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Before we begin, this video will contain spoilers for the first season of the isekai anime series ‘My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!’. If you are worried about spoilers, consider bookmarking this video, and coming back after you have watched the series.
After my previous video about Hamefura, and which ending Katerina actually got, did better than any other on my channel, although I guess that is to be expected since that is the only video on the channel, I decided to make another video about the series.
In Hamefura, after Katerina Claes, the show's main character hits her head, it is established that Katerina is the reincarnated form of a Japanese schoolgirl who enjoyed playing otome games, and that before she died, she was playing the game ‘Fortune Lover’. It is also later established that Katerina died as a result of getting hit by a car. The series Hamefura, is shown to be set in the world of Fortune Lover, with the characters from Fortune Lover being people in the world of Hamefura, and Katerina herself being one of the characters from the game.
So what if Katerina isn’t actually in the world of Fortune Lover at all? I’m not just saying that the world Katerina is in isn’t exactly like the Fortune Lover game, I’m saying that Katerina isn’t in the world that she is shown to be in, in the series at all. Throughout the series, Katarina isn’t actually dead, and what is shown to be happening is just in Katerina’s head.
At the start of the series, when Katarina hits her head on the ground, we are shown that this is when Katarina remembers her past. In reality, this point of hitting her head is likely the point that Katerina first steps into this world, and her ‘memories’ of her life in this world are just fabrications created by her mind. Katarina’s transition to this world, and her belief that she has been ‘reincarnated’ is a coping mechanism in order to help her cope with the trauma of being hit by a car, as her delusional state can separate her from the reality of her injuries. In this world, her injury from supposedly hitting her head on the ground has likely been given to her as an ‘equivalent’ to her injuries from the car. Based on this, Katerina likely has a condition known as psychosis.
Psychosis is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “A severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality”.
Psychosis can be caused by extreme stress or trauma, and can result in people seeing or hearing things that aren’t real. According to health direct (https://www.healthdirect.gov.au/symptoms-of-psychosis), this can include delusions of grandeur such as believing that one has special powers or is an important religious or political figure. In the world in which Katerina has supposedly been reincarnated, she is in a world with magic, and where she can do magic, and one in which she is a noble from a prominent family. It is clear where these influences for this fantasy world came from. Around the time of the accident, Katarina regularly stayed up late in order to play Fortune Lover, and was constantly thinking about it, as shown through her regular conversations about the game with Sasaki Atsuko. This also explains why in her delusion, her friend Sasaki Atsuko was also ‘reincarnated’ as Sophia Ascart, who would become one of her friends in this new world.
So where does the series actually take place then? The answer is probably a hospital bed. After the accident, she would likely have been taken to a hospital for treatment, and this is the place where she would live out her delusion. In episode one of the anime, there is a conversation between two maids in the garden observing young Katerina “- She’s been acting strange since she got injured. - But the doctor said everything was normal...”. This is possibly not a conversation between two maids in the garden as we are led to believe in the show, but instead a conversation between two people around Katerina in the hospital, whether medical staff such as nurses or family members. This conversation was likely overheard by Katarina and incorporated into her fantasy. The maids in the anime are shown to be in the foreground, with Katerina working away in the background. This distance between them could represent Katarina overhearing them talking from some distance away, and it being incorporated into this delusion as people away from her speaking.
This can apply whether Katarina in the hospital awake or in a comatose state. Claire Wineland, who at the age of 18 spent two weeks in a coma after surgery described her experience as wandering around the Alaskan wilderness. Regarding when her body was being kept cold, she said “I remember sitting there and staring at the most beautiful scenery ever for hours and hours … it would be freezing cold but I didn’t care,” and continued “Everything that happens in the real world, you hear, you’re aware of … You kind of know what’s going on. But it goes through this weird filter thing … It turns into something else when it hits your consciousness”. This shows how a comatose person can still be conscious of their surroundings, and that the brain tries to make sense of their stimuli, in order to try and create a world around the person that seems to make sense (https://abcnews.go.com/Health/teen-explains-life-coma/story?id=32473542).
In the series, Katerina has a judgement event in which she gets accused of the crimes that she would have normally committed during the course of the game. Due to her actions however, these events never happened, as Katerina had spent this time instead trying to avoid the death flags associated with these events, and the main cast defends Katerina saying that Katerina would never do that. Of course nothing bad comes out of this for Katerina, as she didn’t do anything wrong and this event is explained away as magic having been used to make those girls act that way towards Katerina. In reality, due to her understanding of the plot of the game, Katerina encounters this event because in her mind, it is an integral part of the plot of the game. However, as she hadn’t done any actions that would result in this outcome, her brain tries to correct her story, by having her friends defend her, and explains away the judgement event happening even though there was reason for it with magic.
Later on in the series, Katarina is able to talk to the real-life counterpart of Sophia Ascart, her friend Sasaki Atsuko, which allows Katerina to get important information for the series such as the location of Maria Campbell, and the true identity of her kidnapper. This takes place in a scene in which she meets the Sasaki Atsuko from her original world in a classroom setting, and ends with Atsuko telling Katerina to accept her new life in her fantasy world. This meeting is likely Atsuko talking to Katerina in the hospital one last time, about the game that they used to spend hours talking about. This is why she is able to find out new information about how the game ends, and to help her find Maria. This information fits perfectly into being the solution to the problem at hand as Katerina’s brain tries to make all the information it is receiving fit together in some logical way. This conversation is likely a ‘final conversation’ between Atsuko and Katerina in which Atsuko can see Katerina’s situation and wants to say goodbye.
Another thing to take into account is how throughout the series Katerina eventually comes to terms with the car accident that resulted in her ‘death’. Initially, it is made clear that before spending time in her new ‘world’, Katerina lived in Japan, but it is not made clear how she ended up in the world of Fortune Lover. Later on in the series, it becomes clear that Katerina ‘died’ in a car accident. This represents how initially after the accident, Katerina couldn’t accept what had happened to her. The later reveal of the car accident represents how after time thinking of her situation, she eventually starts to realise what had happened to her and comes to terms with it, now knowing what had happened to her.
In conclusion, the world that Katerina has found herself in in Hamefura, is a fabrication created by her mind in order to allow her to cope with her injury, and allow her brain to process the stimuli it receives into something that appears to make sense.
That’s all for this video. If you enjoyed the video, consider leaving a like, comment any thoughts or ideas about future videos down below, and subscribe so that you don’t miss any future videos. If you want to watch similar videos, I have the channel wIS, which deals with more general pop culture stuff, and I have the channel underlined which deals with gaming. I will pin both in an i-card in the top right corner of the screen. With that, that’s the end of this video.
