The villainess genre has gotten really stale and all the stories feel like same story in different fonts and I used to be really into this genre but now I want some good drama and fantasy which dungeon meshi has provided to me(no spoilers still reading).
You can rant about some stuff in these stories that get on your nerves but have become a staple.
I'll go first when they come from "the real world" it doesn't factor into the story like at all it's literally just an excuse to call her a "villainess" but not have her be evil because "she's a different person" even though the more interesting option of having an awful character grow and develop as a person is right there like. you can still have her know the future through a vision or go back time.
A lot of these stories don't pass the bechdel test.
The characters can be really one dimensional a lot of the times as they're all categorized as "good" or "evil" in the story rather than having any grey area, there are standardized roles like "the doting parent" and "maid that could've been a good yuri love interest with how much she sucks the FL's dick". If a character is ugly and/or fat they will be evil, stuck up or sexist.
I would like to quote tumblr user "catie-does-things" to address this other issue "if you want your female characters to both have agency in the story and be complex human individuals then sometimes bad things have to be their fault" villainess stories will never have the FL make a mistake or take responsibility for an harmful action that was her fault because "um actually that was OG villain FL not her new isekai FL therefore she owes none of these people an apology and they should just accept she's a different person with no proof or evidence and just her being a "nice" person" can you remember a single time a villainess has apologized?. That's not even getting to stories where she was "evil" because she was an abused child and she had to earn her family's love, money, nurturing and attention through good behavior and acting cute (you can figure the harmful implications of that on your own). Think of a single story where the MC has intentionally made a harmful impactful mistake and it wasn't her being framed. The stories that allow her to make mistakes and have her be disliked are the best ones "I have to get my husband on my side", "Death is the only ending for a villainess" and on a weaker not "kill the villainess. The Infallible "cool girl" villainess is a villainess so "cool" and "skilled" that she's detached from the people around her and once more do they treat this as a character flaw capable of hurting others no she just needs "love and affection" from a man she's known for less than a year who only started "loving" and paying attention to her because she's useful now and she doesn't need love and support from friends and family because she only starts letting them in when he breaks her down. I understand complexity is not what they're going for but for all of them to be this lazy, low effort and halfassed.
OMG YESSSS someties i forget that it's a isekai bc they just don't bring it up EVER o only once or twince and only so that we would thin it's more dramatic but i don't care for it anymore bc they didn't do ANYTHING with it. I lile when stories do something fun with that concept. But otherwise i think tjey should just make a reincarnation i...... reply
