Apr 12, 2022
Akuyaku Reijou wa Ringoku no Outaishi ni Dekiai Sareru, or The Villainess Is Being Doted on by the Crown Prince of the Neighbouring Country, is but a conglomeration of common cliched devices popularized by a subgenre of otome that has been skyrocketing in popularity and appeal, otome isekai. Both badly written and one of the most profoundly exhilarating works I’ve ever read in the crown jewel of the fantasy genre, ‘Isekai’. The manga itself is an exercise on the possible apotheosis of the combination of the most meagre, generic and non-proprietary cliches and tropes repeatedly cycled in the realm of Otome Isekai, it’s of course,
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shamelessly repetitive yet wonderfully exciting at the same time. Unintentionally clumsy in its transition of feelings from one scene to another, where emotions are portrayed in an almost robotic, mechanical manoeuvring from one sequence to another, the manga itself is destitute of any sophistication in providing any exalting originalities. Our main character, Tiararose, spends most of her time contemplating her experience in her past life, struggles with remembering and adhering to the rules of the game she held firm to, weeping quiet tears that trickled down her pale face when confronted with numerous forced contrivances, she quiver under the possibility of her love being stolen away from her, or dramatically pictures alternatives in a future where her favourite Prince Aquasteed doesn’t love her anymore. This manga is a land filled with barren caldera, where you could stand at a high vantage point from the beginning, overlooking the canyon whose precursor was that of a dried sea from a promontory and you could guess easily the centre conflicts of the show and discern yourself how much it deviates from your speculations and conjectures. It doesn’t.
However, let’s backtrack a little. This manga is a badly written piece and yet one of the most profoundly exhilarating works I’ve ever read in the subgenre of fantasy, Isekai. In spite of the scathing criticisms I mercilessly plunge into immediately at the head start, this manga managed to provide a great deal of exaltation, it’s not an easy feat to inculcate such an impression in the audience without some perceivable quality that may, or may not have been hidden under the layers of rust. Some might argue it’s plain guilty pleasure and it’s perfectly fine to have that, but I am not here to exploit easy attempts to build an easy argument by casually dismissing the fun I’ve had as ‘guilty pleasure’. I want to be able to rationalize this sense of feeling that roused from the back of my mind naturally as I read page after page of romantic scenes between Prince Aquasteed and Tiararose. First, it’s imperative for us to carefully dissect the plot. It’s rather simple, no need for the difference between a perspective at first blush or a detailed introspection, one could immediately identify the plot easily without heeding excessively: girl gets reincarnated in a game she played – met and discovered that she has been betrayed by his fiance – with a pure stroke of luck and coincidence a prince asked for her hand - condemnation is prevented – having understood the game mechanics gave her certain advantages – winning over the rival – finally travel with the prince and gets married – more challenges. Albeit a bit overused, these are the spur of incidents that could tug at the hearts of most people, reaching climaxes that arouse a sense of great satisfaction within the readers, while the normal, daily lives of Tiararose and her pining for beloved Prince Aqua (similarly, vice versa) does a serviceable job for the audience to latch onto both of these characters well.
Such literary devices aren’t uncommon at all, rather, the pulpy serials of fantasy and science fiction in pulpy magazines of the early 50s to 70s are one of the successful practitioners of this curve of narrative. Repetition, but not to a very discernible degree where it becomes painfully distracting (but still definitely noticeable). Repeatingly exercising and putting into motion the preconceived ideas scraped from similar works of fiction, emphasizing on creating a link between the story and a familiar audience, playing around likewise emotional approaches: character betrayal, heightening of events through a sudden turn by a stroke of luck (a primal precursor would be The Count of Monte Cristo), after a bestowal of omnipotence through instant recognition of past events and what could happen, etc. That is precisely why the works of otome isekai, while not innovative in the literary sense, and neither did it manage to form any pioneering sequences of events that could revolutionize the genre, is able to thrill the audience. By a well-play of existing tropes and by carefully evaluating the cliches and how it brings about the change of events, even the most astute and intellectually critical mind would have to agree that he/she/they are drawn deeply into this vortex of exultation and frenziness. And thus drawn into this extending canvas is the quirky mix of the dull and painful kitsch as well as the delightful and alluring and unparalleled excitement. With a touch of the excess, one is opened to a whole new world of excitement that could prove powerful to even a harsh critic since it fulfills the contradictory yearnings of the mind for pure, unbridled entertainment.
That’s still probably not enough to justify the sort of gaiety and joy I received from reading this manga, in spite of being aware of its glaring shortcomings. I’ve pointed out a few possible and probable points that interlink the sources of this exultation and the effects it was able to achieve through the faulty yet perceivably mighty choice of repetition while not sacrificing the fun the readers experience from the pages of this manga. But I believe it’s insufficient to appropriately justify how the framework of the aforementioned could bring about such impressive results despite being suffused with occasional bad writing choices as ‘padding’ (or ‘filler’, for a more familiar term). Thus I believe it’s significant for us to study the interlinks that connects the reasonings and the effects. The reasonings are there (but not elaborately described yet), the effects of how such a structural repetition could bring is there, but the established connection between these two points is perhaps one of the most important – if not the greatest influence that holds over this series. It’s the power of how these Otome Isekai authors are able to master the bridge – between this cause and effect that their works could become this contagious and affecting, insomuch that it supersedes the necessities of having a strong plotting ability to narrate the central story, rendering it second fiddle to the act of bridging between two elements of the story in this context.
