YMMV / My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!

• Adorkable: There is something simply refreshing and endearing about Catarina's sweet and outgoing personality, lack of aristocratic pretense, and her sheer cluelessness as to the positive effects she has on everyone around her.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • In-Universe example. To many of her close friends, Catarina acts like she's gone mad after her bump on the head. Though the truth is known to the viewer, the idea of insanity is reinforced by the council of alternate personas (some of whom appear from nowhere) she regularly maintains to review events.
  • What motivated Mary's decision to step aside and let Alan get together with Maria in the good ending to Alan's route? Was it selflessly accepting her beloved's decision? Was it because she couldn't bring herself to object despite being unhappy with the outcome? Or was it because her feelings for Alan weren't nearly as strong as her feelings for Catarina in the main series?
• Americans Hate Tingle: Geordo is very popular in Japan, with him being the most favored and most marketed choice for Catarina over there. He's much less liked in the West due to his questionable behavior around Catarina and recurring lack of regard for her boundaries, which bothers Westerners more than it does Easterners (who are more inclined to handwave extreme physical imposition by males as just how romance is supposed to work); Western fans are more likely to going to ship her with one of the other girls or support keeping the entire harem together. This eased up a bit in Season 2 when Geordo was given more affectionate moments with Catarina and a more fleshed out family and backstory.
• Awesome Music:
  • Both the opening and the ending of the anime are simply amazing.
  • The piano solo Alan plays for Catarina in S1E06 is beautiful to hear, as heard here.
• Broken Base:
  • The story after the official "game end" is mostly a rehash of plots from the first two volumes mixed with general silliness and worldbuilding, which has split the main fanbase in two. One side thinks that this is a major disservice that just drags things out and introduces less-interesting new characters, while the other side enjoys seeing more of the comedy and Catarina's wholesomeness, see the new story as different enough to not be a complete rehash, and find the new characters entertaining enough to get invested in. Consequently, the same differing opinions reappeared regarding the announced second season that will adapt Volume 3 and beyond, with one side happy about it, while others wish it stayed one season.
  • While initially the fandom was united on enjoying the story, even if a decent chunk of the fanbase felt miffed about the route later volumes went, with the introduction of the Verge of Destruction spinoff, especially after it started Growing the Beard, the fandom gained a massive split between those that like the main story more, those that like VoD more, and those that enjoy both. The split comes from the fact that Verge of Destruction takes a much more serious turn than the main story, as Catarina being a massive bully to everybody before regaining her memories around the start of the game means that not only is her "doom" a genuine possibility, the rest of the cast aren't immediately deeply in love with her and retain their game personalities. Those that prefer the main story see VoD as way too serious and not as entertaining, those that prefer VoD see the main story as too boring and formulaic, while those that enjoy both either simply see each of them as good ways of telling two different versions of Catarina's life or VoD being the "Hard Mode" or "New Game+" of the main series story, justifying their different tones.
  • The scene in Season 2 where Keith pins Catarina to his bed and says, "if you enter a man's room in night clothing, you can't complain about what happens" has been extremely polarizing amongst fans. Some became Squicked out by what came across as an implied rape threat along with Blaming the Victim, while others were impressed by Keith's forwardness, felt that he was telling the truth, and that Catarina was "fortunate" that he settled for kissing her on the forehead—or they took into account the context of the episode and how, shortly before this, Keith was trying to caution Catarina because Geordo was being increasingly pushy in trying to seduce her, and figured that Keith was (at least in part) warning her against getting into situations like this because of that.
  • The Visual Novel trailers greatly downplay the three female members of the Harem in favor of a pair of newly introduced pretty boys (unlike all 6 male characters, no kissing scenes with the girls is present in the trailers, for example), leading to grumblings from those that ship Catarina with Maria, Mary, and Sophia.
• Diagnosed by the Audience:
  • The fact that Atsuko didn't understand social interactions by the time she entered junior high (and in her words, she has always been like that) suggests she may have some kind of developmental or mental disorder.
• Die for Our Ship:
  • There is a lot of this going on, considering how many suitors Catarina has. Keith and Mary have many detractors, due to the possessiveness of both and the manipulativeness of Mary in particular; some fans also see Nicol and Maria as too passive and/or bland and Sophia as too "needy" or "fake"...but no one gets it as much as Geordo. He is considered, both in and out-of-universe, to be the biggest threat in the harem, since he is the crown prince (with all the influence and privilege that entails), is arguably just as smart and manipulative as Mary and just as possessive as Keith, and is practically standing at the finish line as Catarina's legal fiancé. Fans who ship someone else, don't like heterosexual shipping, or just don't like Geordo want him out of the picture.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Anne is absolutely adored by almost all of the readers/viewers, especially after her Day in the Limelight that showed exactly what Catarina means to her, with her utter devotion to Catarina, tragic-turned-uplifting backstory, and snarky attitude making her a very compelling character. Many are hoping that she eventually gets a bigger role in the story.
