What’s it about? Grace Avergne has not been acting like herself. She’s been treating her servants better! She is making friends with the lower classes! She’s bussing her own trays! Who IS she? The answer? A 52-year-old bureaucrat dad named Tondabayashi Kenzaburo. And, while he’s wondering how he got here too, he’s not complaining!
Okay y’all, here we are. Finally, the show of the season. Maybe even the show of the year. For anybody who has been waiting for a worthy follow up to My Next Life As a Villainess: All Routes Lead To Doom’s fantastic debut season, here we have the first good Villainess isekai adaptation in years. And all it took was the willingness to not only have the protagonist not be a former NEET, nor a former otome otaku, but be a full on 52-year-old bureaucrat to make it happen.
First of all, the protagonist, Grace/Tondabayashi, is a fucking gem. They are so deeply wholesome that they are completely incapable of being cruel–one of the main jokes is how their attempts at “villainess” behavior just read as “I’m gonna help you learn the ropes at rich people school” for Anna. And it is consistently funny. I think a significant part of what makes the jokes land is that realistic normal dads, those that are not designed to look sexy, or DILF-y, or be spies, are very rare as main characters in anime. So when Grace suddenly starts talking like, well, a normal dad, it is not only not what you would expect a villainess in an anime to say, it’s not even what you expect any main character in an anime to say at all. I also just love their chibi form, how their nose disappears. Good for them.
Additionally, the show side-steps almost any of the normal gender shenanigans that come with TSF manga–there is no horror at being a girl, no sense of struggle with their new gender identity. They just kind of roll with it, and even embrace it. This is, of course, helped by their magical dysphoria-away power, which allows them to do the physical gestures associated with masculine politeness internally, and have their body move like that of a noble girl with noble girl mores. It is a convenient plot device that allows the show to first address and then avoid many of the kinds of questions regarding what it means to change your body and social role entirely. They even seem to nod to the trans aspect of the story by giving the character a fan colored like the trans flag.
The execution here is fantastic. The visuals vary between the slideshow-esque (during some of the dialogue scenes) and the dynamic, like the adorable dance animation found in the ending, but the comic timing consistently hits. Every joke lands. And generally the writing is clever and keeps the infodumping at a minimum. The only note I have is that when the protagonist is away and the boys are talking I zone out—but that just goes to show how entertaining they’ve made Grace.
To be honest, I’ve been excited for this show ever since I got the chance to sit with Vrai as part of an interview with Aiba Kyoko about her parody manga based on it. I am so happy to see it getting such a fantastic adaptation, and even more happy that the adaptation seems to be leaning into the queer aspects of the story, if the same-sex dance in the OP is anything to go by. If you haven’t watched this show, what are you doing?
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