode that aired today.
The Villainess Is Adored by the Prince of the Neighbor Kingdom is streaming on Crunchyroll.
