Specs
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(3.81/5)I mean, it's a funny SRS for some reason called ranobe
The plot
A reckless tomboy moron reborn into a villainess, making the villainess a genuine earnest moron, which changes the setting drastically.
The story is funny. The MC is such a blind moron like you wouldn't believe it. I have been explicitly told not to expect her to be aro/ace but the 0 effect 2 puberties have on her is sending very mixed signals.
The format
The format is absolutely horrible. When it just starts out it's funny - you see MC's POV, then you see the other character's POV and the sheer gap between their perceptions is kinda fun. Except that... After the first time (or even then) the reader can already see the clear fact that she's misunderstanding things so you don't need to be told again. And then you don't need to recap it again in the end. And then you don't need to recap the recap again from another person's POV that AGAIN adds nothing we didn't already know. This is a torture.
Now because the volume is full of these repetitions the plot of the game didn't manage to start within this volume (the entirety of vol 1 is a prologue) and I will be reading the next one to get some sense of resolution.
Language learning
Language learning wise it's frankly weird. As the same vocab repeats to some crazy levels (i.e. in a chapter you'll have "damn I remember when character said X and I reacted with Y" and 20 pages later you'd have "I remember how that character said X to the M and she Y-d it. This is how it was: character was looking at MC and said: [X] and then MC answered [Y]") so you're naturally remembering the vocab. Because just. The sentences keep repeating? Same with character descriptions.
It's good to learn villainess vocab without actually "learning" (no flashcards needed).
Sometimes funny but repetitive and full of filler
Having caught up with this series, I cannot recommend it. Its main strengths are that it is sometimes funny (as someone who likes idiot protagonists) and the cute bi reverse harem, but the series is repetitive and full of filler. The books are short and yet teeming with alternate PoVs that retell the story's events verbatim with only slightly altered internal monologues. This barely improves over the thirteen volumes currently published and is very tedious.
The romance, which is heavily deemphasised in the second arc but very saturated in the first arc, is lackluster as well, and doesn't really go anywhere. The characterisation is a bit shallow and often relies on a single running gag of them all being unbelievably clingy. The relationships are all predicated on characters with samey sob stories, whose hearts are all healed by the main character via shoujo-trope interactions (fitting for the title) that are implausibly simplistic. If you like romcoms or otome games, this still might be worth checking out for you, though.
A lot of the characters from the first arc recede to the background in the second arc, which may be unrewarding for many fans. There isn't much in the way of worldbuilding or description (a small pet peeve is that one of the few details given about the world is that it it is like medieval Europe, but the books are overrun with anachronisms, magic or no magic).
The writing style is very simple (making this series well-suited for a beginner), but in my opinion it errs on the side of being boring. You are unlikely to learn much new vocabulary or grammar unless you are very new to Japanese.
The story is fun but the writing style is really annoying!
I really enjoyed the story, had some good laughs as well, but the writing style is the worst I've read yet. Based on 2 volumes I finished currently, there's 2 problems:
- Repetition. The author keeps adding different point of views and repeating what we already know instead of proceeding the story. If it was once or twice, maybe as a special chapter at the end, that'd be cool, I really like it when changing the point of view continues the story instead, unfortunately it's not like that here.
- It feels like a monologue! (mostly for other characters PoV) The few dialogues are there as a bonus, because really when PoV changes you're there to hear the internal monologue of the characters.
Despite all that I'm willing to read some more, the characters are very good and there's a lot of potential to the story. It's also good as an entry level to orange level books (27+)
I didn't expect to like this as much as I did
Wow, I didn't expect to like this book at much as I did! Yes, it's an early "villainess" isekai, but (at least as of volume 1) the usual tropes are barely there. Protagonist Katarina anticipates the tropes and tries to make counter-plans, but almost immediately just derails whatever "plot" was going to happen before it can get off the ground and never looks back. She's a top example for me of a character who's oblivious without feeling forced: she's fairly well-rounded in terms of interests, and I generally didn't feel that her airheaded moments had to twist the situation too badly to follow her train of thought.
Other reviews mention the egregious redundancy of "Katarina POV -> immediately reiterate the entire chapter from other character POV with only minor additions" over and over and over...and over, and yeah, that's there and pretty annoying. I read this first volume with the Natively Light Novel Book Club, so these sections were made a little better by spacing them out, but I'm definitely hoping that future volumes tone these down, or at least give us something more of substance if we have to have them.
The book itself is a very easy read; the author's writing style is so plain and redundant it honestly sometimes looped back on itself and forced me a re-read a sentence a few times, only to realize I hadn't actually missed anything, the author was just restating the information. (If you couldn't tell already, you might need some tolerance for that for this book. ^_^;)