  • Alan experienced a massive surge in popularity due to the anime. His friendship with Catarina, where the two maintain a Friendly Rivalry and also their one-on-one interactions made viewers look upon Alan as a classic case of "best friend turned lover". His denseness regarding his feelings for Catarina, giving them a big thing in common, also endeared him to many viewers.
  • Game Catarina is a cruel, manipulative Alpha Bitch at her nicest who has practically zero screentime before she essentially ceases to exist. Yet despite this, she has a fairly sizable fanbase who love despite or perhaps because of her glaring flaws. This tends to veer into Draco in Leather Pants territory when it comes to fanfiction, as stories focused on her tend to give her far more sympathetic qualities than she's ever had in canon.
• Fandom-Specific Plot:
  • Catarina's friends and family learning about her past life/Fortune Lover, often ending with them reassuring Catarina that they would never kill or exile her.
  • Catarina becoming homesick for her past life, becoming melancholic and sometimes includes her having an emotional crisis over forgetting her past self's name.
  • OG!Catarina fics, i.e., stories about the Catarina of the in-universe otome game Fortune Lover. Despite being a bully, OG!Catarina seems to suffer rather excessively in the story of Fortune Lover—light novel/anime protagonist Catarina even notes that she's treated far worse than any of the other love rivals—to the point that many fic authors write stories where OG!Catarina redeems herself without needing memories of her past life/meta-awareness of Fortune Lover's plot line, such as a Peggy Sue after she suffers one of the bad ends that lead to her death. The premise also lends a bit more dramatic weight, since OG!Catarina is deeply flawed compared to her isekai self's unrelenting kindness and goodness.
  • Sophia regaining her memories as Atsuko Sasaki AKA Acchan, either partially or completely, through a variety of means.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • The exact nature of "Monkey Girl's" death and what impact it might have on Catarina. We're told at various points that it was a "traffic accident", but we only get this information from an overwhelmed Catarina and Acchan's flashbacks and to date, we have never been shown the actual event. This makes playing with it a prime fanfic target.
  • The exact nature of Acchan's life after "Monkey Girl" dies and is reborn as Catarina is left vague. She says she will "carry on", and that she wishes to be reunited with "Monkey Girl" when she passes on, but we are given no details about her life after that. This gives fanfic authors a billion different directions to potentially take, particularly in "awoken to the details of a previous life" scenarios, from Acchan not having lasted very long without "Monkey Girl" all the way to Acchan-Sophia actually being the most canny cast member by far, due to having lived a full and complete life with decades and decades of life experience to draw on from a much more advanced society.
  • There's fic devoted to any and every individual pairing you can imagine. Or even groups of pairings. Or even abandoning such quaint notions as "pairing".
  • As a specific episode example, S1E08's A Tale By The Name of Desire Tome of Eldritch Lore has generated a lot of fanfics.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Bakarina, a nice portmanteau of "Baka" (idiot) and Catarina. Becomes an official nickname for the series itself when J-Novel uses it as shorthand for the series on their site. Black Hole is another name that gets thrown around due to her attracting everyone that gets close to her and being incredibly dense.
  • Bikarina, is also used, because Catarina ends up being shipped with everyone, regardless of their gender.
  • The Japanese fanbase has BGM for Alan, due to him being an Elegant Classical Musician but also because his Always Second Best tendencies relegates him to be functionally in the background.
  • GHL, short for "Green Hand Lesbian" for Mary Hunt (in the Japanese fanbase), after the "green thumb"^note The Japanese version used "Midori no Te," or "green hand"/ remark Catarina (Alan in the original game) made to her.
  • Shining Les for Maria Campbell, also courtesy of the Japanese fanbase, due to the nature of her magic.
  • As both the original title and the official English title can be quite the mouthful, fans typically shorten it to Destruction Flag Otome. With the release of the anime, Hamefura^note Portmanteau of Hametsu Furagu, Japanese for "Destruction Flag". has emerged as another way to shorten the name.
  • The On the Verge of Doom! spin-off is often called "Hard Mode".
  • Lysithea for Sophia, namely due to their appearances being similar.
  • On the subject of Bakarina, "Catarina's Exactly Five Brain Cells", or similar, is often used in the English fandom for the mini-Catarinas during her inner monologue sequences.
