Why is every master of their trade a 23 year old pretty boy?
Impressions:
I will have to admit that as far as these kinds of things go, this does have one of the better starts. Mainly because the lead is fairly charismatic. She’s confident, relatively competent, the period where she’s mewling in disappointment over the bratty prince is short. The bloody opening also provides a good hook. Dispensing with all thoughts of parody or humor also does it a lot of good. If you genuinely wanted to make a pretty cool show in this vein, something like a McGyver or Burn Notice (or I guess Vivy) where the reincarnated not-a-villainess-in-any-way-despite-the-title has to use her unrealistic knowledge from all over to spycraft and scheme her way through various adventures, I could see that as being a pretty fun show.
Unfortunately though, this does fall back on all the standard cliches, and the episode, despite only a few screaming overreactions from the corrupt brat prince, is largely simply going through them. In a more competent way than most, but it’s still not bringing anything new to the table, and oftentimes, really half-assing it. Why she’s a ‘villainess’? All explained off-screen. Every one of her deaths besides the first stabbing? “Oh, uh, war?” *fade to black*. Hell, they only do like 3 of her lives, all of which are being taken in by some sparkling 23 year old genius hunk who teaches her to be the most famous job-class in the world before “Oh, uh, war?” *fade to black*. And then the ‘evil’ dude of course is charmed by her spunk and marries her, becoming sparkling 23 year old genius hunk #7, as always.
So I’m pretty ambivalent. There’s literally nothing else on Sundays except that godawful fluffy reincarnation thing, so there’s no competetion, and if you enjoy the more serious/dramatic kinds of villainess reincarnation shows, you’ll probably like this one, but it’s just doing the same cliches more competently in a subgenre that is not QUITE as flooded as cheat powers in RPG worlds, but is definitely getting there.
