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Before we begin, this video will contain spoilers for the isekai anime series ‘My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!’. If you are worried about spoilers and haven’t already seen the series, consider bookmarking this video and coming back once you have watched the series.
My Next Life As A villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!, or Hamefura for short, will be getting a second series soon, My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! X, so what better time to take a look at the first series and to discuss it. I assume the second series’ title is pronounced as /ˈɛks/ as opposed to ten, otherwise I’m not exactly sure what happened to the other eight series.
Hamefura’s plot revolves around Katarina Claes, a noble who as a child hits her head, and remembers some of her past life before she was isekai’d. In Katarina’s previous life, she was a school-age girl who enjoyed playing visual-novel-style otome games, and had reincarnated as a character from the game she was playing before in her previous life - ‘Fortune Lover’. Unlike other videogame isekai, where the reincarnated becomes the protagonist and hero of their new world, Katarina is the villainess in her new life, the main antagonist who no matter how you play gets killed, or at the very least exiled. Whilst trying to avoid any death flags, Katarina manages to make all of the game’s main characters fall in love with her, although unbeknownst to her due to her oblivious nature.
At the end of the last episode of the first series, at her second year graduation where Maria Campbell (Fortune Lover’s protagonist) is supposed to make her decision about who she falls in love with, and ultimately Katarina’s fate, Katarina finds that nothing bad happens to her, and in her eyes without Maria falling in love with any of the game’s love interests. Katarina eventually decides that she must have gotten a secret friendship ending, again oblivious to the fact that the game’s entire cast including Maria had fallen in love with her. Of course looking at the relationships of the characters, it is easy to see the ending of the series as having harem surrounding Katarina, but as Maria is the protagonist of Fortune Lover, whichever ending the game has ended with is based on Maria’s relationship with all of the other characters. As Maria is in love with Katarina, it looks like you could definitely classify the ending as having been the ‘Katarina ending’.
Could the ending also be classified as the ‘friendship’ ending in addition to Maria liking Katarina, which is what Katarina herself suggested was the ending? The other routes in the normal version of the game would all end up with Maria being romantically involved with one of the characters in the game, and even if Maria was still friends with the other characters at the end of the game, you would still classify it based on who she ended up with as her love interest. This seems to eliminate the possibility of the ending being a friendship ending.
If you want to classify the ending as something that involves Maria’s relationship with all the other characters in the same way that the idea of the friendship ending does, what about a ‘rivals’ ending. Unlike a friendship ending which you could never normally have as an ending classification when Maria is in love with someone, you could have a rivalry ending due to the fact that Maria is competing with the other main characters to win the affection of Katarina in a love not-a-triangle-but-some-other-weird-shape-where-Katarina-has-no-idea-what’s-going-on. You are probably wondering why the Katarina ending doesn’t supersede the rivalry ending the same way it did to the friendship ending. I could just discount the idea that there could be a Katarina ending as as far as we know, Katarina is not a character that Maria can get romantically involved with in Fortune Lover, but I will not, as the world of Hamefura is not exactly like Fortune Lover, and there is nothing to stop Katarina from becoming Maria’s love interest. I will however discount the possibility of it being a Katerina ending as Katarina’s oblivious nature prevents her from being able to reciprocate Maria’s feelings. This is an issue, as in the other endings as established in Fortune Lover, the endings that see Maria with one of the other characters involve both of them coming to like each other, which is something that Katarina never does. This has left us with just the option of the series ending with a rivalry ending.
While a rivals ending is quite open ended, it seems to be the only option that could explain Maria not getting into a relationship with any of the characters, and instead having an unrequited love of Katarina, who the other characters that Maria would normally have a relationship with are also interested in.
With that, the ending of the first season of Hamefura is not a friends ending or a Katarina ending, but instead a rivalry ending. When the next series of Hamefura comes out, we will have to take a look to see if there are any more developments in the relationships between these characters.
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