  • With the second season, a fan nickname of the subtitle started "All Routes Lead to Kidnapping", as starting from the last few episodes of the first season, there have been five kidnappings of main characters — Maria and Keith once each, and Catarina three times.
• Fanon Discontinuity: While the novels are still ongoing, a subset of fans would rather pretend that the story has already ended at the end of volume 2, where the end-of-the-school-year banquet happened and Catarina mistakenly believed that this was the friendship ending, due to believing that it was a pitch-perfect ending itself already and anything beyond that is stretching the concept needlessly. The fact this is where the original web novel ended, with the light novel story mainly continuing because the original got so popular the author decided to keep going, only made these feelings stronger.
• Fan-Preferred Couple:
  • There's a massive yuri audience that genuinely want Maria and Catarina to end up together. It helps that Maria is already considered to be the strongest romantic rival of the harem.
  • On the hetero side, while the preferences are a lot closer than with the girls, a growing number of fans find themselves rooting for Keith, as he's the romantic rival who best understands how Catarina thinks (which still isn't all that much), along with him being a bit more noticeably Adorkable than the other guys. There's also the fact it has a hint of Incest Yay to it.
  • Over in the yaoi fandom, the favorite ship is Keith / Geordo, since their stronger connections to Catarina have them interacting the most among the guys, along with their constant bickering over Catarina making excellent Belligerent Sexual Tension fuel.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: On the flipside to Geordo being less liked, the girls are more popular in the West than they are in Japan, due to the West generally taking girl-on-girl relationships more seriously than Japan (who tend to subscribe to the Gay Romantic Phase model instead). CataMaria support is especially strong among the Western fanbase, going by the polls done.
• Growing the Beard: In the Verge of Destruction spinoff, Catarina seems to build up her relationships with Maria, Geordo and Mary quite easily, leading to complaints of It's the Same, Now It Sucks!. Initially, the only difference between the two series was Sienna, someone who wouldn't give a second thought to the Catarina of the main series but is her friend in VoD. However, when Keith debuts, he makes it clear that he has no intention of forgiving Catarina for bullying him for years, breaking the previous trend and showing that Catarina's past actions have consequences for her.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Catarina and Sophia becoming friends gains an extra level of sweetness after the reveal that they were also best friends in their previous life and that the latter's greatest wish after the former's death was for them to be reunited.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Jeannie Tirado, Catarina's English voice, also played the role of another character who was obsessed with sweets.
  • In the Latin American Spanish dub, Keith (Diego Becerril) and Mary (Cecilia Guerrero) were also Nasa and Tsukasa before, but here the two are rivals for one woman instead of a happily married couple. Bonus points due to the exchange between them in the first episode of the second season (not dubbed in LA Spanish yet, but still).
  • Catarina's forceful entrance into Keith's room with an axe, when Keith was trying to isolate himself, brought fan comparisons to Disney's Frozen, often stating lines like "An axe works a lot better than a musical number."
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!:
  • Readers have had this opinion of Verge of Destruction (along with They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot). Its premise is that Catarina has bad to nonexistent relationships with the core cast and is thus more at risk of her bad endings, but she quickly built up her relationships with many of them, causing the story to pan out to be similar to the original work. Luckily, the introduction of Keith has begun to make more use of the premise, with him absolutely having no intentions of forgiving Catarina for her past actions.
  • S2E07 of the anime was an almost exact repeat of the plot of S1E08, simply replacing a magical dollhouse for a magical book. Fans still found it entertaining, but wished that there could have been something different.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Shortly after the show became popular on Crunchyroll, word-of-mouth began to spread about its "Mixed-Gender Harem" premise. The show garnered a lot of praise for not only building a likable harem of both men and women, but writing a character cute and lovable enough to make their charisma believable. A lot of people who never would have given the show a shot, or would have written it off as "just another isekai", became fans after learning of this premise.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Considering what half of the premise is, this was inevitable. Alongside her actual love interests, Catarina is shipped with almost every other character in the cast that has any meaningful interactions with her, whether the other character has actual romantic interest in her or not. This extends to Fanfic, where Catarina can become the inverse of "Anything That Moves" in that everyone, from any universe, becomes infatuated with her.
• Les Yay: There are a lot of romantic hints involving women throughout this story, both through subtext and straight text, the majority of which involves some of the other female cast showing varying levels of attraction to Catarina. While there are at least three girls that are fully in love with her without any doubt, many of the other women that haven't proclaimed love for her still get a number of scenes that can be inferred as romantic.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "This is what happens when you max Charisma and dump Intelligence." ^ExplanationCatarina is rather dim-witted and ignorant of her surroundings, but her empathy and magnetic personality ends up being all that's needed to resolve various issues in the story.
