Watashi no Oshi wa Akuyaku Reijou.
I'm in Love with the Villainess

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Brief summary:

The story is about Rei, a girl who, after dying, is transported into her favorite otoge (or dating game) where she's a student at an extremely exclusive school with magic and the like, and she has to choose between the three princes that fall for her throughout the game.

Except, Rei has no interest in these princes, Rei's true goal is the game's villain, Claire who is supposed to act as a love rival/bully to her but she ends up trying to get together it *her* instead.

Review:

The manga is a parody in it's truest form and I think what makes it so funny is how ... relatable it is for those of us that, while playing a game, are forced to choose between uninteresting male love interests though they'd rather just go for the much more attractive and appealing antagonist.

The jokes are all hilarious, its filled with references and jokes avid videogame fans will get and the art is absolutely beautiful.

This story is one of those things people on the internet joke about "wanting to see" not expecting to actually see it so I'm EXTREMELY excited to see how things pan out

[More info about my review style can be found on my profile]

▶LGBTQ+ themes: -----------------------------------------------------------------
⚠️This review will only address the LGBTQ+ theme of this manga.⚠️

I have been told that the Light Novel (which the Anime is adapted from) is much less egregious than the manga, but as I have not read it, I can only comment on the manga.

It appears at first glance to be an unusual pro LGBTQ+ yuri Otome Isekai out of Japan.
But it is sadly tarnished by some twisted comparisons.

Throughout the first 30 chapters. The author equates a homosexual relationship to that of an incestious relationship. The protagonist (from our ... universe) is sympathetic to the incestious siblings struggling with their hidden incest romance. Something the protagonist supposedly can relate to as a gay person.

Another person the story wants us to feel sympathetic to is a boss who raped their employee.
The manga shows the boss in a sympathetic light, due to them having to repress their gay sexual... urges? The manga is losely implying that it makes sense that they snapped and raped their employee.

This feels like another case where gay people are being portrayed as perverts and deviants.

I will pose a rather strange question: what even is this manga?

I have read 23 chapters, and I legitimately cannot tell you what the central theme of this story is. It's not girl love, it's not civil conflict, it's not friendship, it's not a fantasy adventure, it's not a coming of age tale... it feels like an amalgamation of tropes from various genres married into what is, quite honestly, borderline insulting narrative.

There hasn't ever really been a clear direction letting you know how to read this story as, so you blindly try to figure it out only to be blindsided with, well, stupidity. ...

I don't consider this a love story, and if you do, then perhaps it's good that you're reading this review: what you have here is a borderline psychotic case of love-bombing. You have one character who is clearly not interested, and one who is desperate for attention, and even if it's played off for laughs and wholesomeness and as though it's sweet, it's... well, it's really not. While at the start it may have worked as I simply believed the chick was just hard-simping for her favorite character (where the comedy would work), when it became clear that she is legitimately, unequivocally *in love*, whatever little was working in the story just... stopped. It was no longer funny, it was sad. And then from sad it became depressing, and from depressing it became, well, worrying.

Then chapter 22/23 came, and I was just kind of done. Not only did we get introduced to a trope so boring it was outdated in 1987, it was the story's last chance to actually go back to the roots of comedy, and it just didn't. It fully embraced the melodrama, and whatever little it still had going for itself (which was honestly almost nothing at that point) was just... gone.

So, ultimately, what you have here is some psychotic, perverted version of a love story that, quite frankly, isn't even a love story (and it shouldn't be), with a set of simple, one-note characters, and a world beyond inconsistent and full of logical holes. You have a main character that goes from being a comedic self-insert into... I don't even know anymore, to be honest.

This is not a love story, this is not a 'villainess' story, this is not girl-love story, this is just... annoying tropes inked with increasingly inconsistent art.