So let’s backtrack a few paragraphs once again. This manga is badly written from a critical perspective, but is also one of the most exciting fantasy manga ever written (for me). The overall structural integrity of the manga is questionable due to the large amounts of padding which inevitably distils certain powerful scenes down to really cheap melodrama. While writing the review, I tried my best to rearrange and edit a number of scenes in the manga in my headspace, restructuring it to give it a tighter pace, thinning it down so all the bad padding and redundant self-reflections of our protagonist could be removed, essentially slimming down the unnecessary contents so we could gladly enjoy the distilled essence of the manga – and I eventually gave up – even with the attempt to remove the amount of repetition I abhor in the manga (not removing all repetitive scenes, mind you, to achieve some level of theatrical effects), I found it that my own distorted product seems to be apprising me of the impossibility of such a task – even if we are bored by the monotonous repetition of unnecessary kitschiness woven into the narrative, the unravelling of an extending web of highly similar narrative lines – the princes, the princesses, the preceding betrayal and the subsequent darling appearing out of nowhere, the flashy, garish scenes of our protagonists sharing teas and cakes, the love rivals, the dances, libraries, kitchens, sweets and finally the wedding. Surely no one would dispute for the sake of artistic sublimity, one could easily remove a number of redundancies that suffuses the manga. Nevertheless, our mind who seeked entertainment argued that the exact contrary is true.
Would we be able to enjoy as much – as we did previously, the story, whenever Prince Aquasteed shares an intimate moment with Tiararose if not for the organic spasmodic delay through Tiararose’s repetitive scenes of self-doubt and gradual uncovering of the next love rival? (we giggle, or a chill goes down our spine when the latter is played out). It turns out that the relentless padding with endless sequences of Tiararose’s self-doubt, albeit detrimental to the artistic merits of the story by including limitless redundancies and empty narrative calories, nonetheless it has its own structural value, a common virtue that similarly runs in the veins of these otome isekai manga, the structural value of incessant padding. If it’s condensed or wiped out, the exasperation and increasing frustration would not be built up naturally through the mighty use of this shoddy (yet a bit effective) trick of a kitschy artifice, therefore when the prolonged suffering and agony of the audience is expelled out of the mind through an intimate moment ensues the painful repetition, the happiness that followed is heightened by the preceding agonies, and thus this neurotic delay (from the story) pushes our minds from troughs to crests. Ultimately we felt that the duration we’ve endured is earned, as the immediate expulsion of weariness unintentionally dispelled the manga of its suspicion of weaponizing dull, tedious filler to fill up the empty narrative lines. While such a practice is aesthetically repugnant, but speaking from a structural standpoint, it does contribute to the heaping of emotions which sooner or later, results in an avalanche of emotional relief when expelled. It thickens the structure of the plot with lignified walls, whilst not pretty to look at and definitely not polished well, it manages its principal function to entertain rather well.
While there exists merits in the story, one should not merely discuss the process to rationalize the guilty pleasures and excavate the greatness within the mediocrity, it’s of equal importance that we should be able to proffer the glaring issues speckled throughout the narrative. Whilst a lot of the plot points and elements contribute an especial temptation to us readers, the number of problems that followed cannot be dismissed easily. If a critic, or a more intellectually demanding reader is completely underwhelmed by stories that go under the label of ‘Isekai’, they are expected to leave this specific genre to its ghettos and its ghettoised readers. The modern pieces of fiction that run under the labels of isekai, blessed by its large amounts of readership and viewership are treated with contempt and met with whiteeyed dismissals by shrewd critics and exigent readers as something of a lesser genre. To better circumscribe with the literary tradition of undergoing serious transformations (to the form, style and movements) by gradual metamorphosis as time passes, literary works and art are fully expected to follow the flow of biological evolution. Biological evolution, as in the stages of adaptation, degeneration, decay, elimination, retrogression, succession and inevitable developmental stagnation.
Retrogression and developmental stagnation. It’s typical in the process of natural selection, whether its nature, or in our art, however it’s even more common and evident in decidedly enclosed literary genres, by enclosing itself in compact, unventilated and dense comparts, it’s of course, undeniable and also inevitable, that inbreeding occurs recurrently in order to better suit the need for reproduction. Hence, in the case of Isekai, these manga and light novels and anime, riddled with the selfsame literary devices and limited tools of writing, would unavoidably resort to having incestuous relations with works of similar veins of blood, consummating with each other to further produce works that are violated, vitiated and ventriloquized by recurring techniques, plot, characters and themes. The more such actions are practised, the more virile our producers are to endlessly recycle maddeningly repetitive plots and banal themes (then treat it as ‘important aesthetics’ for very lazy reasons) and slap on it a different title, the more enclaved the genre is. The ghettos increase in size, their territories enlarge day by day, they might forget they’re enclaves hopelessly shut off from entire worlds and thrive in it, but even in their most lucid dreams would they have to realise that they’re still pathetically trapped under the same land and enclosed by the same walls.