  • Denser than a Black Hole ^ExplanationCatarina's charisma is so strong that she draws in everyone and everything into it. She's also extremely dense, so the term has a double meaning.
  • Serious Dick.^note How Sirius Dieke is pronounced. The fact he ends up an antagonist in the story helps.
  • "Catarina only has five brain cells." ^Explanation Go to any Youtube video or forum discussing the manga, anime, or light novel, and expect to see a comment somewhere mentioning the incredibly small amount of brain cells Catarina has. This is in reference to just how dense Catarina is, blaming her lack of intelligence on the idea that she only has five brain cells; the five parts of Catarina's psyche that often appear to discuss the methods by which Catarina will avoid her untimely demise.
  • "Mary has water magic, but she's still somehow thirsty."^note Of all the harem members Mary is by far the most vocal and active about her interest in Catarina. The fact she has water magic wasn't lost on people, so whenever she's on screen being open about her interest, expect the community to comment about the "thirsty water mage".
  • Geordo's many names. ^note  While other characters have this trope in effect, this trope really cranks up to eleven in regards to Geordo, with fans being utterly confused of what is really the correct one based on the romanization of his name. Doesn't help that the different source materials use different names to refer him. Geord-dude is a popular spin-off, and he's sometimes called Geodude.
  • "Anudda one." ^Explanation Catarina's already sizable harem continues to keep growing well into the anime's second season. By the time Sora became another of her suitors, fans were waiting to see who else would be pulled in.
    • "Welcome to the harem."
  • "Maria: 'Leave no evidence.'"^ExplanationIn S2E05, the harem confronts Geordo after he kisses Catarina a second time, whereupon an angry Mary and Sophia start casting magic. Maria, the sweet, innocent All Loving Heroine, then just asks them to "keep the injuries mild enough" that she can heal them. Fans immediately jumped on this and began comparing Maria to a mafia "cleaner", who erases the evidence after a target is beaten or killed.
  • "Geordo started a war...and not for the throne."^ExplanationAt the conclusion of S2E04, Geordo is shaken by the fact that her kidnapper almost took Catarina's virginity and then kisses her in front of the entire harem to claim her. Fans have likened this to an act of war, and the other characters in the harem didn't disagree.
    • "Everything changed when the Fire Prince attacked." ^ExplanationA play on the "Everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked" meme (though sometimes "Fire Nation" is used verbatim), made all the better since Geordo actually has fire magic."
    • "Peace was never an option."
    • "Begun these harem wars have."
• Moral Event Horizon: Noelia from the Verge of Destruction spinoff crosses it when she locks Katarina away in an abandoned shed with no food or water. Judging by her reaction to Katarina's friends rescuing her, Noelia fully intended for Katarina to die in there.
• Narm: As mentioned under Memetic Mutation, the fact that Sirius Dieke's name is pronounced "Serious Dick" becomes unintentionally funny, especially since he's most often referred to by his full name when the cast doesn't call him by his title of Student Council President. It gets even worse when he turns out to be an antagonist. Thankfully, it's not his real name- the "Sirius" we know is actually Raphael Walt, who's pretending to be Sirius- but one has to wonder what Marquess and Marchioness Dieke were thinking when they named their child Sirius...
• Once Original, Now Common: While being one of the forerunners of the "otome game villainess" sub-genre of isekai, by the time HameFura received its anime adaptation, the Sub-Genre was so oversaturated, the notion of a "fresh breath into overdone clichés" was long gone due to countless copy-cats. However, this only applies if one is familiar with similar manga and light novels, while the anime is able to maintain its "fresh" status.
• One True Threesome: Beyond some fans that want a full harem ending, the sheer number of viable love interests provides a near-infinite number of possible combinations. Catarina/Geordo/Keith is seen as an alternative for the yaoi fandom which sees their rivalry for Catarina as Belligerent Sexual Tension, and by others as well, since those two are the closest to Catarina amongst the boys. Catarina/Geordo/Alan also gets attention for the Incest Yay and Twin Threesome Fantasy vibes. Catarina/Mary/Alan and Catarina/Sophia/Nicol are also popular, since Mary and Sophia are still close to their former love interests even after falling for Catarina, with some fans believing Sophia is secretly trying to achieve the latter ending by pushing Catarina to marry her brother. Later, Catarina/Maria/Raphael picked up steam due to the latter two convincing Catarina to join the Dept. of Magic. Catarina/Maria/Mary gained support after S1E08, where Maria was shown to be just as kind to Mary as she is to Catarina. Catarina/Mary/Sophia is also popular among those shippers since they are all childhood friends and romance novel enthusiasts. And then there are some that don't involve Catarina at all, such as the Catarina-less "full yaoi" (Geordo/Keith/Alan/Nicol/Raphael/Sora) and "full yuri" (Mary/Sophia/Maria/Ginger/Larna), which is popular amongst the people that see Catarina as asexual.
