'The Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess' seems like another average isekai involving a villainess, a genre of which I usually like. Its synopsis is interesting enough for me to take a look.

The girl who used to be Konoha is reincarnated in her own shitty story that she wrote in middle school. Instead of reincarnating as her ideal girl and saintess, whom she named after herself, Konoha Magnolia, she reincarnated instead as the villainess, Iana Magnolia.

As the villainess, Iana is to experience several death flags as he death is supposed to be inevitable. By avoiding an existing death flag, she will encounter several more until the story corrects itself as written.

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First things first, when she got to the isekai, the anime rushed through the tropes. We barely saw truck-kun. This anime fails to hook, or at least as far as I'm concerned. That's unfortunate, as it quickly mocks the tropes immediately.

Going meta and mocking the tropes by itself is not bad. It's only bad if 1) it fails to hook you, and 2) the metafictional story doesn't stand as a good story on its own. Instead of being funny, this anime leans more toward being annoying.

Why? It's an endless discussion of the trope being considered. The anime is merely self-aware and not clever at subverting the villainess genre. (If you want something that mocks and subverts the tropes of something yet in itself is an excellent story, just watch or, even better, read Trapped in a Dating Sim.) Iana yaps endlessly, over and over again. The viewer can barely rest from her verbal diarrhea.

This leans more on telling, not showing. I'm not criticising this aspect. What I am criticising is how annoying this constant yapping is, which renders the telling not showing worse. Telling, not showing, works for the Monogatari series but not this one.

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Another annoying thing about this anime is the overuse of the background effects in shoujo, such as flowers and sparkles.

Usually, such moments are reserved to show the heightened emotions that the shoujo protagonist feels for her love interests. This trope, however, is frequently used with no rhyme or reason. In some episodes, this can happen so frequently that it switches from one of the male love interests to Konoha. If the purpose, which I can only speculate, is to demonstrate that such effects make the anime so cheesy, it succeeds to the detriment of its watchability. ________________________ Another annoying thing about this anime takes place in the earlier episodes. Whenever Iana is in danger, we hear a cheerful insert song. There is a disconnect between the tone of the song and the events that are playing out in the anime. Is this deliberate? Maybe, or maybe not. Regardless, it's annoying.

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This is its worst sin. My humorous title for this is 'Helicopter Villainess.' Why? Iana acts like a helicopter parent. Sure, she prevents Konoha from experiencing danger. But in the process, Konoha does not experience growth, and she remains a pretty but flat character. In other words, Iana's intervention militates against Konoha from becoming strong and acquiring her saint powers.

I know that Iana's objective is to survive. But in doing so, she turns her already shitty story into something worse. Her old self looks like Natsuko from Zenshuu, which is saying something. I did not like Zenshuu, and I am disgusted by watching something worse than Zenshuu. ________________________ Let's compare another anime that I considered 'torture watch.' I scored mono a 2 out of 10 due to how it can't find its identity. Despite that, it has four good episodes.

To use another villainess anime, The Most Heretical Last Boss Queen: From Villainess to Savior, aka Lastame, I scored it a 4 out of 10 due to several weaknesses. Despite such weaknesses, I enjoyed watching it. Not so with this anime under review.

'The Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess', on the other hand, may have somewhat improved in the latter half, but it remained annoying, and therefore, there is no good episode.

My judgement: It pains me that this is the worst villainess anime I've ever watched, and by extension, among the worst anime I've seen.