So, it is rather easy for us to criticize the framework of the story. It’s an entertaining but unsuccessful work. There exists the presence of an incongruent fusion between past titles and undeniable influences from other works in the similar genre throughout the story. The writer, albeit the incompetent and overly thickened framework had provided a great deal of exaltation, is also simultaneously highly unsatisfying for more deeper realms of interpretation. It’s a patchwork of rosely tinged melodrama, some degree of character introspection and endless rinsing of sweet moments. These elements, while giving us a load of fun and exultation, have a very imperfect composition, its unbalanced and utterly incongruous arrangement of sequences considerably weakens the entire structure of the novel once we inspect it with a more critical lens. An example comes directly into my head. The unimaginably cheap melodramatic inclusion of Tiararose’s meeting with the Fairy King of the Forest after she indirectly caused the triggering of a particular event that might in turn, trigger another event in accordance to the plot of the otome game (referred to as a definite route in the game), where the supposed ‘heroine’ love rival would fall in love with Prince Aquasteed and vice versa. Desperate and heartbroken, she fled into the castle and is swooped away by the Fairy King and the sequence is left once again, unhinged and Prince Aquasteed abandons the heroine Lady Aishira there to search for his beloved.
The sudden inclusion of the Fairy King to resolve the problem she indirectly caused – is a very inadequate and milquetoast scene , not only does it weaken the powerful hints (which are repeatedly emphasized before, to remind people) that are stressed numerously for chapters, it’s also a complete waste of opportunity to develop fruitful solutions that could inspire more nuanced developments between our protagonists. The previous chapters, while suffering under the influences of egregiously bad panelling (let’s admit it), do a serviceable work to imply the existence of a shadow [mentally] that stands firmly footed to its silhouette that looms large over the mind of Tiararose. In spite of that, it was resolved easily as there is no definite resolvement at all, the threat was glossed over and triumphed over by the silly drama incurred by the Fairy King who snatched Tiararose away for the purposes of giving her a ‘good sleep’, the conflict, or the interesting setup is penultimately vaporized by such a juvenile approach to handling a rather satisfying buildup and ultimately treated with a forced battle between Prince Aquasteed and Fairy King ‘Keith’ for Tiararose. The intense, heightened theatrical effects that are inserted in the previous chapters, ergo, are ignored deliberately and a substitute for the supposed resolvement is in no way compelling enough – or at least, convincing enough to serve as a solution to the proposed troubles that awaits Tiararose. The writer is unable to find a way to impose this interesting motif with an equally rewarding resolution, it’s a thinly disguised semblance of a motion to serve as a suitable resolvement. In conclusion, the number of exciting scenes in the manga, while undeniably exhilarating, is also an acne on the face. The ambition for the setup is bogged down by the incapability to resolve, both the preparation given and the actual workmanship involved is highly incongruent, both of them are doomed to be artistically insufficient, and it’s therefore an artistic failure.
The example above thus can be adduced easily to the lengthy paragraph I elaborated above. The suspicion of inbreeding between works of otome isekai is clearer than ever. A similar story with a similar setup can be discovered practically everywhere: [Ouji no honmei wa akuyaku reijou is awfully similar in everything]. We with our two eyes could clearly perceive the prosperity of isekai titles and the incontrovertible proof to its extensive influence needs not to be explained. But what is also equally [easily] discernible is the fact that despite the sole fact that these titles are still prevalent as ever, these internal intense dynamics of ghettos named ‘Isekai’ are all exercises in repetition that ultimately lead nowhere. These writers could copy each other, setting up a similar framework that is highly efficient, but most of them ultimately crumbles under their own weight since they could only figure out how to imitate precisely, but they couldn’t find their own voice to provide a sensible resolution, as in the case above. The nutrients they assimilate are themselves, they assimilate each other, (mark the similarities between Ouji no honmei wa akuyaku reijou and Akuyaku, at the least), it does not generate new patterns of appreciable quality but resorts to join the old ones that are increasingly frustrating to rapidly growing readers. In such cases, with the demand to pander certain audiences who demand more of these easily digestible but annoyingly repetitive works, all of us are unavoidably trapped in a circular motion: We are trapped in this perpetual moving machine, while enjoying the stories in the flow we are also critical of it, and in the long run we’ll probably exhaust ourselves and our minds with the limitless regurgitation of similar frameworks and not full fledged stories, it’s almost as if we as readers are products of thralldom, but voluntarily.
We now exist in the largest domain of herd creativity, while I could rationalize my overall liking for the series, I could not deny that I found it occasionally frustrating for how similar it is to other series, and how desperately I wanted it to become independent of those titles and plumb into greater depths so that it could reach the plateau of creative sublimity.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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