• Ship Mates:
  • Fans of any yaoi combinations will also encourage the yuri ones as well, since the two are not mutually-exclusive and actively gets Catarina out of the way of their boys-love ships.
  • People who ship Catarina with any of the conquer targets will thus also ship the rival pairings as well; for example, shipping Alan/Mary and Nicol/Sophia gets four rivals out of the way for Geordo, Keith, Maria or Raphael.
• Ships That Pass in the Night: Anne and Mrs. Campbell have begun picking up traction as a pairing in fanfics despite the two of them never once interacting in the source material. Them both being supportive family figures of the main cast whose lives have been greatly improved thanks to Catarina's efforts is likely a good contributing factor.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat:
  • The series drew in a massive yuri fandom who don't really like the pairings with Catarina and her male suitors.
  • There's a vocal hatedom for Keith/Catarina due to a growing subset which sees the Incest Yay Shipping unfavorably despite being Not Blood Siblings; Keith is the illegitimate child of one of Catarina's father's relatives, so he and Catarina are distant relatives. On the other hand, there may be some Values Dissonance in this, as Japanese society is more likely to find their relationship acceptable, both due to viewing people's relationships with family as tied to their birth parents and the fact that being adopted and then marrying into a family has been an accepted practice for centuries.
• Signature Scene:
  • 8 year-old Catarina grabbing a battleaxe and breaking down the door to Keith's room to apologize for worrying him.
  • For fans picking up the series in Season 2, the scene where a kidnapped Catarina sits down to talk with her kidnapper, Sora over tea, and by the end of said conversation, he has fallen in love and pledged to take her out of the country.
• Squick: Some viewers were disgusted by Geordo kissing Catarina while she was asleep (or to be more accurate, in a dark magic-induced coma) in S1E11, although in context, he was trying to help get water to her lips.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Fans of the light novels were not pleased by many of the overtly Les Yay scenes (in particular, Maria's rescue from the storehouse) being severely toned down, downplayed or cut entirely in the anime, especially when the gender-equality of the harem is one of the story's biggest selling points.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The visual novel My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! The Pirate Known as "Trouble", for the Nintendo Switch is this to fans. While it continues where the first season left off with Catarina getting in a new adventure after being kidnapped by pirates, many fans were disappointed when they learned the game would only have routes for all of Catarina's male love interests only and none of the females with the latter being made side characters. Many fans felt the makers of the game missed the point of what made the series popular since it had a female protagonist with a bisexual harem of both men and women and they failed to provide the fans the opportunity for Catarina to have Yuri routes with her female friends.
• Values Dissonance: Keith's initial adoptive family doesn't consider him to be fully part of the family, with the light novels mentioning that he wasn't allowed to call his adoptive parents "Mother" and "Father," and had to be deferential to his adoptive brothers. Even though that is shown to be an abusive household, he still calls Katarina's parents "Duke Claes" and "Madam Claes," and is surprised when Catarina insists that he call her "Sister." This would come off as unfair to Western audiences, but seems to be at least partly born from Japanese attitudes toward adoption, and partly due to how a medieval society like the kingdom of Sorcier would view illegitimate children.
• The Woobie:
  • Almost every one of the named characters for the game besides Catarina was a woobie in some form, with several of them being ostracized for things out of their control, likely deliberately done by the game developers to get players invested in each of the characters. A big part of the story, besides Catarina avoiding her "doom flags", is her helping heal the wounds of everybody around her and making their lives happier, rescuing them from this status.
    • Catarina is also one after regaining her Past-Life Memories. In her perspective, she suddenly found Her Days Are Numbered seven years before the fact and has been living in the constant fear of having to die for a second time.
  • This is even worse in Verge of Destruction, because Catarina regained her memories while already at school instead, meaning that all of the woobies in the game are still that way in the story, but amplified further because Catarina is a woobie as well. Despite earnestly trying to make up for what she did before, nobody besides Maria and Geordo believe her change of heart, and her relationship with Keith seems broken beyond repair, shattering her dreams for a younger sibling to love and breaking her heart.

---