Queerness in ‘My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!’
My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! is a 2020 anime adaptation of a 2014 Japanese light novel by Satoru Yamaguchi and illustrated by Nami Hidaka. The show recently finished airing its first season on Crunchyroll. When I first heard about it, I was hesitant. As an aroacespec viewer, my initial impression was that it would not suit me well. The show, often called HameFura by fans, is a reverse harem isekai. For those who, like me, are not too well-versed in anime genres, that means it is a type of portal fantasy wherein the majority of the cast falls in love with the female main character. The expectation of reinforced allonormativity at every turn and a fear of casual, unnoticed aphobia initially put me off and yet when a friend’s enthusiastic response to the first few episodes convinced me that I wanted to give it a try, I was hooked.
The show wastes little time in introducing a lot of queerness into the setting. From Mary Hunt’s obvious crush on Catarina in episode 2, to Catarina’s assumption that Keith is attracted to Nicol in episode 3, to the existence of same-sex romance novels (mentioned in multiple episodes), all the way to Catarina’s trademark density when it comes to all things romance, and to a much lesser extent all things sexual. Catarina’s obliviousness to and confusion by the romantic (and sexual) attraction her friends experience for her even when they explicitly tell her so is one of the most powerful and affirming aromantic experiences in media to date.
The plot of the show is that, after an accident, Catarina regains her memories of a previous life. In this life she was a high schooler in the middle of playing an otome game called Fortune Lover. As it happens, she has been reincarnated into the game’s setting as Catarina Claes, the game’s main antagonist. All the routes in Fortune Lover lead either to Catarina’s exile or, worse, her death. Catarina, not wanting to die young again, uses her knowledge of the game’s setting to significantly alter the storyline and avoid the ‘doom flags’ that would lead to her bad ending. As a result, all the romanceable characters (and several of the game’s non-romanceable characters) fall in love with her. Catarina’s reasoning is that if she can prevent Maria, the game’s protagonist from falling in love with any of the romanceable characters, she can avoid her inevitable doom as a villain.
One of its most powerful queer scenes occurs in episode 9, “Things Got Crazy at a Slumber Party…”. In this episode, as the title suggests, Catarina decides to throw a slumber party for her friends. She invites Mary, Maria and Sophia over both because she wants to have fun with her friends and because she needs to check on Maria’s romance options to ensure that she is still on track to avoiding all the doom she still expects in her future.
In this scene, Catarina asks the girls whether they’re seeing anyone. They are not, which leads Catarina to mentally conclude that she is still safe from her doom. Sophia follows up her question with one of her own: asking Catarina what she would like to do with her significant other. Catarina, thrown by the question and unsure, remarks that she’d probably like to make them a meal from the vegetables she’s raised herself. This scene is the most uncomfortable and flustered we have ever seen Catarina when it comes to love and romance and she is quick to deflect the question to Maria, who answers with a shy blush but none of the panic that accompanied Catarina’s answer, and Maria then asks the question of Mary.
Mary, bless her lesbian heart, lists all the things she’d like to do with her significant other, to increasing heteronormative disbelief of the other girls and Catarina interrupts asking why Mary would want to trade dresses with a boy. Visibly confused, Mary asks if she has to picture a boy, gives it a moment’s thought and declares that she can’t think of anything. However one might want to read Mary as falling into the harmful Gay For You trope, that trope depends on a heterosexual person suddenly discovering same-sex attraction to one other person and only that one other person. Mary, however, is clearly not attracted to boys at all. She is engaged to Alan and her lack of attraction to him is remarked upon several times.
In this episode then we have a good example of the queerness of the show and the ways in which the show’s heteronormative setting influences queer expression. Though both Sophia and Catarina have read and loved queer romance novels — they initially bond over a sapphic romance — and though Catarina also has all the memories and sensibilities of a modern Japanese girl, they both struggle to parse Mary’s stated romantic desires because they are so strongly and clearly coded as queer: she wants to bathe with her significant other and have each of them do each other’s fair. Catarina’s obliviousness to her friends’ attractions to her are less evident in this particular scene, though her flustered response to Sophia’s question follows a pattern of the show putting Catarina’s desires at odds with what is traditional considered romantic.
Later in the episode, Geordo, Catarina’s fiancé, received an elaborate invitation from Catarina, asking him to meet her on a terrace that is usually deserted. Though Geordo is aware of and acknowledges that both the letter and his fancy that Catarina will confess her love to him are utterly unlike her, he struggles to interpret her letter any other way. Moreover, he decides that the occasion calls for a gift. After considering several traditionally romantic options, such as a ring, a pearl necklace, or earrings, he remembers that Catarina was lamenting no longer having a decent pair of garden sheers. Despite the fact that he deems the gift utterly unromantic, he decides to get it for Catarina anyway because it will make her happier than an outright romantic gift.
