princess of convenient plot devices

By Mamecyoro and Mitsuya Fuji. Released in Japan as “Watashi wa Gotsugou Shugi na Kaiketsu Tantou no Oujo de aru” by B’s-LOG Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Sarah Moon.

Again, my favorite part of this series is just out of my reach, which is everything that is happening in it, minus Octavia’s internal blathering. Don’t get me wrong, her narration is not all that annoying once you get used to it, and helps to drive home the fact that 95% of the time she’s improvising desperately rather than having a grand master plan. But I do love seeing her from the outside. Without that narration, she looks exceedingly crafty, mysterious, powerful, and possessed of knowledge that she just should not have. She does not behave the way than anyone thinks she should, her support for her older brother leaves much to be desired, and she comes across as… well, as a villainess. She’s trying to get a fake boyfriend so that she isn’t used as a womb to give her older brother an heir, but to others, she’s… well, trying to become Queen. Which is worrying, given the kingdom’s secret history.

After the revelations of the previous book, Octavia is a lot less keen to make Rust Byrne her fake boyfriend, given who he resembles. Unfortunately, he’s now very interested in her, in particular because she doesn’t react the way almost everyone else has when they see his face. To her surprise, the King is another one who reacted the same way that she did. Unfortunately, as they try to have a chat, traitors are trying something at the party, and have to be put down by armed guards. What are they after? And why is Sil now missing? The answer will draw Octavia into (pardon me, I’m so sorry) a web of mayhem and intrigue. Because there’s a secret room that has a passage to a different, even more secret room. And there are even more traitors there… including Sil? Maybe?

So many villainess books have some variation of “you can’t fight fate” built into them, with the villainess trying hard to change her destiny and the story itself fighting back as much as it can, even when that makes no sense in terms of how reality actually works. Here we see the past starting to repeat itself, despite Octavia’s intentions. And there’s no denying that Queen Idealia, the queen who was written out of history, has a lot in common with her. Hopefully not including being murdered by her brother. And of course there’s also the past of Klifford’s family, which everyone is still boiling mad over. What this means, I suspect, is that at the end of the day everyone’s going to see Octavia finding the tomb of the missing powerful and beloved Queen, discovering the *real* royal crown, and asking her uncle to present it to the King himself but say that she found it, as a massive power ploy. Not exactly what she’s intending.

Basically, if you like gambit pileups and a lot of handsome men, this is a fun little series. I read it for the bits in between the text.

By Mamecyoro and Mitsuya Fuji. Released in Japan as “Watashi wa Gotsugou Shugi na Kaiketsu Tantou no Oujo de aru” by B’s-LOG Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Sarah Moon.

This is one of those “everything is the same as the previous volume, until it isn’t” volumes. For the most part, the first three-quarters of Book 2 are the same as most of Book 1. Octavia is attending a ball in the hopes to find a (fake) boyfriend, and has someone in mind who will be there. Unfortunately, she’s dealing with the fact that everyone else sees her thinks she’s some sort of evil spectre with supernatural influence on the lives of everyone she meets. Most of this volume deals with her learning about this, and trying to use it for her own ends, with limited success. (Octavia’s life can sometimes be described as the “I’m a Genius!… Oh no!” meme.) Then we get to the point where she’s about to achieve her goal and meet the guy she’s come there to see… and actually seeing him terrifies her so much that she flees immediately. Then… the rest of the book happens.

Octavia, with her bodyguard Klifford about about 8 other guards (she *is* a princess, after all) is on her way to a ball held by noble Rosa Reddington, where she will hopefully get to meet Rust Byrne, the person she’s tagged for her “get a fake boyfriend” plan. On the way there, though, she meets up with Sil, who is about to have a tragic carriage accident, and rescues him. Sil is going to the ball as well, without telling his lover Sirius. He wants to find out about his real family… something he says that Octavia secretly inspired him to do. (This is true, but it was mostly by accident.) Once at the ball, it becomes apparent that Rosa has engineered for Octavia to dance with someone, because it turns out that any dance partner she’s ever had has either risen to glory or fallen to destruction. This is news to Octavia. And then there’s the man she supposedly came to meet…

Of all the light novels I ever thought I would comp[are this series to, The Saga of Tanya the Evil was certainly not one of them. The last quarter of the volume, though, reminds ,me quite a bit of the start of Tanya. Octavia recalls her death, and has the obligatory meeting with “God” afterwards. Except that God is an asshole. And says her death was an accident, but he can’t be bothered to revive her because her soul isn’t that important. This causes her to get angry… and the negotiation that follows upends this entire series. That said, the biggest takeaway that we get is that Octavia, whose attempts at bettering her life were mostly centered around herself, is now going to try to better her life by changing the entire kingdom. That’s definitely going to put her up against her brother, and probably the majority of the nobility, but it’s also the only way to get back at God. She may even have to become a villain.

So yeah, still loving this series a lot more than I expected. Can’t wait for the third book.

By Mamecyoro and Mitsuya Fuji. Released in Japan as “Watashi wa Gotsugou Shugi na Kaiketsu Tantou no Oujo de aru” by B’s-LOG Bunko. Released in North America by Yen On. Translated by Sarah Henshaw.

When you’re talking about a genre, it’s never quite just the same thing. No, not even isekai series starring Potato-kun protagonists. There’s mix and match, there’s variations, there’s ways to make this different enough that we don’t get sued. And some genres cross over with others. For example, one genre I quite like is “everyone thinks that the protagonist is being ridiculously clever and crafty, when they’re really just improvising and winging it”. Tearmoon Empire is probably the best current example, but we’ve seen a few others. And, of course, there are BL fantasy novels, where true love is found even if you have to rewrite reality so that the kingdom is predominately gay. And, of course, there are villainess books, where our heroine ends up being accused of things she either never did, or only did in the source material. Put them all together and you’ve got this series, which asks: how would a kingdom run on BL really work out?

Maki was a girl who loved BL novels, particularly a series called The Noble King. It features a kingdom where the king is married to another man, and his son the prince is also in love with a man. In the novels, the prince’s younger sister, Octavia, was a big supporter of theirs, a perfect side character for a BL series. But now Mari has died and is reincarnated *as* Octavia, and has to deal with how the writer manages to have a working dynasty with all the nobility being gay: she will be married off (possibly to a not-gay man, possibly as a beard), produce a child, and then give him to her older brother and have him raise the child as his own. Needless to say, this does not delight Octavia AT ALL. She’s going to find a man of her own! There’s just one slight problem… everyone else thinks she has designs to take over the throne. And is possibly evil.

Octavia, in this first volume, is not an airhead like Katarina Claes. She sees her problem and takes actions to solve it. But she’s also not a clever genius like a lot of other Villainess heroines. Most of her action taking is spur of the moment and improvised, and sometimes quickly regretted. She is, in other words, a normal person reacting the way a normal person would to being in a novel that she’s very familiar with… to a point. (She died after Book 5, so has missed some later stuff.) Unfortunately, to a noble family who are used to everyone acting like they were born into nobility and set in very defined roles… she’s incredibly hard to read, and her actions frequently make no sense. Such as hiring as her new bodyguard a man who is likely an assassin. Or being ambivalent about her older brother’s relationship. Or… in political terms, she’s a bomb that hasn’t gone off yet. This provides terrific tension, which is offset by her narrative voice, which is very “chatty teen girl”.

Basically, this is excellent. It also moves a lot slower than I expected, as we only cover about three days in this first book. We don’t even get a ball where Octavia can be publicly shamed! Possibly next time?