Villainess Level 99

Episode 4

After three weeks of seeing him in the opening theme and being fully aware – even if you haven't read the source novels or manga version – that he's the romantic interest, Patrick Ashbatten finally appears! Or rather, gets to do more than be a name mentioned in the background. I've quite liked that method of introducing him; we know he's a presence in Yumiella's world, but until he attracts her interest, he's just another NPC to her. Because she's so stuck in her gamer's eye view of her new world, she basically can't be bothered to process that everyone around her is a real person, and even then, she can't imagine that they wouldn't share her hardcore grinding mindset. Yumiella would probably disagree with the assessment that it's her world and they're all just living in it, but that's what her attitude makes it look like.

It probably doesn't help that everyone is falling far short of her expectations. She briefly does wonder if Alicia's rudeness comes from her being another reborn player with incomplete game knowledge, and some of us have mused about that as well. This episode paid to that notion, however, as it comes to light that Alicia is just an unfortunate combination of credulous and prejudiced, and maybe a little unintelligent to boot. Without the world existing within a game, Alicia's plot armor is largely gone, meaning that she's just an ordinary girl with an unusual form of magic. Her light magic makes her stand out, but that doesn't mean that she has supernatural powers of perception or even better-than-average reasoning skills. She's a fifteen-year-old girl who's putting the pieces together as best she can while also having her head turned by the attentions of the three hottest guys at school. Her behavior very much reflects that.

More striking is how incredibly stupid Prince Edwin is. He calls Alicia out (albeit gently) for her unreasonable bias against Yumiella based on her physical strength, magic type, and hair color (and lack of social skills), but he's also the idiot who blabbed top-secret information to his crush, who then leaked it to the entire school cafeteria. Rather than covering Alicia's blunder up, Edwin then goes ahead and confirms it, making everyone glad that he's the spare rather than the heir because that is some very poor politicking. Does Yumiella help her case by outlining her vicious training regimen? No, not at all, but at least she's earnest in her desire to help; Ed, Alicia, and their pals seem more interested in fomenting distrust of her than anything else.

Yumiella is not, fortunately, the only person who sees the problems with the way things are going. No one else has quite her lack of tact or understanding when it comes to rectifying those problems, but the new headmaster appointed by the king (after the old one “retired”) is firmly on her side and even understands that using her to help instruct in the field is better than sidelining her, and Patrick is very much aware of the shortfalls of the school's leveling methods. Does that mean he agrees with Yumiella's tactics? Absolutely not, but it's nice to see that he implicitly trusts her, even as he despairs of her extra-enthusiastic use of the demon-summoning flute. To Patrick, Yumiella just seems to lack something in the common sense department – and that's hardly unusual or evil. If Alicia persists in her blind prejudice (likely intended as an in-world parallel to racism), Yumiella's going to need people in her corner. I just wish that that corner and the rest of the show looked a little better because the story here remains a lot of fun. Awful CG monsters and waving shadow hands notwithstanding.

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Villainess Level 99 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.