In the previous episode, Catarina and all her friends (except Maria and Mary) get sucked into a magical book of desire. The rules of the book are that if one lets a person’s desire reach the end, everyone trapped in the book will be freed. When Mary opens the book for the first attempt, she and the viewer get to see Geordo’s desire to have Catarina alone with him on their wedding night. Catarina, maintaining her self-awareness, is thrown by Geordo’s advances and has more interest in food than what Geordo is angling for. Mary, unable to deal with seeing Catarina romantically (and it is implied sexually) involved with someone else, slams the book shut, visibly upset. This repeats several times, with Mary getting increasingly more upset and shutting the book earlier and earlier because everyone trapped in the book desires to be Catarina’s One and Only. Finally, only Catarina is left. Her desire? To eat until she is no longer hungry. The book frees them all in an explosion because it cannot fulfil Catarina’s desire and in the discussion the friends have afterwards, while most of them leave, embarrassed at having shared their desires so openly, Catarina ascribes their behaviour in the book to being magically influenced.
Catarina’s obliviousness even in the face of explicit romantic and sexual behaviour — Geordo wants to ‘take’ her lips; Sophia pushes her against a wall moving up for a kiss, Nicol actually kisses her — and her shocked confusion when Nicol confesses his love for her in a previous episode all add up perfectly for a reading that suggests that Catarina is queer as queer can be, just a queerness that is rarely allowed to be seen in fiction. Even seemingly discordant notes, such as her visible reaction to Sophia and Nicol’s beauty when she first meets them, do little to discredit a reading of Catarina as queer. Using the idea of the split attraction model, there is no conflict between Catarina experiencing the aesthetic attractions she does and her aromantic asexual coding throughout the narrative, but viewers disinclined to read her as aspec will likely still be left using that attraction to remark on Catarina as a pansexual or bisexual character. The only way to read Catarina Claes as not-queer is to deliberately ignore everything the show has given us.
To me, however, it is the final episode of the series that cements my reading of Catarina as aroacespec. The climax of the plot, occurring in the first half of the episode, centres on Catarina reaching out to the narrative’s hidden main (or actual villain) and offering her friendship. The villain’s feelings for her are explicitly tied not to romance (though it will by the episode’s end), but to his feelings for his mother and Catarina makes no romantic moves towards him. Later, at the graduation party where, in the game, Maria is set to declare her feelings for the character the player romanced, Catarina is increasingly agitated by Maria’s lack of announcement.
Eventually, Catarina seeks out Maria by herself and asks, explicitly, whether there is someone Maria likes. While not as overt as using ‘love’ would be, the context makes it crystal clear that this is what Catarina is asking. Maria responds in the affirmative, blushingly admitting that she likes Catarina. Catarina’s response is befuddlement, saying (in subs) “I’m happy to hear that, but that’s not what I mean. Is there a boy that you like and want to have a relationship with?”
Heteronormativity again rears its head because Catarina clearly cannot picture Maria loving a girl, but crucially to reading her as aro Catarina, though she started off explicitly asking Maria who she loves, misinterprets Maria’s confession despite the context it was asked in and despite her knowledge of the game informing her that Maria’s words to her are the exact words Maria uses in the game when confessing her (romantic) love to the character the player romanced. There is, in short, no visible reason why Catarina should be so incredibly confused by Maria’s confession that she dismisses it out of hand. At this point in the conversation, Mary interrupts and disrupts any chance that Catarina will finally figure it out by declaring that she too wants to be with Catarina forever. Soon everyone does the same and the viewer gets one last scene of Geordo and Keith’s rivalry and their bickering over who gets to be with Catarina forever. Catarina’s response? Is to express happiness that she’s found the ‘friendship ending’. This ending means that the player character in a game does not end up with anyone, but is instead good friends with everyone. It is the most aromantic possible ending and though Catarina recognises that it is a bad ending from a romance novel perspective, it is also the ending that makes her happiest because she gets to stay with her friends, all of them.
In a show that was supposed to end with one of two options: either a dedicated romantic pairing with one person or a pairing with no one, I was not expecting it to break with allonormativity and opt to have Catarina end up with none of the main characters. More surprisingly, though Catarina’s obliviousness is often part of the humour of a scene, she is never presented as unsympathetic, unlikable, cold, or any other aspec stereotype one might expect. Her friends accept and love Catarina just the way she is, even if they don’t quite understand her, and in doing so the show gave us an example of an aroace main character whose strongest skill is bringing people together and allowing her friendship to bring light and colour to their world.
