悪役令嬢の兄に転生しました 1

I read this because it was temporarily free to read and I'm a sucker for stories that feature siblings. I didn't really expect much, but it's adorable and surprisingly wholesome?

The main character reincarnated as Cain, one of the romanceable characters in an otome game and the older brother of the villainess, Diana. Diana meets a terrible fate in every single route of the game, one of which references sexual abuse non-graphically. But Cain meets her as an adorable, innocent newborn who has done no wrong yet and vows to protect her.

Cain resolves to raise his sister to be a better person than the girl who caused so many problems in the game. A chance meeting with one of the other romance targets inspires him to thwart every romance route, one love interest at a time, because Diana can't be doomed by the narrative if he doesn't allow the narrative to happen, right?

As of the end of this volume, we've met two of the romanceable characters, and it feels a bit like Cain's become the protagonist of the otome game hahaha.

The characters are all complex and well-fleshed out. The parents and people around them are flawed in ways that make it understandable how their children ended up with issues, without actually being terrible people. In fact, I quite like their parents! And yet I totally see how the game timeline happened!

Language-wise, I found this more difficult. It features nobility, so there's a mix of regular speech and very polite speech, very polite terms for parents, uncommon vocabulary, etc. There's no furigana except on some words that must be pretty uncommon, the text density is moderate, and thank God Cain and Diana have simple names because everyone else gets katakana soup.